Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  Following Georgina’s and my return to England, our wedding took place in October, which Patrick and my mother flew over to attend. Fortunately, no problem arose like that attendant on his son Richard’s wedding nine years earlier, when (according to Richard’s account) his mother had refused to appear should Patrick be present. In our case my father, likewise, firmly declined to appear were my mother or Patrick to be there. Fortunately, a conflict did not arise, since they attended the Anglican ceremony at Georgina’s parish church in Radlett on the Saturday, while my father and stepmother were present the next day at our wedding in the Russian Orthodox church in Emperor’s Gate, London.

  Our wedding at Radlett in October 1971

  In 1972 Patrick failed again to keep a diary record, it being a relatively uneventful and possibly unsatisfactory year. In February Richard Ollard and his wife Mary came to stay for the first time at Collioure. Richard was a perceptive observer, and the impression he obtained during this and subsequent visits tallies, in part at least, with my own observations. As my résumé of a later discussion with him records, his:

  visits [to Collioure] were always extremely pleasant: Mummy was always a delightful hostess – could not have been nicer. However one always had to be on one’s guard with Patrick, but Richard found once he had learned the ropes this was not an insuperable problem. Mary Ollard however felt on the first occasion indignant at the way in which Patrick from time to time rudely corrected Mummy, and felt strongly that he imposed unduly upon her good nature.

  Richard was fully aware that one had to remain on one’s guard in conversation with Patrick, but given that caveat was able to commune with him quite happily. His impression was that Patrick was concerned to inflict snubs when he felt so minded, but was not really seeking to be offensive, nor to crush his ‘opponent’ beyond the immediate context. He agreed that Patrick altered very little over the years in character and even looks, and was always very fit. He held himself well, and was an exceptionally energetic walker.

  This perception appears to me remarkably shrewd, my chief reservation lying in Mary Ollard’s comment concerning Patrick’s treatment of my mother. It is perfectly true that he was inclined on occasion to contradict or even ridicule observations she proffered, reproofs to which she invariably meekly submitted. Like Mary Ollard, for long I found this not a little tiresome, or even offensive. However, after many years of observation at close quarters, I eventually came to a differing conclusion – a view incidentally shared by Georgina, after she had also come to know my parents well. We became more and more persuaded that all was not as it might appear. My mother’s apparently submissive attitude in large part represented an act (she would even address him as ‘sir’!), whereby she exercised a subtle degree of control over Patrick. I realized, too, that she was fully aware of his underlying insecurity, and the concomitant need to sustain his self-confidence. Equally, she herself could on occasion appear sharply dismissive, as when Patrick showed her some piece of handicraft of which he was endearingly proud.

  My subsequent immersion in their voluminous diaries, memoranda and correspondence strongly confirms this interpretation. Provided one accepted the ‘rules’, which once understood were really not difficult to follow, Patrick was the most delightful, interesting, and good-humoured companion one could wish for.

  To these virtues must undoubtedly be added his astonishing industry. Unfair criticism and publishers’ occasional neglect afforded him disproportionate distress, but were rarely permitted to hinder his productivity. Thus, between January and April 1972 he translated Miroslav Ivanov’s The Assassination of Heydrich; from April to July he wrote H.M.S. Surprise, the 110,000-word sequel to Post Captain; and from September until January he translated Charrière’s Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon.

  In May Patrick paid another of his recurrent brief nostalgic visits to Ireland, which invariably exercised an uplifting effect on his spirits. Having flown to Dublin he drove in a hired Ford Escort to Belfast, then at the height of the Troubles. It was his first visit to the city since his stay in 1937, when he wrote part of his youthful novel Hussein. Now, however, ‘I did not, do not, remember the town at all – not a single building, street nor the orientation.’ Troops and police were everywhere, and ‘It was forbidden to stop, that is to leave an unattended car, & the only car park I could find was full.’ In the evening he walked for miles through the ravaged city, alert to dramatic insights. However, ‘I don’t think the people I speak to here tell the truth: they are certainly under great tension.’

  Driving to Londonderry, he found the situation if anything worse:

  … I walked in the drizzle on the walls as far as I could, which was perhaps three quarters of the way (the barbed wire barriers being set sideways) … a valley below & ¼m away a rise with a poor-looking scattered suburb on it. This was the Bogside, though I did not know it, and I was looking at [the cannon] Roaring Meg (bore about 10 cm) when a soldier crept from his sandbags & said ‘You might get shot’. He kept very low under the parapet: his simple anxious young face was not so much black as streaked. I did not know whether he might feel compelled to shoot me & asked him to repeat himself twice. No, it was the Bogside that might let off at a moving head.

  After this he drove westwards away from the troubled Six Counties. On his way to Sligo:

  a little after Donegal I picked up two wet girls who wanted to go to Galway where they study, so I took them there. One, Grainne, a native speaker from Aranmore, told me delightful things about her island. Sweet, gentle, trusting & rather confiding children longing for experience, quite learned too, & with the right ideas. But I missed Sligo & many another place, as well as infinite miles of country, talking [thinking?] on the other hand, that Grainne was I suppose as pure a piece of the ancient land as could be seen or heard.

  I wonder where is Grainne now, and does she recall her long conversation with the obliging stranger?

  On his way to Achill Head Patrick ascended Croagh Patrick, where St Patrick encountered the angels:

  As stiff a climb as I have known, on a path, sliding back in some places at about 35º. Up to the ridge in an hour, then beyond to the true cone, where I turned & was instantly hailed up so as to sting my ears despite hat. Down, blundering, and to the dear old late Gothic friary, where to my astonishment I found myself within 20 ft of a Cornish chough, nesting I imagine in the top of the wall. It defied me: & in time I realized I had miscalculated the hours – flew back to Oughterard, or tried to fly, would have flown if half Ireland had not been taking its cattle, asses, sheep, lamb, along the road.[fn8]

  Next day he spent an enjoyable (though unproductive) day’s fishing on a nearby lake. ‘I feel deeply rested,’ he noted next morning, before making his way back to Dublin. On the way he stopped at Loughrea to view ‘a 1stC[entury] phallic stone at Turoe. I found it in time, & phallic or not it is a splendid mysterious thing. Grey.’[fn9] Back in Dublin, he encountered a disappointing reverse. He had hoped to meet one John de Courcy Ireland, an advocate of various fashionable radical causes, who had also published books on Ireland’s maritime history. However: ‘arriving here, naively expectant, all I found was a single anonymous typed note wholly concerned with business matters & arrangements: the old familiar depression came straight back – anger – indignation – hopelessness. A quoi bon?’

  Quite why he was so eager to meet this relatively obscure figure is unclear, but his excessive dismay at being apparently fobbed off illustrates yet again his extreme fear of being slighted or ignored.

  Indignantly, he left Dublin for another tour by way of Galway, Clonmacnois, and the Bog of Allen, before once again returning to the capital. There he was forcefully reminded of his youthful protracted Irish visit in 1937, whose very occurrence has been called in question by his detractors:

  Dublin again, & I am strangely reminded of New York:[fn10] but only by the old-fashioned mouldering squalor of many of the smaller shopping streets (so like upper 8th Avenue) & the stark nakedness b
eyond Christchurch; not in the least by the people, the freshfaced pleased-looking creatures, so very polite & helpful, only civilized. (The old ladies in a black & muddy alley who walked back a hundred yards with me through the rain to make sure I did not miss Tailors’ Hall: the chambermaid who said No that there were no chemists’ shops open after 7 but who fetched me aspirin for my incipient cold.) I love the smokey-eyed girls & shiny clean bumpkin-faced boys …

  Shelbourne pleasant, & my window looks straight on to the corner of Stephen’s Green, diagonally across from the dear Miss Spains of 35 years ago [where he lodged]: a striking contrast & in some ways a sad one.

  The melancholy provoked by reflecting on those ebullient days when he was writing Hussein was increased by his having succumbed to a severe cold.

  Next day he hired a car and ‘drove off to veiled Tara – looked respectfully at a figured stone in the mound of the hostages which must, I take it, have been of immense antiquity in the time of the kings’. Driving west, he gave a lift to two students whose company he found tediously dull, and arrived that evening at Currarevagh House in County Galway where he had stayed during his visit in the previous year. ‘That evening after dinner I talked with two pleasant, ingenuous brothers from Dublin: we drank port until 12. There is a quality in Irish people that I have seen nowhere else at all.’

  He drove on to Galway and thence to the sea. Much of the formerly beautiful coastline near Spiddal was now covered with rows of depressingly monotonous bungalows. Although disappointed, his viewpoint was not blindly romantic: ‘Many of the bungalows seem to be the old houses replaced & now inhabited by the original people, which is I have no doubt more comfortable. To live in an externally beautiful rural slum for the sake of outsiders is scarcely right.’

  Moving on to wilder parts, he observed with delight many fine seabirds, but while pondering some godwits he managed to get his car stuck in a gateway on slippery seaweed (a valuable fertilizer). Two men in a passing lorry stopped and pushed it free. When he began apologizing for putting them to the trouble one replied to his gratification: ‘Sorry, no English.’ Some hours later, after passing through fine wild country around Clifden, he managed to get his car stuck again, this time while ‘wishing to look into a lough for mergansers … few birds give me a greater feeling of rarity & triumph’. Rescued by another helpful passer-by, he drove on successfully for an hour or so, until attempting to consult his map while driving he ‘lurched violently into the hedge. Amidst the din I thought “this is it: all is up”. But no: car wrenched clear unhurt, hardly scratched & the world continued.’

  What with his recurrent accidents and ever-worsening cold, Patrick was now finding his expedition less and less enjoyable. After an abortive attempt (it was closed) to revisit Carton, the palatial former seat of the dukes of Leinster, he arrived in Dublin and retired to his hotel room ‘where I lie prudently, soberly in bed’.

  Although illness had marred some of his holiday, what shines through his occasionally lugubrious account is his intense love of Ireland and the Irish. Having repudiated his largely unhappy early life, it is evident that from the time of his first liberating visit in 1933 (symbolically, also the occasion of his first deep love, for a beautiful Irish girl) he fastened on Ireland as a spiritual refuge. However, I am sure that he was throughout perfectly conscious that it provided him with a Happy Otherworld of the spirit, not a country to which he had ever belonged in reality. Whenever the possibility of settling there presented itself as a practical opportunity, as in 1945 and 1954, he rejected it without providing any compelling reason.

  On this occasion Patrick toyed yet again with finding himself a refuge in the Green Isle of Erin:

  On to a point between Glinsk & Cashel, & a notice Site for Sale: a cheerful young woman in a filthy booth (car at the door, however) with a fierce, mute ancient man by the fire (‘himself is a hundred years old’) & a baby in her arm, said the site might be above or below the road or by the water (a pond) according to one’s fancy – half an acre or less & the price about £1200. Bog & rock, but the view over Bertraghboy Bay to the Twelve Pins on so beautiful a day (the mountains three-dimensional & the water right sapphire) was improbably lovely.

  Although conscious that critics may elect to regard this as special pleading, I would stress again that his scanty half-hearted claims to Irish origin reflected reluctant awareness that the Ireland he loved was a land of dreams, unrealizable in the harsh world of actuality. As he wrote in his diary at Collioure two years later: ‘I … read in the Shell guide to Ireland, longing for that almost non-existent country.’

  Early next morning he flew back to London, where he met my mother, who had I assume been staying with her parents in the West Country. They lost no time in returning to Collioure, where he spent the remainder of the year reading and working at home. In a marginal note written on a draft letter to Richard Scott Simon, Patrick triumphantly recorded: ‘Goody. Have just finished Surprise & will be quite ready to start translating in Oct. Should like to do both (can do Papillon [i.e. Banco] at 2–3000w[ords] a day Beauvoir [Tout compte fait] slower about 1000) Can schedules be made to coincide?’

  H.M.S. Surprise was published in August of the following year. Although I imagine few now would find it in any way inferior to its two predecessors, reviews were mixed, ranging from strongly enthusiastic to what can only be described as painfully obtuse. In March 1974 Patrick noted ‘some deeply stupid US reviews of Surprise. Most praise leaves me untouched: most blame too unless it is literate, but the accumulation of these really vexed me.’ In the following month he heard from Richard Scott Simon. In his diary Patrick recorded: ‘Last Pool sold to H[ouse]& Garden: Surprise sold 6000, almost exactly the same as the last 2. I am astonished & rather disappointed. Why no increase?’ To this plaint Simon responded sympathetically (and prophetically): ‘I too was rather disappointed with the sales of H.M.S. SURPRISE, but I think it should have a long life.’

  Eventually the novel received its due from readers and reviewers. To me, what is perhaps the most weighty compliment derived not from a literary reviewer, but a professional sailor and historian. In his scholarly account of the prize system in the Royal Navy, Rear-Admiral Hill extols Patrick’s astonishing powers of insight into the technicalities of history:

  Patrick O’Brian in H.M.S. Surprise … gives a fictional account of a discussion in the Admiralty on this case, which, like all this author’s work, is based on historical study and shows deep understanding of the factors that may have governed Their Lordships’ decision.[1]

  A former wartime naval officer responded with equal enthusiasm to another striking aspect of Patrick’s writing. On 6 November 1995 Sir Alec Guinness confided to his diary:

  Spent the evening reading Patrick O’Brian’s HMS Surprise. The smell of the sea lifts off his pages together with that of tar and the oiliness of so many Mediterranean harbours. His description of a storm in the south Atlantic catches one’s breath away with fear and excitement. This is the third of his books I have read (in the wrong order) and I am now resolved to climb up the rigging of all of them.[2]

  Finally, we may note a strand of continuity in Patrick’s writing. In chapter 7 Stephen Maturin takes in hand a delightful little Hindu girl named Dil, who comes to a sudden distressing end. She surely cannot be dissociated from the impudent, amoral, and wholly charming Sher Dil, ‘a lively lad of eleven’, who takes service with the author in Francis Yeats-Brown’s best-selling work of 1930, Bengal Lancer. Patrick had read the book at an early age, when he evidently drew on it for his short story ‘Wang Khan of the Elephants’ in 1933, as also for his novel Hussein. The theme of a homeless bright child’s being discovered and protected by a sympathetic father figure can scarcely have failed to appeal to Patrick, whose own childhood had been so lonely and relatively loveless.

  IX

  Pablo Ruiz Picasso

  But I shall little care for censure, as long as the testimonies I use doe assure and warrant me: since I intend not to describe h
im otherwise, either good or bad, but as He really was. Onely where he holds any doubtfull part, I conceive it will be but just to give a favourable construction.

  Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (London, 1649), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’

  Despite the acclaim with which the text of H.M.S. Surprise was received by those whose opinions mattered most to Patrick, its completion provided something of an anticlimax. Although Collins remained enthusiastic about his naval tales, sales had continued satisfactory but unspectacular. When he reported to his agent Richard Scott Simon that he would shortly be delivering the typescript of the novel, Simon’s reply raised only the possibility of fresh translations and made no mention of a further sequel. He had two suggestions: the latest volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs, and the sequel to Henri Charrière’s bestselling Papillon.

  Patrick was relieved at the prospect of an imminent influx of income (a month earlier Simon had written gloomily: ‘So far no luck with translations. I am asking around the whole time but there seems to be nothing which publishers need to have turned from French into English’), and enquired whether he might obtain contracts for both books.

  His gift for flawless translation had long been acknowledged by publishers, and the proposal was accepted without difficulty. Within three weeks Weidenfeld had drawn up a contract for the de Beauvoir book, and (as has been seen) at the beginning of December 1972 Hart-Davis commissioned him to translate Charrière’s new memoir Banco.

  Although it was the second of the books commissioned, and the advance smaller, Patrick decided to begin with Charrière: possibly because, as with its predecessor, the contract ensured him a royalty of 1% on all copies sold above 15,000. On 17 September he assured Richard Scott Simon: ‘Have just finished Surprise … can do Papillon [i.e. Banco] at 2–3000w a day …’ By 19 January 1973 Simon responded: ‘With amazing speed the translation has arrived … I don’t know how you managed to do it so quickly. You must be quite exhausted.’