Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  What surprised and pleased me on the occasion of my stay in his rooms was Patrick’s unexpected and to me quite astonishing openness. My relationship with him had always been filial and affectionate, but I had long eschewed raising any topic of an overly personal nature. Now, however, he became for the first time both unusually confiding and (still more surprisingly) prone to discussing his inner feelings openly. I slept on the sofa in his sitting room, which provided opportunity for late-night cogitations over liberal libations of Power’s excellent Irish whiskey. He now expressed considerable agitation at the news that Dean King intended to publish his unauthorized biography. He had consistently refused to be interviewed by him, a problematic issue which we discussed late into one night.

  On his arrival at Trinity, Patrick had found awaiting him a further request from the aspiring biographer to grant him an interview for what he cautiously described as ‘a literary article’. Now, as the evening drew on with much conviviality and intimacy, Patrick suddenly asked me to state frankly what I thought should be his response to King’s request. While I myself possessed personal experience of misrepresentation by a small but vociferous coterie of the British media, for Patrick to seek my candid advice on so very personal an issue was all but unique in my experience.[fn19] My response was that, it being impossible to stifle hostile criticism, I had found that co-operation provided the simplest and safest course. While this risked (even at times occasioned) distortion, I believe the prime concern of most journalists is to secure a good story. Moreover, the likelihood on the whole is that an interviewer will naturally prefer a protagonist’s first-hand account to that concocted by ill-informed outsiders. Besides, all press comment being inherently ephemeral,[fn20] there was little to be gained by any fruitless attempt to avert malicious distortion. Patrick listened attentively, and to my great surprise suddenly expressed agreement with this view.

  Next day he telephoned his literary agent, asking her to inform King of his change of mind, and consenting to an interview. However, her response dramatically altered his decision. It transpired that King had just published a lengthy article in the influential US magazine New York, which provided a detailed account of Patrick’s family background, while dwelling somewhat obsessively on the falsity of any pretension he might have to being Irish. That it included a number of speculative inaccuracies cannot have improved Patrick’s indignant estimate of the writer.

  His anger at this invasion of his privacy seemed to me understandable. He promptly informed his agent that in no circumstances would he have anything to do with King. Not long after, I learned more of this dramatic episode. That the world was beginning to grow acquainted with Patrick’s ‘secret life’ had become all too evident. The BBC had opened the door on his past by a crack, and shortly afterwards Ben Fenton’s well-researched articles let in the first flood of light. It was clear that King’s desire for a scoop was becoming seriously endangered, and I was informed that his US publisher had urged him to move quickly to establish his prior claim to authority by publishing an outline of his discoveries through a reputable outlet. It was this that led him to rush out his article for New York. Now he belatedly discovered that he had inadvertently wrecked what was for him potentially the scoop of a lifetime. Anguished pleadings and apologies via Patrick’s agent availed him nothing, with the result that he was prevented from accessing not only Patrick himself, but the testimony of practically all those surviving family members, friends and literary colleagues who actually knew him.

  Patrick’s indignation was total, and it was further unfortunate for King that his wrath was exacerbated by occasional tactless remarks from people who had seen the New York article. When King sent me for comment a draft account of an event in which I had supposedly been involved, I prepared a reply pointing out one or two of his more blatant inaccuracies, together with a general warning against the dangers of groundless speculation. I first despatched a draft copy to Patrick, who was by then back in Collioure. He telephoned by return, angrily upbraiding me for entering into any contact with King, and declaring that he wished to have nothing more to do with me! It was only when I gently pointed out that what I had sent him was a draft, not to be despatched without his approval, that he relented with equal suddenness.

  I cannot help wondering what would have been the outcome had King’s unfortunate venture into print not occurred. While I feel certain that Patrick would have proved pretty much as reticent as was his wont, he might, I imagine, have corrected some of King’s wilder misrepresentations. Above all, even had the latter gained nothing else, it would have provided a major fillip for his biography could he have cited his subject’s co-operation. As Patrick wrote to Richard Scott Simon in the New Year of 1999: ‘The wretch King is absolutely determined to be a nuisance, but at least we can cut him off from anything that gives the book an “authorised” air.’

  Equally, given the combination of Patrick’s reserve with King’s lack of critical acumen and marked tendency towards speculative sensationalism, it is quite possible that readers would have benefited little from the exchange.

  The knowledge that a biography likely to prove gravely damaging in effect, if not intent, was imminently to be published afflicted Patrick with bouts of depression, sleeplessness, and suspicion. Stuart Proffitt at Collins was so concerned that he flew to Dublin on Patrick’s return and took him on a tour of the Irish countryside. While he enjoyed this, his apprehension proved in no way diminished. When his former editor Richard Ollard inadvertently failed to send him a Christmas card, he worried lest he had been affected by the adverse publicity: ‘Could it be on account of articles in press?’ Occasionally he quaintly sought solace by viewing the video film of the Queen’s bestowal of his CBE, which seems to have brought him greater consolation than Proffitt’s assurance that press criticism exercised no perceptible effect on his continuingly soaring book sales.

  Despite his own melancholy problems, Patrick followed my own travails with his customary sympathy and understanding. In one of his many letters to me at the time, he wrote with passion:

  How sorry I am about the horrid, horrid time you had in that vile law-court. I wish I could accurately recall the Old Testament’s words about human justice, likening it to a woman’s filthy rag. I had it from the Vulgate, and the Latin was particularly powerful. But there is this reflection: Aldington has to live with Aldington, & as Lady A said long ago ‘There will be tears again tonight’ – a fairly permanent state of affairs, no doubt.

  XVII

  Melmoth the Wanderer

  … the most austere and bitter accidents that can happen to a man in this life, in æternum valedicere, to part for ever, to forsake the world and all our friends, ’tis vltimum terribilium, the last and the greatest terror, and most irksome and troublesome vnto vs.

  [Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: What it is. With all the Kindes, Cavses, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Severall Cvres of it (Oxford, 1624), p. 279

  In 1998 much undeserved pain was inflicted on Patrick by the BBC’s insinuation that he was a liar (an accusation robustly corrected a few weeks later by Ben Fenton in the Daily Telegraph), and then – more damaging – by Dean King’s would-be exposé in New York magazine. Worst of all was the knowledge that the hard-earned climacteric to his long and arduous literary life found itself more and more threatened by publication of what he felt certain (rightly, as it turned out) would be a profoundly damaging biography by the same writer. Deeply troubled by this looming threat, assailed by recurring insomnia, bouts of illness and lapses of memory – above all, wretched in the poignant absence of my mother – the pleasure that might have been expected from his astonishing accession of fame and wealth persistently eluded him. On a lowlier, but nonetheless troubling, level, deprivation of my mother’s management of their accounts (which she had handled since at least 1945) left him regularly bewildered by the smallest bills.

  For the present, however, he had benefited from his winter’s stay in Dublin. Trinity College ha
d afforded him a warm welcome, and the exclusive Kildare Street Club, which he had been able to use in consequence of a mutual arrangement with Brooks’s, accorded him honorary membership. He had acquired some good friends in the city, and from his diary it is clear that he derived comfort from my visit and that of our youngest daughter Xenia. His tour of the Irish countryside with Stuart Proffitt likewise afforded him pleasure, as did his renewed familiarity with Dublin, above all with its evocative memories of his youthful stay in 1937, when he wrote his successful novel Hussein.

  Perhaps most gratifying of all at this stage, despite constant misgivings he had at last completed Blue at the Mizzen. In February 1999 he reported to Richard Scott Simon: ‘I have indeed had a pleasant time here in an agreeable little set of rooms, writing 60,000 words of a new book.’

  When the book was published later in the year, it bore the inscription:

  I dedicate this book, donum indignum,

  to the Provost and to all those many people

  who were so kind to me while I was

  writing it in Trinity College, Dublin

  The College, where I too had enjoyed exceptionally happy days forty years earlier, did indeed provide Patrick with a warm and much-appreciated refuge. As the Provost, Tom Mitchell, wrote to him on 9 December 1998: ‘I hope you will long continue to enjoy life at Trinity and in Dublin. You will be welcome in the College at any time and for as long as you wish. Good luck with the arduous, anxious but exhilarating ars scribendi.’

  It was about this time also that Patrick received an appreciative visitor at his rooms in Trinity. The Honourable Mr Justice Deeny was a graduate of Trinity, who subsequently became a High Court judge in Northern Ireland. A devotee of Patrick’s novels, he had seized the opportunity, when on holiday in the Roussillon some years previously with his wife Alison, of requesting a visit to the reclusive author. The judge’s Irish charm, tact and intelligence worked wonders, when Patrick, unusually, welcomed them into their home. That evening he insisted on taking the couple out to dinner at his favourite fish restaurant in Port-Vendres. While Patrick and the judge discussed naval practices in the time of Nelson, my mother described to his wife their initial years of poverty following their arrival in Collioure.

  In 1996 Deeny and his wife attended the banquet held in Patrick’s honour in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, where they again spoke briefly. Now, learning that Patrick was in Dublin, he obtained an invitation to visit him at his rooms in Botany Bay. Although such delicate matters were not raised, the Judge’s keen forensic mind privately scouted the bizarre sensitivities of critics outraged by Patrick’s change of name. As for his supposed claim to be Irish, Deeny commented:

  I can only say for my part that he never said anything to us to suggest either that he was in fact Irish or that he had been on active service in the war. As to the former he seemed one of those Englishmen who was proud of some connection with Ireland which in his case he did not elaborate on.

  Aspects of their conversation reveal the surprising extent to which an intelligent and sympathetic interlocutor could extract fascinatingly candid personal information from Patrick. So little is known of his life between completion of his education in 1933 and his lengthy visit to Ireland in 1937, that it has even been questioned by Dean King whether he ever crossed the Irish Sea at that time. It is to Sir Donnell Deeny (as he subsequently became) that we owe this invaluable glimpse of his initial stay in the North: ‘Indeed he said his first love was from Belfast. She was called Mona Fitzpatrick … I have to say that he also admitted to taking another girl up to MacArts Fort which she told him she was not meant to climb.’

  It seems that it was not only the incomparable landscape and poetic imagination of the Irish that generated Patrick’s love affair with the green isle. Possibly, too, the judge’s introduction of Bushmills whiskey to Patrick’s palate contributed to the relative candour of the conversation.[1]

  A poem he composed at the time to which this memory relates has fortunately survived, poignantly commemorating his adolescent love affair:

  Dear Mona FitzPatrick ’32 (or ’3)

  A boy – a man – I loved in County Down:

  In the evenings, the sweet dusk of that summer

  I used to turn my face to the North

  writing writing and counting the days for a letter

  (I was a boy)

  longing the days long, my hands out to Ulster

  I stood in the secret dark of the evening.

  And now, on the evening path of a mountain, unthinking it came fresh again:

  familiar, familiar the sadness pervading

  heart-worn the prayer for a wind from the north.[2]

  The allusive expressions ‘my face to the North … my hands out to Ulster’ indicate that the poem was written in the Irish Free State following his encounter with Mona in Ulster. This chance reference shows that Patrick paid at least two substantial visits to Ireland before the War, which entrenched his profound love of the island of saints and scholars.

  With the arrival of spring he returned home to Collioure. Hitherto I have been enabled to follow Patrick’s activities not only from my own memories, but above all from the diaries he had kept since 1969 – that for the pivotal year 1968 having regrettably been purloined at the end of his life. Frustratingly, that which he kept for the last year of his life also vanished in suspicious – although entirely distinct – circumstances. On 31 December 1998 he purchased a diary for the coming year at Read’s bookshop in Nassau Street, around the corner from Trinity. That he fulfilled his intention of continuing his daily entries is attested by an acquaintance who saw it on several occasions in the Westbury hotel where he was staying at the end of 1999. Since he was not in the habit of carrying sizeable diaries around with him, it is all but certain that it was in his room when he died there on 2 January 2000. About that time, however, it disappeared in circumstances which have never been explained. The London solicitors responsible for administering Patrick’s estate refused to investigate the matter. For reasons which I am unable to specify here, I have reason to believe that it was abstracted from his hotel bedroom, and I fear destroyed in Dublin shortly after his death.

  In April 1999 Patrick returned to Collioure, dismayed to find an enormous accumulation of post awaiting him. In September he had received an invitation from Annemarie Victory in New York, inviting him to participate in a Mediterranean cruise on board Sea Cloud, a magnificent four-masted barque with a fully manned crew to handle the vessel under sail. It had been constructed in 1931 at Hamburg for the Post Toasties heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. The interior was luxuriously but tastefully furnished and decorated. Any doubts Patrick might have nurtured were stilled by Annemarie’s assurance ‘that you will not make any speeches nor respond to personal questions. I assure you that the other guests on board … will be more than happy simply to meet you and share conversations about Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin …’

  The prospect was certainly exciting, with Patrick sailing in a vessel so closely recalling those whose handling he has described more vividly than any novelist since Stevenson or Conrad. (It still baffles me when Patrick’s detractors assert that his extensive reliance on imagination and research rather than practical navigation represents a blemish on his literary achievement!)

  Despite the very considerable cost of the cruise, Annemarie encountered no difficulty in filling the cabins with guests, many of whom had travelled from the United States to participate in this unique experience. Patrick was unsure how long his temperament would match up to days away from his writing, spent among potentially garrulous or inquisitive strangers. He agreed to board the vessel when it put in at neighbouring Port-Vendres, and to disembark two nights later at France’s great naval base of Toulon.

  As Patrick told me afterwards, his fears proved groundless, and he thoroughly enjoyed the voyage. His admirers were polite and discreet, and he found his fellow guests of honour cordial and interesting. They were Walter Cronkite, the veteran U
S journalist and broadcaster, the naval historian David Lyon, who was preparing a prosopography of Patrick’s seafaring novels, and Lyon’s wife Eleanor Sharpston (whom Patrick privately termed ‘the Lyoness’), an international lawyer who first met her husband on a converted gaff-rigged Baltic trader in the North Sea. All three were experienced amateur sailors. Patrick’s spirits rose among this congenial company. After he left the ship, Eleanor Sharpston wrote to him:

  It has been a delight for me to have opportunity to renew, on board Sea Cloud, our earlier slight acquaintance. I do hope that, as well as being duly lionised by your devoted American followers, you have had some time and space for yourself and for ‘Blue at the Mizzen’; and that you have enjoyed being back at sea under square sail as much as I have relished my forays aloft.

  In the event Patrick became sufficiently relaxed to deliver a short talk while on board. One particularly enthusiastic admirer was an American bibliophile named David Mattie, who had longed for Patrick to sign his collection of first editions of the Aubrey–Maturin series, now handsomely rebound in leather. Although Patrick had of late succumbed to his US publishers’ pressure to engage in occasional public signings of single volumes, he had never before agreed to such a collective signing. Now, however, he consented to fulfil Mattie’s request to sign the entire set in the privacy of his cabin. Mattie having since died, the twenty volumes[fn1] were, I noted, recently offered for sale at £50,000.