Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  Exultation reigned in the little apartement. ‘Very, very happy,’ rejoiced my mother. Patrick promptly wrote to Andorra concerning the building plot for which they had been negotiating. Then they jumped up, and ‘walked to P[ort]. Vendres without noticing the way’. My mother was ‘unable to resist giving P. gloves, camera (whose shutter won’t work & Patau [the photographer] is shut) & pineapple in tin. All these were for his birthday’ on 12 December. Three days later the contract arrived.

  The book represents in many ways a tribute to the rugged land he had come to love, and its lively inhabitants. Among them they now had many fast friends, and were accepted as honorary Colliourenchs. It is the more fortunate, consequently, that the novel was not translated at the time into French or Catalan, since it included matter that must surely have provoked offence and dismay in some quarters.

  The greatest pleasure I derive from Patrick’s novel lies in the exquisite evocation of Collioure (barely disguised as ‘Saint-Felíu’), and its stark hinterland of vineyards and mountains. Here is enshrined forever the old Collioure, before the destruction of ancient customs, language, clothing, music; the end of the fishing industry, and the building of rank upon rank of lotissements on the skirts of the town. Fortunately, enough of the old town survives in physical form for it to be possible to people it again in imagination, viewed in the light of Patrick’s loving recreation in The Catalans.

  Several of his extended pen portraits are taken from the life. The account of the vendange in chapter VIII, with its vivid depiction of the toil involved, culminating in Alain’s climactic ‘rape’ of the lubricious Madeleine, drew extensively on Patrick’s own experience during those three backbreaking days in October 1951, when Odette’s provocative behaviour privately scandalized my mother.[fn17] Again, the festival in the central place of the town, recounted in chapter IX, echoes the Carnival witnessed by Patrick in February 1952.

  For the biographer the book contains much of interest. The figure of Dr Alain Roig, returning from long exile in the Far East to resolve a domestic crisis at home, stands (like Pugh in Three Bear Witness) in material respects for Patrick himself. A detached, reflective outsider, he is concerned to observe and dissect the psychological turmoil by which he finds himself surrounded. At one point he ascends the town rampart, where he contemplates from on high the tumbled confusion of houses below:

  He passed it carefully over in review, looking for changes and for known, personal landmarks. It was exactly as he remembered it, as he thought of it when he was away, exactly the same and yet with an additional strength of life, a vibrant immediacy: his memory, however sentimental with the distance, might not have provided the shrilling of the cicadas in the oleaster that grew tortuously from a crevice in the wall below, the play of the dancing, shimmering air, the flick and dart of the lizards, and the distant sound of men hauling on a boat.

  This was what Patrick himself enjoyed, observing (at times with binoculars) the world from an inaccessible vantage-point, like the peregrine falcon in his adolescent short story of that title.

  Familiar, too, from Patrick’s own experience are the internecine intrigue and feuding which Alain encounters among his family. The Roig family members represent in varying degree a dysfunctional collection, an affliction largely originating in the character of Alain’s deceased uncle: ‘an evil-tempered man, powerful, dom ineering, and restless; a ferocious domestic bully. It was not that Alain blamed his Uncle Hercule then; he accepted him as a force of nature and hated him without forming any judgment.’

  All this is too close to Patrick’s experience of his oppressive father Charles Russ for coincidence, and the damaging effect he exerted in varying degrees on his offspring.

  Alain’s return to Saint-Felíu arose from a summons to save his cousin Xavier, Uncle Hercule’s son, from what leading members of the family regard as a wholly inappropriate marriage. Alain himself ‘was sorry for Xavier … There was something very moving, in those days, in the sight of that proud, cold young man being humiliated and bully-ragged, and bearing it with a pale, masked fortitude.’

  There can be no doubt that Xavier is a figure similarly deriving from Patrick’s character and experience, and the relationship between the dead father and his young son mirrors closely his own experience.

  Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the bullying father figure is the way that the distorted relationship repeats itself in succeeding generations. Despite (or rather, because of) his harsh upbringing, Xavier in turn replicates the tyrant in his relationship with his own son Dédé. Although resolved at first to treat the child with the kindness his father never gave him, Xavier grows more and more dissatisfied with the boy, finding him intolerably weak, inadequate and sly. He tries educating Dédé himself, but the child’s foolish frivolity and sullen impertinence goad him into subjecting him to repeated beatings. While acknowledging that he had become the oppressor he so loathed in his father, Xavier confesses himself now incapable of acting otherwise.

  This unsavoury episode unmistakably reflects both Patrick’s assessment of his own nature as a child, and his treatment of his son Richard, when he rashly attempted to tutor him in Wales in 1948–49. In this respect the experiment proved miserable for both father and son, as Patrick himself appears to have acknowledged following his arrival in France. What persuaded him to revisit that unhappy time, above all making Xavier excoriate his son in repellently disparaging terms? The explanation is, I suspect, that here as elsewhere Patrick utilized his writing on occasion as means of exorcizing his own shortcomings. He possessed no confidant beyond my mother, and even with her it seems unlikely that he found himself able to enlarge on actions he had come to regard with profound shame. He successively employed his three autobiographical novels (Three Bear Witness, The Catalans and Richard Temple) as vehicles for such confessions. The approach was presumably effective, as thereafter he appears to have felt he had effectively exhausted the theme.[fn18]

  The extremity of Xavier’s cruelty, and the inadequacy of his justification, are so hyperbolical as to suggest that Patrick expected readers to find the first as repugnant as the second was implausible. I suspect that, by grossly exaggerating his own misconduct, Patrick privately acknowledged it as indefensible. Its function was plainly cathartic. From a biographical point of view, the section in question (chapter IV) should be read in context. Xavier’s savagely frank account of his neglect and ill-treatment of his wife and son is set in the form of a confession, accompanied by expressed desire for absolution. Finding his formal confession to the town priest inadequate, he confides his lack of humanity and consequent fear of damnation to his sympathetic cousin Alain. Alain himself represents an alternative personification of Patrick: the gentle, inquisitive, sage adviser, which is how I for one found him when he confronted problems affecting those close to him. Chapters VIII and IX of The Catalans, recounting events from Alain’s perspective, derive almost verbatim from Patrick’s own experience.

  Thus, one underlying function of The Catalans is to provide Patrick’s own confession. More than once in conversation with me he adverted to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, laying sardonic emphasis on the writer’s ingenuous account of his callous treatment of his children. Unsurprisingly, my mother observed that, on completion of Xavier’s bitter self-examination, Patrick found himself emotionally drained. ‘P. finished Chapter IV & got terribly depressed.’[9]

  The one person whom Patrick clearly would not have wished to understand the reality behind the father–son divide in The Catalans was his own son Richard. Equally, he must have appreciated the likelihood that the boy would read the book. As has already been seen, he followed his father’s literary career with filial pride. On learning in October 1953 of the book’s completion, he supplied a practical suggestion:

  I am very glad to hear that you are having a holiday after completing the book. It seems to me that no sooner is one book out than you have finished another. Instead of writing with your hand why not get a tape machine
or some such gadget or would that wreck everything? I do hope it comes out as you would wish it.

  Next July, he enquired of my mother:

  Has Dad heard anything of the last novel, and what is the title. Over in one shop (bookshop) I was peering round and I heard a customer ask for The Frozen Flame [the title of the British edition of The Catalans]. It was a terrific thrill to hear that, especially when I know my father wrote it.

  His friend Bob Broeder remembers the sensation this aroused at school: ‘Richard brought in a book written by his father, the book was called “The Frozen Flame” by Patrick O’Brian. Richard was very proud of this and the whole class were now more than happy to be associated with a boy whose father was an author.’

  As has been seen, once Patrick had renounced the ill-considered scheme of acting as his son’s teacher, a renunciation which coincided with Richard’s arrival at years of discretion, their relationship became unremittingly warm. The boy proved more and more capable of appreciating the literature that Patrick loved. In January 1952 he sent Richard copies of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. It is scarcely conceivable that in 1953 he would have published anything he believed likely to prove wounding to the boy. It seems he was confident that Xavier’s confession would be read purely as a literary construct.

  Regarding the element of savage exaggeration in Xavier’s confession, it is further worth considering a linked episode (what Patrick himself terms ‘the parallel disaster’), in which his morbid concern to exaggerate the heinousness of his sin becomes yet more evident. Xavier acquires a dog, which proves disobedient and ill-behaved: so much so, that he thrashes it until he eventually ‘reduced it to a cowering, hysterical, incontinent, useless cur’.[10]

  Both Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, and adored their own Welsh hunt terrier Buddug. In the early summer of 1952, while he was in the midst of writing The Catalans, my mother was obliged to visit England in pursuit of the disastrous Opel car. Always uneasy in her absence, Patrick became increasingly on edge as the days went by, and when after three weeks on the day of her expected return he received a telegram announcing its postponement to the following day, he found himself ‘feeling very much the pathetic poor one and generally angry. Poor Budd chose this one day to be bad, and I whipped her sore.’

  The nature of her crime and the harshness of the punishment remain undisclosed. Two aspects are, however, clear. In the first place, Patrick was confessedly in an exceptional state of tension. Secondly, this was almost certainly the sole occasion on which the faithful Buddug was ever ‘whipped’. Not only is there no record in my mother’s diary of such an occurrence at any other time, but I am confident she would not have permitted it. It was surely this uncharacteristic episode that inspired Patrick’s awkwardly obtruded account of Xavier’s sadistic treatment of his dog. Patrick was deeply ashamed of having lost his temper with Buddug, and inserted the passage in his novel as a further form of exorcism or self-castigation.[fn19]

  Finally, on this significant topic, there remains Patrick’s passing allusion to the formal act of confession, which Xavier finds inadequately emollient when he repairs to the town curé, Father Sabatier. What he required was not a bland rite of forgiveness, but surgical exposure and extraction of the moral cancer of which his conscience accused him.

  In 1960 he and my mother spent several months in London, coming every day to see me in hospital, where I was confined after a severe back operation. Despite the bitter circumstances of her divorce, my mother remained throughout her life deeply attached to the Russian Orthodox Church, in which she had married my father, and my sister and I were baptized. During this time she and Patrick became regular attenders at our Russian church in Emperor’s Gate, where they came to know and admire the parish priest. Father George Sheremetiev was a remarkable figure. Head of one of Russia’s greatest aristocratic families, he had previously been a cavalry officer in the Imperial Army. More importantly, he possessed a truly noble character: wise, perceptive, and holy in the truest sense. I regularly confessed to him, and like his other parishioners invariably found his admonitions perceptive and inspiring.

  So impressed were my parents by Father George, that they asked him to marry them – their civil union of 1945 being unrecognized by the Church. Since Patrick would have appreciated from my mother how beneficial was the rite, it seems possible that he himself engaged in confession at this time – perhaps of an informal character. In the Aubrey–Maturin novels, Stephen Maturin is consistently portrayed as a Laodicean Catholic, verging on deism. However, after a particularly sumptuous dinner at Ashgrove Cottage, he congratulates Mrs Aubrey, adding jocularly: ‘When next I see Father George I shall have to admit to the sin of greed …’[11] That Maturin had a confessor at all comes to the reader as a surprise, and that the latter bore so apparently English a name seems further anomalous (one would expect him to have been Irish or Catalan). On the one hand, we never read of Maturin’s participation in a Catholic service, while on the other numerous instances attest to Patrick’s pleasure in assigning the names of his acquaintances to characters in his books. Is this what happened here? Did Patrick eventually make the confession he had sought to express through his early novels?

  I have dealt with the confessional element in The Catalans at some length, as it would be dangerously easy in the absence of knowledge of Patrick’s emotional state of mind to take Xavier’s rant against his son Dédé as a reflection of his own attitude towards his son Richard.[12] In fact, given the warmth of their relationship at the time of writing, such an assumption appears wholly implaus ible. Furthermore, even had Patrick perversely decided to blackguard his own son in print, my mother would have registered the strongest objection. She loved the boy almost as much as she did his father. In December 1952, she wrote fondly: ‘Horrid letter from Mrs. Power [Elizabeth] about poor R., & letter from the school … Started V necked jersey for R. One of school complaints is that he wears my jersey, & Mrs P says he has lived in it since he got it. Cannot help feeling pleased.’

  The year 1952 ended on a note of cautious optimism. My parents entertained high hopes for the success of The Catalans in the USA, and with luck in Britain too. Contemplating his next project, Patrick returned to notes he had compiled in the British Museum before the War for his planned book on medieval bestiaries. Hitherto the scheme had barely left the drawing board, but now as Christmas approached he completed a 10,000-word draft, which he planned to send with a synopsis of the remainder to his US and British publishers. In the event, it seems that their newly gained wealth allowed pleasurable distractions to interrupt the work sufficiently long for it to be abandoned permanently. It is a pity the draft has not survived, since his notes and provisional chapters in my possession indicate that Patrick could have produced an entertaining work on the subject.

  All this is, however, to anticipate the book’s publication. It would be a year at least before The Catalans appeared in print, and what was to be done during the agonizing months of anticipation that lay ahead? Christmas drew near, with nothing happening as it should. On 19 December my mother was dismayed to find they had spent that year more than 60,000 francs on entertainment alone. The 22 of December proved worse: it was the ‘Black Day’, when they learned that the New Yorker had after all turned down the collection of stories submitted with such high hopes six weeks earlier. On Christmas Eve they received Richard’s school report: it likewise proved damning, provoking further depression. Christmas cards arrived, including one from Patrick’s stepmother Zoe, of whom he was very fond, and kind neighbours called with gifts. The festival was quietly enjoyed, but they decided they could not afford to give each other the customary presents.

  Although the need for economy was pressing, they had managed to amass sufficient funds five days after Christmas to purchase for 100,000 francs a Citroën 2CV, popularly known as a ‘deux chevaux’. This was in due course to prove an even greater asset than the alternative prospect of an Andorran bolt-hole, which th
ey now found themselves reluctantly obliged to abandon.

  III

  New Home and New Family

  I descended a little on the Side of that delicious Valley, surveying it with a secret kind of Pleasure (though mix’d with other afflicting Thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and that I had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it I might have it in Inheritance, as completely as any Lord of a Manor in England.

  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

  After more than three years’ stressful poverty in their little flat in Collioure, early in 1953 Patrick and my mother found their financial situation greatly improved by the warm reception his publishers accorded The Catalans. Since it had been submitted complete, substantial advances of $750 from Harcourt Brace in the States, and £100 from Hart-Davis in England, arrived at the beginning of the year.

  Reviews proved encouraging. As a biographer I am primarily concerned with autobiographical aspects of the novel, but as a literary achievement it has gained high esteem. In 1991 the American novelist Stephen Becker wrote to Patrick:

  I never told you how I enjoyed meeting an early (if older) version of Stephen [Maturin] in Alain Roig – and allow me to state that I found The Catalans not only first-rate but wise and moving … It is spacious and rich, and all of life is there – land and sea and sky, arts and sciences, food and drink, body and mind and spirit.

  Constricted living conditions and the incessant cacophony of the narrow rue Arago had for some time made the couple long for a refuge in the countryside. Attempts to buy or build in Andorra had been frustrated, and despite encouraging praise for Patrick’s latest novel, their income remained too unpredictable to accumulate any capital of substance.

  However, these unexpectedly large advances had at least enabled them to buy a car, which afforded means of escape from their stiflingly constrained existence. In the New Year, they found themselves in a position to fulfil this dream. They bought their little deux chevaux in Perpignan, which filled them with delight. Patrick noted that the number-plate included an M for Mary, and my mother ecstatically confided to her diary: ‘Car dépasses all our expectations in every way.’ Kind Tante Alice, the butcher, let them use her abattoir for a garage, and that day they drove the car up to the rim of the castle glacis, where it was formally photographed. Proud Buddug perched inside, no doubt foreseeing further camping expeditions.