Review Monday: The Way It Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books

The Way it Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books
Edited by Jenny Lawrence
294 pages
Published in 2009

Reviewed by Kyle Semmel

The Way It Was is an indispensible introduction into the mind (and work) of one of America's foremost historians of the 20th Century, Walter Lord. Without Lord, James Cameron's Titanic--one of the highest grossing films of all time--would not have been made. It was Lord, you see, who wrote the book on which that film was based. That book, A Night to Remember, is a riveting account of the night the Titanic sank, told in Lord's signature eye-witness style: through various personae on board the doomed ship. As Evan Thomas of Newsweek (whose father was one of Lord's editors) puts it in the preface: "His style of you-are-there-narrative and eye for telling detail, combined with his prodigious researching abilities, made him a model or inspiration for later popular historians, including David McCullough."

Published in 2009 and available on Amazon, The Way It Was serves as a kind of posthumous memoir--and a very personable, enjoyable one at that. Edited by his close friend Jenny Lawrence--a daughter of one of Lord's college friends. (You can read Lawrence's account of Lord in a First Person Plural "Whatever happened to" feature posted last year.) Because of her unique proximity to Lord, she had valuable access to him in the waning years of his life. Though some of the material in the book comes from writings he'd left at various archives in the U.S. and England, the bulk of the material, she writes, comes from interviews she conducted with him at his New York City apartment.

A Night to Remember was Lord's second published book, but already here the seed of his later iconic style was planted, one that humanized the study of history and made engaging narratives part of the story. In Lord's books, the people that populate history are not submerged beneath facts and dates; they are part of the very fabric of the events. Take the passengers of the Titanic as an example:

Minute by minute, the reader will live with the ship's company during her last breathtaking hours. The book will pick up several of the most interesting people and follow them straight through. The emphasis will be on those tiny details that will make the night seem to live again. And when he finishes, the reader will go on his way, knowing well that--in the words of the title--here was A Night to Remember. 

Those tiny details, it turns out, make for really interesting reading. As a history major in college and a would-be fiction writer, I was really absorbed by the world that Lord created. But it's important to note that Lord didn't fictionalize his facts here. While working full-time at an advertising agency--the same one that developed the ad campaign for Brommel, Beau Brommel, and Aqua Velva--he sought out and found survivors of the sinking.

Space doesn't permit for too much elaboration on Lord's process of writing A Night to Remember here, but suffice it to say that by uncovering the tiny details of that night, as remembered by those who survived, Lord created a truly new and fascinating story that resonated with his readers (the book became a bestseller and he could suddenly devote himself entirely to writing). Read the book today and you get the same reaction. The book is a deeply fascinating account--even more exciting than the film. Yes, that's possible.

Lord's career spanned the decades and The Way It Was covers the books he wrote in a fashion similar to how Bob Dylan's Chronicles covers the production of his early albums. During his career, Walter Lord published books on a wide body of historical topics, from WWII to the Alamo, and he was a master at coming up with great book titles: Day of Infamy (1957), The Good Years (1960), A Time to Stand (1961), Peary to the Pole (1963), The Past that Would Not Die (1965), Incredible Victory (1967), Dawn's Early Light (1972), Lonely Vigil (1976), The Miracle of Dunkirk (1980), and The Night Lives On (1986).

Though it's hard to know just how many of these titles will be remembered a hundred years from now, Lord's impact on the study of history is not in doubt. His use of eye-witness accounts was groundbreaking in its time, and has contributed to the narrative style of writing history that has rejuvenated that field of study. And The Way It Was is a fine contribution to his canon, a great case study for historians and novelists alike.
***


Kyle Semmel is the publications and communications manager of The Writer's Center and administrator of First Person Plural. In addition to his work at TWC, he is a writer and translator (under the name K.E. Semmel) whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, The Washington Post, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Review, The Bitter Oleander, Redivider, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. His translation of Jytte Borberg's classic Danish story "Englene" will soon appear as "Angels" in The New Renaissance. His interview with internationally acclaimed poet Pia Tafdrup is in the current issue of World Literature Today. For his translations of Simon Fruelund’s fiction, he received a translation grant from the Danish Arts Council.

Whatever Happened To? Walter Lord

The Making of an Historian
Guest blogger: Jenny Lawrence

In 1926, Walter Lord, nine years old, persuaded his mother to cross the Atlantic aboard the Olympic. The choice was no accident; the Olympic was sister ship to the Titanic and already the doomed White Star liner sailed in and out of young Lord’s imagination. The following year, he wrote and illustrated an account of how the Titanic sank in the early morning hours of April 14, 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Classmates at the Gilman School in Baltimore and later at Princeton and at Yale Law School, as well as colleagues in the Office of Strategic Services during the war, and even associates in his post-war jobs in journalism and advertising remember Lord’s fascination with the disaster. In retrospect it seems inevitable that the Titanic would be the subject of his first foray into book-writing. In July 1954, while a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, he proposed the book to his friend Howard Cady who was an editor at Henry Holt Publishers.

“The whole book will be limited to the eight hours between the time when Lookout Fleet sighted the iceberg and the time when the last survivor climbed onto the deck of the rescue ship. Everything else can be woven in. Minute by minute, the reader will live with the ship’s company during her last breathtaking hours and when he finishes, the reader will go on his way, knowing well that in the words of the title—here was A Night to Remember.” Amazingly, not one book had been written about the Titanic since 1914.

Lord focused initially on testimony given to the United States Senate and to a British Court of Enquiry into the tragedy. Then he tracked down survivors through letters-to-the-editor in newspapers across the U.S. and Britain. In his text he “salted in” survivors’ accounts, creating what one reviewer called “a kind of literary pointillism.”

A Night to Remember was an immediate bestseller, bringing him another contract, this time for Day of Infamy, a book about Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. One of Lord’s important contributions to this subject was his exploration of the Japanese perspective. He also sent out a detailed questionnaire about the attack to which he received more than 1,000 responses. The use of questionnaires became key in the Lord modus operandi.

“In trying to reconstruct the attack, in trying to tell the story ‘the way it really was,’” Lord wrote, “I found myself using official records, especially the 40 volumes of the Congressional investigation, action reports, published accounts, ships’ logs, diaries, journals, letters, questionnaires, and interviews. I called it the ‘Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder Approach.’ Everything went into it. The truth might be lurking somewhere in any or all of these sources. My biggest job was finding the courage to weed out and not use some very good material.”

When Day of Infamy topped the bestseller list, Lord realized he could make a living as a writer. He had taken a totally new subject—one about which he knew relatively little—and with exhaustive research, turned it into a vivid story that told people a lot more than they might have expected. Neither was it the Lord approach merely to tell all about the battle but to show from several points of view how human nature behaved in crisis.

Lord honed this eye-witness approach to history to perfection whether writing about the defense of the Alamo in A Time to Stand (1961), or the skirmishes over the admission to Old Miss of James Meredith in The Past That Would Not Die (1965), the Battle of Midway in Incredible Victory (1967), the Coastwatchers of the Solomon Islands in Lonely Vigil (1976), or the evacuation of allied troops from French beaches in May 1940 in The Miracle at Dunkirk (1980).

In 1972, Lord developed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease after publishing The Dawn’s Early Light, about the War of 1812. The illness slowed his output yet he went on to write three more books, including a second book about the Titanic, The Night Lives On (1986).

Walter Lord wrote 12 books in all—short page-turners packed with compelling recall from every point of view—using techniques that made history come alive and that shaped the way popular history is written today. He died in 2002.

A forthcoming memoir, The Way It Was: Walter Lord on His Life and Books, will be published in January, edited by Jenny Lawrence, a freelance editor and writer based in New York City.












Photo by Carol Kaliff, 1986