Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  Patrick’s condition was not good, but my mother’s much worse: ‘Left femur; left tib[ia] & fib[ula] just above the ankle; 3 ribs; ominous blood from right ear.’

  The de Salises were notified, who visited them in Eastbourne General Hospital shortly afterwards. They in turn telephoned me, when I travelled at once to visit the hospital. I found them in bed, Patrick weak but cheerful, but my mother barely conscious. It was by chance that I was there when a policeman called, who politely questioned Patrick. As I left with him, I took the opportunity of asking what had happened. It became clear that my mother was driving, since the worst injuries were all on her left side. On emerging from a side road onto the main road without pausing, the vulnerable little deux chevaux was struck by a car coming from the left. The policeman tactfully intimated that my mother was clearly at fault. However, given that the other driver had not suffered any personal injury, combined with my mother’s horrifying brush with death, I gathered that it had been compassionately decided not to initiate a prosecution for dangerous driving. To my knowledge my parents rarely if ever admitted to being at fault over their driving, and I am amused to see that in the following year my mother’s Christmas card to my uncle Ivan referred firmly to ‘The wicked car whose fault it was hit my side …’![fn9]

  I remember feeling at the time a little hurt that my mother had not alerted us to their coming to England, and am relieved to find in Patrick’s diary for 13 November that ‘in the evening she was so much happier: remembers Nikolai as one of the few solid realities in all the vile period of hallucination’.

  Her condition made it clear that she would have to remain in hospital for some considerable time, while Patrick was sufficiently recovered to shift his quarters to the Heatherleigh Hotel in Eastbourne. My heart sinks, when I find that on 6 November he ‘hired a mini: drove it v badly to Beachey Head, jerking and stalling’. A couple of days later: ‘I went to Brighton, escaping another accident (at a roundabout this time) by very little.’ Fortunately, he evaded further danger, and took advantage of his enforced stay to pay nostalgic visits to spots in and around Lewes familiar from vividly recalled childhood days, where ‘memories came flooding up’. Lunching at a pub near Herstmonceux he suddenly felt ‘something like happiness’.

  After successive difficult operations, my mother’s birthday on 4 November saw the beginning of a protracted recovery: ‘Less pain, but oh so much wandering – is persuaded that the place is an hotel or restaurant, sometimes with a brothel below,’ Patrick recorded.

  On 30 November Patrick hit on the plot of his next novel The Fortune of War pretty well in its entirety:

  JA & SM returning (as passengers?) in small frigate from E Indies – perhaps a preliminary piece about some E Indian, Javan activity. In the S Atlantic they fight one of those US/UK actions – are beaten & taken prisoner PoW in US. JA will not give parole. Hospital. Escape (by means of a former shipmate?) to Herapath, Mrs Wogan, DV. Audubon or A’s friend. Painted black, perhaps. Might Johnson & US Intelligence play SM false? Further escape anyhow. SM taking DV aboard Shannon (says state of the war with France such that you can settle in Paris within months – just what was it anyhow? Then JA still passenger, but a v active one, action with Chesapeake. This leaves the possibility of the Cochrane stuff / ? & some war for another book. Alternatively it could start with the Cochrane disgrace ? & clear him after the action.

  By 15 December 1977 the long-drawn-out ordeal was over. Patrick paid ‘A last, rather sad, look at Lewes, Southover & the deathly [i.e. sluggish] Ouse’, before retiring to bed for an early rise next morning. In the early hours they were taken in an ambulance to Gatwick, whence they flew to Montpellier, my mother being hoisted and carried with difficulty in a sort of canvas hammock. Driven to Collioure, they found the bridegroom’s mother Claude and others of the Jonquères d’Oriola family awaiting them at the little bridge by the turning up to their house. Heroically, Claude and her assistants bore my mother home up the rough track. That her body was very light added to the poignancy of the occasion.

  She and Patrick, although much wearied by the journey, were relieved beyond measure at being back in their snug home. Next day a huge backlog of mail was delivered, which included a parcel containing an eagerly awaited first edition: ‘Persuasion & N[orthanger] Abbey are bright & beautiful, but I cannot take much pleasure in them yet.’

  Patrick was by now becoming preoccupied with his forthcoming novel in the Aubrey–Maturin series. Already, in the previous November:

  I began to draw a rough plan of a sea-tale – Botany Bay, she-convict, iceberg, wreck – but I doubt there is enough in it for a book. (And anyhow there is the glamorous woman at sea aspect). In bed I thought of another entirely [The Fortune of War]: American war: JA defeated by heavy US frigate – POW – sees D[iana]V[illiers] – exchanged – serves as volunteer in Shannon.

  However, current work translating Pierre Schoendorffer’s The Paths of the Sea meant that it had not been until May 1977 that he made ‘a tentative start on the naval tale’. The structure of the tale is provided by an amusing account of Jack Aubrey’s elephantine blunderings on land, prior to his taking the ageing fourth-rater Leopard to Australia; its exciting chase and sinking of the Dutch 74-gun Waakzaamheid; and Jack’s skilful extraction of his own vessel from a perilous encounter with an iceberg in the South Seas. The latter was based on the real-life adventure of HMS Guardian in 1790, commanded by Captain Edward Riou. Also on board was Midshipman Thomas Pitt, afterwards Lord Camelford, whose biography at Patrick’s suggestion I was compiling at this time.[4]

  Additional colour and intrigue were lent by the presence of the beautiful American spy Louisa Wogan and her lover Herepath. As ever, doubts assailed Patrick as he conceived and at times restructured the story. ‘Is the story I have in mind (parallel between S[tephen]M[aturin] + D[iana]V[illiers] & Herapath & Wogan) dismally flat?’ – ‘Qu. Is Mrs Wogan straight out of a novelette?’ – ‘The book will end in anticlimax if not bathos’ – ‘I live much in the book, & altho I know it is pretty trifling I shall be sorry when it is done – shall miss it.’ He abandoned a pleasing living for the chaplain Fisher: ‘Rector of Little Zeal. Perhaps too corny.’ For a while he cast about for alternative settings, obtaining local topographical information from Mary Renault at Cape Town, which in the event the Leopard never visits. As ever, he conquered such trying misgivings and alterations to produce a work containing some of his most dramatic encounters.

  On 18 September he and my mother hit on the successful title Desolation Island (Patrick’s original title had been ‘A Voyage towards Botany Bay’). Finally, on 7 October: ‘I added some little pieces to Desolation Island & packed it up. We both feel rather lost without it.’ Three weeks later, Richard Ollard’s response from his home in Dorset served to clear any lingering doubts Patrick might have nurtured:

  I have just this moment finished reading Desolation Island & must congratulate you on a real tour de force. What a cracking good book in every way, so different from all the others & yet so perfectly in tune & in character. Certainly you have done nothing better & with the psychological insight, the mastery of narrative & above all the sheer visual power of your descriptive writing puts the book in a rare and select company.

  The book was published to great acclaim in the following summer. Patrick sent me a copy for my birthday, accompanied by amusing advice on dealing with publishers:

  I am very glad you have changed to Cape [for Lord Camelford] … It is so very, very much better to be with a publisher one likes: and yet as far as my experience goes, even with very amiable, deserving publishers, it is as well not to see too much of them, but to remain rather distant. Otherwise they tend to become familiar and even overbearing, which is not to be tolerated and which always ends in tears – they are, after all, only greasy tradesmen, often half knave, half fool, but they often have remarkable pretensions.

  This was the last in the series that he published with what he had increasingly found to be the unsatisfactory
US publishing house of Stein and Day. While the change may have weighed with him, his advice to me was, I know, largely tongue-in-cheek.

  The New Year of 1978 had brought a flurry of sympathetic good wishes, together with a visit culminating with an unusual experience on Patrick’s part: ‘Then in the afternoon Jacques [Dr Théodor], his mother, & [his wife] Caroline. the perfectly delightful child. A good tea party (though M rather worn) & on leaving the child insisted on kissing me on the nose.’

  The first half of the year was devoted by Patrick to writing The Fortune of War. Encouraged by the additional support of his enthusiastic new US publisher, he had wasted no time in returning to the series. As ever, a primary concern was to reconcile his dramatic overview to historical events. Both factors were essential to his conception, but neither could be permitted entirely to overrule the other. In March Patrick queried:

  How can I get JA on to Java & preserve historical accuracy? Blow him up in the S. Atlantic? He & SM looking for a boat. But in that case how preserve his followers? I did find to my distress that Javas prisoners were all sent home from Brazil in a cartel: so where is my historical accuracy. (Get round it by having JA too badly wounded? SM will not leave him?

  Persistent application ensured that the obstacles were ingeniously overcome, to the extent that readers are left with no inkling of knots that had been unravelled and seams skilfully concealed. On 26 July:

  I finished the book after tea – quite a strong bout of work: 8 pp – with Broke’s victory & the colours going up, not without a certain doubt that this is the end, at least of my story – perhaps an end irrelevant to the tale. Still, it is done (4 months & 3 days & I shall type it, leave it by, & consider.

  This he did, and at the beginning of September: ‘I finished my reading, not v pleased in the end (but I cannot see it clear – too close) & wrote a little introductory piece, boasting under the cover of false modesty.’

  The latter allusion was to his exaggerated acknowledgement of extensive dependence on the considerable historical record.

  Although Patrick freely availed himself of the novelist’s prerogative of adapting historical events to dramatic requirements, he justly prided himself on meticulous accuracy with regard to those trifling details which convey to the readers so vivid a sense of participating in events of the distant past. I recall his indignation when a pedantic ‘learned Dutchman’ wrote claiming to have spotted an anachronism, where Captain Broke orders the forepeak to be made decent for Diana Villiers with a lavish sprinkling of Eau de Cologne.[fn10] This was on the unsatisfactory basis of the Oxford English Dictionary’s providing a first allusion to the scent in 1823 – ten years after the event. Obviously this cannot establish an irrefragable terminus ante quem, and two years later a loyal lady fan in Somerset sent Patrick a reference to a Royal Navy captain’s purchase of the commodity at Gibraltar in 1806. Patrick was delighted at having his intuitive perception borne out in this gratifying manner.

  As ever, I derive additional pleasure from detecting hidden personal allusions in this fine tale. Here Killick declines to obey Captain Aubrey’s injunction to remove Maturin’s wombat from his cabin, stubbornly declaring ‘I duresn’t sir.’ The response is taken from that of a Devonian sentry in India during the Great War, whom my grandfather vainly ordered to kill a dangerous-looking serpent. Again, the name Jaggers borne by an elderly seaman aboard Aubrey’s Leopard is that of the Appledore ferryman who used to row my mother across the Torridge in her youthful pre-war days. ‘An exact list of the kings of Israel’ (p. 61) was what my grandfather supplied as a hopeful substitute answer to an unprepared scripture paper while up at Oxford before the Great War, while Herepath’s translation of a Chinese poem echoes Patrick’s own unpublished ventures in the same field.

  Particularly pleasing to me is the catalogue of the scholarly Captain Yorke’s library in his cabin aboard La Flèche. On inspection Jack Aubrey ‘could make out some of the nearer titles: Woodes Rogers, Shelvocke, Anson, the immense Histoire Générale des Voyages, Churchill, Harris, Bougainville, Cook, all natural enough in a sailor; then Gibbon, Johnson …’

  In the story all these hefty tomes are dispersed to the elements with the destruction of La Flèche by fire. In reality, however, the greater part lived on to become part of Patrick’s library, now in turn gazing reassuringly down at me from my own bookshelves.

  For the book itself, I suspect most readers would share Richard Ollard’s enthusiasm, conveyed in a letter of 19 October:

  I finished THE FORTUNE OF WAR last night, and I must write to congratulate you on an absolutely splendid book. The inventiveness and originality are the equal of anything that you have done and the whole series deepens in richness and brilliance with each succeeding book. There is so much to admire that one hardly knows where to start. The description of the burning of La Flèche, dinner at the Herepaths, the thrilling sequences in Boston and the final climax of the action between the Chesapeake and the Shannon. All are memorable. The plotting and characterization seem to me marvellously accomplished.

  Next spring Ollard forwarded this gratifying endorsement from John Bayley and his wife Iris Murdoch:

  We have long been devotees of C.S. Forester and thought that nothing could fill the gap left by the creator of Hornblower. Then we discovered Patrick O’Brian. His series about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars are beautifully assembled. In some ways they are more sensitive and scholarly than Forester’s tales and every bit as exciting. Captain Aubrey and his surgeon, Stephen Maturin, compose one of those complex and fascinating pairs of characters which have inspired thrilling stories of all kinds since the Iliad.

  Meanwhile life at Collioure pursued its usual placid course. In September Patrick and my mother entertained an English judge and his wife at their home. A chance mention of my name led to the discovery that years before he had been the magistrate who fined me, as a youthful protester against the arrival in London of the Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev in 1956: ‘Judge had been the beak who fined Nikolai for demonstrating against Bulganin – fined him too much – it had weighed on his conscience ever since & he reimbursed £5. A very agreeable pair indeed & a most successful evening.’

  In the following month Patrick’s improved financial position enabled them to buy a vineyard in the mountains behind Collioure: ‘In Mlle de Maigret’s window M saw a 40[hect]are vineyard f[rancs] 2M … If say Pierrot [Camps] or one of his boys would work it & merely give us our year’s wine & some muscats that would be fine, particularly if the casot could be made a refuge.’

  The property at Manay was purchased on 6 October. Pierrot and Hélène’s son Michel took over tending the vineyard as planned, while Patrick henceforth conducted much of his writing in the isolated little casot, at times when excessive heat and swarming estivants in and around Collioure disturbed his writing at home.

  In December Patrick received the customary birthday card from his brother Bun, and a few days later a copy of my latest book, which owed much to his original suggestion and subsequent detailed advice. ‘Nikolai’s Camelford, a handsomely produced book: he does not dedicate it to me, as I had more than half expected, but he does make all proper acknowledgements – until I saw them I was much wounded.’

  This was not the first occasion that I had unwittingly given hurt. In September our son Dmitri was born, upon whom we had bestowed my father’s name: ‘At lunchtime a telegram to say that Georgina has a boy, Dimitri. No comment needed … I wrote to Nikolai, not without difficulty. The hurt cannot be expressed, yet it is impossible to write as though it had not been inflicted so v deliberately.’

  In fact, it had never occurred to me that they should feel so strongly about the choice of a family name borne not only by my father, but also by his uncle, a young naval officer killed fighting the Japanese at Tsushima in 1905.

  In the high summer of 1979 my mother underwent another of her persistent close brushes with mortality, from which once again she experienced a further near-miraculous e
scape. On 1 August she and Patrick drove up into the Pyrenees beyond the Tour Massane to retrace a walk familiar from an earlier expedition. There they entered the deep forest, ‘wonderfully devoid of life’.

  After a picnic:

  we walked a little way up, towards the place of the strange cep, above the descent to the girolles. It all seemed rather unfamiliar, & at one point I saw M turn uphill, left-handed. This was about 1 o’clock or perhaps 1.30 & it was the last I saw of her until 7, she having contrived to scramble across country as far as the Coulomates, breaking a tooth on the way. In the meantime I had ranged to & fro, always in the wrong direction until at 5 I lost hope and drove fast down to Le Perthus, puncturing on the way, to the gendarmes. They were very, very good, grasped the point quite quickly, changed into bush clothing, laid on dogs & reinforcements in case of need, & drove up, 8 strong I think, with me following. M was there, pretty battered but virtually intact, having been led back by a powerful Pole. Her legs, if not her sense of direction, had behaved wonderfully. Farewells to the kind gendarmes – & they totally unresentful – & so home to whiskey, scrambled eggs, & a wonderful bath.

  Next day, Patrick reflected: ‘How quickly the true anguish fades – a thin recollection of a memory. But it was atrocious, never-ending at the time. Uncontrolled imagination – efforts little more than formal gestures. And indeed it could have ended horribly.’

  These days Patrick was troubled by apprehensions of mortality, accompanied by vague feelings of guilt and starts of nostalgia for the vanished past. ‘A vile dream of missing a boat-train again – missed it twice this time, or to be more exact the dream ended when I was torn between catching the boat & so abandoning a little girl who had been with me, & returning for her & so missing it.’