“How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay”, by Frances Wilson

 

352 pages, Harper, ISBN-13: 978-0062094544

Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad about the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including a young British seaman named Jim, who is then publicly censured for this action and who spends most of the book attempting to come to terms with himself and his past. I mention this because in Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay the author spends an inordinate amount of time linking the trials and struggles of the fictional Jim with the trials and struggles of the very real J. Bruce. Too much, I would argue.

Several reviews of Lord Jim argue that the book, split into two broad sections, was rather too long, and that the second half didn’t really match up with the first. This is ironic, for I would say the same about How to Survive the Titanic; the first half recreates the night of April 15^th, 1912, and the life of Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the White Star Line (although at the time of the sinking, he had in fact sold his company to J. Pierpont Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine Company and was, as he argued, just another passenger).

The second half illuminates the inquires afterwards and J. Bruce’s life, but in such an odd, convoluted way as to make it almost unreadable; in linking Lord Jim with J. Bruce, Wilson gives a “compare and contrast” feel of an English Lit 101 exam to her book. The similarities between Conrad’s novel and J. Bruce’s life are time and again forced together with all the skill of a person using a hammer to assemble a jigsaw puzzle; sometimes it fits but, more often than not, the pieces come together only after having been bashed into place. An aside here or there would have gone a lot further in making her point, methinks.

This book shows just how J. Bruce has since gone down in history as a coward and the polar opposite of the proper Edwardian gentleman who should have gone into the drink so that women and children could live. After 100+ years, there is still a fair amount of mystery around the events of that night. Did J. Bruce push aside women and children in order to get a seat on a lifeboat, or, as he claimed, did he help women and children board lifeboats and then only took a seat when there were no other women or children about in the area? Was he pushed into the lifeboat by First Officer Wilde? Did he really row with his back to the wreck and, thus, not watch the “ship of dreams” perish?

Without question the best parts of the book were the descriptions of the sinking and the subsequent rescue of the survivors; the hour-by-hour account of J. Bruce’s activities during the whole ordeal are engrossing and absorbing, with Wilson providing some very moving and even heart-wrenching descriptions of the tragedy, even from the viewpoint of this most unsympathetic of persons. The biographical material on J. Bruce’s life serves the purpose of the book well which is, after all, to illuminate the case on how to successfully navigate the aftermath of a catastrophe like the sinking of the Titanic. The man’s thoughts and actions are analyzed and given a new perspective, thanks to insightful commentary from the author, even if, as I argued above, Lord Jim has little to do with J. Bruce.

But How to Survive the Titanic is still very much a peculiar book, attempting as it does to tie together several narrative threads into one all-encompassing and readable narrative of the life of one of the major figures in the story of the sinking of the Titanic. In the capable and guardedly sympathetic hands of Wilson, J. Bruce appears to have been, at best, a difficult man to deal with; undistinguished, diffident and introverted, inward-directed and almost incapable of empathy towards anyone not within his tight little family and social circle (and even not often then; just read about his relationship with his wife, Florence), and perhaps not very much empathy at that to those inside it. He was the unfavored son of an up and coming man, and if J. Bruce had all the advantages that wealth could bestow upon the son of a fantastically successful bourgeois industrialist of the mid-Victorian era, he did not wield them with much confidence.

If the Titanic had not struck an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic on an April night of 1912, it is entirely possible that no one but history enthusiasts for the grand late 19^th and early 20^th Century’s luxury liners, or chroniclers of the Edwardian social scene, ever would have ever heard of J. Bruce at all. He probably would have preferred it that way, all things considered, but fate or circumstance had other plans for him.