April 14th - 100 Years Later

100 years later.

I still have my yellowed copy of the paperback of Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember.” It has traveled with me more miles than the ship sailed, from Indiana to California, than to Rhode Island, New York, California again, and now it resides on an upstairs bookshelf in Vermont. Along the way it has picked up traveling companions, namely James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (which I never really read all the way through, though I made many attempts. Love the beginning, oh that beginning) and Gabriel Marquez’s “A Hundred Years of Solitude.” There have been other books that have traveled with me over the years, many, but these 3 are the Holy Trinity, the 3 Musketeers, and “A Night to Remember” outlasts them all . It has staying power. And since tonight is the 100th anniversary of Titanic’s brush with the iceberg, I thought it fitting to herald the book's unsinkable status in my life.

I’ve been a history nerd from waaaaay back. The Civil War ignited the first fires of my fantasies. Also around that time, the idea of a Time Machine, anything to do with traveling in time, captivated me. And I always wanted to go back, never forward. Back to see Lincoln and Lee (and later, much later, Walt Whitman), to be there at Gettysburg, Appomatox, Ford’s Theatre. I checked out a 20 reel version of “A Birth of a Nation” from our library and watched it over and over on our home movie screen. From there World War II and the relentless rise of the Nazis enthralled me. (Why was it wars and disasters interested me? Hmmm?)

I don’t know how the Titanic first cruised into my imagination. There are several possibilities. My grandmother was an expert storyteller, a former teacher in a one room schoolhouse, and a great lover of history. Did she first bring it up or did I ask her about it? She had been born in 1900 and was 12 when the ship sunk. She remembered the headline. And since I was an early collector of old newspapers, obtaining that particular headline whetted my appetite. (I have a Fort Wayne News Sentinel original from that date.) Another possibility would have been the 1950’s movie “Titanic” with Barbara Stanwyck and Clifton Webb which was going to be shown on Saturday Night at the Movies one Saturday in my early youth. I’d seen previews and had anticipated its coming for at least a week (it felt like weeks plural, but time stretched and seemed like an eternity back then), but on the afternoon of the fated day, I had my own brush with disaster. I rode my bike into the street without looking both ways and a car brushed the front tire. No injuries, but my mother witnessed this and as punishment forbad me from seeing the movie. I begged, pleaded, cajoled, tap danced, spun plates, sang in black face (no I didn’t), nothing worked. She was firm as a glacier. Not a crack in her resolve. I didn't see the movie until years later. But maybe the interest was already there. We did have a book about the sea and famous ships in which there was one page that had an artist’s rendition of the Titanic going down, the iceberg still in sight, lifeboats filled with powerless people aghast at the horror they were witnessing. I would stare at that picture, conjuring up my own versions of events. And there were also versions of the Titanic on the tv show “Time Tunnel” and in the movie and musical “Unsinkable Molly Brown” but these again came along after the image of the doomed ship had been firmly branded.

At some time in all this, Walter Lord’s wonderful book steamed into my hands. It’s a thin paperback, with a startling artist’s rendition of the sinking, different than the book’s I mentioned. It was sepia toned and proved an excellent page turner. I wanted, needed to get inside that book. And it held the most effective forward to any book I’ve read since. It speaks of a fictional book written by a struggling author in the 19th century in which he takes a boat dubbed unsinkable, fills it with some of the world’s richest people, and then sinks it on its maiden voyage. I forget now whether the fictional book hit an iceberg or not. The forward goes on then to briefly describe the actual White Star Line ship. Amazing similarity. And then the last line is the clincher, and I paraphrase: “The fictional ship was called the Titan, the real ship, the Titanic.”

Well, I was had.

I devoured the book. This was how history should be written. Captivating, edge of your seat, what’s going to happen next, oh if only they’d done this they could have avoided the whole thing, tales of heroism, foolishness, fate. I loved it. An expert job. Even describing it now it makes me want to open those sad, brittle pages and embark on the voyage once more. It’s as if it’s a cautionary tale against human pride with the scale of a Greek tragedy. Amazing. And there it is in my mind’s eye, the Titanic, its ghost, not at the bottom of the sea, but sailing the same route 100 years later, all the rich in their pomp, all the poor below decks, enjoying what they have no idea is the final day of this ship, of their lives perhaps. It so captivates the imagination. A great story. A great book.

So here's to Walter, to the book, to the ship itself, to all the many stories and myths and conversations its spawned, to all the people, all the people, survivors, the dead, the storytellers.

Postscript: If you’ve never seen the British film “A Night to Remember” adapted from Walter Lord’s book, watch it. Excellent. Far superior to James Cameron’s “Titanic” in my estimation. If they could’ve melded the story and script of the British film with the effects of the most recent version, it would’ve been perfect. But that’s the old history nerd speaking.