Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  While identification of some of the sources of Patrick’s creation is of interest to a biographer, it can in no way detract from his achievement. The Unknown Shore (the title replacing The Voyage of the Wager) is a worthy successor to its predecessor, recounted with comparable vivacity, humour, and historical verisimilitude. Patrick’s imaginative creation flowed with remarkable speed. His pocket diary shows that he completed chapter 3 within twenty-four hours, the next four chapters within nine days, and the remaining seven over a further fortnight.

  Turning the page back a little, it was in the autumn of 1956 that I went up to Trinity College Dublin, where I was to enjoy some of the happiest years of my life. They swiftly resulted in a love of Ireland generally, and Celtic studies in particular. It was curious chance that led both Patrick and me, neither of whom possessed a drop of Irish blood, independently to succumb to the same infatuation. In the summer vacation of 1957 I returned for my second visit to Collioure, when the holiday there proved altogether different from my first disastrous visit two years earlier.

  An upper room had by now been added to the casot, in which we enjoyed what were often hilariously convivial evenings. Generous provision of their good vin du pays from the previous year’s vendange, together with a decanter of Patrick’s favourite cognac or Banyuls, played their part in the jollification.

  Patrick was particularly interested in my news from Trinity College Dublin, where I had established an elegant retreat in my spacious Georgian two-room suite on the first floor of number 2, Front Square. Recitations of poetry, conducted by each in turn, provided part of our festive entertainment, following my mother’s delicious suppers. I remember how we particularly relished the American boys’ book Rival Bicyclists by Captain Ralph Bonehill, published in Chicago in 1897 (where Patrick picked it up, I do not know). The climax of the tale lay in the young hero’s outspeeding his unscrupulous rival, who bore the unusual name of Lemuel Akers. The author’s constant emphasis on ‘spurting’, as practised by the speeding protagonists of the tale, evoked much lubricious mirth. Years later, when announcing his arrival in England, Patrick sent me a telegram signed simply ‘Lemuel Akers’.

  With my mother in 1957 (Willy Mucha’s portrait above)

  Life appeared sparklingly full of promise at this time. In the following summer of 1958 I brought my girlfriend of university days to stay for a month. Patrick and my mother were greatly taken with beautiful auburn-haired Susan Gregory, whom I described in advance as my ‘dauntless female companion’ (a description demurely applied to Maid Marian, in one of my favourite Robin Hood comic books). Her good humour, gentle tact and lively enthusiasm won them over completely. One day Patrick watched her through his binoculars returning along the passerelle below the castle, where a dashing young Frenchman tried to engage her in conversation. Patrick much admired the gracious way in which she deflected his advances. On another occasion, when I was unwell, he took her to see a corrida at the bullring beside the railway station (now sadly demolished). No bulls were killed at Collioure bullfights, and what Patrick particularly enjoyed were what he described to me as ‘spectacular exhibitions of cowardice’ evinced by local youths seeking to impress their girlfriends, by descending into the arena to snatch a flower placed between the agile creature’s horns.[fn8] At a critical moment, demure Sue delighted Patrick by rising from her seat and, placing her fingers in her mouth, emitting a piercing whistle of encouragement.

  Susan Gregory

  Later that year Patrick travelled to visit me in Dublin (his first visit since 1937), where he entertained us to a fine lobster dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel. At his departure he slipped me a generous £10 to take Sue out to dinner tête-à-tête. Visits to Ireland always tended to bring out his youthful optimism and engaging good humour.

  V

  In the Doldrums

  My Melancholy increases, and every Hour threatens me with some Return of my Distemper; nay, I think I may rather say that I have it on me … Dear Pope, what a barren Soil (to me so) have I been striving to produce something out of! … I find myself in such a great Confusion and Depression of Spirits, that I have not Strength enough even to make my Will …

  John Gay to Alexander Pope, October 1727

  (C. F. Burgess (ed.), The Letters of John Gay (Oxford, 1966), pp. 65–6)

  While my mother was married to my father she threw herself with enthusiasm into the world of Russian culture. She was happy to see my sister and me baptized into the Orthodox Church, attempted (with some success) to speak and write in Russian, and enthusiastically supported my father’s determination to ensure that I grow up bilingual. Despite his continuing resentment towards my father, Patrick shared this fascination, and my mother and he each seized the opportunity to visit the then mysterious ‘forbidden territory’ beyond the Iron Curtain. In the spring of 1959 my mother paid her first visit, when Patrick instructed her: ‘You will have to bring something growing from Russia, of course, as well as bags of the holy earth.’

  On 10 April she travelled first to visit her family in England. As was all too often the case, I fear her stay with my grandparents and me in Kent proved not altogether happy, as Patrick noted that: ‘She has never mentioned Nikolai, horde [her brother Binkie’s children], holiday.’

  On the other hand, she managed to see Richard, who as ever displayed much affection to his stepmother. ‘Darling P,’ she wrote:

  I had such a happy time with our dear Richard. He is so affectionate & confidential & handsome & properly dressed & short-haired. He is as good as gold. We spent five hours talking without a pause, & he told me lots about the Navy (they still have the 18 inch space for each hammock as in Nelson’s time) & frightened me terribly by darting me about swiftly in his car & took me to a coffee-bar. He has not changed, except that he has fined down immensely, & his voice is a deep man’s voice. He hopes to have a month for Collioure this year. Lord, I love our Richard. We talked so lovingly of you P., & agreed that we are vastly proud of being your family.

  Patrick was delighted with the news.

  A fortnight later my mother embarked in a state of high excitement on the Russian ship Baltika, sending Patrick the first of a succession of long letters describing her adventure. Although conditions on board were fairly spartan, she swiftly came to love the attendants and sailors for their kindness and good manners. She was proud, too, of the extent to which she found herself able to communicate with them in their own language. ‘Lord, what an adventure,’ she reported. ‘How unbearably loquacious shall I not be on my return.’

  In Copenhagen she was shown the sights by their old friends Charles and Mary de Salis, Charles being now attached to the embassy. As with all O’Brian expeditions, the purpose was as much to acquire useful information as for enjoyment. So far as the latter was concerned, my mother found it hard without her soul-companion. From Helsinki she wrote plaintively:

  P dear, it seems many years since I left home. I shall be shy. Lard, how happy I shall be if I ever do get home again which seems improbable in this utterly foreign & utterly unaccustomed life of mine. Glorious though it is, it will not happen again. In future I shall never desert Mr. O’Brian.[fn1]

  However, she was so entranced by the romance of finding herself for the first time in Russia, that she declared: ‘We should live in St P. I think. It is so inciting.’ During a trip on the Moskva, she piously dropped a piece of paper into the river bearing in Cyrillic letters the names of ‘Patrick and Mary O’Brian and Buddug’. Despite her romantic enthusiasm, however, she was not blind to relentlessly grim manifestations of ‘Big Brother’ attendant on the dourly regulated May Day festivities, combined with many signs of lamentable poverty. Compensation was provided by attendance at a crowded Easter service, the piety of whose congregation was patent and touching.

  For his part, Patrick kept her au fait with detailed accounts of domestic affairs in Collioure, and conveyed encouraging news of the imminent publication of The Unknown Shore in the United States. At home he had resumed wor
k on Richard Temple.

  My mother’s Russian voyage comprised the longest period of separation from her beloved Patrick during their long life together, and brought about a uniquely voluminous correspondence. It comprises a succession of deeply affectionate love letters, faithfully preserved by Patrick in my mother’s original STEWART BROWN TRAVEL CO. folder. On rereading them now they appear at first glance hard to associate with a couple who had lived together for twenty years, and been married more than ten. But as an old friend of mine, John Yeowell, remarked on reading the first volume of this biography: ‘it is as much a great love story as the life of a great writer.’

  Patrick and my mother standing proudly outside their home

  My mother’s eventual happy return to the little house in the vineyards was marked by the arrival the week before of the first copies of the British edition of The Unknown Shore. Patrick was gratified by its appearance: ‘The Unknown Shore came. It is not a very pretty book, but perfectly acceptable and it has such pleasant things about [The Golden] Ocean on its back – Times Lit Sup etc – which is opportune, welcome, encouraging.’

  Sadly, this time reviews were to prove sparse and generally unenthusiastic. It is hard to see why, given the chorus of approval which greeted The Golden Ocean. As Patrick conceded, it lacks something of the élan and inventiveness of its predecessor, but surely not to the extent of being unworthy of praise. Despite Patrick’s initial high hopes, it was not to be published in the USA until 1995.

  This lack of interest must undoubtedly have dampened his spirits at the time, and conceivably accounts for his own less than enthusiastic reaction on rereading the book nearly forty years later. The new edition had been proposed by Norton in the United States, leading him to undertake a fresh assessment:

  I finished the Shore (not without pleasure). It owes much more to the historical Jack B[yron] than I had remembered – indeed some important events (Cheap being marooned) were quite forgotten, perhaps because I did not invent them. It is not a v good book, but not discreditable either – perhaps rather dull.

  Nevertheless, at the time one admirer’s lavish praise for the book gave Patrick particular pleasure. From his mother’s home in Chelsea (to which he had returned, following completion of his national service), his son Richard wrote:

  Thank you a thousand times for my copy of the ‘Unknown Shore’, secretly I have been hoping for such a copy for a long time. Now I am immensely pleased and delighted with it; I have read it twice already and shall do so again for the book improves the more one reads it.

  In his long letter, Richard volunteered practical advice about buying a boat, which my parents apparently contemplated at the time. He went on to enthuse about his new car ‘Chloe’, in which he had overtaken a Morris Minor speeding at 50 miles an hour, and explained that he was presently engaged in a six-year course for a degree in engineering.

  By 1959 Patrick’s initially promising venture into seafaring fiction had ground to a disappointingly abrupt halt. Nearly ten years were to pass before circumstances would cause it to be unexpectedly resumed. Meanwhile, my mother’s Russian expedition had cost a formidable (for the penurious couple) £42 9s. However, as Patrick toiled intermittently at Richard Temple, she was able to supplement their income by continuing her tutoring of young people in the town for their examinations. One of these was Danielle Banyuls, a teenage girl requiring tuition in English literature in order to enter the University of Montpellier. She was taught by Patrick and my mother twice a week for two hours each afternoon. The course required mastery of three difficult texts, including Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. Their teaching proved as ever highly successful, and Danielle gained her place. Describing this to me in later years, she was astonished to learn that Patrick himself had never attended university, having found his exposition of the texts more profound even than that of her university lecturers.

  At the outset of 1960 Patrick’s career appeared to be undergoing another fretful period in the doldrums. Financially, The Unknown Shore had proved only moderately successful, and for the present it seemed that he had exhausted the congenial theme of naval fiction. The only work he had on the stocks was Richard Temple, but that was still proving hedged about with difficulties. It was as long before as March 1953 that he first conceived the idea of the ‘Chelsea novel’. Behind that in turn lay his story ‘William Temple’, written in 1951. The autobiographical element in the latter version was slight, reflecting little more than Patrick’s disappointment at having been unable to engage in active service with the French Resistance. Although the story is exciting and vividly written, it was never published – possibly on account of its awkward length, being too long for a story and too short for a novel.

  It does not appear that any manuscript or typescript trace of Patrick’s writing of Richard Temple has survived. This is unfortunate from the point of view of a biographer, since the story is profoundly concerned with his own evolution as an individual and an artist. Its writing involved much agony of spirit, which makes the persistence with which he pursued the task against all odds the more impressive. I think it safe to assume that the fresh work was autobiographical from the start: a conclusion supported inter alia by the substitution of his own first name Richard for the ‘William’ of the earlier version. The completed work is imbued with a deep sense of shame at perceived inadequacies of his former self: his lack of formal education, his early abject poverty and social inadequacy, the failure of his first marriage, and his jejune attempts to achieve success as an artist (in the story he becomes a painter, rather than author).

  It is equally clear that the dogged persistence with which Patrick conducted his long and frequently agonizing struggle to complete the work, in face of his own underlying revulsion at the prospect, combined yet further with discouraging responses from publishers, reflected the intensely purgative function of his task. The story is told in the form of Richard’s reflections on his earlier life while incarcerated in German-occupied France. His recurrent physical humiliations at the hands of brutal Nazi interrogators add to his sense of worthlessness. Despite this, he doggedly manages to withhold the information sought by his captors, and the story ends with Richard’s liberation by the French Resistance, and his dazzled emergence into a bright new world.

  Fortunately, my mother’s diaries provide revealing insights into the novel’s prolonged and arduous gestation. It was in March 1953 that Patrick hit on the concept of the ‘Chelsea novel’, after which he spent three months ‘internally working’. It was not until the end of June that ‘P. wrote those fatefull words “Chapter I”, & began the book.’ Three days later he ‘showed me perhaps ¾ of Chapter I of Temple novel: immensely impressed’. Although Patrick greatly valued my mother’s judgement, within a few days: ‘P. says he must find him another occupation: writing makes him feel too ill. He is looking terribly pale. Book has reached about 4000 words.’

  Ten days later, Patrick himself recorded that he ‘Worked spasmodically towards the end of Ch. 1. Is it any good? Even if it is (which I doubt) it is little more than a kind of preface.’ The struggle continued over the next two months, when in desperation he decided to send the completed chapter I, together with a synopsis of the planned whole, to his literary agent in the States. It must have seemed a forlorn hope, until a week later my mother delightedly recorded: ‘Wonderful post: Naomi to say dear H[arcourt].B[race]. will advance $750 for new novel (to be called Richard Temple): $500 when contract is signed, further $250 on completion of the book.’

  The contract was signed and the initial payment received … but the momentary excitement became as swiftly abated. ‘Walked after lunch round Cap Dorat; poor P. in despair when he thinks of having to write R. Temple.’ The ups and downs continued day after day: ‘P. steadily working now, morning & afternoon’; ‘Home, to find P. in despair: worry about Chap. II of book … After tea I read what is done of Chap. II’; ‘Poor P. worries about his size as a writer.’ Eventually, though, Patrick got into his stride, and on 16
January 1954 ‘P. finished typing R. Temple this evening.’ The typescript was despatched to America, with what high hopes may be imagined. By June they were summarily dashed: ‘Such bad news of Temple: poor P. HB want a book of short stories instead, & Collins put a ps on Naomi’s letter with advice to offer Temple elsewhere.’

  The cloud hanging over the rue Arago was partially lifted by a generous proposal forwarded by Patrick’s literary agent from the American publisher: ‘C[urtis]B[rown] to say Harcourt scraps Temple contract & will produce $500 advance on short stories.’ Yet the fact remained that all his hard work and mental torment had seemingly gone for nothing. Richard Temple, which in some ways meant more to Patrick than any other of his work, was it seemed doomed to remain stillborn.

  Yet its necessity to Patrick’s inner well-being would not go away. Five years later, in March 1959, ‘I begin Temple again.’ This time, at any rate at first, it seemed to go smoothly. Within two months he had completed four chapters. His agent liked the work, which she passed in its truncated form to his current American publisher, John Day. Now hopes were raised higher than on the previous occasion, as Day evidently exchanged contracts and paid an advance.[fn2] However, disappointment loomed yet again:

  John Day have done the dirty, as I rather expected they would. A man who begins a sentence with too, meaning also, is capable of anything. Naomi is very indignant, won’t repay the advance and thinks that Little, Brown might buy … It undermines my confidence a little …

  Although Patrick momentarily toyed with the idea of resuming work on Richard Temple, it seemed that his career as a novelist had come to a premature close. By good fortune, it was at this very time that an alternative source of literary income presented itself. Nine years earlier his agent Spencer Curtis Brown had approached the publisher Fred Warburg with the suggestion that Patrick was well equipped to undertake translation work from French into English. Nothing came of the proposal at the time, but now out of the blue Weidenfeld and Nicolson invited Patrick to provide a translation of Jacques Soustelle’s La vie quotidienne des Aztèques à la veille de la conquête espagnole.