Waiting for the Barbarians (12 page)

I wasn’t the only one who was obsessed—or writing. It may not be true that “the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the
Titanic
,” as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. Since the early morning of April 15, 1912, when the great liner went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it five grand pianos, eight thousand dinner forks, an automobile, a fifty-line telephone switchboard, twenty-nine boilers, a jeweled copy of
The Rubáiyát
of Omar Khayyam, and more than fifteen hundred lives, the writing hasn’t stopped. First, there were the headlines, which even today can produce an awful thrill. “ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION,” the New York
Evening Sun
crowed less than twenty-four hours after the sinking. A day later, brute fact had replaced wishful conjecture: “TITANIC SINKS, 1500 DIE.” Then there were the early survivor narratives—a genre that has by now grown to include a book by the descendants of a Lebanese passenger whose trek to America had begun on a camel caravan. There were the poems. For a while, there was such a glut that
The New York Times
was moved to print a warning: “To write about the
Titanic
a poem worth printing requires that the author should have something more than paper, pencil, and a strong feeling that the disaster was a terrible one.” Since then, there have been histories, academic studies, polemics by enthusiasts, and novels, numbering in the hundreds. There’s even a
Titanic for Dummies
. This centennial month alone will see the publication of nearly three dozen titles.

The books are, so to speak, just the tip of the iceberg. Between 1912 and 1913 more than a hundred songs about the
Titanic
were published. A scant month after the sinking, a one-reel movie called
Saved from the Titanic
was released, featuring Dorothy Gibson, an actress who had been a passenger in first class. It established a formula—a
love story wrapped around the real-life catastrophe—that has resurfaced again and again, notably in a 1953 tearjerker starring Barbara Stanwyck and in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, which, when it was released, was both the most expensive and the highest-grossing film of all time. (The film was rereleased during the week of the centenary, after an $18 million conversion to 3D.) There have been a host of television treatments: the most recent is a four-part miniseries by Julian Fellowes, the creator of
Downton Abbey
. And that’s just the English-language output. German dramatizations include a Nazi propaganda film set aboard the ship—
not
the same movie as the Leni Riefenstahl
Titanic
movie. A French entry,
The Chambermaid on the Titanic
(1997), based on a novel, fleshes out the story with erotic reveries.

The inexhaustible interest suggests that the
Titanic
’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the
Hindenberg
, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the
Titanic
sank, of the
Lusitania
, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. The aura of significance that surrounds the
Titanic
’s fate was the subject of another, belated headline, which appeared in a special publication of the satirical newspaper
The Onion
in 1999, stomping across the page in dire block letters:

WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG

The “news” was accompanied by an archival image of the ship’s famous four-funneled profile. The subhead pressed the joke: “TITANIC, REPRESENTATION OF MAN’S HUBRIS, SINKS IN NORTH ATLANTIC. 1,500 DEAD IN SYMBOLIC TRAGEDY.”

The Onion
’s spoof gets to the heart of the matter: unlike other disasters, the
Titanic
seems to be
about
something. But what? For some, it’s a parable about the scope, and limits, of technology: a 1997 Broadway musical admonished us that “in every age mankind attempts / to fabricate great works at once / magnificent and impossible.” For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of World War I—the marker of the end of a more innocent era. Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia; for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.

All these interpretations are legitimate, even provocative; and yet none, somehow, seems wholly satisfying. If the
Titanic
has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, you have to turn away from the facts and consider the realm to which the
Titanic
and its story properly belong: myth.

If the facts are so well known by now that they seem more like memory than history, it’s thanks to Walter Lord. More than fifty years after its publication,
A Night to Remember
(1955) remains the definitive account; it has never gone out of print. In just under 150 pages, the author crisply lays out a story that, he rightly intuited, needs no added drama. He begins virtually at the moment of impact. “High in the crow’s nest” of the sumptuous new ship—the largest ever built, widely admired for its triple-propeller design, and declared by the press to be “unsinkable”—two lookouts peering out at the unusually calm North Atlantic suddenly sight an iceberg “right
ahead.” Within a couple of pages, the ship’s fate is sealed: Lord gives us the agonizing thirty-seven seconds that elapsed between the sighting and the collision, and then the eerily understated moment of impact, the “faint grinding jar” felt by so many passengers and crew. (“If I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled,” one survivor recalled.) Only then does he fill in what led up to that moment—not least the decision to speed through waters known to be strewn with icebergs—and what followed.

Until Lord’s book, what most people had read about the
Titanic
came from the initial news stories, and then, as the years passed, from articles and interviews published on anniversaries of the sinking. Lord was the first writer to put it all together from a more distanced perspective. The unhurried detachment of his account nicely mirrors the odd calm that, according to so many survivors’ accounts, long prevailed aboard the stricken liner. “And so it went,” Lord wrote. “No bells or sirens, no general alarm.” His account has no bells or sirens, either; the catastrophe unfolds almost dreamily. There are the nonchalant reactions of passengers and crew, many of whom felt the sinking ship was a better bet than the tiny lifeboats. (“We are safer here than in that little boat,” J. J. Astor declared; he drowned.) There are the oddly revealing decisions: one socialite left his cabin, then went back and, ignoring the $300,000 in stocks and bonds that he had stashed in a tin box, grabbed a good-luck charm and three oranges. There is the growing realization that there weren’t enough lifeboats; of those, many were lowered half full. There are the rockets fired off in distress, which one passenger recalled as paling against the dazzling starlight. And then the shattering end, marked by the din of the ship’s giant boilers, torn loose from their housings, hurtling downward toward the submerged bows.

There are iconic moments of panache and devotion, and of cowardice. Benjamin Guggenheim really did trade in his life jacket for
white tie and tails. Mrs. Isidor Straus really did refuse to leave her husband, a co-owner of Macy’s: “Where you go, I go,” she was heard to say. Among the songs written after the sinking was one in Yiddish, celebrating the couple’s devotion. And—an anecdote that has been repeated in everything from a poison-pen letter sent soon after the sinking to an episode of
Rod Serling’s Night Gallery
—a woman in a lifeboat turned out not to be a woman at all. It was just a terrified Irish youth wrapped in a shawl.

Lord had access to many survivors, and the details that had lodged in their memories have the persuasive oddness of truth. One provides an unsettling soundtrack to the dreadful hour and a half between the sinking, at 2:20 in the morning, and the appearance of a rescue ship. Jack Thayer, a teenage passenger from Philadelphia’s Main Line, who was one of only a handful of people picked out of the water by lifeboats, later recalled that the sound made by the many hundreds of people flailing in the twenty-eight-degree water, drowning or freezing to death, was like the noise of locusts buzzing in the Pennsylvania countryside on a summer night.

The closest that
A Night to Remember
comes to engineering drama is an account, shrewdly spliced into the larger narrative, of the doings of two ships that would become intimately associated with the disaster. One was the little Cunard liner
Carpathia
, eastbound that night en route from New York to the Mediterranean. Fifty-eight miles away from the
Titanic
when it picked up her first distress calls, it was the only ship to hasten to the big liner’s rescue, reversing its course and shutting off heat and hot water in an attempt to maximize fuel efficiency. The other was the
Californian
, a small steamer that had stopped about ten miles from the
Titanic
—unlike the doomed ship, it had heeded the ice warnings—and sat there all through that terrible night, disregarding the
Titanic
’s frantic signaling, by wireless,
Morse lamp, and, finally, rockets. Not all of this was as inexplicable as it seems: the
Californian
didn’t have a nighttime wireless operator. (All passenger ships were subsequently required by law to have around-the-clock wireless.) But no one has ever sufficiently explained why the
Californian
’s captain, officers, and crew failed to respond to what seemed like obvious signs of distress. The second officer merely thought it strange that a ship would be firing rockets at night. If Lord had been given to large interpretations, he might have seen in the one ship a symbol of the urgent force of human striving and, in the other, the immovable resistance of sheer stupidity.

About halfway through
A Night to Remember
—this is just after the ship has gone under, and an English socialite in a lifeboat turns to her secretary and sighs, “There is your beautiful nightdress gone”—Lord interrupts his narrative for a few pages of musings about what it all means. The themes he finds are characterized by an appealing combination of nostalgia and skepticism. One notion is that the sinking marked “the end of the old days” of nineteenth-century technological confidence, as well as of “noblesse oblige”; another is a sense that people behaved better back then, whether noblesse, steerage, or crew. When one officer was finally picked up from his lifeboat, he carefully stowed the sails and the mast before climbing aboard the rescue ship.

But overshadowing everything is the problem of money and class. The
Titanic
’s story irresistibly reads as a parable about a gilded age in which death was anything but democratic, as was made clear by a notorious statistic: of the men in first class—who paid as much as $4,350 for a one-way fare at a time when the average annual household income in the U.S. was $1,800—the percentage of survivors was roughly the same as that of children in third class. For all his sentimentality about gentlemanly chivalry, Lord doesn’t shy away
from what the sinking and its aftermath revealed about the era’s privileges and prejudices. “Even the passengers’ dogs were glamorous,” begins a tongue-in-cheek catalog in
A Night to Remember
that includes a Pekingese called Sun Yat-sen—part of the entourage of Henry Harper, of the publishing family, who, Lord laconically reports, had also picked up an Egyptian dragoman during his preembarkation travels, “as a sort of joke.” The book traces a damning arc from the special treatment enjoyed by the pets to the way in which third-class passengers were, at the end, “ignored, neglected, forgotten.”

Even so, Lord kept his sermonizing to a minimum. His book ends on a grace note: the seventeen-year-old Jack Thayer climbing into a bunk on the
Carpathia
, which saved 706 of the Titanic’s 2,223 souls, and falling asleep after swallowing his first-ever glass of brandy.
A Night to Remember
left the love stories, stolen diamonds, handcuffs, axes, and underwater lock-picking to others.