Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  His thin skin left him exposed to bouts of what at times almost amounted to persecution mania. In the early days I was occasionally assailed by his unexpectedly resentful moods, when it was only my mother’s devotion and his considering me a son rather than stepson that removed the possibility of a permanent rift. It was ironic, therefore, that it was in his brilliantly successful old age that he experienced an increasing succession of unprovoked and unaccountable embittered attacks, which seemed to confirm with a vengeance his most fanciful fears of treachery, envy, and deceit.

  Patrick had now become something of a Melmoth the Wanderer. It was at home at Collioure that his most cherished memories were rooted, yet he could not stay there long before the memories and solitude grew too much to bear, and he found himself compelled to depart. As he noted: ‘I had not quite fully realized how much of one’s life is lived with reference (or relatively) to one’s other half (or probably a good deal more than half).’

  On his next return home he experienced one of those eccentric accidents to which he was ludicrously prone:

  Shopping at Mme Camps, with change & counting, I contrived to lose the outer door key. The Duffars have fenced the far side, the pyracantha denied entrance by Mme Dreuille [his neighbours on either side], so I climbed on to the roof, thence to the cloister tiles – dear postière [postwoman] urged me to desist – & so [I] dropped on to the marble table. For a moment all was well but then I lost my balance (on the sundial?) & fell – a grazed elbow & broken marble were all – found spare key. Postière gave me letters, but disapproved.

  It appeared (so Patrick told me afterwards) that she believed he had rashly injured himself on purpose.

  It was not only to his diary that Patrick confided his concerns. After his death I discovered a plethora of little notes distributed about the house, frequently worded in the form of internal dialogues. A typical example reads:

  I MUST NEVER PUT IMPORTANT THINGS IN NEW, CLEVER PLACES: A LITTLE WHILE AGO THOUGHT IT UNWISE TO HAVE CARDS, PASSPORT & WALLET ALL TOGETHER, SO MOVED THE WALLET. I DID FIND IT AGAIN BUT ONLY WITH DIVINE HELP & AT THE COST OF EXTREME ANGUISH.

  On 21 August Patrick received a telephone call from his oldest Collioure friend, Odette Boutet, whom he had first met during his exploratory visit to Collioure in 1949. ‘Then Odette [telephoned], with more or less fictitious journalist who would [like] to write my biography.’

  Patrick had received his first warning of this contingency over a year before, when Richard Ollard wrote to warn him: ‘Stuart [Proffitt] tells me that you are being pursued by an unwished for biographer called Dean Smith or some such name. Rest assured that he’ll get nothing out of me.’[fn12]

  The biographer proved to be an American writer, Dean King, who had enterprisingly hit upon a potentially fascinating topic for a biography. However, he now learned for the first time that the project would prove mired with difficulty. As the reader will by now appreciate, Patrick would not brook the least threat to his privacy. Unfortunately for his purpose, King had made his intent clear from the outset, when he conducted a lengthy interview with Odette, who, unwarned by Patrick, innocently described her close friendship with my mother and him during the early years of my parents’ settling in Collioure.

  Warned by this, the indignant Patrick firmly declined to receive King, and wrote at once to all his friends and publishing colleagues, strongly urging them to have nothing to do with his would-be biographer. A few weeks later I in my turn received a letter from King, in which he declared his interest in republishing my biography of Lord Camelford, written at Patrick’s suggestion many years before, and requesting an interview. King also raised in passing the subject of his proposed biography of Patrick. I replied that I was happy to discuss my book and activities generally, but explained that I had undertaken at my stepfather’s request not to speak about my parents’ private life.

  When King arrived at our Berkshire home, he spoke barely at all about Camelford, focusing instead on unearthing details of Patrick’s life.[fn13] However, I firmly deflected these discreet probes. No further mention was made of the proposed republication of The Half-Mad Lord. The consequence of Patrick’s ban was that King now found himself able to speak to few who possessed any intimate acquaintance with Patrick. Among prominent exceptions were Odette Boutet and Patrick’s estranged son Richard, as well as a handful of people with whom Patrick had for the most part long lost touch, whose silence he had in consequence failed to request. For the present, however, King and his proposed biography were forgotten, as Patrick received his first unpleasant shock: one premonitory of much worse to come.

  On 30 September the BBC finally aired its hour-long documentary, under the title Patrick O’Brian: Nothing Personal. Since Patrick could not view it in Collioure, he asked me to report back by telephone. In the event, I felt largely able to still his apprehensions, since the programme appeared for the most part innocuous, and at points even laudatory. His closest friends were like me delighted by his flat refusals to answer what he regarded as personal questions. William Waldegrave spoke for many, castigating the fact that:

  the BBC (which nowadays behaves no better than the commercial companies, and sometimes worse) had put out ridiculous advance publicity making it clear that the only purpose of the programme was personal prying. So I switched on prepared to be furious; and ended up delighted. Not that it wasn’t an absurd programme; I’m afraid it was: but it was an utter rout of the busybodies. There were you batting away impertinent questions like Len Hutton playing schoolboy bowling.

  The actor Robert Hardy, with equal contempt, ‘watched the BBC’s attempt to invade your castle, with growing irritation at the present consuming desire to ferret out unnecessary details’. Richard Ollard’s verdict was succinct: ‘I thought you were dazzling – yourself, & no dam’ nonsense.’

  One point, however, had aroused alarm in Patrick. As has already been seen, the interviewer at his home in Collioure had managed to extract from him mention of the fact that the character and physique of Jack Aubrey owed much to his elder brother Mike, who had been killed in a wartime bombing raid over Germany. In the documentary this response was juxtaposed with a BBC reporter’s visit to the archives, where he enquired after a pilot officer named O’Brian, who had been shot down as Patrick related. An assistant holding up an official list of the relevant deaths was duly filmed declaring that no such name was to be found in their records. This was of course correct, since Mike had enlisted under his baptismal name of Michael Russ – O’Brian being the name assumed in 1945 by Patrick alone of his family.

  It seems the BBC was already apprised of the reality, since Patrick’s literary agent had informed him five days earlier that the Corporation had discovered his change of name, a revelation it then leaked to the Sunday Times. On 29 September she reported further that the BBC interviewer David Kerr ‘has found my early books [published under his original name Richard Russ]’. The BBC had also been careful not to inform Patrick of their ‘discovery’ of the absence of a ‘Michael O’Brian’ from the official records. So it seems that by the time of the interview they were in a position to know that, had they troubled to question him, he would have been able to explain the circumstances. But that of course would have removed the opportunity for implying that he had lied.[fn14]

  All this conspiratorial activity reads oddly, when set beside BBC producer Mark Bell’s assurance when negotiating Patrick’s agreement to the interview, that ‘the film would aim to be a thoughtful and measured appreciation of Mr O’Brian’s achievement as a writer, and we would not want to intrude on any private part of his life’.

  Had Patrick consulted me, I would have warned him of the likelihood of such skulduggery, of which I had considerable personal experience.[fn15] As it was, I now sought to reassure him by saying that few viewers would have noted, let alone be likely to remember, the malicious slur. With this he was perforce obliged for the present to remain content. Patrick’s legion of devoted readers across the world evinced lit
tle concern with irrelevant details of his personal life. Regrettably, however, the attitude of a vociferous ill-natured segment of the London press and would-be literati was very different. Envy of his astonishing literary success and accompanying wealth, combined with an insatiable requirement to provide dramatic personal ‘revelations’, continued to gather momentum in such quarters.

  As Patrick himself wrote a week later:

  Small rain in the evening spoilt my intended work, & I tended to brood on what I take to be the jealous ill-will excited in small journalists etc by what I may without gross immodesty call relative success … I grew more cheerful & had quite a good dinner; then in bed I listened to Tallis with real enjoyment – a longish pause for pain, pills & then sleep again, with a strange, v affectionate coming together.

  Even in death, my mother was able to console him.

  All these worries preyed upon Patrick to the extent that he decided to pass the winter between London and Dublin, where there would at least be much to distract him. He arranged for his post to be forwarded to me, which he gave me carte blanche to sift, passing on only what appeared of interest. On arrival in London he encountered the first of what was to become an increasing flow of more or less hostile press articles. Warned by me that the Daily Telegraph intended to publish on the Saturday what I feared might be an ‘unpleasant’ feature article about him, he apprehensively avoided the attention of members of Brooks’s Club (where he was staying), by breakfasting around the corner in Jermyn Street.

  The article, which occupied two entire pages of the newspaper, proved dismaying to Patrick: ‘It had a large number of accurate details, some inaccurate (the first almost certainly from a family source), & above all a singular malignance. It did not worry me much at first, but uneasiness grew.’

  His apprehension was understandable. Although he had taken the surname O’Brian at random in 1945, adopting it from that of a nineteenth-century sea captain upon whose record he had chanced, it inevitably led many who had not known him at the time into the supposition that he was Irish. He had spent some months in Belfast and southern Ireland in 1933, and again in Belfast and Dublin in 1937 when writing his early novel Hussein. These protracted visits instilled in him a lasting love of Ireland as a sort of Happy Otherworld, leading him on occasion to hint at, or (rarely) even silently accept, the presumption that he was Irish. Since the true reason for his change of name arose from an overriding desire to banish his wretched childhood and tormented early adulthood, he was desperately concerned to suppress those early years – even to some extent from his own memory. The change of name occurred when he married my mother in 1945, an event which proffered opportunity for beginning his life anew.

  Rereading the article today, I can however detect no trace of ‘malignance’. As Patrick himself conceded, its content was almost entirely factually accurate, and (as he would not however have admitted) comprised what I would have thought matter of legitimate public interest. The author, Ben Fenton, had conducted considerable researches, his prime source evidently being surviving members of the Russ family.[fn16] The article’s only serious error lies in its dramatic but fictitious account of Patrick’s alleged first encounter with my mother during an air raid in 1941, when in fact their romance began long before the Blitz, before the outbreak of War. A few days later the Telegraph published a second major article by Fenton, containing a detailed rebuttal of the BBC’s canard that the bomber-pilot brother on whom Patrick claimed Jack Aubrey was partially based never existed.

  A handful of journalists and others professed pious outrage on learning that Patrick had changed his name. A well-educated mutual friend even telephoned me to say that he felt ‘betrayed’ by the ‘deception’. It seems that he and others felt foolish for having accepted Patrick’s adopted name as that of his birth. An extreme, but far from unique, example was the writer Jan Morris. At the end of 1999 she had published a glowing review of Blue at the Mizzen, which included a perceptive assessment of the Aubrey–Maturin œuvre in its entirety (Observer, 21 November 1999). Less than a year later, however, on reviewing Dean King’s ‘extremely thorough’ biography, she pronounced that: ‘In O’Brian … I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar’ (Observer, 3 September 2000).

  I continue to find such startled reactions baffling. After all, having accepted the ‘deception’ at close quarters for the greater part of my life, I might be thought to have had reason to feel more aggrieved than most! Although I assume I was aware of his change of name even before my first visit to Collioure in 1955, I do not recollect its ever having aroused in me anything but the most fleeting interest, far less concern. I continued to find Patrick the same person writing the same books, whatever his original name. Nor have I found myself unable to enjoy Candide, Middlemarch, Huckleberry Finn, Alice in Wonderland, Lord Jim, Animal Farm, or the works of innumerable other authors who likewise elected to write under names other than those received at their birth.[fn17]

  Still more pertinently, I have yet to hear of any critic’s succumbing to a fit of the vapours on learning that C.S. Forester’s baptismal name was in reality Cecil Smith. Further parallels with Patrick’s career are striking. Acutely embarrassed by his modest social origin and erratic upbringing, Forester was deeply concerned to suppress or reinvent his early life. On a visit to the United States in 1939, he warned his wife that, on her arrival: ‘If I’m not meeting you meet the reporters quite frankly: talk about Hollywood and lecture and so on … It’ll be all right. I’m very much a public figure here by now. But don’t know anything about me before we got married … [italics inserted].’[1]

  Clearly, there must be a reason for this disparity of treatment of the two celebrated maritime authors, whose works have so often been compared. Being personally acquainted with one or two of Patrick’s former admirers who turned bitterly against him, following the revelation of his change of name and occasional assumption of Irish origins, my interpretation (for what it be worth) is as follows. Although the reclusive Patrick tended to keep even those whose acquaintance he valued at discreet arm’s length, there were some among them who liked to represent themselves to their readers or friends as bosom confidants of the famous author. When it was belatedly revealed that they were ignorant even of his real name, they felt foolish, and reacted accordingly. Of course, there may be another reason, although at present I cannot think of one.

  As it turned out, Patrick’s suppression of his early life proved to be a disastrous mistake. An Irish admirer admonished him about this time that ‘you created what you thought was a fortress – but it proved to be a prison’. On the other hand, such morbidly irrational reactions may well have appeared to justify his secrecy. As a great Irishman wrote, objecting similarly to an overly personal newspaper article:

  It is full of anecdotes and particulars of my life. It therefore cuts deep. I am sure I have nothing in my family, my circumstances, or my conduct that an honest man ought to be ashamed of. But the more circumstances of all these which are brought out, the more materials are furnished for malice to work upon: and I assure you that it will manufacture them to the utmost.[2]

  Reverting to Fenton’s article, although initially troubled by his revelations, by the time Patrick arrived at our home that evening his equanimity appeared quite restored, and he was even preparing to take belated advantage of public awareness of his change of name. Alerted to the imminent publication of Fenton’s piece two days earlier, Patrick wrote in his diary: ‘I read most of Caesar, written 70 years ago & almost entirely forgotten: it is rather silly, childish & moderately dull, but not downright discreditable or embarrassing & I think I should like to protect copyright.’

  Caesar was Patrick’s first book, published when he was only fifteen, which appeared under his original name of Patrick Russ. For this reason all his books and short stories published before 1945 had been omitted from the British Library’s lavish tribute.[3] Now he seized the opportunity to regain credit for his precocious ea
rly works, acknowledging privately that: ‘There are, it seems to me, certain advantages [to public awareness of his change of name] – openness.’ Would that he had grasped this much earlier!

  If elements of the lesser literati chafed at Patrick’s continuing immense popularity, this was emphatically not the case among another class of reader. On 26 October Patrick entertained the Second Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Brigstocke, to dinner at Brooks’s. Patrick found Sir John ‘a very agreeable thorough sailor’, while his guest wrote next day to thank him, enthusing that ‘We really must make you an honorary Admiral! Not only have you brought reading pleasure to millions, you have also educated them in British naval history, and its significance. This has inspired many to join the Royal Navy, and to maintain its honour and record of success.’

  Sir John’s counterparts across the Atlantic were equally complimentary, prominent among his admirers being Admiral Jay L. Johnson, Chief of Naval Operations, and Vice Admiral George W. Emery, commanding the Submarine Force of the US Atlantic Fleet. President Reagan’s Secretary for the Navy, John F. Lehman Jr, presented him with a copy of his memoir Command of the Seas, inscribed ‘with admiration and appreciation’.[fn18]

  At the beginning of November Patrick returned to Dublin, where he received as ever a warm welcome from the Provost and Fellows at Trinity. By now, however, news from his literary agent that King was definitely preparing his biography greatly distressed Patrick. A few days later I flew over to stay with him in his rooms provided by the College on the ground floor of Botany Bay, where I found him at first a little low, although seemingly cheered by my visit. He was further delighted by becoming further intimate with our youngest daughter Xenia, who had accompanied me to acquaint herself with Trinity College, which she hoped to attend in the following year. Patrick’s mood was, however, volatile, and his lifelong fear of finding himself the butt of ill will manifested itself when one night during my visit he was turned away by a porter from the dining hall. In reality, as I learned, this was occasioned not by malice, but because there happened to be a special dinner hosted by the College to which only faculty members were invited.