In the summer I paid my annual visit to Collioure, which was as ever greatly enjoyed by the three of us. I am glad to find my mother writing afterwards: ‘Nikolai 29th [July] for only a fortnight because of PhD: he was delightful the whole time.’
At the end of the year she and Patrick travelled to England, where they stayed for the second half of December with my mother’s parents in Somerset. A highlight of their visit was a stay with my mother’s cousin Brigid and her husband Michael Roffe-Silvester, who lived in a ramshackle but exceedingly picturesque farmhouse in the valley of the Culm. Michael was Master of his own pack of foxhounds, ‘Mr Roffe-Silvester’s Hounds’, while his brother Peter was Master of the Exmoor Staghounds. Rural England is today being subjected to a tidal wave of uncontrolled building which appears set before long to extinguish forever the traditional countryside, which will eventually become accessible only through the evocative imagery of such resources as Hardy’s novels and Constable’s paintings. At the time of my parents’ visit, however, much of the traditional world continued little changed from that of Surtees and Trollope a century earlier. They enthusiastically attended the hunt: ‘Prettiest meet in the world, with Michael really stunning, lots of cherry-brandy. Sun all day & we saw 3 foxes.’
Such glimpses of a world so close in many ways to his beloved eighteenth century enhanced Patrick’s ever-brimming imagination, and are found transmuted into fiction in the opening chapter of Post Captain and elsewhere in the series.
Although little of solid moment had been achieved in 1965, it appeared largely a year of promise. Indeed, so ebullient had they become, that they indulged in a major extravagance during their visit to England, buying four silver plates for £137 10s, off which they regularly dined thereafter.
Like so much else in the cosy living room at Collioure, the plates found their way into Patrick’s literary creation. Early in his career Jack Aubrey decides to emulate Lord Nelson: ‘… I dare say I described those elegant silver plates he has? … Please could you go ashore and order me four …?’ When Stephen Maturin brings them into his cabin, Jack exults: ‘Here’s elegance, damn my eyes. How they shine!’Much later, when fallen into temporary financial difficulty, he exclaims with feeling: ‘… nobody could be poorer in reality than sailors in a ship without any stores – what crusts you may scrape together eat with more relish in handsome silver.’[fn16]
Unfortunately, unlike the silver, the generally optimistic outlook of 1965 proved short-lived, and 1966 was to prove something of a nadir in the couple’s fortunes. Superficially, the outlook appeared promising. Commissions for translations continued to provide a dependable income. The first five months of the year Patrick spent working on The Quicksand War, a well-informed history by Lucien Bodard of the French war in Indo-China. Patrick admired the author and his book, for whose translation Little, Brown paid well: $1,000 on signature and $1,500 on delivery. Completion was due by 1 September, but Patrick characteristically despatched it at the beginning of June. At the publisher’s requirement he skilfully abbreviated the two-volume original, and provided an excellent introduction. A week later he learned (in my mother’s words): ‘Bodard received with applause / relief, relief.’
The next commission was finished even more speedily. On 20 June he began work on Michel Mohrt’s novel The Italian Campaign, which he finished on 17 July. However, the speed of its completion did not reflect any enthusiasm for the task. As my mother sighed after its despatch, ‘Mohrt is the rottenest book we’ve done.’ Next came an improvement, in the form of a well-paid American contract for translation of the two-volume memoirs of Clara Malraux. Patrick’s remarkably disciplined approach to his work is exemplified by a note he wrote on 29 June: ‘120000 [words] at 1,500 a day is 80 days. In August, September & October there are 79, counting Saturdays & perhaps I shall have 10 in July.’
In the event he finished the work on 5 December, which was still good going. The payment was good, and by the end of the year they were respectably in credit.
Although there were many pleasant interludes, and work within and without the house continued unabated, my parents were both plagued by physical ailments. My mother was also beset by bouts of depression hard to avert, as well as the occasional frightening dream. In March: ‘Horrid nightmare I had. Nikolai was desperately ill in a foreign hospital & I could not find him.’
Translation of the execrable Mohrt upset Patrick, to the extent of triggering a momentary coldness between him and my mother. On 23 June (when she recorded my birthday), they enjoyed a convivial dinner with neighbours. However, my mother sensed that all had not gone well: ‘I irritated Patrick at dinner though. I MUST TAKE CARE AND WATCH OUT. So nervy & upset we are.’ As a precaution she headed successive weekly pages of her diary with the watchword: ‘REMEMBER TO SAY YES.’
This may sound unduly obsequious. In reality, however, I had long been aware that each intuited the other’s mood through a sort of osmosis. She perfectly sensed the underlying causes of Patrick’s withdrawal, which was his characteristic mode of dealing with real or fancied setbacks he could not for the present handle. As she continued in her diary: ‘I hate P having this inferior chap Mohrte [sic] – and I suppose the bulldozer does really affect us.’
Her reference was to the nearby construction of one of the regimented lotissements which continued remorselessly creeping up the valley. In the previous month my mother fretted that she ‘felt low about whether P should not have been in London all these years & whether he is happy here. Very low.’
What appeared more and more unjust in view of the tasteless building programme in the valley at the time was that an application on 28 September to build a garage and spare room on their newly acquired land was eventually rejected by the Mairie. They still had no bedroom for guests, nor anywhere to house their car. Their purchase of the adjacent land had been in large part motivated by a desire to make their little home more habitable. For the present they had had to be content with constructing a paved terrace beside the house. Furthermore, their financial predicament was once again dire. In July my mother had recorded with alarm: ‘I wrote to Barclays again for mon[ey]. We are so short. We went to P[ort]V[endres] & I got the last 25000 until mon[ey] gets through.’
However, the situation improved as the year wore on, largely owing to the diligence with which Patrick completed his translations. In September my mother spent ten days with her parents in Somerset. Unfortunately ‘It was a dreadfully sad time in England.’ This, I fear, arose from the fact that her parents tended to find her persistent well-intentioned attempts to assist them in their old age more of an irritant than a help, while her morbidly jealous brother Binkie (a sort of pantomime villain in the family) did his best when opportunity offered to poison the atmosphere.
Despite this, she returned with Patrick to stay in Somerset for the last three months of the year. This time they sensibly lodged for the greater part of their visit at a nearby pub, the Rose and Portcullis in Butleigh. There Patrick was able to continue his translation of Clara Malraux’s memoirs in peace, while they enjoyed the congenial company of my mother’s cousins the Slacks and Roffe-Silvesters. Another friend from the past was George Turner, head of classics at nearby Millfield School, who lived close by. A shy but friendly soul, he had nurtured a secret passion for my mother during her teenage holidays on Lundy Island.
Finally, the year ended on a promising note. Despite the expense of their stay in England, they found themselves some £850 in credit at the bank, despite having spent £285 on their protracted jaunt to England. Nor was their time entirely profitless from a literary point of view. Although Patrick was yet to know it, the time was drawing near when his familiarity with timeless aspects of English country life would be put to striking use. His observant eye was ever open, noting such delicate touches as ‘a strong frost & now in a dead calm the leaves fall, one by one or in little showers’; ‘A cock blackcap ate asparagus berries outside my (or rather Nikolai’s) window’ at my grandparents’ house.
/> VII
Master and Commander
When I cast my eye on the expanse of waters, my heart bounded like that of a prisoner escaped. I felt an unextinguishable curiosity kindle in my mind, and resolved to snatch this opportunity of seeing the manners of other nations, and of learning sciences unknown in Abissinia.
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ch. viii
After three months in England of enforced abstention from literary work, Patrick and my mother prepared to return to Collioure. Before their departure he experienced a bout of nostalgia for the days of his childhood. It was recollection of homes in the countryside which drew him, rather than those in town.
As has already been noted, it was in January 1967, on their way home from Somerset, that the couple drove from London to Ford Field Cottage at Crowborough, the last of Patrick’s boyhood homes, to which three decades earlier his parents had withdrawn following the failure of Charles Russ’s erratic medical career. There Patrick and his sister Joan had enjoyed a considerable measure of happiness.[fn1] The previously fraught relationship between Patrick and his father had by that time mellowed. Charles Russ appears to have reacted sympathetically to Patrick’s abortive attempt to gain a career in the RAF, regarded his promising literary successes with parental pride, and subscribed to a clipping service to ensure that he obtain a full set of book reviews. In 1934 Patrick dedicated his second book Beasts Royal ‘To my father’, while during his subsequent impoverished existence in Chelsea the cottage continued to provide a welcome haven.
Next they drove to Lewes, where Patrick and Joan had earlier lived as children with their stepmother from 1926 to 1929. Patrick and my mother had arranged to stay the night with a friend, but having arrived early they strolled in the water meadows by the Ouse, where as a boy he had whiled away spells of gentle contentment immersed in the natural world. Lewes had provided the happiest interlude in his otherwise largely monotonous and at times frightening childhood. His compensating affinity with nature made the countryside a secure and rewarding refuge, while his father’s regular absences at his distant London surgery can only have been a relief.
It would be fascinating to know what he told my mother about his youthful existence during this poignant visit. Could the grievous pang of nostalgia he experienced at Crowborough have arisen from a sharp contrast between blossoming hopes of early days and his current bout of creative stagnation? By 1940 he had published three books and a continuing succession of short stories, and entertained high hopes of pursuing a brilliant literary career. Then the War disrupted his creativity, although it provided compensating excitements. After that followed the four increasingly frustrating years in North Wales, with their mounting accretion of writer’s block and the depression it entailed.
That dark period seemed for a time largely banished, following their removal in 1949 to sunny Collioure. For several years Patrick’s books and short stories continued to be well received, and although disappointingly none had proved a bestseller, they were accorded considerable praise – at times by reviewers whose judgement Patrick respected.
These achievements had culminated with the publication of Richard Temple in 1962. For Patrick, that book and its predecessors Three Bear Witness and The Catalans were defining works: each well received by reviewers, and apparently foretokening an assured literary future.[fn2] Yet something had gone astray. Sales had been respectable, but not so extensive as to set publishers pressing for further work.
The character of the three books suggests an explanation for Patrick’s impasse. Each in its own way represented a work of purgation, and was in consequence overlaid with gloom. The travails which afflicted him in North Wales and Collioure were successively depicted through the eyes of world-weary, misunderstood and ultimately betrayed protagonists, whose real-life prototype is readily distinguishable. Finally, Richard Temple dissected the Patrick whose memory the author sought to expose and banish altogether: the penurious failed artist, who had deserted his wife and then been betrayed by his real love. Although the latter disaster never occurred in actuality, it nonetheless loomed as a fitful irrational fear.
Dimly recalled pronouncements gathered during my first stay at Collioure in 1955 suggest another unconscious influence on Patrick’s writing at that time. High tragedy was a staple of the works of great writers, he indicated, and I received dampening snubs for favouring authors who relied on rollicking characters and high adventure. At the impressionable age of nineteen, Charles Lever, Harrison Ainsworth and Rider Haggard ranked high among those lively writers whose works I devoured, but … ‘Nikolai, we do not call that literature.’
My subjective impression may be borne out by Patrick’s initial acceptance (he was later to revise this view) that his own adventure novels, The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore, were expressly intended for a juvenile readership (they are described as ‘for children’ on the dustjacket of Richard Temple). At the same time, although commissioned on this basis, it seems that a relaxed Patrick wrote them in the first instance, as do many good writers, for himself. In common with other readers, I still fail to find them generically distinct from the Master and Commander series. Like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Gerard, they are just as absorbing for adult as for juvenile readers. Patrick generally produced his best books at a publisher’s suggestion, while others composed on his own initiative often proved less successful. It seems he had yet fully to discover his true métier.
Richard Temple, that intensely autobiographical work, did not afford any avenue for a sequel. Nothing suggests that he seriously contemplated writing a further work of fiction during the half-dozen years that followed. He appears to have felt that he had exhausted all possibilities in that line.
Moreover, a further disincentive was afforded by the alternative course of accepting commissions for translations, which had happened to recommence at the time of publication of Richard Temple, and was proving a healthy source of income. In January 1967, Patrick had been commissioned to translate a second work by Simone de Beauvoir, Les Belles Images, which he completed at the beginning of March. This was followed in quick succession by an undistinguished biography of Louis XVI, and a work on Easter Island.[1] Neither of the latter books appealed to him, and in July he noted with relief that he had ‘finished disgusting E Island’.
As though to emphasize the drudgery of this relatively undemanding work, the weather in the early months of 1967 continued unremittingly grim (‘foul tramontane: the weather has been horrid this year,’ Patrick recorded as late as 19 May), and on the day he finished the de Beauvoir translation he wrote: ‘Depression: I note it to see whether it has any pattern, cyclical pattern.’
However, it was at this seeming nadir of his career that events combined to launch him onto an entirely fresh and absorbing departure. On 8 April1967 he received a ‘remarkable suggestion’. Robert Hill, editor-in-chief of the prominent US publisher J.B. Lippincott, had read and admired The Golden Ocean. C.S. Forester, whose Hornblower novels enjoyed enormous success on both sides of the Atlantic, had died a year earlier, and Hill perceptively singled out Patrick as a writer eminently qualified to fill the void. He invited him to submit an outline for a novel about an eighteenth-century naval commander – Hornblower’s successor, if not epigone, as it might have seemed at the time.
Patrick responded swiftly. On 6 May he ‘Wrote long & careful letter about projected book to C-B [Curtis Brown, his literary agent] for Lippincott.’ In the meantime, by odd chance, he received an invitation from Marni Hodgkin, an editor at Macmillan in London, who was preparing the fourth number of their Christmas annual Winter’s Tales for Children. She suggested that Patrick write a short story for inclusion in the coming Christmas edition. For this, he cleverly adopted the device of composing what is effectively a missing chapter from The Unknown Shore. Characters and setting thus being ready-made, he began writing on 20 April, and laid down his pen on 25 May.
The story, to which
Patrick gave the title ‘The Centurion’s Gig’, slots seamlessly between chapters 5 and 6 of The Unknown Shore. (It is perhaps surprising that, so far as I am aware, no publisher has thought to do so.) Given the picaresque nature of the novel, interpolation was not difficult. The Wager is discovered tacking in a placid and all but windless ocean, some 20 leagues off the coast of Morocco. After a close encounter with an inquisitive whale, the heroes of the story, having become detached from their vessel in the visiting gig of the Centurion, escape an attack by Barbary corsairs, whose menacing polacre is driven off in the nick of time by the arrival of the Wager’s sister ship, the Tryall. (This encounter is echoed in Jack Aubrey’s repulse of an Algerine galley in chapter 4 of Master and Commander, written in the same year.)
However, interest is primarily sustained by lively and humorous dialogue, together with the happily contrasted characters of the protagonists. The similarity between Jack Byron’s companion Tobias Barrow and Jack Aubrey’s friend Stephen Maturin becomes more apparent in the short story than it was in the novel, as this extract illustrates. (It is also intriguing to note that the story brings Jack and Toby from The Unknown Shore together with Peter Palafox from The Golden Ocean.)
‘I will just hurry downstairs and bring up my little net and a jelly-bag,’ said Toby. ‘With so placid an ocean it is possible, just possible, that we may light upon yet another pedunculated cirripede.’ ‘Would he be making game of us, now?’ asked Peter Palafox, who was very quick to resent anything like an affront. ‘Never in life, upon my word and honour,’ said Jack. ‘You would never believe what a learned cove he is – reads Greek for the joy of it, has filled our cabin with curious flayed monsters in spirits of wine, and has never spent five minutes of daylight below since we left the chops of the Channel in case he might miss some sea-fowl, in spite of being as sick as a dog every time we meet the slightest hint of a sea. And now ever since we have reached these latitudes he has spent every night in the long-boat, staring at the things that light up, like a cat at a vase of goldfishes.’ ‘Well, I honour learning, the Dear knows,’ said Peter. ‘So he’s not the great seaman, at all?’ ‘Lard no. He had never seen salt-water, never smelt the bilges of a ship, till I brought him to Portsmouth at the beginning of this commission. He is my particular friend, you know – you should see his prodigious collection of serpents at home – and I have brought him into the Navy by way of making his fortune. But I should never call him a seaman: no. He looks upon the whole ocean as a museum of natural curiosities; why, the other day he desired the first lieutenant to put the ship about because he fancied he spied a turtle. I try to keep an eye on him and make him understand our ways, but he’s in the moon three parts of the time, parsing his Sanskrit verbs.’
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