Walter Lord’s 1955 book A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic, is a classic about the doomed ocean liner. Lord interviewed numerous survivors and highlighted their stories in brief vignettes. At around 160 pages long, A Night to Remember is a quick and propulsive read. A Night to Remember is well-written, and Lord did a marvelous job of threading together so many different accounts and points of view.
Lord starts the book as the fateful iceberg is sighted. The limitation of Lord’s decision to start the book at that moment is that we lose the opportunity for more scene setting. The reader can’t really differentiate very much between the characters, and there’s less of a connection to the characters, since you don’t meet them until the disaster starts. This kind of scene setting was perfected with 1970’s disaster movies, where you learn before the disaster starts who’s on the brink of getting divorced, and which adorable elderly ladies have stowed away without a ticket.
In comparison, I just read Jonathan Mayo’s 2016 book Titanic: Minute by Minute, which begins 24 hours before Titanic hit the iceberg, so there’s plenty of time to soak up the rhythm of life on the ship before the tragedy ensues. And learn crazy little facts like the bugler played the song “The Roast Beef of Old England” in all three dining rooms to announce that meals were being served.
Lord’s writing style is straightforward and highly readable, but A Night to Remember is quite dated in how women’s names are handled. Married women are referred to only by their husband’s name, so the unsinkable Molly Brown becomes Mrs. J.J. Brown. It’s very outdated, and honestly, the women’s names should just be updated. I know, that’s changing what the author wrote, but A Night to Remember is now 70 years old, and times change. And I’d like to know what these women’s first names were.
Curiously, in A Night to Remember, Lord did not depict the Titanic breaking apart as it sank. (Survivors’ testimony differed on this account, but the discovery of the wreck, 30 years after Lord’s book was published, proved definitively that the ship broke apart.) Survivor Jack Thayer’s privately printed account of the sinking stated that the ship broke apart. Lord must have read Thayer’s account, so I’m not sure why Lord didn’t at least raise the possibility of the Titanic breaking apart.
One section where A Night to Remember is very strong is Lord’s understanding of the class issues surrounding the sinking of the Titanic. He writes: “the New York American broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1,800 others were also lost.” (p.91) I’m not sure who was more clueless, the New York American or the Evening Sun who ran a headline: ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION. “The story reported all passengers transferred to the Parisian and the Carpathia, with the Titanic being towed by the Virginian to Halifax.” (p.139) If only Titanic had been so lucky.
Lord writes: “the Titanic also marked the end of a general feeling of confidence...For 100 years the Western world had been at peace. For 100 years technology had steadily improved...Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterward all was tumult.” (p.95) That might be an overstatement, but it’s hard not to feel as though the sinking of the Titanic was the last gasp of the Victorian and Edwardian Age, a harbinger of the chaos that would erupt when World War I broke out in 1914. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, the main character Dick Diver says while exploring a World War I battlefield, “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” (p.72) The post-World War I era would bring about a time of great uncertainty and many changes, as Fitzgerald chronicled in his writings.
It’s hard to imagine future generations displaying the sangfroid of millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim, who helped numerous women and children into lifeboats, and appeared on the boat deck in full evening dress with his secretary. Guggenheim said, “We’ve dressed up in our best, and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” He told a steward, “If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty.” Guggenheim died in the sinking, and his body was never recovered.
A Night to Remember is an excellent book about one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.
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