Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  One might imagine this gloomy little tale arose from a flight of fancy, but for this notice in my mother’s diary for St Patrick’s Day 1951:

  P. finished the Flower Pot yesterday … after we had been on the jetty. There was a fantastic dry warm wind three days ago which knocked the pinks off bedroom window-sill. It landed just beside M. Ribeille, who only laughed. We felt terribly guilty & P. has fastened all the pots with wire.

  Their dismay was understandable, but Patrick’s emphasis on the great wave of collective hatred arising against the hapless outsider plainly reflects his continuing sense of isolated insecurity, originating in the damaging circumstances of his solitary childhood.

  Another tale illustrates Patrick’s propensity, at least in the early days of his literary career, to deploy his fiction as a weapon of psychic attack. ‘The Lemon’ concerns a man whose isolated existence has transformed him into a psychopath. The first part of the story comprises an arresting analysis of his bewildering condition, and its symptoms. Despite this, he is on good terms with his neighbours, who are:

  working people, kind, sensible, very tolerant. Good people, my neighbours: all except the man and woman who kept the restaurant on the ground floor. They were a bad couple; the man a flashy, smarmy-haired little pompous rat; the woman a short-legged, hard-faced shrew of about forty … They drank heavily, quarrelled and screamed until dawn sometimes. Their place was frequented by their friends and by foreigners on the spree, and they bawled and sang and shrieked above the blaring wireless until four or five in the morning.

  A sluttish waitress, ceaselessly singing loudly and tunelessly during the day, by night slept indiscriminately with the clientèle.

  The restaurant in question is unmistakably Le Puits, which occupied the ground floor of the house in the rue Arago, two storeys below the flat in which Patrick and my mother lived. On 19 February my mother wearily recorded: ‘The Puits kept it up until 6 a.m.: an infernal racket.’ On 27 May Patrick stayed up most of the night writing ‘The Lemon’. In the story he (for I fear the nameless protagonist is he) creeps downstairs, removes the fuse controlling the lighting for the restaurant, and hurls a hand grenade (‘the lemon’) into the darkness. As he carefully restores the fuse and tiptoes back up to his apartement, a blinding flash and shattering roar proclaim the destruction of the entire crew of revellers in Le Puits. Ah, if only …[fn3]

  Of the thirty-three stories Patrick wrote during the year 1950–51, nine were never published. Of these, three (‘Federico’, ‘Moses Henry’ and ‘Fort Carré’) appear to be lost. The manuscripts of the remaining six are in my possession, and make interesting reading. ‘Mrs Disher’ concerns an old man’s confused reflections on his dying housekeeper, while ‘The Clerk’ explores a disturbing memory of medieval antisemitism encountered in a remote English town by a visiting enthusiast for church architecture.

  ‘George’ (which he retitled ‘The Tubercular Wonder’) is the most revealing of these unpublished tales in respect of Patrick’s own life. In the first volume of this biography, I suggested that it provides an illuminating exposé of his troubled state of mind at the time he began his secret affair with my mother, betraying an overriding sense of guilt in respect of his betrayed wife Elizabeth.[2] The theme of another story, ‘Beef Tea’, recalls that of ‘Samphire’, with its dull and relentlessly facetious husband, who drives his long-suffering wife to insanity. It looks like a further attempt to dismiss the reproachful figure of my father, representing him as utterly impossible to live with.

  The personal application of the story ‘A Minor Operation’, which is one of those published in the collection, speaks for itself. A young English couple come to live in an old French town by the sea. We learn that ‘they were virgins; virgins from principle, mystic and practical’. They are very poor, but so well liked by the inhabitants that they are continually sustained by regular gifts of food. Much of this popularity they put down to the ‘affectionate, well-mannered dog they had brought with them’. After a while Laurence is troubled by a severe affliction to his hand. Eventually an operation becomes necessary, which unexpectedly proves so sanguinary that the surgeons depart, leaving their patient for dead. However, he is not. Arising from the operating table, the victim races frantically back to his apartement, brutally kicks their beloved dog downstairs, and apparently (it is not entirely clear) kills his wife.

  Patrick wrote the story on 12 and 13 June 1951, originally entitling it ‘A Nice Allegory’, and later ‘Hernia, Stranguary and Cysts’. That the couple is Patrick and my mother, and the dog their Buddug, is evident from the opening description. Three weeks earlier, my mother had written in her diary: ‘P. showed Dr Delcos swelling on his hand. It has to be removed.’ Five days later ‘P. had his hand done, fainted, poor P., is splinted & bound & in a sling.’ For over a fortnight he continued in great pain, suffering continual discharges of pus from the infected wound, and enjoying little sleep.

  It looks as though this protracted suffering led Patrick, as in ‘The Lemon’, to reflect on how far an inordinate degree of psychological distress or physical pain might wholly distort a man’s nature, exposing the perilous fragility of the mind’s control over destructive elements of the subconscious. The threat is emphasized by the frenzied patient’s violent assault on the very beings to whom he is closest.

  There exists what may be a tentative draft of the tale in one of Patrick’s notebooks. There he contemplates writing the story of ‘A very sensible childless pair [who] decide that the husband had best beget one on a healthy girl’. This he does, with predictably stressful effect on the wife. This perhaps appearing too trite or unrealistic a theme, it seems Patrick converted it into a savage melodrama, whose principal content derived from his own experience.

  Another story written at this time is ‘William Temple’, which remains unpublished. Ultimately a precursor to Patrick’s novel Richard Temple (1962), it begins on an unmistakably autobiographical note. Like Patrick during his wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, Temple is employed by a branch of Intelligence whose members do not normally operate in occupied Europe. Again, I suspect like Patrick himself, ‘he had often pictured to himself William Temple as one of that great secret army that was being built up in France’. Unexpectedly, he is selected to be dropped on a special mission to the French Resistance ‘in the mountains between Spain and France’. After a realistic account of his reception by the maquis, he is diverted into a hunt for a magnificent boar, which he finally tracks down and shoots.

  The story is very much longer than others written at this time, being reckoned by Patrick at 23,500 words. The indications are that it was at first intended as a novel, which for some reason came to an unanticipated halt. Possibly, with the (symbolic?) death of the boar, he simply found further inspiration lacking. At any rate, he decided to include it among the collection submitted to Fred Warburg. In view of its exceptional length, it was divided into two parts, oddly entitled ‘A Pair I’ and ‘A Pair II’. The adventure is fluently narrated, but from its length ill-suited to a collection of short stories.

  Disheartened by Warburg’s rejection, Patrick brought his short-story writing to an abrupt close. Not until well over a year had passed did he attempt another. As his publisher pointed out, the twenty tales are widely varied in quality. Without straying into excessive analysis, it has to be said that in several cases the plots appear somewhat contrived, and I am inclined to suspect the baneful influence of Somerset Maugham in what appears to be Patrick’s apparent need to round off with a quirky or violent conclusion. Again, several stories are driven by a desire to sublimate personal fantasies, wish-fulfilments or resentments which do not always fully accord to dramatic requirement. More, too, might perhaps have been made of those descriptive passages at which Patrick excelled, evoking the Catalan people and their harsh but beguiling landscape.

  Another possibility for generating desperately needed additional income occurred to Patrick at this time. In November 1951 Curtis Brown p
assed an enquiry to Fred Warburg: ‘Patrick asks if I know of any books which a publisher would like him to translate from the French. It occurs to me that he might be a very good translator. Have you by any chance any such book in mind?’

  Warburg could offer nothing, and the proposal fell by the wayside. Eventually Curtis Brown was to be proved right, and Patrick became an admired translator of contemporary French writing. But another ten years were to pass before he was afforded opportunity to undertake that lucratively dependable employment.

  Over the winter of 1950–51 the couple’s hopes were largely founded on the success of Three Bear Witness, for which Warburg had expressed such high regard. It was a desperately worrying time. In January 1952 my mother lamented that: ‘The year continues to go badly: Seckers don’t want W[illy Mucha]’s maquettes. Very much gloom.’ They were eager to have the dustjacket illustrated by their friend. At the beginning of the next month ‘Secker sent list with T.B.W. in it.’ A month later the strain had become almost unendurable: ‘I could not sleep for thinking of TBW, copies being liable to arrive any time now.’ Eventually, on 22 April, ‘TBW came; parcel on the stairs. P. infinitely kind, sat by me.’

  Unhappily, the excitement proved ephemeral. Press reception in Britain was muted, and although one or two reviewers voiced approval of the book’s finer qualities, it slipped rapidly from public consciousness. For all their exceptional resilience and recurrent surges of optimism against hostile odds, for much of the time during the first two and a half years of their life in Collioure, Patrick and my mother found it hard to sustain their spirits. Foremost among concerns impossible to overlook was the grinding poverty of their existence, which continued poised on the brink of disaster.

  Looking back, five months after their arrival in Collioure their bank balance stood at 600 francs (about 12 shillings). But for the unstinted generosity of their neighbours, and occasional contributions from my mother’s father, they could not possibly have survived. A year later my mother ruefully noted: ‘On Thursday the money had not arrived at the bank, so I borrowed 1000fr. The electricity came & demanded all we had save 5fr. so I went to Tante Alice for another 1000fr.’ In April 1951: ‘Accounts alarm me much: we spend far too much.’ By the end of that month: ‘Did month’s accounts: 11.000fr odd, much better. Two francs left in the house but will get bread and milk with “j’ai oublié mes sous & money should be at bank tomorrow”.’

  Patrick and Willy Mucha

  The year 1952 opened with the anguished query: ‘Can we live on 10.500 fr a month until July? We will try.’

  For over two years they frequently went hungry. Having cooked a modest feast for St Patrick’s Day in 1951, my mother reflected: ‘We are so used now to very plain living that we cannot eat much at feasts, we have no capacity.’ For everyday diet: ‘We live mainly on new potatoes, fried bread & bread-and-marmalade.’ Much of their modest shopping was conducted across the frontier in Spain, where prices were much lower. This regularly involved my mother’s walking to Port Bou and back: a 34-mile round hike, traversing successive steep rocky ridges.

  Patrick’s parting words on leaving Wales were: ‘if you’re going to be poor, it’s better to be poor in a warm country’. This was to prove true in some respects, and the couple grew adept at living off the land. On 3 September 1951 my mother ‘picked 4 lbs. of blackberries in the river bed, & we made about 5 lbs of jelly’. In the same week they went gathering figs in the mountains at Col de Mollo. The task proved hazardous as well as arduous. ‘Got a dozen ripe ones; trees covered in green ones … P. in tree and I underneath when a chasseur shot at us: shots spat all round. Coming home met Marraine who said the chasseurs are “très mal élevés”, & said Come & see her for some anchovies.’

  After a time Patrick, who had been a keen fisherman in Cwm Croesor, took his rod to join men angling at night from the jetty, regularly returning with anything up to half-a-dozen tasty daurades (bream).

  But this monotonous and erratic diet was largely seasonal, and there were lengthy spans when little or nothing was available to be picked or caught. They might scarcely have survived, had their sustenance not been supplemented by the wonderful generosity of the warm-hearted Colliourenchs. Typical entries in my mother’s diary read: ‘Mlle Margot called me in with great mystery & filled my basket with huge cauli., 4 eggs, a big onion & 6 oranges, all with hideous embarrassment; she could not meet my eye’; ‘Tante gave us viande hâchée & bones & pâté & a pot au feu’; ‘Mlle Margot brought us 13 fresh eggs & a litre of ? Banyuls “pour demain”’ (Easter Day).

  My parents never forgot this kindness, and remained lifelong friends with many of their affectionate neighbours, a sadly diminishing handful of whom remain. Within such a tight-knit community, mutual concern and charitable support were taken for granted. Links of family and friendship permeated the town. When the electrician Cadène was electrocuted at work, some 1,500 people attended his funeral. An incomer, having bought a house in the town, sought to eject the tenants on grounds that they had lately failed to pay rent. The husband had in fact always paid, but on falling ill temporarily proved insolvent. The huissier (bailiff) arrived, together with a removal van, to enforce their departure. The town rose in anger, and, despite the appearance of gendarmes from Port-Vendres, refused to permit the ejection. The van driver declared that he would not have accepted the employment, had he known it was not an ordinary removal, while the ringleader of the town’s resistance was discovered to be gentle Dr Delcos.

  The Colliourenchs also possessed enchanting natural courtesy. When King George VI died in 1952, ‘Women come up & say how sorry about King, tears running down their faces. Tricolor at half-mast in place & at post office.’ Women in the shops explained to each other, as my mother passed by, ‘c’est son roi à Madame.’

  One neighbour remained for some reason dubious about the extent of this Christian spirit, expressing her view with that decisive emphasis that characterizes the true Colliourencque. At the time of Odette Bernardi’s difficult divorce, my mother ‘offered that O. would be happier if F[rançois]. were to remove her from here, Mlle. M[argot]. agreed “parce que c’est un pays de perdition, Collioure”. She repeated this many times, saying that we do not know – the terrible character of Collioure, unlike any other village.’

  As my mother commented on encountering such baffling pronouncements: ‘eh?’

  In view of their life of constant privation, it is not surprising that she and Patrick were rarely free from one ailment or another. From June 1950 ‘medecine’ and ‘chemist’ feature remorselessly in their monthly household accounts. In February 1951, ‘P. looked & felt terribly poorly on the 17th’. Dr Delcos paid regular visits, presenting no bill until that May, when additional expense arose from treatment of the dangerous cyst in Patrick’s hand. In February 1952 ‘P’s rheumatism very bad’; a few weeks later ‘P. went to dr. & had his left ear completely cleaned but it is stone deaf still. The right one hurt dreadfully. He came out with shirt wet through.’ A persistent requirement was medicine for his ‘nerves’. Similarly, my mother was visited by recurrent afflictions: ‘My tum in bad condition’; ‘I slept all afternoon – had vile headache’; ‘Medecine [M’s liver] 530 [francs]’.

  Some of Patrick’s troubles appear to have stemmed from unremitting mental strain. ‘Medicine [P’s nervous turn]’, reads a characteristic entry in their account book. A bad attack, the nature of which is obscure, occurred in May 1952, when my mother was staying with her parents in England. At dinner with their neighbours the Rimbauds:

  I smoked. In spite of pills I felt the usual trouble coming on, but escaped in time on pretext of seeking Almanach Catalá – on the stairs wondered very much where I was – at home (still on all fours) recovered with dear Buddug’s aid (she was very kind on finding that it was not all a great game, and stood quite still, just touching my face) washed, returned in reasonably good form, and was able to finish the evening without, I hope and trust, throwing any damp.

  About this time Pa
trick compiled a six-page essay, perhaps with a vague view to publication, entitled ‘How to make the best of poverty’. The advice is pragmatic, being based on daily experience:

  If you have to go a month on x p[ennies]. you must make do on fr. the first day, and on each day after that. Never rely on any bank, friend, publisher or business person to send money on a given day

  Do not ever pretend to be rich, with the lower classes. Be as affable as can be with them, but always use a good deal of ceremony – M. and Mme., and formal greetings always.[fn4] If you have to borrow money, do it before you are destitute. Once you have no money at all (literally none) your mind, your values, are terribly distorted.

  Careful instructions are given providing advice on giving up smoking: ‘The first few days are hard, but your increasing sense of smugness will carry you through. You end up on a wonderful moral pinnacle, and if you ever start to smoke again they taste exceedingly good.’

  When the worst comes to the worst, ‘Exceedingly weak tea without milk is a good drink, if you take it piping hot.’ Even Buddug’s concerns were taken into account: ‘If you have a dog, feed it before your meal begins. You will find it comes too hard at the end.’

  With regard to making ends meet:

  The food that you can afford when you are very poor needs a great deal of care and preparation to be anything but sickeningly dull. With very great care it can be surprisingly good – garlic, herbs (especially thyme and parsley) flour and a little oil rightly used can give plain potatoes soul and substance.[fn5]

  If there are two of you, you would be better advised to leap off a cliff than to allow wrangling to begin. As soon as you are wretched your subconscious, unsavoury mind begins to look about for a scapegoat: you must stop it from picking on the object nearest at hand – the almost invariable object, the loved one.