Patrick O'Brian
Page 55
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fn9. Patrick’s reservation was apt. The coy fashion for seeing phallic symbolism everywhere in prehistory has long been exploded, and the stone is now more plausibly considered an omphalos, or marker of a provincial sacred centre.
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fn10. The comparison strongly suggests that Patrick had at this time paid an earlier visit to New York, of which no record is known to me. Since it cannot have occurred at any time after the outbreak of war in 1939, we must, it seems, look to the sparsely documented period of his life before that.
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IX Pablo Ruiz Picasso
fn1. They feature, in a deliberate anachronism, as married in Master and Commander, which is set in 1801.
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fn2. Picasso’s home on the Riviera, where Torra-Balari visited him not long before his death.
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fn3. The last had appeared earlier in the year in The Cornhill, Spring 1974.
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fn4. This is a running theme in Liam O’Flaherty’s novel Skerrett, which Patrick read at an impressionable age.
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fn5. Patrick named the mountain (which is probably in reality the Canigou) under which the fugitive in the story passes ‘Malamort’: from malemort, ‘cruel death’.
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fn6. Patrick maintained such contact with members of his family as distance and long separation allowed. He and his brother Bun always exchanged Christmas letters, and his sister Nora wrote at this time to Joan: ‘My – Pat is 60 yrs old tomorrow! I must write to him next.’
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fn7. The two tasks marched in tandem, designs for lions and tigers appearing on the backs of Patrick’s notes on Picasso. The ark and its inhabitants now dwell in my library, where they continue much admired by grandchildren and visitors.
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fn8. Charles Gay in Patrick’s Richard Temple is partly modelled on the diplomat Charles de Salis.
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fn9. Cf. Patrick O’Brian, Picasso: Pablo Ruiz Picasso (New York, 1976), pp. 414, 420–23. I have been told that Brigitte Bardot was similarly frustrated in a subsequent attempt to acquire the fortress.
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fn10. Picasso, p. 126. Patrick’s chronology had become a little hazy, as Picasso’s first visit to Collioure was in 1953 (ibid., p. 413).
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fn11. Patrick later made a second Noah’s Ark, for my sister’s sons Michael and Robert.
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X Shifting Currents
fn1. My sole criticism of the book when in due course Patrick sent it to me was that Jack did not sufficiently employ the customary ‘my lord’ when addressing Lord Clonfert!
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fn2. My mother’s Aunt Joan and Uncle Austin – the latter I have suggested earlier as another partial model for Jack Aubrey. Of course, Patrick did not draw for inspiration on any one figure, but blended aspects of different people into the finished characters of his own creation.
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fn3. On showing his handsome set of Prévost’s great work to the American writer Ken Ringle in 1994, he remarked: ‘It’s an irreplaceable resource, but it’s never been translated into English, so few people know it exists.’ The volumes now occupy pride of place in my library.
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fn4. Her Christmas card that year bears a copy of an oil painting of Table Bay by John Thomas Baines, in which she enquires: ‘How does this fit your period?’
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fn5. My mother had been appointed local representative of the Royal Air Forces Escaping Society, her prime responsibility being assessment of the financial needs of beneficiaries.
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fn6. On 25 November 1975 Patrick recorded in his diary: ‘read some court-martials (Ld Camelford, particularly)’.
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fn7. Hopelessness, despair.
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fn8. I do not mean that Patrick envisaged Mrs Williams as a lively representation of my grandmother, but that his resentment on my mother’s behalf appears to have led him to assign her an unpleasant character.
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fn9. Patrick more candidly explained to his editor Stuart Proffitt in a letter of 13 November 1989 that ‘we came to a crossroads, looked the wrong way, & woke up in an ambulance’. My mother typed the letter evidently without comment!
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fn10. The Fortune of War, pp. 264–65.
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fn11. See Appendix B.
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XI Muddied Waters
fn1. The historical Cuthbert Collingwood features as Admiral Sir John Thornton in the novel. It seems curious to me that Patrick did not identify Collingwood by name.
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fn2. On 18 December Patrick recorded the impressive fact that ‘M. having checked her figures, states that this is the 51st book of ours that she has typed. Strangely enough we had never counted them, or at least not for many, many years. Fifty books! I am amazed.’ I cannot but compare this to the invaluable services rendered by Sophia Tolstoy to her husband.
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fn3. It will be recalled that Ollard had served in the Royal Navy during the War.
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fn4. King, Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed (London, 2000), p. 198. Later, in November 2003, the hitherto accurate Ben Fenton accepted this version of events, asserting that Patrick ‘quarrelled with his siblings, rejecting them to the point where he sloughed off the name Russ, by deed poll, in 1945. The new O’Brian stayed in vague contact with his son, Richard, then cut him off for good.’
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fn5. Although Patrick’s boyhood and adolescence had been largely unhappy, he retained fond memories of brighter interludes and associations. In February 1982, walking up to Manay he lost one of a pair of light gloves he had taken off. ‘Right vexed,’ he noted – ‘those gloves being a remnant of my youth.’
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fn6. For some reason of which I am ignorant, my parents’ estimate of Pantheon was, initially at least, unfavourable. Beside the contract’s heading ‘PANTHEON BOOKS’ my mother has written ‘I HATE’!
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fn7. My mother in particular appeared markedly ill at ease during her rare visits to our successive homes, which Patrick normally was not. I suspect it arose from an uneasy consciousness that she had been unable to provide a home for me and my sister during our childhood, and found our unconscious but palpable sense of independence troubling.
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fn8. Patrick possessed a much-thumbed copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is. With all the Kindes, Cavses, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Severall Cvres of it (Oxford, 1624).
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fn9. Their vineyard in the mountains, where Patrick frequently withdrew to write in peace.
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fn10. The lair of the feline prowlers was situated among drystone walls around the foot of the road up to the house, where it gave off a memorably foul acrid stench of urine.
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fn11. Terry Zobeck tells me: ‘I have a letter from Sol Stein to Ollard telling him that Stein & Day were turning down Treason’s Harbour – allegedly Patrick’s kind of book didn’t appeal to women and the major US chain stores wouldn’t sell it.’
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fn12. Over a year later, Bernard mentioned in a letter to their younger sister Joan that Patrick’s correspondence had become intermittent since their meeting in London, while correctly ascribing this to preoccupation with my mother’s persistent ill-health.
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fn13. The ruined fortress on the ridge above their house.
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fn15. Cf. my reconstruction of the event in Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist (London, 2004), pp. 152–6.
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fn16. This fear is most clearly evoked in Patrick’s autobiographical novel Richard Temple, wherein my mother’s fictional counterpart Philippa Brett abandons him for a glamorous wartime army officer. It will also be recalled how irrationally distressed Patrick became during a visit to Austria when my mother failed to write as often as he hoped.
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fn17. It had already featured in Master and Commander.
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fn18. Patrick’s working copy of Francis Huber, Observations on the Natural History of Bees: A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author (London, 1841). Dr Maturin will have possessed one of the earlier editions, published in 1792 and 1796.
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fn19. In Patrick’s partially autobiographical novel Three Bear Witness, the protagonist is an Oxford don engaged in research on medieval bestiaries – a literary project with which Patrick himself had been engaged.
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XII Travails of Existence
fn1. On 4 April 1985 Patrick noted that: ‘Dr T Lodge, the laborious translator of Josephus, wd make a fine subject for a biography.’ He possessed a copy in his library, whose title alone afforded him pleasure: The Famovs and Memorable Workes of Iosephus, A Man of Mvch Honovr and Learning among The Ievves. Faithfully translated out of the Latin, and French, by Tho. Lodge, Doctor in Physicke (London, 1632).
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fn2. On 21 November 1985 Patrick noted: ‘MEM In the appendix to Warren Dawson, under Pitt, the strong hint that J[oseph]B[anks] had at least something to do with intelligence.’ Blaine’s surname probably originated in that of Dr Gilbert Blane, whose Observations on the Diseases of Seamen was first published in 1785. Patrick possessed Blane’s account of seamen’s health during the Napoleonic wars included in Christopher Lloyd (ed.), The Health of Seamen: Selections from the Works of Dr. James Lind, Sir Gilbert Blane and Dr. Thomas Trotter (London, 1965), pp. 136–211.
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fn3. Pierre de Bordas was my parents’ dentist as well as friend.
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fn4. In 1992, in a response to an admirer’s polite enquiry into the origins of his literary career, Patrick explained: ‘You are quite right in assuming that I do not like giving my personal history on the dust-jackets of my books. Jane Austen went farther, omitting her very name from the title-page itself; and I think she was quite right. These things seem to me not only distasteful but essentially irrelevant: the Altamira cave-paintings would be no more moving if the painters’ names were known, and Anon’s huge musical and poetic outpouring would gain nothing if the poor soul were split up into individuals.’
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fn5. When an American reader bearing a name of Italian origin expressed incredulity that Jack Aubrey could have crossed the Atlantic without ordering a single flogging, Patrick began his draft response with the dampening words: ‘I see that English is not your first language.’
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fn6. That June Bennett had bought his copy of Emma at auction for £900.
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XIII Family Travails
fn1. In September 1995 Patrick wrote to Edwin Moore at Collins with a suggestion for inclusion in any future edition of their recently published Dictionary of Quotations. It was this apt admonition ‘(& it is a beginning that I use shamefully often)’ by Dr Johnson: ‘You are not to think yourself forgotten, or criminally neglected, that you have had yet no letter from me. I love to see my friends, to hear from them, to talk to them; but it is not without a considerable effort of resolution that I prevail upon myself to write.’
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fn2. As Terry Zobek points out to me, this contradicts Patrick’s oft-repeated dictum that the character of an author can bear no connection to his creation!
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fn3. Patrick’s contract provided for him to translate both weighty volumes of Lacouture’s book.
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fn4. Patrick’s distress was such that his flurried explanation left Bun a little perplexed as to whose ill-health was under discussion. It was of course primarily my mother’s.
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fn5. I suspect this reflects no more than Patrick’s concern not to discuss so painful an issue.
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fn6. King himself notes Patrick’s daunting workload from 1988 onwards (Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, p. 304).
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fn7. I imagine that Patrick’s allusion to Bayley’s ‘mistaken words’ reflects his dislike of being compared to another author. In this case I do not believe that he regarded J.G. Farrell as in any way inferior, but simply different.
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fn8. He often referred to the sanctimonious Binkie as ‘Pecksniff’.
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fn9. On 7 May 1989 Patrick recorded that: ‘We worked out tax papers, from which it appears that the UK unearned income was £5762 gross, unearned, & £17638 for writing & expenses £9225.’ In August of the following year ‘M showed me her account books – she has been working hard these last days bringing them up to date – & I see to my astonishment that we possess £90000+ in ready money. Shares of course have dropped abt 20%, but even so we can call Croesus cousin.’
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fn10. Bun’s unsympathetic refusal to comply with Patrick’s modest request appears a trifle hypocritical, in view of the fact that his autobiography withholds all reference to his own first wife (whom he had abandoned at the outbreak of war) and his two sons by that marriage, whom he appears to have treated with marked indifference. I am grateful to his son Charles for a detailed account of this sensitive matter.
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fn11. When Dean King’s lucubrations were first launched in the press, Patrick was for a while persuaded (wrongly) that they originated in Bun’s tactless work.
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fn12. In the event it was The Letter of Marque that they published in August 1990.
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fn13. Desolation Island had been published by the unsatisfactory firm of Stein and Day in 1978. On 13 August 1979 a contract was signed with Berkley Publishing Corporation for The Fortune of War (providing for a $5,000 advance), but nothing came of this.
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fn14. One juryman’s inability to read the oath at the outset of the trial revealed him to be illiterate. The judge pronounced the consideration irrelevant. He further declared, unprecedentedly, that he had personally investigated each juror’s background.
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fn15. Judge Michael Davies had instructed the jury that I was to be regarded as a ‘self-styled historian’. Patrick commented in his diary: ‘No more so than Gibbon, who did not even have a degree.’ Davies further suggested to the jury that they regard Nigel Nicolson, a leading witness for the defence who had fought with the Grenadier Guards from North Africa across Italy to Austria, as ‘a wet’. No record of Judge Davies’s military service during the War has yet been discovered, although he was eighteen in 1939.
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fn16. Patrick had evidently changed his mind since he wrote The Golden Ocean more than thirty years earlier. As my mother’s diary records, on that occasion he himself provided both the diagram of HMS Centurion and an accompanying list of sea terms. However, I assume these were requested by the publisher, with whose requirements he could scarcely quibble at this delicate opening of his momentous series of maritime tales.
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XIV The Sunlit Uplands
fn1. A typical diary entry at this time reads: ‘Poor M’s asthenia grows worse: she was v kind about Ch V in the morning, but by the evening quite worn out – inspissitated gloom with both, so catching it is.’
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fn2. Terry Zobeck reminds me that Patrick discusses Jane Austen’s earnings at some length in his introduction to the HarperCollins edition of Mansfield Park (The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (London, 1993). Indeed, slipped into Patrick’s copy of Jane Austen’s Letters is his three-page analysis of her finances!
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fn3. Terry Zobek comments ruefully: ‘The rarest of them all – I paid $1,500 for mine!’
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fn4. On 2 December 1991 Norton in the USA reported sales figures of 20,300 for the three hardcovers published, and 89,247 for eight hardbacks. This was of course only the beginning of Patrick’s astonishing transatlantic success.
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fn5. It was about this time that he even raised objection with Proffitt to the revelation of the year in which he was born!
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fn6. Stuart Proffitt reported back that: ‘Both Richard [Ollard] and I greatly prefer Clarissa Oakes as the title. It has a nicely Jane Austenish ring to it, and may encourage critics to make those pleasing comparisons with Austen again.’
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fn7. ‘M is much harrassed by this tax qu. – spent much time typing the figures – I disappointed her by not sending them off today – a reluctance to part with £10000 odd – is peace of mind worth it? Data is so slight – vague memories of municipal control in 92.’ In 1997 Patrick privately confessed to forty years’ perplexity over his tax status.
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fn8. Charles Gray QC, subsequently appointed a High Court judge.