Media Review ' * 1 ' • ;•••!•••-•• ••j- Compte rendu de média

Recent Media Treatments of the Titanic Tragedy

JOHN WILSON FOSTER

Titanic: Class and Culture examples. This is ironic since the middle class is It is reported that a South African company rarely depicted as a participant in the Titanic intends to build a replica of R.M.S. Titanic that affair and no longer sees itself reflected in it. in late December 1999 will duplicate the great Titanic "2" and Titanic "3" will be the ultimate liner's maiden voyage from Southampton. cruise ships, a now ubiquitous class of vessel Thanks to the most up-to-date detection equip­ that both mimicked (in a rudimentary postmod­ ment on board that will remove the threat of ice, ern fashion) and superseded the working luxury duplication will cease at the fiftieth meridian liner when jumbo jets rendered it obsolete. (which Titanic had just crossed when she had The middle class, like the wealthy, are as­ her fatal rendezvous with an iceberg), and the sumed to want their anachronistic creature replica will finish the trip to New York, having comforts when they re-live history, and so the in some fanciful sense become the original ves­ cabins of the Japanese replica will be brought sel in the first hours of what most of us will up to modern standards: "none will be third- wrongly regard as the first year of the third mil­ class," we are assured; there must be no echoes lennium. In April 2002 the feat — or stunt — of steerage and poor emigrants. If this is will apparently be repeated by another replica achieved on Titanic 2 and 3, it will not only Titanic, built this time by a Swiss-American be because of shipboard regulations: it will also business alliance calling itself — with appro­ be because unpleasant historical reality must be priate mimicry — White Star Line. discountenanced. These projects will go one better than the There is some hypocrisy at work in these Japanese company's plan to build a full-scale revisions of material history. We affect distaste Titanic—but sans engines and other innards — at the rigid class inequities practised on board to function at its mooring as a conference cen­ Titanic and other liners of the time, and the pre- tre and "floating hotel," as the promotion has First World War English class system generally. it, echoing contemporary praise and criticism Yet we are comfortable with the identical three- of R.M.S. Titanic. class system on transatlantic jets, and those in Tickets for the millennial voyage will no "hospitality" or "world traveller" class (the doubt be themselves replicas, and the cheapest lower the class the more extravagant the will probably cost rather more in equivalence euphemism) wait patiently while first and busi­ than a second-class transatlantic passage on ness class passengers board and deplane ahead board a luxury liner in 1912. Thereafter, one can of them. And like the ship's contemporaries, we suppose, tourism will provide the customers, are interested chiefly in the rich and famous on and Alexander Wilson in The Culture of Nature: board Titanic: to this day we fasten on the North American Landscape from Disney to the names Guggenheim, Astor, Widener, Straus, Exxon Valdez (1992) has wittily defined tourism Rothschild, Dodge, Rothes, and even Vanderbilt as "the mass circulation of the middle classes and Morgan (who cancelled their plans to make around the globe." It is the middle classes, in the maiden voyage). We indulge the imagery of their touring and conferencing guises, who are a luxuriant first class: jewels, tuxedos, brandy- the chief consumers of "theme park" culture, snifters, cigars, evening gowns, and feather the commercial reconstructions of our mate­ boas. In our own era of belt-tightening, down­ rial history for leisure purposes, of which the sizing, and retrenchment, we have begun to two projected replicas of Titanic will be floating daydream once more of sumptuousness and

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoire delà culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 182 glamorous wealth, and Titanic, first class, is Although fast-paced (a "rattling good story," such stuff as these dreams are made on. a "gripping yarn," as the outmoded phrases We lump steerage, as the aggregate form had it), Lord's book is also elegiac and if there implies, into anonymous victimhood, but is a thesis in it, it is dais: "The Titanic somehow sweeten our perception of them as jolly, musi­ lowered the curtain on this way of living. It was cal, venturesome, bibulous. This is how, even never the same again. First the war, then the in 1997, James Cameron depicts steerage in his income tax, made sure of that." A Night to movie, Titanic; in his screenplay, the "third Remember commemorates the Edwardian way class general room" is described as "rowdy and of life. Lord pays attention to second-class pas­ rollicking." He is following Titanic cinematic sengers, and he is disturbed that no one, tradition in this, but he is more economical reporters or inquiry members, were interested with the truth than his predecessors by omit­ in what third-class survivors had to say, but one ting second class entirely, rendering his two senses that to Lord what matters is the end of depicted classes, first and third, crudely noblesse oblige and masculine chivalry and emblematic, and his class "analysis" of the courage that for him the tragedy spelled. First ship's tragedy crudely unhistorical. class for Lord is an honorific, not just a socio­ For it is the presence of the second class — economic category. that is, of the middle class — that is the buffer We are wholly impatient now with the between warring simplifications, and a measure English upper class, but it still makes good cos­ of our ability to see pre First World War life tume drama to which we are addicted; and it steadily and to see it whole. I borrow Arnold's is an easy ethnic (as well as class) target, which dictum because it was repeated verbatim by political correctness and multiculturalism give the advanced figures at the time — T. S. Eliot, us permission to attack. Lord's anglophile elegy Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Virginia has given way to Cameron's anglophobe cari­ Woolf. Woolf and her husband attended the cature. It is virtually a tradition in American British inquiry into the loss of Titanic and the Titanic representation to turn wealthy Ameri­ tragedy reinforced — if it did not initiate — the cans in first class into honorary English upper imagery of water and drowning that pervades crust: the hated Old World hereditary wealth Woolf s novels; the fate of Titanic and her pas­ and position. It is true that there was an inter­ sengers were incorporated into Woolf's nationalism to the Euro-American industrial painstakingly steady and whole vision of life. elite and financier class, which Lord draws I lose respect for any treatment of the tragedy attention to and Beryl Bainbridge exploits in her that sees it chiefly and at second hand as the recent novel (see below); according to Lord, prédation of an idle first class (with a com- "Titanic's trip was more like a reunion than an plicit officer class) upon a corralled and ocean passage." Still, this has often been given transported peasantry. an anti-English twist. In Herbert Selpin's film Social class has always been central to our Titanic (1943), John Jacob Astor becomes Lord interest in Titanic and still is, in an increasingly Astor, albeit for purposes of German wartime lazy and shorthand way. The first wave of anti-British propaganda. In Cameron's movie, Titanic fever preceded the sailing, rose with Caledon Hockley, die cartoonish villain, is as rumours of disaster, and peaked between con­ close as Cameron can get him to an effete, swin­ firmation and the official hearings; it was ish English gentleman, while still being an generated by shock, grief, anger, and disbelief. American. (Molly Brown is the "true" Ameri­ The chief cultural reaction took the diverse can and of course is goodhearted, brave, form of memorial and the narrower form of anti-establishment — a frontier rough diamond inquiry. The first revival began in the 1950s and very definitely "New World" and "New and lasted a decade, and it was stimulated by Money") Walter Lord's marvellously readable book, A I will say more about Cameron's movie later; Night to Remember (1955), and boosted by the my points here are, one, that erasure of the film of the same name released three years later. middle class reduces history to easily depictable The earlier memorial culture of Titanic was and politically correct simplicity and, two, that replaced by a commemorative culture (though the concept of culture that die real middle class Lord also updated the earlier inquiries), but consumes — culture as easily packageable self- social class remained as important to him as it representation — are major features of the had been in 1912 when the presence on board of second revival of Titanic enthusiasm ignited by so many grandees and industrial captains gave Robert Ballard's discovery of the wreck in 1985 boost to the American and British investigations. through technical wizardry. In short, Titanic is

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 183 now commonly doctored history and "lab-bred" Biel's Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural culture. As for the second of these features, it History of the Titanic Disaster (1966), joins Wyn is, after all, a short step from Cameron's impres­ Craig Wade's The Titanic: End of a Dream (1979) sive special effects and set-construction, to furnish in tandem a comprehensive Ameri­ stopping just short of a full-scale rebuilt ship, can cultural history of the tragedy. Wade to the project of total, functioning re-construction. analyses the American hearings, and though We have passed from memorial to commemo­ he ends with a chapter that discusses the con­ ration to what I want to call "rememoration" (I temporary women's suffrage movement and am adapting the dictionary — Oxford English Black street reaction to Titanic (he subscribes to — of to remember, "to put together again"). We Lord's idea that the sinking was the end of a want to enact the past; even exhibitions now complacent, caste-structured, and materialis­ aspire to go beyond mere display into replica­ tic era), Wade stays close to the nautical and tion and virtual experience; the exhibit may be technical realities of the tragedy and the narrow the type form of our cultural reaction to Titanic political context in which they were investi­ today, and Cameron's movie in its art of osten­ gated at the American inquiries. tation betrays the influence of exhibition. Almost half of the Biel's book (the first part I could hastily add other major features. One, is entitled "Meanings") is devoted to rejection the debunking of received wisdom about the of the end-of-an-era proposition: "In my ship and its fate dating from 1912 and the 1950s opinion the disaster changed nothing except (including, with some ambivalence on our part, shipping regulations...the Titanic seared itself Lord's nostalgia). Two, the insistence on into American memory not because it was secrets still to be revealed, questions still to be timeless but because it was timely." The mean­ answered, mysteries still to be solved. Three, ings of the tragedy, like the era itself, was he our renewed emulative fascination with the insists "contested terrain." Biel is at pains to dis­ technology of Titanic. The first suggests that the pute what he regards as our shallow notion of ship means something different to each gener­ what happened: "In the conventional narrative ation; the second that (besides those of us who the story of the Titanic functioned as a parable are intrigued and curious), there are those who of the natural goodness of class, racial, ethnic, profit from the ship and require the phe­ and gender hierarchies." Drawing on contem­ nomenon to be unfinished business; the third porary newspaper accounts and concurrent that we wish to re-create, by discovery, salvage, events, he deals with each hierarchy in turn, or replication, the ship and its milieu since first the received conservative or establishment many of us now believe this is what culture is: notions of the time, then the contemporary recovery of the already accomplished and the reality. In Biel's loosely Marxist revisionism, already occurred; our technology may be either the value system enacted on board the advancing with vigour, but many of use have a ship was one of damaging and discriminatory tired sense of culture, it seems, and are lazily stereotypes of the powerless groups, or the and literally (that is, without imagination) turn­ fine-sounding values apparently enacted on ing back upon our past. board were not in fact so enacted. Clearly it is Lord's elegiac account he wishes to revise (while paying tribute to its modernist vitality), but Cultural History: Biel and Beyond though he wishes to rescue Titanic from The two millennium replication projects will "popular history" and retrieve it for academic keep the engines fired in this astonishing phe­ history (the author teaches writing at Harvard), nomenon until we spy on the horizon the he can't himself resist seeing the Titanic affair coastline of the Titanic centenary. In the mean­ as "an event of deep and wide resonance in time, there is much material to be going on Edwardian England and Progressive Era Amer­ with, a good deal of it produced since 1985. ica...one of the great mythic events of the "Jim's Titanic Bibliography" and "Bibliotheca twentieth century." Surely this loose use of Titanic," both available on the internet, list "myth" implies the very timelessness he hundreds of books, videos and CDs, and in the repudiates, and it is hard to accept that this remainder of this article, I can treat only a frac­ mythic event had no issue other than shipping tion of the more interesting among the regulations. If nothing else, this event has been newcomers. variously interpreted down the century. Besides, There are scores of book-length discussions Down with the Old Canoe is itself popular his­ of the Titanic affair, including survivors' tory, as its journalist style, range of subject- accounts. An important recent book, Steven matter, and success in the marketplace show.

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 184 In its amassed data, however, Biel's book many of them shamelessly sentimental, some (with its forty pages of endnotes) will be presumably heartfelt, others tin-pan alley extremely useful to popular and academic his­ exploitations. Most interesting were the Chris­ torians alike, and Biel's workaday, even slack tian, Black, and worker songs that used the fate prose keeps portentousness at bay. He shines a of the ship as a vehicle for grievances and useful light on the position of black, female, and recriminations. working-class Americans in 1912 society, and Biel is not much interested in the contribu­ on Protestantism and its uneasy relations with tion of Titanic to "high" culture, and the capitalism. One way or another, Titanic was in novelists Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf, the thick of it, and reaction to the tragedy impli­ the poets Thomas Hardy, E. J. Pratt, Anthony cated the fundamental questions of race, gender, Cronin, Derek Mahon, and Hans Magnus Enzes- class, religion, and economics. berger, the playwrights St John Ervine and The rest of Biel's book (the second part is Stewart Parker, the choreographers Cornelius entitled "Memories") is no less instructive, and Fischer-Credo and Plan K Company, and the he is particularly good on 1950s America and painters Max Beckmarm and Charles Dixon, why Titanic appealed to it — "it provided a nos­ are absent from his index. This is partly because talgic alternative to a world in 'rude transition' the American context is Biel's focus, and in to the atomic age," and chimed with the disas­ my own book, The Titanic Complex (1997), I ter research begun after the Second World War, have sketched in the British context, to which and continued into the most frigid years of the the writers H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Cold War. He is entertaining as well as instruc­ E. M. Forster, Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as tive on the motives of Titanic societies, seeing Conrad and Woolf, contributed. buffs as mostly white male conservatives who In any case, two recent novels, Psalm at cleave to the values Biel believes did not exist Journey's Endhy Erik Fosnes Hansen and Every on board — or if they did, they oughtn't to Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge, both 1996 have, being right-wing. If he is correct, then in (Hansen's originally appeared in Norwegian in a sense Titanic indeed changed nothing for her 1990), appeared too late for Biel. So too did a generations of enthusiasts, who have preserved couple of serious musical compositions. None in the amber of commemoration the value sys­ of these works is kitsch or replication, but are tem they perceive her as representing. genuine artistic attempts to realize their inspi­ After dealing with the buffs, I'm not sure ration. Biel mentions the Englishman Gavin how welcome Biel would be in their earnest Bryars' 1969 work, The Sinking of the Titanic. company. In his book he rather resembles a This composition was transformed into a per­ sheriff sent into town to clean it up before rid­ forming version in 1972, reworked and ing off to his next assignment; he doesn't appear re-recorded in 1990, and released on a CD in a to be particularly interested in Titanic other composite form in 1994; the executive pro­ than as a remarkable social history case study. ducer is Philip Glass, whose minimalism it is His discussion of the enthusiasts is a reminder tempting to hear as an influence on this eleven- to me that Titanic studies, Titanic memorial part work for instruments, keyboard, and choir. societies, and the Titanic salvage-and-exhibition But Bryars has been called a Romantic and industry are uneasy allies and also overlap. mystic (any mysticism of Glass's — for exam­ Sometimes roles are ambiguous. And in the ple, his recent Kundun — is altogether more bustling and fractious Titanic fraternityther e are severe) and indeed The Sinking of the Titanic individuals and societies whose names recur is a ghostly subaqueous music, through which and who seem to act as culture-givers or gate­ appears and reappears the Protestant hymn keepers, something of a Praetorian Guard; they "Autumn," said by some to be the last tune crop up time and again in television docu­ played by Wallace Hartley's band on board. mentaries and newspaper interviews, and some I cannot imagine the work would improve in of them wield real power in a scene in which live performance, since the experience of the lis­ serious money can be made. tener at home better honours the stimulus of the Biel has occasion to mention briefly the composition. We are told that Bryars countless cartoons, posters, model kits, video borrows a theory from Marconi, the inventor games, books, movies and television programs of electromagnetic waves: that sounds never inspired (though this is usually not the mot completely die but merely grow fainter and juste) by Titanic. He is to be commended on his fainter. What if the music of the Tïtanic's band lingering attention to Titanic songs (over a hun­ might still be playing 2,500 fathoms under the dred were published before the end of 1913), sea? Using underwater recordings, hymn tunes,

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 185 morse code messages, recorded reminiscences the television program The Onedin Line did of survivors and a child's musical box, Bryars' years ago. realisation of this theory has become one of the One of the sections, "Hard to Starboard," is legendary events of twentieth-century musical experim en talis m. of genuine worth, a richly textured and dramatic seven-minute piece that re-lives the collision In one haunting section of what he called on a and is mercifully un-Irish. If Horner was writ­ recent CBC radio interview "a mysterious col­ ing to Cameron's script, then this successful lage piece of music," Bryars exploits the fact of piece suggests that Horner's musical talent was there having been a Scottish bagpiper on board constricted by Cameron's weak dramatic vision by writing what he calls a "Titanic lament," a as a script-writer. Anyway, those who loved "pibroch piece" for bass clarinet. We hear a the film almost certainly loved the music, so muffled voice, as though one of the drowned here it is; musically it is to my taste mostiy were giving testimony from beneath the waves, decaffeinated and de-alcoholized Irish coffee. and the swaying music of the water, and at the Ronan Magill, a one-time student of Ben­ section's end the ominous drips as of water jamin Bitten's, is a Sheffield man of Irish that magnify into depth-soundings, the voice extraction, but there is no facile Irishness in his now silent or merged into ocean, abyss, the Titanic 10th-15th April 1912: An Atmospheric underwater echoes of our fate. Poem in Five Pictures for Piano Solo (1997). Its Bryars has said he needs his music to be twenty sections are grouped under the five pic­ referential (that is, programmatic) but this is sat­ tures entitled "Lamentation for the Sea Dead," isfactorily disguised by his resistance to "The Departure," "The Voyage," "The Iceberg" melodrama, climax or crescendo, and we have and "Return to the Sea." The music ranges from instead the flat seabed of impersonal lament that the fairly programmatic (treble repetition in begins with the weird sound effect of the ship's "The Wireless Room," bass massiveness and tre­ halves dropping to the ocean floor and ends ble highlights in "The Iceberg," for example) to with two elongate "amens," leaving only dying the open-endedly suggestive. Only a musician echoes, as if we leave the wreck in peace as one could properly assess the technical achieve­ might depart a graveyard. (There is mild irony, ment of composition and execution (I am then, in Bryars' thanks to R.M.S. Titanic Inc., reminded occasionally of Satie and tone-poetry), salvors in possession of the ships' remains who but the work impresses me greatly. There is a have been bringing objects from the ship and charming original waltz in memory of Wallace debris field to the surface.) The Sinking of the Hartley and his band, and Magill's arrangement Titanic is an unforgettable work. of the Irish melody "The Lass of Aughrim," Music from the Motion Picture Titanic (1997) which is fitting in a way Magill may not real­ by James Horner is a fair example of music ize: it is the song Gretta Conroy hears Bartell composed as a score for a Hollywood mega- D'Arcy sing in James Joyce's great Edwardian movie. Some of the spacious open-arm choral story, "The Dead" (1907); listening to it she is passages (e.g. "Southampton") echo Morricone's lost in the memory of the dead young man who score for The Mission (itself sometimes courted her; unheard by the reader, it becomes echoing Carl Orff). There is a recurring and the "distant music" of a vanished past, and dis­ infuriatingly hummable "love theme" ("My tant music is what Magill has essayed here. Heart Will Go On") that is varied throughout Picture Five also includes renditions of the score before climaxing in Celine Dion's "Remembrance" (1908) and "Songe D'Au­ "inspirational" rendition — High Sentimental­ tomne" (1909), both by Joyce's contemporary ity to the Low Sentimentality of those songs in and namesake, Archibald Joyce, and the latter 1912 provoked by the sinking that were in the a contender for Last Song Played on Titanic. The Edwardian parlour tear-jerker tradition. Like fifth Picture concludes with a larger version of the script, the score appropriates Titanic for a the waltz for Hartley and his band, and the kitsch Irishness: melodies for penny whistle or whole Picture raises middlebrow music of the pipes are "identikit" Celtic revivalism, with a Titanic era to art, at once softening and strength­ recurring line that echoes the first line of "The ening it in Magill's versatile tonalities. Cliffs of Dooneen." The fifteen sections have It is that contemporary music that the programmatic tides ("Leaving Port," "Take Her English-born, Californian-based composer Ian to Sea, Mr. Murdoch," and so on) but the Whitcomb has given us in Titanic: Music as Heard reference in music is a tenuous swirl that on the Fateful Voyage (1997), re-arranged and uncommonly tries to do other than capture the performed by the White Star Orchestra (a five- movement of a ship, as the theme music of piece nonce ensemble, I assume). The runes are

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoirede la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 186 those of songs played either by Hartley's band for with such integrity and high seriousness that first and second class passengers or by the steer­ he honours the band and the ship more in age passengers for their own amusement. They the breach than another novelist might in range from Elgar's "Salut d'Amour" through the observance. "The Merry Widow Waltz" to "Waiting for the Movie-makers face an additional challenge: Robert E. Lee," "Alexander's Ragtime Band," what we might call titanism, the problem of "Frankie and Johnny" and, of course, "Songe d'Au­ depicting a gigantic ship and its sinking. This tomne" — over a score of tunes in all, together is a problem of effects and set-construction, of with Whitcomb's fine reading of Hardy's chill­ course, but because it tempts the maker towards ing poem, "The Convergence of the Twain" literalism, it is a problem too of directorial above an ominous bass line and piano notes like imagination. I have seen six full-length screen glints of oncoming danger. There are medleys narratives of the Titanic tragedy: Titanic (Ger­ of marches and waltzes and a selection from The many, 1943); Titanic (USA, 1953); A Night to Arcadians, a musical comedy of the time. Remember (UK, 1958); S.O.S. Titanic (USA, In composing the soundtrack of an era, the 1979); Titanic (USA-Canada, 1996); Titanic compilation is larger than the sum of its parts, (USA, 1997). (There was a lost 1912 movie in and is ideal for the unstoppable Titanic gath­ which the surviving film actress, Dorothy Gib­ erings (dinner, dance, party) — or home son, starred: Saved from the Titanic; and I have listening, since there is a diversity of colour in heard tell of a 1929 British movie.) They have the assemblage, sentimentality vying with an all met the challenge of titanic representation oblivious glee that is to us ironic, elegy with within the limits of contemporary film tech­ carefree insouciance. There is a musical atten- nology, of the medium itself, and of their budget. tiveness mat allows the enterprise to escape A television movie such as Titanic (1996) — the charge of opportunism. The music is played shown in two parts, each almost two hours with confident verve: the delightful produce of long, the whole therefore somewhat longer than research by the author of Irving Berlin and Rag­ James Cameron's epic — compensates for small- time America, and highly recommended. screen limitations remarkably well, with a moving and imaginative depiction of the sink­ ing through a series of muted, overlapping, Celluloid Titanic slow-motion vignettes with a choral accompa­ One artistic challenge in responding to Titanic, niment. Directed by Robert Lieberman, this whether in music, literature, or film, is to film has George C. Scott as a suitably troubled acknowledge the program composed by its and thoughtful Captain Edward Smith. extraordinary career and yet achieve art through The films for cinema, from Jean Negulesco's it, not around it. In this ongoing choice between Titanic of 1953 to Cameron's, all depict the historical fidelity to the given and creative catastrophe creditably, Cameron's perhaps too fidelity to the imaginable, the artist does not creditably. Films for the American market want literalism, mere transcript or imitation require a love interest, the shipboard romance, (the equivalent in art's "software" to the "hard­ and this narrative temptation to infidelity (some­ ware" of the ship's replication), but neither times in both senses, as it turns out) is hard to does he want to substitute egregiously his own resist. S.O.S. Titanic is rather chaste in this stories for the stories we know so well or the sto­ regard, and Lawrence Beesley's potential rela­ ries that still lie on the seabed of both history tionship with an American teacher is realistic and the imagination, waiting to be told; if he and inoffensive. Beesley, played by David does they had better be good. I myself— in the Warner (who survives the film to sail again on teeth of our contemporary reflex egalitarian- Titanic as the odious Lovejoy in Cameron's ism — believe a great Titanic story remains to movie), was a second-class passenger who sur­ be told that would place John Jacob Astor vived to write a fine book on the subject, and (inheritor of vast wealth, American of German this somehow calms the fever in which ship­ immigrant stock, decorated soldier, suitor of board romance in other movies is portrayed. A technology, writer of science fiction) at its epi­ Night to Remember stays close to Lord's account centre, as at the heart of an Edwardian Europe and manages its drama without a foregrounded and America soon to feel the earthquake of the love story, and seems the better for it. Great War. Titanic (1953) offers a blossoming young Hansen in his novel has met the challenge love, and an unravelling mature one, both in in his own impressive way. He substitutes his first class; Titanic (1996) offers a steerage love own fictional members of Hartley's band but story and a first class love story (of infidelity) —

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 187 again, the missing second class; while Titanic unusual circumstances — on this floating (1997) assails the class barriers by insisting on island, thrown together in peculiar intimacy, a young steerage hero literally leaping them — passengers must 'face themselves' and the the young heroine reverses his direction and truth — extends to the perception of the sunken 'descends' to the lower class for sexual and ship as a repository of secrets it is reluctant to romantic fulfilment (like a pale Lady Chatter- 'yield up.' The wreck itself was a secret, of ley), and when she survives without her young course, until Ballard's location of it, and the lover, she does so as a classless (that is, middle- documentary video Secrets of the Titanic (1997), class 'bohemian') woman which, really, her is subtitled A Legend Surrenders Her Mysteries. young lost lover was in embryo. Cameron there­ Exterior footage of the ship quickly gave way to fore economically combines the love and class the irresistible temptation to penetrate her, and themes associated with Titanic. 'secrets' in the least contentious sense meant the I think it worthwhile to draw attention to two first views of the interior in seventy-three years thematic cultural motifs that recur. One is the and after the ravages of time. Quickly, too, in the notion of redemption: the tragedy offers selected wake of Ballard, 'secrets' came to mean objects characters the chance to redeem themselves — and ship's pieces (mementos and souvenirs the vindictive husband (Clifton Webb) in the dignified as "artifacts"), and, better still, closed 1953 movie, for example, or the young steerage suitcases and bags and, best of all, locked safes thief in the 1996 television movie. (the tabernacle, as it were, of the sacred "build­ In the latter, the adulteress is 'redeemed' ing" the wreck constituted). into a moral life when her lover is lost and her 'Secrets' also means solutions to questions, husband and daughter greet her at New York. and one such question is posed in the television In all the film treatments, J. Bruce Ismay, Pres­ documentary, Titanic: Secrets Revealed (1998): ident of the White Star Line, is the Great could Captain Smith have prolonged the life of Unredeemed, and alone among artists, Derek the ship by re-opening the bulkhead doors and Mahon has extended compassion to this reviled letting the ship flood evenly? The answer after figure, in his poem "Bruce Ismay's Soliloquy." a test with a model is "no"; Smith is exonerated, In the midst of so much loss, it is not surpris­ but poor Ismay is hammered mercilessly, still ing that redemption should appeal to artists the incontrovertible culprit: "While Ismay sat who approach Titanic, especially those required in his self-made hell, others raised themselves by the marketplace to have a reasonably happy to their finest hour.". (This possibly unwitting ending up their sleeves, for redemption is a allusion to Milton's Paradise Lost — Satan car­ way of snatching a measure of victory from the ries his self-made hell within him — has the jaws of historical loss. effect of demonizing the White Star President. The married woman in Titanic (1996) reveals Really, this vilification has gone too far.) to her lover before the ship goes down that he But the real secrets in this post-Cameron, is the father of her daughter; revelations of one "spin-off" program, narrated by Bernard Hill kind or another are a firm formula in Titanic who, not coincidentally, plays Captain Smith in retellings. Barbara Stanwyck tells her husband the movie, are the artifacts either already (Clifton Webb) that their son is not his, which brought to the surface by R.M.S. Titanic Inc. launches his vindictiveness and rivets their (paid respectful tribute by the script-writer) or marriage (heading for the rocks) to the sinking awaiting their robot hands. May I say that the vessel; but his bravery at the end symbolically spin-off is a side-kick in theme-park culture; and saves the marriage and salvages the husband's so Cameron's movie has been accompanied by character. The American playwright Christo­ the best-selling book, fames Cameron's Titanic pher Durang took the Stanwyck-Webb situation (1997), which tells us, of course, how to get the as a starting point for his absurdist, one-act soundtrack as well: the synergy of capitalist play Titanic (1974) and reduces it to disturbing sellerdom. And we can extend the notion of and comic nonsense as if the children in the spin-off to include the "book-making" phe­ 1953 film were to wreak revenge on their par­ nomenon in publishing; it is brought to a fine ents amidst an ocean of revealed identities: the art by Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley in Captain's daughter Lidia reveals herself as Har­ their bestselling Last Dinner on the Titanic: riet, the Stanwyck figure's lover, and therefore Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner (1997, the mother of the non-existent daughter Foreword by Walter Lord), which is reprehen- Annabella, and so on. sibly enjoyable despite being an arrant act of Titanic as a venue for the revelation of secrets cultural "salvaging" from the tragedy. The small among passengers, under the pressure of its discography reveals that the authors are not

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 188 aware, alas, of Whitcomb's album, which would Hartley's release of his band and then starting be ideal for the chapter entitled "Chore­ up "Nearer My God to Thee" by himself, only ographing a First-Class Titanic Dinner." to see the band-members return to join him, a A locked safe and treasures (a diamond neck­ liberty to which Walter Lord objected in 1958. lace, a drawing) feature prominently in (Or are these borrowings meant to be quotes and Cameron's Titanic, and the depiction of their therefore tributes?) retrieval resembles footage from either Stephen Other liberties are more serious — Ismay Low's remarkable IMAX® Corporation film demanding that Titanic make headlines by Titanica (1993) or Ballard's Secrets of the breaking the speed record, the young steerage Titanic; the retrieval is the frame story around hero and the heroine free to cavort around the the inner story, one of human "secrets" — that prow of the ship, and First Officer Murdoch a centenarian woman in California was a Titanic shooting the Irish steerage passenger Tommy survivor, that Rose Dawson was Rose DeWitt Ryan point blank before shooting himself. It is Bukater, that she loved a lost lover on Titanic, less important that Murdoch's suicide is "con­ that she has the necklace and precious stone in tested terrain": Wade believes it probably her possession. happened, but passenger Archibald Gracie, There are impressive scenes in Cameron's researching his own book after the disaster, movie though the special effects are triumphal could find no direct evidence for it. More impor­ rather than triumphant — scenes in the engine- tant is the irresponsibility against the room, the scene of the stern rising from the background of Northern Ireland of showing an water with its three immense dripping pro­ effete English officer shooting a broth of an pellers (shot 266 in the script), the scene with Irish boy. (This is libel — or in a film is it slan­ Fifth Officer Lowe's lifeboat cruising die instant der? — of the dead.) The Irish in the film are cemetery of the sunk ship's vicinity looking for oppressed but happy-go-lucky — and see, they survivors. But these cannot rescue the movie, got rhythm! — whose condition is symboli­ about which I remembered Dr Johnson's com­ cally explained when the "limey bastard" ment on Paradise Lost "sir, no man ever wished shoots Ryan. it longer." If James Cameron is too literal with James Cameron appears to know little about the ship, he is too liberal with the characters. Ireland. Thomas Andrews speaks with a south­ The fascinating historical characters are stinted ern Irish accent, when of course he was an and few in the audience can recall them after­ Ulsterman. In S.O.S. Titanic, his home town of wards. Nor do the replacement characters have Comber, Co. Down is acknowledged, and anything memorable to say: the script is flat and Andrews, like Helen Mirren as a Belfast maid, Cameron should have hired a writer. In Titanic speaks wiui a plausible northern accent. It is (1953), we at least get alive lines like "It's a unlikely that in 1912, in the midst of the Home brand new day that's never been touched" and Rule crisis — during which Titanic was "If you get a good omelette, who cares whether launched in Belfast — a southern working-class the chicken likes you or not?" (a cheeky young youth would proudly claim Titanic for Ireland, Robert Wagner gets that one). And we are treated as the script has him do, when the ship as to A. E. Housman's lovely poem, "When I Was everyone knew was designed and built by One-and-Twenty." Instead, Cameron's movie is northern anti-Home Rule Protestants. As an Romeo and Juliet without the language, a Ulsterman, I resent the air-brushing out of his­ melancholy prospect. torical depiction of the northern, Protestant, Some of Cameron's language is anachronis­ unionist, industrial culture out of which came tic — "squat" (from diddlysquat"), "horseshit," all the great White Star liners and much else of "like we forget," which is current ironic syntax interest to the material historian. This is com­ for "as if we could forget," "to take a shit," not mon practice in movies about the Irish Troubles, to mention Rose's middle-finger salute. Most of past and present, but to find it happening in the the cast strike me as physically anachronistic; re-creation of an historical time and place in they don't come across as Edwardian types: which this culture played a key role, when they are stooges for the ship that looks real Ulster Protestants can be shown accomplishing enough though in deck scenes it struck me as something fine, is especially reprehensible. I suggesting weighdessness; I never quite believed have tried a measure of redress in my book, The in it except in its sinking. The script borrows Titanic Complex. from previous scripts: the ashtray sliding off The easy Titanic questions are briskly if dubi- Thomas Andrews' table or the runaway trolley, ously handled in the film — the Speed both from A Night to Remember, as is Wallace Question, the Breaking in Two Question

Material History Review 48 (Fall 1998) I d'histoire de la culture matérielle 48 (automne 1998) 189 (Cameron shows the ship fracturing in half well I believe), from Britain Street (now Parnell above the surface, in which case there would Street) in Dublin; he did not desert and he died have been no question), the Officer Murdoch unsung; apparently some pilgrims, hearing of Question, the Last Song Played Question, and his nonentity, turn away in disgust. the Lifeboat Question (young Rose presciently In his script, Cameron's direction for a scene spots the shortfall and informs Andrews; Cale- in the first-class smoking room reads "the usual don Hockley of course approves the shortage of fatcats are playing cards, drinking and talking." lifeboats). The notorious "God Himself could­ (Steerage passengers were no doubt engaged n't sink this ship" line (which a passenger in more edifying activities.) This is rich com­ overheard an anonymous crewman say) is given ing from a man who has made millions and will to Hockley, as an extra burden of hubris for his make millions more, courtesy of Titanic, film, well-tailored but cowardly shoulders to bear. ship, and tragedy. (But of course, it is new The tough social and race questions are either money and therefore all right.) Hockley, we are evaded — in 1997! — or solved in risk-free, told, "never tires of the effect of money on the politically correct, infantile equations: English unwashed masses" — another irony, since "the bad, Irish and Other Europeans good; old money stupendous power of money" (that Pip learns and Old World bad, New World and new in Great Expectations) not only made the film money good (not only Molly Brown's, but also possible, but muted criticism, few critics dar­ Jack Dawson's: Jack wins his ticket aboard by ing to tell the emperor he has no clothes. In the gambling); first class bad, steerage good. In each frame story, the "money guy" (as the script case, "bad" means sexually repressed, author­ phrases it), representing the limited company itarian, smug, effete, cruel, undeserving, "good" subsidizing Brock Lovett's dive to the wreck, their polar opposite. If James Cameron had complains that "we're running thirty thousand really cared about class, he would have avoided a day, and we're six days over." Several fold, this caricature of steerage and also — first among is the real-life story with the making of Titanic. film-makers, an opportunity wasted — told It is choice that the most expensive movie in some of the stories of the brave engineers, fire­ history, one that demonstrates its own opu­ men, trimmers, and greasers. It is an irony that lence by replicating the opulence of Titanic, the grave of J. Dawson in Halifax, Nova Scotia should be an attack on money and an exaltation is the destination of misguided pilgrimages by of love across social and ship's barriers. In the young girls enamoured of Leonardo DiCaprio's immortal words of Jack Dawson, finding him­ Jack Dawson. The real Dawson was a trimmer self handcuffed to a pipe below decks on a (whose job it was to arrange cargo in the hold, sinking ship: "This could be bad."

RECENT MEDIA TREATMENTS REVIEWED

BOOKS CDS Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the The Sinking of the Titanic. Composed by Gavin Bryars. Titanic Disaster. Steven Biel. New York: W.W. Nor­ Markham, Ont.: Point Music. Dist., PolyGram ton and Company, 1996. Cloth CDN$25, ISBN Group Canada Inc., 1994. 0-393-03965-X. Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage. Ian Whit- Every Man for Himself : A Novel. Beryl Bainbridge. New comb and The White Star Orchestra. Santa Monica: York: Carroll & Graf Inc., 1996. 224 pp. Cloth Rhino, 1997. CDNS18, ISBN 1-56826-833-5. CDN$29.50, ISBN 0-7867-0349-0. Titanic: Music from the Motion Picture. Composed and fames Cameron's Titanic. Edward W. Marsh. New York: conducted by James Horner. North York: Sony HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. 178 pp., illus. Music Entertainment (Canada), 1997. Cloth CDN$28.50, ISBN 0-00-649060-3. Titanic 10th-15th April 1912: An Atmospheric Poem in Last Dinner on the Titanic: Menus and Recipes from the Five Pictures for Piano Solo. Composed by Ronan Great Liner. Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley. Magill. Albany, New York: Athene Records, 1997. Toronto: Madison Press Books, 1997.144 pp., illus. $33.95, ISBN 0-7868-6303-X. MOTION PICTURES Psalm at Journey's End. Erik Fosnes Hansen. Translated Titanic. Directed by James Cameron. Beverly Hills and by Joan Tate. New York: Harvest Book, Harcourt, Hollywood: Paramount Pictures and Twentieth Brace & Company, 1996. Originally published in Century Fox, 1997. Norwegian in 1990. 371 pp. Paper CDN$18, ISBN Titanica. Directed by Stephen Low. Markham: IMAX® 0-15-600527-1. Corporation; distributed by David Keighley Pro­ ductions Ltd., 1993.

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190 TÉLÉVISION VIDEO Titanic. Directed by Robert Lieberman. n.p.: White Star Secrets of the Titanic. Written, produced and directed Productions Ltd., with executive producers Frank by Nicolas Noxon (Robert D. Ballard, co-director). Konigsberg and Larry Sanitsky, 1996. Made-for- Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, dist. TV movie broadcast on CBC, November 1996. Warner Home Video, 1997. ISBN 0-7806-1859-9.

"Titanic": Secrets Revealed. 1998. Narrator Bernard Hill. New York: WPDC Television, 1998. Television doc­ umentary broadcast 4 April 1998.

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