Finally, on 26 March came further exciting news, which put everything at rest. Collins had accepted the novel!
Letter from Richard S[imon] with most agreeable, soothing, tranquillizing (& totally unexpected) news that Macmillans yield up £500 as unreturnable, so that when the Collins advance is in we are £250 up. This, from yesterday’s supposed position, is a gain of £500; a real one of £250. Calmness rather than joy; & a suspicion that Macm. are willing to pay the 500 to go away. Or is it James Wright being good & kind?
Richard Scott Simon’s switch from the unenthusiastic Macmillan was to reap dividends extending far beyond any current concern. The editor at Collins whom he approached was Richard Ollard, who had been a King’s Scholar at Eton, and a talented historian in his own right. He had served in the wartime Royal Navy, where poor eyesight prevented his participation in active service. While he never pulled critical punches, he was appreciated as a fair and penetrating assessor of other men’s labours. It is hard to conceive of an editor better qualified to give Patrick’s work its due.
Ollard read the text of Master and Commander with avidity, providing the formidable Sir William Collins with this ringing endorsement:
This novel was jointly commissioned by Lippincott in the USA and Macmillans here. Lippincott are delighted with it but Macmillans were tepid, so Richard Simon, wanting him to be published by someone who would put some punch into it, offered the novel to me.
I did just mention it in a letter to you dated March 12th, from which you will have gathered that it is a novel of the C.S. Forester/Dudley Pope type, done with originality, gusto, and a really astonishing knowledge of the sources. Indeed, very occasionally the author’s expertise in the technicalities of sailing ships or his fondness for parodying 18th Century turns of phrase leads him into faint tiresomeness, but these are the most minor of blemishes, easily removed. What he has got is first class narrative power. This is a book which is extremely difficult to put down, and the descriptive passages, particularly of naval action, are thrilling. He is also a more than competent hand at characterisation except that his women do not seem to be up to much, but that doesn’t matter in a book about a Nelsonic naval officer as the women appear for strictly utilitarian purposes.
After a summary account of the book’s plot and principal characters, Ollard concluded: ‘This is a book of high literary quality and I think we could set it very well … I would therefore most emphatically recommend taking this novel …’
On 3 April the contract was signed, and Patrick’s literary career now appeared firmly settled on both sides of the Atlantic. While Tony Gibbs was shortly to leave Lippincott, Ollard continued as Patrick’s editor until 1993. It swiftly developed into the happiest of collaborations. A tall and authoritative figure, Ollard was decisive, occasionally acerbic, in his judgements. However, they were invariably sensible, and in Patrick’s case sparingly applied. In Ollard he had acquired a sympathetic editor, whose learning and judgement he came profoundly to respect. Ollard’s combination of gentlemanly courtesy, impressive physical appearance and perceptive acumen combined to allay the easily irritated author’s generally dismissive view of the comments of critics and editors alike. He it was who contributed all the subsequent dust-jacket ‘blurbs’ for the Aubrey–Maturin series, which he recalled as having invariably been submitted to Patrick for approval and occasional alteration.
Ollard was not the only scholar-editor working at Collins. He amusedly passed on a plea from Philip Ziegler, the biographer, who was ‘deeply disturbed that you should speak so harshly of the future William IV (whose biography he is writing) as you do here, but I will leave you to fight that out with him …’ The allusion was to the fact that Aubrey ‘had been shipmates with that singularly unattractive hot-headed cold-hearted bullying Hanoverian’. Patrick provided this spirited (and surely justified) response:
… it grieves me to speak roughly of the Duke of Clarence. But H[is] H[ighness]’s treatment of Schomberg, Byam Martin, the officers of HMS Andromeda (‘Shd any officer or gentleman be reprimanded by the capt, it is expected upon these occasions no answer is given’), naval uniform, American painters, George III, & Mrs Jordan make it difficult to love him.[fn14]
Patrick felt well served by his publishers, save in one significant respect. At the end of July 1969 he received the ‘Draft of a jacket from Collins. Embarrassing, but better than Lippincotts’. The American jacket depicted an agitated and bewigged Aubrey, yelling aimlessly at a fiery ocean. ‘Horrible Lippincott jacket,’ commented the author. ‘If I had written a book it matched, I really should have prostituted myself.’ The Collins version was little better, where Aubrey features as a diffident youth crowned with twentieth-century haircut and sheepishly clutching an anachronistic percussion-hammer pistol.[fn15] My mother was so disgusted with it that she threw it away, subsequently replacing it with the more tasteful design by Arthur Barbosa introduced for a later edition.
Just before Christmas: ‘Collins M & C arrived, to my astonishment: it was all right, apart from the lamentable blurb actually inside the book: but I don’t care for it.’ It is difficult to see what there was to dislike, but his correspondence suggests that he took exception to what in an earlier version he regarded as excessive emphasis on his writing for children, as also to comparison with C.S. Forester. (Setting aside filial prejudice, I can only concur that there is no realistic comparison between the two authors. But such judgements are best left to the reader.) Ten days later copies of the US edition arrived. They had been held up by the customs, and in fact this appears to be the first edition, if only by a few days.[fn16]
While the objectionable blurbs were concocted by the publishers, Patrick devoted particular care to the wording of his introduction. Ever fearful of rancorous criticism, he was particularly ‘unwilling that any envious worm with gnawing lips should spring up on his hind legs in the TLS and cry “This chap has been cribbing”.’ He was at pains to explain that he had indeed drawn extensively on works of contemporary naval historians like James, and was inspired by the real-life heroics of ‘the Cochranes, Byrons, Falconers, Seymours, Boscawens’ and others who distinguished themselves during the epic conflict. At the same time, he had not hesitated freely to reorder events and characters with dramatic licence.
I remember Patrick’s once affirming the best moment in an author’s working life to be the receipt of page proofs. There the work appears for the first time in book form, while opportunity remains for correcting surviving solecisms. Now, however, it was too late for further correction. On this occasion natural caution, combined perhaps with a sense of anticlimax experienced by many authors, led him at first to harbour grave doubts about the book’s literary quality. Five days after receiving his first copy, he went so far as to confess: ‘I am much depressed by M & C.’
Patrick’s original draft preface to Master and Commander
Fortunately, the initial acclaim which greeted its appearance rapidly swept away his doubts. In January he received ‘Such a kind, generous letter from Mary Renault in S. Africa: very difficult to reply to, but I like it extremely.’ Author of a succession of highly regarded historical novels, Renault remained a regular correspondent and admirer of Patrick’s work over the years that followed. Richard Ollard wrote ‘to congratulate you on your outstandingly successful debut as a historical novelist’, while Philip Ziegler declared himself delighted that ‘Master And Commander has got off to so good a start. 25,000 words of my William IV whitewash are now on paper!’
So satisfactory were sales, that as early as 9 February Richard Ollard wrote to Patrick, informing him: ‘I am delighted to say that we have to-day put in hand an immediate reprint of Master & Commander. It should be through in about 3 weeks. I do congratulate you on your success & hope that it will encourage you to further labours.’
The judgement of reviewers was, however, oddly mixed and strangely muted. Inevitable, but surely inapt and largely pointless, comparisons with Hornblower featured, as feared, with monoton
ous regularity. In the Irish Press H.J. Poole dismissed the book as ‘not, I think, memorable, at least in the Hornblower way’, while David Taylor in the Library Journal patronizingly suggested that ‘mourning Hornblower fans may prefer to read a good if disappointing book rather than to reread one of the master’s epics’.
Fortunately there were more perceptive assessments to set against these dismissive comments. The naval historian Tom Pocock extolled Patrick’s achievement: ‘It is as though, under Mr. O’Brian’s touch, those great sea-paintings at Greenwich had stirred and come alive.’
Martin Levin, in the New York Times Book Review, provided a careful appraisal, in which he declared that Master and Commander:
re-creates with delightful subtlety, the flavor of life aboard a midget British man-of-war plying the western Mediterranean in the year 1800, a year of indecisive naval skirmishes with France and Spain. Even for a reader not especially interested in matters nautical, the author’s easy command of the philosophical, political, sensual and social temper of the times flavors a rich entertainment.
However inept, peevish, or unfair he considered it, a poor review never failed to dash Patrick’s spirits. More than once he humorously cited to me an aphorism he ascribed to Mae West: ‘Don’t give me criticism – all I want is unstinted praise.’ Setting aside a few trifling inconsistencies (Jack Aubrey cannot have been stationed in the West Indies throughout the Irish uprising of 1798 and engaged in the battle of the Nile in the same year), Patrick displayed an encyclopaedic, yet at the same time comfortable, mastery of historical detail unmatched since Scott or Stevenson.
In time he was able to consider his most famous book from a dispassionate perspective. Five years after publication he reread it, concluding with an assessment most readers would I imagine strongly endorse: ‘The beginning of M & C is as good as anything I ever wrote: there is a freshness that I doubt I shall ever recapture.’
Later still, in 1988:
I spent the day with M & C, correcting some mistakes & making alterations. Some of the book’s liveliness comes from the fact that this was my 1st adult encounter with the RN – I could describe many things that could scarcely be described again, or not often, in later books – but although I like what I have read (only 100 pp) I may have over-rated it. The last 2 [books] have perhaps more weight & depth.
VIII
The Green Isle Calls
‘I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on’, cried she.
‘Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.’
William Butler Yeats, ‘I am of Ireland’
The years 1969 and 1970 saw major shifts in Patrick’s literary and household situation. His perennially precarious financial position had been improved by completion of his translation of the celebrated memoir Papillon by Henri Charrière, a convicted criminal who effected (so he claimed) a dramatic escape from the notorious French penal colony of Devil’s Island. On 14 August 1969, Patrick’s literary agent Richard Scott Simon negotiated a contract with Rupert Hart-Davis which accorded terms exceptionally favourable to the translator. Patrick was to receive ‘a fee calculated on the basis of £5. 0. 0. (five pounds) per thousand words … and a royalty of 1% (one per cent) on all copies sold after 20,000’. From the following year the book swiftly became an international bestseller, eventually adapted into a major feature film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. However, despite the welcome income received in consequence of the terms agreed with Hart-Davis, the US publisher’s choice of a different translator deprived him of a much more substantial revenue that he would otherwise have obtained.
Patrick began by being impressed by the book, but eventually:
I finished [reading] Papillon with some contempt for his easy sentimentality, hypocrisy & really silliness, which was a pity. But on reflection I see that there was a good deal in the earlier parts: a picture of some value; & as the pte or post-face says, a remarkable récit linéaire.
When the book was published, Patrick was invited to meet the author in Paris. To me he confided afterwards that he found Charrière shifty and untrustworthy – a shrewd assessment, since borne out by evidence.
By now Collioure, though still a gem of the western Mediterranean, was changing – not, alas, for the better. Strolling through the town one day, Patrick observed with a pang:
Desolation on the plage des pêcheurs – I went on, to the jetty having posted letters. They are making a port de plaisance, which is reasonable, perhaps, but they have seen fit to smash three beautiful fishing-boats, allegedly to make room. People standing about, silent. Py [Patrick’s barber] nervous, conscious, apprehensive. Impiety.
It was not long before a philistine Mairie blithely ordered the remaining fishing boats to be destroyed in a huge bonfire on the beach. Fishing was henceforth banished from Collioure after untold centuries of colourful life, to be conducted henceforward by a vast grim vessel emerging from Port-Vendres, which indiscriminately gorged up everything living within the violated deep.[fn1]
Melancholy as the prospect appeared to Patrick, he at least was able to immerse himself in loving re-creation of another in many ways for him more congenial world. He had written Master and Commander in a high flush of inspired enthusiasm. Despite this, he found himself encountering problems with its sequel. The first work had been germinating off and on for many years – as has been seen, possibly from as early as 1955. After the tremendous surge of energy and imagination that resulted in Master and Commander, Patrick at first entertained grave doubts as to whether he could make a success of a renewal of his heroes’ exploits. This apprehension had arisen before, when he gained lasting delight from The Golden Ocean, but reckoned its sequel The Unknown Shore somewhat lacklustre and over-reliant on the historical record.
Nevertheless, in July 1969 Patrick noted that ‘I have a rough idea of about ½ the next book THINK Privateering? Piracy?’. Within a few days he had:
finished Chapter I & typed nearly all of it: about 5000 [words]: showed it to M but am afraid she does not like it, or at least has strong reserves. Sad. If I ask for praise I shall get it (& any Qu. is a request for praise) & know it is worthless; & if I do not I shall never know for sure. There are other relationships very like this … No sleep. So depressed about the book. It is pretty trivial, I know. Drop it? Press on alone?
Such was the initially uneasy genesis of Post Captain.
I do not know what induced my mother’s lack of enthusiasm. Had she detected the obvious affinity between herself and the strong-minded but scarcely moral Diana Villiers? Then again, there was the unpleasant figure of Mrs Williams, who removes her beautiful daughter Sophia from Jack Aubrey’s company on learning of his descent into poverty. The character plainly draws on my mother’s own mother Frieda Wicksteed, who continued throughout her life in some degree disapproving of Patrick. For the purpose of his narrative Patrick endows Mrs Williams with characteristics of meanness and vulgarity, neither of which was remotely applicable to my intelligent and elegant grandmother.
Other problems assailed Patrick around this time. His right hand was recurrently affected by Dupuytren’s disease – a particularly unpleasant affliction for a writer. Bouts of depression came and went. Then again, the household was far from providing a restful literary refuge. In September 1967 he and my mother had finally managed to buy the vineyard on their northern boundary, which they had long coveted, for a million francs. A year later they obtained the permis de construire from the Mairie to extend the house onto the new property, and on 20 March 1969 the bank at Port-Vendres ‘promised eventual support in the neighbourhood of 500,000 without formality’.
Patrick’s little study in the year of his death
In due course a handsome bedroom with adjacent bathroom was constructed, and beyond it a substantial garage. Extension of this structure allowed for opening up below a cave in the rock for storing wine, together with an outer gallery which was to becom
e Patrick’s study for the remainder of his life. A lavatory was conveni ently – if a little obtrusively – installed beside the open entrance to the cave. Although these added facilities would transform their home life, for the present their peace was shattered for months. Apart from enthusiastic builders constantly banging on the roof and adjacent walls, while shouting to each other in exuberant Catalan, creation of the cave and gallery below required deployment of mines and pneumatic drills. At times evasive tactics were required: ‘Very stupid this morning. Beautiful sun, breakfast out[side]. Down through the dew, along the correch to avoid the workmen (small talk in short supply, & continued rather servile admiration probably vexes them). They were not there.’
It was not until 2 April 1970 that Patrick recorded with relief: ‘Chairs painted, & gallery: house nearly done: this is the 8th month.’
He celebrated this near-completion with a brief restorative trip to his beloved Ireland.[fn2] From Dublin he toured the south from County Wexford to Dingle, whence he gained a ‘splendid’ view of the Blasket Islands. He was also gratified to see men fishing from currachs. Destructive changes looming over Ireland’s matchless countryside were yet to come. At Ennis he:
Was set upon by pure beggar-woman with blanket & then – ‘I’m an Irish person, your honour. & a Catholic, & would not tell a lie’. She was going to hospital tomorrow to have a baby; & she would pray for me. She was also the 7th daughter, she observed. gave her 31/-. On, rather pleased. Many asses, turf stacks. Marvellous [round] tower between Crushen & Gort.
Having gazed from the towering cliffs of Moher onto the Aran Islands, he returned to Dublin by ‘splendid Clonmacnois all to myself’ and Maynooth, visiting along the way ‘Carton’s splendours, shown round by kind owner’. After concluding his round trip in Dublin with a poor dinner at Jury’s restaurant, he penned a heartfelt: ‘Dear Dublin. Quando te aspician?’
Patrick O'Brian Page 23
