The Unsinkable Optimism of Walter Lord
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Washington Post The Unsinkable Optimism of Walter Lord |
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The Washington Post - Washington, D.C. The Unsinkable Optimism of Walter Lord If Heaven exists, and there's justice in it, Walter Lord is finally aboard the Titanic. The author of "A Night to Remember" will have booked a second- class cabin (he was not given to extravagance), but has been bumped up to first class by a purser who is confident the historian's gentle manner and generous spirit betray a patrician traveling incognito. Lord is even now at the captain's table, listening happily. Can he warn them about the iceberg? He will certainly try. For John Walter Lord Jr., who died Sunday at 84 amid the fabled clutter of his Manhattan apartment, was more than just an observer of all the history he chronicled in 13 books. He lived and breathed it and walked among its people, and made his readers do so, too. He was a narrative historian in an age of data collectors, a rational humanist in an era of emotional ideologues, and one of the last gentlemen of manners in an era that too often celebrates the foul-mouthed, the confrontational and the crude. He also bore life's vicissitudes with humor and with grace. Beside the bed in which Parkinson's disease tortured him for the last decade of his life, he kept a pillow embroidered: "A Collision at Sea Can Ruin Your Whole Day." Though his other books ranged geographically from the North Pole and the Alamo to the Solomon Islands, Lord was into the Titanic even before he was born. His grandfather, a Baltimore business baron with steel, railroad and shipping interests, was a personal friend of the ship's captain, Edward J. Smith, and had 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," he told me in 1987. "But she made her decision, whatever it was, the first night out." 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 more than a decade later, at age 7, on the White Star liner Olympic -- quite conscious even then that the Olympic was the Titanic's sister ship. He started a scrapbook about the Titanic at 8. Years later he was a J. Walter Thompson ad copywriter on the Aqua-Velva account when a friend told him to stop his constant talk about the Titanic and write a book about it. The result sold countless millions of copies in dozens of languages long before James Cameron's mega-movie put it back on the bestseller list in 1997. It has never been out of print and made Lord, who never married, so wealthy he might never have written another word. Except that wasn't how his mind worked. He was always probing history for tales of people in adversity, noting who behaved well and who behaved badly, always with empathy for their conflicts and celebration for their humanity. "I'm a great optimist about people," he said. His optimism, however, was always clear-eyed. "A Night to Remember" remains not only the best telling of the Titanic story, but the first to write its social history. It was Lord who first examined the storied chivalry of the ship's male passengers closely enough to point out that a higher proportion of males in first class made it to the Titanic's lifeboats than did third-class women and children. There were reasons for that discrepancy other than just wealth and class, he noted, but it was a discrepancy nonetheless. Most journalists meet a source like Lord only in their dreams. I was more fortunate. As this paper's self-appointed (and patiently indulged) shipwreck reporter during much of the past 30 years, I was periodically chasing down rumors about the Titanic even before Robert Ballard found the great wreck in 1985. My first stop in evaluating those rumors was always Lord, the worldwide clearinghouse for everything Titanic. Whatever project then held his attention, he was always eager to talk about the great ship and its metaphoric demise, freely offering nuggets from his encyclopedic archives to help put the latest rumor in context. Had the wreck broken up on the surface, or would it be found in one piece? What had he learned from survivors since "Night" was first published in 1955? Could a "mystery ship" have been the one seen from the Titanic just before it sank or was it definitely the Californian? Whatever the question he would always make a careful distinction between what he knew as fact and what he surmised from the best information. Those who disagreed, he always said, might well be right. "It's a foolish man," he always cautioned, "who claims to have the last word on what happened that night." But more impressive than his unequaled knowledge was always the generosity with which he shared it. Even late in life (and late at night) he would rally cheerfully as if a fellow severely disabled by Parkinson's looked forward to being awakened to referee some obscure detail about an 80-year-old wreck beneath the sea. He seemed to have internalized the civility that characterized the most fortunate social interactions of the Edwardian age, and acknowledged more than once that the years before World War I remained his favorite era. He even wrote a book about it: "The Good Years." Historian Barbara Tuchman, he said, used to dispute his nostalgia for the Edwardians, pointing out labor unrest, poverty and other shortcomings of the time. "And of course she's right, in large part," Lord said with his typical graciousness. "But I feel there was . . . a kind of confidence in the air. Where things were in terrible shape, even if we didn't know how to make them better, at least we were sure they could be made better. . . . And where there's a nostalgia for that age, I think it's not so much for its elegance as for that sense of tranquillity." And people, as the Titanic story shows, could try very hard at times to face life, or whatever, with a certain grace. Last year I found myself in New York with an extra hour and stopped by Lord's apartment on East 68th Street. I was distressed to find him totally bedridden, his disease so advanced he could scarcely speak. Yet he dismissed any talk of age or affliction. "Look what I've got to show you," he said, cheerily. "It's my latest toy." On a bureau nearby was a musical pig, its song activated by cranking its tail. It had been given to him by a woman who carried it as a young girl into a lifeboat on the RMS Titanic. |
