How to Survive the Titanic

by Frances Wilson

  Jim Hawkins is one of the heroes Conrad’s Lord Jim dreamed of becoming when, as a boy in his country parsonage, he was reading himself into ruin.

  Galsworthy and Sanderson missed meeting Stevenson, but met Conrad instead. The Pole’s ‘rare personality attracted us at once’, Ted Sanderson wrote, ‘and a friendship was begun which lasted unbroken until death’. For Galsworthy, the experience of talking to Conrad ‘outweighed… all the other experiences of that voyage’. He remembered Conrad as ‘tanned, with a peaked brown beard, almost black hair, and dark brown eyes, over which the lids were deeply folded. He was thin, not tall, his arms very long, his shoulders broad, his head set rather forward. He spoke to me with a strong foreign accent. He seemed to me strange on an English ship. For fifty-six days I sailed in his company… Many evening watches in fine weather we spent on the poop. Ever the great teller of a tale, he had already nearly twenty years of tales to tell.’ During the evening watches, Conrad told tales of his own ‘romantic history’: Poland, the South Seas, gun-running in Spain. He was, Ted Sanderson said, ‘a fascinating talker on almost any subject’. Conrad’s great characteristic, Galsworthy concluded, was ‘fascination’.14

  Neither Conrad nor Galsworthy had yet become writers, but the manuscript of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, currently in the locker of his cabin on the Torrens, would be finished later that year at Elstree School. Here Conrad stayed for ten days as a guest of the Sanderson family, who immediately took to him. Elstree was Conrad’s ‘dear place’. ‘I have been made at home in Elstree,’ Conrad wrote to Agnes, one of Ted’s sisters, ‘by so much kindness; I am often there in my thoughts.’15 The Sanderson household gave Conrad his first experience of family life, and he later dedicated The Mirror of the Sea to Katherine Sanderson, Ismay’s Mrs Kitty; his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, about a man on the run from a scandal, he dedicated to Ted Sanderson. After Conrad married and started a family of his own, Sanderson promised his friend’s five-year-old son, John, a place at Elstree, but the boy went instead to Ferox Hall at Tonbridge, run by Ted Sanderson’s sister, Agnes. So by curious coincidence, the spot in which Ismay had been least happy, Conrad was most happy; the place where Ismay had first felt homesick, Conrad first felt truly at home.

  This voyage on the Torrens was to be Conrad’s last. In no other kind of life, he said in Lord Jim, than that of the sailor ‘is the illusion more wide of reality — in no other is the beginning all illusion — the disenchantment more swift — the subjugation more complete’. Aged thirty-seven and already an exile, he made another standing jump, leaving his world of ships for life at a desk. It was now that Konradek transformed himself into Joseph Conrad, and began the process of extracting from his years at sea every drop of meaning, every ounce of significance, as though meaning and significance were what he feared these years may have lacked.

  Chapter 6

  THE SECRET SHARER

  A man always has two reasons for the things he does: a good reason — and the real reason.

  J. Pierpont Morgan

  A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.

  Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  Florence Ismay and the children were on a motoring holiday in Wales when they heard that the Titanic had sunk. They returned to Liverpool straight away and on Wednesday 17 April, Florence wrote her husband a letter.

  My darling Bruce,

  It seems an eternity since last Monday night when I first heard that the Titanic had met with an accident. We reached Fishguard about 6.30 and there got telegrams from the Office and from Margaret [their eldest daughter] saying that there was a report that the ship had struck an iceberg, but no lives lost, and that she was proceeding with two other liners to Halifax. Of course I was full of sorrow at the thought of the splendid vessel but felt no real anxiety until the next wire about 10.30. That was followed by another at 3.30 which made me terrified for your safety. Words fail to describe the horror and anxiety of the hours that followed. It seemed an eternity.

  Oh darling, what that time must have been like to you. When I think of the anguish you must have been through it makes me tremble even now. Thank God. Thank God that you have been spared to us. My life would have been over if you had not been saved. For me there never has been and never could be any man but you and I feel I can never express the gratitude and thankfulness that fills me for your escape… I have wished many times since Monday night that I had gone with you, I might have helped you in this awful hour. I know so well what bitterness of spirit you must be feeling for the loss of so many precious lives and that thing itself that you loved like a living thing. It must have been ordained by Providence as every precaution human skill and care could devise had been done. We have both been spared to each other, let us try to make our lives of use in the world. My dearest, if I have you I feel no trouble or sorrow can be unbearable, and that these last 48 hours that we can never forget may yet in some unknown way be turned into good…1

  This is possibly the first love letter that Florence has ever sent, and she reveals her feelings for her husband as though they are a secret she has harboured for years. She can hardly bear what he has been through; it is pure providence that he is still alive, that their marriage has been given a second chance. Bruce, who has never before shared anything with his wife, will now need her to help carry his load. She has forgiven him the errors of the past; they will start their lives together again and this time do it differently; they will make themselves of use to the world and approach each day with gratitude and generosity. Most of all, they will now talk to one another, the decades of silence are over. Bruce is due to retire soon anyway: he will leave the sea for good, they will no longer need to be apart. And this might indeed have been their story, had Ismay not found a secret sharer in Mrs Thayer.

  The Titanic’s maiden voyage has always conjured up images of ill-fated lovers. Whether it is the ship and the iceberg in Thomas Hardy’s poem, or Jack and Rose in James Cameron’s film, the story is one of convergence. When Ismay and Marian Thayer first encountered one another we don’t know; they may have met through friends in New York but it is more likely that they met at sea and consolidated their relationship on board the Titanic. Ismay was at his most relaxed on his ships and the Thayers frequently crossed the Atlantic on White Star liners. In his account of the wreck, Marian’s son, Jack Thayer, said that he and his father spent a good deal of time talking to Ismay on the Titanic, that during the voyage they got to know him ‘well’. Friendships which would never form on land blossom on board ships where the usual bounds and restrictions are suspended and passengers and crew exist in a zone between time and place. Conrad’s talk on board the Torrens ‘fascinated’ Galsworthy and Sanderson; his ‘rare personality attracted us at once’; Ismay’s attraction to Mrs Thayer’s talk and rare personality was also immediate. She was the most sympathetic woman he had ever met.

  Marian Thayer belonged, like the Astors and the Guggenheims, to Scott Fitzgerald’s enchanted world of East Coast money. From impeccable Philadelphia stock, she had married John Borland Thayer, ten years her senior, on her twentieth birthday. Before taking on the Vice-Presidency of the Philadelphia Railroad, Thayer had been one of the state’s premier cricket players. Three months before the Titanic set sail, Mrs Thayer’s presence at Philadelphia’s First Assembly Ball had drawn the usual press attention. This was ‘the Prime Social Event of the Season’ and the lovely Marian Thayer was ‘one of the most strikingly costumed women’ of the night. She wore, according to Women’s Wear Daily, a high-waisted white satin gown with long train and a ‘gauzy overdress, heavily spangled with gold’. Her slippers were also gold, and her thick dark hair shone in coils around her head. In love with her husband, devoted to her four children — the youngest of whom, Pauline, was eleven when the Titanic went down — and loyal to her friends, Marian Thayer was the image of contentment but seemed also to understand unhappiness, and this was her appeal. Her husband may have suffered from bouts of m
elancholia; he was periodically described in gossip columns during 1910 and 1911 as being unwell and in need of rest, and the Thayers visited ‘nerve doctors’ in Switzerland. It was typical of Mrs Thayer to have insisted on the grief-stricken Emily Ryerson’s taking a walk with her on the deck of the Titanic the afternoon that they met Ismay; the grieving and the troubled gravitated towards her and she drew them in. Graceful and low-voiced, she shirked the superficiality of groups, preferring the intimacy of one-to-one conversation. She was a collector of life stories; people talked to Mrs Thayer as they would to no one else. She soothed the lonely with her promise of friendship, she reassured the bereaved with her belief in an afterlife. There was no pain that Mrs Thayer apparently could not take away.

  The night the Titanic went down, the Thayers had been at the dinner for the Captain hosted by their friends George and Eleanor Widener. Other guests included William Carter, who jumped into the same lifeboat as Ismay, Carter’s wife, Lucille, who would divorce him on account of it, and Major Archie Butt, the trusted aide of President William Howard Taft. During the evening, while Ismay was dining with the ship’s doctor on the other side of the room, Mrs Thayer locked herself in private talk with Major Butt, who was returning on the Titanic from a European holiday which the President had advised his ‘dear Archie’ to take.

  Six days later she described their conversation in a letter she felt ‘compelled to write’ to the President. ‘In my own grief’, Mrs Thayer began, ‘I often think of yours.’ She addresses the most powerful man in America as a fellow suffering being. ‘I feel I must write to tell you how I spent the last Sunday evening with Major Butt — for we all cherish news of last hours — and we spoke much of you. How devoted to you he was, and oh what a lovely noble man he was!’ Her meeting with Major Butt was ’meant to be’, Mrs Thayer says; he ‘opened his heart to me and it was as though we had known each other well for years’. This was the first time that she had ever spoken to Major Butt, but ‘from the moment we met [we] never turned from each other for the rest of the evening’. She felt ‘as though a veil was blown aside for those few hours illuminating distance between two who had known each other always well long long before and had just found each other again — and I believe it’. While the rest of the room discussed the stock exchange and crossing speeds, the society wife and the forty-six-year-old bachelor were ‘opening our innermost thoughts to each other’. He spoke of his love for his mother (‘he told me I was just like her’) and his sister-in-law, Clara, to whom he wrote every day about his life in the White House with Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, letters which were later published. He spoke of his ‘love’ for the President and of ‘someone else he loved but that I do not’. They made an engagement to meet again the next day, ‘as I was going to teach him a method of control of the nerves through which I had just been with a Swiss doctor, knowing it would be a very wonderful thing for him if he could get hold of it for he was very nervous and did not know how he was going to stand in the rushing life he was returning to, and we were going to work so hard over it the rest of the time on board’. She ends by asking if the President thinks there is ‘any chance of seeing my husband or [Major Butt] again here in this life? My reason tells me No but how can we give up all hope until some days yet go past of this cruel torture?’2

  Marian Thayer’s appeal is disarming. She has a belief system, she is searching for a deeper truth; her interests are in fate, the spirit world, alternative medicine; she is intense and odd and immediate. She sanctifies human relations; she describes her conversation with Major Butt as though it were the beginnings of an affair, she writes a letter of condolence as though it were a love letter. She speaks to everyone in the same way. Her genius lies in the realisation that Taft responded to the Titanic not as an international catastrophe but as a personal loss. ‘I cannot turn around in my room,’ he wept at Butt’s memorial service; ‘I can’t go anywhere without expecting to see his smiling face or hear his cheerful voice in greeting.’ While the former President, Theodore Roosevelt, who had also been close to Butt, was sending his ‘deepest sympathy to the kinsfolk of those who have perished’, Taft was thinking of the death of one man only: ‘Archie was the soul of honour. He was wholehearted and wholesome; courteous and courageous and a charming companion.’ While others thought Taft’s self-involved grief inappropriate at a time when he was required to steer his own ship through rocky waters, Marian Thayer opened her arms to him. ‘Never had I come in such contact immediately with anyone,’ she told Taft of her encounter with the Major. ‘He felt the same and we both marvelled at the time at the strangeness of such a thing…’ But there was a quality of strangeness to all her relationships, particularly the one she shared with Ismay.

  It seems likely that while they were on the Titanic, Mrs Thayer came into ‘contact immediately’ with Ismay in the same way she had done with Major Butt. Ismay, who was not used to having ‘contact’ with anyone — apprehension was the response he more usually generated in people — interpreted their easy communication as a mutual attraction. She flattered him with her attention as she probably flattered other men; women were raised to reflect men at twice their size, and in response Ismay felt unusually relaxed and open. Conrad noted in Victory that forty-five is the ‘age of recklessness for many men’; in the American edition of the novel he increases it to fifty. During his time on the Titanic, Ismay experienced the recklessness that comes from supreme self-confidence and sudden, unexpected joy. His ship was the future; he was enjoying the attention of a beautiful female passenger. Having tried to get out of being present on the voyage, he was now in no hurry to get to New York. Finding time alone with Marian Thayer, who was constantly chaperoned, was impossible but when they met in company, whether in the dining room or on the deck, they never turned from each other. He looked for reasons to detain her, and when he saw her on the promenade deck with Emily Ryerson on the afternoon of Sunday 14 April, he had the perfect excuse: he showed her the message from the Baltic. While Mrs Ryerson told the story to the press, Mrs Thayer said nothing about the encounter herself. When the time came for Mrs Ryerson to sign her affidavit, it may have been Marian Thayer who persuaded her to withhold Ismay’s comments about lighting further boilers to get through the ice. The poor man was going through enough already.

  Mrs Thayer phoned Ismay to say goodbye before he left New York on 5 May, and he sent a message to her from the pilot boat as he was leaving on the Adriatic. A letter from Mrs Thayer was then waiting for him when he boarded the ship which, he said, he ‘read every night’. Her letter eclipsed the one from Florence, which he received several days earlier: there is nothing more repellent than a love letter from a person you no longer love. Marian Thayer had lost her husband but her son, Jack, who had also gone down with the ship, had been miraculously saved by clinging on to the same upturned lifeboat as Lightoller. She at least had something to be thankful for and, unlike the other widows in first-class, harboured no ill will towards Ismay. Instead, she gravitated further towards him. Such was Mrs Thayer’s sympathy for Ismay that while the other widows on the Carpathia were spreading rumours about his culpability, Jack went to see him in his cabin. ‘I have never seen a man so completely wrecked,’ he recalled twenty-eight years later.3 Jack Thayer’s description, which he must have taken straight to Marian, suggests that he saw Ismay not as his father’s killer but as his mother’s friend. To Mrs Thayer, Ismay was neither a villain nor a coward but someone who was grieving, as was she. Her sympathy was a cause of irritation to the other widows on the Carpathia, particularly Eleanor Widener, whose dead husband’s father was on the board of the IMM, and who had not liked Ismay sufficiently to invite him to their dinner party. ‘Better a thousand times a dead John B. Thayer than a living Ismay,’ Mrs Widener announced when she heard that the president of the IMM was alive. Her remark was a reminder to Marian Thayer not to let a soft heart besmirch the memory of a heroic husband.

  In the letter to Ismay which she sent to the Adriatic, Mrs Thayer said t
hat she wished she too had died that night, that death would be better than living like this, and she asked him not to forget her.4 She enclosed a page cut from her calendar which carried some words which had given her comfort and which she hoped would comfort him as well. Ismay replied from the ship that he ‘repeated the words regularly’ and that he would keep them on his dressing table. ‘Ever since leaving America,’ he continued, ‘you have been in my thoughts and I have talked to you so much. How I wish you had been here as I am sure we could have helped one another to bear our grief and loss. For you, poor dear, my heart bleeds and I cannot convey to you in words all I feel. I ask myself often why it is you seem so much to me. Can you answer?’

  His crossing on the Adriatic, he told her, has so far been ‘wonderful’. While he stayed in his room for the first few days, he now started going onto the deck twice a day for a short time. ‘I hate seeing anyone I do not know, as I cannot feel I have done anything wrong and cannot blame myself for the disaster. Still, the feeling is there. I can only hope time will make things easier.’ Ismay had confided to other people his sense of blamelessness. In the letter written to the brother of Frank Millet on 25 April, he had also expressed his belief that ‘I am not in any way responsible for the truly dreadful disaster’. The death of Mrs Thayer’s husband, Ismay now tells her, had nothing to do with him; it was an act of God. But still, he says, ‘the feeling is there’. The feeling of responsibility has attached itself to his skin like an irritating tick which, with luck, he will be able to flick away. ‘Forgive me for inflicting on you such a long letter,’ he ends. ‘Goodbye, my friend.’

  There are few people less equipped than Ismay for a journey into the human heart but in Mrs Thayer, it seems, he has found his Marlow: ‘I would like somebody to understand — somebody — one person at least!’ Jim reveals in the Malabar Hotel, ‘You! Why not you!’ Ismay has never known the comforts of fellowship, but Marian Thayer talks intensively to many people. She is surrounded by family and friends and she spends her days writing to those who share her sense of the meaninglessness of living on after such a catastrophe; she writes to the President, she writes to Ismay, she writes to the other American first-class wives who lost their husbands, many of whom are friends of hers, some of whom are neighbours. She will stay in touch with Captain Rostron for the next ten years. Virginia Woolf believed that ‘there should be threads floating in the air, which would merely have to be taken hold of, in order to talk. You would walk about the world like a spider in the middle of a web.’ Mrs Thayer worked her own loom of human relations. In this, as in other things, she flowed in the current of the age.