Asked why he had never before come to the United States, he replied testily: ‘Penury’.[5]
Patrick was indeed not only weary, but suffering from an incipient cough. However, cheering news arrived next morning that MGM had offered $35,000 for a film option on Master and Commander. After that he visited the museum and ship USS Constitution, where he was formally presented with a handsome copper bolt mounted on an oak plank from the vessel. Although the mount is not large, it is impressively heavy, indicating exceptionally well-seasoned oak – as Royal Navy frigates of inferior construction found to their cost in the war of 1812. After their return home, Patrick received the bolt by post and learned that he had been appointed an Honorary Trustee of the USS Constitution Museum.
Exhausted by what had been a heady mixture of pleasure and strain, acclaimed as a great success by their hosts in the USA and colleagues in London on their return, the ailing elderly couple returned gratefully to their cosy home beneath the Château St Elme. ‘Undercroft sadly damp & mouldy, all else well, the kitchen a delight, but still to be explained [how it worked!].’
The enthusiastic reception Patrick received during his visit to the United States was exhilarating, but it was a relief to be home, checking the vines at Manay, watching birds on the salt lakes beyond Perpignan, and conducting his familiar evening walk up the ridge and past the Dugommier fort.
This year of continually accruing success was crowned by the news in November that the Samuel Goldwyn Company had finally agreed on a contract for an option on rights to Master and Commander. New Year’s Eve of 1993 was marked by a reminder of their shared wartime days, so full of excitement and hope, from my Uncle Ivan in Denmark, together with a prayer reflecting an uncertain future: ‘Cards: one from Ivan, remembering Chelsea … having wished Nikolai a happy new year [re legal problems] we went to bed.’
XV
Epinician Acclaims
I find it does a man good to be talked to by his sovereign. In the first place, a man cannot be in a passion.
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1793), i, p. 502
Patrick regulated his life by many curious little habits, some amounting almost to superstitions. Above his armchair in Correch d’en Baus perched the fine sixteenth-century chamber clock he had owned since Chelsea days. An accomplished amateur horologist, he regularly attended to its welfare, his trusty guide being William Derham’s slim octavo volume The Artificial Clock-maker. A Treatise of Watch and Clock-work (London, 1732). On occasion he would remind me that its sonorous strike provided the heartbeat of the house, or what he once termed in his diary ‘a comforting, necessary presence’. His distress was accordingly acute when, one day in January 1994: ‘Clock stopped & my heart died within me.’ His marginally superstitious cast of mind was further provoked on 25 April of that year: ‘My little silly omens for this book (times of [Rubik’s] cube) were all disastrous.’ Looking ahead, that autumn: ‘I saw fit to begin XVIII [The Yellow Admiral], though the cube gave a bad omen.’
At the end of the month he spent a fortnight in and out of hospital at Perpignan, undergoing unpleasant operations for bladder infection and gallstones. As ever, television provided an unsatisfactory diversion. At the end of March Patrick found himself disappointed with the film of Cyrano de Bergerac: ‘… the v well-spoken of Depardieu’s Cyrano turned out to be costume piece with hero rushing to & from bullying, slashing with sword – all the old crap – shouting too.’
Patrick will have been accustomed to more classical renditions of Rostand’s play staged in the apt setting of the Château Royal.
Shortly afterwards a reminder of their distinguished American actor friend proved even less rewarding. Patrick’s television set disappointed him with tiresome regularity, obdurately declining to improve with the years. ‘We tried Chuck [Heston]’s Ben Hur, but could not bear more than 10 wordy minutes. Their clothes are always made of v thin cloth.’
Patrick regarded the apparatus as something of a complex living entity, possessed of a malevolent will of its own. One such struggle may stand for many more:
… in arranging magnetoscope for the Henry V film [Laurence Olivier] I found that the Ivan the T[errible] part II had in fact been recorded, which is something of a satisfaction. For Henry I put on the dreary Fellini tape – itself superimposed on World Cup football, since the Shakespeare (poor soul) was to last longer than anything I possessed otherwise. Everything turned on properly, but alas it was the most primitive ham acting, much of it of course in darkness, and M could not stand ½ hr. I lasted somewhat longer in the hope of Agincourt, said to be remarkable, but then I too crept off leaving the machine running. Qu. will it record the rest of the film? No, it went back to Fellini.
Undeterred, Patrick continued his Homeric struggle to make the wretched machine work, however entrenched its perverse resistance to reform. Some time previously, for example, ‘we watched Deneuve & Depardieu in a film … in the dark of course & largely inaudible. After an hour we could take no more but retired full of admiration for both’ – possibly on account of their skill at acting under such tenebrous conditions.
Persisting ill-health hampering work on his current novel The Commodore doubtless accounts for a troubling dream: ‘A disappointing night, however. M cramped dreadfully & I had a foul dream: bill for breakfast in Venice £5 – I only had 30/- left her there & hurried back to hotel – COULD not find it – never did.’
It was at this time that Patrick received his first intimation of Dean King’s unwelcome biographical project. Norton passed on a detailed outline of his proposal via HarperCollins, which included a request for Patrick to write the foreword to King’s proposed ‘Patrick O’Brian Companion’. Patrick’s response was stern:
I have always been luke-warm about the idea of a companion … Yet clearly there are readers who think it important to know the difference between a smiting-line and a twiddling-line, and those who very naturally long for maps … yet on the other hand, what are his [King’s] own technical qualifications and literary powers? … he speaks of a contribution by me with rather surprising assurance; and I have the impression, perhaps mistaken, of a confident, somewhat journalistic taking-over of what is after all my domain.
If Norton or Collins feel inclined to encourage the project, I should raise no objection: but I should certainly have to know very much more about Mr King’s abilities as a writer before I associated myself with it in any way.
King’s proposed academic collaborators appear to have faded away on learning of Patrick’s reluctance to co-operate, but he himself remained undeterred, and published his unauthorized companion single-handed in 1996. Fortunately, an authoritative and beautifully illustrated companion has since been published by the leading naval historian Brian Lavery.[1]
On 12 April the post brought a copy of the Collins edition of Testimonies, bearing Geoff Hunt’s magnificent dustjacket illustration of their tiny cottage in North Wales. It was accompanied by the HarperCollins publication of Patrick’s Collected Short Stories, but Patrick unfortunately found ‘the tales utterly ruined by Byatt’s cruel (intended?) comparison with [Georgette] Heyer’ on the rear of the dustjacket. This pained comment illustrates Patrick’s extreme sensitivity to what he considered inappropriate comparisons. The citation from A.S. Byatt runs as follows:
Narrative addicts all have writers to whom they return regularly to cheer or console themselves. Mine are Georgette Heyer, C.S. Forester, Margery Allingham and Dick Francis. I have just discovered another, Patrick O’Brian, and he is in many ways better and more satisfying than any of them.
Byatt’s comparison was surely intended to evoke authors whose impact on readers at a susceptible time of life leads them to return in later life to their work with undiminished pleasure, regardless of their literary quality. In fact, the characteristic remarked by Byatt is one shared by many admirers of Patrick’s great roman-fleuve, who proclaim the pleasure they derive from regular immersion in its vividly depicted world.
Despite this aggravation, on 25 April Patrick completed writing his current novel ‘in quite a flurry of excitement, &, for the very end, delight …’ Originally entitled ‘The Middle Passage’, he was obliged to abandon the title when advised by Norton that a book by this name concerning the Atlantic slave trade had recently gained a National Award in the United States. After some discussion, it was decided to call it The Commodore, despite that being the title of one of Forester’s Hornblower series.
After being checked and typed by my mother, the text was sent to the British publishers in May. As ever, Richard Ollard was delighted, writing in haste: ‘what a delight and what a triumph The Commodore is. The aging & development of the characters, the newness of the background and the deepening of the constants in it – I write hurriedly & no doubt like St Paul foolishly.’
The story begins off the coast of West Africa, where Jack Aubrey is despatched in command of a small squadron to engage in suppression of the slave trade, whose brutal nature is vividly exposed, together with Britain’s exemplary record in suppressing the cruel institution. The expedition, although successful, proves to be partially intended as cover for assembling a force to frustrate a renewed French attempt to land on the coast of Ireland.
As ever, the novel contains personal touches which could not be known to the reader. It is not difficult to detect Patrick’s indignation at continuing revelations of the underhand practices of the British government and judiciary in securing Lord Aldington’s victory in the courts, when Sir Joseph Blaine explains to Maturin underlying factors of the innocent Jack Aubrey’s condemnation in The Reverse of the Medal:
You might think it a far cry from the Solicitor-General and a long-established eminently respectable firm of lawyers to a band of criminals; but the eminently respectable know the less respectable and so down to the very dregs; and where raison d’état or what can be disguised as raison d’état is concerned I believe that even you would be astonished at what can happen.[2]
Less significant allusions may be touched on briefly. There can be little doubt that the continuing expansion of Jack’s originally modest Ashgrove Cottage with successive injections of wealth from prize money corresponds to Patrick’s pride in the upstairs room, northern wing, and cloister his earnings had enabled him to add over the years to their original one-room casot. Sophie’s heartfelt lament to Stephen that ‘we were so much happier when we were poor’ echoes a recurring refrain in Patrick’s diaries, as well as what my mother occasionally lamented to me. Stephen’s bestowal of a Munster farm on his servant Padeen recalls Patrick’s bequest of their Manay vineyard on Michel, son of their close friends Pierre and Hélène Camps. Similarly, the she-potto which Maturin’s colleague Whewell presents to a delighted Stephen is a precursor of my mother’s beloved dachshund Miss Pätz, also known as ‘Miss Potts’, who helped her drive ambulances during the Blitz, when she became also known as ‘Potto’.[3] Again, the precious volume ‘Elzevier Pomponius Mela De Situ Orbis’, brought by Whewell on board the Bellona, eventually descended down the centuries into the possession of Patrick himself – having by then sadly lost its title-page.[4]
Finally, we may note Diana Villiers hunting ‘with Ned Taaffe’s hounds’ in Ireland. Edward Taaffe was Patrick’s close Irish friend (of whom tantalizingly little is known) in 1930s Chelsea, with whom Patrick recalled voyaging under sail in the Atlantic.
The 19th of May saw the arrival of the British Library’s Festschrift in Patrick’s honour, which understandably caused some stir at Correch d’en Baus: ‘Then post brought … copy of the Telegraph’s reproduction of Chuck’s B[ritish]L[ibrary] article &, from Cunningham, the elegant little book itself. These things put me & I think M into quite a flurry of spirits, scarcely calmed by driving to the Madeloch …’
The ‘elegant little book’ is indeed a worthy testimonial to Patrick’s literary prowess – the first for a living author to be produced by the august institution, under whose great Panizzi dome he had toiled more than half a century earlier on his abortive scheme to compile a scholarly book on medieval bestiaries. Entitled Patrick O’Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, contributors included the erudite naval historians Brian Lavery and Nicholas Rodger, the American neuropsychiatrist Professor Louis Jolyon West (discussing Maturin’s medical skills), William Waldegrave, and Charlton (‘Chuck’) Heston, together with literary appreciations by John Bayley and Richard Ollard. Patrick himself contributed a brief and characteristically evasive autobiographical essay, together with two of his short stories and a collection of poems. Finally, the editor Arthur Cunningham contributed an authoritative bibliography, while Stuart Bennett provided a sample collection of reviews over the decades.
Patrick very properly insisted that the reviews included should be broadly laudatory (indeed, they were not hard to find). However, as Cunningham pointed out to him, ‘I have omitted any mention of your early pseudonymous novels.’ This suggests that he had inferred the name ‘Patrick Russ’ to be a nom-de-plume, although it may be that the scholarly Cunningham was more aware of the actual circumstances than he vouchsafed.
Patrick made many suggestions for the work, not all of which were adopted. ‘I think we should have out the photograph of Bennett & me carrying grapes half naked,’ he remarked – advice which Cunningham wisely ignored. Despite this, Patrick was delighted with the finished product, a special edition of which, signed by all the contributors, was presented to him during a visit to London shortly afterwards.
Patrick had since childhood been intrigued by the narwhal, with its impressive rapier-like horn (actually, a canine tooth), and had long desired to possess such a ‘horn’. A serious obstacle lay in the fact that narwhals are among internationally protected species, which means that their horns, regardless of age, are forbidden to cross national frontiers. Eventually, he was informed of a Canadian dealer, who could arrange for the purchase to be collected in Switzerland. There remained the problem of transporting it back to France. The dealer suggested use of a motorcar, which was unlikely to be searched: ‘Apparently this is the preferred method in Europe.’
On 18 June Patrick and my mother drove to Geneva, where they met a dealer who handed over the horn in a cardboard tube. This they inserted into a fishing-rod bag, and set off for the French frontier. Their apprehension was extreme when faced by French douaniers, but all passed smoothly, and the horn was installed at Collioure. In due course it made its appearance in The Hundred Days, where it is broken in consequence of Killick’s foolish antics, being subsequently mended with great skill. This course of events closely followed reality, Patrick’s precious horn being likewise damaged and repaired.
On 30 June Patrick suffered one of his intermittent low moments, lamenting that ‘We are dreadfully dismal: joy in life is all gone’, but was cheered shortly afterwards when John Saumarez Smith reported that:
I hear from one of our old friends/customers, Sam Goldwyn Jr, that he has bought the film rights to the Aubrey series. He says that the last time Heywood Hill [bookshop] recommended his taking up film rights was in about 1960 when we told him to buy rights to James Bond – it was a pity he didn’t!
Sadly, Patrick did not live to see Peter Weir’s magnificent film of Master and Commander, with Russell Crowe as a convincing Jack Aubrey.[fn1]
Increasing financial security enabled Patrick to put into effect projects close to his heart. During their early years at Collioure he and my mother had contributed as generously as they could from their sparse resources to fund his son Richard’s educational expenses. Now he could afford to be lavish in supporting our children. In August he ‘wrote to Eton bursar about putting a year’s fees aside in case of sudden death’. This was for our son Dmitri’s education, whose progress he followed attentively. As well as being delighted with his successes, he and my mother were tolerant of any setbacks occasioned by his youthful years. When I broke news to them of the boy’s being rusticated for having been found in a Windsor pub, my mother made an urgent plea fo
r me ‘not to be angry with him’.
It is refreshing to observe how relatively little Patrick was affected by material success. On 10 October he learned from Barclay’s Bank that their combined accounts totalled no less than £535,836. Next day, however, he set the news in proportion: ‘One pleasant thing (& it is astonishing how the huge sum left us indifferent, even obscurely resentful) was that I tried recording a piece of TV on the magnétoscope, & it worked.’
The year concluded on a generally high note, marred only by increasing intimations of mortality. Just before Christmas he gazed disconsolately upon ‘photographs of Admiralty speech – I had no idea I looked so v old, pale with age’. Happiness was restored, however, by completion of their second garage extending beside the lane.
By the beginning of 1995 Patrick’s international success seemed secure, even in his eyes. In January he wrote to Stuart Proffitt at Collins:
Thank you very much for your note about the million mark [paperback sales in the UK and Commonwealth alone], which if my calculations are right, means rather more than fifteen miles of books standing side by side.
It tickles my vanity, but at the same time it makes me uneasy: is not such a vast figure obscurely discreditable? If so, I shall have to put up with it.
The new book [The Yellow Admiral] advances, but very very slowly. Workmen are in the house painting doors & shutters, making a path for Mary to go down to the garden, providing the garage with the kind of door that turns on its horizontal axis. Thieves took away my fine powerful Citroën BX in the night, drove it to the outskirts of Perpignan and then destroyed it entirely by fire. And I have lost all the notes on inclosure of commons that I made last time I was in London – a matter of real importance to me for the present tale. These things would slow down any writer short of an evangelist.
Patrick suddenly ‘felt old, really old, & discouraged’ (he had attained his eighty-first birthday in the previous month), becoming increasingly prone to fatigue and loss of memory. He wrote asking me to provide him with accounts of boxing matches contemporary with the setting of his novels, which I was able to do, but he then found he had mislaid his copies of the Hammonds’ books on eighteenth-century rural economy.[fn2] Eventually both notes and books were run to ground, but his recurrent back ailment began playing up again, and the following month found him momentarily contemplating bringing the series to a finish, though ‘The idea of parting with Aubrey & Maturin grieves me.’ Fortunately this did not happen, but various mishaps of mind and body meant that he would not complete the current novel until the beginning of the following year.
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