How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Conrad did not restrict his scorn to the Americans. He also condemned the British Board of Trade, asleep on the job, which ‘took its dear old bald head’ out from under its wing to declare the Titanic ‘unsinkable’ before putting it back again, ‘in the hope of not being disturbed for another ten years’. He condemned the ostentation of the Titanic herself, ‘boomed’ by advertising, ridiculous in her Egyptian decor — or was it Louis Quinze? — with her ‘gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style) smoking room’, her swimming pool and ‘delightful French cafe’, all of which gave the passengers a ‘sense of false security’. What is all this luxury for? Were there no ships, most of us would happily put to sea in a bucket. The White Star Line are dealers in illusion posing as ‘benefactors of mankind’ magnanimously ‘engaging in some lofty and amazing enterprise’. And what kind of discipline is operating on a ship in which passengers think that entering a lifeboat is ‘an optional matter’? What has happened to the moral atmosphere of sea life, in which certain conditions and rules prevail? ‘The order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest character, to be obeyed unquestioningly… A commander should be able to hold his ship in the hollow of his hand.’ Refusing to abandon ship when ordered to do so is evidence of social breakdown. The Titanic was not commanded, manned and equipped as a ship at all, she was a ‘marine Ritz’, a ‘sort of hotel syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain’. A 46,000-ton pleasure palace made of thin strips of steel was sent adrift to meet all the usual dangers of life on the waves, and there is uproar and ‘surprised consternation’ when she sinks.

  His second article, ‘Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic, which appeared in the English Review in July 1912, was written in reply to a letter he received from John Quinn.9 ‘The inquiry was a God-send,’ Quinn had written to Conrad from New York, ‘in that it lifted the cloud of mystery that shrouded the whole thing and was really a safety valve. It was a loosening by proxy of the pent-up horror that the loss had caused everywhere and by the time the inquiry was over people were more or less satisfied that they had got to the bottom of things… As a whole the American press behaved admirably both in news and editorial comments.’

  The US Senate inquiry a God-send? A safety valve? It reached the bottom of things? ‘The Senators of the Commission’, Conrad responded through the pages of the English Review, ‘had absolutely no knowledge and no practice to guide them in the conduct of such an investigation; and this fact gave an air of unreality to their zealous exertions.’ And anyway, what is this obsession with bigness as a sign of progress? ‘If it were, elephantiasis which causes a man’s legs to become as large as tree trunks, would be a sort of progress, whereas it is nothing but a very ugly disease.’ Bigness should not be confused with greatness; bigness has no intrinsic moral value, it is no more than ‘mere exaggeration’. As for the language of heroism employed by the halfpenny press, ‘there is nothing more heroic in being drowned very much against your will, off a holed, helpless big tank in which you bought your passage than in dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought from your grocer’. It would have been finer, Conrad suggests, ‘if the band on the Titanic had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing — whatever tune they were playing, the poor devils’. But Conrad is not, he insists, ‘attacking’ the shipowners themselves: ‘I care neither more nor less for Lines, Companies, Combines and generally for Trade arrayed in purple and fine linen than the Trade cares for me… I am attacking foolish arrogance… I have been expecting from one or other of them all bearing the generic name of Yamsi, something, a sign of some sort, some sincere utterance, in the course of this Admirable Inquiry, of manly, of genuine compunction. In vain. All trade talk.’

  Gone is Marlow’s sinuous sidetracking, his serene suspension of moral judgement. It is Conrad speaking in these essays and his irony is out in full force. His tone is one of parental wariness, this is the ‘I told you so’ of the jaded and fastidious when the inevitable occurs. The Titanic was never a ship; she was a fashion. The focus on speed, on advertising, on profit, on the values of ‘progressive’ modernity which dominate the miserable affair offend Conrad’s belief in the nobility of the sea, in the rigour and efficiency of those who try to combat it and the honour and decency of the men who devote themselves to its traditions. The Titanic crew died, he believed, for commerce and it is his ‘brother’ seamen about whom Conrad is thinking when he writes about the disaster; their duty had at one time been his duty, their feelings were his feelings. As for the men who died ‘compartmented’ in the bowels of the ship, ‘nothing can approach the horror of that fate except being buried alive in a cave, or in a mine, or in your family vault’. This ‘horror’ is as close as Conrad gets to commenting on the human side of the tragedy; he had no ‘personal… thoughts, reminiscences and reflections’ to make about the man at the tiller or the boys in the crow’s nest, about the responsibility of the Captain, or the officers, or the role on the ship of the owner. He said nothing about the individual behaviour of anyone on the Titanic, and made it clear that he was using ‘Yamsi’ to refer to the corporation rather than to the man whose code-name it was. While the rest of the country celebrated individual acts of heroism and debated displays of cowardice, Conrad considered the Titanic to be no more than the tale of a tub. His essays are about an empty ship.

  At the same time as he describes the Titanic as resembling ‘a Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin’, the romantic in Conrad understands, although he will never admit it, the romanticism of this particular ship, from its fatal name onwards. Conrad responds powerfully to symbols; he knows that the Titanic represents more than just profit, that there was something transgressive in her arrogant challenge to the gods, that she had about her an element of the sublime. Conrad says that he is on the side of the seamen but he is really on the side of the sea, that creature of ‘unfathomable cruelty’, and he both admires and mocks those with the audacity to float ‘in the face of his frown’. The Titanic assumed that the ice would part for her, that she could control the waves, that her squash court and French cafe could dazzle and defy what for centuries has smashed boats and wrecked men simply because it could. The Titanic’s attempt to seduce the sea with her glamour appeals to the writer in Conrad.

  The more distance he put between himself and his life as a mariner, the more Conrad idealised ships and the ‘brotherhood’ of sailors, and the more he romanticised the time in which he had been, for the best part, bored and disillusioned. He remembered the displacement of sail by steam as ‘a swift doom’ but the vessels had been operating side by side for years. Conrad constructed a myth in which an enchanted world abruptly ended and a commercial world began. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘the days thus enchanted were empty, but they were not so tedious as people may imagine.’ Or perhaps they were. What has changed for Conrad in the replacement of sail by steam is the role of the sea in the imagination. At one time, a traveller would leave the conditions of shore behind to find ‘in the ship a new kind of home’. He now, especially when crossing the Atlantic, ‘brings the conditions of shore life with him on board’. The sailing ship made a man free, while the modern steamer is a ‘prison’.

  Advertisement for the Olympic and Titanic, 1911

  Conrad’s problem is that, like Marlow, he is modern as well as being a Romantic. He is a product of the Titanic age with its love of technology and its ‘speed lust’, as a writer in the Cornhill Magazine described the acceleration of everything in 1909. Conrad had no interest in bigness, and none whatever in what E. M. Forster called, in Howards End, the ‘clipped words’ and ‘formless sentences’ of the new ‘language of hurry’; but he, like Florence Ismay, loved mechanical velocity. One of the earliest motorists, he drove his Cadillac (which he pronounced ‘Cadiyac’) around the Kentish lanes at a belting pace, taking corners at thirty miles an hour, tooting his horn at foolish pedestrians, missing farm carts by shavings of inches. His young son Borys w
ould accompany him, terrified, fascinated. Conrad in his motor car with his goggles and flat cap was like that other Edwardian speed merchant, Mr Toad: ‘What dust clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way! What carts shall I fling carelessly into the ditch in the wake of my magnificent onset!’

  Conrad’s biographers describe him as living three lives — those of a Pole, a mariner, and an English writer — but his was really a double life. Homo-duplex, he said, ‘has in my case more than one meaning.’ Conrad, as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘was a compound of two men; together with the sea captain there dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow’.10 Marlow’s temperament was closer to that of Conrad’s father, the Polish nobleman, intellectual and leading Red activist, Apollo Korzeniowski, than it was to the nerve-racked, neurotic writer himself. Marlow and Apollo were both wanderers without land, except that Marlow relished his condition while Apollo, whose life was devoted to freeing Poland from Russian oppression, railed against it. Conrad described his father, whom many considered to have been a hero, as having an ‘exalted and dreamy temperament; with a terrible gift of irony and of gloomy disposition’.

  Jozef Teodore Konrad Korzeniowski was born in the Ukraine in December 1857, five years before Ismay. To celebrate his birth, Apollo produced the following lines: ‘To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression, A Song For the Day of His Christening’.

  Baby son, tell yourself

  You are without land, without love,

  Without country, without people,

  While Poland, your mother, is entombed.

  Conrad’s other mother, Ewa Bobrowska, was also entombed by the time he was seven, dying in northern Russia where Apollo was exiled in 1862. An only child, Conrad was raised by his heartbroken father whose stated object was ‘to bring up Konradek not as a democrat, aristocrat, demagogue, republican, monarchist, nor as a servant and a flunkey of these parties — but only as a Pole’. Apollo was granted conditional parole in 1867 and he returned to Poland with his son, but his spirit and health were broken. The boy’s companions were Apollo’s ‘clouded face’ and his collection of Polish Romantic poetry. ‘Poor child,’ his father wrote, ‘he does not know what a contemporary playmate is.’ Their life was one of confinement; Apollo described the pair of them as the only two people ‘left on this earth’. Apollo’s politics, he said, made him a ‘monk in the Polish order’ whose thoughts were ‘confined in the small cell of patriotism’ while Konradek was living ‘as if in a cloister… we tremble with cold, die of hunger, struggle in the abject poverty of our brothers’.11

  Apollo died in Cracow in 1869, his public funeral becoming a mass patriotic demonstration; thousands turned out to pay a final homage to Poland’s great son whose tombstone reads: ‘To the man who loved his Homeland, laboured for it, and died for it — His Compatriots. Apollo Korzeniowski — victim of Muscovite martyrdom.’ Orphaned at twelve, Konradek was taken in by his down-to-earth uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski, whose letters to his nephew provide the rare moments of levity in any Conrad biography.

  According to his Polish biographer, Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad inherited from his country the ‘heroic virtues of duty, fidelity, and honour’, while he inherited from his father a hatred of Russians, an inflexibility of character, a preoccupation with public duty, a passion for Romantic literature, an ‘exceptionally intense emotional life’ and a tendency to pathological depression. It was Apollo who nurtured the part of Conrad which, as Bertrand Russell put it, ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths’.

  But Apollo did not pass down his love of the earth. His father’s obsession with a homeland left Conrad with only one option: to go to sea, and aged seventeen he jumped… it seems. Bidding farewell to Poland, where he would never live again, Conrad left for Marseilles and the life of a sailor. ‘I verily believe,’ he reminisced, ‘mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations.’12 Conrad’s writing is filled with boys who go to sea in order to get away from home, but his critics and biographers puzzle over his own desire to leave his landlocked country with its tragic history. He seems too cultured, too bookish, too depressive to endure the solitude and hardships of the nautical life. However, dreams of adventures in far-flung places are typical for young boys. ‘What was truly extraordinary,’ Najder reminds us, ‘was his later career as a writer.’13

  After two months in Marseilles, Conrad had his first experience aboard a ship, crossing to Martinique and Haiti on the Mont Blanc, a three-masted wooden barque. He went out as a passenger and returned as a member of the crew; from mixing with the Polish intelligentsia, he was now mucking in with French sailors. In his autobiographical writings, such as The Mirror of the Sea, Conrad would idealise these early years, picturing himself as the hero in a book, dabbling in gun-running along the Spanish coast, losing in love, feeling alive in his youth as never before or since. The tales of gun-running are quite possibly a fantasy and there is no evidence that Conrad was emotionally or spiritually transported by his early voyages. Instead, despite a healthy allowance from Bobrowski, he quickly fell into debt and despair and in 1878 he shot himself through the chest. The bullet, remarkably, went ’durch und durch, narrowly missing the heart and not damaging any internal organ. Bobrowski, who rushed over from Poland to rescue his nephew, found him to be ‘extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved and in addition excitable’. He sorted out his debt and put him back on the rails. Conrad’s inability to handle his finances was to be a perennial problem for Bobrowski who, when asked again by him for money several months later, reminded the young man that ‘you were idling for nearly a whole year, you fell into debt, you deliberately shot yourself — and as a result of it all, at the worst time of the year… and in spite of the most terrible rate of exchange — I hasten to you, pay, spend about 2,000 rubles’.

  Several months after his suicide attempt, Conrad set foot in England for the first time when his steamer, the Mavis, landed in Lowestoft on 10 June. Already fluent in French, he began to learn English from the daily papers and ‘from East Coast chaps, each built to last forever and coloured like a Christmas card’. He joined the British Merchant Navy and between 1880 and 1883 he sailed in Eastern waters, ‘the place from which I have carried away into my life the greatest number of suggestions’. ‘Karain’, Lord Jim, Youth and ‘The Secret Sharer’ are all products of this period. In 1883 he took of a passage to Liverpool on a steamer; in 1886 he gained his Master Mariner’s certificate and became a British subject, and in 1889 he went to the Congo from where he returned a different man. ‘I am still plunged in the deepest night,’ he wrote, ‘and my dreams are only nightmares.’ Still recovering from his breakdown, in 1891 he became first mate of the Torrens, one of the most famous clippers of the day, which ran a swift passage between London and Adelaide. The Torrens was, Conrad recalled in his essay, ‘The Torrens: A Personal Tribute’, ‘a ship of brilliant qualities — the way [she] had of letting big seas slip under her did one’s heart good to watch. It resembled so much an exhibition of intelligent grace and unerring skill that it could fascinate even the least seamanlike of our passengers.’ The ship, with her cargo of ‘a cow, a calf, and a good many sheep, geese, turkeys, ducks, hens, pigs… a kangaroo, two wallabies, five parrots, a dog, two cats, several canaries, and two laughing jackasses’, was a veritable ark. The Torrens would be Conrad’s only experience of working on a passenger ship and while he had a dislike of the general public, he now for the first time met educated Englishmen who spoke like Jim, using words like ‘by Jove’, ‘ripping’ and ‘bally ass’.

  In March 1893, the Torrens sailed from Adelaide with two new passengers. Ted Sanderson and John Galsworthy, both twenty-five, were returning from adventures in New Zealand, Australia and the South Seas, where Galsworthy had be
en sent by his parents in the hope that he might recover from what they considered to be an inappropriate love affair. Sanderson, accompanying his friend, was going home to Elstree where he was to help the Reverend Lancelot Sanderson run the family’s prep school, while Galsworthy was reluctantly returning to his studies at the Admiralty bar. Both men had wanted to encounter Robert Louis Stevenson, now living in Samoa, whose novel Treasure Island they had read as teenagers. Published ten years earlier, Treasure Island told the story of another Jim who was faced with a jump:

  ‘Jump’, the Doctor orders Jim Hawkins. ‘One jump, and we’re out, and we’ll run for it like antelopes.’

  ‘No,’ Jim replies. ‘You know right well you wouldn’t do the thing yourself — neither you nor squire nor captain: and no more will I.’