Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  In his privately printed memoir, Bun asserts that ‘We had not been a very close family, emotionally, perhaps because of my mother’s early death and the subsequent preponderance of housekeepers coupled with my father’s active mind but failing physical health which necessitated cutting short some of our schooling.’[1]

  This is largely pious fiction, suppressing as its does the fact that the children’s inadequate education was largely due to their father’s selfish or foolish improvidence. Moreover, as I have explained earlier, when in differing degree lack of contact occurred it arose primarily in consequence of geographical distance or other happenstance concerns. The fact is that their relationships differed little from those of thousands of their contemporaries, above all those whose youth or early middle age had been thrown into turmoil by five years of universal war.

  It would be superfluous to emphasize this factor, but for speculative assumptions indulged by Dean King in his biography of Patrick.[2] These in turn would by now have become long forgotten, were it not that they became in turn seized upon by critics, whose effusions in some more meretricious cases became misguidedly perpetuated on the internet. In fact King’s fancies may readily be shown to be without substance.

  ‘Patrick’s reasons for detaching himself from his family were complex,’ pronounces King. The obvious objection to this gratuit ous assertion is that Patrick did not detach himself from any of his brothers and sisters, save Bun – and even then only briefly. The ironical fact is that in two cases alone did permanent rifts arise among Dr Russ’s offspring, in both of which it was close family members who elected to detach themselves from Patrick! The first was his son Richard, who, by his own confession and for reasons which remain in part mysterious, summarily broke off relations with his father from 1963 – to Patrick’s enduring distress. The other was his notoriously testy and eccentric sister Joan, who in 1981 took offence at an imagined slight – one so trivial that Patrick appears to have continued unaware that it even occurred.

  In June 1988 Bun wrote to Joan, complaining inter alia about Patrick’s decision to change his name, together with what he took to be his disinclination to maintain links with his family. However, in the following month Bun wrote to Patrick himself, explaining that his daughter Elizabeth, who had expressed fondness for her uncle after their meeting in Paris, would like if convenient to pay a visit to Collioure. Patrick’s eventual reply, sent on 12 July, in a letter bearing clear indications of haste and distress, explained his current difficulties:

  I should have answered earlier, but my recent life has been very much disturbed, ill-health of course being the primary cause.[fn4] I have had to deal as best I can with a series of crises, and although for the moment the worst seems to be growing less acute there is still a most shocking decline in physical & spiritual strength that fills me with anxiety. It threatens to be of long, indeed of indeterminable duration, & obviously in the circumstances no visit is remotely possible.

  Unhappily, at the very beginning of the trouble, when the difficulties seemed merely transient, I contracted to write two books in the near future: the contracts have heavy penalty clauses attached, & this, as you may imagine, complicates the situation.

  However, whining will do no good, and I will only ask you not to take it amiss if I neglect correspondence – I should have added, by the way, that in case of extreme emergency I can rely on the support of [my mother’s] affectionate, intelligent family.

  Bun took what was surely needless offence on receipt of this mildly worded and entirely reasonable explanation. To Joan, he snorted: ‘Well, I can’t cope with non-communication and I shall not write further unless I receive a sensible answer.’ In fact Patrick had made no suggestion of ceasing their correspondence, but merely explained why it could not be maintained as frequently as might be desired so long as current conditions prevailed. The touchy Joan, who was likewise angered by Patrick’s apologetic inability to conduct regular correspondence, responded to Bun that ‘the best thing to do in the face of such persistent rudeness is to maintain an unequivocal silence. He has been consistently blocking all communication with one and all, so why bother?’

  Although he assured Joan that ‘I don’t intend to write to him’, Bun shortly afterwards wrote an injured letter to Patrick, together with another to Elizabeth, warning her not to call on the household at Collioure. She, however, ignored the advice, and arrived there on 18 August:

  … M came diffidently in & said Canadian niece was on the phone. I coped as well as I could – gave her a drink chez Pous [the Café des Sports] – asked her to lunch there tomorrow – explained impossibility of invitation [into their home]. She had left her consort & 3 children on faubourg plage, so I necessarily saw them – man pleasant. She seemed affectionate, pretty good at not asking questions v anxious for family connexion (why?), properly shocked at what she had done.

  Next day, however: ‘Lunch was less successful than I had hoped: a spate of questions – what did my mother die of so young? Was I afraid that my wife might die any minute …’

  For her part, Elizabeth found him charming and attentive. A few years later, she described her visit to me:

  During the summer, my 2nd (and current) husband Bill, his son and my two children ferried, drove, camped, trekked and generally made our way from S. England to N. Spain, down along the west side of the Spanish/French border until we reached Andorra (gawd awful), and then drove to Collioure. The month would have been August. There were 5 of us – including 3 lively pre-teenaged kids – so we camped in a campsite a mile or so away from the port. Against my Dad’s wishes (I believe Dad was irked by but wanted to respect Pat’s wish for isolation – if that’s the correct word), I phoned Pat. Your Mum answered, was very cheery and pleasant, and said he was out and it was agreed I should call back again later. I did so, Pat answered and we arranged to meet at the harbour and he would take me out for lunch. He expressed the wish that it be only myself with him for lunch.

  We met at the agreed place and time. I introduced my husband and children who then went swimming and Pat and I went for lunch in a really amazing restaurant [the Café des Sports]. Perhaps you know of it. The walls were covered with paintings, some originals. It had quite a character to it, the food was good and we spent about an hour or so. Again he was polite and friendly without being overly warm. He brought two bottles of wine for me, one from each vineyard. He bemoaned the changes in Collioure since he and your Mum had settled there. We chatted about many topics, his vineyards, your Mum’s delicate health (on the phone she sounded hearty and cheerful, as she had done on another occasion when I called when I was in Montpelier in 1995. Pat was on a trip and so I didn’t speak with him), how Pelican was changing the look of his book covers and re-issuing some, he asked me about my work in London, my Spanish (not Catalan!) my mother, my stepmother – when he asked about them, I took the liberty of asking about his own children. He denied Richard’s existence![fn5] I mentioned Connie [one of Patrick’s elder sisters] and Joan and members of the family I would have been seeing in England. He talked about Picasso, another manuscript he was working on for the series …

  Yes, my father often spoke about Pat and frequently shared his letters with me (to and from). In my mind’s eye I can still see Pat’s handwriting and the wonderful way he expressed himself. I know Dad was very proud of Pat’s accomplishments, even though there was slight sibling rivalry.

  It seems that, relying on that restricted part of these exchanges between Bun and Patrick to which he managed to obtain access, Dean King misunderstood Bun’s largely unjustified complaints, pronouncing confidently that ‘O’Brian’s reasons for detaching himself from his family were complex … A few well-placed words from Patrick could have gone a long way in smoothing over familial relationships. But O’Brian was not predisposed to reconciliation …’[3]

  How King believed himself privileged to interpret the inner workings of Patrick’s mind is left unexplained. In fact, Patrick had on successive occasions expl
ained to both Joan and Bun the very real obstacles to his maintaining any regular correspondence.[fn6] Besides, so far from being ‘not predisposed to reconciliation’, save for one interlude arising from mutual misunderstanding Patrick maintained contact with Bun pretty much as before. At his birthday in December he received his brother’s customary congratulatory letter, in which Bun made it clear that he was ‘much confused at his daughter’s conduct – a handsome letter’. Patrick described his own prompt reply as ‘rather odiously magnanimous’ (i.e. affectionately generous). Their contacts in the following year will be described shortly.

  On 29 July Patrick received his first copies of The Letter of Marque without much immediate enthusiasm: ‘The lettering has spoilt the picture [on the dustjacket] & in any case I was not moved – too long a wait –? too old – but I liked seeing Bayley’s kind though mistaken words again.’

  The picture in question was the first of Geoff Hunt’s, whose maritime masterpieces adorned this and all subsequent volumes, to the unabated delight of Patrick and his readers alike.

  John Bayley’s conclusion was as generous as it was justified:

  O’Brian is particularly successful at conjuring the whole life of a ship, the camaraderie, the formality, the talk of the officers in the ward room and the men on the gun decks. He makes brilliant use of the speech patterns of the time, but escapes any suggestion of quaintness … O’Brian is a master of rapid and unobtrusive aperçus; and all of the characters … live in their own right and on their own terms. Like Farrell, O’Brian has solved in his own individual way the intractable problem of getting history – in terms of habits, assumptions and ideas – into the texture of the novel … [Jack Aubrey] is a Lord Jim without the author’s philosophic pretension, and in his context far more convincingly contrived. [In him] O’Brian’s combination of sagacity and magic is at its best.[fn7]

  As ever, I am intrigued to observe personal touches in the tale. The ‘Blue Breeches’ episode at the outset recalls the hero’s regular encounters with wayside eccentrics in the rollicking Regency realm of Jeffrey Farnol, an immensely popular historical novelist living in Lewes at the time of Patrick’s schoolboy days in that picturesque town. Sir Joseph Blaine’s elegant house in Shepherd Market reminds me of Patrick’s pointing it out as we strolled by one day. Regrettably, I did not note the number – just as I can no longer identify Stephen Maturin’s Catalan castle, which Patrick once indicated far below us in Spain during a walk in the high Pyrenees long years ago. The ‘poor Senhouse’, borne off in a balloon never to be seen again, was Patrick’s much-disliked editor at Secker & Warburg in the 1950s. Cullis, the dentist whose huge fee so impresses poor Padeen, is Michael Cullis, a Foreign Office friend from early days. More welcoming is the tender portrait of Jack’s matured and beautiful Sophie, in whom I recognize my own Georgina, whose calm courage during our time of trial so impressed Patrick at the time he was writing the novel.

  Stephen Maturin’s seaside exultation, when ‘he felt rising in his heart that happiness he had quite often known as a boy’, recalls Patrick’s enchanted explorations of the beach at Seaford in his childhood. Likewise, the Miss O’Mara whom Jack employs as his children’s governess is named after one of the few beloved by Patrick in his infancy.

  With the autumn of 1988, Patrick found himself diverted from work on the next novel in the series, The Thirteen-Gun Salute, into momentary reassessment of the early novels in the series for the forthcoming paperback reissue by Collins:

  I spent the day with M[aster] & C[ommander], correcting some & making alterations mistakes [for the new paperback series]. Some of the book’s liveliness comes from the fact that this was my 1st adult encounter with the RN – I could describe many things that could scarcely be described again, or not often, in later books – but although I like what I have read (only 100 pp) I may have over-rated it. The last 2 have perhaps more weight & depth.

  Next day Patrick was excited to learn that Stuart Bennett had managed to secure for him at auction a magnificent set of the 1810 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.[4] This would place at his fingertips the surest guide to the state of knowledge at the precise period of his historical writing, removing all possibility of his perpetrating needless anachronisms.

  News of an old friend’s grave illness brought from Patrick the poignant adjuration: ‘God help all loving couples at the end. Amen, amen.’ Five days later Hugh Forster, a cherished visitor at Collioure in earlier years, was dead.

  In October Stuart Bennett came again to stay for a couple of nights. Unfortunately Patrick was suffering under great strain, recording that on the day before his departure:

  I felt curst snappish however & said some rude things about US [Bennett being American] – flag-worship & so on – that I regretted later. Still the atmosphere improved much in the course of the v pretty day & we had a most agreeable dinner with cassoulet & Manay 79 & quantities of Banyuls, M bearing up perfectly well.

  That evening Patrick candidly observed that his problem arose from the fact that: ‘I have an unhappy way of being v glad to see guests on the 1st day & hating them the next, or at least being dreadfully bored & put out.’

  Over the years I had frequent occasion to observe this characteristic at first hand. Only latterly have I come to appreciate that it arose from the difficulty he encountered when there was an outside presence (however intrinsically congenial) within the house. He tended to become overridingly tense, and unable to proceed with his work. This in turn made him temporarily doubt his capacity. Had I appreciated this in early years it might have prevented much bewilderment and occasional resentment. Not a few guests departed understandably dismayed, or even angered, at this inexplicable change that unexpectedly overshadowed what had promised to prove a convivial stay.

  Returned to The Thirteen-Gun Salute, Patrick detected another of his literary troubles – one shared, I imagine, by many authors:

  The other day, looking for a reference to Clonfert’s fabulations in M[auritius] Command. I read quite a lot of the book: it seemed to me much better, more full of life & of living people in a highly-populated world, than what I am doing now – in short that I was declining. But on recollection I find that I have thought this with every book.

  In November Ian Chapman, chairman of Collins, circulated their authors with the unwelcome warning that ‘News International plc has announced a predatory bid for William Collins’, while declaring the company’s intention of vigorously opposing the attack. In common with most of their other prominent authors, Patrick at once rallied to the publisher’s defence, ‘expressing full support as author and shareholder’. However, the takeover materialized, and in the following February a newly appointed chairman sought to reassure the company’s generally sceptical authors. Nevertheless, with Stuart Proffitt continuing as his editor, Patrick himself did not record any difficulties experienced under the new regime.

  On his birthday at the year’s ending Patrick noted with quaint precision that he had now achieved ‘74 years: 27,010 days & odd 29th of February’. This quirky calculation unconsciously echoes the entry he had inscribed in his brother Victor’s schoolboy diary more than sixty years earlier: ‘Patrick Russ 10 on December 12th on which they say he was born 1914’.

  It was in April 1989 that my mother suffered a grievous tragedy. At ninety-nine, her mother Frieda Wicksteed had finally begun failing fast, and she and Patrick flew to England to visit her at her nursing home in Burnham-on-Sea. A week earlier she had suffered a stroke, and when my mother arrived ‘she was scarcely present’. All my mother could do was sit sadly beside her, the only consolation being (as she reported to Patrick) that ‘the nurses are very, very kind, thank God’. There being nothing more that could be done, she and Patrick returned home. Next morning I telephoned with the sad but not unexpected news that her mother had died. Since her elopement with Patrick fifty years earlier, relations between mother and daughter had been awkward, which in a way made the present loss the more unhappy. Now the link wi
th carefree childhood days at Appledore and on Lundy had passed for ever.

  Immediately after the event my mother’s brother Binkie telephoned her to emphasize that ‘Frieda had particularly wished no one to be present – no flowers or anything of the kind – at her cremation’. Having reason to be suspicious of his intentions towards my mother and myself, I ignored the same stipulation he impressed upon me, and drove with Georgina to the service. Whom should we find there but Binkie, who it appears wished it to be believed that no one else in the family had troubled to attend! He looked exceedingly awkward at our arrival, and provided no explanation for his presence. I believe his ill-concealed jealousy of my mother originated in their childhood, when her beauty and liveliness made her the darling of the family and toast of the young men of North Devon. His resentment, and her awareness that he was in a position to be perpetually seeking to undermine her parents’ affection, caused her great unhappiness throughout her marriage to Patrick.[fn8]

  My mother in North Devon in the 1920s

  Although my grandmother had lived to a great age, retaining her intelligence, beauty, and charm to the end, the loss inevitably aggravated my parents’ accruing concern with mortality. Shortly after their return from England to Collioure, Patrick noted: ‘We spoke of our deaths. We should both like to be buried in the village with nothing but local friends (but proper notice to them – Indépendent – Lafitte to cope) & children told later. I shall write Bun a letter to be posted long after.’

  My mother’s constitutional fragility, which so exercised Patrick, is exemplified by a painful accident occurring at this time: ‘Poor M cracked a floating rib as she started up from a dream about my black hat being left out in the dirty rain.’

  Troubles were brewing also in Patrick’s family. In the New Year he had received ‘a letter from Bun with a present of about £500, v kind but embarrassing’. For Bun’s birthday in March, Patrick sent him a copy of his newly published The Letter of Marque, and in the following month Bun mentioned to Joan that he and Patrick were now engaged in regular correspondence, from which he had belatedly come to appreciate the grave and unrelenting nature of my mother’s illnesses. Again, in July Bun mentioned in passing to Joan that: ‘I hear occasionally from Pat, quite pleasantly. Evidently his wife is very frail indeed and this must limit his ability to travel, but apparently he keeps pretty busy and he speaks of having to write two books.’ Unfortunately the prosperous Bun, who privately expressed disparagement of Patrick’s writing, patronizingly insisted throughout on assuming that his younger brother was teetering permanently on the edge of bankruptcy.[fn9] He had compounded the offence by sending Patrick the £500, while tactlessly reminding him of money he had lent him thirty-five years earlier. As he complained to Joan: ‘He seems to resent the fact that in thirty or so years since he and I joined forces in having his house built, I have referred to the fact from time to time … he seems to have felt that I was competition.’