Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  Fortunately, Patrick’s compliant acceptance of Ollard’s suggested cuts swiftly brought the work to a state where the publishers could freely accord the work its due. Possibly because it had been agreed that Collins should undertake the editing, William Targ at Putnam proved gratifyingly enthusiastic. On 13 October he wrote:

  Lord Clark’s letter to Patrick

  I’ve just finished reading your manuscript, PICASSO, and hasten to send you my sincerest and warmest congratulations. To Mary, too, my felicitations; I can well imagine how much she contributed to the materialization of this splendid work. It is a monumental work – informative, moving, visual, interpretative – the total biography.

  This was just the sort of reaction every author needs, and there was more to come. At the end of the month, after supplying me with fresh information about Lord Camelford, Patrick continued:

  Speaking of peers, Ld Clark, Sir Kenneth as was, has just written me the very kindest possible letter about Picasso – says ‘a really excellent book – much the best biography of P – very good judgments – very well written.

  This pleases me.

  Among other admirers whose opinion Patrick valued was Mary Renault, who sent an equally enthusiastic encomium from Cape Town.

  When the book appeared a year later reviews ranged from the frivolous and envious to the serious and considered, but overall Patrick felt it received its due. In the letter conveyed within the crowded hold of Noah’s ark by Charles de Salis to England, he gave me this overview:

  Yesterday’s post brought the first review of the English edition of Picasso: the Guardian was rotten (its literary editor is a Trotskyist), the Mail concentrated wholly on Picasso in bed, some others praised foolishly, but John Raymond did the book proud in the Sunday Times, speaking of hard work and corruscating genius. Hard work, yes: but as I snort and wheeze at my desk this morning the corruscation seems somewhat less than obvious. Furthermore, the drains have blocked.

  A major criticism that might have been levelled at the book, which many critics continue to regard as the most perceptive biography of Picasso, is its virtual ignoring of the wayward artist’s appalling record as a callous apologist for Stalin and Soviet totalitarianism.[2] While Patrick cannot have been unaware of this unsavoury aspect of the artist’s character, it probably did not impinge greatly on his area of concern. He himself entertained only marginal interest in politics, and probably took Picasso’s besotted admiration for the genocidal regime as the minor aberration of a mind focused on higher things. Above all, he was genuinely persuaded that an artist should be judged by his works rather than his character.

  X

  Shifting Currents

  I hear the noise about thy keel;

  I hear the bell struck in the night:

  I see the cabin-window bright;

  I see the sailor at the wheel.

  Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

  When H.M.S. Surprise was published in England in August 1973 it received what Richard Ollard described to Patrick as ‘marvellous reviews’. However, the immediate aftermath proved somewhat disappointing. When the American edition eventually came out in the spring of 1974 Patrick was upset by ‘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.’ Nor had the generally laudatory English reviews achieved all that might have been hoped.

  The failure to achieve an increase in sales over its predecessors was disappointing, but that it held its ground at least ensured Collins’s readiness to publish a sequel. With the typescript of Picasso safely in Richard Ollard’s hands, Patrick began pondering Jack Aubrey’s next adventure. On 16 September 1975 he slept on the sofa upstairs, where he:

  spent a wretched night – ruminating a variety of resentments and (I hope a little more profitably) going over the beginning of a naval tale phaps to be called the – Command (Indian Ocean). The reverse of Paradise – domestic joys – better to marry than to burn, but what if one burns married? – no point in living, bringing up children to just the same miserable round – SM[aturin] agrees, no point at all, unless reference to futurity – let us not whine however – here at least the illusion of real purpose (i.e. command) & at least it is between men, more comprehensible. In idyllic cottage, m-in-law, twins (? m in law lost money ? twins wanting [i.e. mentally deficient]) women constitutionally unaffectionate.

  In this way the introductory section of the novel came to Patrick almost in its entirety during the course of a single cold, damp and unhappy night. Jack Aubrey’s initial pessimism clearly reflects Patrick’s own worries about the future, now that he seemed faced by the prospect of uncertain waters. His doubts and fears brought on a resurgence of old demons: the difficulties inherent in marriage, and the burden of a disapproving mother-in-law.

  However, peace of mind returned once he began to conceive the main section of the work. Three days after his nocturnal musing the weather at Collioure had changed from sodden grey to ‘A bright clear day, with lovely roses in the garden’. Patrick began to see his way ahead: ‘Mind full of naval tale. Antagonist to be a role-playing man, the dashing naval officer. It would be useful to have him a peer (Irish or Scotch) playing the part too, but that might lead to too much my-lording.’[fn1]

  His plan continued: ‘His wife wants a lift? Late, purposely left behind. He was JA’s senior, but was made [promoted] later – reversal of roles. SM quite likes him, so vulnerable.’

  Having provisionally arranged his principal characters, Patrick ‘looked into James[1] & my Indian Ocean campaign, & find it much less simple than I had remembered’. It can be seen that he conjured up an image of the novel more or less as a whole before checking its historical setting. Even now he continued to focus on the characters and plot, rather than the historical circumstances: ‘An idea for the novel. Maturin & surgeon of antagonist’s ship (? both United Irishmen but the 2d a drunken though able Presbyterian) to act as chorus pointing out the motives, failings & perhaps fate of the main characters.’

  However, there came an unpleasant check when Patrick found that his further reading in James conflicted increasingly with the initial plan:

  Going on to the Mauritius campaign I found to my horror that my memory had been at fault. The island was taken not by the commodore but by an admiral with an enormous force. The first part – his being reduced to a single frigate & then capturing 2 – will do, but the rest will not; & I can hardly use history in one part & abandon it in the next.

  Patrick raised his concern with Richard Scott Simon:

  It seems to me that there are three courses open to me. I can scrap the idea altogether, and think of another campaign of a similar nature. Or I can transpose the situation that I had first got hold of to a fictitious milieu as I did in ‘Post Captain’ and ‘Surprise’. Or I can keep all the historical sequence that suits my purpose and change some of the later facts towards the end for the sake of the tale: in point of fact, if I did that I should only have to interpolate one or possibly two actions so as to make the commodore’s personal triumph virtually certain before the admiral comes to take it over. The third course seems to me the best …

  Both Richard Scott Simon and Richard Ollard concurred with Patrick’s judgement. His qualms perfectly illustrate the narrow path the historical novelist must tread between excessive pedantry, and flying so free of the facts as to invite the question whether he be an historical novelist at all. As before, he selected his ground with consummate skill. He promptly set to work summarizing James’s detailed account: ‘So long as I abandon JA’s triumph as the climax, the historical sequence will do v well. (Though I shall have to make Willoughby a post-captain straight away).’

  What chiefly concerned him at this time was less his ability to write a worthy successor to Aubrey’s three previous adventures, than whether continuing relatively modest sales would ensure further commissions in that line. He toyed with the idea of writing a biography of the Marquis de Custine
, who visited Russia in the reign of Nicholas I and afterwards published a celebrated critique of the Russian Empire. However, ‘it would call for an immense amount of reading all round’. ‘We are both very dismal these days’: a complaint with which many writers and their spouses will be familiar.

  On 18 October 1975 Patrick:

  wrote 1000+ of Mauritius Command with much pleasure & in the evening looked into the other [Aubrey] naval books to catch the tone & to remind myself of what had happened. They were better than I had remembered, though in places too high-flying & the reader is expected to fill too many gaps. I must speak plainer in this one.

  This was largely necessitated by the fact that this time his story centred on a major historical event, one which involves Jack in extensive combined operations.

  Patrick’s literary labours were regularly interrupted by the constant necessity to polish his Picasso, engage in extensive correspondence, tend the garden, and press the grapes. In November he planted twenty-one cabbages – no doubt those which Jack proudly shows Stephen at the beginning of the novel. Their beloved tortoise Caroline had disappeared, and Pierrot Camps (a Collioure fisherman, with whom he and his wife Hélène my parents were longstanding friends) arrived with one he believed might be her. It was not, but my mother ‘appropriated it quand-même’. Next day the wanderer reappeared, and ‘a few minutes after their introduction, Caroline & the new tortoise coupled heartily’. Two days later the testudinous Lothario decamped.

  On 25 October an ‘excellent contract’ for The Mauritius Command arrived: ‘£2000 advance & 12% rising to 15% after 5000’. That afternoon friends called for luncheon with their three-year-old daughter, whose movements Patrick observed much as Stephen Maturin would have those of a Réunion lemur: ‘I had not considered that the little girl would be walking, nay running about & vocal. She is a good child, but ½ hour of her would have been enough. A perpetually renewed miracle for the parents, less so for others.’

  She appears unwittingly to have contributed to Patrick’s description of Mrs Williams’s tiresome granddaughter Cecilia.

  Pleasanter inspiration came from a visit to an étang near Perpignan, where he saw ‘Thousands of duck, perhaps flamingoes beyond them. Cormorants! Hunchbacked curlews.’ His bouts of low spirits persisted, however:

  Is it worth recording my gloomy reflections about loss of faith, loss of music equally desire for unremitting punishment – for continued wound (not to say mutilation) that the inflicter must always bear. Perhaps it was the unconvincing starets [in The Brothers Karamazov, which he was reading] who started this train of thought. He speaks of pleasure in clinging to an offence.

  My conjecture is that Patrick at times tended to dread unhappiness rather more than he actually experienced it.

  It was presumably in consequence of the protracted break after writing H.M.S. Surprise that he continued to find it hard to immerse himself in his new work: ‘I re-read what I had done of Ch I, & did not think much of it. It seemed to me contrived, inorganic as it were, with the remarks made on purpose to illustrate various points.’

  Two days later he recorded wearily: ‘Some work: qu. (& a grave one) am I rather tired of the RN?’ Next day: ‘I finished Ch I rather abruptly (too long: 11000 +) & am somewhat at a loss how to go on.’ This would appear to reflect a temporary despondency, since the account of Stephen’s arrival at Ashgrove Cottage is replete with life and colour.

  Much of the opening description derives from Patrick’s visit in the high summer of 1973 to our first home in wild Wales, with its ‘hanging wood on the other side of the valley’. Like Jack Aubrey, I possessed a large astronomical telescope: that which we had earlier taken to Collioure, in order to scan the heavens at night. Again, the passage ‘Stephen Maturin had thought of Aubrey as powerful resilient youth itself for so long that this change and the slow, weary motion as the distant figure closed his instrument and stood up, his hand pressed to an old wound in his back’ was surely drawn from the foot-long scar across the base of my spine, resulting from the operation I had undergone in 1960, when Patrick and my mother for weeks attended daily by my hospital bed, which recurrently caused me severe pain for years thereafter. However, when Maturin ‘saw not only that look of anxiety but also the marks of age and unhappiness’, he was, I imagine, drawing on my subsequent appearance a fortnight before he wrote the passage, when he and my mother visited us at our cottage home in Somerset:

  Nikolai welcoming, but drawn & anxious. Will not really tell me about his book. Incapacity? Smokescreen? … To the Slacks[fn2] … & we exchanged our anxieties about N … Our general impression (& M’s) is that he has bitten off more than he can chew.

  The book was my Victims of Yalta, which at the time was proving hard work, in its initial form too long, and delays in publication continued matter for stressful financial concern.

  After some difficulties, Patrick sets Jack and Stephen on their voyage with the capture of the 28-gun Hébé off the Dry Salvages, for whose topography he turned to that mainstay of his world-picture, the eighteen-volume Histoire Générale des Voyages by the indefatigable Abbé Prévost (1746).[fn3] Now firmly into his stride, Patrick was able to celebrate his sixty-first birthday (12 December) in style. My mother had found him an appropriate present, a jersey from Mauritius made of pure Shetland wool. They drove to Perpignan, where they enjoyed a fine lunch at Les Antiquaires, accompanied by a bottle of 1963 Gevrey-Chambertin:

  Then a most amusing film, Le Sauvage: the pretty, spirited C[atherine] Deneuve & sympa Y[ves] Montand – no pretensions, great fun, lovely scenery, preceded by astonishing Caribbean birds – pelicans diving, cormorants, frigate birds. Home in the twilight, quite done.

  The year 1975 ended on a propitiously happy note. My mother invited some close friends to lunch on New Year’s Eve. Patrick noted: ‘They all accepted, alas & our only hope is that 1 falls v mildly ill. 6 perfect, 7 an unmanageable horde.’ The day arrived, with Patrick’s apprehension undiminished until he found ‘Monique [de Saint-Prix] had had to cry off – grippe – as if in answer to my prayer. Not that my prayer included any painful incapacity, however.’ The reduction seemed to do the trick: ‘A v cheerful party indeed: remarkable quantities of [home-made] gin. Mathilde wonderfully funny … We were neither of us much done up until the v end of the day: such a pleasant end to the year.’

  Fine sunny weather assisted inspiration in the New Year, when within a few days Patrick brought Jack near the Cape. Four days later a book arrived from Mary Renault in South Africa, describing the detention of a Russian naval captain at the Cape in 1808–9.[fn4] This not only provided Patrick at the moment juste with a detailed description far in excess of what he already knew, but enabled him to provide the inebriate Captain Golovnin a walk-on part in the story (‘I was trying to be droll with Golovnin’).

  Arrival of the paperback edition of H.M.S. Surprise cheered Patrick and my mother, while the proofs of Picasso were checked and returned with general satisfaction at the quality of the book. Less gratifying was the state of their accounts. These revealed that they needed £4,000 ‘for a year’s ordinary quiet living’, while the ‘sea tales’ – assuming they continued indefinitely – brought in only about £2,500 p.a., which meant drawing £1,500 from their savings, leaving sufficient only to last a further year. ‘But perhaps Pic will do well: how I hope so.’ However, an author’s life is frequently up and down, every book being a fresh venture. More to the point, within the week came news that my mother’s Aunt Barbara had died, leaving her a life interest in her estate which promised to amount to £1,000 p.a. This was followed by the further welcome announcement that a capital payment of £1,500 was due in addition to the income.

  Despite this, February proved as so often the nadir of the year. The Mauritius Command was moving slowly, and Patrick was troubled by unhappy reflections on ‘the mutilation of age’. Once again, he suspected my mother’s affections of waning, and ‘thought of putting into SM’s mouth “Who can possibly tell the failures, the deep humi
liations, the disappointments & the frustrations in such a relationship!”’ Fortunately he did not, but it is worth noting his all but explicit identification with Maturin, and my mother with Diana Villiers. The black mood passed, and ‘in bed I snored so that M left me’.

  Fortified by their unexpected windfall, Patrick contemplated travelling to Réunion and Mauritius in order to obtain local colour. Before long, however, he abandoned the project, confirming how little he needed beyond his imagination and reading to assist creation. His slow progress was paralleled by my own with Victims of Yalta, for which he expressed characteristic sympathy: ‘Nikolai, poor chap, is having the same difficulty about length … We are anxious for him.’

  It was a generally worrying time. Although The Mauritius Command was beginning to flow satisfactorily, there seemed no especial reason to hope that it might sell materially better than its predecessors. In addition there was the grievous setback of the sudden loss of interest in the series by American publishers. He contemplated undertaking a biography of Matisse, which with any luck should appeal to the cultivated William Targ at Putnam.

  As not infrequently occurred when prospects appeared gloomy, Patrick became concerned about his health. At the end of January my mother had paid one of her regular calls to old Madame Naudo, who had helped fugitive Allied servicemen to cross into neutral Spain during the War.[fn5] Sadly she found her frail and blind, unable to distinguish night from day, and hence possessing no notion of time. Patrick found this ‘an added horror that I had never thought of’, and suffered nightmares of losing his sight. Everything depended on his good health, which caused him to suffer from bouts of what may at times have been mild hypochondria. In fact his physical powers were to remain vigorous for years to come, and he noted of his regular walk up the steep ridge behind the house: ‘To the milestone (& the measured walk, uphill, requires 1992 paces, which leads me to suppose that I am slightly longer legged than the average Roman) on a perfectly sound pair of feet. No panting, either.’