Aside from such material interruptions, Patrick continued financially largely dependent on translation work. Over the winter of 1969 to 1970 he translated Robert Guillain’s Japon: troisième grand. This he fortunately found ‘exceedingly interesting & literate’, although ‘very hard to put into running English’. Nevertheless he completed the 110,000 words within three months: ‘In 2 bouts I finished Japon: it was a very heavy task indeed.’
No sooner had he completed this than he was commissioned to provide his third translation of a work by Simone de Beauvoir. Patrick fortunately entertained a high respect for her reputation, and was concerned to do her work justice. A meeting in Paris was arranged in April, which led to a continuing friendship. However, even this three days’ separation from my mother distressed him, and he wrote in a letter he gave her on his return:
Dearest M. You brood dark unhappy thoughts: they are essentially baseless & they arise from the old, unfounded impressions of disseminated guilt that your childhood was bathed in – unscrupulous, insecure people can easily make the sweet-natured young feel bad & inadequate, & those feelings can come to the top in moments of stress. I am not much of a creature, whatever in your kindness you may say, but such as I am, with all my faults, I am yours P x.[fn3]
Throughout this time he also continued working on Post Captain, for which he signed a contract with Lippincott in the US in February 1970, and with Collins in England in April. Despite this, he suffered from continued misgivings, lamenting in June: ‘PC is sadly twee & knowing – pastiche, too sub-Austen. But how can I tie in the new beginning? I sat down to write it, but ran aground on technical trivialities. What was the armament of a 28 gun frigate in 1801? 9lbers?’
Recurrent bouts of writer’s block plagued him. It was probably in an attempt to deflect this, that at the end of May and beginning of June 1970 he and my mother paid a visit to Vienna, where they came to know two charming elderly aristocratic Austrian ladies, the Princesses Schönburg and Auersperg. Close friendships developed, and shortly after their return to Collioure Patrick returned a fortnight later to stay as a paying guest at Princess Auersperg’s magnificent Schloss Goldegg outside Vienna. His hope was that the change of scene would serve to detach him from pressing worries and distractions at home, enabling him to break the back of the still troublesome novel.[fn4]
Unfortunately, although he applied himself with wonted diligence, further unexpected considerations arose to disturb him. His account of the incipient love affair between Stephen Maturin and Diana Villiers owed much to the troubled days of his own furtive romance with my mother on the eve of the War. As he confided to his diary on successive days in July: ‘I am tempted now (10 pm) to start the piece with D[iana]V[illiers] & S[tephen]M[aturin] at the ball, but I need to be on top of my form’; ‘I wrote the piece about the ball quite well I think’; ‘M[ar]y obvious parallel to DV: a temptation to push it too far (facility etc) must be resisted.’[fn5]
To my mother he wrote: ‘Is my DV credible? Can you speak of naked motives without making your character odious? Is the technique of never seeing her from the inside valid? Is the use of SM’s diary a solution of facility, weak?’ It seems that relations between Maturin and Diana Villiers were so enmeshed in Patrick’s mind with his own clandestine relations with my mother in 1939–40 that he was not entirely able to disentangle the two. ‘I have mucked up the SM–DV intrigue, probably, but at least there is something to work upon.’
Before long Patrick was finding the separation from my mother all but intolerable:
No word from M. This seems to me inhuman & I wrote her a pretty ignoble blackmailing letter. Spirits extraordinarily up & down – mostly down – a strong sense of ill usage … I read M & C, perhaps too quickly. It seems poor thin stuff to me.
Patrick’s ‘pretty ignoble blackmailing letter’ survives, and is worth citing for the insight it provides into a surprising aspect of their intensely close relationship. Although the couple were now in their mid-fifties, Patrick clearly continued as much in love with my mother as he had been thirty years previously – or indeed would be thirty years later:
Saturday
You said you would not write, and I did not believe you: when I found no word here after those days and days of driving I was strangely shocked, and your one, cold dutiful note of the 22nd disturbed me even more. The lunchtray came up just now, and when I realized there was no letter on it I pushed the whole thing aside: all the more since yesterday was the only moderately cheerful evening I have spent for God knows how long – shopping with Heinz and Eve, playing bridge with Princess Schönburg – and since I spent this morning sending you a bauble for our silver wedding day. It seemed impossible that our minds should not have crossed.
Sometimes you have said that I do not speak clearly, and it is true: I distrust words and I value indirection too highly. But I will say this as directly as can be – if you think my writing worth a straw, do not keep me in this state. While expostulations, harangues and pleading drift between me and my paper I can do nothing but hack work, and that only with a grinding, inefficient labour.
Our relationship is vital to me. Write kindly if you have kindness left: tell me plainly if you have none.
My mother’s side of the correspondence has not survived, so one can only surmise what led her to respond in so apparently perfunctory a manner. Could his cheerful and chatty correspondence have led her to think that he was enjoying himself rather too much without her? Did she herself suffer from depression in his absence? Was she ill, as was all too often the case?[fn6] Fortunately, harmony was restored when they were eventually reunited, and Patrick found their ‘House so much prettier than I had remembered.’
Although he applied himself undeterred to his current literary commissions, he continued over ensuing weeks assailed by misgivings and bouts of depression. In February The Golden Ocean had been republished (with Patrick’s minor corrections) by Macmillan, and in October Penguin Books agreed on paperback publication. Unfortunately, however, sales of neither proved satisfactory. Macmillan in consequence declined to republish The Unknown Shore, and eventually Patrick received disquieting news that their remaining copies of The Golden Ocean were being pulped.
While in the summer of 1970 much of this remained in the future, Patrick himself expressed dissatisfaction with The Unknown Shore, which as has been seen he regarded as too derivative from the historical record, and generally less inspired than its predecessor. This in turn may (at least in part) account for what most readers will surely consider exaggerated doubts about the merits of his sequel to Master and Commander. In September he noted: ‘We decided to go to Minorca when the money comes.’ Nothing came of the project, which conceivably reflected an additional scheme for the recovery of inspiration.
Further signals of Patrick’s continuing low spirits very likely account for the abandonment of his diary for the three years covering 1971 to 1973. It was his regular tendency to preserve a careful record of his activities when his affairs appeared promising, and to abandon it when they did not. Thus, he kept a lively journal for the first nine months of his and my mother’s stay in Wales. Their withdrawal to the mountain wilderness presented so exciting and promising a project that Patrick was concerned to preserve a detailed account of their adventures. This he did, and most entertaining reading it affords. However, when after some months a protracted bout of severe writer’s block set in, he abandoned the project. It was surely no coincidence that he made his momentous decision to keep a daily journal in 1968, the year he began to fulfil Lippincott’s magical commission to write Master and Commander. As mentioned earlier, although this invaluable record was regrettably stolen at the end of Patrick’s life, we know from a subsequent diary entry that he regarded 1968 as an (if not the) annus mirabilis of his life, when he researched and wrote Master and Commander.
In January 1971 Patrick was cheered by a proposal from Collins’s Children’s Books Department to write a brief explanatory account of British warships during t
he Napoleonic wars. This was naturally a project easy for him to fulfil. He received a welcome advance of £300, but publication was oddly delayed until April 1974, when he noted: ‘Men-of-war has just arrived, a pretty little book – pictures wonderfully reproduced but some dreadful blunders, mine or the printer’s, that make me really low.’
In March Patrick returned to Vienna, this time accompanied by my mother. Sadly, the change of scene once again proved no recipe for success, as he explained on their return in a letter to Richard Ollard, his valued editor at Collins:
What a long time we have been out of touch; and it makes me feel guilty, because if it had not been for the strike I should have told you months ago that Post-Captain was not coming along as well as we could have wished, and that I should find it very difficult to keep to my contracted date of March 25th.
I was ill in Austria – Vienna was nearly the death of us both – but since we have been back the right flow has returned and I am quite pleased with the chapter I finished yesterday. At this rate the book should be finished by midsummer.
At the moment Jack Aubrey is being harried by tipstaffs: but you know although arrest for debt was so usual, I am sadly ignorant of the essential processes – the rules of the game – I wonder whether you are acquainted with any succinct account of the law as it stood in say 1800.
Austria was not all pills and physic, however, and among other things we heard a most magnificent Fidelio, and a Mozart mass in a perfect little baroque cathedral in the country.
In June I became engaged to Georgina Brown. Patrick and my mother sent enthusiastic congratulations, eagerly inviting us to Collioure. We arrived by train at the end of July to an excited welcome. Georgina proved a great favourite. As lively as she was beautiful, she was for the most part tactfully content to sit demurely listening when the conversation became overly intellectual. However, at one point she glimpsed an opportunity to obtrude her own contribution. Patrick was discoursing about the Indian sect of Jains, who among other customs are said to sweep the ground before them as they move about. ‘Oh, I know,’ exclaimed Georgie: ‘they want to make sure they don’t tread on any minute orgasms!’ On Patrick’s and my mother’s looking askance at this odd explanation, she blurted out: ‘Oh, no – what I meant of course was “minute organs”!’ There followed a moment’s mute mystification, followed by much laughter. Although many who met Patrick found him daunting and withdrawn, in private with his family he was a continual source of merriment – not infrequently, infectiously childish.
Another incident I recall from that holiday was distinctly alarming. As I shall have regular occasion to mention, both my mother and Patrick were irredeemably appalling drivers, who on innumerable occasions escaped death by a hair’s breadth. One day they took us for a jaunt in their little deux chevaux up the mountains to Le Perthus, on the Spanish frontier in the Pyrenees. At one point during our journey we found ourselves climbing a mountainside on a narrow road with a precipitous drop unnervingly close to our immediate left. After a while Georgie, who was sitting beside me on the back seat, whispered that she was convinced there was something wrong with one of the rear wheels. Not being a driver myself, I had noticed nothing untoward and tried to reassure her. Eventually she whispered that she was too frightened to continue, which I promptly explained to Patrick, asking if we could stop to check the wheels. Telling us firmly that there could not possibly be anything wrong, Patrick reluctantly stopped the car, and we gingerly descended. For once he had to admit himself at fault: all but one of the nuts had fallen off the bolts holding the outer rear wheel in place, while the remaining one had also begun working itself loose! After replacing the wheel, we resumed our journey without further mishap.
Following our departure after a happy holiday in Collioure, Patrick received encouraging news concerning Post Captain. Both his literary agent Richard Scott Simon and editor Richard Ollard expressed enthusiastic approval, the latter writing: ‘I do think it is a superb piece of work and I cannot too much admire the way in which you combine inventiveness with fidelity to detail and, like Raymond Chandler, contrive to criticise ideas and surprise the reader into thought at the same time as you are dazzling him with narrative and descriptive skill.’
This was gratifying, but disappointments continued. The advance from Collins was respectable, but scarcely princely, being £400 on signature and £200 on publication. In the USA Lippincott pointed out that the 165,000-word text far exceeded the contractual length. Equally, the editor accepted that: ‘Your book is so beautifully structured he does not feel that large pieces could be taken out without damage to it.’ Eventually these frustrating issues were overcome – not least in consequence of a rapturous endorsement by the historical novelist Mary Renault, received in July 1972:
MASTER AND COMMANDER raised almost dangerously high expectations; POST CAPTAIN triumphantly surpasses them. Mr O’Brian is a master of his period, in which his characters are firmly placed, while remaining three-dimensional, intensely human beings. This book sets him at the very top of his genre; he does not just have the chief qualifications of a first-class historical novelist, he has them all. The action scenes are superb; towards the end, far from being aware that one is reading what, physically, is a fairly long book, one notes with dismay that there is not much more to come.
I sincerely hope that reviewers will remit their current obsession with psychopathology, to give this brilliant book the acclaim that it deserves.
Generally speaking, this being a biography rather than a literary critique, I leave evaluation of the qualities of Patrick’s writing to his readers, and confine myself in the main to noting intriguing personal touches embedded within his fictional creation. The affectionate Sussex setting at the beginning plainly derives from Patrick’s largely happy childhood days in and around the lovely Georgian town of Lewes.[fn7] The hunting Dr Vining (Post Captain (London, 1972), p. 15) is borrowed from my mother’s grandfather Dr Francis Wicksteed, who in the latter half of the nineteenth century was often diverted by the attractions of the local hunt when riding to visit patients in his practice. Patrick was much taken by the tale of the horse’s fart (p. 39), which I had once recounted to him. Jack’s escape from France by the pass at nearby Le Perthus disguised as a bear (pp. 86–96) doubtless owes something to those participants attired as bears who had delighted Patrick years before at the Mardi Gras Carnival in Collioure. The amiable Captain Azéma (pp. 115–25) acquired his name from the proprietor of the original vineyard bought by my mother for their future home.
The glowing account of Stephen’s castle in Spain here includes details drawn from Patrick’s fondly imagined plans for an eventual extension to their house. Although its construction was not to achieve fruition for another fifteen years, he had begun planning it in April 1969. As Jack explains to his tiresome mother-in-law: ‘… the most romantic thing I ever saw was … the orange-tree in Stephen’s castle … this orange-tree was in a court with arches all round, a kind of cloister …’
Such also was one day to be Patrick’s ambulatory. Among many characteristics shared with his creator, Maturin is a devotee of apiculture (pp. 339, 353). The Dover taxidermist Griffi Jones (p. 351) acquired his name from the man who drove Patrick and my mother through Cwm Croesor to their little Welsh cottage in 1945. These and other borrowings confirm the extent to which much of Patrick’s own life passed into his novels. Obviously many novelists use matter from personal experience, but in Patrick’s case I feel confident that this afforded means of inextricably melding his own experiences into his literary creation.
Patrick’s Questar (July 1984)
Reverting to 1971, when in July Georgina arrived with me for her first visit to Collioure, I had brought with us a newly purchased astronomical telescope, which we heaved with difficulty in its trunk-sized box from train to train en route. Patrick at once espoused an enthusiastic love of star-gazing. In those days there was little or no light-pollution in our otherwise empty valley at Correch d’en Baus, so that ast
onishing panoramas of the night sky were always visible save on the occasional cloudy night, with many shooting stars coursing smoothly among their fixed brethren. He proved equally delighted by the opportunity the telescope afforded of gazing into the sitting room of a lotissement some distance away. Of course, we could only see and not hear, which provoked much jocular speculation about the personal lives of our happily unwitting neighbours.
Patrick, like Maturin, was a keen natural scientist. I imagine he had always nurtured curiosity about the night sky, but it was my telescope that kindled his devotion to serious astronomical observation. Not long after our visit he purchased his own instrument in consequence of an advertisement in the Scientific American, to which he had long been a subscriber. Powerful as mine was, it was outshone in almost every respect by the Questar. Not only was the new acquisition compact enough to be housed in a modest portable case, but by connecting it to the household electricity it constantly moved to correct the effect of the rotation of the earth. In consequence a single heavenly body might be kept under observation without continual readjustment. However, whatever envy it provoked in me during ensuing years is now sadly stilled, as the faithful Questar eventually passed into my possession. (It incidentally surprises me that Patrick never bought a microscope.) I would emphasize that his enthusiasm for sky-gazing was no dilettante pastime. Thereafter the house became increasingly littered with notebooks and loose sheets of paper covered with baffling equations and cryptic calculations.
In September he was faced with a momentous professional decision, when his agent Richard Scott Simon decided to leave Curtis Brown and set up an agency under his own name. Patrick loyally decided to go with him: a move he never regretted. Writing to Simon, Patrick added his wish, despite the burgeoning success of his naval novels, to continue with translations ‘if only as an insurance against sterility’. This further disposes of the suggestion that he regarded translation as mere drudgery, imposed solely by the need for a regular source of income.
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