Patrick O'Brian

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by Nikolai Tolstoy


  Work on Joseph Banks proceeded slowly. However, one night Patrick unusually had ‘A dream in which I did catch a train, though it had already moved. Adsit omen.’ The omen did indeed appear propitious, when my mother at long last found herself up to resuming typing Patrick’s completed chapters. On the same day she ventured down into the garden – her first visit since the previous July. By St Patrick’s Day she had managed to weed the entire cabbage patch, and that evening at their customary annual feast she presented Patrick with a fine bottle of Hennessy brandy and ‘a noble cake’.

  Four days later Patrick experienced yet another of his myriad miraculous escapes from death:

  A cold tramontany day in which, going to Argelès, I did perhaps the most foolish & dangerous thing I have ever done – supposed the turning were clear 2 or 3 ahead passed a tanker – came face to face with a heavy truck – just but only just squeezed through – angry horns in my ears – feeling of intense guilt rather than relief.

  That evening, however, saw cause for celebration. Dining out at the Albatros in Collioure, ‘M stood this – her first sortie for 8 months, admirably.’ This material improvement continued slowly but satisfactorily, and in April she proved up to entertaining my sister and her two sons for a couple of days. A few days later: ‘With a surprising shock & with real regret we heard of S[imone] de B[eauvoir]’s death: I had never thought of it in connection with her.’

  With justifiable satisfaction Patrick reflected on his completion of the Banks biography:

  I spent some of the morning trying to establish the history of the Banks book, but I did not record it accurately & another time (if it really has any importance) I will write dates on the MS. Anyhow the writing took from 26 Nov 84 until 22 March 86: 16 months with 3 months off from illness, travelling, guests & more reading or even 4, which would give a year.

  Considering the extent of research required, this represents an impressive feat.

  It was at this time that Patrick received a letter from Arthur Cunningham of the British Library, who explained that he was compiling a bibliography of his published works. Patrick obliged with corrections and additions, but jibbed at a suggestion that his early works published under his natal name of Russ (to which the bibliographer Cunningham had become alerted) might be included. Justly (as it turned out) apprehensive of danger posed by the envy of a small but shrill claque of English critics, Patrick courteously declined: ‘As for my earlier books, fortunately published under another name. I must ask you to excuse me – I had much rather they remained unread, and I wish all follies of youth could be dealt with in the same way.’[fn4]

  At the same time, Patrick’s strong sense of nostalgia for his early days and continuing attachment to his family were never far from mind. In June he spent a contented afternoon waxing some of his precious leather-bound books, while listening to Mozart. He achieved ‘extraordinary success with Burn’s justice,[2] which I have had man & boy these 55 perhaps 60 years’; i.e. in his adolescence. Two days later he was gratified to receive a letter ‘from Bun with an oddly touching photocopied page from Vic’s diary of January 1919 showing me in bed’.

  Patrick and my mother had attained that decade when mortality begins to impinge with unwelcome regularity. In August Patrick ‘went to see W[illy]M[ucha], pale – i.e. suntanned – & somewhat thinner but better than I had expected & though not v brilliant perfectly compos mentis’. In the following month I telephoned with the news that their old friend Nigel Curtis-Raleigh had died. A contemporary of my father at Wellington, his stays at Collioure in the 1960s had occasionally overlapped with mine. He was a jovial soul, witty and youthful in his outlook. He became a judge and married late, and unfortunately my parents found his wife tiresome. Whether she rashly contradicted Patrick, or they simply preferred their old friend to continue a bachelor, I do not know. Patrick’s reactions to the news of his death were conflicting: ‘It was a strange wound: I had regretted him much before this, but I wish the last time we met had been less painful.’ In December Patrick recorded my informing him of ‘Nigel’s memorial service: mixed feelings, regret predominating’. When my parents occasionally fell out with their friends, it is generally impossible for me to assess the cause unless I had been present. That they could be contrary at times in their social relations is undeniable, but on the other hand in my own case I found that patient tact normally achieved wonders. Then again, my relationship was naturally different from that of a friend, however close.

  On 5 August 1986 I arrived for a ten-days’ stay. Patrick met me at the station, after which: ‘Dinner out & then prolonged sitting in the cloister – we drank a whole bottle of Banyuls (72, quite good).’

  On the 6th, my mother proving somewhat exhausted by this excess, Patrick took me up to view their new property at Manay. On the following day he and I walked up to the Madeloc ridge, talking cheerfully all the way. ‘My walk,’ Patrick noted, ‘was about 6 miles & did not tire me at all, a tiny triumph.’

  Next day he and I drove and then walked up to the Massane forest. Unlike my own father, Patrick always took a paternal and perceptive interest in my personal affairs. As it happened, they had at this time reached a particularly dire point of crisis, and for reasons which now largely escape me, we faced a financial impasse. Our bank had issued peremptory notice that we could cash no more cheques, and we entertained a lively fear of the imminent arrival of bailiffs. My literary work had succumbed to a temporary blockage. My recent book The Minister and the Massacres, which indicted Harold Macmillan of prime responsibility for the otherwise unauthorized betrayal to their Communist foes of 70,000 Cossacks and 50,000 Yugoslavs in Austria in 1945, had come up against the determined hostility of the British Establishment. The Conservative government covertly commissioned a purportedly independent ‘committee’ to pronounce my book fallacious in successive publications; a Sunday newspaper adroitly blocked the customary press serialization by securing rights to publication of an extract and then cancelling the project the night before; while the BBC issued a secret directive (revealed to me by producers indignant at the censorship) that neither I nor my book was to be mentioned in any broadcast.

  My supportive publisher Century Hutchinson had nevertheless commissioned a further book, which, however, not only required at least a year’s work, but was for the first time in my literary career not a project which particularly inspired me. Dampened by these setbacks, I had rashly abandoned all other labours in order to plunge into an historical novel about Merlin – a long-standing favourite project, several times attempted and as often abandoned. Realizing that I had no practical means of sustaining an uncommissioned work which would take at least two years to achieve, I had in desperation sent my literary agent (the late Giles Gordon) what was to prove only the first third of the typescript.

  More than understandably, my publisher indignantly rejected it – as did another, who roundly pronounced it unpublishable. Such was our deplorable state of affairs when I walked with Patrick in the shady stillness of the forest of Coulamates. He as ever was profoundly sympathetic, but what could be done? We had an overdraft (now stopped) against our home of £80,000, and unsettled school fees amounting to some £14,000: ‘disaster immediately ahead’, as Patrick recorded in his diary.

  Having heard that our return path had been blocked, Patrick recommended our pursuing a rough track trampled down by boars. Unfortunately we went astray, having at one point to scramble up a precipitous slope, and arrived home late sadly mutilated by thorns. There we found my mother awaiting us in the doorway in a high state of excitement. Scarcely able to formulate the words, she explained that Georgina had telephoned with amazing news. Giles Gordon had rung to say that Bantam Press was delighted with my uncompleted text, and had agreed to pay £250,000 for the completed work and its two projected sequels. Furthermore, there remained the strong likelihood (subsequently materialized) of a comparable advance by a US publisher! My parents were overjoyed, and Patrick gravely advised me: ‘Nikolai, if you have any more
trouble over the overdraft, tell the manager you’re going to buy the bank!’ Next day, he confided to his diary: ‘General, more temperate contentment, & I find to my satisfaction that the little spasms of ignoble jealousy that assaulted me have died quite away.’

  He had in fact signed a fresh contract with Collins the day after my arrival for ‘THE TWELFTH AUBREY/MATURIN TALE’, which I do not recall his even mentioning to me at the time. This was The Letter of Marque, which in the event was to prove as successful as its predecessors. I find it ironical that Patrick, who was surely among the least envious of authors, was to arouse such embittered rancour among a marginal coterie of reviewers. During the last decade or so of his life, he was himself much in demand as a reviewer. His judgements were almost invariably as constructive as they were charitable. It was only to his immediate family, diary or publisher that he would express an occasionally acerbic verdict. He once told me that he found it hard to be overly critical of an author’s work, knowing as he did just how much effort and concern go into the writing of serious books.

  Next morning, with Patrick’s strong approval, I gave thanks for our good fortune in the lovely baroque church beside the plage St Vincent. After lunch he and I set off for another round walk beneath the ridge crowned by the Madeloc tower. That evening we were rewarded with a capital dinner below at La Chréa in the Port d’Avall.

  I left on 15 August, when Patrick drove me to Collioure railway station. I am happy to see from his diary that he and my mother had enjoyed my visit as much as I. As Patrick wrote on the evening of my departure: ‘He took most affectionate leave & now it can be said that his being here was an unalloyed pleasure: & he gave every sign of enjoying it too.’

  In September Patrick heard from Richard Ollard, who had sent him a book by a leading historian of the Royal Navy. ‘I’m glad,’ wrote Richard, ‘you enjoyed what you read of Nicholas Rodger’s book. It seemed to me a tremendous vindication of your own presentation of the C18 navy – as against the fashionable view of a floating Belsen, wh. never made any sense.’ Rodger’s brilliant study[3] does indeed show up the absurdities of the ‘rum, sodomy, and the lash’ school of popular historians and novelists.[fn5]

  In the same month they received exciting news that land adjacent to their property at Manay had become expropriated by a bank – presumably as security for a loan – and was now for sale. Two days later they attended a Dutch auction in Perpignan and, at the extinction of three candles limiting the bidding, the 3.26 acres became theirs for a total (including tax and legal expenses) of 4,906,000 francs. Two days later they drove up to survey the extension to their land, which comprised two vineyards and a stretch of mountainside. The land had not been well tended, but Patrick reckoned that the path and spring ‘could be restored without enormous labour’.

  In October 1986 Patrick and my mother were visited by Stuart Bennett, an American antiquarian bookseller who had recently settled with his wife Kate in Bath. Patrick had bought from him a succession of Jane Austen’s novels, in either first or second editions. He frequently emphasized to me the pleasure of reading classic works, if not necessarily in first editions, at least in those published during the author’s lifetime. Elegant binding, distinctive print, the thought that the work had been read by the author’s contemporaries, and the idiosyncratic smell of early editions add materially to the pleasure of reading.

  Patrick assisted by Stuart Bennett at Manay

  In July Bennett had written to my parents, asking if he and his wife might visit Collioure for a few days to assist with the vendange, which that year began in the plains on 19 September. They arrived at the beginning of October for a five days’ stay. Stuart did indeed provide sterling assistance with the harvest, and the visit passed for the most part very pleasantly.

  A major highlight was provided by a mutually satisfying exchange. In return for a recently acquired first edition of Jane Austen’s Emma, Patrick gave him the original manuscript of Master and Commander:

  Having said that I had no MSS & having then felt doubts I looked & found the 3 1st [manuscripts of the novels in the series], rather dirty but sound (S. Maturin was called Martin Joyce for the 1st few chapters). Told SB, who at once said that his Emma was worth more than 1 MS. This, & some other rather mercantile words displeased & grieved me & I turned the whole thing aside.[fn6]

  Next day, however, dining together at La Chréa:

  A truly magnificent bouillabaisse appeared, guided by SB, who a little before this had made a v handsome apology, so handsome that although I had become attached to the MS of M & C I let him have it. A v pleasant dinner indeed: certainly the best bouillabaisse we have ever eaten.

  A week after the Bennetts’ departure the three-volume set of Emma arrived through the post, to Patrick’s high pleasure. He rationed himself to reading his new treasure of an evening in the cloister. His collection of early Jane Austen editions was now complete, and his eye frequently rested on the attractive set lined up on his bookshelf. The exchange was probably a fair bargain, although I suspect that today the total absence on the market of manuscripts of the Aubrey–Maturin series would make their value (above all, that of Master and Commander) very considerable indeed. On the other hand, the fact that the set of Emma had become Patrick’s own has probably increased its already considerable intrinsic value.

  On 29 September page proofs of the Joseph Banks biography arrived. For Patrick, this was always the most pleasant stage in a book’s progress: finally it could be read as a polished whole, while tiresome errors could still be corrected. Three days later, ‘I reached reasonably pleased with the book, & liking JB.’

  Here I cannot resist recapitulating yet another of Patrick’s idiosyncratic dreams, occurring at this time:

  Last night I dreamt that M & I were lying on the couch [upstairs, in the sitting-room]. I said ‘Look’, pointing cautiously at a little bittern that was peering in through the window with intense curiosity. But the bird (brown, with paler frill, seen from beneath, like a grebe’s) was not easily frightened. We entered into conversation & she said her name was Pataska (or something like that) & her age 4 months. I said if ever she would like a bath she had but to come: but begged her to beware of cats, which made her look grave. She admitted that her feet (which were v odd) were not suited for digging a hole in which to bathe.

  I fancy that the talkative animals and birds he regularly encountered in dreamland originated in his lonely childhood, becoming confirmed by a lifelong absorption in natural history. Also intriguing is the extent to which his absurdist sense of humour permeated his dreams. It is probable that this proclivity likewise arose in his infancy: as I have suggested, as an internalized counter to the grim power of those exercising repressive authority over him.

  In December Patrick underwent a pang of nostalgia, when he was carried back in imagination to the dawn of their great adventure, when they arrived, penniless but excited, at their tiny cottage Fron Wen in North Wales: ‘My diary of 1945 caught my eye – Fron, of course, in our first days. How it takes one back: but where was Cwmorthin & the house with a fireplace each end of the single room?’

  As ever, an even earlier past resurfaced at Christmas: ‘A birthday & Xmas card from Bun, rather curt – did he ever get TROTM [The Reverse of the Medal]? Says [their sister] Nora has seen a book of mine, presumably recently.’

  A couple of days later a further card arrived from Victor’s widow Saidie. It was pleasurable to contemplate those distant days, although at times also exquisitely painful.

  As for their current state of affairs, yet another of Patrick’s dreams is decidedly indicative:

  Dream of circus horses dressed as camels pulling waggon: one (speaking from a gap in the camel’s neck) told me that it had written a piece, but (laughing heartily) it was badly reviewed. The man of the waggon said yes, it was v badly reviewed. I told the horse that the man had shown it only the bad reviews, concealing the others, for fear the horse should ask for a rise. This was all in Fr., because I said aug
mentation.

  Although 1986 ended on a happier note than it had begun, much of it had been a time of worry and frustration. While my mother had at last recovered from her dangerous heart operation, her health continued poor. She remained weak, and much subject to flux and other internal pains. Although the purchase of additional land at Manay had brought rejoicing, during one of their visits she had slipped and badly injured her shin. The ill effect of such unpleasant accidents was greatly exacerbated by her continuing constitutional infirmity, which caused Patrick constant distress.

  He himself found his current work at times a tedious struggle. No further commission being forthcoming for another naval tale, he had been contracted in the previous November to translate the first of a massive two-volume biography of de Gaulle by Jean Lacouture.[4] He found the book in large part pretentious and even silly, and it is hard to tell whether he disliked the author or his subject more: ‘I lowered my spirits still farther by looking into Lecouture, who is v French & who would be (perhaps only until I got into him) v difficult to make English. Vol I is 500000 [words].’

  Although the work broadly proved little more than mere drudgery, as ever Patrick maintained the struggle every day.

  XIII

  Family Travails

  In seeking to discourage, or at any rate to control, any overlapping of his London world and his Dorset world – especially the world of his own family – he can scarcely have been motivated by mere snobbishness or social vanity … although few … can have realised just how humble and isolated his childhood had been. It was simply that he felt his family affairs were his own business and no one else’s: as he had told [his publisher] Kegan Paul in 1881, ‘I have an opinion that the less people know of a writer’s antecedents (till he is dead) the better’.

  Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford, 1982), pp. 267–8

 

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