Taking on disaster of Titanic proportions
“I can’t swim.”
It’s a striking, possibly even Jungian-worthy confession from the author of a book based on one of history’s greatest only-too-true shipwrecks.
“My sisters learned to swim,” Kim Izzo continued, “but I never did. I was always the horse-crazy one. I stuck to horses.”
Holding forth at Soho House was the lifelong-equestrian-turnedetiquette-expert-turned-novelist, having come to discuss her just out novel, Seven Days in May. A roman à clef of sorts, it scoots around the circumstances of the ill-fated, but now somewhat under-mythologized Lusitania, which began its voyage in New York one fine day in 1915 and, only a week later, was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Sinking in just 18 terrifying minutes off the coast of Ireland, more than half of those on the ocean liner were lost to the sea. About 1,200 passengers.
“Everyone knows about the Titanic,” felled by an iceberg only three years before. “Few people know about this.”
What stoked her imagination about the RMS Lusitania (or the “Lusy,” as she’s also known) is that “it’s considered by many the first act of modern terrorism . . . a level of carnage at that level of scale.” Izzo even puts forward this connect-thedots hypothesis: “There was Lusitania, there was Pearl Harbor . . . there was 9/11.”
With the T-word — terrorism — more ubiquitous than ever in our present geopolitical age, it’s amazing how relevant the story feels now. But, because this is a novel and not a musty blow-by-blow, Izzo set about to create a lives-colliding work. It features two New York heiresssisters setting sail on the ship — the eldest, Brooke, determined to marry into the English aristocracy; the other, Sydney, a self-styled suffragette and a champagne socialist of sorts — and another back in Lon- don, intrepid Isabel with a nebulous past, who works as a code-breaker in the bowels of the British Admiralty (psssst: she crosses paths with a young Winston Churchill).
The end result? What Hello! Canada editor Alison Eastwood recently described in a review of the book as “Downton Abbey, The Imitation Game and Titanic, all rolled into one.”
For Izzo, there was another remarkable pull to the saga of the ship: her great-grandfather, Walter Dawson, was one of the survivors of the tragedy. He even pops up on the sidelines of Seven Days in May.
“Part of my family legend,” she relates matter-of-factly. Jumping into the water with two children — who both perished — Walter lived to tell a story that coursed through the generations, but it wasn’t until Izzo started doing the research for the book that she found his own voice shuttling back to her from a century ago. Courtesy of an old newspaper clipping she tracked down, the relative she never met told her he’d been on the deck that doomed day in May — a cloudless afternoon with Ireland in plain sight.
Walter, alas, via Massachusetts’ Lowell Sun on June 8, 1915. “After the first explosion, the ship seemed to right herself, and the captain gave orders for no more [life]boats to be lowered. Then she keeled over again to her starboard side and within three minutes she was going down by the nose. I ran to the stern and stayed there as long as I could before I dived.”
“My great-grandfather was never the same after that,” Izzo says. Scarred by both that tragedy and the onslaught of the First World War, he wound up leaving her great-grandmother and turned into a “ghost of himself.”
Back here on this side of the millennium, the very prospect of the book only emerged when Izzo, a perennial journo-about-town, was on the hustings for her first novel, The Jane Austen Marriage Manual. When, at a party, she ran into fellow author Hugh Brewster — author of Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World — she happened to mention her family’s connection to “Lusy,” that other ship, to which he replied, “You should write a novel about the Lusitania.”
Doing her due diligence, Izzo even did a transatlantic crossing herself a few years back on the Queen Mary II; just to get a sense of what it’s like to be “at sea” like that. Water, water, everywhere. “I was sailing by myself,” she says. “You must have been the subject of much conjecture,” I comment. “I hope so,” she snaps back. Of the nautical terminology that runs, inevitably, through her novel — the “four point bearing” here, the “eighteen knots” there — Izzo says, “I knew nothing.” While writing, she kept a diagram of the magnificent ocean liner printed out at all times, “so I knew where the suites were, where the different decks were . . .”
About the social mores of the time, she was on steadier ground. Having co-written two books on etiquette in the early aughts — The Fabulous Girl’s Guide to Decorum was one, for which she even wound up doing an appearance on Oprah — Izzo had an innate feeling for the period and her characters.
“I think my etiquette-expert hat never leaves my head . . . I relied on instinct and inherently knew what was ‘right’ in terms of their behaviour.”
What is it about these beasts of the sea that continue to intrigue and that have loomed so large over the years both on the page and onscreen? Whether it’s An Affair to Remember, the high seas-set classic starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, or Gentleman Prefer Blondes, showcasing Marilyn Monroe on a cruise ship or, indeed, a certain Leo DiCaprio-Kate Winslet weeper, big ships continue to spur stories.
Izzo stoops to pause a bit, then answers, simply, “There’s just a romance to it.”