Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  In April Proffitt reported that Charlton Heston, one of Patrick’s prominent admirers, had bought Geoff Hunt’s original painting for the cover of The Thirteen-Gun Salute. A few weeks later Patrick received a friendly invitation from Heston to attend the London première of his film of Treasure Island. In view of the actor’s enthusiasm over the possibility of making a film of one of his novels, Stuart Proffitt urged the benefit of accepting the invitation. In the event my mother’s ill-health prevented her travelling, and Patrick journeyed by train and ferry to London, where on the evening before the première he gave a dinner at Brooks’s for Heston and his son Fraser, which proved to be a success. ‘A better party than I had expected – nothing brilliant, but general amiability, unusual appreciation, & no personal questions at any time.’

  On the following day he attended the film, on which, however, he was less enthusiastic: ‘Hestons welcoming, kind about yesterday. Film indifferent – much overacting, rolling of eyes, violence – but with some pretty good pieces of ship at sea. Hestons kinder still afterwards – many colleagues who like my books, much praise …’

  Later that year Proffitt reported on a publishers’ meeting with the actor in New York, at which he had discussed publication of his memoirs. On his return Proffitt reported to Patrick that:

  Naturally he did not want to talk about himself at all, but about you, which I must say made an impression on my boss, who was with me … When I asked him what he wanted from his publishers he said, ‘To be in distinguished company, and of course there is no company more distinguished than that of Patrick O’Brian’.

  My mother’s persistently poor condition constantly troubled Patrick while in London. The day after his return: ‘Coming down [from Manay] we looked at the cemetery. The site indeed is v fine, but I had misunderstood Ms account (she had been there with Hélène [Camps]) & the shining granite vaults & artificial flowers distressed me.’

  The old cemetery in the town had long been full, and while Patrick was away my mother began enquiring about graves. Today, the new cemetery on the hill above the town has become a place of pilgrimage for Patrick’s many admirers from around the globe.

  On 10 September my mother arrived at the hospital in Perpignan, where she underwent examination by a cardiologist. He recommended a pacemaker, but not as a matter of urgency. On her return home, gravely confused by the effect of powerful anaesthetics, she slipped and tore skin off her leg while descending the iron ladder to their bedroom below. Her stay in the hospital ‘was all horribly familiar from Eastbourne & the last operation’, reflected Patrick – no human contact, constant prattling, and frenetic activity. Next day, fortunately, she was greatly improved and acceptant of kind Dr Manya’s recommendation that the pacemaker be fitted as a matter of urgency by a specialist from Toulouse. On learning that its installation should greatly improve walking, gardening, and even travel, Patrick felt an exultation hard to contain.

  A few days later, however, my mother awoke in the night suffering from cruel spasmodic pains in her bowels. Together they were rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. By the time she was settled with a tube passing from her nose to her stomach the hospital cafeteria had closed, and Patrick was obliged to walk to Perpignan station for a meal. Passing through a tunnel along the way, his attention was attracted to graffiti, among which he found worthy of record that ‘someone had written FUCK OFF & someone else had added EVERYONE’.

  That night Patrick joined my mother in the hospital, where both slept exceedingly badly: ‘at one time M was in such a bad way as to forget French & feel she was dying’. Despite much suffering, the operation was pronounced a success. It is unclear to me what precisely was wrong at this stage, but my mother’s fearfully debilitated condition meant that she underwent several days of suffering, attended throughout by an anguished Patrick. It was not until the end of the month that she was able to return home, with the prospect of insertion of the pacemaker in three weeks’ time. Patrick was briefly consoled ‘with vivid dreams (topless nurse in bed with me, though with disappointingly pure motives)’. But on waking he was plagued by ‘Sombre, sombre thoughts. And the old, damned back-ache.’

  Throughout the coming weeks my mother’s condition continued to distress Patrick, with inevitably ill effect on his work:

  M’s heart is worrying. Sometimes, for no evident reason & when she is sitting down, it takes to beating at 110 or even more; & sometimes the pulse is v fast … I hope all this has not divorced me from the book again.

  … I typed, but with only moderate satisfaction (I shall lose my way in this book if I do not get well back into it quite soon).

  The year 1990 – pivotal in many respects, troubled in others, ended on a melancholy note. Walking up the ridge to the point assigned as his milestone turning-point, Patrick found even that remote spot sadly altered. Vegetation and rocks looked oddly different, and the white stones with which he had marked noteworthy days had mysteriously disappeared.

  XIV

  The Sunlit Uplands

  Words move, music moves

  Only in time; but that which is only living

  Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

  Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

  Can words or music reach

  The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

  Moves perpetually in its stillness.

  T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

  The New Year of 1991 saw no amelioration in my mother’s pitiful state of health: ‘17° & 6°: an even more beautiful day. But M was poorly throughout it – heart 112, aorta beating violently, general malaise – to such a degree that she wisely retired before the Helmuts came.’

  Helmut Vakily, a painter of Persian origin, had hitherto been a welcome visitor over the years – but she was no longer up to receiving visitors. So wretched indeed was my mother’s condition, that Patrick took the unprecedented step of asking his literary agent for information about a professional typist. Fortunately, however, for the present she continued capable of summoning up her strength for the task when occasion demanded.

  What Patrick could not have foreseen was that a bare week was to pass before he encountered one of the greatest transformations in his literary career. On 7 January 1991: ‘We had just been picking grapefruit when Christopher MacL[ehose, at HarperCollins] telephoned: said there was Snow’s piece on the front of NY Times – he was touchingly pleased …’

  Towards the end of 1990 a devoted American fan, Richard T. Stearns, ‘snarling and raging’, had sent Patrick a forthright denunciation of an ill-natured review of The Letter of Marque by a pseudonymous writer in the New York Times Book Review. Patrick responded appreciatively, noting sadly that:

  I am sorry that the New York Times man did not like The Letter of Marque, and I particularly regret that his review should have arrived on the very morning that I intended to work again on my fifteenth naval tale after an enforced interruption of two months: praise from such a source would have had little effect, but quite illogically disparagement, when I am in the act of writing, angers and depresses me to a disproportionate extent. In this case it has stopped the flow.

  He was not exaggerating. His childhood unhappiness had instilled in him an instinctive fear and resentment of adverse reflection on him or his work, above all when it appeared (as in this case) aggressively malignant.

  On this occasion, however, the historian and novelist Richard Snow unexpectedly pulled out all the stops to laud Patrick’s creation, in one of America’s most influential literary journals. A few days after MacLehose’s telephone call, a copy of the New York Times Book Review arrived at Collioure, a New Year’s gift whose effect on the little household may be imagined. Snow had persuaded the editor to allow him nearly three densely packed pages, in which he exalted to the skies ‘AN AUTHOR I’D WALK THE PLANK FOR’.

  After recounting his earlier bafflement on prematurely encountering Master and Commander – which threw him back into the arms of the seafaring novels of Alexander Ken
t and the like – Snow subsequently happened on a second-hand copy of the novel at a street fair. Whether it was because he was older, or on account of a growing fascination with history, he now found himself gripped by an unexpected passion:

  … this time I understood what I was reading. For one thing – and I had managed to miss this completely on my first go-around – it was funny; every page shone with humor, sometimes mordant, sometimes wise, and always growing naturally out of the situations it illuminated.

  But behind the humor, behind the storms and the broadside duels that I had understood on my first encounter, loomed something larger: the shape and texture of a whole era. Without ever seeming antiquarian or pedantic or showy, O’Brian summoned up with casual omniscience the workaday magic of a vanished time. The furniture of life was all unobtrusively here: clothes, curtains, the sauce on the fish, the absent-minded politeness of daily intercourse with grocers and friends, everything whose inconsequence insures its almost immediate oblivion, and which is so hard to retrieve without an ostentatious show of ‘research.’ In fact, the story was told with such scrupulous respect for every nuance of the world in which it unfolded that I might have been reading the prose of Jane Austen’s seafaring brothers (two served in the Royal Navy), had they shared her gifts. Before I finished the book, I was convinced it was the best historical novel I’d ever read.

  Today the piece remains one of the most effective introductions to Patrick’s masterpiece that one could wish. On receiving a copy from Stuart Proffitt, Patrick gratefully recorded: ‘He also enclosed a piece about the series by Snow, perhaps not v wise but full of earnest praise, & fulsome though it was it had a most encouraging effect on bringing XV [his current work Clarissa Oakes] to life.’

  The ‘perhaps not v wise’ reflects no more than self-mocking modesty, and Snow’s review more than sufficed to restore Patrick’s equanimity. He wrote to the writer, praising his ‘long, deeply perceptive and encouraging article’, which ‘gave me great pleasure’, and enclosing a copy of his Joseph Banks.

  Despite this fillip, during the early part of the year Patrick suffered renewed bouts of depression, arising from a combination of concern for my mother’s persistent worrying weakness,[fn1] and his own consequent difficulty in moving his novel forward. Seeking to divert himself during a gloomy February:

  These evenings I read Le Faye’s monumental JA,[1] trying to remember the relationships. Qu. is this digging into private affairs, particularly money (privatissimo), decent? JA’s own background is said to give one a greater understanding of her books: I doubt it. Of the books as an accurate mirror of her time, yes: as novels, no.[fn2]

  It is not difficult to detect personal considerations in Patrick’s dismissal of literary biography, with its ‘digging into private affairs’. His publishers found this frustrating when seeking to stimulate publicity for his writing. Their attitude is understandable. For a start, knowledge of Jane Austen’s ‘own background’ must clearly assist in establishing whether her novels do in fact represent ‘an accurate mirror of her time’. Furthermore, Patrick’s view is scarcely consistent with his unalloyed admiration for Boswell’s magnificent Life of Johnson, in which the smallest detail is included to flesh out the subject’s life.

  Unfortunately, my own continuingly precarious legal plight ensuing on the disastrous Aldington trial in 1989 added much to my parents’ worries throughout this time. On the other hand, compensation lay in the fact that reassurances of the justice of our cause continued to appear. In January, Patrick visited an Englishman living at nearby Sorède: ‘He spoke, not knowing of the relationship, of N’s trial & how it discredited Eng. justice.’

  At the beginning of March ‘M wrote to Georgie as we had agreed, promising help in emergency to [£]10–15000’. Later in the month: ‘Nikolai telephoned in the evening, v handsome about our offer of contingent 10,000 +, & delighted by Nutmeg’s reception. Position worrying and uncertain, depending it seems on Aldington’s whim – possibility of European court.’

  Throughout this worrying time (my mother’s pacemaker afforded her constant trouble, before it was discovered that it required readjustment) consolation was afforded by a regular visitor, whose presence much comforted them: ‘Robin came down & flitted about the garden with us, gently singing from every branch …’ There was also a ‘hedgepig’, who devoured bread and milk each evening but was rarely to be seen. Nevertheless: ‘Book was v heavy going: what has flowed in my mind, even weeks ago, no longer flows; but by flogging I did 2 pp.’

  As ever, Patrick’s dreams tended to reflect their troubling circumstances: ‘I lost my way, friends, belongings & having wasted time looking at a false narwhal horn (in fact twisted goat) I ended on a desolate railway line far out in an unknown countryside.’

  A few nights later: ‘Such a vile, everlasting dream: I was looking for Peugeot’s HQ in some vast, shabby town with confusing streets – could not find it – lost myself & the car – on & on, hope dying – all grey.’

  Collectors of first editions of Patrick’s novels will wish they had been by when Patrick put out his dustbins in the second week of July:

  We culled the shameful stores of my books & discarded another 3 sacks – another small one to come. I had been stupid in my 1st attack, throwing away all but 1 Surgeon’s M.[fn3] The plan is now for me to have a set of paperbacks, M the same with her hardbacks, & a store of 1 H[ardback] + 2 P[aperbacks].

  He was shortly to regret this precipitate action, when in November John Saumarez-Smith of the Heywood Hill bookshop told him that first editions of the earlier hardback naval tales were beginning to fetch about £40 a volume.

  Further in July Patrick received gratifying news that he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, founded in 1820 by King George IV to ‘reward literary merit and excite literary talent’. The honour would have been particularly gratifying to Patrick, as George IV was the aesthetic (if dissolute and neurotic) Regent to whom his favourite author Jane Austen dedicated her Emma. From his literary agent he learned further that a copy of The Nutmeg of Consolation had been added to the Queen’s bookshelves at Balmoral. (Patrick replied to his editor Stuart Proffitt that: ‘I was charmed to learn that the Queen should have (among other things) Nutmeg. I think only Queen Anne had closer naval connexions.’) In November HarperCollins provided total sales figures for the fourteen novels in the maritime series already published. In Britain alone it amounted to the satisfying totals of 73,353 hardback and 757,291 paperback![fn4]

  As though all this were not encouragement enough, he received confirmation that the British Library proposed to publish (for the first time in the case of such an undertaking) a bibliography and literary appreciation of his published works, under the skilled editorship of Arthur Cunningham, the Library’s Head of Publications. Patrick was requested to provide an autobiographical sketch, an invitation he guardedly approved. An underlying worry accompanied this signal honour, however. In the first place, what was he to do about his juvenile works published under the name Patrick Russ, a name he had spent so long concealing; and, as a corollary, how was he to continue sustaining the privacy to which he so firmly consigned that earlier existence he had long ago put behind him?[fn5]

  This belated recognition of his achievement was gratifying, but remorselessly advancing years continued to provide nagging reminders of human frailty. Meeting in the streets of Perpignan one day, his old friend Pierre de Bordas showed Patrick his right hand racked with arthritis, explaining that he was retiring from his dental practice. ‘How pleasant he was, but how we shall miss him,’ he reflected. Pierre and his wife Rirette were among their little circle of close friends, with whom Patrick and my mother could share their deepest concerns.

  Such concerns included Patrick’s longstanding confrontation with the invention of the automobile. Driving home down the mountains from a shopping expedition in Le Perthus ‘in a shocking head wind’, ‘something fell from the back seat – stopped to put it right – the open door
flew out of M’s hand, wrecking the hinge. After she had held it for some miles I tied it more or less shut’ – after which they just about made it home.

  Following another particularly bad asthma attack, Patrick asked himself: ‘Qu. How much is state of mind?’ Despite the constant assault of such painful bouts of illness, he finally completed his book on 19 May ‘with quite a powerful burst of work’. Provisionally entitling it The Truelove (the title retained by the American publisher), he was in due course induced by my mother to rename it Clarissa Oakes – the title it bore for the British market.[fn6] By 10 June my mother had recovered sufficiently from what had long appeared an endless succession of wearisome ailments, and ‘began typing Truelove & became calmer, happier, better’. Despite her physical weakness and constant pain, on 3 July she ‘finished the book – such a feat!’ exclaimed Patrick gratefully.

  When he received what he described as ‘a pleasant letter’ from Norton with ‘proposals for a photograph of me on the next jacket’, he commented bluntly: ‘No, sir.’ His intense dislike of being photographed seems at first glance odd, as he was in fact to the end of his life a good-looking man. It aroused in him an oddly visceral fear, and in addition he was adversely affected by those photographers who misguidedly require a fixed pose, which he like many found stressful. The few good pictures taken throughout his life tend to be snapshots, particularly those rare ones catching him unawares. It is possible that the irrational malignity evinced by some of his critics was in part intensified by the strained – almost menacing – appearance posed photographs tended to give him.

  On the other hand, he continued enthusiastic over Geoff Hunt’s masterly dustjacket designs. As the latter’s annotated plan for the cover of Clarissa Oakes exemplifies, the pains he took to accommodate them to textual detail are surely unparalleled since George Cruikshank’s collaboration with Dickens and Ainsworth. Despite expressing a minor reservation over the narrative passage selected for illustration, Stuart Proffitt expressed his confidence that ‘it will make a fine jacket’.