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fn18. While Jack Aubrey’s father, the wayward General Aubrey, clearly owes something to Dr Charles Russ, he is portrayed as foolish and irresponsible, rather than despotic or brutal.
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fn19. This recalls the conclusion of the short story ‘A Minor Operation’, discussed supra, in which the frenzied Patrick-figure is driven to assault the only two creatures he loves in the world: his dog and his wife.
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III New Home and New Family
fn1. Patrick must be allowed to speak for himself and my mother. For myself, I believe some allowance should be made for their detestation of Franco, together with regrettable manifestations of curiosity on the part of the lively Spanish population. This in particular was anathema to the hypersensitive Patrick.
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fn2. I suspect Patrick to have been author of an anonymous survey of the delights of Spain published in the American journal House & Garden later in the same year. I am indebted to Terry Zobeck for a copy of this article.
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fn3. As my mother noted in her diary, ‘P. told idea of Chelsea novel, then retired all morning working.’
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fn4. In view of ill-natured assertions that Patrick provided Richard with no financial assistance, it is worth noting the state of his and my mother’s finances at this time. A month earlier in her diary she recorded: ‘Sad accounts: 29000 instead of our allowed 17.500. P. says he must find him another occupation: writing makes him feel too ill.’
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fn5. The US title of the book (the true first edition), which was presumably that sent to Richard by his father. It was also the edition retained by my mother. My parents besides preferred it for its jacket design by their friend Willy Mucha.
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fn6. This was one of the two occasions when Richard and I met. This lack of contact arose entirely from chance, and I particularly regret that my visit to Collioure in the following year did not overlap with his.
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fn7. The 1954 Hollywood film of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
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fn8. I should emphasize here that Dean King’s apparent resentment towards Patrick extends only to his personal character. He is, in marked contrast, both admiring of his literary achievement, and not infrequently perceptive in his judgements of individual books.
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fn9. This could explain why no one in the Aubrey–Maturin novels is represented as even mentioning such immensely popular contemporary works as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), or The Lady of the Lake (1810). On the other hand, in a piece written for radio about music aboard ship in Jack Aubrey’s day, Patrick observed: ‘I have the impression that only a very few of the most advanced [naval officers] would have had anything to say to the early Romantics.’
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IV Voyages of Adventure
fn1. When republication of the novel was suggested by Norton in 1995, Patrick responded: ‘As for The Road to Samarcand it had no merit apart from the title, and its republication would do neither of us any good.’ This seems a little harsh, and I suspect the schoolboys for whom it was clearly intended would enjoy it today.
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fn2. I am grateful to my friend Terry Zobeck for reminding me of this factor.
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fn3. Occasionally Patrick’s humour has sailed over a reader’s head. His ludicrous use of a passage in the Spectator of 1710 for the preface to Lying in the Sun has been gravely interpreted as ‘a caustic jab at an innocent public’ (King, Patrick O’Brian, p. 183).
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fn4. The care with which Patrick perused these volumes is shown by a slip inserted at p. 165 of vol. xv, where he notes references to subsequent promotions of Lieut. Justinian Nutt and the Rev. Richard Walter, who had participated in Anson’s expedition. In February 1945 Patrick read a biography of Anson, which did not enthuse him: ‘Life of Lord Anson, by Captain Anson Kirker c. 1910. Horribly disconnected. It is not enough to be a naval officer and a descendant to be a good biographer.’
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fn5. For the published collection Lying in the Sun.
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fn6. Looking back in 1992, Patrick remarked that ‘what I wanted to write was a book for readers of no particular age (after all, one can delight in David Copperfield or Kidnapped at 12 or 72)’.
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fn7. Patrick’s niece Gwen has suggested to me that ‘Elwes’ may be an anagram of ‘Lewes’, which certainly seems possible.
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fn8. I have to say that on those occasions when I attended the spectacle, the youths appeared to me remarkably courageous.
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V In the Doldrums
fn1. In fact they could not have afforded to travel together on so expensive a journey, while Patrick was besides immersed in refashioning his novel.
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fn2. This is clear from what Patrick wrote at the time, but my mother did not preserve the aborted contract.
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fn3. ‘… Diana Villiers was what he [Maturin] usually called her in his own mind, for their marriage aboard a man-of-war, with never a priest in sight, had convinced him no more than it had convinced her’ (Patrick O’Brian, The Letter of Marque (London: Collins, 1988), p. 121).
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fn4. Terry Zobeck informs me that ‘several years ago I bid on a proof copy of Richard Temple inscribed by Patrick to Barbara. I lost. It is one of my great bibliophile regrets that I didn’t bid more, which is only exasperated now that I know how close the association was between them.’
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fn5. I imagine Patrick had in mind the clean break between Temple’s unsatisfactory past and imminent transformation.
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fn6. Terry Zobeck reminds me that, very unusually, ‘there is barely any dialogue at all in the novel’. Could this derive from his drawing to an exceptional extent on personal memory? Also worth consideration is the fact that meditation and dreams frequently contain little or no dialogue.
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fn7. While Dean King is mistaken over the dating and circumstances of Patrick’s writing of Richard Temple, I would endorse his judgement on the work: ‘Dealing with many issues that were clearly of personal relevance, Richard Temple appears to have been a cathartic work for O’Brian. Literarily, at least, it seems to a great extent to have emptied him of bile and severe introspection and, perhaps for a time, of motivation. He did not publish another novel for seven years. Nor did he ever write another set in the twentieth century’ (Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed (London, 2000), p. 195).
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fn8. Although I always addressed him as ‘Patrick’, his diaries show that he regarded me as his son, and subsequently my children as his grandchildren.
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VI A Family Man
fn1. Dean King claims that Patrick’s approach ‘often’ included ‘starting to translate about a third of the way into the book to catch the author’s language and rhythm in stride. Later he went back to the beginning’ (Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed (London, 2000), p. 191). So convoluted an approach would be very unlike Patrick’s modus operandi, and it is clear from extensive references to translation work in his diaries and correspondence (as well as his conversations with me) that it is doubtful he ever adopted this curious approach in reality.
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fn2. On 14 March 1979 Patrick noted in his diary: ‘A pleasant letter from Nikolai, but with the quite shocking news of Sue’s death.’
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fn3. Presumabl
y on account of his presence in the Soviet Union, which Aunt Maroussia scornfully termed ‘Bolshevia’.
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fn4. My account of Patrick’s 1963 Russian trip draws on the fifty-page journal he kept throughout his visit.
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fn5. Patrick’s aversion to spoiled children (or what he regarded as such) was shared inter alios by Jane Austen and Lord Byron (cf. Sense and Sensibility, chs 7, 21; Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York, 1957), pp. 1037–8).
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fn6. I was regularly beaten at school, and occasionally at home by my father. Although I naturally disliked the experience, like many of my contemporaries I accepted corporal punishment as an unpleasant fact of life in a generally pretty spartan existence.
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fn7. Dean King, Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed (London, 2000), pp. 196–97. It seems odd that it took some two decades for Richard to appreciate almost overnight the effects of his father’s desertion of his mother, when he had lived with the latter for much the greater part of the previous twenty years and more. Others have expressed further puzzlement as to how Richard’s delay in marrying Mimi might be expected to ensure ‘that they would not make the same mistake his parents had’.
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fn8. Shortly after Patrick’s death, I telephoned Richard to suggest our meeting for a drink. He responded brusquely that he wished to have nothing to do with me or my family.
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fn9. See Appendix B.
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fn10. Natasha, having been only two when our mother left us, retained no childhood memories of her, and consequently remained closer than I to our father and stepmother.
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fn11. Richard’s letter to my mother of 8 March 1964 represents his sole communication throughout this time. He had last written to her in the previous March, well before any question of marriage had arisen. In 1964 my parents had yet to install a telephone at Collioure, and there was no other effective means of communication.
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fn12. There would have been no problem over accommodation in the little house: Brigid and Michael slept on board their yacht, while Jonah and I were accustomed to camping in my tent.
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fn13. ‘The feeling built up inside me that the false name represented my father’s falsehood … It was a crunch time. I felt a deep resentment at the way he had treated us. He changed his name to chop out the past. I changed mine to bring the past back. We never spoke again – and that was 37 years ago’ (Mail on Sunday, 16 January 2000).
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fn14. Cf. pp. 312–13 of the first volume of this biography. Richard acknowledged that he retained almost no memory of his parents’ relationship during his infancy.
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fn15. There was a real-life Captain the Hon. George Heneage Lawrence Dundas (James, The Naval History of Great Britain (London, 1837), iii, p. 113), but the context suggests that the fictional Heneage Dundas’s friendship with Jack Aubrey arose from Patrick’s affection for Timothy. This is further indicated by Dundas’s skill at mathematics (Master and Commander, p. 343): at the time Timothy taught mathematics at Millfield School.
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fn16. Post Captain, pp. 378, 381; The Yellow Admiral, p. 215. Two years later my parents bought a further two plates to make up a set.
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VII Master and Commander
fn1. After Patrick’s eventual departure, Joan’s life became more and more lonely – indeed wretched.
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fn2. Here, as elsewhere, I cite the book titles preferred by Patrick.
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fn3. It is likely that he had been toying with a version of the project for some time. Fifteen years earlier my mother recorded in her diary ‘P. has talked for last 3 days of “Martin” novel.’ ‘Martin Joyce’, as will be seen shortly, was the original name he chose for Stephen Maturin.
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fn4. Patrick did not own any of Marryat’s works, and some years ago I publicly questioned whether he ever read them. However, I had overlooked telling allusions among his preparatory notes for Master and Commander. They include a reference to ‘Marryat’s book on the press’, an allusion to the author’s Suggestions for the Abolition of the Present System of Impressment in the Naval Service (1822), while another note records that Patrick ordered a copy of his novel Poor Jack from the London Library.
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fn5. ‘Jack [Aubrey] had a great respect for a man who could show good sport with a pack of hounds’ (Master and Commander, p. 197), while the exhilaration experienced in combat was ‘like fox-hunting at its best’ (The Ionian Mission, p. 185).
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fn6. ‘… the Colette letters are in Goudeket’s book (the New Yorker, by the way, said “the translation is perfect”)’ (Patrick to Arthur Cunningham of the British Library, 24 August 1993).
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fn7. It may be wondered how, as a Roman Catholic, Maturin was admitted to the staunchly Protestant foundation of Trinity College Dublin. In Patrick’s preparatory notes (although not, so far as I recall, anywhere in the printed works), Martin Joyce (as the Doctor was originally named) describes himself as ‘nominally Protestant’. On the other hand, Catholics were formally admitted to the College from 1793, and had in individual cases been admitted even before that date.
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fn8. In his preparatory notes for Master and Commander, Patrick reminded himself ‘Working a ship – Burney’.
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fn9. At Christmas 1963, I had reported to Patrick that ‘Austin was in great form, and his jokes were even more feeble and vulgar than usual’.
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fn10. It appears that he did not keep a record during these years. In 1993 he noted: ‘Unhappily I do not seem to have anything for 1971–/2/3, the probable years of their [onions’] planting.’
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fn11. In the mountains above Collioure.
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fn12. Master and Commander, p. 319. In The Golden Ocean (pp. 224–27, 225) Commodore Anson presents Peter Palafox with William Winstanley’s quaint anthology The New Help to Discourse (London, 1716), of which Patrick possessed what I like to consider the copy owned by Peter. Patrick’s favourite silence-breaker from Winstanley’s guide during conversation was ‘Who was the most famous Whore in her time?’ (p. 27). Both tooth and book are now in my possession.
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fn13. The spoonerism at first escaped me.
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fn14. Ziegler himself came to acknowledge that ‘there is no doubt that Prince William in 1787 was bad-tempered and even sometimes brutish’ (King William IV (London, 1971), p. 59). In subsequent novels Patrick came to portray him in a more favourable light, corresponding to his improved character after leaving the Navy.
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fn15. Patrick was further dismayed by the Collins paperback cover, whose protagonist he described to me at the time in a letter as ‘a left-handed gentleman, of markedly simian appearance’.
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fn16. The delay accounts for the fact that my mother retained the Collins edition as her personal copy. Patrick himself appears to have regarded the Lippincott edition as the first. When visited by the journalist Mark Horowitz in 1993, Patrick noted that: ‘He had brought … a 1st ed (Lippincott 69) of M&C to be signed.’
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VIII The Green Isle Calls
fn1. In 1948 Raoul Dufy had written in the livre d’or at Les Templiers restaurant: ‘Collioure sans voiles, c’est un ciel sans étoiles.’
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fn2. Terry Zobeck reminds me that, ‘given the closeness between him and Mary, he certainly took a good number of trips by himself’
. This is true, and I assume arose from a combination of shortage of money, the requirement for someone to remain looking after the house and vineyard, and (I fancy most likely) Patrick’s occasional need to detach himself entirely from his workaday routine. However, I have not found the reason specified anywhere in his diaries or correspondence.
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fn3. Everything I know indicates that my mother had in reality been very much a favourite of her parents, both as a high-spirited teenage girl and following her marriage to my father. I fear it was not her childhood that was bathed in disseminated guilt, but rather her abandonment of my sister and me five years after her wedding. But Patrick of course knew only what he learned or sensed from my mother.
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fn4. My own experience echoes that of Patrick: viz. that changing the location of one’s writing rarely induces any lasting renewal of inspiration.
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fn5. This provides a unique but tantalizingly cryptic glimpse of Patrick’s initial relationship with my mother just before the War.
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fn6. The torment inflicted by a loved one’s failure to communicate provides a recurring motif in Patrick’s novels: e.g. The Surgeon’s Mate, pp. 37–38; The Far Side of the World, p. 119.
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fn7. When first considering his new book, Patrick jotted down this cursory note: ‘Cold: young man on foot in spatterdashes: is [?] curate (in pursuit of Hawke)’; ‘nursery – bread & butter misses’; ‘set it all in the Southdown country’.
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fn8. Patrick commemorated his ascent of Croagh Patrick in verse (Patrick O’Brian, The Uncertain Land and Other Poems (London, 2019), p. 36).
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