Two by Bainbridge

The Birthday Boys  & Every Man for Himself – Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge (1934 - 2010; obituary) was an English writer of short, readable historical novels.  The Birthday Boys (1991) told the sad story for Capt. Scott’s disastrous journey to the South Pole in 1912. Every Man for Himself (1996) was about the first and fatal voyage of the Titanic a month later. In an interview with TheParis Review, Bainbridge said “Those events were emblematic, as they seemed to presage what lay ahead—the First World War and all that followed.”

Told from five points of view, The Birthday Boys describes the decisions and rivalries that doomed the men on the expedition to the Pole. Out of a misguided sense of honor and lack of sense that Creation gave geese, Scott decides in favor of going on foot instead of harnessing dog teams. And the followers, out of duty, carried out their orders. The courage that makes them heroes also leads to their lonely deaths in their tents in Antarctica. It brings to mind the First World War, when generals sent men over the top into No Man’s Land without ever seeming to learn that hammering the enemy was rough on the hammer.

Researching J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, Bainbridge discovered he and Scott had been great friends. She said, “I thought what a strange couple, but of course, the idea of lost boys in Never Never Land leads logically (to my mind) to my next book, The Birthday Boys. And that led to the Titanic.”

Near the beginning of Every Man for Himself, the novel’s rich young narrator, Morgan, takes an unauthorized tour of the engine rooms of the huge ship Titanic. Heis "dazzled” -- "I was thinking that if the fate of man was connected to the order of the universe, and if one could equate the scientific workings of the engines with just such a reciprocal universe, why then, nothing could go wrong with my world."

Such optimism and self-confidence in the face of the plaguy fact that we can’t control anything outside of our own heads. Such faith in technology. Nature, guised in the shape, size, and solidity of a great bloody iceberg, has something to say about such self-assured modernity. And a couple years later, the First World War showed, like the American Civil War did, that once started wars take on an intransigent momentum of their own.