places, where we taste the pleasure of believing that what we see is boundless as we wish our souls to be.
After the inquiry into the case of the Patna finds Jim guilty of ‘abandoning in the moment of danger the lives and property ‘confided to’ his ‘charge’, he is stripped of his seaman’s papers. He stays on in the eastern seaports, limping from job to job like a bird with a broken wing, hiding his identity, unable to endure reference to the scandal, and disappearing whenever it is mentioned. It is impossible, he realises, to lay the ghost of a fact; ‘there is always that bally thing at the back of my head.’ Jim wants a ‘clean slate’ and with Marlow’s help he makes ‘the second desperate leap of his life’, into Patusan, a remote island backwater in the South Seas consisting of bandits, maidens, and thirty miles of forest and surf. In the novel’s second half, Jim is treated as a leader and called by the natives ‘ Tuan or ‘Lord’ Jim. Just as he once gazed at the serenity of the world from the security of the Patna, he now looks ‘with an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening, at the river, at the houses, at the everlasting life of the forests, at the life of the old mankind, at the secrets of the land’. Defending his village from attack by an English marauder, Jim dies like a medieval knight.
‘The division of the book into two parts’, Conrad admitted, was its ‘plague spot’.7 Readers and critics have agreed; Lord Jim is less a book divided into two than a self-divided book, a book which breaks in the middle and, like Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield, it has become a novel remembered for its first part alone. Conrad was successfully able to imagine Jim’s failure but he failed to imagine his success; when his account of Jim’s life in Patusan begins, Marlow relaxes his grip on the young man’s consciousness and the narrative loses its psychological tautness. Conrad would have been wiser to say goodbye to Jim as he embarked on his island life, as he said goodbye to Leggatt in ‘The Secret Sharer’ when he slipped off the ship to swim to Koh-ring, a ‘free man… striking out for his new destiny’. But he was too involved in Jim’s story, he needed too badly see Jim wrest control of his fate, and in order for Jim to win back his honour Conrad had to change the genre of his book. What Albert Guerard described as ‘perhaps the first major novel built on a true intuitive understanding of sympathetic identification as a psychic process’, now became a boy’s adventure story of the kind that Jim had always dreamt of inhabiting.
Jim eventually dies for honour, but has he redeemed himself? Has he, in his island life, faced or shirked his crime? While Conrad made Jim’s ending too easy, Marlow is always drawn to the equivocal and it is the absence of clarity in the young man’s situation that interests him. Despite Marlow’s endless production of words, Jim becomes less and less clear as the tale progresses. It is only, Marlow realises, ‘when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun’. By the close of Lord Jim, the book’s subject is no longer the encounter between the self we believe ourselves to be and the self unknown, lying in wait like a snake beneath a stone. Marlow now wonders whether atonement is possible at all, whether a slate can ever be clean. ‘A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.’
The second half of lives, as well as novels, can also be of limited interest. Few people much mind what Wordsworth had to say after he married, and the story of Florence Nightingale ends once she extinguishes her lamp, her final forty years being consigned to a footnote. Conrad used the half of his life spent on land to translate into romance the monotony of the half he spent at sea, and what is curious about Ismay’s life is that having jumped from the Titanic into Conrad’s world, a place in which we live out our time as convicts, self-deceived and unpitied, his story was quickly given a Conradian second half. Ismay was imagined as an outcast on an island even as he attended to his daily rhythm, walking the streets of London in a suit with a rolled umbrella, taking the train to Liverpool, feeding the pigeons in the park. The man whose speech was once described by the press as a ‘luminous fog’ was now constructed by them as a man in a mist. And that, it was assumed of Ismay, is the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.
By the time of Ismay’s death, the Titanic was no longer the most horrific event of the twentieth century and the crisis of one man’s loss of honour had, for the moment, been forgotten. The tone of his obituaries was gentle, forgiving; the London Evening News said that although ‘the Titanic episode was written on his heart, it will not be his epigraph’. The New York Times stated that he had been a ‘passenger’ on the ship and had died ‘without making any further public statement on the Titanic or his conduct than that which he told the Senate Committee and Lord Mersey’s Board of Trade investigations’. The Journal of Commerce remarked that he was ‘one of the greatest captains of the shipping industry… having once reached a decision [he was] absolutely immovable’, added to which he possessed ‘an extraordinary memory’. On the ‘personal side’, however, ‘Mr Bruce Ismay was, to most people, an enigma’. In America, the New York Tribune noted of Ismay’s life that ‘the parallel with the tale of Conrad’s Lord Jim will occur to most of us’. The parallel had occurred to no one, and if it had ever occurred to Conrad — as it must have done — he did not say so. Conrad turned his face away from the human side of the Titanic. He knew what ships did to men, he had written enough about the codes of fidelity and community on which both he and Ismay had been raised. Nor would he have considered the mirroring of Jim’s and Ismay’s stories such an extraordinary coincidence. Nothing about the sea surprised Conrad: so long as there are ships to sink, men will jump from them.
‘Jim’s desertion of his ship’, the New York Tribune’s obituary of Ismay continued, ‘was, to be sure, in direct violation of his duty… but it too had its explanation that men accepted. The point is that with a sensitive soul the explanation, however convincing, is overshadowed by the necessity to explain, and from that there seems to be no release short of the grave.’ Ismay felt the necessity to excuse rather than explain himself and while Jim, too, makes excuses — ‘I told you I jumped; but I tell you they were too much for any man. It was their doing as plainly as if they had reached up with a boathook and pulled me over’ — he is also compelled, as Ismay was not, by the desire to understand his actions, or at least for others to understand them. Ismay had no knowledge of the release that comes from elucidation, and only the slightest idea — from his brief communication with Mrs Thayer — of the healing power of empathy. He was happy to appear as a man without moral content because, unlike Jim, he had not dreamed of becoming a hero. Ismay had never thought so much of himself.
According to Wilton Oldham in The Ismay Line, the only time Ismay ever spoke of his departure from the ship was in a conversation with his sister-in-law, Constance, who was the sister of Bruce’s wife as well as the wife of his brother. Described by her great-niece as a ‘bookworm, animal-lover, traveller, rebel, and in her old age [a] dispenser of wisdom’,8 Constance, who thought Florence’s moratorium on talking about the Titanic a mistake, was another of Ismay’s secret sharers. The reason, he revealed to her, that he had jumped was not because the boat was there and the deck was empty, but because he been ordered to do so by Chief Officer Wilde, who said that Ismay’s evidence would be needed at the subsequent inquiry. Ismay left the ship knowing that the purpose of his survival was to represent the Captain, the crew and the company, to be the witness of the night, to contain, explain and make sense of it all to the bewildered world. In exchange for his continued life, he must carry into the history books the story of the Titanic. Why did he keep this a secret? Both Albert Weikman, the Titanic’s barber, and Lightoller had told Senator Smith that Ismay had been thrown into the lifeboat by Wilde, but Ismay had always denied that this was the case. After hearing Lightoller’s defence of Ismay in Washington, Lawrence Beesley wrote in the New York Times on 29 April 1912 that ‘bundling Ismay into a boat… seems a very natural act for an officer of the line to perform toward the head of the line’. Endorsing, in his conversation with Constance, this version of events, Ismay now suggested that the great burden of his life was not that he had jumped from a sinking ship teeming with lives, but that he made a Faustian pact which he then failed to keep. Ismay decided, as he sat in the lifeboat, that he would rather be cast as a coward than drag behind him the ball and chain of the narrative. His life had been granted in order that he face the inquiry, but it was Lightoller instead who took on this role and played it for all it was worth.
Fidelity to the notion of honour was a concept that would dominate the lives of Ismay’s two sons-in-law. Brigadier General Ronald Cheape, the husband of Ismay’s eldest daughter, Margaret, was a soldier possessed, as Pauline Matarasso puts it, more of ‘bone-headed courage than tactical brilliance’. Cheape, known as ‘the General’, refused to speak to one of his sons — named Bruce — who had spent four years in Germany as a prisoner of war because, as far as he was concerned, the young man was a ‘hands-upper’. Never happier than during a war, the General lived like a Viking on his Scottish estate and expected his guests to do so too; even lavatory paper — which
