Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  Could the little girl have been his small daughter Jane, whose funeral he missed attending in 1942?[fn11]

  Some weeks later he suffered a bout of ‘Ill temper, gloom, a kind of undefined resentment, easily (though no doubt falsely) rationalized. A looking at life & saying “Is this all?” The edge of something like despair …’

  On 1 December: ‘By the afternoon we were both exhausted & I for one deeply unhappy – the edge of despair as I said in a perhaps whining poem a little while ago. If most men mind the decline of their powers as much as I do, no wonder there are so many grim grey faces.’

  Even recourse to his beloved Samuel Johnson conjured up a troubling comparison with his own talent: ‘An hour or so with [Boswell’s] Johnson at 64 filled me with melancholy.’ On the other hand, not all was bad in the contemporary world. In August, Patrick had observed a pleasing novelty on the plage St Vincent: ‘some few bare-breasted women’. Johnson, too, would probably have approved, as his back-stage admiration of actresses in varied states of undress suggests.

  Passages of his early life, when as a child Patrick had experienced periods of unreflecting joy, were brought to mind by an affectionate letter from his youngest sister: ‘Joan wrote to me, having been given Pic[asso]: an echo of [step]Mother’s voice over 40 years & more. She spoke of Kempsey, too.’ This was the location of their early home in Worcestershire, where the two children had become close companions, while their kindly stepmother Zoe exerted a benign influence over the household.

  Despite these personal worries and passages of self-doubt, Patrick toiled hard at his latest novel. One increasing concern was the little historical time which seemed left to him. Not having anticipated the enduring success of his Aubrey–Maturin creation, Patrick had set its initiator, Master and Commander, in 1801. Its most recent successor, The Fortune of War, had already reached 1812 – leaving a bare three years until Waterloo, climax of the epic struggle between Britain and Napoleonic France. Sensing the underlying problem, a loyal fan wrote to suggest that Patrick follow the example of C.S. Forester, who in a later novel turned to Hornblower’s early life. However, this approach did not appeal to Patrick – not least, one presumes, in view of the fact that Stephen Maturin could not feature in any story antedating his memorable first meeting with Jack Aubrey at Port Mahon.

  Initially, Patrick had intended to base his new novel on the trial of Lord Cochrane for his alleged involvement in the notorious Stock Exchange swindle of 1814 – when, with the substitution of Aubrey for Cochrane, the date of course becomes immaterial. On 20 October 1978, Patrick sent his literary agent Richard Scott Simon ‘A sketch of the next Aubrey book’:

  But although these tales have now reached the end of the war, or very nearly, and although I do like to keep to the historical sequence as much as I can, Richard Ollard observed (very rightly I think) that there was no real objection to my moving sideways in time. So before coming to the stock-exchange catastrophe it seems to me that I might very well intercalate some minor actions, fictitious but based on fact: one that occurs to me is the Royal Navy’s bloodless removal of a small Catalan army serving Buonaparte on the shores of the Baltic … I am not quite sure that I can make this fit historically, but if I can it will present a perfect field for Maturin: at all events this is the sort of thing that I should like to use to delay Aubrey’s temporary downfall and disgrace, which would probably end this volume, and end it in a way that the reader would see that more was to come.

  By the New Year of 1979, Patrick had decided that the Stock Exchange scandal should be reserved for a future novel, which in the event proved to be The Reverse of the Medal. By June the current work was completed, at least in draft. He had for the present abandoned Cochrane’s career as a model, its tense and vivid climax being the capture and ultimate imprisonment of Aubrey and Maturin in the notorious Temple Prison in Paris. The historical sources on which he drew for the climax of his tale, together with many of its colourful details, were the imprisonment and escape of the irrepressible Captain Sydney Smith from the same prison in 1796, Lord Camelford’s subsequent incarceration there in 1803, and events leading up to the escape of Lieutenant George Jackson from the equally formidable gaol at Bitche.[5]

  Patrick at first contemplated entitling his novel The Temple. Next, he toyed with the idea of Blue Peter, the name of Diana Villiers’s magnificent Indian diamond. Wholly out of touch as he was with British popular culture, he went in October 1979 ‘To Collins, where I showed it to Sarah Wynn Evans: she called in the woman (Watt?) of Fontana who stated very strongly that BP would not do, it being the title of a famous children’s TV programme.’ On 3 December Richard Ollard suggested The Surgeon’s Mate, to which Patrick immediately agreed. The book was published in May of the following year. On receipt of his complimentary copies, Patrick expressed himself as ‘moderately pleased, but the jacket is rather tawdry & they have made a sad mess of the Author’s note’. The latter contained perceptive comments on the role of the historical novelist. It is a measure of Patrick’s overriding perfectionism that his original version of the ‘Author’s Note’ differs (so far as I can see) not in the minutest punctuation mark from the published version!

  As ever, personal touches are to be found in the novel. Jack’s distress at his wife Sophie’s failure to correspond with him surely echoes Patrick’s dismay at my mother’s failure to write when he was absent in Vienna for a few weeks in 1970. Readers familiar with my prolonged battle with Lord Aldington (Toby Low) over his responsibility for the betrayal of thousands of Cossack men, women, and children in Austria in 1945 will not need any reminder of the model for the unpleasant Colonel Aldington encountered in Halifax at the outset of the story, whom Jack shrewdly perceives to be ‘not a well-bred man’.

  As regards Patrick himself, we may note Jack Aubrey’s eccentric father’s embarrassingly outré political activities, which surely owe something to Dr Russ’s perverse espousal of Liberal views in predominantly Conservative Sussex, when they were living at Lewes before the War. Again, Dr Maturin had ‘performed three dissections of the calcified palmar aponeurosis with Dupuytren’. Patrick himself had undergone successive operations for the same ailment, which bears the name of the great French surgeon. Again, Maturin undergoes an acute attack of nerves when called upon to address the French Institut – a terror of public speaking which afflicted Patrick for the greater part of his life.

  Reviews of the novel were, as ever, laudatory. Particularly apposite, given Patrick’s introductory words concerning the specialized function of the historical novelist, was T.J. Binyon’s perceptive praise in the Times Literary Supplement:

  Here there is nothing of your ordinary historical novel, in which plausibility is vainly sought through a promiscuous top-dressing of obvious contemporary references and slang, which then stand out against the rest as glaringly as the fruit in a naval plum duff. Instead each incident or description is saturated by a mass of complex and convincing detail.

  XI

  Muddied Waters

  Repeatedly dwell on the swiftness of the passage and departure of things that are and of things that come to be. For substance is like a river in perpetual flux, its activities are in continuous changes, and its causes in myriad varieties, and there is scarce anything which stands still, even what is near at hand; dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and future, in which all things vanish away.

  Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, v, 23

  The New Year of 1980 began badly: a premonition of what was to prove a strangely unsatisfactory year. ‘Slow bodging at the book [The Ionian Mission]: a couple of pp.’; ‘Frustration, gloom. I wake unhappy’ run typical entries in Patrick’s diary. A self-taught course in Italian was proceeding well, as was his prowess at darts, but these diversions afforded less consolation than did a sprightly gecko who had taken up quarters beneath the Georgian tea-caddy in the sitting room and subsequently shifted to the coal-scuttle, whence it was rescued by Patrick, half-choked with black dust. Two months
later, he reproached himself further: ‘How I wish I were not filled with angry (or ready to be angry at the least excuse) gloom from morning till night. Little joy, little admiration, much fault-finding.’

  In May he recorded one of those bizarre dreams to which he was prone, which tended to fascinate and alarm him in equal measure: ‘In the night such a painful dream of M being a mad wolf perhaps & of my beating her on the head as though to kill her (some glancing blows, some direct) & she saying meekly that she was born in Shrewsbury – that was all she could offer. Piercing distress.’

  When his editor Richard Ollard wrote enquiring about the possibility of his being interviewed on television, the response illustrates his deep-rooted unease at the prospect:

  As to my appearing on radio or television. I can imagine nothing more calculated to discourage people from buying what I write. I am a wretched, reluctant, inefficient, mumbling public speaker: I refused the French television with the Picasso book; only the other day I declined an invitation from Sandhurst to address the RMA in May on writing war-novels; and I would beg to be excused as far as the BBC is concerned, were it not for the fact that if your colleagues are right my indulgence may cause your firm to suffer as much or more than myself, which is hardly fair. So in the unlikely event of any really remarkable invitation, an invitation qui vaut le voyage, please tell them that they may count on me.

  It can only have been fortunate that nothing came of this at the time, as will become apparent from the consequences eighteen years later when he reluctantly acceded to the BBC’s request for an interview.

  Patrick’s depression at this time appears to have been largely visceral, as nothing particular appears to have occurred to dampen his spirits. The Surgeon’s Mate had been completed in the previous year, and by that September: ‘Another naval book, a parenthesis before JA’s catastrophe, is beginning to take shape in my mind. Might I plot it out chapter by chapter, or would that be too rigid?’ Next: ‘I begin to see Collingwood quite clearly, & shall certainly use him’,[fn1] and by November: ‘I abandon the history of Franco-Turkish relations, hoping my readers’ ignorance may exceed my own: in any case I can always be vague.’ Next he despatched to Richard Ollard an outline of the projected work, and on New Year’s Day of 1980: ‘Today I began the Parenthesis & wrote about 1000 words. And now comes the time when all the floating ideas have to be penned, the choices made. This will not be an important book, but I am glad to be back at work.’

  Three days later Collins signed the contract.

  Patrick’s difficulties in sustaining flow and balance in the opening chapters of The Ionian Mission were briefly interrupted by the next translation proposal from Collins. Unfortunately, this proved no more satisfactory, and on 20 February 1980 he noted: ‘I began Beauvoir & read 20 pp: undergraduate stuff so far, & it would be difficult to translate. How I have to force myself to read a book I am going to work on – force really hard, although the subject might interest me. Why?’

  A fortnight later: ‘I did finish Beauvoir a dreary book.’[1] However, in mid-May he learned that ‘Collins are not going on with the S de B. In a way I am relieved, but I regret not so much the money as the paid rest. Perhaps Weidenfeld may do it.’

  Before this reprieve Patrick and my mother experienced yet another of their perennial brushes with death, which might so easily have brought his career to a premature end. On 11 March:

  Perpignan in the afternoon, through strong cold tramontane. Just beyond Argelès, on the straight, a car in front braked violently (no light I think). It may be that my eye was off the road at that moment – a hitch-hiker? – but anyway I thought it impossible to avoid running into it – swerved, skidded & came to rest right across the road on the left-hand side in the path of a large van. It nearly stopped in time but not quite & crushed our front wing breaking its own headlight. No other harm, & surprisingly no fright either in M or me.

  At the end of March Patrick and my mother travelled by boat to Gibraltar, after which they crossed to Tangiers and toured Agadir, Tetuan and nearby places. None of this itinerary appears relevant to the plot of his current novel, and as Patrick’s notes are focused almost entirely on the rich birdlife of the region I can only suppose an ornithological break from what had temporarily become literary drudgery was the prime purpose of the expedition.

  Regrettably, however, the enjoyable trip achieved little in the way of improving his continuing difficulty with writing. On 20 June: ‘Looking back at diaries of only a year & 2 years ago I am grieved to see how my energy has declined – Imagination inventiveness too. In those days I wrote ‘only 3 pp’ (& 6 or even 8 were not unknown) whereas 3 is now quite a feat.’

  Minor travails became major irritants: ‘Some sod stole the hammock rope this afternoon: how it angered me. Youths crossing the drain & coming along our wall angered me – rude & defiant – I took one by the neck & v nearly cast him down – so at last I put barbed wire, I hope enough.’

  Nevertheless, there were consolations: ‘There is a young woman over the way who takes the sun stark naked: this pleases me, but tends to delay my work.’

  As the year moved on, Patrick toyed with alternatives to fiction, including a biography of the naval hero Lord St Vincent, a cultural history of Spain, or a guide to the Roussillon. Returned to The Ionian Mission, his gloom momentarily led him to ‘kill Pullings – doubt the soundness of his death’. Fortunately, a few days later he issued a reprieve: ‘I resuscitated Pullings (how convincingly?).’ It is a measure of his disciplined determination that he nevertheless persisted with what had largely been a Sisyphean task, beating the close of the year by despatching the final typescript on 3 December.[fn2]

  As ever, Richard Ollard proved delighted with the outcome, notwithstanding a minor misgiving. On 16 December he wrote:

  I have just finished reading THE IONIAN MISSION with the immense pleasure that your books always give me. Among the many felicities that struck me was one that you were kind enough to commend in my biography of Pepys, namely that you have made your central character age convincingly; that is he becomes different yet remains the same. Not easily done but here brilliantly achieved and the more effective by the reprise of his earliest exploits, amatory and naval, involving Admiral Harte and Port Mahon. The portrait of Collingwood – for such I take Admiral Thornton to be – is again admirable. And you have drenched your imagination in that thankless, cold, sodden, miserable Toulon blockade. And how well you have brought out the combination of tension and frustration which is the real experience of war, for most of its participants anyway.[fn3]

  There are one or two places where I think the exuberance of your period sense has too-far out-distanced the lagging comprehension of your mere readers and I, shopkeeper that I am by nation and by nature, recommend a silent sacrifice on the altar of commerce. But you must be the arbiter of this, as of everything else.

  Patrick returned a cheerful reply, promising to look into Ollard’s suggestion. Nevertheless, despite this high praise from the critic whose judgement he probably valued most after that of my mother, on 31 December 1980 he recorded: ‘Rather a sad end to an often sad & anxious year.’

  Family affairs also obtruded into the normally placid course of his existence. Given Dean King’s unchallenged assertion that: ‘After Zoe’s death [in 1964], O’Brian reached almost complete emotional detachment from his Russ family’,[fn4] I feel it necessary to describe the situation as it really stood at the time. At the end of the previous May (1980), Patrick had received a letter (one of a longstanding, if at times intermittent, transatlantic correspondence) from his brother Bernard (Bun), informing him of their sister Olive’s death. Although Olive had long become distanced from the family, Bun clearly assumed that Patrick would be concerned by the news. In December he and Patrick exchanged their customary Christmas cards.

  About this time he received the first unexpected letter from his younger sister Joan, the sibling to whom he had perhaps been closest. Explaining that she had been living in Birmi
ngham for the past thirty-five years, she expressed admiration for his recent biography of Picasso, and went on to enquire whether Patrick remembered their shared childhood in the spacious house at Kempsey, which she had glimpsed recently when driving past the village. Patrick was so touched by the letter that he retained it until his death – it was, so far as I am aware, the only Russ family letter he preserved. (It will be seen in due course that a brief rupture led him to destroy his voluminous correspondence from Bun.)

  He promptly replied in affectionate terms. After explaining that he retained a few vivid memories of Kempsey, he eagerly enquired: ‘if you should ever pass that way again, please would you photograph it for me?’ He told her of his visit to Crowborough in 1967, where they had lived subsequent to Kempsey, concluding: ‘I was strangely grieved, and I drove away without ever walking along the farther lane to the forest, which seemed quite unchanged.’

  On 20 March 1981 he responded to a further communication from Joan, concluding with another melancholy reference to his nostalgic Crowborough visit. Again, he explained poignantly:

  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 there, my dear, I leave you

  With much love and many thanks

  Pat

  Joan retained this letter, which is the last to have survived of their correspondence. According to Dean King: ‘When Joan tried to initiate a correspondence with him, he wrote back saying he would rather not be reminded of his youth. Joan’s pride was injured, and they never communicated with each other again.’ Apparently, King never saw Joan’s letter initiating the correspondence, while Patrick’s responses over a period of months were, as has been seen, warm and welcoming. Neither of his extant letters expresses the slightest hint that ‘he would rather not be reminded of his youth’: on the contrary, in the second he confirms his overwhelming nostalgia for their shared childhood.[fn5]