The second half of lives, as well as novels, can also be of limited interest. Few people much mind what Wordsworth had to say after he married, and the story of Florence Nightingale ends once she extinguishes her lamp, her final forty years being consigned to a footnote. Conrad used the half of his life spent on land to translate into romance the monotony of the half he spent at sea, and what is curious about Ismay’s life is that having jumped from the Titanic into Conrad’s world, a place in which we live out our time as convicts, self-deceived and unpitied, his story was quickly given a Conradian second half. Ismay was imagined as an outcast on an island even as he attended to his daily rhythm, walking the streets of London in a suit with a rolled umbrella, taking the train to Liverpool, feeding the pigeons in the park. The man whose speech was once described by the press as a ‘luminous fog’ was now constructed by them as a man in a mist. And that, it was assumed of Ismay, is the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.
By the time of Ismay’s death, the Titanic was no longer the most horrific event of the twentieth century and the crisis of one man’s loss of honour had, for the moment, been forgotten. The tone of his obituaries was gentle, forgiving; the London Evening News said that although ‘the Titanic episode was written on his heart, it will not be his epigraph’. The New York Times stated that he had been a ‘passenger’ on the ship and had died ‘without making any further public statement on the Titanic or his conduct than that which he told the Senate Committee and Lord Mersey’s Board of Trade investigations’. The Journal of Commerce remarked that he was ‘one of the greatest captains of the shipping industry… having once reached a decision [he was] absolutely immovable’, added to which he possessed ‘an extraordinary memory’. On the ‘personal side’, however, ‘Mr Bruce Ismay was, to most people, an enigma’. In America, the New York Tribune noted of Ismay’s life that ‘the parallel with the tale of Conrad’s Lord Jim will occur to most of us’. The parallel had occurred to no one, and if it had ever occurred to Conrad — as it must have done — he did not say so. Conrad turned his face away from the human side of the Titanic. He knew what ships did to men, he had written enough about the codes of fidelity and community on which both he and Ismay had been raised. Nor would he have considered the mirroring of Jim’s and Ismay’s stories such an extraordinary coincidence. Nothing about the sea surprised Conrad: so long as there are ships to sink, men will jump from them.
‘Jim’s desertion of his ship’, the New York Tribune’s obituary of Ismay continued, ‘was, to be sure, in direct violation of his duty… but it too had its explanation that men accepted. The point is that with a sensitive soul the explanation, however convincing, is overshadowed by the necessity to explain, and from that there seems to be no release short of the grave.’ Ismay felt the necessity to excuse rather than explain himself and while Jim, too, makes excuses — ‘I told you I jumped; but I tell you they were too much for any man. It was their doing as plainly as if they had reached up with a boathook and pulled me over’ — he is also compelled, as Ismay was not, by the desire to understand his actions, or at least for others to understand them. Ismay had no knowledge of the release that comes from elucidation, and only the slightest idea — from his brief communication with Mrs Thayer — of the healing power of empathy. He was happy to appear as a man without moral content because, unlike Jim, he had not dreamed of becoming a hero. Ismay had never thought so much of himself.
According to Wilton Oldham in The Ismay Line, the only time Ismay ever spoke of his departure from the ship was in a conversation with his sister-in-law, Constance, who was the sister of Bruce’s wife as well as the wife of his brother. Described by her great-niece as a ‘bookworm, animal-lover, traveller, rebel, and in her old age [a] dispenser of wisdom’,8 Constance, who thought Florence’s moratorium on talking about the Titanic a mistake, was another of Ismay’s secret sharers. The reason, he revealed to her, that he had jumped was not because the boat was there and the deck was empty, but because he been ordered to do so by Chief Officer Wilde, who said that Ismay’s evidence would be needed at the subsequent inquiry. Ismay left the ship knowing that the purpose of his survival was to represent the Captain, the crew and the company, to be the witness of the night, to contain, explain and make sense of it all to the bewildered world. In exchange for his continued life, he must carry into the history books the story of the Titanic. Why did he keep this a secret? Both Albert Weikman, the Titanic’s barber, and Lightoller had told Senator Smith that Ismay had been thrown into the lifeboat by Wilde, but Ismay had always denied that this was the case. After hearing Lightoller’s defence of Ismay in Washington, Lawrence Beesley wrote in the New York Times on 29 April 1912 that ‘bundling Ismay into a boat… seems a very natural act for an officer of the line to perform toward the head of the line’. Endorsing, in his conversation with Constance, this version of events, Ismay now suggested that the great burden of his life was not that he had jumped from a sinking ship teeming with lives, but that he made a Faustian pact which he then failed to keep. Ismay decided, as he sat in the lifeboat, that he would rather be cast as a coward than drag behind him the ball and chain of the narrative. His life had been granted in order that he face the inquiry, but it was Lightoller instead who took on this role and played it for all it was worth.
Fidelity to the notion of honour was a concept that would dominate the lives of Ismay’s two sons-in-law. Brigadier General Ronald Cheape, the husband of Ismay’s eldest daughter, Margaret, was a soldier possessed, as Pauline Matarasso puts it, more of ‘bone-headed courage than tactical brilliance’. Cheape, known as ‘the General’, refused to speak to one of his sons — named Bruce — who had spent four years in Germany as a prisoner of war because, as far as he was concerned, the young man was a ‘hands-upper’. Never happier than during a war, the General lived like a Viking on his Scottish estate and expected his guests to do so too; even lavatory paper — which the Picts had done without — was considered by him effeminate. He was, in the words of one of his nephews, ‘the last of the Titans’. According to Ronald Cheape’s obituarist, ‘There are many people with physical courage, fewer with moral courage. General Cheape’s outstanding characteristic was the combination of both in the highest degree.’
Basil Sanderson, the husband of Evelyn, was more refined in his understanding of courage. Having fought on the Somme and won an MC, Basil wrote in an army notebook an essay containing his thoughts on ‘Fear’. ‘There is no such thing as courage,’ he begins, ‘at least in the way most people understand the word.’ Many men overcome fear not because they are brave but because they have an even greater fear of scorn. Because he was ‘born a coward’ in a culture of heroes and hero-worship, young Basil spent his boyhood preparing to defend himself against the sudden emergence of fear, jumping into the deep end of swimming pools because he was afraid of water, taking up boxing so that people would think he was brave, banging at the door to enlist in I9I4 because ‘the one thing that has always petrified me is the thought of war’. These, he says, are signs not of courage but of ‘moral cowardice’, which is a condition that arises in a man when ‘fear of the opinion of the rest of mankind is more terrible than that awful dread which is gnawing at him inside’. Moral cowardice was the reason that Basil Sanderson ‘went down into the biggest and longest battle there has ever been and stayed in the line at my own request throughout the whole of it. I was terrified to think that people might suspect I was afraid… And oh, the fights and battles which I used to have within myself!’9 It is impossible to read these pages without thinking of Ismay, the closest friend of Basil Sanderson’s father, who had thought himself impervious to fear until it reared its hydra head.
‘Why’, Marlow wondered of his interest in Jim, ‘I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details of an occurrence which, after all, concerned me no more than as a member of an obscure body of men held together by… fidelity to a certain standard of conduct, I can’t explai
n. You may call it unhealthy curiosity if you like; but I have a distinct notion I wished to find something.’ Would Marlow have found anything in the deplorable details of Ismay’s story? The tragedy for Ismay was not that his ship hit an iceberg, but that he was unable, as Conrad puts it, to find ‘fit words for his meaning’. Rather than confide in a discreet, understanding man with an interest in extracting the ‘felt, subjective experience behind the objective, outward facts’, Ismay watched as his story was constructed from a collage of contradictory witness reports, hasty journalistic reactions and a drama staged by Senator William Alden Smith. Without the presence of a Marlow, the chaos of the night, the horror of it all, remained for Ismay chaos and horror, an experience too great to absorb. Had Marlow been at either of the inquiries into the Titanic, he would have known immediately, instinctively, of what Ismay was made. And had he then taken Ismay off to some quiet corner of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria or Willard’s Hotel in Washington and listened to him circle his story — I got in as she was being lowered away… Because there was room in the boat… She was being lowered away… I felt the ship was going down and I got into the boat… I did not get into the boat until after they had begun to lower it away… My back was turned to her… I did not wish to see her go down — he would have experienced one of his moments of awakening, ‘when we see, hear, understand, ever so much — everything — in a flash’, and when he sees a person ‘as though I had never seen him before’.
Then Marlow would stretch out his legs after dinner on the deck of some barque, light his cigar, fill his glass, and tell Ismay’s tale to an audience of men who also follow the sea. First he would paint on his dark background the details so essential to the myth of the Titanic: there would be a ship the size of a cathedral, her monstrous birth in the Belfast shipyard; the decision to limit her lifeboats so as not to clutter the decks; her doomed beauty; the cheering, the pride, the jubilation as she slides down her cradle to taste her first drop of water; the ice warnings; the Captain driving her on and on, the moonless sky, the sudden appearance of the berg, rising 500 feet out of the water; the misplacement of the binoculars; the boys in the crow’s nest ringing the bell; the order to turn ‘hard-a-starboard’; the opening up of the ship like a tin of sardines; the torrential rush of water; the sleeping passengers; the dutiful crew; the Captain losing control; the band playing ragtime; the Californian, with her engines off only eight miles away; the steerage passengers trapped down below; the half-filled boats dropping into the water; the men in their dinner jackets going down like gentlemen; the man who dressed as a woman to get a place in a lifeboat; the wives who chose to die with their husbands; the other wives in the lifeboats refusing to save their husbands; the strange unnatural calm of the conditions; the refusal of the passengers to take in what was happening until the very end; the small town’s-worth of people who died that night. Marlow would linger over the many different languages spoken in the steerage compartments, the four Chinese sailors of Collapsible C, and he would save for his finest canvas the splendour of the Titanic’s final dive and the death-music that followed. But at the heart of his story would be Ismay’s jump and his subsequent battle with his moral identity, because for Marlow ‘the ship we serve is the moral symbol of our life’ and nothing can be said with certainty about a man until he has been ‘tested’ by his ship.
Marlow and Conrad parted company two weeks before the Titanic set sail. His departure is as mysterious as his arrival, but Marlow had probably seen enough, analysed too much, sat for too long upon too many decks holding audiences spellbound with too many soliloquies, and Conrad said goodbye to him on the night of 25 March 1912 when he finished Chance: A Tale in Two Parts, whose subject is coincidence. ‘The last words were written at 3.10 a.m.,’ he told the American collector of his manuscripts, John Quinn, ‘just as my working lamp began to burn dimly and the fire in the grate to turn black… I went out and walked in the drive for half an hour. It was raining and the night was still very black.’10 He was happy with what he had produced but ‘as to what will happen to it when it is launched, I am much less confident’.11 That spring, Chance was serialised in the New York Herald, making Marlow’s appearance in New York converge with the attacks on Ismay in the American press.
The Titanic is a tale of the convergence of art with nature, but nothing converges so much in its telling as fact and fiction. Even for those survivors who watched from their lifeboats as the ship went down, it was an imagined as well as a real experience and many later drew on Dante and Virgil in their descriptions of the night. Conrad, too, preferred to base his yarns on recorded events; the origin of Lord Jim was, after all, the affair of the Jeddah and Jim himself was modelled on the Jeddah’s Chief Mate, Augustine Podmore Williams. Conrad used Jim as a way of reflecting on the conduct of Williams, and one of the effects of using Jim’s story to reflect on Ismay’s is to see how characters who live in fiction have more appeal than those who do not, although even Marlow admits to becoming ‘thoroughly sick’ of Jim’s ‘vapourings’. Ismay is less sympathetic than Jim, just as an evening spent with Hamlet at a hotel bar would be less engaging than an evening spent watching him perform his indecision on the stage, and Emma Bovary would become a bore were she to telephone us every day. As with a mirror, the distance afforded by art adds depth of vision; art increases our capacity for sympathy. It reveals, as Oscar Wilde puts it in ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition’. It is only when we place Ismay’s crude, monotonous, absolutely unfinished narrative next to that of Lord Jim that his form begins to thicken, his blood to flow and his consciousness to take on an essential extra layer. The voluble Jim, who digs deep into his own experience, is the underside of the taciturn Ismay who, having glimpsed the depths, sticks to the surface of his story throughout.
Conrad and Ismay converge as well: born five years apart, Ismay is all size and splendour while Conrad, a solitary exile, is a creature of great experience and terrifying intensity who comes to us by sea from heaven knows where. Even to his friends, Conrad was a stranger drifting through. Like the Titanic itself, the lives of both men broke in half somewhere near the middle; each spent the first part on water and the second part on land, recovering. Their love of ships pushed them to the limit. Each collapsed beneath the weight of his experience, each found solace from the sea on an island, and each jumped — twice.
In the mailroom of the Titanic was a package containing the manuscript of ‘Karain: A Memory’, the precursor to Lord Jim. Written in 1897 and first published in Blackwood’s, ‘Karain’ was later included in Conrad’s collection of five stories, Tales of Unrest. He had been sending it to John Quinn in New York, whose letter describing as a ‘God-send’ the US Senate inquiry into the wreck would subsequently inspire Conrad’s second article for the English Review, ‘Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic’.
Karain is a ‘great Bugi dandy’, a spotlessly clean, magnificently theatrical Malayan ‘adventurer of the sea, outcast, and ruler’, whose domain consists of three villages on the narrow plain of an island shaped like a young moon. He befriends the crew of a visiting ship, one of whom, in a prefiguring of Marlow, is the sympathetic narrator of the story. One night Karain swims out to the yawl in a state of terror. ‘Not one of us doubted that we were looking at a fugitive… He was haggard, as though he had not slept for weeks; he had become lean, as though he had not eaten for days… his face showed another kind of fatigue, the tormented weariness, the anger and the fear of a struggle against a thought, an idea — against something that cannot be grappled, that never rests — a shadow, a nothing, unconquerable and immortal, that preys upon life.’ In the safety of one of the cabins, Karain reveals that he is an exile on this island; a victim of unrest.
Many years ago, in his own land, the lovely sister of Karain’s great friend, Matara, had run away with a red-faced, red-headed Dutch tradesman, bringing dishonour on h
er family. Karain swears to help Matara avenge himself on the couple, and the two men set out on their journey. After years of scouring the islands in search of the girl, she starts to appear to Karain in waking dreams. ‘No one saw her, no one heard her, she was mine only!… And she was sad!’ Her continued presence ‘gave me courage to bear weariness and hardships. Those were times of pain, and she soothed me… She was all mine and no one could see her.’ Karain, who talks to the vision in the dark, murmurs to her one night, ‘you shall not die’. When he and Matara at last find the house where the girl and the Dutchman are living, Matara hands the gun to Karain and whispers ‘Let her die by my hand. You take aim at that fat swine there. Let him see me strike my shame off the face of the earth — and then… You are my friend — kill with a sure shot.’ Karain takes the gun and then sees the tender eyes of the ‘consoler of sleepless nights, of weary days; the companion of troubled years… Had I not promised that she should not die?… her voice murmured, whispered above and around me, “Who shall be thy companion, who shall console thee if I die?”’ Karain hears himself shout to her to run and the girl leaps; Matara too leaps and runs towards his sister; Karain fires the gun and kills Matara instantly. ‘The sunshine fell on my back colder than the running water’, and he walks away into a forest ‘which was very sombre and very sad’. Since that day Karain has been ‘hunted by his thought along the very limit of human endurance’. The girl stopped appearing to him — ‘Never! Never once! She had forgotten’ — and instead he is pursued by the spirit of Matara, who ‘runs side by side without footsteps, whispering, whispering old words — whispering into my ear in his old voice’.
How to Survive the Titanic Page 30
