A Night to Remember: The Classic Account of the Final Hours of the Titanic

"It’s hard to imagine anybody producing a more thrilling account of the Titanic than Walter Lord’s book from 1955. The Titanic has never really gone away, but between 1912-13 and 1955 there wasn’t a lot of sustained interest. Then Walter Lord came along and published A Night to Remember. It was a bestseller that has never gone out of print. Lord’s book is a moment-by-moment telling of the events of the night of April 14 and the morning of April 15. What’s most skilful about it is the way that it moves around in space as it recreates these moments in time. From the outset, you get phrases like ‘meanwhile’ or ‘on the boat deck.’ He moves you around the ship, creating a sense of simultaneity, even as he’s conveying a sense of the vastness of the Titanic and all of these different experiences happening at the same time, from calm to panic. He also plays around with the pacing so that it’ll slow down to have Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer, reflect on his career, or Isidor and Ida Straus reflecting on their marriage. And then the pace speeds up as the danger becomes clearer, the lifeboats are being loaded and launched, and the water is rising. It becomes a complete page turner by the time the ship is going down. It’s also held up incredibly well in terms of accuracy. That’s in part because of the advantages he had writing this book in 1955 as opposed to later, because he could interview or correspond with 60-plus survivors. He was a meticulous researcher. He used newspapers, the British and American inquiries, the published survivors’ accounts, as well as his interviews and correspondence with survivors. He was careful about not reporting some of the more dubious stories that were told about the disaster at the time. Lord really bears a lot of responsibility for people who, like Eaton and Haas, got interested in the Titanic and who started organizations devoted to the history of the ship and the disaster. Pretty much all of those people were inspired by reading A Night to Remember . It’s still a book that’s especially popular with kids. I read it as a kid. I didn’t develop an immediate and lifelong Titanic obsession, but I think a lot of people who read that book in the 50s and have read it since have become Titanic obsessed for their whole lives. I wasn’t interested in retelling the story of what happened that night. I don’t think A Night to Remember will be surpassed in that regard. I saw it as doing something that the books that I’ve talked about didn’t do. I got into it after I read some letters written by Henry Adams, who was the grandson and great-grandson of American presidents and a famously curmudgeonly critic of technology and the whole idea of progress at a time when it was widely taken for granted. It turns out from these letters that Henry Adams had passage booked on the return trip of the Titanic from New York to Southampton. And so, when he heard that the ship had gone down with this enormous loss of life, he wrote to friends saying how the Titanic was supposed to be the triumph of civilization, and now look where we are, look at the misguided confidence, look at the hubris. It occurred to me that this must have been an event that people really struggled to make sense of, and that got me going. I knew the Leadbelly song. I knew some of the other folk songs about the Titanic. What I didn’t know was how it was reported on at the time. I didn’t know about the endless number of poems that were churned out about the Titanic in its immediate aftermath, or the reams of sheet music. So I thought what I could contribute was to really work out some of the ways that the disaster resonated in the moment in 1912, and that’s when I discovered that it was being deployed in debates about immigration and women’s suffrage, and in debates about Jim Crow and segregation and racial violence and labour agitation. It just kept opening out for me. I was going to write about how it resonated in 1912, and then I decided I had to follow it through time. So the second half of the book includes a chapter on Walter Lord and how the Titanic resurfaces, so to speak, in the 1950s. And then I took it up to Robert Ballard’s discovery of the wreck, which I situate in the Reaganite 1980s. I think if I were writing it again, I would make it more transatlantic than it is. It’s largely focused on responses in the US. There’s a lot of overlap to responses in the UK, but there are important differences that I could have teased out in the book."