How to Survive the Titanic Read online

  Ismay tells everyone, not only Mrs Thayer, that the first half of his life is now meaningless. William Boulton, a soldier who has known him for years, tells Ismay to ‘not say again your life is ruined — don’t say it, or even admit it to yourself. You are still suffering from nerve shock which would have broken most men down and you are not competent to judge.’ It is vital, Boulton continues, to stop all this ‘morbid introspection’; to let ‘your friends estimate your worth and tell you what value they place on your life’s work’.

  Ismay receives other letters of consolation: Mary Anna Maxwell Stuart, the sister of an old friend and the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott, tells Ismay ‘how perfectly frantic with indignation we are at the way you have been treated! As if anyone who had ever known you could have believed you capable of any mean action!’8 Captain Mark Kerr writes on Admiralty notepaper to express his ‘indignation at the unjust, abominable and lying accusations against you in some of the press and by some ignorant people. Anyone who knows you and knows the sea, and ships, and occasions of excitement there, will see that your behaviour was most proper in every way.’ He continues on a more contemporary note: ‘Hysteria is the prevalent disease now — everything is at extremes… The wireless operator who does what he is paid for, is a hero if he does it and a miserable skunk if he doesn’t! Those are the only two words they know! It makes a lot of us sick to see the stuff written.’ The Commercial Club in the town of Ismay, Montana lets him know that they have no intention of changing their name. William Molson MacPherson, who formed the Canadian Dominion Steamship Company, reminds Bruce of the first disaster Thomas Ismay endured in 1873, when the Atlantic hit a rock and 250 people were drowned: ‘History has repeated itself for your poor father went through the same distress; it prostrated him for years, but he lived and continued his wonderful work, which you are spared to continue.’ Mary Jones, who remembers Ismay as a child in Liverpool, writes that as a nurse during the Boer War she gained ‘a very intimate knowledge of men when in extremity. I discovered that the greatest heroism and bravery are not by any means always associated with the truest chivalry — often far otherwise. Personally I think to live is often much harder than to die — I do not doubt you will agree… you have many unknown friends, believe me.’ Ismay’s sister ticks him off for stopping his Sanatogen — ‘You could not begin to feel the effects for at least EIGHT WEEKS. I know it will do you good — try it again.’ Harold Sanderson begs him to ‘try to see things as they really are, and not through glasses of a morbid tint… I am confident that you are wrong to worry about your own position so much. This is’, Sanderson concludes in a Jamesian vein, ‘a very interesting experience.’9

  Two people who Ismay hears nothing from are J. P. Morgan and William Pirrie. ‘As usual,’ Pirrie’s wife explained later in the year, ‘when feeling strong and sorry over a matter [William] is very quiet and sad over it.’10

  In her last letter, Marian Thayer says that she is getting out more and visiting friends, that she is constantly surprised by how good and kind everyone is to her. Why be surprised? Ismay replies. ‘It is the most natural thing in the world.’ She wonders if he believes the verse she sent him, which he placed on his dressing table? He says that he does, and that ‘doing so is a comfort’. She offers to send him a book which is filled with similar verses and prayers; he says he would appreciate it. She asks him, as she also asked President Taft, whether he believes in life after death? Ismay replies that he has ‘several times heard my mother’s voice but I think it must only be in my dreams. How I loved her.’ He does not, he admits, ‘believe in reincarnation but I feel as you do in regard to knowing each other’. They had, Mrs Thayer suggested, met in a previous life. ‘There are a great many things I should love to talk to you about and some day,’ Ismay continues, ‘we will have the opportunity of doing so.’ He then repeats that ‘I cannot blame myself in any way for the awful disaster’, adding that he ‘had no more to do with it than you had’. It’s a startling remark by any measure, and it must have startled Mrs Thayer. That Ismay is as blameless as she is, or she as culpable as he is, had not occurred to her. As far as Marian Thayer is concerned, while Ismay should not be expected to shoulder the entire responsibility for the disaster, he must surely — as a man of honour, a businessman of repute, and a church-going Christian — acknowledge some responsibility. To err is only human. Had he learned nothing from the two inquiries?

  Her sympathy has already started to wane, and she forgets to enclose her photograph in the letter. She is filing an insurance claim for the loss of her husband’s life and asks Ismay whether he might, as a favour, present her case to Mr Franklin for special consideration. Ismay replies that while ‘I would do a great deal for you, and you know it, what you ask is impossible.’ He is ‘satisfied you really don’t mean what you write. I am deeply sorry for the loss you have sustained and of course I know any claim you put in would be absolutely right, but you must agree with me that all claims must be dealt with on the same basis now don’t you?’ Mrs Thayer is doubtless used to being patronised, but the sudden imposition of boundaries and proprieties in a relationship which has so far dispensed with them altogether comes as a further surprise. Ismay begins his letter by suggesting that he and she were equal in their blamelessness; he agrees that they knew one another in a previous life; he is resting his future on her goodness; he guesses that she alone stood up for him on the Carpathia, that she prevented Mrs Ryerson from mentioning him in her affidavit, that she understands his pain, but he will not extend his influence as her friend. ‘You must not think me unkind or inconsiderate,’ he continues, ‘and I am satisfied that if you will think this matter over you will agree that I am acting rightly. Don’t let us say anything more about this please.’ No more was said and Marian Thayer, who asked the White Star Line to compensate her for the loss of her luggage, never claimed for the loss of her husband.

  Ismay then returns to the perennial subject of whether the two of them will ever meet again. ‘Of course we will,’ he says, ‘why do you get such ideas in your head? Writing is a very poor substitute but surely it is better than nothing so don’t make this an excuse for not writing. You will surely be coming to this side ere long and we will meet.’ He knows he will never again go to America. He ends in his usual fashion, apologising for ‘such a long letter’ and telling her she is ‘constantly in [his] thoughts’. In a postscript he adds that ‘it is always difficult to say what one would like at the end of a letter but I’m sure you will understand’. Mrs Thayer understands everything.

  To and fro the letters go, each one trying to replicate the intensity of their first contact. Ismay repeatedly describes himself as ‘talking’ to Marian Thayer but it is remarkable how little he says beyond expressing his desire to talk to her further. What, apart from his sense of blamelessness, does he want to talk about? Does he want this to be an amorous exchange, or one in which they simply comfort one another as fellow beings? Are his reasons for writing the same as her own? Whatever it is he is trying to say, his words simply freeze in the air before melting. He expresses his trauma as a confined banality and his letters, like his responses to the two inquiries, wander around and around the same immovable fact. He plays along with Marian Thayer’s peculiar fads in which he clearly has no real interest, he takes on board her specific vocabulary as though he has no words of his own, and he hands back nothing but the continued drip of his sense of unfairness. When Ismay next writes it is mid-December, he has turned fifty and the shooting season, which has taken ‘my thoughts from other things’, is nearly over. Apart from his daughter Margaret, ‘who has left her husband to keep me company’, he is alone in the house. Florence and the children are currently in London, but will be returning to Liverpool for Christmas when they are expecting a ‘large party — all family, sisters, brothers, son-in-law’. Ismay is dreading it. ‘I am not fond of the so-called festive season, full of pleasure for the young and full of sorrow and unhappy memories for the old like myself.’ Fo
rgetting that he has already, in a previous letter, confided in her about his retirement plans, he now confides again, ‘in the strictest confidence’, that he is ‘going out of business on 30 June’ and that this decision has nothing to do with ‘that terrible calamity’. He will be sorry to no longer be involved with the White Star Line as he ‘loves the business and all connected with it’ but he has ‘neglected other matters’. The reason for his early retirement, he reveals, is to ‘see more of my family and to try and make them happy’, adding that ‘it will be a very great wrench. I will leave Liverpool and settle somewhere in the country.’ But can this really be the reason? Ismay’s children, aged twenty-three, seventeen, fifteen and ten, are now drifting in their own directions and his marriage has been over for years. Ismay, whose motivations always have a secret side, has been divesting himself of his chattels since the day his father died.

  He is more anxious about the future than he is about the past; as usual he is looking straight ahead. He is moving into a life of being rather than doing and his anxieties about retirement are nothing new; before he boarded the Titanic he had expressed to Harold Sanderson his ‘very mixed and doubtful feelings’ about the coming years. He delayed the date of his retirement from the presidency of the IMM and the chairmanship of the White Star Line from January to June 1913 because he thought it would be easier in the summer months to deal with the ‘little or nothing’ he now had ‘to fill up my time’. He now has cold feet again about giving up the White Star Line, a company for whom he feels a ‘sentimental attachment’, and announces that he has changed his mind about retirement, that while he is willing to let the IMM presidency go to Sanderson, he still wants to be at the helm of his father’s firm. J. P. Morgan replies this will not be possible; that Ismay has, ‘by your ability and your strong personality overshadowed the other managers’ and that it would be ‘easier for these men, as also for the incoming president, to assert their independence if their former chief is not on the boards with them’. Ismay does not understand what Morgan is saying to him; that he is considered a liability, that he represents the errors of the past, that he is seen as an autocrat around whom no one can breathe.11 He does not mention in his letters to Mrs Thayer that he has been excised from his own company.

  Marian Thayer’s most recent letter to Ismay had contained a selection of photographs of herself and Jack, and Ismay has chosen to keep two of the mother and one of the son — ‘I hope you will not consider that I am too grasping.’ ‘Do you know,’ he continues, looking at her picture as he writes, ‘not a single day goes by without my thinking of you. I cannot understand it.’ He wonders how she is and wishes he could talk to her: ‘How I should love it.’ He then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, says something extraordinary: ‘I often think of where our friendship would have taken us if that awful disaster had not taken place, how well I remember our conversations when everything looked so bright. You had a very peculiar attraction to me and I loved talking to you and hearing you talk, you interested me so much… How I ramble on. I must stop.’ Had the Titanic not gone and hit the iceberg, he and Mrs Thayer could have been happy together: this is what occupies Ismay’s mind. ‘My God,’ as Jim says to Marlow when he jumps from the Patna, ‘what a chance missed, what a chance missed.’

  In a newspaper article written on the twentieth anniversary of the wreck, Jack Thayer recalled that when he was standing on the deck with his parents, Ismay approached them and told them that the ship had one hour to live. Ismay, who did not even warn his own valet, of course wanted Marian Thayer to live and of course wanted to live himself, especially now that there was someone worth living for.

  In October, six months after the disaster, a collection of three sea stories by Joseph Conrad appeared in the shops. Titled Twixt Land and Sea, his new book marked a turning point in Conrad’s career. No longer under the shadow of Henry James, Conrad was once more the master of ‘adventure and psychology’, he was flying his ‘old colours of mystery, romance and the strangeness of life’.12 It was the second story in the volume, called ‘The Secret Sharer’, but variously titled in draft ‘The Secret Self’, ‘The Second Self’, ‘The Other Self’ and ‘The Secret-Sharer’, which was his favourite. It appeared, perfect and complete, in two weeks; Conrad experienced none of the usual agonies and interruptions in the writing process. Some part of him had been released by the tale; it made him feel curiously elated. ‘“The Secret Sharer”, between you and me, is it. Eh?’ he wrote to Edward Garnett. ‘No damn tricks with girls, there, eh? Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note. Luck, my boy. Pure luck!’

  ‘The Secret Sharer’ is told by a fledgling captain who remains unnamed. He has been in command of his ship — also unnamed — for under two weeks and is still waiting to see whether he ‘should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly’. He is soon to find out: keeping watch in his sleep suit one night, rejoicing ‘in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land’, he finds in ‘the sleeping water’ a naked man hanging onto the rope ladder.

  The Captain pulls the man, whose name is Leggatt, on board. Like Jim, Leggatt is the son of an English country parson. He has swum several miles from his own ship, the Sephora, where, during a storm, he landed a blow on the head of a mutinous seaman. The seaman is killed, and Leggatt kept prisoner in his cabin. After nine weeks of incarceration, he is overcome by ‘a sudden temptation’ and jumps: ‘I was in the water before I had made up my mind fairly’, and he swims until he sees the lights of this present ship, when he decides to chance his luck. Leggatt feels blameless: in killing the man he saved his ship, and he has nothing but disdain for the law by which he will be judged should he ever again see land. ‘But you don’t see me coming back to explain such things to an old fellow in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen, do you? What can they know whether I am guilty or not — or of what I am guilty, either?’ The Captain feels sympathy for the fugitive, who is older than him by five years and trained, as he did (and as Captain Rostron did too), on the HMS Conway in Liverpool (a training ship which was also a concern of Thomas and Bruce Ismay). He gives Leggatt a sleeping suit of the ‘same grey-striped pattern as the one I was wearing’ and, at the risk of losing his own authority with the crew, keeps him hidden in his cabin. ‘He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes… I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping suit…’ Leggatt is the Captain’s ‘double’, his ‘reflection in a dark and sombre mirror’. Conrad forces on the reader the fact of the Captain’s identification, using the word ‘double’ on nineteen occasions. ‘I knew well enough… that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more.’ If anyone were to see the pair of them, ‘he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own grey ghost’. Not that the two men looked in any way similar. ‘He was not a bit like me, really; yet, as we stood leaning over my bed place, whispering side by side, with our dark heads together and our backs to the door, anybody bold enough to open it stealthily would have been treated to the uncanny sight of a double captain busy talking in whispers with his other self.’ Leggatt too has found his sharer: ‘As long as I know that you understand,’ he whispers. ‘But of course you do. It’s a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose… It’s very wonderful.’

  The Captain’s description of himself with his looking-glass reflection recalls the picture Conrad painted of himself and Marlow, ‘when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony’. But the company of Leggatt does not offer comfort and harmony: the Captain is ‘creeping quietly as near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border’. In the story’s t
hrilling final scene the Captain takes a risk with his ship and ‘shaves the land as close as possible’ to allow Leggatt to leg it and swim to the island of Koh-ring. ‘The secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for his new destiny.’

  ‘The Secret Sharer’ belongs to the same world as Lord Jim: there is a crime at sea, a jump, a story to unburden, an understanding captain, and a second chance. Both Jim and Leggatt commit a ‘breach of faith with the community of mankind’, and both men make sense to themselves only in relation to another. ‘We exist,’ as Conrad puts in, ‘only in so far as we hang together.’ And like Lord Jim, ‘The Secret Sharer’ is based on a real event. In September 1880, during an argument on board the Cutty Sark, the chief mate, Sydney Smith, brought a capstan bar down on the head of a black seaman, who died from injuries three days later. Sydney Smith persuaded the Captain to let him jump overboard where he swam until he was smuggled onto another ship. In his shame, the Captain of the Cutty Sark then killed himself. In Conrad’s hands, the scandal, which was reported in every paper and discussed in every port, becomes the tale of two men in their sleep suits whispering in a ship’s cabin, and this dreamlike scene recalls Ismay in his pyjamas, hiding in the doctor’s cabin on the Carpathia, plotting with Lightoller how to escape the inquiry without anyone noticing. Lightoller, like Conrad’s captain, is caught between personal conscience and corporate duty. Will the officer prove ‘faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly’?