nonfiction

nonfiction
Sinking In:
The Titanic Tragedy Turns 100
“Words alone...can’t convey the
complete story of this once-mighty craft.”
BY J. KINGSTON PIERCE
Historian Walter Lord
once labeled the Titanic
disaster “the unsinkable
subject.” Indeed, a century
after that elegant passenger
liner struck an iceberg
and went to a watery
grave in the north Atlantic
Ocean on April 15, 1912—
taking with her more
than 1,500 passengers and
crew, or two-thirds of the
people on board—that
vessel and her shocking
fate remain fertile topics
of research, debate and
public fascination.
It’s no surprise, then, that an abundance
of new nonfiction books about
the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic have
been published over the last year, with a
particular flood of them reaching bookstores
just in time for this month’s 100th
anniversary. Several of those works
are excellent, but they ought not overshadow
a few older volumes that belong
in the library of any Titanic enthusiast.
New and especially useful to readers
looking for a dramatic recap of the craft’s
foundering is Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage:
The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their
World, by Hugh Brewster. As the title
suggests, the focus here is on those fortunate
folk able to book the most luxurious
accommodations on the Titanic’s ill-fated
maiden crossing from Southampton,
England, to New York City.
Lily May Futrelle, the wife of American
mystery writer Jacques Futrelle (who
perished in the sinking), described her
first-class shipmates as “a rare gathering
of beautiful women and splendid men.”
Included in their number were real-estate
magnate John Jacob Astor IV and his
pregnant 18-year-old wife; tennis player
and future Olympic gold medalist R. Norris
Williams; Denver socialite and women’s-rights
champion Margaret Brown
(immortalized, incorrectly, as “Molly”
Brown); Maj. Archibald Butt, the military
aide to U.S. President William Howard
Taft; and silent-film actress Dorothy Gibson.
(Financier J.P. Morgan had planned
to sail on the Titanic as well, but instead
stayed behind with his mistress in France.)
Although Gilded Lives relies often on
speculation about the shipboard activities
of the Edwardian celebrities lost in that
1912 calamity, Brewster balances that with
a splendid use of firsthand accounts from
the survivors—a much greater percentage
of whom were cabin-class passengers than
poorer, steerage travelers.
Interestingly, among those rescued
from the wreck was the president of
the company that owned the Titanic;
he leapt into one of the vessel’s too-few
lifeboats, along with women and children—and
was later vilified for having
lived through the disaster. In last year’s
How to Survive the Titanic, or The Sinking
of J. Bruce Ismay, Frances Wilson
employs Ismay’s story as a window into
the troubled soul of a privileged industrialist
who, as he was rowed to safety,
wouldn’t even look back at his ruined
White Star liner and the hundreds of
people struggling to flee its ruination.
Analyzing Ismay’s last-minute
instinct to save his own hide, even if it
cost him his honor, Wilson sees “an ordinary
man caught in extraordinary circumstances,
who behaved in a way which
only confirmed his ordinariness. Ismay
is the figure we all fear we might be.” He
eventually quit public life and settled in
Ireland, but not before having to submit
to government inquiries in both the
United States and Britain. Wilson uses
his testimony to re-examine numerous
contradictions surrounding the Titanic’s
final days, but goes beyond that to plumb
parallels between Ismay’s experiences
and those of Joseph Conrad’s protagonist
in Lord Jim (1900), another gent who
abandoned a ship in distress.
Anybody familiar with Titanic history
knows about the two groups of
onboard musicians who, as the grand
ocean liner dove beneath the frigid
waters, gathered together to serenade
an audience less captivated than chaotic.
However, it took Steve Turner’s
The Band That Played On: The Extraordinary
Story of the 8 Musicians Who Went
Down with the Titanic (2011) to finally
give those men—five of them English,
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage:
The Titanic’s First-Class
Passengers and Their World
by Hugh Brewster
one French, one Belgian and one Scottish—strong
individual identities.
Turner, a music journalist, tracked down
descendents of the eight instrumentalists
and collected photographs that fit
his middle-class subjects into their time
and give them heroic dimension. Unfortunately,
he cannot answer the burning
questions: Why did those men decide
to perform on the Titanic’s deck that
night And were they still playing as the
ship vanished
If you’re looking for more eyewitness
recollections of the steamer’s destruction,
turn to Titanic: First Accounts. Edited
by Tim Maltin, and released earlier this
year, it features excerpts from books and
newspaper articles penned by the survivors.
It also contains the full text of The
Truth About the Titanic, composed by firstclass
passenger Col. Archibald Gracie IV
following his return to civilization, but
not published until after his passing in
December 1912.
Gracie was washed overboard during
the ship’s plunge; however, he subsequently
found salvation on an upturned
lifeboat. His memories of the scene
following the Titanic’s disappearance
will send a chill up your spine: “[T]here
arose to the sky the most horrible sounds
ever heard by mortal man…The agonizing
cries of death from over a thousand
throats, the wails and groans of the suffering,
the shrieks of the terror-stricken
and the awful gaspings of breath of those
in the last throes of drowning, none of us
will ever forget to our dying day.”
Similarly arresting is Wreck and Sinking
of the Titanic: The Ocean’s Greatest
Disaster, edited by Marshall Everett.
Originally rushed to press in 1912, but
rereleased this year in a handsome edition
with new artwork and an antique
quality, this book includes survivor
remembrances, tributes to the betterknown
figures who went down with the
ship, dramatic re-creations of the sinking’s
key moments, stories about relief
funds raised for the poor immigrants
who managed to live through that
WRECK AND SINKING OF
THE TITANIC: The Ocean’s
Greatest Disaster
by Marshall Everett
maritime horror and even a statement
of remorse (“My heart overflows with
grief for you all…”) from the widow of
Capt. Edward J. Smith, who’s thought to
have remained on his bridge till the end.
Words alone, though, can’t convey
the complete story of this once-mighty
craft. Photographs of the luxurious liner
under sail are hard to come by; most of
them having been shot by a 32-year-old
Jesuit priest named Francis Browne, who
boarded the Titanic in Southampton but
got off with his camera in Ireland, before
the fatal ocean transit. Titanic in Photographs
(2011), by Daniel Klistorner and
Steve Hall with Bruce Beveridge, Scott
Andrews and Art Braunschweiger, contains
Browne’s images, as well as shots
of the steamer’s construction in Belfast
and newspaper photos taken during
its sea trials and stops along the way to
New York. On top of those there’s a set
of color illustrations from the interior of
the Titanic’s sister ship, the Olympic, that
shows in what extravagance White Star
passengers traveled.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the
quantity of books currently available
on this maritime misadventure. Not yet
mentioned is John Maxtone-Graham’s
Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost
Liner, which addresses a few of the lesscovered
topics associated with the tale,
such as the role of wireless communications
in the steamship’s destiny, the shipyards
where the Titanic and Olympic were
assembled, and the rescue vessel Carpathia,
diverted from a Mediterranean
cruise to the site of the Titanic’s collision,
375 miles off the coast of Newfoundland.
Meanwhile, Steven Biel’s 1996 work,
Down with the Old Canoe (an updated
version of which was recently released),
focuses on how the Titanic calamity was
turned into a cultural symbol, used by
feminists, anti-capitalists and others to
advance their own ideologies, and how
its story has been preserved in films,
books and music.
And of course, it wouldn’t do to forget
Walter Lord’s short but classic 1955
work, A Night to Remember (the basis for
the 1958 film of the same name), which
endeavors to provide a “true minute-byminute”
account of the liner’s abbreviated
maiden journey—though many
details of its doom weren’t understood
until oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard
finally located the Titanic’s remains in the
mid-1980s. Which brings up one more
book that deserves a place on your bookshelf:
Ballard’s well-illustrated work, The
Discovery of the Titanic (1987).
So many books. Yet these still represent
only the tip of the iceberg.
9
J. Kingston Pierce is both the editor of The
Rap Sheet and the senior editor of January
Magazine.
822 | 15 april 2012 | nonfiction | kirkusreviews.com |
| kirkusreviews.com | nonfiction | 15 april 2012 | 823