© Jef Gunn

Saving the Titanic by Steven Schlesser "I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that." Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Saving the Titanic
I’m a moulding salesman and spend much of my time driving across the Pacific Northwest on sales calls. As I drive, I Found myself thinking about events in history and one event in particular—the moment when, in my estimation, the twentieth century awoke.

Sunday, April 14, 1912.

The North Atlantic. Latitude: 41o46´ north. Longitude: 50o14´ west.

The Titanic brushed an iceberg at 11:40 pm. Passengers noted a faint grinding noise emanating from below and lasting less than thirty seconds. Captain Edward Smith, a white-bearded veteran of the White Star Line, rushed to the bridge and began cracking off orders. Reports from his engineers below indicated serious trouble. Smith summoned Thomas Andrews, managing director of Harland & Wolff Shipyard, the Titanic’s builder. Andrews understood the Titanic better than anyone, and the captain requested he sound the ship.

Andrews descended the crew’s stairway to attract less attention and inspected first the mail room and the nearby squash court (water lapped against the foul line on the backboard), and then boiler rooms five and six. He then ascended through the a deck foyer, where a group of passengers studied his face to detect the gravity of the problem.

Just outside the bridge, the ship’s builder and her captain conferred beneath a star-filled sky. Smith stared hard at Andrews. In a quiet voice, Andrews explained. The gash made from the iceberg was over 200 feet long. The first five watertight compartments were flooding. A sixth was damaged. The bulkheads between each compartment did not create a complete seal. In fact, the bulkhead between the fifth and sixth compartments went only as high as E deck. The Titanic could float if any two or three of these compartments were flooded. It could even float with four compartments flooded. If the first five compartments flooded, however, the pull of the water would force the bow of the ship to start sinking. Once that happened, water in the fifth compartment would flow over the bulkhead into the sixth and then, as the bow continued down, water in the sixth compartment would flow into the seventh and so on. Andrews knew. The Titanic’s doom was a mathematical certainty. As if to underscore his explanation, the ship began to list slightly, almost imperceptibly, towards the bow.

Captain Smith raised his eyes heavenward. He was fifty-nine years old and had planned to retire after this trip. In fact, he would have retired sooner, but he traditionally took the White Star ships on their maiden voyages. It was his greatest boast to be alive and active in a time when shipbuilding had reached its zenith. Earlier he had said: "I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."

Now, it was clear to both men that the ship would sink, and they would not live to see the morning. I imagine the two of them lingering for a few seconds, as if, by parting, they would trigger the events which would cause more than 1,500 men, women, and children to drown in an indifferent sea.

Profile
"A wise and trusted consular," thus does the dictionary define a mentor—that figure which writers, especially beginning writers, dearly need and seek and so rarely find. Writing workshops, seminars, classes, all those programs designed to satisfy that need are in fact seldom one-on-one enough to do the trick. For implicit in the notion of mentor is the casual intimacy of two people, not a class and teacher at a certain scheduled time. In contrast, a mentor is a person who is pretty much always there, to help with a special writing problem, even to read a whole manuscript and to give time and thought to it, or someone just to chat with about books and writers and the craft in general. But most important, a writer’s mentor must be a person who has read widely with discrimination and whose judgment the writer can fully trust. For any writer such a mentor is a prize.

Steven Schlesser found that prize in Celia Stoddard Ralston. Mrs. Ralston, born in the first decade of the century, grew up in Baker City and in a time when small-town Oregon life was more cultivated than is the case today. One of her high school teachers was a summa cum laude from Wellesley, another a Reed College graduate. When the traveling opera company came to town, she never missed a performance. And it was in Baker’s Carnegie Library that she first read Proust.

The young woman, who then went on to the University of Oregon, was hardly a hick. She majored in English, with a minor in Greek, and in time became a teaching assistant in both Welds. She was the favorite pupil (and perhaps more) of Dr. Lesch, the University’s legendary professor of English literature. One of her unacademic pleasures was skinny-dipping in the millrace—this some forty years before the "way out" 1960s.

After a rather Bohemian life in San Francisco and a marriage that didn’t work, Mrs. Ralston came to settle permanently in Portland, and here she married again, this time most happily. Employed as a social worker, she retired early—which not only gave her time to read even more voraciously but also to travel extensively. It was on the last of her journeys, descending a Greek mountain on a less than sure-footed donkey, that she received an injury which left her crippled for life and thereby with still more time to read.

By the time Schlesser first began calling on Mrs. Ralston with his work and questions, she had been reading for some seventy years—poetry, fiction, essays, drama, biography, a whole range of literature, ancient and modern—and, what is more, reading with that essential asset, discrimination. But what was most important for Schlesser, she was ready to read his work and pronounce her judgment, with utter truthfulness, of what he had done.

And so the sessions began, there in the old room with its heavy mahogany, the fading Persian carpets, the wall of books. Or out on the summer loggia, the city below, she with her glass of ouzo, Steve with his beer, questioning, criticizing, praising, there with his mentor, a true prize indeed.

—Terry O’Donnell

Bio

Steven Schlesser
Place of residence: Portland, Oregon.
Birthplace: Portland.
Day job: Manager/owner of a moulding company.
Education: B.A., Claremont McKenna College. J.D., Vermont Law School.
Serial publications: The Schlesser Review, Schlesser Times—monthly newsletters. Cune Magazine—online. (For newsletters 800-445-8032.)
Favorite books: The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. James Joyce by Richard Ellmann.
Favorite novelist: Anthony Trollope. I admire Trollope not for what he wrote but for his discipline. Seven days a week he rose at 5:00 am, drank a cup of black coffee (tea came later), ate bread with butter, and wrote 2,500 words by 8:30 am, after which (Sundays aside) he left for his job at the post office.
Work-in-progress: A Study in Failure. I am obsessed by the course of the twentieth century, and I’m working on a short book composed of three essays. Each is devoted to an event in recent Western history which has helped shape this century: Custer, The Titanic, and the opening of World War I.
Former work-in-progress: The Red Staircase. I spent twelve years writing a literary novel which was accepted for representation by the William Morris Agency, shown to twenty New York publishing houses, and received a medley of editorial comments.
Favorite rejection letter: On The Red Staircase. An editor at Dell wrote: "On the positive side, it reminds me of some of Christopher Isherwood’s earlier writings; on the negative, it conjures up a bunch of confusing metaphysical foreign films I have tried to like over the years."
Favorite trend: The emergence of the micro-press. I first encountered this concept when I read a pamphlet written by Scott C. Davis in 1994 called The Soul of our Culture.
Neat concept: In this blessed era of desk-top publishing, the micro-press can make do with only one or two full time staff. It publishes no more than two or three titles per year and uses employees/subcontractors who work at home using modems, and faxes to pass data back and forth, thus avoiding high overhead costs.
Favorite analogy: The comparison of micro-presses with micro-breweries. After many years of trying to get my novel published, I saw that the micro-press could do for thoughtful writing what the micro-brewery did for the quality of beer.
A new course: Like government, good things happen to an industry if at least a part of that industry is decentralized. Grassroots publishing can bring a closeness between writers and the communities they serve. Those of us inhabiting the frontier now have a chance to break down barriers erected by a small, centralized circle of business executives, overly-busy agents, and a clique of established, big-name, endlessly recycled writers.
Beliefs: Conservative Episcopalian. I focus, still, on the means to enrich and improve our lives on this earth, although I do feel that a higher power is, ultimately, cradling our shared existence.
Craving: Stronger communities.

Click to
Purchase
Return to ETG cover page

Cover | Skills | Essays | Travel |  History | Fiction | Poetry | Reviews | Ordering | Books Online