The Surgeon's Mate
Page 39
It was qualified, naturally, by professionalism. Only an idiot or an incompetent would pick a fight against over whelming superiority of force. In the very first novel in the series, Master and Commander, Jack Aubrey, holding his first command in a small brig, finds himself in this unenviable position no less than four times. On one occasion he succeeds in disguising himself as a private neutral vessel (an age-old ruse de guerre, which had still plenty of life left in it in the war of 1939-1945). On another he just succeeds in running away, eluding the pursuit that is gaining on him by dropping decoy lights after darkness has fallen. On the third, since flight is impossible, he attacks his far stronger adversary and captures her by a combination of better seamanship, better gunnery and the sheer ferocity and unexpectedness of boarding a ship more than twice his own size. On the fourth and last, falling in with a powerful squadron of battleships who have the wind of him, he strikes his colours. Surrender under such circumstances is no disgrace. Professionals have no use for pointless slaughter.
Jack, though subtly drawn, is not a subtle character. He convinces by his roast beef, hearty straightforwardness. But his officers are by no means all of his type. The First Lieutenant of the Sophie, the brig Jack commands in Master and Commander, is a proud Irish aristocrat who had had political connexions in his native country which he is anxious to conceal. He is by the same token a secret Roman Catholic, which would at that date have disabled him from holding any civil or military office under the Crown. He openly despises Jack's anxiety to make money out of prize-taking and is secretly irritated by his uninformed Protestant prejudices. Another officer, the Master, who is charged with navigation and the handling of the ship, is of obviously homosexual disposition. Obviously that is to everyone aboard except Jack. All of them, in short, are individualised, not taken out of stock, whether the stock be historical or literary. And all of them speak and react, read (if they do read) and think, in the idiom of their time. They could not come out of The Cruel Sea or The Caine Mutiny to take two of the best-known novels about the war of 1939-1945.
The same is true of the sailors. Some of them are jolly Jack Tars who are familiar from the fact and fiction of every age of the Navy. But a number are pressed men and foreigners. The shortage of seamen was the perennial problem of a country that only maintained a small naval establishment in time of peace. When war came the Admiralty expected to man its ships with the sailors who had been earning their living as fishermen or in the coastwise or ocean trades. By this means somebody else had to pick up the pay cheque except when the men were actually wanted for active service. Since both fishing and seaborne trade had to go on in war as in peace this meant that there were simply not enough men to go round—and the unhealthy conditions of life at sea, particularly in climates such as the West Indies, rapidly intensified the shortage. Death in battle was a marginal factor in the statistics of maritime mortality.
Fortunately for the Navy there were usually seamen of some sort to be found in every port. Men who had jumped ship and run out of money, men who had been defrauded of their wages, or just seamen who could not find employment in their own country. The mess deck of a British man-of-war had a generous seasoning of foreigners. There were no less than 71 aboard the Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar including two or three Frenchmen. Here again O'Brian will be found on close inspection to reflect the facts of history with out making a parade of them. The Sophie's crew for instance contains a couple of Greek sponge fishermen who are particularly useful in scraping her keen clean of weed. There are one or two Italian-speakers who come in handy both in gaining intelligence from neutral ships or in disguising the Sophie's own nationality when occasion requires it.
Where does O'Brian get his knowledge from and how did he acquire it? On the naval side there are a number of histories and personal memoirs printed within a few years of the exciting events they describe. At a later date the Navy Records Society was founded to publish materials of this kind which still remained in private diaries or letters as well as in official records. O'Brian, with the tastes and training of a scholar (his earliest work, destroyed in the war, was a study of bestiaries—medieval writings about animals) was also an amateur sailor of some experience. He had thus the perfect equipment to work this exceptionally rich vein. But most important of all he is a professional writer of wide and impressive achievement. He has published poetry and short stories. He is an accomplished translator. All the novels of Simone de Beauvoir that have appeared in English, the biography of de Gaulle by Jean Lacouture, the best-selling memoirs of Papillon, the convict who escaped from Devil's Island, these examples give an idea of his range. He is the author of two notable biographies, that of Picasso and of the eighteenth century naturalist, explorer and long-serving President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks.
Both of these gives important clues to O'Brian's interests and affinities. To take Picasso first, O'Brian's passion for music and the arts is obvious enough from the Jack Aubrey stories. The opening scene of Master and Commander is a concert given in Minorca, and it is love of music that first leads to the otherwise improbable friendship between Jack and the universally learned Stephen Maturin who ships with him as his surgeon. O'Brian's love of painting will hardly seer strange when the visual quality of the Jack Aubrey books is considered. Light and colour are everywhere. But why Picasso particulary? Partly, no doubt, because O'Brian had met him and had many friends in common with him, notably in the Matisse family. But chiefly because he personifies, as no other artist does, the interpenetration of French, Spanish and Catalan culture in which for many years O'Brian has been happily domesticated. It is no accident that the first novel of the series is set largely in the Western Mediterranean along the coasts the author knows so well, in the seas and winds and weather he has himself experienced.
It is no accident either that Stephen Maturin should be half-Irish, half-Catalan: that he should, like the author, be fluent in languages and that he should be, amongst his many accomplishments, an expert botanist and biologist. Stephen can never understand nor wholly forgive Jack's refusal to break off the search for an enemy in order to put in at some unvisited island in the Pacific which may hold some rare or even unrecorded specimen of animal or plant. Here the biographer of Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his great voyages of exploration, adds a dimension to the fictional character.
Stephen's breadth of reading and of practical scientific knowledge enable the author, without clearing his throat and addressing the reader directly, to demonstrate the particular state of technology and the general ideas in fashion at the period in which the action is set. The same device, this time thrown into reverse, provides, again without checking the flow of the narrative, the information necessary to an under standing of the intricacies of sailing and fighting a fully rigged ship. Stephen has never been to sea and cannot so much as tell the sharp from the blunt end of the vessels in which he finds himself. Either Jack or one of the officers or seamen has to explain to him what is going on and why. Even the most land-bound reader thus finds himself enlightened.
The particular strength of the Jack Aubrey novels is the realism that derives from this thorough mastery of detail, not just ships and sea-fights (though that is no small matter in a series of naval tales) but of the world in which the characters move. There is no anachronism, no violation of truth that makes the stream of time run uphill. The books they read, the ideas they hold, the times of meals and the food they eat and the imagination by steeping it in the period. A writer, too, who has firsthand experience of much that he writes of. He has sailed in the Atlantic, the Channel and the Mediterranean and knows how terrifying the sea can be. He loves food and has been for many years married to a most skilful cook (she is also his first reader, to whom many of the novels are dedicated). He is a connoisseur of wine and makes his own from the grapes he grows on the steep hills that rise above the village. All this enriches the otherwise necessarily narrow world of a man-of-war. Graham Greene in his days as a publisher'
s editor used to impress on his writers that time and space were what was needed in a novel. It is no small achievement to make the reader aware of them in so confined a setting.
It is in this richness of texture that O'Brian surpasses C. S. Forester, whom many will compare him with when it comes to scenes of action. The closest comparison, perhaps, is with Captain Marryat, the Grand Old Man of the naval novel, who had himself as a midshipman served with Cochrane in the frigate L'Imṕrieuse. Her brilliant and daring exploits have inspired almost every writer of such stories. Certainly Marryat himself and O'Brian have both drawn on them. And both writers are strong (where Forester is not) on humour, both in their depiction of character and in a general sense of the comedy of life. In plot and construction O'Brian is a far superior artist. The old, old, art of storytelling, so condescendingly treated in E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, can never be superseded or dispensed with. The special qualities of O'Brian's books succeed as they do because they rest on this foundation. And is not the storyteller's art itself based on the perception of the variousness and unexpectedness of life? You never know what is going to lead where.
Indeed if you did the charm would vanish. Take for example the character of Stephen Maturin, whose development in the later books of the series had upstaged Jack's. When he is introduced to us in Master and Commander a number of markers are put down. Which, and at what point, will be taken up? Does the narrator, at that point, even know himself? What he makes certain of, is that there are plenty of points of growth. For Stephen, an oddball if ever there was one, bristles with potentialities for taking the story out side the world of the Navy. He is half-Irish and may, as we have seen, have been involved in political movements which Jack and his kind would regard as subversive if not downright treacherous. The supposition that some twist of the story will bring this into prominence is strengthened by the fact that this is even more markedly the case of his First Lieutenant. But Stephen is also half-Catalan and it is the Catalan coast off which they are plying. Early in the book he goes ashore and obtains intelligence about the probable movements of enemy ships. This proves, in fact, the tip of an iceberg far deeper than the Irish connection. Stephen, it soon becomes clear, is a secret intelligence officer of the highest importance. The cover afforded by serving as a surgeon in a man-of-war is ideal, whether she is operating off the enemy coast and can land or retrieve an agent on a moonless night, or whether she can be instantly sent to the far side of the world to forestall a coup or nobblesome dubious neutral. The flexibility of sea-power makes it the perfect instrument of clandestine warfare.
Nothing has been said so far of the women in the lives of these far from monastic figures. They are as various and lifelike as the men, ranging from the enchanting to the odious, from the virtuous to the promiscuous, with an adventuress or two as ruthless as any fighting man in pursuit of the feminine equivalent of glory and prize money. But the point of view of these novels is that of a man's world as Jane Austen's are seen from a woman's. It is one of the elements of their authenticity, as is the gout du terrior of an unblended wine. And for all the range and variety of background they are firmly set in that exclusively masculine enclave, the Navy of Nelson.
This essay first appeared in
Patrick O'Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography,
A. E. Cunningham (ed), British Library, 1993.