Author Walter Lord Is Still Sailing the Titanic

Walter Lord was into the Titanic before he was born.

His grandfather, a Baltimore business baron with steel, railroad and shipping interests, was a friend of the ship’s captain, Edward J. Smith, and sent Lord’s mother to sea once under Smith’s care to make up her mind about a marriage proposal.

“I don’t remember whether it was my father’s proposal or somebody else’s,” Lord mused not long ago, the summer sun heliographing off his eyeglasses like an SOS. “But she made her decision, whatever it was, the first night out.”

An Early Fascination

Her story was a staple of family lore, he remembers, as were tales, both cautionary and heroic, of the icy, starry night in 1912 when Smith and his great ship went down. Lord made his first Atlantic crossing 14 years later, at age 7, on the White Star liner Olympic--quite conscious even then, he recalls, that the Olympic was the Titanic’s sister ship. At 8 he started a scrapbook about the Titanic and, in a way, he has been sailing with it ever since.

He exhumed old newspaper clippings on the Titanic in the Princeton library as an undergraduate and read transcripts of the U.S. investigation into the sinking during law school at Yale. Finally, in 1953--while he was working as an advertising copywriter on the Aqua Velva account at J. Walter Thompson--an editor friend advised him, since he was always talking about the Titanic, to write a book about it.

The result, a year later, was “A Night to Remember,” the first and still the best telling of the Titanic’s history. Thirty-three years, 54 printings (nine in hard back) and millions of copies later, “Night” is still selling well, refueled (if refueling were needed) by discovery of the liner’s shattered hull two years ago.

The Story Continues

The book has never been out of print. It has been made into a movie (in 1958, starring Kenneth More). And last year, after three decades of correspondence with Titanic survivors and buffs, rethinking some old theories and unearthing new facts, Lord came out with a sequel, “The Night Continues,” updating the Titanic story. That book’s gone through six printings, sold 60,000 hardback copies and is coming out in paperback next month. He’s also written the forward to Dr. Robert Ballard’s book about the Titanic’s discovery, due out next month as well.

The Titanic, it seems, won’t let Lord go--after a lifetime with his subject, he finds the legendary ship “intriguing still.” Despite the weight of 68 years and the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease, he took to the phone this summer with the enthusiasm of a teen-ager, pressing for the latest details of the current French expedition to the wreck.

He was against salvaging artifacts “as a matter of propriety,” he said. “It’s a question of taste, and like (Supreme Court) Justice Potter Stewart with obscenity, I know it when I see it. Excavating Pompeii is one thing, this is another. It’s just too soon. I don’t know where the line is, but this isn’t it.”

Still Captivated

Nevertheless, he remains captivated by the expedition, puzzling over the satchel of jewels recovered, volunteering pictures from his own collection or, best of all, images from the magic lantern of his mind.

“Actually, I just heard a wonderful new story that’s not in either book,” he says. “There was a Mr. and Mrs. Walter Clark among the first-class passengers. He was in the smoking room playing cards that night. She was in their cabin. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, he didn’t give it much notice. Kept on playing cards. But she felt it was serious. Came out of the cabin and learned the ship was sinking. She went to the smoking room to warn him but she wouldn’t go in! The smoking room was a male refuge--inviolate. It was unthinkable for a woman to enter. Even with the ship sinking! She stood outside waving until she caught his attention through the door.”

He pauses, marveling at the deadly quaintness of that vanished age. “Think what that says about them. . . . all they went through. . . .”

Lord lives and breathes those images of history; he’s an almost-Victorian bachelor who can recoil gently at the “pretty rough language” in modern novels while simultaneously enthusing about the “wonderful turbulence” of Manhattan.

He lives alone in a file-filled apartment at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, shunning the electronic seductions of the word processor to scribble his books in pencil on yellow legal pads from 9:45 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. His schedule would send most younger, able-bodied writers into therapy, but Lord laughs off any suggestion that his daily efforts are in any way remarkable. “I enjoy it,” he says, and anyway it only amounts to about 10 hours. “I find I’m cheating and starting closer to 10 these days . . . and I take a good break and go out for lunch and dinner, preferably with somebody.”

There’ve been 13 books now, most of them critically and commercially well received, and the only time Lord sounds impatient with the Titanic is when people seem to think that’s all he’s done. He’s written about everything from the civil rights movement (“A Time to Stand”) to Arctic exploration (“Peary to the Pole”), including three major books on World War II (“Day of Infamy,” “Incredible Victory” and “Miracle at Dunkirk”) and the definitive book--”The Dawn’s Early Light”--about the burning of Washington during the War of 1812.

Lord’s fascination with the Titanic does not extend to romanticizing it. It may indeed have been “women and children first” in some cases that night, but as Lord was the first to point out, a significantly greater proportion of men among the first-class passengers were saved than were women and children in third class.

Still, he remains moved by the courage--the ship’s band, in uniform, playing to calm the passengers with hymns as the ship went down; honeymooner Dan Marvin handing his new bride into a lifeboat saying, “You go, I’ll stay awhile”; the wealthy Mrs. Isidore Strauss, turning back from a lifeboat saying, “I have always stayed with my husband. Why should I leave him now?”

A Theme of Courage

“The son of a friend of mine, writing an article for a journalism class, pointed out that all my books in one way or another are about human courage, or the lack of it,” Lord said, looking into the distance. “Not so much the courage of standing for a principle, but raw physical courage--facing physical peril and surmounting it or not surmounting it.

“I’d never really thought about it, but I suppose almost all my books have that element in them. I like to watch ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and see how they react. And of course the Titanic is such a grand stage for studying courage and the absence of it.”

Thirty years of studying and writing, he says, have convinced him that it’s not so much that history repeats itself, exactly, but that “human nature repeats itself.” The human animal, he said, is prone to folly and pride and arrogance. “The tragedies of the (space shuttle) Challenger and the Titanic, for example, are very similar . . . assumptions about technology . . . pressures to keep on schedule . . . safety taken for granted . . . nothing could ever happen to it. And warning signals all around . . . . If the Challenger people had known the Titanic story better, they might not have set off in quite such cocksure fashion.”

Yet there are less gloomy lessons as well, he says. For every coward on the Titanic (“Bruce Ismay, president of the White Star Line, didn’t cover himself with glory”) there was someone like the baker of the ship, “who had no obvious leadership qualities whatsoever . . . showing enormous initiative . . . lashing deck chairs together for people to float on and doing all sorts of things. . . .”

Researching his book “The Good Years” on the period from 1900 to 1914, Lord said, he found the same things happening in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake: “Some rich man’s chauffeur organized the few automobiles in the city into a rescue squad” while many of the city’s supposed leaders and prominent citizens “stood around wringing their hands” or “did what I would do--just run to the safest-looking place in town.”

Where some might find in such anomalies fuel for disillusionment or cynicism, Walter Lord finds cause for hope.