This year marks one hundred since 1,502 people died at sea when the RMS Titanic sank on her maiden voyage. This costly night has its remembered heroes. The story of the brave musicians who played “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the ship was taking them down to their unmarked graves has been told splendidly in Steve Turner’s recent book, The Band That Played On.
It has not, however, been one hundred years since the death of J. Bruce Ismay. The chairman of the White Star Line and the president of its parent company, the International Mercantile Marine, outlived his unsinkable ship by a quarter of a century. Hence he is the antithesis of the bandsmen: not the hero that died but the scoundrel who lived. A popular song of the mid-20th century counseled people to do what they pleased without worrying about public censure because it will all be forgotten “A Hundred Years from Today.” Defying such reassurance, Ismay’s ignoble conduct has been perpetually retold and despised for a century now.
In this centennial year, a number of accounts of the disaster have appeared, but one of the best appeared a year earlier and is now available in paperback: a beautifully written, reflective book by Frances Wilson, How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay. If Ismay’s case undercuts the advice of “A Hundred Years from Today,” Wilson’s book-length account of it also calls into question Sebastian’s dictum in Brideshead Revisited: “To understand all is to forgive all.”
Although Wilson does not speak in these terms, the evidence she offers lends itself to the interpretation that Ismay was a textbook example of narcissistic personality disorder. She does testify that “other people held no reality for Ismay.” He was the kind of husband and father who is the family dictator. Intolerant of their very presence, he banished his children to what was, in effect, an adjoining house. He took sadistic pleasure in picking on his well-behaved wife in public, and when a son contracted polio he became an additional favorite target.
Overseeing the whole project as the grand culmination of his glorious career, Ismay had personally decided that the Titanic should not have sufficient lifeboats because the space could be better used for additional leisure opportunities for the first-class passengers. To what degree the captain was following his orders—possibly even to increase speed—was never established, but Ismay was informed that they had received iceberg warnings.
The chairman of the White Star Line was also one of only four people who knew before the lifeboats had been loaded that the ship really was going to go down—and in just a matter of hours. Wilson unsparingly lists all the people with whom Ismay should have had a bond of affection that he did not bother to warn, including his personal servant of many years, Richard Fry. No man is a hero to his own valet indeed.
Instead, Ismay hung around a lifeboat, ostensibly helping with the evacuation of the women and children. Looking down at an unnaturally calm sea, Narcissus must have seen his own reflection and realized he was in love. As the boat was being lowered, he jumped in.
He was not the only man to behave badly. Some went so far as to disguise themselves as women. It was alleged that Lord Duff Gordon bribed the crew of his woefully under-filled lifeboat not to go back and attempt to rescue anyone. The Philadelphia-set millionaire William E. Carter hopped into the very same boat as Ismay. Carter’s wife later successfully sued for divorce, claiming that he had abandoned her and their children to their fate in their cabin and just ran off to save himself—surely in its own way an apposite case for divorce on the grounds of desertion.
And still it is Ismay who is especially loathed. This has traditionally been attributed to the facts that, first, his own decisions contributed to the tragedy; and, second, that as president and chairman—as a kind of “super captain” for whom Captain Smith worked—it was his duty to give priority to his passengers and not to himself. Ismay’s response to this way of seeing the matter was to claim that he was not a part of the crew (neither, incidentally, were the musicians) but rather just a passenger like all the others. He affected to have no idea why the captain had informed him and not anyone else beside crewmembers that there were reports of ice. When he stuck doggedly to the line that he was “simply an ordinary passenger,” the British inquiry finally asked him if they were meant to understand that he had bought a ticket for the voyage, his truculent “no” reducing the room to hearty laughter.
Reading all the details presented in Wilson’s narrative, what makes it so hard to sympathize with Ismay is how unchastened he was by the disaster. When the survivors were rescued by the Carpathia, he reportedly came aboard shouting, “I’m Ismay! I’m Ismay! Get me a stateroom!” Great man that he was, he duly secured a fine room to himself on the overcrowded ship, leaving women who had just watched their husbands and sons die to huddle together day and night in the smoking room. As they proceeded to New York, Ismay failed to respond to his company’s own urgent requests for information about the tragedy and to his wife’s message of concern, instead sending a flurry of Marconigrams entirely confined to arranging how he could get away as quickly and comfortably as possible: “Please send outfit of clothes, including shoes, for me to Cedric.”
Upon landing and being told he could not leave the country, he headed straight off to the Ritz Carlton. When asked at the American inquiry about the lives lost, it became apparent that he had still not even bothered to find out which of his own employees had died, let alone how many women and children.
Instead, Ismay immediately began a flirtatious correspondence with a Titanic survivor who had been widowed by the tragedy. In these letters, he is so self-absorbed that he repeatedly intimates that his loss—what should have been the crowning achievement of his career has been ruined!—is worse than hers. (A year before the tragedy, he had resolved that he would give the world its greatest ship and then retire triumphantly, informing a colleague of this decision with the disclaimer: “I hope that, upon reflection, you will not harbour the thought that I am deserting the ship prematurely.”) Mrs. Thayer was level-headed enough to not let his insinuating prediction that they were destined to meet again lead her into an ill-judged liaison, but Ismay apparently did successfully seduce another survivor.
As the sinking of the Titanic took its toll on the White Star Line, retirement was forced upon him. Ismay bought a remote Irish estate and retreated there to enjoy his own private nature preserve. In what for a less pathological soul would surely have been a painfully ironic allusion, the locals referred to him deferentially as “Your Honour.”
Wilson’s finest achievement is tracing the interplay between these historical events and literary parallels. Indeed, at points the book is almost in danger of becoming a joint study of Bruce Ismay and Joseph Conrad. The connections with Lord Jim are uncanny, and she makes much of them.
Occasionally I wished for less of this and more historical detail. For example, we are told curtly in the middle of a list that Ismay “was blackballed from his club.” Which club? Who was behind this move? Did he have any supporters who objected? We are informed that throughout his life he kept a scrapbook of references to himself in the press: “In this sense, Ismay compiled an edited version of his rise and fall.” What exactly was in it? Did he really cut out, paste in, and carefully safeguard articles calling him a coward?
Still, the literary echoes are so bountiful and striking that it would have been perverse to ignore them. Not only had Conrad seemingly described Ismay’s life-defining actions in advance, but Morgan Robertson had chronicled the main drama in an 1898 novella, Futility. In it, the largest ship ever built hits an iceberg. Due to the hubris that she was “unsinkable,” not enough lifeboats had been installed, resulting in great loss of life. Believe it or not, this fictitious vessel was christened the Titan.
J. Bruce Ismay’s repulsiveness is such that eventually I could not even muster much sympathy for his wife, coming to see her as an enabler of his narcissism. Strangely poignant, however, was the inscription she wrote upon his death and had carved in stone and placed on the grounds of their isolated estate: “In memory of Bruce Ismay, who spent many happy hours here 1913-36. He loved all wild and solitary places, where we taste the pleasure of believing that what we see is boundless as we wish our souls to be.”
Here is a life writ small. No other human being mattered enough to him to warrant a mention in his epitaph. There is no service to humanity to record. Behold a man who pleased himself; a misanthrope in a wilderness of his own making.
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford Univ. Press).
See also: The Liner
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