The Belem outside Port-Vendres in 1991
Terry Zobeck has drawn my attention to an allusion I found in one of Patrick’s notebooks, whose significance I had overlooked. In May 1972 he kept a journal of a visit he paid to Ireland, which includes this tantalizing passage: ‘Dublin again, & I am strangely reminded of New York: but only by the old-fashioned mouldering squalor of many of the smaller shopping streets (so like upper 8th Avenue) …’
When could Patrick have visited New York before this time? His first recorded visit did not occur until the following summer of 1973, when the unprecedentedly substantial advance he received on being commissioned to write his biography of Picasso enabled him to travel to the States to view the artist’s paintings held in art galleries there.
His life from 1939 onwards is too fully documented for there to be any possibility of his having visited the United States during or in the aftermath of the War, and in any case before 1973 he lacked financial means for undertaking so expensive a voyage. Nor do my mother’s meticulously kept financial accounts record one, which must at that time have been conducted at their own expense. Yet the phraseology of his 1972 allusion unmistakably evokes personal memory, rather than a description based on hearsay or photographs. It seems that we must look to his pre-war years, presumably those following completion of his education in 1933.
A material objection to this suggestion is posed by the fact that he married at the beginning of 1936, after which he and his wife Elizabeth lived in considerable poverty. However, in 1945 she deposed that ‘BEFORE the war the Respondent was a Courier and spent most of his time abroad on business’. This suggests more than his sole recorded visits to Ireland and Italy, and it is conceivable that Patrick employed his ‘courier’ activities as a pretext to cover other expeditions less justifiable in the eyes of an impoverished and at times lonely wife.[fn3]
Patrick himself was fairly reticent when questioned about his youthful sailing experience, and there are trifling variations in what he vouchsafed on different occasions. The fullest and most measured account is that which he provided for the British Library Festschrift:
One of the compensations I have spoken about was the sea. The disease that racked my bosom every now and then did not much affect my strength and when it left me in peace (for there were long remissions) sea-air and sea-voyages were recommended. An uncle had a two-ton sloop and several friends had boats, which was fine;[fn4] but what was even better was that my particular friend Edward, who shared a tutor with me, had a cousin who possessed an ocean-going yacht, a converted barque-rigged merchantman, that he used to crew with undergraduates and fair-sized boys, together with some real seamen, and sail far off into the Atlantic. The young are wonderfully resilient, and although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on.[3]
In press and television interviews he provided further details. The yacht had previously belonged to the Duke of Westminster, afterwards to Patrick’s friend Edward’s cousin Arthur, who sailed in it on long ocean voyages. These details identify the yacht as the Fantôme II, belonging to the Hon. Arthur Ernest Guinness. It is pertinent to enquire how Patrick might belatedly have become aware in old age that the vessel had once borne that name – which it had not done since the aftermath of Guinness’s death in 1949 – had he in reality never enjoyed any connection with it.
Patrick’s ‘friend Edward’ was presumably Edward Taaffe, who was best man at his wedding in 1936, and dedicatee of his short story ‘The Dawn Flighting’ published in 1950.[fn5] I can find no evidence of their having maintained contact thereafter, following Patrick’s permanent move to France in 1949. Nor, despite enquiries with the Guinness family (some of whom I knew when at Trinity), have I been able to establish Taaffe’s connexion with Arthur Guinness. However, Taaffe is a good Irish name, and cousinship can be an elastic concept in Ireland. Mr Henry McDowell, the Irish genealogist, proposed to me the interesting suggestion that: ‘Ernest Guinness was said to be very kind and interested in his god-children – perhaps that is where Edward Taaffe fits in.’[fn6] This seems not unlikely, given the failure to discover a Guinness blood-relative of that name.
That Patrick ‘shared a tutor’ with Taaffe suggests the summer of 1933, when Patrick sat his external matriculation at Birkbeck College, London. Following his brief and erratic schooling, his father might well have accepted the necessity of professional tuition. As it was in the same year that Patrick paid his first visit to Ireland, could it be that it was Taaffe who invited him for his first visit to his homeland in 1933 – perhaps to celebrate completion of their examinations? A possible intimation that Patrick’s voyage occurred no later than 1933 may also be found in his mention that Guinness ‘used to crew with undergraduates and fair-sized boys, together with some real seamen’. Since Patrick was never an undergraduate or a ‘real seaman’, presumably he could have been one of the ‘fair-sized boys’.
A curious dream recorded by Patrick in his diary on 3 March 1980 reads as follows:
… so home & to an early bed where I dreamt so sadly of Taafe & Kathy. The Chelsea of 40 years ago was much the same but we were our now age: he wd not take the 1st step twds me, nor did he seem really pleased when I did so. She & I tried to make love, but I would not. They neither of them had their own faces, but their identities were the same.
That ‘we were our now age’ suggests that Patrick assumed Taaffe to be still living, a likely enough belief on the assumption that they were contemporaries. That he continued to bear his friend in mind is indicated by a mention in The Commodore (1994), where Patrick has Diana Villiers riding with ‘Ned Taaffe’s hounds in Ireland’. Five years later Taaffe’s death in a duel is mentioned in the unfinished novel on which Patrick was working at the time of his death.
One may question whether the hypersensitive Patrick would have risked public assertion of having sailed with Edward Taaffe in his cousin’s yacht, had the possibility existed of Edward’s or his wife’s being alive to contradict the claim if false. It might be proposed that either or both had died by the time Patrick came to mention his ‘friend named Edward’. However, by that time it seems unlikely that he possessed means of learning of such an event, while I feel in any case fairly confident that had he done so he or my mother would have mentioned so poignant a loss in their diaries.
That Patrick actively sought the opportunity of sailing in his younger days is confirmed by the fact that in 1946 he made formal application to serve in a whaling expedition, which to his expressed disappointment was turned down.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to discover whether Fantôme II ever sailed to New York before the War, when it seems Patrick first visited the city. However, it is not unlikely, given that Arthur Guinness took her on successive oceanic cruises, including a circumnavigation of the globe in 1923–24 and a voyage to Montreal in 1937.
While I am far from suggesting that the foregoing discussion is in any way conclusive, I feel equally that Patrick’s claim is by no means so demonstrably false as to be glibly dismissed as that of ‘a liar’. At the least, it illustrates the extent to which much of his life in the early 1930s remains too sparsely documented to permit of facile judgements one way or another.
Postscript
The 1937 volume of The Oxford Annual for Boys opens with a short story by Patrick (R.P. Russ) entitled ‘Two’s Company’. A couple of close friends, a Scot named Ross and an Irishman called Sullivan, arrive at a desolate lighthouse, where they are to be stationed as keepers for the ensuing three months. Their adventures involve disposal of a stranded whale by means of explosives, and their capture and domestication of a sea eagle and a skua. At first contented with their lot, they volunteer for a further term of duty. This time the tedium is relieved for a while by acquisition of a violin and bagpipes, with which they entertain themselves. Eventually, however, their solitary companionship descends into accruing mutual irritation. The tension increases o
ver several days, culminating in a ferociously mindless fight. This serves to clear the air, and for the final month their comradeship is restored.
I have often wondered whether Sullivan and Ross may not reflect Patrick and his friend Edward Taaffe. A few years later, during his wartime service with PWE, Patrick modified his originally German surname Russ to the Scotch ‘Ross’. Taaffe is of course an Irish name. One of Patrick’s most marked idiosyncrasies was his inability to keep company for any length of time with even the most longstanding of friends or close members of his family. Such enforced contiguity placed an intolerable strain on his nerves, which inevitably resulted either in an open quarrel or more usually ill-concealed anger.
Could something like this have occurred, had the two friends shared a cabin aboard ship on a lengthy cruise? The story was probably written in 1936, not long after the time such a voyage might have taken place. I am inclined to credit the hypothesis, although at present there exists no means of confirming it.
Footnotes
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Preface
fn1. This should not be taken to imply that I particularly approve authorized biographies, which all too often end up as hagiographies.
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fn2. A striking counterbalance is provided by the American Patrick O’Brian scholar Anthony Gary Brown. Lacking any biographical material beyond that contained in the published biography, he nevertheless politely but damningly shows that, on their internal evidence alone, barely any of the writer’s speculations stands up to critical scrutiny. See his ‘Still Waters: A Review of Dean King’s “Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed’, at Anthony Gary Brown’s internet 2009 Homepage – Saignon.
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fn3. Johnson declared that ‘nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him’ (Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ii, p. 22). He was of course exaggerating for emphasis, as he himself compiled biographies of people he had never met. Nevertheless, there is clearly an advantage in being able to picture with vivid immediacy the character whose history the biographer is recounting.
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I Collioure and Three Bear Witness
fn1. Cotlliurenca in Catalan.
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fn2. Soon after my parents had settled into the rue Arago, Bernardi painted the fresco depicting the grape harvest and fishers of Collioure, still to be seen in the restaurant on the ground floor of the house where Patrick and my mother lived. The yet more splendid fresco in the railway station is also by him.
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fn3. The numbers of the street have been changed since.
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fn4. For some reason the piece was not published.
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fn5. Incidents like this show that Patrick did not exaggerate when referring to ‘those screaming, tearing scenes that broke out three or four times a day somewhere along the street’ (The Catalans, p. 30). ‘How Mme Rimbaud ill-treated [her daughter] Martine: vicious slaps & howls,’ my mother recorded in her diary in October 1953.
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fn6. It is a curious fact that the local inhabitants of my parents’ homes in both Wales and France were for the most part monoglot speakers of indigenous tongues.
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fn7. Note the absence of houses in Correch d’en Baus (on the slope of the hill below the castle), where my parents were soon to build their home.
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fn8. This income was to become severely depleted in ensuing years.
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fn9. Patrick O’Brian Collection, the Lilly Library. Could the fact that Elizabeth carefully preserved Patrick’s letters, written at this most acrimonious of times, suggest that she may not always have nurtured the degree of lifelong detestation which has been posthumously ascribed to her?
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fn10. Early in the next month, Richard himself wrote: ‘I think my mother is finding it a strain in doing her job and looking after me. She has been very unwell this winter.’
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fn11. It appears from this that Power deserted Elizabeth almost immediately after their marriage, though I possess no confirmation of the fact.
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fn12. Patrick’s own book reviewing in later years was almost invariably sympathetically constructive in its criticism – sometimes, I felt, to the point of being overly charitable.
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fn13. Dunsany might have noted the idiosyncratic spelling ‘O’Brian’, which is rare almost to non-existence in Irish usage. I have shown in the first volume of this biography how Patrick adopted it entirely at random from a copy of a nineteenth-century marine insurance certificate (now in my possession).
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fn14. Dean King asserts that Patrick ‘put this to good use: to confirm his nationality, all he had to do now was circulate Dunsany’s review’. There exists no evidence whatever known to me that endorses this jaundiced assertion.
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fn15. ‘Auntie Vron’: my mother lived at Fron Wen.
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fn16. In Patrick’s most intensely autobiographical novel, the hero’s father is likewise dismissively ascribed a Liverpool-Welsh background in trade (Richard Temple, p. 28).
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fn17. Bronwen (‘White Breast’) is both a classic Welsh name and that of my parents’ cottage Fron (pronounced ‘Vron’) Wen.
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fn18. In November 1952 my mother ‘went to Port Bou & bought & sent off Christmas presents … 3 to Croesor Fawr’ (the Robertses’ farmhouse).
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fn19. In May 1950 Patrick observed ravens nesting near Collioure.
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fn20. What provoked this dismissive judgement I do not know, but Senhouse was in reality a dedicated sado-masochist, who engaged in a bizarre affair with Lytton Strachey.
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fn21. The short story ‘Not Liking to Pass the Road Again’.
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II The Catalans
fn1. In May 1951 Patrick received a puzzling, though welcome, cheque for £28 13s 9d from Oxford University Press. It was not until nearly two years later that he discovered it to be payment for a new German edition (1950) of Hussein, which was first published on the eve of the outbreak of war in 1939.
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fn2. Terry Zobek informs me that the New Yorker never published a story by Patrick, while Poetry Ireland published the single poem ‘Song’ in their April 1952 issue.
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fn3. There exists some sort of cosmic justice, however. In real life the dissolute maid of Le Puits departed in search of a customer who had made her pregnant, while the owner died of alcoholism a year later.
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fn4. On 30 May 1952 Patrick wrote: ‘the Tante (who, I think, has cottoned on to our dislike of Christian names) gave me a pâté – so good – and Mlle Margot a dish of sardines.’
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fn5. The recipe appears to have been inspired by The Way to get and to save Wealth, or the sure method to Live Well in the World; being the pleasant art of Money-Getting (London, 1788). Patrick generously gave me his copy for my birthday in 1972.
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fn6. When eventually the time came, Patrick died just under two years after my mother’s death.
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fn7. Lundy was the home of Gweir, mythical First Man and primal ancestor of the Britons.
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fn8. I still have one of these large sonorous bells brought back by my mother.
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fn9. A glass wine pitcher, in Catalan porró.
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fn10. A traditional fisherman’s knife, still available in Collioure shops (I retain min
e, given me by my mother during my first visit in 1955). Patrick once told me that they were employed by local smugglers in the mountains, for the charitable purpose of stabbing unwary customs officers.
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fn11. This detail, if Bob Broeder’s memory be accurate, represents a pardonable schoolboy embellishment. As my mother’s diary shows, no such meeting took place. Possibly Richard’s imagination was inspired by the banderilla my parents gave him.
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fn12. ‘Isn’t it true, Madame O’Brian, that in all reproductions angels always have curly hair?’
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fn13. The Revolutionary dictatorship was widely resented in the independent-minded Roussillon as an oppressive alien power, to be resisted at every opportunity – even to the extent of welcoming the Spanish army of occupation which attacked Collioure in 1793–4.7 Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, ‘The Roussillon does not talk about Paris. It talks about Barcelona’.8
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fn14. This reads uncommonly like a survival of the pagan practice of actual or simulated sexual intercourse to ensure fruitfulness of crops (Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, ii, pp. 98–104).
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fn15. ‘Moustisser’ may be a neologism coined from ‘moustique’, meaning something like ‘teasing or provoking the men like a mosquito’. Whether it was my mother’s invention, I do not know.
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fn16. A lurid claim (‘The secret life of Patrick O’Brian’, Sunday Telegraph, 1 March 2000) of an unconsummated love affair between Patrick and Odette (at the time of my writing this, an astonishingly youthful ninety-year-old) continues even now to arouse her indignant colère.
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fn17. Patrick also utilized a five-page description of the previous year’s vendange, which he compiled at the beginning of 1951. It appears intended for one of the short stories he hoped to have published about that time, which in the event never attained print.
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