Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life

It turned out that Richard, who frequently struggled to keep up with school work, tended to grow restless and unhappy as the term drew to its close. At the same time, he looked forward to coming over ‘for the summer hols’.

My mother undoubtedly loved Richard as though he were her own son, and her affection can only have been accentuated by an unhappy exchange of correspondence in the early summer of 1951. In view of her desertion, and continued ‘living in sin’ with Patrick until their marriage in 1945, a court had granted my father custody of my sister Natasha and myself. He himself had remarried in 1943, and as a promising barrister with a substantial private income was in a position to provide a suitable home for us.

My mother in the early 1950s

I was to be sixteen in June 1951, and in April my mother wrote to the London solicitor who had handled her divorce proceedings, ‘to ask if in fact Nikolai can choose to know me if he likes after his 16th birthday’. After some delay the solicitor confirmed that there was no reason why she should not at least enquire. Accordingly, she wrote both to her parents, who remained in close contact with my sister and me, and also directly to me. I received the letter at Wellington College, accompanied by a birthday present of a handsome book: William Sanderson, A Compleat History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of Scotland, And of Her Son and Successor, James The Sixth, King of Scotland (London, 1656). My mother must somehow have learned of my devotion to the House of Stuart, following my enraptured introduction to Scott’s Waverley novels by the enlightened headmaster of my preparatory school.

Needless to say, I was delighted with the present, but bemused to know how to respond. Before I could do so, however, my father arrived at the College in a state of grim agitation. He was at pains to impress on me how appallingly my mother had behaved, not the least of her crimes being an insidious attempt to make contact with me by entering Richard for Wellington. He accordingly urged me not to reply. When I enquired what I should do with her present, he smiled and suggested I keep it. Although I felt instinctively that there was something not quite right about this, I complied, and still have the book.

Children tend to be remarkably adaptable to circumstances. I myself was generally unhappy at home. Probably as a consequence of the loss of his own mother at the age of three, followed by terrifying childhood experiences during and after the Russian Revolution, and finally my mother’s desertion, my poor father had become a solitary, parsimonious, and generally morose figure, while my Russian stepmother was a relentless scold, who made no secret of the fact that she resented my presence in the house. Although set in a delightful situation beside the Thames at Wraysbury near Windsor, our home appeared to me a gloomy prison visited by few: so much so, that each holiday I compiled a calendar, whose function was to record and strike out on a half-daily basis the approach of the longed-for return to my friends at school. Yet, despite this dismal condition, I accepted all that my father urged on me, and remained persuaded throughout my schooldays that my mother was a very wicked woman. Shortly after the episode described above, she received letters from my father and her mother, impressing on her the undesirability of approaching me when I was already experiencing emotional problems at home and school. It is not hard to picture her anguish. Fortunately, she had Patrick to sustain her. ‘Dear P.’, as she wrote appreciatively that night in her diary.

Small wonder, then, that my mother poured so much affection onto her young stepson. While he continued devoted to his own mother, he had long become correspondingly fond of his stepmother, and swiftly grew enraptured with life at Collioure. His nostalgia for the town was such, that on the occasion of one return to London he requested a phial of sand from the beach, which on its arrival he much prized: ‘The sand has turned moist as the air is damp. If you send me any more curios I can start a penny-peep-show-museum.’

At this time Patrick and my mother were living on a more and more heavily taxed income amounting to £48 a quarter from the trust established on my mother by her father, supplemented by modest literary and other irregular earnings. My mother in addition occasionally taught English to Colliourenchs and their children, translated and typed letters, and engaged in other modestly remunerative activities. From this meagre income they had to meet continual requests from the growing Richard and his mother for new clothes, school extras and private entertainment. This they invariably did to the best of their ability, and the fact that his requests feature with such blithe regularity in his correspondence confirms that they neither reproached nor stinted him.

Any unforeseen expenditure was in danger of sinking their precarious little boat. On 1 September 1951, my mother was ‘Rudely awakened this morning by cheque of £32 instead of expected seventy. We have £13 a month until March … Richard never wrote: P. wrote again to him today. Dreadful letter from Mrs. Power suddenly demanding “maintenance”.’ This was Richard’s mother, who had finally married her lover John Le Mee-Power in May 1949. On what grounds she believed she could now make a claim on Patrick was unclear, but nonetheless alarming. Some weeks later, however, my mother heard again from the unhappy Elizabeth: ‘Letter from … Mrs. Power: poor thing, husband gone two years ago, not enough money.’[fn11] Power had proved to be a drunken, irresponsible bully. Elizabeth’s demand proved to be a momentary cry of despair, since by this time she appears to have accepted that my parents lacked any means of providing more financial help than that which they already lavished on Richard.

Now that Richard was fast becoming a young man, Patrick could share pleasures with him, imbuing them with that infectious enthusiasm which was one of his most endearing characteristics. Overall, the relationship had reached a happy modus vivendi. Patrick, my mother and Richard had grown into a compact little family, corresponding regularly and affectionately, and meeting from time to time for extended holidays and London treats. My mother’s parents, Howard and Frieda Wicksteed, as ever concerned for Richard’s welfare, regularly intervened to plug her recurrent financial holes. Fortunately, they lived in Upper Cheyne Row, a short walk around the corner from his mother in King’s Road. There Elizabeth eked out an existence marred by poverty and illness, while he continued devoted to her and she to him. Even the once bitter feud between Elizabeth and Patrick appears to have subsided into a mutually acceptable truce, with letters passing between the two households concerning Richard’s welfare, and my mother during visits to her parents calling to collect him from Elizabeth’s little upstairs flat round the corner. Other exchanges included Patrick’s arranging for her to be given their Hoover. How happy might it have been had these amicable relations continued! The only lasting sadness was that which constantly assailed my mother: deprivation of opportunity even to correspond with her own son and daughter Natasha. And whatever distressed my mother deeply troubled her devoted Patrick.

As this account has established, it is a regrettable but undeniable fact that Patrick was by nature and upbringing ill-suited to engage with young children, whose waywardness, unreflecting lack of tact and blithe innocence of the ways of the world tended all too readily to affront and alarm his fragile composure. However, once they attained an age which he regarded as providing a measure of rationality and intelligence, his attitude shifted remarkably. In one of his novels he describes how: ‘When Madeleine was a little girl she was a plain creature, and timid. Her form was the undistinguished, pudgy, shapeless form of most children.’ As an adolescent, however, she swiftly blossoms into a beautiful, intelligent, self-possessed young lady.[9] It is clear that he recognized this evolutionary transformation from caterpillar to butterfly in the case of his son. Furthermore, as I have shown in the first volume of this biography, it is worthwhile to stress that it was only when teaching Richard that his patience was tried: outside the ‘classroom’ Patrick became charm and enthusiasm personified.

Following the move to France, Patrick’s equanimity was restored by the generally promising path of his literary work. Shortly before their departure from Cwm Croesor, he had assembled a collection of short stories. Although in 1947 he had published A Book of Voyages, an anthology of seafaring episodes, this slim collection was to comprise the sum total of his original published literary projects since 1939, when the first of its tales was written. Although reflecting his sparse creative output over the preceding decade, the stories are beautifully written and highly imaginative, and were received enthusiastically by his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown. He passed them in turn to Fred Warburg, of the publishers Secker & Warburg, who on the eve of Patrick’s departure for France expressed similar appreciation:

We have now read and admired the remarkable stories of Patrick O’Brien [sic], at present entitled COUNTRY CONTENTMENTS, and should certainly like to publish the book … We do not like the title proposed by O’Brien and tentatively suggest THE LAST POOL as a possibility.

Patrick had adopted the title Country Contentments from his copy of a delightful work of that name, a guide to rural activities by the seventeenth-century writer Gervase Markham, which Patrick had sought to put into practice in Wales.[10] There seems little doubt, however, that Warburg’s choice was preferable (several stories in the collection are markedly discontented, being positively gloomy and even macabre), and The Last Pool (the title of the first story in the book) is what the title became. Curtis Brown stood firm in Patrick’s interest, insisting inter alia that he retain US rights for the book. Warburg gave way graciously on the issue, and the contract was signed on 27 September 1949. In it Patrick further committed himself ‘to write a book on Southern France and to proceed to France within the next two months in order to collect material for such a book’. For this ‘the publisher undertakes to pay to the Author forthwith the sum of £75 (seventy-five pounds) towards the expenses of the Author’s visit to France’. In fact, Patrick had by this time already crossed the Channel.

In addition the publisher obtained an option on Patrick’s next book, and when the two of them had lunched together on 24 August of that year Warburg learned that it was to be ‘a full length novel with a Welsh background’. Next day Warburg wrote to Spencer Curtis Brown, thanking him ‘for putting this most unusual book [The Last Pool] our way and very much hope it will have the success it deserves’. At the same time he (surely wisely) rejected Patrick’s tentative suggestion for the alternative title Dark Speech upon the Harp.

Patrick appears to have persuaded Secker that the prime motive of their journey was to gather material for the ‘book on Southern France’. Either way, the money came in extremely handy towards meeting the expense of their move. In the event, they arrived at Collioure shortly before the contract was completed. The removal cost £9.10/-, and since the rent of the flat in the rue Arago amounted to some £10 a year (which their genial landlord, M. Germa, seems to have collected erratically), for a while at least they should have been quite comfortably off. However, by next February they were alarmed by a statement from their bank in London, explaining that no more money could be forwarded, as they had attained the limit of £250 which it was at that time permitted to take abroad. Towards the end of May Patrick was still struggling to liberate Warburg’s £75 advance from an impassive bureaucracy. He noted grimly: ‘Wrote to C.J. Foreign Div. & Parry – The last two letters Mrs O’Brian wrote to you are still unanswered. This sort of treatment is really intolerable, and I must insist upon an immediate final.’

Unfortunately, it turned out that they did not qualify for remission of the advance.

At Warburg’s invitation, Patrick forwarded from my grandparents’ house in Chelsea (whose lease they had taken over from him at his departure in 1945) ‘some biographical scraps’ for inclusion on the dustjacket. Although Warburg thanked him for ‘the biographical material, which is excellent’, nearly eight months later he oddly repeated the request for ‘your biographical details, i.e. date and place of birth, education, appointments held and any other relevant information … speed is of the essence’. Since it was Patrick’s persistent habit to preserve copies of such material, it is hard to conceive of any reason why he should have failed to comply with the second request after being so prompt in fulfilling the first. It seems likely therefore that in the event Warburg decided against inclusion of a potted biography. As the sizeable dustjacket blurb implies that the tales arose out of the author’s own communing with the countryside which provides their setting, this may have appeared to suffice for a personal description.

The Last Pool was published on 17 August 1950. Its best stories contain some of Patrick’s finest writing, while all are entertaining. A Latin dedication ‘To Mary, my wife and Dearest Friend’ acknowledged her indispensable support and help. The book’s atmospheric green dustjacket design by Edward Bradbury, depicting three fine trout in the foreground, and shadowy images reflecting country sports circling dimly through refracted water, make it a handsome volume, now much sought by bibliophiles.

Reviews in the press were largely favourable: in some cases, enthusiastic. The novelist L.A.G. Strong perceptively described him as ‘A real new writer, with a voice of his own. He shows a real power to describe physical sensations.’ Patrick’s response to all this was guarded. In a letter to his editor Roger Senhouse written in the following February, he provided an assessment of critics which came from the heart: ‘I do grow passionate about criticism from fools, from people who have not really read what they criticise and from those whose aim is to show off; but I am really grateful for genuine criticism.’[fn12]

He welcomed Senhouse’s comments on his next book, but clearly had coverage of The Last Pool in mind, for he continued with some sharp reflections on ‘the damned silly review Dunsany produced in the Observer. Did you see any worthwhile reviews of The Last Pool? I only saw a long and offensively fulsome one in the Irish Times, and a short and stupid one in the Spectator, apart from the Observer.’

At first glance, Patrick’s testy dismissal of the Observer review appears perverse. Lord Dunsany, a well-connected Irish peer, literary figure and keen rider to hounds, was surely ideally placed to review such a book. What seems particularly to have riled Patrick was a well-intentioned laudatory comment, much canvassed since: ‘This charming book by an Irish sportsman is a genuine collection of tales of the Irish countryside.’ For a start, it might suggest that Dunsany had done little more than glance through the text. Although five of the thirteen tales have Irish settings, a careful reader would have noted that the three located in Wales evince a much more fundamental grounding in local toponymy, landscape and speech.

Still more upsetting appears to have been Dunsany’s gratuitous allusion to the author as ‘an Irish sportsman’. This was presumably inferred by Dunsany from Patrick’s surname,[fn13] together with the Irish setting of several of the stories. That an influential Irish writer publicly hailed him as a compatriot placed Patrick in an embarrassing quandary. As was explained in the first volume of this biography, his change of name was selected in order to banish an unbearable past – not to invent a new one. An obsessively private individual, the last thing he wanted was to find his personal life paraded before an inquisitive public. After all, Dunsany’s erroneous assumption could lead to his being derided as an imposter. What could he do? A correction (in the unlikely event of the newspaper’s publishing it) must inevitably invite enquiry into his actual background.

While this might be criticized as an absurdly paranoid reaction, it was to become unexpectedly justified when belated revelation of his change of name half a century later aroused bitter diatribes in the media beyond anything Patrick at his most vulnerable might have anticipated. He instinctively believed a substantial body of the literati to be an innately envious and consequently malevolent crew. Sadly, he lived to find this jaundiced view not altogether mistaken. It may surely be enquired, were he as concerned to lay claim to Irish ancestry as ill-natured critics have proclaimed, why he did not seize the opportunity to do so in The Last Pool, nor seek to profit from Lord Dunsany’s flattering allusion.[fn14]

When Patrick came under pressure by publishers on other occasions to provide autobiographical notices, he either evaded doing so altogether, or submitted some patently humorous fantasy. The dustjacket of his early novel Hussein (1938), for example, informed its readers:

Patrick Russ has seen much of life in his 26 years. When he was stoking a Portuguese tramp steamer, he came to Rabat and made the acquaintance of two professional story-tellers with whom he wandered up and down French Morocco for a couple of months. It was from them, conversing in mixtures of French and Berber Arabic that he got much of the material widely current throughout the Mohammedan world, which goes to form the story of Hussein.

It is presumably the rarity of this dustjacket which has thus far protected Patrick from being accused by humourless critics of intending these imaginative exploits to be taken au pied de la lettre.[11]

Although beautifully written, the stories in The Last Pool proved to be no more than a swansong to the otherwise alarmingly arid period from which he was at last emerging. I have described in the first volume of this biography how they were spasmodically compiled over the decade of 1939–49, during which time the interruption caused by wartime employment, followed by nearly four years of mounting writer’s block, eventually brought to fruition no more than this sparse collection. After their luncheon meeting in August 1949, Fredric Warburg noted: ‘I gathered that in this field he had, for the moment, written himself out.’ In fact, all he had had in mind for further writing was ‘a book on the French Catalans’.

It appears, however, that not long after their arrival at Collioure, Patrick began to find memories of life at Cwm Croesor flooding back. Now distanced from the life of hardship and frustration they had endured there, he began to picture it all anew in his mind’s eye. In a notebook he jotted down a plan for a novel set in the dark valley:

Do not forget the idea of having the man (or one of his friends) a sociologist nor overlook the possibility of presenting slabs of Welsh life in the manner either of direct reporting or now I come to think of it, what about having the farm situations seen from many angles – all the others 3rd person – no one being wholly true. From each slab one could regard the farm.

The ‘sociologist’, professional observer of the workings of humanity, is clearly derived from Patrick himself, and indeed in the finished work he appears under palpably thin disguise as its protagonist Pugh, who arrives as a visitor in the valley. The name itself was possibly drawn from ‘old Pugh’, a servant who worked at the house at Kempsey where Patrick had lived as a boy in 1923–24. He had retained in his mind a vivid picture of life in Cwm Croesor, as also its inhabitants, with whom he and my mother maintained warm if intermittent contact for several years after their departure. In January 1952 Bessie Roberts, the neighbouring farmer’s wife, sent them a charming photograph of their two young sons Gwynfor and Alun (‘Taken at school in September / With there love and many thanks to “Antie Vron”’),[fn15] which my mother lovingly preserved.

Gwynfor and Alun Roberts

In September 1951 ‘Pierce sent £5 for the old bikes’ they had left behind to be sold, and four years after their settlement in France my mother was still singing Welsh songs. In addition to his memories, Patrick drew on the journal he had kept during the first nine months of their Welsh existence, on which he relied extensively for descriptive passages in his novel.

Long afterwards he provided this summary analysis of his work:

About forty years ago I did write a mildly experimental book called Testimonies in which all the main characters, having left this world, sat peacefully in the next, each independently delivering an account of his or her recent life to a simple, objective being whom readers of the fifties at once understood to be a kind of non-sectarian recording angel. The novel has just been reissued and to my astonishment many of those who read it today, or at least many reviewers, though very kind about the tale itself, are sadly puzzled by my angel. ‘Who is this investigator?’ they cry. ‘Who him? What is this guy doing around the joint?’

On another occasion he explained further:

I was writing hard, working on a novel called Testimonies, which I placed in Wales, though the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia: I finished it very late one night and, in a state of near-prostration – how I wish I could, in a line or so, convey the strength of generalised emotion and delight at times like this, when one feels one is writing well. (I speak only for myself, of course.) The book was politely received in England, much more enthusiastically in the States where the intellectual journals praised it very highly indeed. It did not sell well, but New York magazines asked me for stories.[12]

The claim that ‘the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia’ must be taken with a large grain of salt. The valley setting is described with wonderful vividness, reflecting the fact that it is indeed the Cwm Croesor, unchanged (save for some readily identifiable toponyms), of their four years’ exile. In addition, so far as I have been able to identify them, virtually every character reflects a real individual. Broadly speaking, it is the melodramatic plot alone that derives from Patrick’s imagination.

It is not my purpose to analyse the story. With my mother excluded from the story, Pugh is a combination of Patrick as he really was, and in some respects what he wished to be. Pugh is a university Fellow at Oxford, who is preparing a learned tome on The Bestiary before Isidore of Seville. This was the topic selected by Patrick for a book he hoped would establish his scholarly credentials, on which he had worked in the British Museum before the War. He had also nurtured an early ambition to go up to Oxford, and enjoy the prestige of gaining academic qualification.

Pugh’s antecedents confirm the self-portrait. A forebear had established himself as a draper in Liverpool, while ‘my father, a sociable man, living in a time of acute social distinctions, felt the Liverpool-Welsh side of his ancestry keenly.[fn16] He dropped all Welsh contacts and added his mother’s name, Aubrey, to ours. He had never cared for me to ask him about it.’[13] Patrick’s grandfather had been a successful furrier in London, while his father embarked on a medical career. It is needless to emphasize the change of name, nor (in another context) the selection of ‘Aubrey’ as a gentlemanly alternative. (Pugh further has a close friend named Maturin!) For ‘Liverpool-Welsh’ may be read ‘German’, the original nationality of the Russ family.