Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  I learned much about Patrick’s writing, and remember being particularly delighted by his good-humoured short story ‘The Virtuous Peleg’. His other writings were less to my adolescent taste, which was disinclined to stray beyond current obsessive enthusiasms. Unfortunately, those of his own works which would have appealed to me at the time remained inaccessible, since no copies of his early books published under the name Richard Patrick Russ were to be found in the house. Equally, the robustly exciting boys’ books The Road to Samarcand and The Golden Ocean had yet to be published.

  It is hard for me now to be certain how far my faded image of those memorable three weeks remains entirely accurate. However, I do recall that after a week or so I began to find Patrick increasingly didactic and irritable, to an extent which swiftly became all but intolerable. Referring to himself on one occasion as ‘a writer who has been compared with Dostoevsky’ (which may conceivably have been true), he was openly contemptuous of my preferred reading: old-fashioned favourites such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever and R.D. Blackmore. Oddly enough, so far as I am aware Patrick had not read the one ‘good’ writer whose works I also loved – Walter Scott.[fn9] However, he possessed the 1839 ten-volume edition of J.G. Lockhart’s classic biography of his father-in-law, which on discovering my enthusiasm he presented to me during my stay. Glancing at it now, I suffer once again an acute pang of nostalgia, fancying myself back in the snug little flat at 39, rue Arago.

  Today I remain shamefully conscious of the fact that the growing coldness which developed between us during my stay was very far from being Patrick’s sole responsibility, as I then believed it to be. I still recall with painful embarrassment how prone I was at the time to faults not uncommon among young men of twenty. Uncompromising political views, assertions of belief as incontrovertible fact, and related failings made me no more tolerable to my elders than many another immature youth awkwardly poised between adolescence and manhood.

  On 13 September my parents’ old friend and colleague from their wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, the American academic Jack Christopher, came to stay. Lodgings were found for him with the Azémas, while he spent each day with us. A tall, mild-mannered scholar, he was co-author of a recently published two-volume History of Civilization. I recall Patrick’s humorously condemning the work, on the grounds that it omitted to mention a battle between the O’Tooles and the Danes – a joke repeated from a passage in The Golden Ocean, which he had just completed. While Jack was a model of discretion and politeness, Patrick at times used his presence to ‘punish’ me in a manner he not seldom employed when irritated, deliberately excluding me from conversations, in the course of which he occasionally let fall none too subtle allusions to my deficiencies.

  Recollection of this first visit still pains me. Indeed, I was for long inclined to accept almost the entirety of blame for the mutual ill-feeling which increasingly pervaded my stay, until many years later I came to read my mother’s diary account of my visit: ‘N. left on 19th: when it started going bad I do not remember. Only I do remember being in the middle of it & trying & trying to think of something to bring things back to pleasantness.’

  As her normal reaction to any such awkwardness was to support Patrick, right or wrong, I am inclined to infer that she sensed the faults were not all on one side. Long afterwards, I was told by their friend Mary Burkett that Patrick angrily declared on my departure that he would never allow me in the house again! This was the only such occasion of which I am aware when my mother put her foot down, insisting she would continue to see me regardless.

  Fortunately the unpleasantness blew over, and the letter I wrote back after my return reads as though all had been warmth and light. Over the decades to come, I confess that Patrick and I continued at times to find each other difficult, or even downright insufferable. But each in his own way was, I believe, conscious that blame lay not all on one side, and such unpleasant clashes were invariably overcome and dismissed – lessening considerably, too, as the years passed by. However, there is no escaping the certainty that, had I not been my mother’s son, I would never have been invited to Collioure again.

  IV

  Voyages of Adventure

  From tho yles that I haue spoken of before in the lond of Prestre Iohn, that ben vnder erthe as to vs that ben o this half, and of other yles that ben more furthere beyonde, whoso wil pursuen hem for to comen ayen right to the parties that he cam fro and so enviroune alle erthe; but what for the yles, what for the see, and for what strong rowynge, fewe folk assayen for to passen that passage, all be it that men myghte don it wel that myght ben of power to dresse him thereto, as I haue seyd you before. And therfore men returnen from tho yles aboueseyd be other yles costyng fro the lond of Prestre Iohn.

  M.C. Seymour (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford, 1967), p. 223

  By 1954 Patrick’s inspiration appeared to be flagging. Many authors will recognize the symptoms, when we find him turning to revisiting old notes and uncompleted earlier ventures. Among the latter was a novel for boys, which he felt might prove worth reviving. On 15 December 1945, not long after their arrival in Wales, he wrote in his journal:

  I have just re-read that Samarcand tale. It is better than I had supposed, and it is well worth finishing. Suffers from want of central plot. It is hardly more than a series of incidents, more or less probable, fortuitously connected. M. is typing the rehashed novel. I hope it may not prove a disappointment, but it was poor stuff to begin with.

  This indicates that the manuscript was among those efforts which he wrote in a flurry of creativity just before war broke out. However, the debilitating attack of writer’s block which assailed him during their four years’ stay in Wales obstructed any further endeavour in that direction, and eventually he found himself unable to progress beyond chapter six.[1]

  Under pressure, he tended to look back to those exhilarating pre-war days, when inspiration apparently flowed unhampered by doubts. In November 1952 my mother observed that Patrick was ‘thinking of Samarkand’. Once again, nothing came of it, and a further year passed by when ‘P. took out Samarcand & looked at it.’ This time he experienced a sudden flow of inspiration, and on 26 January 1954 ‘P. did 2000 words of S.’ He was sufficiently pleased with his progress to write next day to his literary agent Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown in New York, enquiring whether Harcourt Brace might take the completed work.

  By the beginning of February 1954 the book was well under way, when Naomi responded to my mother with a ‘fine misunderstanding about me leaving P[atrick]., & she says send Samarcand to her’. This appeared encouraging, so far as it went, and Patrick raced ahead to the conclusion. Ten days later he came to bed at 1.30 in the morning, ‘having finished Samarcand. He could not sleep, & looks so poorly today. S. posted …’

  They had sent their sole typescript of the text, and an agonizing wait culminated on 24 April with a letter from Naomi containing the dispiriting news that Harcourt Brace was not interested. The precious typescript itself did not return until 6 May, when they forwarded it to Spencer Curtis Brown in London. Their relief and excitement may be imagined when, on 17 June, they learned that the publishers Rupert Hart-Davis were ‘“very enthusiastic” about dear Samarcand & suggest £100 advance’. On 24 June a contract was signed for ‘a Juvenile work by the Proprietor at present entitled “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’, with the advance payable in successive tranches of £50 on delivery and £50 on publication.

  The money was welcome (though as ever slow to arrive), and high hopes were pinned on the novel’s success. However, when The Road to Samarcand was published in February 1955, the outcome proved disappointing. Reviews were sparse and varied. While the naval historian Oliver Warner gave it a cautious thumbs up in Time and Tide, the Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer tartly derided its conclusion – ‘as absurd politically as it is geographically’. The criticism may have been directed against the protagonists’ dramatic escape from Tibet in a Russian helicopter, dis
covered intact in a snowdrift. The story comprises many exciting adventures, of a character familiar to readers of early boys’ journals such as Boys’ Own Paper and Chums, wherein a daring English lad, customarily accompanied by an excitable Irishman and laconic Scot, survives a succession of hair’s-breadth perils at the hands of sinister foreigners. Patrick’s contribution to the latter is an evil Bolshevik agent named Dimitri Mihailovitch, who has his neck deservedly broken by the youthful hero’s uncle Sullivan. Evidently Patrick could not resist according this scoundrel my unfortunate father’s Christian name and patronymic!

  The pre-war genesis of The Road to Samarcand represented a throwback to Patrick’s earlier success with children’s stories. However, while Caesar and Hussein were delightful original creations, it is hard not to concede that Samarcand represents something of a pastiche of the boys’ books that he loved during his lonely and imaginative childhood.[fn1]

  Derrick, the boy hero of Samarcand, is an orphan assigned to the custody of his uncle Terry Sullivan, master of the schooner Wanderer plying the China Sea. Sullivan and his Scottish companion Ross are the protagonists of Patrick’s three immediately preceding published short stories, the third of which (‘No Pirates Nowadays’) is effectively prefatory to the events recounted in the novel.[fn2] The crew includes a comical Chinese cook Li Han, whose exotic English provides a lively source of humour. Together with the eccentric and resourceful archaeologist Professor Ayrton, the friends survive perilous adventures in China and Tibet, battling Chinese warlords and Bolshevik agents, eventually coming through against all odds and acquiring the customary treasure.

  I suspect that Patrick’s voracious reading as a boy in Willesden Green or his Devonshire preparatory school included Under the Chinese Dragon: A Tale of Mongolia, published in 1912. The author, Captain F.S. Brereton, was a prolific creator of rousing boys’ adventure stories. The hero of his tale is a brave orphan boy, David, who outwits dangerous Russian anarchists, and afterwards joins Professor Padmore on the China Station. Among the crew is an excitable French cook Alphonse (who must in turn be derivative of the more celebrated comic cook Alphonse in Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain), whose quaint speech is juxtaposed with that of faithful Chinese attendants. They are attacked by pirates, undergo stirring adventures in China and on the Mongolian frontier, and conclude by finding a hoard of valuable objects, including documents which enable David to recover the inheritance of which he had been cheated.

  Although well written and fast-moving, Samarcand may perhaps be regarded as a retrograde step in Patrick’s writing at this time. To do him justice, I think it likely that the novel represented a distillation of half-remembered early reading, rather than overt plagiarism. In any case, much of it, as has been seen, was written at an early stage of his literary evolution. Although it was published at the time in Germany and Sweden, a publisher could not be found in the United States until 2007.

  Nevertheless, 1955 was to prove a pivotal year in Patrick’s life. It was purely fortuitous that his son Richard’s final departure coincided with my first arrival in Collioure. As has also been seen, it was in this year that my mother and Patrick established themselves permanently at Collioure, buying the vineyard at Correch d’en Baus, and beginning work on building the casot and upper room of the home they would inhabit for the rest of their lives. Finally, January 1955 saw what may be regarded as the inception of Patrick’s enduring contribution to world literature.

  Here I would emphasize that nothing in the unhappy contretemps arising during my first visit (described in the previous chapter) stinted one of Patrick’s most amiable characteristics: his unfailing generosity. I had returned to England laden with presents, ranging from an open razor and leather strop, which I used for years, to a precious copy of The Trial of James Stewart in Aucharn in Duror of Appin, for the Murder of Colin Campbell, Esq (Edinburgh, 1753). This is the now rare book which inspired Stevenson’s Kidnapped. When Patrick bought it in early 1945, he noted in his diary:

  Before reading Catriona [the sequel to Stevenson’s Kidnapped] I went through James Stewart’s trial, which was very good, if somewhat repetitious reading. Unfortunately I chanced to see the result before reading it, which rather spoilt the suspense for the last speeches, but before that it was positively exciting. It is impossible to see it objectively, having read Kidnapped but I am sure I could never have made such a tale of it.

  Despite this rueful acknowledgement, while being fortuitously in a position to compare it with its prime source, Patrick’s diffident self-criticism provides a premonition of his eventual mastery of one of the most difficult (yet oddly underrated) of literary achievements, the historical novel. In 1945, a month after reading Catriona, he had skimmed through:

  Dr Goldsmith’s History of Rome [1782], abridged by himself, as a preparation for Gibbon. A poor piece of work, I think, though I liked ‘through desarts filled with serpents of various malignity’. All somewhat Little Arthur-ish.[2] One gets the impression that the Romans were an appallingly bloody-minded lot – true maybe – but what is far worse, and quite false is the impression that they were modern men (insofar as they were men, and not names) acting in an incomprehensible way in a vacuum. It is not history – hardly chronicle. It seems to me that works like the Hammonds’ English labourer are worth more than a dozen such works, as far as inculcating an historical sense goes.

  This trenchant criticism might be levelled at all too many historical novelists. Indeed, the indications are that it was about this time that Patrick himself came to shed his earlier jejune concept of historical fiction. In January 1940 he had written a melodramatic short story about a crusading knight, John of Bellesme, which owes more to the romantic novels of high adventure written by the Sussex novelist Jeffery Farnol than to anything actually occurring during the Middle Ages. Although Patrick preserved the manuscript, he must surely have been relieved in later years that it was never published.[3]

  His only other transitory attempt at historical fiction appears to have been written about the same time. Published in The Last Pool, ‘The Trap’ is much inferior to its fellow tales set in Patrick’s own day. Although as ever well written, its tale of a daring youth who fares forth to poach in the grounds of a tyrannical squire is too reminiscent of the stock characters and standard predicaments of juvenile fiction to carry much conviction.[4]

  Following a flurry of creativity over the momentous winter of 1939–40, it seems that Patrick’s wartime employment, first as an ambulance driver in the Blitz, then as an operative with Political Warfare Executive, effectively diverted him from writing. Finding himself, for the first time in his life, unexpectedly in possession of a settled income, he bought many books, chiefly in the second-hand shops of Cecil Court. These he read and clearly absorbed, but it was only as the War drew inexorably towards its close over the winter of 1944–45 that his authorial ambition became reawakened.

  The fact that there is frustratingly little documentation for this period of his literary life is in itself suggestive. He began keeping a pocket diary on 1 January 1945, and the care with which he preserved his diaries thereafter makes it unlikely that earlier copies have perished. In it, as well as in memorandum books compiled about the same time, Patrick began entering comments on his reading, together with suggestions for books he contemplated writing. The indications are that, although the war years provided him with a period of respite from creative work, they were also a time of protracted parturition. His perceptive condemnation, on the one hand, of Goldsmith’s trite Roman history, and on the other his unqualified praise for Stevenson’s masterpiece Kidnapped, indicate his dawning understanding of the realities of historiography, together with its glamorous offspring, the historical novel.

  Mention of Stevenson’s two great books leads me incidentally to wonder whether Patrick may not also have been unconsciously influenced by the Scottish author’s creation of paired contrasted characters (David Balfour and Allan Breck), their attitudes reflecting disparate political and so
cial aspects of the age: an antithesis which at the same time enriches a memorable friendship.

  Again, I wonder whether his new-found propensity for imbuing his narrative with humour – grotesque and farcical, light-hearted and ironical, at times cheerfully vulgar – had lain submerged beneath a long-held conviction that adult literature represented an essentially serious business. His natural sense of humour, ironical and exuberant, took long to emerge in his work.[fn3] At times I put this belated development down to the influence of Somerset Maugham, whom Patrick like many of his contemporaries rated high in the literary scale. But there can surely be little doubt that the enduring precarious state of his finances played its part in producing an entrenched state of gloom.

  After Hussein, only his sparkling short stories ‘The Green Creature’ and ‘The Virtuous Peleg’ fully revealed Patrick’s propensity for laughter in court. However, an observant follower of his literary career would have noted how his anthology A Book of Voyages (1947) reproduced specimens of choice rococo passages which afforded him perceptible delight.

  As was mentioned in the last chapter, the theme Patrick selected for his fresh venture was Commodore Anson’s celebrated voyage around the globe in 1740–44. One reason for this choice was almost certainly the fact that his library was well equipped for the purpose. He had first grown familiar with the story from the concise account included in Beatson’s six-volume Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, which he bought before the War.[5] Subsequently he acquired the Reverend Richard Walter’s account of Anson’s voyage, published in 1762, together with its accompanying (now rare) handsome quarto volume of maps and plates.[6]

  For the social, literary and political history of the time he profited greatly from a present fortuitously given by my mother. In February 1945, ‘M[ary]. very civilly gave me the Gentleman’s Magazine 1743–4–5. Masses of information, both solid and (what is more in some ways) ephemeral. Handsome panelled calf. Vilely printed – hard to realise that any verse can be good in such a dress.’[fn4]