Senator Smith too returned to New York where, at the Waldorf-Astoria, he took affidavits from various survivors including August Weikman, the Titanic’s barber, who was probably the source of Lightoller’s story that Ismay had been ‘ordered’ by the officer in charge into ‘the last boat to leave’. Ismay’s actions were justified, Weikman swore, because ‘there were no women in the vicinity’. Mrs Malaha Douglas, travelling first-class, claimed that on the afternoon of the accident she and her now-deceased husband had seen a seaman take the temperature of the water not by lowering a pail down the side of the ship, but by filling the pail with water from a tap and then placing his thermometer inside. Mrs Douglas also claimed that Ismay had been at the Wideners’ dinner party that night, and repeated the story told by Emily Ryerson of his showing an ice warning to Mrs Ryerson and Mrs Thayer that afternoon, before announcing that they would deal with the problem by lighting more boilers.
Emily Ryerson then arrived to give her affidavit. Smith’s key witness described her last hours on the ship but said nothing about the now famous encounter with Ismay. Why she held back would be clearer to Ismay than it was to Smith, but she doubtless said that it was to avoid additional stress. Mrs Ryerson, who had been returning on the Titanic for the funeral of her eldest son, was now also burying her husband. If Lightoller, who tried to prevent her thirteen-year-old boy from boarding the lifeboat, had had his way, both her sons would now be dead. Getting tangled up in what Ismay did or didn’t say about speed was more than she could bear this week. Marian Thayer, who had been with Mrs Ryerson during the encounter, had said nothing whatever about it. She was caught between loyalty to an old friend and a new one.
On 2 May, Ismay left for England on board the Adriatic. He was, he told a British journalist, ‘worn out. I am feeling very tired and wish to retire.’ The previous day, the funeral of John Jacob Astor had been knocked off the front pages by the appearance of 15,000 suffragettes parading through New York.
The Senate’s report of its findings was published on 28 May. It seemed that for all his support of the ‘little man’, Smith was uninterested in the part played by class on the Titanic. He saw the conflict as between good men and bad, rather than rich men and poor. Smith duly noted that 60 per cent of first- class, 42 per cent of second-class and 25 per cent of third-class passengers were saved, but he questioned only three steerage passengers, each of whom assured him that those in third-class had not been trapped in the ship’s bowels.
William Alden Smith’s aim, ‘plain and simple’, had been ‘to gather facts relating to this disaster while they were still vivid realities’. The facts he gathered were these: that the Titanic was fitted with davits that could hold forty-eight lifeboats but which were carrying only sixteen (the number approved by the British Board of Trade); that the lads in the crow’s nest were not provided with binoculars; that while the Captain was at a private dinner party made up of East Coast millionaires the ship was steaming at 22 knots — her maximum speed of the voyage — into an ice field which he had been warned about by Marconigram on many separate occasions; that after the collision the Titanic continued to go forward for thirty-five minutes; that the Captain failed to inform his passengers and crew that the ship was sinking; that he gave no instructions as to the handling and manning of the lifeboats, and there was no order to abandon ship. The single fact that Senator Smith had not been able to ascertain, despite repeatedly asking him, was one that his star witness himself was hardly able to understand: why had Ismay jumped?
The language William Alden Smith used in his report to describe these facts was neither ‘plain’ nor ‘simple’; he was writing a florid page of history. Six weeks after its loss, with the mariners still wet, the Titanic had become an historical document. Senator Smith had gathered together myriad witness accounts, all of them partial, some false, and allowed them to interface, interlace and interfere. He had thus given the chaos of the night a start, a middle and an end. There was a beauty to the process of reconstruction, and the romance of his role was not lost on him. The Senator concluded that ‘the willingness’ of Captain Smith ‘to die was the expiating evidence of his fitness to live… In his horrible dismay, when his brain was afire with honest retribution, we can still see, in his manly bearing and his tender solicitude for the safety of women and little children, some traces of his lofty spirit when dark clouds lowered all about him and angry elements stripped him of his command.’ He spoke of the ‘bosom’ of the ocean, the ‘glamour of the sea’, and ‘the daring spirit of the explorer and the trader’ whose noble ‘calling’ was ‘already demoralised and decadent’.
And so it rolled on, page after page of high oration, until he came to the part played by Ismay. Here William Alden Smith showed himself to be a man of hidden dimensions. Ismay’s personal conduct, on which the inquiry had expended so much energy, was not discussed, and nor did Senator Smith comment on the chairman’s survival. Instead, he shifted the debate onto an entirely different level. While it could not be proven that Ismay had ordered the Captain to keep up the ship’s speed, Senator Smith concluded that the ‘presence of the owner unconsciously stimulates endeavour’. Did he mean that Captain Smith was unconsciously stimulated by Ismay or that Ismay had unconsciously stimulated the Captain? Whose unconscious was Senator Smith referring to? Was the Captain acting as Ismay’s unconscious, or Ismay acting as the Captain’s?
Smith had chosen a word the impact of which was only quietly beginning to make itself felt in America. In Vienna, Freud was conducting his own inquiries into the unconscious which, he discovered, ruled everything. What distinguished the hysteric, Freud believed, was the ‘inability to give an ordered history of their life’, a narrative he compared to ‘an unnavigable river whose bed is now obstructed by masses of rock, now broken and made shallow by sandbanks’. Moments of clarity and coherence are followed by the drying-up of information, ‘leaving gaps and mysteries’. Connections are fragmented, the sequence of events becomes uncertain, the speaker will correct a fact or a date and then, ‘after a lengthy vacillation’, return to the original statement. The reasons behind such a disordered narrative, Freud suggested, could either be ‘deliberate dishonesty’ — ‘the patient is consciously and deliberately holding back a part of something that is very well known to her’ — or ’unconscious dishonesty’, the innocent result of amnesia or repression.25
The concept of the unconscious was not Freud’s alone. It was he who distinguished it as a place separate from consciousness as opposed to a state into which you fall, but Freud always said that the unconscious had been ‘discovered’ by ‘the poets and philosophers before me’.
Joseph Conrad, like Senator Smith, had no knowledge of psychoanalysis but knew there was a link between the psyche and the sea. When Senator Smith spoke of Ismay’s pressure on the Captain as ‘unconscious’ he was drawing, as Conrad often did, on the early twentieth-century interest in doubleness: the conscious self we think we know is controlled by a powerful stranger who inhabits us unawares, who entangles himself in our speech, who pushes us forward and holds us back. Duality runs like a fever through an astonishing number of novels and stories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly those of Henry James, who left his native Albany to live in England: in ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), Spencer Brydon leaves New York for Europe and returns to the family home thirty years later to discover it haunted by the self he might have been had he stayed in the city of his birth. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) dealt with the ‘terrible pleasure of the double life’, and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Hyde ‘drew steadily nearer the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two’. In 1913, the poet T. E. Hulme described, in ‘Speculations’, the self as being composed of two parts, a ‘superficial self’ and a ‘fundamental self’: it is the fundamental self, he said, that ‘leaps into action’.
