A biographer asserts that Patrick disliked ‘the inglorious and underpaid labour of translating’. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth on either count. Apart from being happy with the increasingly regular income it provided, as a consummate craftsman he was fascinated by the fine-tuned skills required to transform subtle nuances of writing from one language to another, producing a text in fluent English, while at the same time preserving the full intent of the original. He noted in June 1978: ‘A man at Chatto would like to commission a book on the Merchant Adventurers: well, maybe, though I should prefer a quiet good translation in a way.’
He was gratified when reviewers singled him out for praise as a translator, and told me once that Harrap had invited him to provide corrections or additions, where he came across them, to their authoritative French dictionary.
Nor (in Patrick’s case at least) was translating at all ‘underpaid’. In 1958 he received a £200 advance for The Unknown Shore (then known as The Voyage of the Wager), half on signature and half on delivery. In 1960 he received comfortably more than that for translating Soustelle’s book, and two years later an increased rate of payment per thousand words gained him £913 for translating A History of the USSR by Louis Aragon.
Patrick completed the Soustelle translation in May 1960. It was his promptness of delivery as well as his professional skill that drew publishers to engage his services on a regular basis, thus providing my parents for the first time with a reliable regular income. Eventually, between 1960 and 1988 he would complete thirty-two translations.[1] By the time of the last, Jean Lacouture’s hefty two-volume biography of de Gaulle (of which Patrick translated the first), he was being paid £32 for every thousand words. With much satisfaction he was enabled to devote himself to working alongside my mother in their garden and vineyard throughout the remainder of May and June.
At this point it is necessary for me to digress a little to obtrude a few words about myself. On leaving school in 1953, I had entered the Army for what was intended to be my career as a regular soldier. After basic training at Wemyss Barracks in Canterbury, I arrived in the New Year at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Hitherto I had been extremely fit, having represented Wellington at athletics, and on leaving spent the summer of 1953 digging drains on mountainsides for the Forestry Commission at Glendoll in the Scottish Highlands. However, as the winter of 1953–54 drew on, I began to suffer increasingly from back pain. This was eventually diagnosed as spondylolisthesis, an ailment arising from a vertebra’s moving out of place, causing acute pain from pressure on adjacent nerves. Military and civil medical experts found my problem to be congenital, subsequently exacerbated by the pressures of military service.
Invalided out of Sandhurst, within a year I unexpectedly gained a recovery which lasted until the beginning of 1960, when I was in my fourth year of study at Trinity College Dublin. The pain had returned with increasing severity, until it was decided that my condition required an urgent operation. In July, when the summer term was concluded, I was admitted to the National Orthopaedic Hospital in Great Portland Street.
My mother, deeply concerned about my operation, at once arranged to fly to London to be by my side. On 7 July I underwent a protracted operation which she described immediately afterwards:
One vertebra [had] slipped outwards; pain is caused by the stretching of the tissues (nothing to do with the bone). They take a piece of his hip & use it to continue the straight line of his backbone: they remove no back bone & neither do they move it. Danger? Of the piece of hip cracking.
Recovered from the anaesthetic, I was lowered onto a bed of wet plaster which swiftly dried to provide a cast in which I lay immobile for nine or ten weeks. The pain in my back continued excruciating by day and night, when the slightest movement on my part caused the nerves at the base of my spine to contract. The distress was exacerbated by permanently bleeding sores in my buttocks caused by unrelenting pressure from the edges of the plaster cast. However, this was in some ways a pioneering operation, and in view of its eventual success I certainly cannot complain.
On receiving news of the operation, Patrick at once flew to join us in London. Care of the house and garden at Collioure was entrusted to Danielle Banyuls, since it was clear that I would not be released from hospital for some considerable time. Throughout this period they visited me every day for as long as was permitted, their cheerful and solicitous company affording me great consolation. Patrick brought select books – only P.G. Wodehouse had to be banished, as even a suppressed chuckle darted a hideous spasm through my spine.
My parents’ financial situation at this time was far from satisfactory. For the present Patrick had not been offered another translation, nor was any novel under commission. They managed to find a refuge above an antique shop at 8, Jubilee Place in Chelsea. The owner was Edward Marno, a neighbour of my grandparents during their time at The Cottage in Upper Cheyne Row, the house where my parents before them had lived during the War. In return for Marno’s hospitality, my mother helped in the shop.
This enforced stay clearly aroused in Patrick and my mother strong feelings of nostalgia for their dramatic wartime years in Chelsea. Almost every street evoked some memory of those exciting days of yesteryear, when the borough was nightly racked by fearful explosions. Not only this, but they now saw much of Richard, who in the latter days of the War had been a cheerful schoolboy living at his mother’s house around the corner in the King’s Road. So strong were their feelings, that my parents for a time contemplated abandoning Collioure and returning to live in London.
Among buildings they passed frequently at this time was the Chelsea Registry Office, where they were married in 1945. Both being religiously inclined, they had never been satisfied with a purely civil ceremony.[fn3] My mother, who was I believe baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church after her marriage to my father, remained strongly attached to our faith, into which I was duly baptized in 1935. Now she and Patrick took the opportunity to attend services at the Russian émigré church in Emperor’s Gate, just off Gloucester Road. There they came to revere Father George Sheremetiev mentioned in an earlier chapter.
Before long my parents decided to be married by Father George. A handful of old friends attended the ceremony, among them Barbara Puckridge and her son James, who as a boy had stayed with my parents in Wales, where he became friends with Patrick’s son Richard. Barbara had driven ambulances in Chelsea with my mother and Patrick during the Blitz, which further evoked nostalgic memories of those dramatic days. As James later told me:
When they were over [in London], my mother would nearly always ask us [James and his wife Stina] round … so we kept contact with them through my mother … I suppose we must have been having a drink together, and they said ‘we’re going to get married’ – frightful excitement, in the Russian Orthodox Church, and they mentioned this wonderful guy, the Russian priest … and they asked us if we would like to come along to the wedding, and we said ‘yes, we’d love to come on to the wedding’. There were no children there! And then Patrick said: ‘would you like to be a crown-bearer?’ I don’t know who the other one was … There were five of us there: Edward Marno, your parents, my mother, Stina and I – there might have been one other couple, if that. I can’t remember anybody else there …
James remembered Marno (as do I) as ‘tall, gaunt, dark-haired … All I know, he was a roaring poof … his manner of speech, and Patrick and Mary had told us that he was a poof beforehand, so that we wouldn’t be surprised, I think. But they were very friendly at that stage, and Edward gave the wedding party … in the shop, just off King’s Road.’ Eventually Marno’s flamboyant homosexuality came to irritate Patrick, and he and my mother moved for a time to the flat of my great-aunt Maroussia in Kensington. However, my mother, whose attitude was more complaisant, continued to help in Marno’s shop when not visiting me in hospital. This minor contretemps was later introduced by Patrick into his fiction, when a dead convict named Edward Marno on board
the Leopard is committed by Jack Aubrey to the deep – his death having originated in part from ‘a vicious habit of body’.[2]
Patrick and my mother on the day of their wedding
My parents’ enforced stay in London, and Chelsea in particular, powerfully influenced Patrick’s literary career at this critical juncture. Their close association with Barbara Puckridge inevitably resulted in much nostalgic recollection of heady wartime days, just as their belated marriage brought back to mind the passionate romance which blossomed at the time.[fn4] Although he had returned to London two years after the Blitz, Patrick’s son Richard shared many of these fond memories. The familiar streets and buildings in and around King’s Road, which had changed little since 1945 (save for rebuilding on bomb sites), served to revive many a long-forgotten incident.
Patrick had wrestled to an extent unparalleled in the creation of his other books with the text of his novel Richard Temple. First, there was the novella ‘William Temple’, written in 1951, the manuscript of which I possess. Unfortunately almost nothing is known of the content of the first two revived versions which followed, which I imagine Patrick destroyed. The description ‘Chelsea novel’ indicates the period of Patrick’s impoverished pre-war life when married to his first wife Elizabeth, while the switch in Christian names from ‘William’ to ‘Richard’ (Patrick’s first name, and his son’s) confirms the increased autobiographical aspect of the book. At the same time, a note jotted down in April 1959 indicates that the French Resistance theme still played a significant part in the story: ‘in the morning I had what I thought quite a good idea for Temple – to inject pieces of the present (Germans blowing up bridges in their retreat, miliciens killing hostages) by way of counterpoint and a perhaps rather obvious irony.’[fn5]
What I suspect happened is this. ‘William Temple’ is broadly a vigorous action hero, while the two abortive ‘Richard Temple’ versions accord him considerably more depth of character by allotting him an earlier seedy existence in Chelsea, from which he is eventually emancipated by his subsequent paramilitary exploits. It was when he came to live in Chelsea in the late summer and autumn of 1960 that he hit on the idea of depicting in fictional form his earlier unsatisfactory life as an immature youth. No longer an heroic adventurer, Richard Temple is largely Patrick himself, whose real or fancied faults are laid bare with brutal candour. The result is an intensely introspective work, vividly depicted with much of Patrick’s best descriptive prose.[fn6]
For me the picture the novel provides is almost painfully evocative. In 1945 my grandparents took over the lease of Patrick’s and my mother’s house in Upper Cheyne Row, where I regularly stayed as a schoolboy and young man. For me Richard Temple conjures up that vanished world as does no other of which I am aware. That this version represents a radical improvement on its predecessors is suggested by the contrasted alacrity with which Macmillan moved to commission the work.
Following my release from hospital, Patrick (followed shortly afterwards by my mother) returned for a few weeks to Collioure to harvest their grapes and set the garden in order for the winter. By the time of their return to London in September, Patrick had all but completed the novel, and on 23 February 1961 the decade-long project came to fruition with a contract that included a welcome £150 advance. My parents’ selfless decision to remain beside me throughout my ordeal meant that everything now hung on a financial shoestring. As my mother had reported to Patrick: ‘Poor little shop: I have sold nothing, but nothing, except that one lamp for £6·10·0. And a bill has come in for the half-yearly rates.’
However, willing assistance was at hand: ‘Dear Richard came in yesterday, & wafted me home in his van. He gets £13 a week: it is not much when he has to pay for van out of it. He is a kind pet. He is coming tonight to do some delivering with me.’
Not only had Patrick given me his unfailing support, but their prolonged stay had brought him closer to his own son.
In view of the book’s overridingly autobiographical nature, I have examined this aspect in some detail in the first volume of my biography, which covers Patrick’s pre-war years in Chelsea. So important was its purgative function to Patrick, that I suspect the self-indictment to be considerably harsher than deserved. Both Patrick’s first wife Elizabeth and my mother feature recognizably in the narrative, but disappointingly I can find no record of my mother’s estimate of the final version of the novel. All in all, there can be little doubt that it served to rid Patrick of painful feelings of guilt which had troubled him over the years.[fn7] When he and my mother reappear as Stephen Maturin and Diana Villiers in the Aubrey–Maturin series, the picture is altogether sunnier.
When my parents returned to London in late September 1960 they rented a comfortable ground-floor flat at 6, Chesham Street in Mayfair until June of the following year. It seems that they continued temporarily beguiled by the notion of living in London permanently. Among their motives would, I assume, have been a desire to be close to their respective children, Richard and me.
Both Patrick and my mother remained in many respects very youthful in outlook, and among other things proved wonderfully understanding – and helpful – during crises attendant on my own youthful affairs of the heart. As has been seen, they were very fond of my longstanding university girlfriend Susan Gregory, whom they had come to know in both Collioure and Ireland. To my distress Sue had proved uncharacteristically unsympathetic during my operation, visiting me only once in hospital. Furthermore, her course at Trinity now required her to spend the Michaelmas term studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. With the heightened emotions of youth, I became at first resentful of her inexplicably cool attitude, then reconciled by a brief tendresse for her pretty friend Alison Wingfield, until I found myself finally unable to continue without my ‘dauntless female companion’ of three years’ standing. At every stage of this impassioned drama my parents[fn8] provided wonderful support, happy to console and gently advise. Eventually I wrote an appeal to Sue in Paris, asking whether we might not make it up.
Her favourable reply transported me into an Elysium of joy, and I vividly recall that day in January 1961 when she arrived from Paris on the doorstep at Chesham Street. Her beautiful auburn hair had been tastefully dressed by a Parisian coiffeuse, and after being warmly welcomed with a drink by Patrick and my mother, they tactfully withdrew. Sue and I then joined a couple of Trinity friends in a nearby pub, where the pact of amity was delightfully restored.
Sue and I remained as close as might be for the remaining two terms of our four years together at Trinity. I also continued fascin ated (or maybe obsessed) by historical problems connected with Dark Age Britain in general, and the elusive figure of King Arthur in particular. I had been engaged throughout my time in Dublin in preparation of a massive book on the latter, which my mother kindly typed and retyped in addition to her arduous work for Patrick. (Fortunately for my scholarly reputation, this premature work never saw the light of publication.) Patrick was highly amused when Sue once privately confessed at Collioure that she felt my one failing to be that I was ‘rather too keen on ye olde folks’.
In May I was invited, unusually for a student, by the Irish Historical Society to give a lecture on early Irish history. My mother flew to Dublin to attend the event. This was her first and only visit to Ireland, and she sent excited postcards to Patrick describing her delight when Sue drove us to Tara, Clonmacnoise, and other evocative sites. Patrick’s virtual adoption of Ireland as his spiritual home (a passion independently espoused by me since my arrival at TCD in 1956) served to redouble my mother’s raptures.
‘Votre pays est merveilleux,’ she exclaimed on a card showing the round tower at Ardmore in County Waterford. To those obsessed by the curious desire to prove (in order to disprove!) Patrick’s fanciful intimations of Irish birth, this might appear to provide strong confirmation of his deception. In fact, a moment’s reflection indicates that it is the diametrical opposite. My mother, who was naturally more familiar than any beyond his own family w
ith the authentic circumstances of Patrick’s birth and parentage, is scarcely likely to have absurdly endorsed a claim both knew to be false, in a message shared by themselves alone. What she unmistakably intended was that ‘Your spiritual (or adopted) homeland is wonderful’ – an assertion which might at the time equally have been ascribed to me, enthused as I was by comparably besotted Hibernophilia.
For the rest of the year Patrick was engrossed in the now remunerative work of translation, creative writing having for the present deserted his muse. He spent the summer months completing a history of the Massacre of St Bartholomew by Philippe Erlanger, followed after the vendange by another book in the ‘Daily Life’ series, this time Henri Daniel-Rops, Daily Life in the Time of Jesus. Both books were published in the following year, receiving acclamation that confirmed not only Patrick’s skill as translator, but his reliability as a punctilious deliverer.
VI
A Family Man
‘Never mind, my Vasia. True, our son has broken away from us: he is like a falcon – he has flown here, he has flown there, as he wished: but you and I, like lichen in a fallen tree, are still side by side, we are not parted … And I shall ever be the same to you, as you will be the same to me.’
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, ch. xxi
Richard Temple, the last of Patrick’s three largely autobiographical novels, was followed by several years’ abandonment of creative writing. Although its melodramatic plot was of his own devising, the setting of Three Bear Witness (1952) in almost every other respect represents a vivid recreation of his more and more frustrated existence in North Wales in the late 1940s. The Catalans (1953), although a generally sunnier work, depicted with equal perception and exquisite Mediterranean colouring the Collioure he and my mother had come to know and love over the following decade. The book also drew extensively on aspects of Patrick’s troubled family relationships, which continued to arouse in him disturbing sensations of shame and guilt.
Patrick O'Brian Page 16
