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The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay
Harper
October 2011
On Sale: October 11, 2011
352 pages
ISBN: 0062094548
EAN: 9780062094544
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
A brilliantly original and gripping new look at the sinking
of the Titanic through the prism of the life and lost honor
of J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner Books have been written and films have been made, we have
raised the Titanic and watched her go down again on numerous
occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances Wilson spins a
new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on April 14, 1912,
and one thousand men, lighting their last cigarettes,
prepared to die, J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner and
inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat
filled with women and children and rowed away to safety. Accused of cowardice and of dictating the Titanic’s
excessive speed, Ismay became, according to one headline,
“The Most Talked-of Man in the World.” The first victim of a
press hate campaign, he never recovered from the damage to
his reputation, and while the other survivors pieced
together their accounts of the night, Ismay never spoke of
his beloved ship again. In the Titanic’s mail room was a manuscript by that great
narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, the story of a man who
impulsively betrays a code of honor and lives on under the
strain of intolerable guilt. But it was Conrad’s great novel
Lord Jim, in which a sailor abandons a sinking ship, leaving
behind hundreds of passengers in his charge, that uncannily
predicted Ismay’s fate. Conrad, the only major novelist to
write about the Titanic, knew more than anyone what ships do
to men, and it is with the help of his wisdom that Wilson
unravels the reasons behind Ismay’s jump and the afterlives
of his actions. Using never-before-seen letters written by Ismay to the
beautiful Marion Thayer, a first-class passenger with whom
he had fallen in love during the voyage, Frances Wilson
explores Ismay’s desperate need to tell his story, to make
sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living
with the consciousness of lost honor. For those who survived
the Titanic, the world was never the same. But as Wilson
superbly demonstrates, we all have our own Titanics, and we
all need to find ways of surviving them.
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