“A Night to Remember” captured the Titanic story like no other
Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember” is still, in my view, the most gripping account of the Titanic disaster ever written. First published in 1955, it has never been out of print. Those of us who have published Titanic books more recently look at its sales figures with awe and envy.
Lord’s book is many things, among them a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the events on board the ship, based in part on interviews he did with 63 survivors, including steerage passengers whose stories were ignored in 1912. Simple and chronological only on the most superficial level, “A Night to Remember” takes an imaginative approach to time and space in which hours and minutes prove extremely malleable, the ship itself seems almost infinitely complex, and the disaster assumes order and unity only from far away.
Lookout Frederick Fleet gazes from the crow’s nest just before 11:40 p.m. on April 14th, but before we can see the iceberg, Lord has shifted to the rich passengers’ dogs and then back to Fleet at 10 o’clock. By the time the berg has passed, we have experienced the collision from the after bridge, the First Class dining saloon, the galley, 11 passenger cabins, and the First Class smoking room.
After stopping time (or, more accurately, expanding it) for this tour through the ship, Lord moves the action to the bridge, repeats the collision, inspects the damage in the boiler rooms, repeats the collision again (this time from the aft boiler rooms), jumps 10 miles away and half an hour back to the bridge of the nearby Californian, and ends the scene with the Californian’s second officer watching a “big ship suddenly stop and put out most of her lights” at 11:40.
After describing the scene of the Titanic’s stern disappearing into the ocean at 2:20 a.m. and before tracing the frantic efforts of the Carpathia to reach the survivors, Lord interrupts the narrative to provide a broader historical perspective on the disaster. He says that the sinking of the Titanic represented the end of an era. He recognizes the class and ethnic “prejudices” of the “old days.” But he also expresses regret for “this lost world.” The disaster, he writes, “marked the end of a general feeling of confidence.” Uncertainty replaced the belief in “a steady, orderly, civilized life.” The Titanic was “the first jar” in an “unending sequence of disillusionment. Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterward, all was tumult.”
It turns out that this idea that the Titanic either represented or caused the end of an era — that it marked the transition from the good old days to a modern age of uncertainty, tumult, and disillusionment—caught on among lots of people who read Lord’s book or saw the movie based on it that came out in 1958. I think it still accounts for some of the fascination with the disaster.
I love “A Night to Remember,” but I think that its nostalgia obscures the contexts in which people tried to make sense of the disaster in its immediate aftermath. As I’ve tried to show in my previous posts, 1912 wasn’t an age of innocence. The actual ship went down in a smooth sea, but the metaphorical Titanic plunged into some very rough waters.