Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  He found Pallarès’ house ‘no longer inhabited – was obviously big, rambling, presumably a court in the middle’, and sketched a plan. He and my mother found lodgings in the café Augustin, kept by a descendant of Pallarès. There they found old men playing cards and speaking Catalan:

  As we drank, we watched mules. The way they ride them is to perch high on the immense panniers (made in one piece, slung across & held with a ? breastband & certainly a crupper) sitting on the beasts withers. One I saw was shod in front with rubber, perhaps from a tyre.

  Patrick possessed an acutely perceptive eye for local life and landscape, and his prodigious memory and detailed notes enabled him to bring Picasso’s early days vividly to life:

  Going down to Tortosa by way of Prat del Comte we followed Pic’s steps I believe (more or less, because the old road mule-track by the stream can sometimes be seen at a distance from the new good, but enormously winding modern road. It must have been an heroic walk, up & down, but mostly up, rising in all I suppose 1000–1500 ft … thro narrow defiles, crossing the stream by fords. The trees were a curious pine (? Aleppo) & I saw some mistletoe on them, with here and there arbutus, lentiscus, rosemary undergrowth. Even in the least inhabited places, olives, beautifully terraced, & almonds. Some sheep. A large herd of black & white goats, far away, against bare rock by the river.

  Quite suddenly we dropped to the Ebro, by a noble dam, & there were oranges everywhere, groves of them, with a good deal of fruit still, a splendid colour in the sun.

  Glimpses of local life were jotted down between his notes, suggesting the eye of the artist (Patrick included several rough sketches and plans) as much as that of the writer: ‘streets [of Horta] too narrow for cars mason’s huge jar as reservoir’; ‘small dog riding on mule, master walking’; ‘Little brown pigs crossing the road’; ‘the abandoned railway, with its stations standing bare – no rails’.

  At Peñiscola they stayed at an inn ‘which is kept by the rudest ugly fat bastards I have ever seen even in Spain’. As though this were not affliction enough, ‘My bed stank of gambas [prawns] all night. At one point I rose in case it should be me, & washed heartily, but no – every time I neared the sheets (the night was cold) the vile reek met me.’

  On they drove southwards, much of the journey dull (Patrick noted the lack of birds) and even dangerous, with ill-driven and ill-lit columns of lorries carrying fruit thundering along the roads. However, the dramatic landscape of Andalusia – ‘brilliant snow on the S. Nevada’ – proved gratifying, and on 15 March they arrived at Malaga. It was here that Picasso was born and spent his early childhood days. Patrick made his usual careful plans and notes, but although he was to make good use of what he saw in his book came away largely disappointed with his visit. ‘A poor dinner: early to bed & away from this vile town (& yet I do not dislike it either: but such a waste of hope) tomorrow.’

  By this stage Patrick had begun to feel he had seen more than enough for his purpose, and the long drive home was punctuated with complaints about dirt, poor roads, poverty, and alleged examples of Spanish bad manners. He was consoled at this stage by observing many unusual birds, but it appears that his enthusiasm for absorbing the atmosphere of Picasso’s youth had palled, and he was anxious to get back to writing.

  As ever a considerable amount of mail awaited their return, and Patrick seized eagerly upon letters from Richard Scott Simon and Richard Ollard. Each impressed on him as tactfully as possible the need to make a fairly drastic abridgement of his first chapter. I have the original typescript beside me, and there can be little doubt that their detached editorial view was the wiser one. After living in Catalonia for nearly a quarter of a century, immersing himself in its social life, culture and history, Patrick was able to draw on a massive fund of information which he was at first unable to resist imparting. Despite the considerable amount of labour it was now suggested he should discard, he accepted their advice with remarkable equanimity, commenting only: ‘Some objections to the book (I had wanted only praise) but some kind words.’

  Meanwhile, during Patrick’s visit to our house in Wales I had discussed with him a literary project of my own. The British government, blithely unaware of the hornet’s nest it would one day unleash, had begun releasing documents relating to the Western Allies’ forced repatriation in 1945 of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens and other helpless victims to be killed, tortured and enslaved by Stalin. During my youth within the Russian émigré community I had heard individual stories of this dreadful tragedy, but it was only when a friend now drew my attention to the documents that I swiftly realized that the cruel policy involved numbers of victims and complex political considerations far beyond anything I or anyone else had hitherto imagined. With Georgina’s loyal support I had withdrawn our modest savings from the building society to pay for photocopy ing thousands of documents in the Public Record Office. This expense was primarily motivated by fear lest the government appreciate the dangerous revelations likely to ensue, and withdraw the material from public access. At the time my misgiving might have been dismissed as melodramatic fantasy, but in the event it was proved to be prescient even in excess of my early fears.

  Based on these and other preliminary researches, I sent a draft outline of a proposed book on the subject to a literary agent recommended by a writer friend. After the disaster of seeing our house burned down, there now appeared an upward turn in our fortunes. Patrick, who as ever displayed keen interest in our activities, recorded in his diary at the beginning of April:

  Nikolai … has signed a contract to H[odder] & Stou[gh]ton, an excellent one, I think, and with an advance of £3,500. I am amazed, & very pleased. (And I am pleased not to detect the slightest tinge of jealousy: dismal surprises, so discreditable, often lie within: but not this time at all events.)

  Three weeks later he expressed pleasure on receiving a letter from Georgina containing ‘a sweet photograph of the old-fashioned child Alexandra’ (our little eldest daughter).

  All this was good, and ‘We worked out the tax returns, from which it appears the writing brought in £6845 last year … What would this have meant in [19]45–50, when we really needed it?’

  Altogether everything appeared to be improving for Patrick and my mother. As has already been noted, three years earlier he had been commissioned by Collins to write a slim book about the Royal Navy in Nelson’s time. This was of course for him an easy task, and in April he finally received his advance copies. It is doubtful whether the general reader would have noticed the errors his mortified eyes discovered, and the book still provides an admir able introduction to be read with profit by adults as much as children.

  A venture which concerned him much more nearly was the publication of a collection of his early short stories, which appeared in June. Richard Ollard had suggested the idea two years earlier, and Patrick, who was justly proud of his skill in this genre, applied himself with considerable care to preparing the book. After some consideration, he reported a problem to Richard Scott Simon:

  there is one aspect that worries me: I want this book to be as good as I can possibly make it, both for my own sake and for the sake of the biography [Picasso], and now that I have gone through the earlier volumes I find that even with a great deal of re-writing only sixteen or seventeen tales really satisfy me now, and they amount to no more than some 70,000 words.

  The extent of his revision shows his concern. He went through the original versions with a fine-tooth comb, effecting minor alterations in some and altering others almost to the point of creating new versions. Particularly interesting is his treatment of ‘The Long Day Running’, a hunting tale deriving from his experiences with the Ynysfor Hunt in North Wales. Details are added to the description of the unnamed Master of the original version to make him accord yet more closely with the real-life Captain Jack Jones, while his nephew and successor Major Roche (who features as no more than ‘the tall soldier’ in the original version) is identified as ‘Major Boyd’. Clearly Pat
rick’s memory of the man he had so greatly admired thirty years before remained as vivid as ever, and his concern to fill out the figure of Captain Jones strengthens the likelihood that he drew on him for aspects of his own Jack Aubrey.

  To bring the book up to an acceptable length he added four stories not included in his previous published collections The Last Pool and Lying in the Sun. These, which he thought ‘pretty good’, were ‘The Rendezvous’, ‘The Chian Wine’, ‘On the Wolfsberg’, and ‘A Passage of the Frontier’.[fn3]

  ‘The Rendezvous’ describes frustrating and eventually dangerous experiences encountered by a man travelling by train from somewhere in France via Paris to England. Its themes are unmistakably autobiographical, although probably based on Patrick’s fears and fancies rather than actual experience. The station from which the unnamed protagonist sets out can only be Perpignan, and his repeated missing or near-missing of trains reflects a recurrent fear (‘oh familiar nightmare’) to which Patrick was himself subject. ‘Last night I [dreamed I] was naked in the street again, & missed another train – we both missed trains,’ he noted in his diary about this time. I am sure Patrick was conscious of the obvious symbolism of missing trains, and used them for the purpose of his tale. His protagonist is to meet a woman in London, and it is clear that his misadventures en route endanger not merely their meeting but their entire future.

  Again, there is no mistaking my mother as the woman waiting (or not waiting) at the journey’s end, since Patrick goes out of his way to identify her by a hat she habitually wore at the time: ‘there could be no Cossack hat at the far end of the platform – did she still wear that hat, or had worms fattened on the Persian lamb?’ During more than half a century of marriage Patrick suffered from occasional irrational apprehensions that my mother might lose her affection for him, or even vanish altogether from his life either by abandoning him, or (as the fattening worms suggest) being snatched away by death. This fear arose from ineradicable sensations of insecurity originating in his childhood, coupled with a consciousness that his whole being depended on her affection and comradeship. There was no one else in whom he could repose confidence: the closest of friends, relations or colleagues might at any moment prove treacherous and hostile.

  In ‘The Chian Wine’ an outsider named Alphard has settled in an ancient seaside town named ‘Saint-Felíu’. The opening description provides a lyrical evocation of the largely unaltered Collioure of Patrick’s early days in the town. This is followed by a lamentation over changes introduced in recent years. Old customs and costumes have all but vanished: ‘Pert white houses had sprung up outside the walls, with red-brick well-heads over nothing, gnomes, plastic storks’, while ‘in high summer the villagers wandered like strangers among the tourist hordes’. Alphard and his friend Halévy, a Jew from Avignon who had opened a small gallery facing the harbour, commiserate with each other over these regrettable changes.

  However, Alphard is partially consoled by seeing the village priest: ‘“There,” he said to Halévy, “there is your bridge – one of your bridges. The Church has not changed.”’ But all is not well in this sleepy and increasingly muddied backwater. The surviving archaisms which console Alphard prove to include a horrifying undercurrent. In his Good Friday sermon in the church of Saint-Felíu the curé dwells morbidly on the responsibility of the Jews for Christ’s death, ‘and the moment the priest cried “Death to the Jews!” they [the congregation] all burst out “Death to the Jews!”’ At this the children rush forth from the church blowing whistles and shrieking, ‘leaving the adults to listen to the collect’. Incited by the priest’s inflammatory harangue, the frenzied youth of the town focus their collective hatred on the benign Halévy, whose shop is incinerated with him inside it.

  When I read this story at the time of its first appearance I found it grotesquely melodramatic. As its whole emphasis is on the survival of atavistic instincts and practices, why had the old priest’s sermons not provoked so grotesque an outrage in previous years? Is it likely that parents would have permitted their children to leave the church in the midst of the service, still less run riot in the town? Patrick appears to have recognized the unlikelihood that the townspeople would even have known Halévy to be a Jew, making him identifiable only by donning ‘a beaded skull-cap’ that very day! Anyone who knew the Collioure of Patrick’s day or its kindly curé would find the episode laughable, rather than sinister or tragic.

  In fact the germ of the tale lay in a curious anecdote related to him by my mother twenty years before. They had visited Perpignan to watch the annual procession des pénitents, which moved them profoundly with its air of ancient majestic piety. Returning home, my mother spoke with their neighbour, who mentioned mysteriously that ‘she heard the whistles coming out of church. “Aie mare, je me suis dit, on tue les juifs.”’ I suspect that this reflected no more than bizarre conjecture on the part of the good-natured but not overly intelligent Madame Rimbaud, which my mother recorded as an example of Colliourench eccentricity.

  This supplied Patrick with the basis of his plot, but I suspect that its inclusion reflected deep-rooted fears inside his own psyche. The first was his at times irrational aversion to children and adolescents, unruly creatures who might at any time indulge in some uncontrollable outburst. The second was a less evident but nonetheless real fear that ancient beliefs and customs could, among much that was good, preserve a residue of atavistic cruelty. When his car got stuck during a recent visit to Ireland he had been rescued by some monoglot Galway men. Although Patrick loved the ancient language of the country and regretted its passing, he felt impelled to record: ‘It is ungracious to say it even privately but together with the kindness I do sense hostility to the stranger here & a savagery.’[fn4]

  His apprehension in these cases was plainly as groundless as it was idiosyncratic, but anyone who had lived through the Second World War could not fail to be aware of the extent to which cruel and irrational impulses lurk in the depths of the human psyche.

  ‘On the Wolfsberg’ is a brief tale of a maltreated woman who has lost her memory, while ‘A Passage of the Frontier’ recounts a fugitive’s flight across the Pyrenees from the Nazis during the War. The latter (if I understand it correctly) is a paradigm of the Passion of Christ,[fn5] although its cryptic ending leaves one guessing at some of the symbolism. As ever, the best passages in the stories are their wonderfully evocative depictions of scenery, and their effect on the emotions of the solitary Wanderer.

  However, it was just as everything in their lives appeared at last to be moving on a smooth and prosperous course that a cruel fate, all too often disposed to act against them with preternatural malignancy, struck yet again. In June Patrick was carrying a washed barrel out to drain when he felt a stab of pain in his back. His agonized yell called my mother to his assistance, and he was barely able to creep on all fours to his bed. At first he thought he must have pulled or torn a muscle, but when the pain persisted and the doctor called it turned out that he had slipped a disc.

  During the next three weeks the pain remorselessly increased, treatment proved ineffectual, one of his feet lost all feeling, and an acutely painful paralysis began creeping up his leg. Taken to hospital in Perpignan, as he afterwards explained in a letter to Richard Ollard:

  a capital neurosurgeon laid bare my spine, discovered une énorme hernie discale paralysante, removed it & gave it to me in a little bottle of alcohol. Then came 3 weeks in the clinic, 3 weeks that I had hoped to fill with reading about Pic; but alas my wits were very much astray, and although the sciatic pain was gone it was replaced by others so that I still could not sleep naturally. However, all that is receding into the past; I am home again.

  It was not until the end of July that he was able to apply himself to his work again: ‘Here I am at my desk again 48 days lost.’ Even then, he felt weak, suffered from recurrent pain, and encountered difficulty in recovering his concentration. As so often, Jane Austen provided him with a restorative. He reread all her novel
s, concluding with Mansfield Park: ‘such a refuge, that comfortable stable world, in spite of its sometimes (I think) false values & cant’.

  Patrick displayed his customary courage and stoicism when he became so cruelly and unexpectedly afflicted, and apart from this painful setback 1974 should have been regarded as a successful year. He had made good progress with Picasso, both in writing and research, seen the successful publication of his short stories in The Chian Wine (a book which meant much to him), and for good measure published the ‘pretty little book’ Men-of-War.

  At the beginning of December he still suffered from recurrent back pain and a series of sleepless nights, and was, I imagine, distressed on attaining his sixtieth birthday.[fn6] Normally he and my mother celebrated the anniversary with presents and a feast, but this time he left his diary blank for several days. On Christmas Eve he recorded ‘Black depression’, and a few days later ‘mild happiness gave way to depression, I cannot tell why.’

  However, although such despondent moments recurred, with the New Year of 1975 Patrick found his equanimity returning. For Christmas I had sent him a copy of the nineteenth-century Irish novelist Charles Lever’s rollicking Charles O’Malley, which afforded him a contented interlude: ‘Dear Nikolai sent a 1st of O’Malley as a Xmas present … Idleness, reading Lever: there is an old & charming pleasure in a tale whose conventions (spotless hero &c) one absorbed 50 years ago.’