Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life

This trenchant criticism might be levelled at all too many historical novelists. Indeed, the indications are that it was about this time that Patrick himself came to shed his earlier jejune concept of historical fiction. In January 1940 he had written a melodramatic short story about a crusading knight, John of Bellesme, which owes more to the romantic novels of high adventure written by the Sussex novelist Jeffery Farnol than to anything actually occurring during the Middle Ages. Although Patrick preserved the manuscript, he must surely have been relieved in later years that it was never published.[3]

His only other transitory attempt at historical fiction appears to have been written about the same time. Published in The Last Pool, ‘The Trap’ is much inferior to its fellow tales set in Patrick’s own day. Although as ever well written, its tale of a daring youth who fares forth to poach in the grounds of a tyrannical squire is too reminiscent of the stock characters and standard predicaments of juvenile fiction to carry much conviction.[4]

Following a flurry of creativity over the momentous winter of 1939–40, it seems that Patrick’s wartime employment, first as an ambulance driver in the Blitz, then as an operative with Political Warfare Executive, effectively diverted him from writing. Finding himself, for the first time in his life, unexpectedly in possession of a settled income, he bought many books, chiefly in the second-hand shops of Cecil Court. These he read and clearly absorbed, but it was only as the War drew inexorably towards its close over the winter of 1944–45 that his authorial ambition became reawakened.

The fact that there is frustratingly little documentation for this period of his literary life is in itself suggestive. He began keeping a pocket diary on 1 January 1945, and the care with which he preserved his diaries thereafter makes it unlikely that earlier copies have perished. In it, as well as in memorandum books compiled about the same time, Patrick began entering comments on his reading, together with suggestions for books he contemplated writing. The indications are that, although the war years provided him with a period of respite from creative work, they were also a time of protracted parturition. His perceptive condemnation, on the one hand, of Goldsmith’s trite Roman history, and on the other his unqualified praise for Stevenson’s masterpiece Kidnapped, indicate his dawning understanding of the realities of historiography, together with its glamorous offspring, the historical novel.

Mention of Stevenson’s two great books leads me incidentally to wonder whether Patrick may not also have been unconsciously influenced by the Scottish author’s creation of paired contrasted characters (David Balfour and Allan Breck), their attitudes reflecting disparate political and social aspects of the age: an antithesis which at the same time enriches a memorable friendship.

Again, I wonder whether his new-found propensity for imbuing his narrative with humour – grotesque and farcical, light-hearted and ironical, at times cheerfully vulgar – had lain submerged beneath a long-held conviction that adult literature represented an essentially serious business. His natural sense of humour, ironical and exuberant, took long to emerge in his work.[fn3] At times I put this belated development down to the influence of Somerset Maugham, whom Patrick like many of his contemporaries rated high in the literary scale. But there can surely be little doubt that the enduring precarious state of his finances played its part in producing an entrenched state of gloom.

After Hussein, only his sparkling short stories ‘The Green Creature’ and ‘The Virtuous Peleg’ fully revealed Patrick’s propensity for laughter in court. However, an observant follower of his literary career would have noted how his anthology A Book of Voyages (1947) reproduced specimens of choice rococo passages which afforded him perceptible delight.

As was mentioned in the last chapter, the theme Patrick selected for his fresh venture was Commodore Anson’s celebrated voyage around the globe in 1740–44. One reason for this choice was almost certainly the fact that his library was well equipped for the purpose. He had first grown familiar with the story from the concise account included in Beatson’s six-volume Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, which he bought before the War.[5] Subsequently he acquired the Reverend Richard Walter’s account of Anson’s voyage, published in 1762, together with its accompanying (now rare) handsome quarto volume of maps and plates.[6]

For the social, literary and political history of the time he profited greatly from a present fortuitously given by my mother. In February 1945, ‘M[ary]. very civilly gave me the Gentleman’s Magazine 1743–4–5. Masses of information, both solid and (what is more in some ways) ephemeral. Handsome panelled calf. Vilely printed – hard to realise that any verse can be good in such a dress.’[fn4]

In the following month Patrick read the latest Hornblower novel, on which he commented in his diary:

Forester’s The Commodore is, I think, the first new novel I have ever bought. It seems much more extravagant than paying a guinea for, say, the learned job. It’s a good tale, but not as satisfying as the other Hornblower stories. Smacks a little of formula and wants design. Also, it has not a great deal of meat, or if it has, a greater length is required to give it body.

Patrick could not have dreamed that he would one day write his own novel The Commodore, which I imagine most readers would concur entirely avoids the faults he ascribes to Forester’s work.

Patrick’s criticism of Hornblower seems not unjust. However, as his comment on Stevenson’s Catriona indicates, he did not at the time feel sufficiently confident of his own abilities to attempt a ‘meatier’ historical novel. It was not until nearly a decade later that inspiration struck quite suddenly. On 4 July 1954 my mother wrote in her diary: ‘I typed fourth story,[fn5] & P. thought of Anson juvenile.’ It is intriguing to note that Patrick remained caught up by the notion that exciting adventure stories were exclusively appropriate to a youthful readership, despite his having appreciated Kidnapped and Catriona, which enthral readers of any age.

The remainder of the year was taken up with house-hunting, concluding with the disastrous visit to Cornwall in October and November recounted in the previous chapter. By the New Year of 1955, however, Patrick with a flash of clarity grasped the way forward. It was on the cold evening of 19 January that:

P. wrote boy & thermometer tale & I got so depressed. But today he showed me wonderful notes & pieces of Stag[7] & synopsis of Anson which are quite beautiful & very exciting … P. wrote to Phebe Snow who answered that yes, Hart-D. might advance on synopsis of Anson.

Rupert Hart-Davis had already proved happy enough with The Road to Samarcand to agree a contract for ‘the next Boy’s book to be written by the PROPRIETOR following “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’.

The ‘boy & thermometer tale’ to which my mother referred is the indignant autobiographical account of Patrick’s childhood terror of his generally grim, authoritarian father. ‘The Stag at Bay’ seems also likely to reflect some aspect of Patrick’s psychological breakthrough. The story concerns a self-righteous, priggish author unwittingly cuckolded by his young wife.

The protagonist Edwin is portrayed as suffering from an attack of writer’s block. He has been commissioned to write a piece on marriage for a women’s magazine:

The article was proving much more difficult than he had expected. It was not for lack of raw material … and it was not for lack of experience or thought. Marriage was a subject that he had thought about a great deal, deeply, and he had supposed that the profound part of the article would be the easiest: yet although he was in the right mood, costive and solemn, the words would not form themselves into an orderly and harmonious procession. They remained in his head, swirling in grand but indeterminate shapes; or if they had any concrete existence at all it was in the form of scrappy notes, odd words jotted down …

Meanwhile, as he struggles with an article intended to define the high ideals of marriage amid the squalid débris of a neglected flat, Edwin’s wife has engaged in an affair with an elderly playboy cousin – not from love or lust, but merely ‘to know, to really know, what adultery was like’: ‘She sloughed the anxiously contriving housewife, dropped ten years from her appearance, and responded to his cheerful obscenity with an assured impudence that no longer shocked her inner mind.’

The moral of the tale is clear. Life is overtaking the drudgery of the laborious author, who writes with ponderous difficulty about an institution which has in his case atrophied, while his amoral young wife instinctively grasps at fleeting pleasure before it becomes too late. The writer’s block is plainly Patrick’s own. The ‘pink, virginal and inviting’ young wife was doubtless suggested by the ever-present figure of my mother, while the customary pristine neatness of the flat in the rue Arago happened at the time of writing to be uncharacteristically chaotic, owing to the need to dry and iron quantities of dirty clothes brought back from their extended trip to Cornwall. As my mother acknowledged, ‘place looks like inferior old clothes shop’. The fictional wife’s flighty enjoyment of a sensual affair possibly suggests a metaphor for Patrick’s dawning realization that successful writing should be fun. Certainly nothing suggests that Patrick ever suspected – still less, had reason to suspect – infidelity on my mother’s part.

It is nevertheless a measure of Patrick’s commitment to the ideology of high-mindedness that he regarded rollicking adventure stories as essentially immature: ‘Anson juvenile’, as he termed it. This derogation may indeed have proved fortunate, enabling him to cast away inhibition, writing from the heart. His cheerful tentative opening passages have survived in a notebook:

At half-past eight on the drizzling morning of Tuesday May the 22nd, 1739, the uproar outside the rectory of Ballynasaggart reached its height; for at that moment Peter …

The Rev. Mr Septimus O’Toole behaved extremely well in the troubles of 1715; he was also a very considerable scholar – his commentary upon the Stoic philosophers of the Lower Empire had given him …

When the troubles of 1715 broke out upon the land, the Rev. Mr Octavius Murphy published a little small pamphlet entitled The Idea of an Expedient King in favour of the Hanoverian succession; and this did more for him, in the matter of worldly success, than the three octavo volumes of his Commentary upon the Stoic Philosophers or the square quarto of his Pelagius Refuted …

All three drafts were discarded, possibly because Patrick came to realize that in reality the Jacobite risings of 1715 exerted little impact on repressed Ireland. He further toyed with the idea of ‘Funny lower deck character who spells with a wee [substitution of w for v] and patronises Irish person on a/c of he don’t speak English proper or at least not wery.’ Eventually, he decided to open in medias res, with Peter Palafox riding away to Cork and high adventure across the glimmering billows of the western sea. Almost at once the writing began to flow with wonderful facility. As my mother happily observed, ‘P. wrote beautiful beginning for Golden Ocean after days of pain.’

On 22 January 1955 she posted a synopsis of the novel to Curtis Brown. A week later: ‘Things go well. Rupert will … give advance & contract for The Golden Ocean.’ So inviting was the encouragement from all sides, that progress continued unchecked. As my mother excitedly commented on 2 April, ‘P. is back at work since 31st: Golden Ocean is perfectly splendid.’ The book was completed in July, and posted to England with high hopes. On the 27th my mother returned from the doctor after tearing a muscle when working on the foundations of the new house. ‘P. met me, Oh Joy bringing kind letter about Golden Ocean from Ruth Simon (H[art-]D[avis]). She thinks too that it is quite lovely.’

Changes to chapter I were proposed by the publisher (did the original version begin with one of the trial opening paragraphs?). Patrick was happy with the suggestions: ‘P. & I worked on G. Ocean, P. cutting & substituting, I reading for a list of sea-terms. It is such a LOVELY book,’ enthused my mother. By the end of October, ‘P. finished beautiful diagram of Centurion for Ocean, I typed list [of sea-terms] he made.’ Both diagram and sea-terms drew extensively on Patrick’s copy of Dr Burney’s revised edition of Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine.[8] It was not until 1971 that he obtained a copy of the original (1769) edition, which was more apt for the chronological setting of his novels. Burney, however, served him well – so much so, that the spine came clean away from overuse, and as has been seen was eventually rebacked by Patrick in vellum in 1989.

The Golden Ocean is indeed a wonderfully happy book: lively, good-humoured, exciting, and convincing as a vision of a past era to an extent which only a tiny modicum of historical novels ever attains. At last Patrick had succeeded in weaning himself off gloomy and introspective themes, and thrown himself into a creation which displayed to marvellous effect his natural genius. Like Dumas recounting the grandiose excesses of Porthos, he subsequently recalled that ‘I wrote the tale in little more than a month [between Testimonies and Richard Temple], laughing most of the time. It made no great impression, nor did I expect it to do so; but it had pleasant consequences.’[9]

And all composed in that little crooked nest above the rue Arago, permeated by the sounds and smells of the south!

Reviews were generally laudatory, the most perceptive being that of the academic T.J. Binyon in the Times Literary Supplement, who described it as: ‘wholly absorbing and wonderfully funny, like the best children’s books it can be appreciated fully only by adults’.[fn6]

In 1970 Patrick confided to his diary that ‘I am childishly attached to the book’, and seven years later he described it to his editor Richard Ollard as ‘a book I look back upon with affection – it was such fun to write, & it came flowing out in a month or two’. As has been seen, ‘a month or two’ represents no more than pardonable exaggeration, for it is clear that his pen did indeed run happily away with him.

There followed a German contract for the novel, for which he received £40 advance and royalties. Much more rewarding was its acceptance by the John Day Company in America, whose contract provided for advances totalling $750 and royalties.

1956 proved a generally quiet and unproductive year. None of the family came to stay. I was preoccupied during the summer with preparations for my entrance examination to Trinity College Dublin, while Richard was absent from home beginning his national service in the Royal Navy. However, in January 1957 exciting news reached the little house in Collioure, which had by now been accorded the Catalan name Correch d’en Baus. On the back of an envelope containing one of her stepson Richard’s letters, my mother has written: ‘R is at Toulon! Patrick goes in eight days (on the first of Feb.) to see him, and perhaps I go also. Do I take my beautiful robe with me please?’

Unfortunately, nothing more is recorded of this event, though the happy expedition was presumably undertaken. On the other side of the envelope my mother wrote further: ‘Hurray Hurray Hurray’, and jotted down train times for travel between Collioure and Toulon. Relations could not have been closer between Richard, his father, and his stepmother, despite their enforced separation.

Throughout this time building work continued on the first-floor living room and kitchen above the casot, which among other benefits would provide room for Richard and me when we came to stay. Although Patrick concealed himself when writing in the casot, in order to avoid being distracted by the exuberant discourse of the workmen above, it was unfortunately impossible to escape them altogether, as this indignant note shows:

May 8th or 9th 1957. I am sitting here – a dark, coldish spitting late afternoon – waiting for the Men to go, so that I do not have to go up & say anything myself. Allez, bon soir. A demain – à demain, eh!

And this stupid situation (I would rather go back now for tea. I would rather have gone back some time ago) this silly indeterminate stuffed state comes from old Oliva’s ill-temper this morning which (its effect continuing) makes it impossible for me to be there watching him crépir [roughcasting] & occasionally helping without truckling.

I had thought of making some observations about all this but they are rather muddled & it really does not seem worth while. I am terrified of the English, French & American income tax people: less the people than the Thing, of which they are the righteous & I am sure complacent powerful hands. Blind but percipient tentacles, slow, slow, ridiculous; & then terribly fast & efficient.

If the English do not send the rebate we are destroyed: as it is can we ever pay for all this ghastly house? It engulfs material: and now it no longer belongs to me at all: I am, at times & on sufferance, a dull kind of labourer, while the capable ones – Oliva’s rough capability is depressing, very – while they walk about & spit & piss on the walls.

Now the silly, silly little man is peering about outside. I pretend not to see him. He is looking for the saw. I still do not see him. Enlightened self interest. He was not looking for the saw but the marteline & the marteau. Just how silly can one get?

Fortunately Patrick’s elder brother Bun in Canada came to their aid with a generous ‘loan’ (seemingly intended as a gift) of several hundred dollars. Despite this, Patrick underwent bouts of restlessness and discontent. In November my mother wrote sadly to Richard, saying that his father and Willy Mucha had taken to sitting up late, complaining about their common lack of inspiration.

Fortunately, it was shortly after this that Patrick’s literary career revived. In due course, the commercial success and gratifying critical acclaim of The Golden Ocean led to a request for a sequel. On 30 December 1957 Rupert Hart-Davis signed a contract with Patrick for a novel to be entitled ‘THE VOYAGE OF THE WAGER’. As with its predecessor, the stipulation was for £100 advance, half to be paid on signature and half on delivery.

Patrick breakfasting on the balcony of the casot in more contented mood

In the course of researching Anson’s voyage for The Golden Ocean, Patrick had come across the extraordinary plight of the crew of a ship of the fleet, which he had found no occasion to mention in the novel. On 14 May 1741 the storeship Wager was wrecked on the coast of Chile, a terrible storm preventing the crew’s rescue. The survivors underwent appalling hardships during their protracted struggle for survival in that desolate region. Eventually, a remnant managed to reach Valparaiso, whence they sailed to England, arriving in February 1745. This fortunate group included Midshipman (later Admiral) John Byron, grandfather of the poet. In 1768 he published a vivid account of their ordeal, which drew great attention then and thereafter.

While Peter Palafox, engaging Irish hero of The Golden Ocean, reappears in the tale, Patrick introduced two fresh protagonists. These are the dashing historical Jack Byron himself, and his fictional comrade Tobias Barrow. Tobias is the adopted son of a wealthy squire, Mr Elwes, a neighbour of the Chaworth family, with whom Jack and his sister live. While Jack and Tobias become fast friends, as a malevolent Whig Mr Elwes was regarded with disfavour by the well-born Tory Chaworths.

Mr Elwes had acquired his riches from successful practice as a surgeon and dubious investment in South Sea stock. He adopted Tobias, with the dual intent of bringing him up as his apprentice, and indulging a hobbyhorse project of educating him to become a marvel of omniscience. As the system involved almost unceasing daily toil and ‘the most severe whippings’, it did not prove a happy home for the boy. Moreover, while he achieved a considerable hoard of knowledge, principally in Latin, Greek and the physical sciences, in addition to an encyclopaedic understanding of natural history, in other respects he failed his oppressive patron’s expectations dismally. Nor was his situation likely to be improved by the imminent arrival of a stepmother, ‘an odious woman with a dark red face’, who ‘hated Tobias at first sight’. Faced with this distasteful prospect, he attaches himself to Jack, accompanying him to serve with Anson’s squadron in the great expedition to harry the Spaniards.

Tobias is an eccentric solitary, a boy-man with an obsession for collecting and studying exotic creatures: ‘he had spent all his days in that strange, dark, unsocial house, with odd, unsatisfactory servants perpetually coming and going.’ Hopelessly absent-minded and inattentive to appearances, he all but falls overboard on boarding ship.

It is not hard to detect the original of Tobias. As a boy, Patrick led a lonely and unloved existence in various grim and silent homes. There he was subjected to the harsh whims, including it seems severe beatings, of his cold and selfish father – likewise an eccentric medical man – who engaged in desultory attempts to instruct his young son. Again, the extent to which Mr Elwes’s Whig principles antagonize his better-bred Tory neighbours recalls Dr Russ’s attachment to the Liberal Party, which Patrick came to believe accounted for their isolation and supposed ostracism at Lewes by the local Tory nobility and gentry.[fn7]

Dreamy and impractical, Tobias sought refuge in varied fields of esoteric learning – just as had Patrick, during long periods of abandonment to his own devices. While Patrick was fortunate to avoid having an unpleasant stepmother, he was regularly tyrannized by a succession of largely ill-qualified governesses. Again, at sea Tobias resents the rough pranks of his youthful messmates in the cockpit of the Wager. His ordeal most likely echoed the stiff and awkward Patrick’s own unhappy experience during his brief service as a cadet in the RAF, later (as I have suggested) recalled in his short story ‘The Happy Despatch’.[10]

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.