An element of farce entered these exchanges, as a cheque for £500 which the irritated Patrick sent ‘to shut him up’ crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, he having forgotten to enter the date on the cheque.
However, a much more serious difference arose out of a wholly novel contingency. In March 1989 Bun proudly informed Joan that: ‘You will be amazed and perhaps amused to know that I have ventured to write an autobiography, complete with photographs, illustrations and so forth, combining the verses I have written in the last sixty years and the prose I have lately put together.’
When the news reached Patrick, he was much perturbed, and promptly issued a strongly worded request to his brother to make no reference to him, fearing (presciently, as it turned out) that revelation of the fact that his original surname was Russ would be seized upon to his disadvantage by envious critics. Bun’s response reassured Patrick that ‘he makes virtually no mention of me’. However, Patrick, having somehow become aware that the assertion was in fact untrue, issued a further eloquent request for reticence. Unfortunately he received a flat refusal to comply, in what he described as ‘a rude, typically domineering letter from Bun’, while the latter at the same time declared to Joan that: ‘I do not pretend to be an author with a capital “A”. For all I know, Pat resents my competition, but he does not need to do so.’ Bun’s son Charles told me that their father had long grown more and more envious of Patrick’s fame. However absurd, this appears to be true, being confirmed by his claim to Joan that Patrick had taken exception to ‘a footnote in reference to his prowess as a translator and author and he may, if he sees a copy of the book, which I doubt, become enraged at the idea that I am borrowing a little lustre from his own fame’. Although I am unaware whether Patrick ever obtained a copy of the offending work, he somehow discovered what he considered a damaging betrayal, in consequence of which Bun received what he described to Joan as ‘the most fearful letter from Patrick’.
Clearly, the coldness which followed Patrick’s outraged response was largely brought about by Bun’s tactless bravado. On 16 January 1990 the latter wrote to Joan: ‘as far as I am concerned, Patrick has exiled himself from my list. I did not send him any form of greeting for his birthday or Christmas and I have heard nothing from him since the letter which offended me so much.’
This temporary distancing became mutual, with Patrick noting shortly afterwards that: ‘I have tossed out all the tedious correspondence with Bun.’[fn10]
Bun’s magnum opus, privately published in Canada in October 1989 under the odd title Lady Day Prodigal, confirmed Patrick’s worst fears. Bun included in the text a photograph of the adult Patrick at their meeting in Paris in 1974, and worse still inserted a gratuitously tactless note recounting Patrick’s marriage ‘into the Tolstoy family’ and describing him as ‘a keen amateur ornithologist and an excellent writer’.
In reality, of course, the likelihood of anyone outside the Russ family’s reading the book (half of which is given over to doggerel verses composed by its enthusiastic author) was very small indeed.[fn11]
Despite all this, the rift was eventually healed in the following spring of 1991, when Patrick received a letter from Bun belatedly explaining that he had been in hospital for months, having suffered a stroke and becoming afflicted by a dangerous bone cancer. On 3 May 1991 Bun’s secretary reported that ‘he has received a very pleasant letter and 2 books from Patrick! Mr Russ is very pleased.’ Thenceforward cordial correspondence was resumed between the brothers, together with Bun’s wife Fifi and daughter Elizabeth. At the end of the year Patrick received ‘A letter from Bun, speaking of his cancer with great fortitude – moving.’ Patrick responded by return, ‘kindly to Bun’. This affectionate relationship continued up to Bun’s death in the following summer. On 5 February 1992 Patrick noted: ‘I should have said yesterday that there was a rambling letter from poor Bun, wanting me to come out, together with a note from his secretary.’
If blame is to be apportioned at all in the dispute which for a brief year interrupted the brothers’ friendship, it surely lies primarily with Bun’s perverse refusal to accept Patrick’s fully justified (if indignantly expressed) request to be omitted in any readily identifiable form from the published memoir. Overall, however, it is clear that the difference owed much to long-term misunderstandings between two brothers of very different temperaments, who had been able to meet on only two or three occasions over the past half-century. Nevertheless, even the temporary coldness that did occur would have been greatly curtailed had Patrick become earlier aware of Bun’s tragic final sickness. This sad chapter closed when his widow Fifi telephoned on 27 July with the melancholy but long-anticipated news that Patrick’s cherished childhood companion was no more. From the biographer’s point of view, the loss of the letter of condolence Patrick wrote to Fifi four days later is much to be regretted.
Thus the evidence is wholly at variance with Dean King’s groundless allegation that Patrick arbitrarily severed relations with his family. Overall, his relationship with the brother who was closest to him is well summarized by Bun’s daughter Elizabeth, who remained close to her father throughout this time:
Because my Dad and Pat kept up a steady correspondence, Dad would always give me Pat’s letters to read. I felt very kindly towards him – he was the only real uncle with whom I had the feeling of any familial connection. (My mother’s only sibling, a brother died when I was quite young but because of living in Canada, I had never met him.) Dad didn’t seem to keep in regular contact with any of his other brothers – however, he did correspond with all his sisters and perhaps you know that he assisted with Nora’s move to Victoria. He acquired a house – a pretty cottage style – close by his and they visited often after that.) Some years later – it was December 1967 – when I married, Pat sent the wedding gift of a Wedgewood teapot which, as I mentioned, I still have.
In June Patrick was gratified to learn that our daughter Anastasia found The Golden Ocean listed among set books for her examination, and on the 23rd ‘It was Nikolai’s birthday, & when we drank his health we wished him a fortunate year to come with even more than usual fervour.’ The emphasis reflected the forthcoming trial hearing for Lord Aldington’s libel action, which had now been postponed to the autumn. Patrick followed the complex succession of events throughout with deep interest and concern. While impressed by the extent of public sympathy for our cause, as well as the impressive list of public figures (including his fellow authors Graham Greene and Alexander Solzhenitsyn) who had declared themselves in my favour, he remained presciently apprehensive of the outcome.
In Collioure there were further signs of change in the air – not all unpleasant to Patrick:
After lunch … I swam Au Racou: crowds, but clean fresh sea, people having fun, quietly upon the whole. Many Dutch. Bare bosoms a matter of course, pleasant in the girls who have grown up with it & are utterly unselfconscious. I swam my 100 strokes, sunned for ½ hour & came back.
Two days later he returned to the beach to swim, ‘in the hope of natural sleep. Many Dutch: many bosoms, showing extraordinary variation even in the young. They are less attractive than I thought.’ With August crowds arrived, less appealing than the Dutch bosoms:
Evening acerbity went rather far & I walked through the crowds in the night – had not been there for a great while – getting my espadrilled feet wet, seeing many changes, among others a proliferation of ‘art galleries’ all brightly lit, all obviously derivative – people gaze into them with a look of earnest stupidity.
Happier considerations were, however, in the offing. On 27 September Patrick was gratified to receive ‘a v agreeable letter’ from an editor at the major American publishing house of Norton. It began promisingly:
Dear Mr. O’Brian,
I do not think you can imagine, even with my help, the pleasure it gives me to write this letter, or the even greater pleasure I have had from reading the few O’Brian titles I have allowed myself thus far. Although I look forward to p
ublishing the entire Aubrey/Maturin series, nothing will compare to the almost guilty delight I take in simply reading. The publishing will be a satisfaction, and a good deal of serious work.
There followed an outline of the Norton proposal, which was ‘to publish THE THIRTEEN GUN SALUTE in hardcover at the same time that we launch the first two titles of the series in a trade paperback format’.[fn12] Their ultimate intention was to publish all of the series, both those already in print and those to come.
The editor’s attention had been drawn to the series in London, during a visit to the literary agency Sheil Land, with which Richard Scott Simon’s agency had recently amalgamated. During his flight home he read The Reverse of the Medal with mounting delight, and swiftly realized that Patrick had mastered to a wonderfully effective degree an almost entirely original means of withdrawing the curtain that divides us from our past.
The day after his receipt of this letter, Patrick responded with enthusiasm:
Many thanks for your very kind letter of September 21st. I am delighted that you should be publishing my naval tales and more delighted still that you personally should like them – it does make such a difference in the sometimes difficult relations between author and publisher. (Have you, in parenthesis, seen the recent Proust-Gallimard correspondence? It throws fascinating light on a connexion of this kind).
His only minor reservation lay in a suggestion for promoting the series as ‘better than Hornblower’. In his draft response, he explained that ‘I am after all aiming higher than Forester did and it may [P’s own deletion] be that John Bayley’s kind words on the blurb of The Letter of Marque and Binyon’s on that of The Far Side of the World’ might be preferable. The editor willingly conceded the reservation, declaring ‘I take your point about“different from Hornblower,” and it will be part of our job to suggest to the reader that there are pleasures awaiting him of which he, or at least Forester, had no conception.’
Ten years had passed since the series had last found an American publisher,[fn13] and Patrick could now look forward on a permanent basis to the transatlantic success that had so often appeared secure, only to elude him.
Meanwhile, The Thirteen-Gun Salute was published in the UK in October. Richard Ollard was delighted, on receiving a copy of the typescript, to find the book dedicated to himself. Reviews were overwhelmingly favourable, with the Oxford academic T.J. Binyon writing in the Sunday Times what Stuart Proffitt considered ‘the most extensive and appreciative notice, I think, any of the novels has had for some years’:
Considered as a whole, the sequence is an immense achievement. That O’Brian is not as well known as he undoubtedly deserves to be stems from the fact that he has chosen to write in a genre at present devalued (that of the historical novel) and has, moreover, taken as his subject the navy of the Napoleonic wars, thus inviting a comparison with CS Forester’s Hornblower series.
But other than that subject matter, the authors have little in common. Forester writes essentially straightforward adventure stories, whereas O’Brian’s novels are adult, subtle and complex … His heroes – the reckless extrovert Aubrey, and Maturin, introverted and suspicious, a perfect intelligence agent – are not static, but change and mature with time.
Patrick replied that he regarded the review as ‘one of the most percipient and valuable that I have had, and wonderfully encouraging. On the other hand it does mean that I have to go on writing at my very highest pitch.’
Throughout this time Patrick continued concerned by my forthcoming legal action, undertaken by Lord Aldington to rebut my accusations arising from his primary role in major war crimes perpetrated in Austria in 1945. ‘M telephoned Nikolai, cheerful & confident, busy answering the opponent’s case. Trial starts tomorrow & is likely to go on till Xmas, God help him.’
Patrick’s gloomy reservation was to prove more than justified by the event. The trial and its protracted ramifications represent another story which can only be touched upon here.
My mother remained an invalid throughout this time, her condition not helped by tensions aroused by the trial: ‘No English papers, & M is low about N.’ Three days later Patrick noted: ‘This was the day the Berlin Wall came down.’ None of us anticipated that this would eventually result in President Yeltsin’s personal intervention, granting me access to documentary evidence confirming that I was correct in all my principal conclusions condemned by successive judges on the English bench. As the trial drew to its close, so damaging were the indications of Aldington’s guilt and consequent perjury, that even Patrick began to entertain a momentary expectation that Judge Davies might, against every indication, prove honest after all. ‘The telephone rang in the evening – I had a sudden wild hope that it would be N with news of his success: M answered: a wrong number, & rude.’
On 1 December: ‘Then in the evening M telephoned Natasha: her news was so shocking that we could not take anything like full possession of it.’ The proceedings had concluded with the judge’s summing-up. He adopted the precaution of denying the jury access to the 41-day trial transcript and the hundreds of official documents on which the case depended.[fn14] This meant that the jury effectively had to reach its verdict on the basis of three days’ inevitably tendentious summing-up by Aldington’s counsel, followed by the weekend break, and then what amounted to a further three-day plea on Aldington’s behalf by the judge. In consequence, he contrived to persuade the jury to find me guilty, and above all (as he emphasized) ‘not to award Mickey Mouse damages’. To this they obediently responded with the record award of £1,500,000 (subsequently condemned by the European Court of Justice as a gross infringement of my right to free speech). Patrick wrote to me on 6 December with burning indignation:
My dear Nikolai,
Many a time have I tried to speak to you on the telephone, but always in vain, so I shall write the few words that I had so wished to say as early as possible: first that the case was heard before a slow, foolish, malignant fumbling old man, so prejudiced from beginning to end, from ‘self-styled’ to ‘wet’[fn15] and beyond that he made the earlier Dreyfus tribunals look impartial. And secondly that your reputation has not suffered – far from it – in the minds of any people whose good opinion is worth having.
With much love to you both and to the children
Yours ever
Patrick
Having learned that the governors of Wellington College had unanimously agreed to waive Alexandra’s fees for as long as she remained there, he and my mother promptly offered to meet our second daughter Anastasia’s school fees.
New Year’s Day of 1990 brought heartening news that the fiery spirit of the Colliourencques had not been altogether extinguished by encroachments of modernity. In his diary Patrick noted:
More gossip: Odette, having run into a sinless car at Argelès [the next village north of Collioure] calmed her trembling nerves with whiskey & Coca C. Then leapt into her car again, drove to Pierre’s love-nest & tried to kick the door in. Later Pierre came & said he was sorry: might he return?
The petite Odette’s dauntless spirit is exemplified by the fact that her faithless husband had in younger days been judo instructor to French paratroops garrisoned in the Fort du Miradou above the town.
Meanwhile, Patrick was experiencing one of his periodic bouts of self-doubt. By the beginning of March he had completed The Nutmeg of Consolation, and confided to his diary: ‘I wish I could think of another naval tale – just the bones. Writing them has become a way of life.’ In April his publishers forwarded a request for passages from his books to be included in a forthcoming Faber Book of Tales of the Sea. To this he replied that: ‘so long as I am not in the company of [Dudley] Pope or [Alexander] Kent, I do not mind appearing in the anthology.’ This might appear a little churlish, but for the fact that a certain class of reviewer persisted in assuming that all novels set in the time of Nelson’s navy were much of a muchness – which apparently did not amount to much. The editor, a retired naval officer, took grave o
ffence at what he considered Patrick’s excessive fastidiousness. He did not appreciate that the latter’s concern arose from a real apprehension that readers of the anthology might assume from the association that his were no more than semi-juvenile seafaring adventure stories.
More constructively, an editor at Norton came up with a suggestion that the naval tales should be accompanied by an illustration of a contemporary man-of-war’s rigging, etc. As others have advanced the same idea, Patrick’s response is interesting:
I think it would be a mistake to have a diagram of a ship. It cannot be done well in a small space, and anything else would throw the whole thing badly out of balance – would make it look technical, complex, boring. Ignorance of the smiting-line fairlead is immaterial; a painstaking search for it would be fatal to the narrative.[fn16]
However, this was not an issue momentous enough to fight over, and the diagram appeared in the US edition of The Letter of Marque.
Patrick O'Brian Page 39
