A separate, titanic tragedy

HOW TO SURVIVE

THE TITANIC:Or the

Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay,

by Frances Wilson. Harper, 328 pp., $26.99

Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" is about a sailor who flees in a moment of crisis and is forever labeled a coward. In "How to Survive the Titanic," British writer Frances Wilson tells the story of a real-life Lord Jim: J. Bruce Ismay, heir to the White Star Line fortune.

The Titanic was to be the pride of the White Star fleet, but, as everyone knows, an iceberg put an end to that. Fleeing the ship in a lifeboat, Ismay himself survived this most mythologized of all maritime disasters, even as thousands of women and children perished on that fateful night in 1912.

He was pilloried in the press. "Mr. Ismay cares for nobody but himself," thundered the New York American. "He cares only for his own body, for his own stomach, for his own pride and profit." Wilson tells a more complex story. If she is exacting in her portrait of Ismay and his decision, she is sympathetic, not prosecutorial.

Born in 1862, Ismay grew up under the shadow of his powerful father, Thomas Ismay, who founded the White Star Line in 1868. Relations between Bruce and Ismay Sr. were chilly, but the son went into the family business. White Star boomed, cashing in on the flow of immigrants to the United States and elsewhere. The younger Ismay sold the line to J.P. Morgan in 1902 (he remained chairman), making a mint in the process.

Ismay's behavior the night of April 14 remains open to interpretation, and Wilson teases out the ambiguities from conflicting accounts. Ismay testified in public inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic. Though a few passengers came forward and said Ismay actually helped save lives, he was cast as a villain. Ismay insisted he was traveling as a passenger and acted accordingly: "I took my chance to escape -- yes," he told a journalist. "It came to me though, I did not seek it. ... And why shouldn't I take my turn?" Under intense grilling from U.S. Sen. William Alden Smith, Ismay offered evasions and cool alibis; he claimed the Titanic had an adequate number of lifeboats (which it did not).

In Wilson's account, Ismay comes across as a tragic figure, freighted with cultural and literary meaning -- she compares him to Ishmael of "Moby Dick" -- rather than as coldhearted and callous. He cannot ultimately be condemned, she writes, because he "is the figure we all fear we might be. He is one of us."