Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  My mother’s response to Richard’s letter was as ever warmly sympathetic. Although he declined to reply, she had no reason to anticipate any lasting rift: indeed, she promised to employ his resumed surname of Russ in future correspondence. That there was no further communication was primarily Richard’s decision. It was he who decided not to continue it, by rejecting the invitation to spend part of their honeymoon at Collioure, and then declining to answer my mother’s response. Patrick’s failure to respond at the time signifies little, since it was my mother, who effectively regarded Richard as her son, who chiefly conducted their correspondence.

  However, as Richard later explained to Dean King, he anticipated that Patrick would resent the implicit rejection and, given his highly sensitive nature, was likely to take grave offence. It is clear from his own account that this is precisely what Richard wished to occur.[fn13] After all, he might readily have tactfully concealed his change of name. He maintained little or no contact with his other Russ relations, and there was no reason why Patrick should have discovered the change. Richard’s sudden overriding attachment to his natal name seems unaccountable, too, in view of his continuing lack of communication with his Russ relations.

  In view of these considerations, it seems not impossible that Richard’s abrupt decision to initiate a rupture with his father, after long years of unremittingly cordial relations, owed something to his fiancée’s influence. As has been seen, she took an instinctive dislike to Patrick at our meeting in Chesham Street, finding him ‘cold and intimidating’. It was she, too, who rejected the invitation to stay at Collioure after the wedding. The fact that she suffered from some form of medical condition conceivably played an ancillary part in her hostility.

  While it is impossible to see into the hearts and minds of others, it is tempting in part at least to associate Mimi’s visceral dislike of Patrick with her own upbringing. Her father was Jean Parotte, a senior diplomat at the Belgian Embassy in London. Bob Broeder, Richard’s friend from their schooldays, saw much of Richard and Mimi at this time. From them he learned that her father was something of a domestic tyrant.

  In view of this, it would have been only natural had the ‘tyrant’ objected, at least initially, to his daughter’s choice of indigent fiancé. Did Mimi envisage Patrick as a similarly oppressive father figure? Her account of their sole meeting in Chesham Street may suggest this. Possessed only of a partial (in some respects untrue)[fn14] version of his treatment of Richard and his mother, and being by all accounts a strong character possessed of a high standard of morality, might it not have come easily for her to believe the very worst of her future father-in-law?

  Patrick in contrast continued to nurture deep affection for his son over the years to come. Some ten years later he recorded this intriguing dream:

  In the night … a dream of a mountainous desert, a large salamander (2 ft long) hurrying down a cliff, lost to sight behind a rock & on being approached found to be a pair of furry ostriches. They were startled by a band or pack of brown yellow spaniels, & one bird, seeing me withdraw a little as they came back to this rock, assured me, with some reference to the ‘one sweep of powerful wing’ that it would not kick. We spoke of diet: I wondered how they could live in such desolation but did not like to stress their being birds: the ostrich said it needed so much to put on a pound as opposed to our requirements; but I forget the figures. A civil bird, but rather absolute & not particularly likeable. Richard, abt 12/14 was in this dream: at first he thought they were gazelles.

  The most touching indication of Patrick’s painfully continuing affection for his son is provided by a charming photograph, which he preserved in a pocket diary kept beside him in his study until his death. It shows a cheerfully grinning Richard, aged about nine, perched on a plinth of the Albert Bridge in Chelsea, with his beloved boxer Sian.

  Richard, aged around nine

  There can be no doubt that Patrick remained deeply wounded by his son’s peremptory decision to break off relations. He and my mother doubtless felt that expansion of their little family through Richard’s marriage would if anything bring them closer together, and this I felt was also their purpose in inviting me to meet him and his fiancée in the previous autumn. Had they come to Collioure in July, when I was staying there with my genial friend Jonah Barrington, we might all indeed have become close. Life is full of such sad mischances.

  Constrained by the isolated and vulnerable circumstances of his own childhood and adolescence, as in other instances Patrick built a defensive wall around his unhappiness. When his niece Elizabeth Russ visited him at Collioure in 1989, she was surprised to find that ‘He denied Richard’s existence!’ I do not know how much Patrick spoke of the tragedy to my mother, who was undoubtedly deeply distressed by the mystifying rift. As Patrick jotted down about this time: ‘one does not expose: the [Jerusalem] Temple had a veil. So all but very shallow creatures speak in tropes.’

  In April, a month after the rupture with Richard, Patrick was struck by another personal tragedy, when news reached Collioure of the death of his stepmother Zoe. In marked contrast to his frequently bullying and unpredictable father, she had acted as a markedly affectionate parent: effectively the only mother he could remember. He entertained the fondest memories of her, who had so often shielded him from his father’s erratic tyranny. It was out of concern for his health in London that she took him for the years 1926 to 1929 to live in Lewes, where he enjoyed the happiest period of his troubled childhood.

  Patrick spent a week in England attending the funeral, where he encountered a number of his rarely assembled relatives. Among them was his younger sister Joan, who had been the close companion of his boyhood. Bun (also called Barney) had flown from Canada to join the gathering, and recalled the occasion long afterwards in a letter to Joan:

  … I expect you will recall our going from London to Staffordshire by train for our step-mother’s funeral and that the little town of Stone was delightful in the Spring. I recall drifts of daffodils and other Spring flowers on our way between the station at Stafford and the churchyard where the funeral took place.

  Dispersed as the family was, this melancholy occasion was to prove the last occasion that many of them were enabled to meet. In particular, Patrick never again had the chance to see those to whom he was closest: Bun and above all Joan. Dean King, once again at pains to emphasize how chilling was Patrick’s relationship with his siblings, asserts that:

  After Zoe’s death, O’Brian reached almost complete emotional detachment from his Russ family. When Joan tried to initiate a correspondence with him, he wrote back saying that he would rather not be reminded of his youth. Joan’s pride was injured, and they never communicated with each other again. If not for Barney’s persistence, Patrick most likely would have forever severed ties with his family at this time.[7]

  This extraordinary charge is in fact completely untrue. Furthermore, it is implicitly utilized to bolster the claim that Patrick went out of his way to shun his own son. A number of reviewers of King’s work and the first volume of my biography have uncritically swallowed the accusation whole, using it to besmirch Patrick’s character.

  Broadly speaking, communications between members of the Russ family were as intermittent as is the case with many families in the modern world. In their instance this was much exacerbated by geographical separation, combined with the usual preoccupations that characterize busy family lives. Patrick himself was an exceptionally industrious man, who for much of his life struggled to make ends meet. Living abroad, and lacking time and opportunity to meet his relatives on any sort of regular basis, communications tended to be restricted to relatively rare occasions, such as Christmas and birthdays. An exception was provided by Patrick’s elder brother Bun in Canada, who on his retirement maintained an extensive correspondence with his surviving brothers and sisters.

  As has just been seen, King writes of Patrick’s younger sister, who had been the closest to him in early days: ‘When Joan tried to initiate
a correspondence with him, he wrote back saying that he would rather not be reminded of his youth.’ Joan’s original letter lies before me, together with a copy of Patrick’s reply. Dated 14 November 1979 (not c. 1964, as King implies), she explains that her letter was instigated by reading his biography of Picasso, which Bun had sent her. This was the first communication between either of them since they had met at their stepmother’s funeral, and Joan had discovered Patrick’s address from Bun – which incidentally indicates that she had made no attempt to contact him since at least 1949, when Patrick moved to Collioure. After congratulating him on writing such a ‘fascinating’ book, she went on to tell him of her family life in Birmingham, and concluded with the cheerful admonition: ‘So. Regard this as a fan-letter and answer it as you will or not. My, by now, sepulchral voice from the past is only concerned with saying Good Show.’

  Ten days later Patrick responded with an affectionate letter, in which he expatiated on shared childhood memories of their successive parental homes at Kempsey and Crowborough. After discussing points Joan raised about the Picasso biography, he concluded: ‘And so with many thanks for your letter and with my love. Yours ever Pat.’

  There the correspondence ceased, until more than two years later Joan took up the exchange again, this time to send Patrick a copy of a pencil drawing of himself as a baby sketched by his brother Victor, together with a copy of a portrait of their elder brother Mike beside his Lancaster bomber during the War. This instigated further nostalgic memories of Patrick’s and Joan’s life together at Lewes and Crowborough, and Patrick replied promptly on 20 March 1981. After describing his feelings on paying visits to both of their former homes in 1967, he concluded with this poignant reaction on viewing the latter: ‘It fairly went to my heart, and I did not go down the leafy lane into Ashdown Forest as I had intended but turned the car and drove away into the present as fast as ever I could. And so these [memories], my dear, I leave you With much love and many thanks Pat.’

  Further correspondence passed between them. However, as she grew older, Joan became according to family accounts increasingly cross-grained, and in 1987 responded to Bun’s latest complaint about Patrick (whom Bun does indeed appear to have regarded with a comical degree of jealousy) with the assertion that he ‘has been consistently blocking all communication with one and all’. However, this was clearly a reaction to Bun’s complaint, rather than any reflection on her own lack of contact with Patrick. After all, a few months earlier Bun had reminded her:

  I am very pleased to know that you did receive a letter from Pat. He is not a good correspondent, but for one who writes so much, I should have thought letter writing would have come very readily [authors naturally have so much time off from their writing!]. Anyway, he has done his bit and for this I am glad.

  As will be seen in due course, in 1989–90 there occurred a brief severance of relations between the brothers, in consequence of Bun’s publication of his privately printed family memoir Lady Day Prodigal. Despite Patrick’s plea to be excluded from his eccentric work, Bun insisted on including allusions to Patrick which the latter found embarrassing. Nevertheless, despite this setback it was not long before good relations were once again resumed.

  Thus, the accusation that Patrick severed relations with his family in 1964 is entirely untrue. He maintained correspondence with Bernard and Joan into old age. They were the two closest to him, both in age and shared childhood memories. Among his other siblings, Godfrey and Michael were long dead, Nora had become a nun and from the 1950s made her home on the other side of the world in remote Vancouver Island, Olive had left the family home when Patrick was still a small boy at Lewes, and Connie had become largely distanced from the entire family in the 1920s.

  Patrick maintained especially warm feelings towards Victor, who had found him and his family the Suffolk cottage where they lived during the early years of the War. When Victor died in 1985, Patrick recorded in his diary: ‘At last I wrote to Bun about Vic’s death: strangely painful.’ Victor’s widow Saidie told me that Patrick also wrote to her after his death: a letter which included the acknowledgement that: ‘Victor was a very good brother to me – much better than I was to him.’ The extent to which Patrick maintained communication with him and others of the Russ family is unknown. What is clear is that the slur on Patrick’s memory is entirely groundless, and the extent of its uncritical acceptance strange, if not unaccountable.

  Returning to 1964, in July and August Jonah Barrington and I paid an even longer visit to Collioure than in the previous year. This time we were accompanied by Timothy Heneage, a mutual friend from Somerset. Patrick and my mother were greatly taken with Timothy, whose name Patrick adopted in his novels as that of Jack Aubrey’s particular friend Heneage Dundas.[fn15]

  At the same time, my parents were becoming increasingly concerned by Jonah’s failure to discover his métier in life. His decision to forgo studies at Trinity had led to his premature departure without a degree. Ever active, he had by this time been gaining a precarious living from such varied activities as heaving sacks for a Cornish coalmerchant, acting as groundsman at Bude Recreation Ground, and painting houses (with me) for the gloomy little local poet Ronald Duncan – with whose pretty daughter Bryony I had become romantically involved. No doubt recalling his own peripatetic youth, Patrick sought to identify some professional activity that would suit Jonah’s talents. During both our visits he admired Jonah’s prowess on the Château Royal tennis court, and when Jonah mentioned that he had heard of a clerical vacancy at the Squash Rackets Association in London, Patrick and my mother enthusiastically urged him to take this up. As I recall, Jonah was at first averse to the prospect of accepting a deskbound job, but eventually succumbed to my parents’ encouraging pressure, and submitted the application.[8]

  Fortunately, it proved successful, and on his return he found himself for the first time with a regular job – albeit a rather modest one. Eventually, however, Jonah’s talent on the courts caught the attention of influential figures in the sport, and in due course he went on to gain international acclaim as the world’s greatest squash player, winning the British Open no less than six times in seven years. Many potent figures in the world of sport were to help him along the road to fame and success, but as he freely acknowledged it was Patrick and my mother who had given him that vital initial spur.

  The New Year of 1965 opened with severe financial problems at Collioure, which inter alia required my mother to spend the ten days before Christmas frantically typing Patrick’s current translation Munich, or The Phoney Peace, by Henri Noguères. However, after some juggling of their finances, on the last day of 1964 my mother defiantly wrote: ‘I have a strong feeling that 1965 will be a very happy year for us & ours.’

  Throughout February and March they spent much time toiling on the neighbouring strip of land they had acquired in 1962. Having learned that rigorous restrictions had been imposed on building in the vicinity, they set to work making the land productive. Apparently oblivious to his previous perilous experience when preparing ground for building the casot ten years before, Patrick now bought fresh explosives in Perpignan in order to create terraces for a vineyard. Although a local builder was employed to undertake the work, Patrick could never resist discharging explosions where opportunity offered. As my mother recorded: ‘Cardonner finished on 18th but yesterday poor P. blew away a piece of the new wall with a vine-hole mine. Still, C. said today never mind he will come one day and do it.’ Patrick was suffering from a severe ailment of the eyes at the time (which may account for the erratic behaviour of the mine), so that much of the labour fell on my mother, who wrote: ‘All day in vineyard perfect sun & no wind. Finished mines & making places, & planted 44 racines. I carried stones, had a bonfire & finished weeding entire vineyard.’

  In January 1966 she noted: ‘I must try to record last year, though it was so crowded we have both lost all sense of chronology. It really was a good year, though at times we felt battered. Work: Marie Mancini
finished, then La Douceur de Vieillir & Une Mort très douce none of which are out yet.’

  The references are to Patrick’s continuing work on translations, on whose financial support their modest though increasingly comfortable income depended.[9]

  My mother seems to have regarded 1965 as a potentially formative time, when she compiled a detailed journal for this and much of the following year – the first and last since she gave up keeping her earlier annual diaries in 1955. A week into the New Year she reported exciting news from Patrick’s literary agent: ‘C[urtis]B[rown] wrote to say MacMillan keep asking when P is coming up with another novel. Dear Lord I feel so deeply about P’s writing.’ Ten days later ‘I am in that blessed state of living in the present & enjoying every moment & every thing.’ Towards the end of the year she received a premonitory glimpse of the revival of Patrick’s creative writing: ‘The most important happening for us in 1965: P wrote a splendid tale for my birthday. He said it came easily, freshly, unspoiled by translating so much for so long. I had been terrified his gift might have been eaten away. It is what really counts.’

  Unfortunately, the story has not survived, and some time was yet to pass before Patrick’s muse returned in earnest.

  His translation work continued to provide a regular income, subsidized by my mother’s modest private income and her private tutoring. Nevertheless, relative poverty remained a pressing reality. On 28 January my mother noted: ‘I put vast patches on P’s corduroy trousers.’ A week later: ‘Poor P. found that if he had joined the London Library some years ago it would only have been about £50 & now it would be £107. I wish he would have it though.’ A change of scene momentarily attracted them. ‘We found an advert. for a furnished cottage on Loch Corrib for £50 for three months & got very excited.’ The image of Ireland as a romantic haven from a fretful world regularly recurred to Patrick’s mind. But as on other occasions this came to nothing.