How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay Review

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How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay ReviewWhat would you do if you had the chance to leave the Titanic in a lifeboat as it was sinking? What if you were its owner? And what if you knew you might face severe questions and even ridicule because of your choice? Frances Wilson examines the unhappy decision of J. Bruce Ismay, President of the White Star Line, who took the opportunity to jump when it was presented to him.
While it's cleverly titled, it's neither a survival book nor a full account of the Titanic. It's partly a history of the ship's owner and covers the tragedy of the Titanic as it centers around its most tragic survivor. Wilson presents the many accounts of those who claim to have seen Ismay, and depicts very well the chaos of the moment as well as the unreliability of witness accounts. But she goes beyond the Titanic itself and brings in the fictional account of Jim from Joseph Conrad's novel _Lord Jim_ (which was written *before* the Titanic), because fiction often presents us with more appealing characters than real life as well as a window into a situation of heroism and lost honor where we can separate "the self we believe ourselves to be and the self-unknown" (pg 270).
The account of the sinking is rather exciting and the insightful comparisons are very thought-provoking but unfortunately, Ismay is a remarkably UNinteresting person and drags down the book to some degree. After the initial American hearings the narrative runs out of steam and becomes quite boring for a time. The discussions on _Lord Jim_ becomes mind numbing in its literary-ness and Ismay's letters to fellow-survivor Marian Thayer (whom Ismay was secretly in love with) are overly detailed and increasingly tedious. I don't wish to dismiss this book so flatly, however, because there was much to enjoy (and the ending gets better), but I think it will appeal most to readers with a special interest in the Titanic and especially those who will appreciate the literary parallel.
While it might be easy from the comfort of our present time, especially where the romance of the Titanic looms large in movies and books, to say 'I would honorably go down with the ship,' Wilson makes a compelling argument that until one is actually faced with the choice, none of us can really say for sure what we would do.How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay Overview
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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