Waiting for the Barbarians (13 page)

One sign of how efficiently Lord did his job is the air of embarrassment that hangs over the latest studies. John Maxtone-Graham, whose fond and thoroughgoing
The Only Way to Cross
, published in 1972, is considered a classic history of the ocean-liner era, interrupts his
Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner
halfway through in order to admit that he’d spent a long time trying to avoid the subject altogether. John Welshman’s
Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town
aims to “both build upon and challenge ‘A Night to Remember.’ ” His subtitle is a phrase borrowed from Lord’s book.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there seems to be no shortage of new angles. Because the allegedly unsinkable ship sank, its design and construction, as well as the number and disposition of the lifeboats, have often been the subject of debate. But Maxtone-Graham shifts
the technological focus, by pointing up the crucial role of wireless communication. The
Titanic
was one of the first ships in history to issue an SOS. (“Send SOS,” the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the
Titanic
’s junior wireless operator, who survived, told the twenty-five-year-old Jack Phillips, the senior officer, who died. “It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”) And the sinking was among the first global news stories to be reported, thanks to wireless radio, more or less simultaneously with the events. One of the early headlines, which appeared as the rescue ship carried survivors to New York—“WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE”—suggests how fast we became accustomed to an accelerating news cycle. The book winningly portrays the wireless boys of a hundred years ago as the computer geeks of their day, from their extreme youth to their strikingly familiar lingo. “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?” came one response to the
Titanic
’s distress call.

In
Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town
, Welshman works hard to “re-balance” another narrative—the one about privilege. There’s a scene in a not at all bad 1979 TV movie about the sinking,
SOS Titanic
, in which a pair of second-class passengers standing on deck observe the struttings of the first-class neighbors to one side and the antics of some steerage passengers on the other. “This is a funny place to be,” one of them, an American schoolteacher played by Susan Saint James, remarks to the other, a British schoolmaster with whom she’s been flirting. “We’re in the middle.” Indeed. In his new book, Welshman persuasively argues that narratives about second-class passengers have tended to be neglected, lacking as they do the glamour of first class or the extreme pathos of steerage. Drawing in particular on the published memoirs of a British science master named Lawrence Beasley (he’s the character in the TV movie who gets a crush on Susan Saint James), the author shines welcome light on this overlooked corner of
Titanic
history. His technique of providing
little biographies of characters in all classes probably tests the limits of the human-interest approach (“the export of butter from Finland was growing rapidly”), but it pays off in some wonderfully idiosyncratic details. Beasley felt an odd “sense of security” once the ship came to a stop, “like standing on a large rock in the middle of the ocean”; another survivor, a boy of nine at the time, realized long after settling with his family in the Midwest that he couldn’t bring himself to go to Detroit Tigers games because the noise that greeted home runs reminded him of the cries of the dying.

The impulse to reappraise is not new. The best dissection of
Titanic
mythmaking is Steven Biel’s
Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster
, first published in 1996 and now updated for the centenary. Biel, a Harvard historian, showed how the
Titanic
’s story has been made to serve the purposes of everyone from antisuffragettes to the labor movement to Republicans. He argues that, while the sinking was “neither catalyst nor cause,” it “did expose and come to represent anxieties about modernity.” One of these was race: an assault on one of the wireless operators during the ship’s final minutes was blamed on a nonexistent “Negro” crew member. Another was the influx of “new,” non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants. Reports by crew members and coverage in the press revealed a prejudice against southern Europeans so pervasive that the Italian ambassador to the United States was moved to make a formal complaint.

Sometimes, the fancy critical frameworks get out of hand: Welshman’s eagerness to talk about “the lifeboat as metaphor” seems a bit grotesque, in this case. One reason that the
Titanic
grips the imagination even today is, if anything, that it poses the big, enduring questions we associate with much larger historical events: as Nathaniel Philbrick writes in the introduction to a new edition of Lord’s book, “Who will survive?” and “What would I have done?” These hover over Frances Wilson’s
How to Survive the Titanic; or, The Sinking of
J. Bruce Ismay
, a biography of one of the most controversial figures in this story: the man who was the managing director of the company that owned the ship. Ismay was widely reviled for having entered a lifeboat rather than going down with his ship; worse, perhaps, it seems to have been he who pressed the
Titanic
’s experienced captain, E. J. Smith, to maintain a relatively high speed even though the ship had been receiving ice warnings.

Twining Ismay’s story around a series of reflections on Joseph Conrad’s
Lord Jim
, a novel about a ship’s mate who abandons his vessel, Wilson at once confirms and undercuts the familiar cartoon of Ismay. To be sure, there are the sense of entitlement and the convenient ethics. “I cannot feel I have done anything wrong and cannot blame myself for the disaster,” he wrote to the widow of one drowned passenger. And yet Wilson deftly evokes the often startling emotional complexities beneath. Drawing on an unpublished correspondence, she reveals that, during the voyage, Ismay fell in love with young Jack Thayer’s mother, Marian, and paid her epistolary court after the sinking left her a widow. Even here, though, a self-serving coldness prevailed. When Marian asked for help with her insurance claim, Ismay replied, “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?”

If you were writing a morality play about class privilege, you couldn’t do better than to dream up a glamorous ship of fools and load it with everyone from the A-list to immigrants coming to America for a better life. The class issue is, indeed, one major reason the
Titanic
disaster has always been so ripe for dramatization. And yet the way we tell
the story often reveals more about us than it does about what happened. If the indignant depictions of the class system in so many
Titanic
dramas coexist uneasily with their adoring depictions of upper-crust privilege, that, too, is part of the appeal: it allows us to demonstrate our liberalism even as we indulge our consumerism. In Cameron’s movie, you root for the steerage passenger who improbably pauses, during a last dash for a boat, to make a sardonic comment about the band as it famously played on (“Music to drown by—now I know I’m in first class”), but you’re also happy to lounge with Kate Winslet on a sunbathed private promenade deck while a uniformed maid cleans up on her hands and knees after breakfast.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the strongest treatment of this issue was the 1958 film of Lord’s book, made in Britain—which is to say, by people who had a better feel for class distinctions than Lord (an American) did, and who were working at a time when the class system was under tremendous strain, and was the object of relentless examination in literature and theater. It says something that the only star in the film (the popular actor Kenneth More) played a comparatively lowly, though heroic, character—Second Officer Herbert Lightoller, who managed to keep thirty men alive while they all stood on an overturned lifeboat. The film, like the book, depends for its effectiveness on a straightforward presentation of information and an accumulation of damning detail. A short scene in which a group of Irish steerage passengers breaks through a metal gate as they make their way to the lifeboats—they suddenly find themselves in the first-class dining room, set for the next morning’s breakfast, and at first can barely bring themselves to penetrate this sacred space—tells you more about the class system than Cameron’s cruder populism does.

It certainly tells you more than the ham-handed treatment of the subject in the new Julian Fellowes miniseries. In his hugely popular
Downton Abbey
, and in the script for the 2001 Robert Altman film
Gosford Park
, Fellowes showed a subtle feel for the ironies of class, but his
Titanic
sinks under the weight of its ideological baggage: the sneering condescension of the first-class passengers is so caricatured that it ends up having no traction. (“We are a political family,” a snooty countess observes. “You, I think, have always been in
trade
.”) There’s even a fugitive Russian anarchist aboard to give free lessons in politics: “Europe was wrong for me.” Worse, the production looks cheap: the first-class dining room has the ad hoc fanciness of a high school cafeteria on prom night. This is a
Titanic
drama in which the class outrage feels synthetic and there’s no compensatory luxe.

If the underlying theme of all
Titanic
dramatizations has been class, the engine driving the plot has nearly always been romance. Apart from
A Night to Remember
, movies and television have tended to ignore the
Carpathia-Californian
drama, preferring to use the
Titanic
as a lavish backdrop for tragic passions and eleventh-hour lessons about the redemptive value of love. Fellowes takes this to new heights, or perhaps depths: whereas previous adapters of the story have made their star-crossed lovers fictional, he foists an invented upper-class suffragette on an actual first-class passenger, Harry Widener, to whose death Harvard students owe their university library, built as a memorial by Harry’s mother. If I were a Widener, I’d sue.

The yoking of romance to the disaster narrative began with
Saved from the Titanic
, the 1912 movie with the weirdly prescient “reality” angle—it’s the one that starred an actual survivor. In it, the heroine must overcome her fear of the sea so that her naval officer fiancé can fulfill his duty. The sinking haunts a 1929 British talkie,
Atlantic
, which sets an adulterous affair on a
Titanic
-like liner, and a bizarre 1937 tragicomedy called
History Is Made at Night
, in which Jean Arthur plays a wealthy American who falls for a famous headwaiter (!) played by Charles Boyer, and travels to Europe with him on a liner that hits an iceberg on its maiden voyage.

The actual
Titanic
makes an important appearance in Noël Coward’s
Cavalcade
, a big hit on both stage and screen in the early 1930s. But it took another twenty years for Hollywood to inject romantic melodrama into the real-life story. In Jean Negulesco’s
Titanic
(1953), Barbara Stanwyck plays Julia Sturges, a midwestern woman unhappily married to a wealthy man (Clifton Webb) from whom she’s become estranged while living an empty life of the beau monde—“the same silly calendar year after year … jumping from party to party, from title to title, all the rest of your life,” as she says, when explaining why she has absconded with their two children, a marriageable girl and a boy on the verge of adolescence. The arc of the drama traces the husband’s evolution from a superficial cad to a self-sacrificing hero; more important, it outlines the couple’s trajectory from estrangement to an inevitable last-minute reconciliation that makes them both realize what’s really valuable—not money but love.

If the
Titanic
is a vehicle for working out our cultural anxieties, the 1953 film makes it clear that one of those, during the first years of the Cold War, was the question of who the good guys were. “We’re Americans and we belong in America,” Julia declares. Middle-class Americans, too. You learn that Julia had started out as a “girl who bought her hats out of a Sears, Roebuck catalog”; on board the
Titanic
, her prissy, Europeanized daughter is being wooed by a handsome American undergraduate who pointedly remarks that the “P” on his letter shirt stands for Purdue, not Princeton. Steven Biel’s
Down with the Old Canoe
makes a further argument: that the film represents Cold War–era nostalgia for a more manageable kind of apocalypse—not the blinding thermonuclear flash but the slow freeze that left you time to write your own ending.

With its focus on feminine suffering and self-sacrifice, and, especially, in its presentation of an ill-fated romance between the unpretentious
young man and the class-bound society girl, the 1953
Titanic
, which won an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay, anticipated Cameron’s 1997 movie, which won Oscars for just about everything. A lot of the dialogue that Cameron put in the mouth of his frustrated debutante, Rose DeWitt Bukater (Winslet), reminds you of Barbara Stanwyck’s lines: “I saw my whole life as if I’d already lived it,” Rose recalls, explaining her attraction to a carefree young artist named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio). “An endless parade of parties, cotillions … the same mindless chatter.” But Cameron gave his film a feminist rather than a patriotic spin. Rose, of a “good” but impoverished Main Line family, is being married off to the loathsome Cal Hockley, who seals their engagement with the gift of a blue diamond that had belonged to Louis XVI. (“We are royalty,” he smugly tells her as he drapes the giant rock around her neck.) “It’s so unfair,” she sighs during a conversation with her odiously snobbish mother, who, in the same scene, is lacing Rose tightly into a corset. “Of course it’s unfair,” the mother retorts. “We’re women.” Small wonder that nearly half the female viewers under twenty-five who saw the movie went to see it a second time within two months of its release, and that three quarters of those said that they’d see it again.