Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life

The tall red-haired farmer Emyr Vaughan is Patrick’s neighbour Harri Roberts, while his comely wife Bessie provided the model for Bronwen, tragic heroine of the novel.[fn17] Readers may wonder, but for myself I doubt that Patrick himself indulged in serious fantasies about Bessie Roberts. He admired and appreciated attractive women, but was too innately monogamous and devoted to my mother to harbour dangerously improper thoughts. Bessie was simply the model for the fictional Bronwen. Moreover it was a dramatic requirement that the heroine be living immediately below the brooding Pugh in his tiny cottage, while the Roberts farm was the only house adjacent to Fron Wen.

The taxi driver who brings Pugh to his cottage at the beginning was in real life Griffi Roberts, owner of the garage at Gareg, while the gwas (farm boy) John, Pugh’s informant on Welsh lore, was Edgar Williams, our good friend who still lives in Croesor. The originals of other characters are less readily identified today, but there can be little doubt that they reflect to various degrees others with whom Patrick came in contact.

The unmistakable extent to which Patrick drew on real people for his novel dismayed his friend Walter Greenway, who had stayed with him in Cwm Croesor. As Walter later told me, he feared it could cause offence in the valley. However, cordial Christmas greetings and other occasional communications continued to be exchanged annually between Collioure and Cwm Croesor,[fn18] and doubtless Patrick assumed with good reason that few if any people there were likely, or even able, to read a book published in English.

Three Bear Witness (his American publisher retained Patrick’s preferred title Testimonies) was written in 1950, and as my mother only began keeping a diary from January 1951 I do not know as much as I could wish about its composition. With the physical hardship and mental turmoil of life in Cwm Croesor distanced in time and space, Patrick could contemplate his former existence dispassionately, even with nostalgia. Observing the mountains above Collioure, he noted one day: ‘I love the absolute hardness and contrast of the mountain and just that pure sky: the Cnicht ridge had it often.’ At about the same time he jotted down this verse:

The raven of the Pyrenees

Cries harsh and folds his wings to fall.

On Moelwyn Mawr the watcher sees

The folded tumble, hears the call.[fn19]

The contract for The Last Pool provided for the publisher’s retention of an option on his next book, together with an opportunity to consider the proposed book about Southern France. Four months later, on 1 February 1951, Patrick signed the contract for Three Bear Witness. It was in many ways an experimental work, with the imaginative contrivance of the protagonists interrogated in turn for their versions of the same events by an unidentified ‘Recording Angel’. In later life he recalled that ‘I do remember that writing parts of it quite destroyed me’. He also felt it was the best book he had written, and remembered the night he finished it:

‘I was writing very hard that evening, and at three in the morning I went like so on my desk,’ he says, folding himself over his elbows in an exhausted swoon. ‘When I knew it was done I had the feeling of achievement and loss simultaneously’.[14]

Although Patrick, always ill at ease when conducting interviews, was on occasion prone to modify or embroider his memories, it does indeed seem likely that the book was written under considerable stress. Poverty at the little apartement at 39, rue Arago was extreme at the time, and there was no knowing whether anyone beyond my mother would appreciate a book that meant so much to him. In fact her initial reaction was one of disapproval: ‘P. finished T.B. which I did not like.’ However, I suspect this was due to alarm at the extent to which their kindly Welsh neighbours featured in largely recognizable guise throughout the tale. Or was she disturbed by its hero Pugh’s silent adoration of the attractive farmer’s wife next door?

At Secker & Warburg, on the other hand, his editor Roger Senhouse expressed approval. He added some reservations – what he conceived to be excessive use of Welsh words and placenames, a need to locate the ‘Recording Angel’ in time or space, ‘the whole conception of the physical side of Pugh’s infatuation needs careful revision’, and so forth. Since it does not appear that the manuscript or proof of the book has survived, we have only glimpses of its original state, and the alterations Patrick was persuaded to accept. As the contract was signed on 1 February 1951, and Senhouse’s fairly drastic ‘improvements’ were forwarded via Curtis Brown a fortnight later, the book must have made its mark as it stood. By March, however, Patrick was expressing extreme annoyance with Senhouse. When in August they learned that he had been in their neighbourhood, my mother wrote: ‘We are relieved to have been away from Collioure & to have missed him. You can tell by his letters he is a pansey.’[fn20]

Although no one at his publisher’s could guess the extent to which Pugh represented a self-portrait, Patrick resented Senhouse’s verdict:

Character of Pugh. Naturally I don’t want to make him a romantic hero, but there is surely no reason why even a middle-aged scholar should be so unsympathetic. He gives himself away: his hypochondria, his lack of affection, his timidity … and ineptitude (as opposed to mere helplessness and vagueness). All this is really sordid, and as a result I have found something repellent about the idea of his being madly in love.

The criticism is not altogether unfair, and naturally could not take into account Patrick’s unconscious motive, which was I believe in part to purge himself of characteristics of which he continued deeply ashamed. Pugh is endowed with much of the ‘difficult’ side of Patrick’s character, while being denied almost any of his compensating virtues: his mischievous humour, exemplary patience, pertinacity, resilience, courage, unselfishness and generosity. The underlying confessional function of the book meant that a more balanced portrayal of the real-life Pugh might not have acted as confession at all. The same process may be detected in Patrick’s other largely autobiographical novels, The Catalans and Richard Temple. In the latter case, the protagonist provides an extensive confession of his earlier degraded (‘silly’) existence. Significantly, this confession is vouchsafed during a protracted spell of imprisonment and torture, inflicted in order to extract ‘the truth’, and concludes with Temple’s liberation (by the French Resistance). Although it does not appear that Patrick was ever formally admitted to the Catholic Church, he occasionally implied that he was a communicant, and it is not difficult to imagine how the confessional would have appealed to his deep-rooted feelings of shame and guilt.

On one point to which he attached importance, Patrick felt compelled to give way. His title Testimonies was objected to by his English publisher on grounds that ‘it sounds far more like a treatise on codicils, or last words and testaments’. Next: ‘Senhouse wrote: they (or he alone) want to change the title from Testimonies to Bronwen Vaughan. I am against it, but I don’t want to offend them just at this point, so I left it up to him if they feel very strongly about it.’

Finally, the publishers settled on Three Bear Witness.

In her diary my mother reports that Patrick continued to find Senhouse patronizing, petty-minded and obstructive. In March 1951, ‘P. sent C[urtis].B[rown]. a card this morning, worried for Manuscript, & this afternoon had a letter from C.B. with loathesome comments from Senhouse & “a femal[e] reader” on Testimonies.’

Another irritating obstruction, likewise apparently ascribable to Senhouse, was a perverse disregarding of Patrick’s request for inclusion of the dedication: À mes amis de Collioure. This was no empty gesture, and in due course he presented complimentary copies to friends and neighbours. He even managed to sell one to a more prosperous acquaintance.

By the end of the year Patrick declared he could no longer work with Senhouse, and Spencer Curtis Brown wrote to Fred Warburg:

The confidential part of this letter is that apparently Patrick O’Brien really does not get on at all well with Roger Senhouse, so that if you want to keep him on your list, as I hope you will do, it might be a good plan if you could take over most of the correspondence with him. I have never found him in any way a difficult author, and I don’t believe that you would do so.

Warburg had been away in New York during the early part of the year, and now promptly complied with Spencer’s suggestion. In due course Patrick was to wreak characteristic punishment on his troublesome editor. Nearly forty years later, in The Letter of Marque (London, 1988, p. 27), Stephen Maturin learns of the fate of ‘poor Senhouse’, who ascended into the sky in a hot-air balloon whose excessive supply of gas ensured that he ‘was never seen again’.

On 3 January 1952 Warburg sent Patrick strong praise for the book, which he had at last found time to read:

I think you have written an extremely promising first novel and indeed even better than that, for in many ways the novel shows a maturity of outlook and a power of construction which augurs well for the future. I cannot somehow take too much interest in your male hero, although he is clearly and distinctly drawn …

On this issue Warburg was broadly at one with Senhouse. After explaining his reasons, he continued:

But these minor criticisms pale before the accomplishment in other directions, above all the splendid rendering of the Welsh Hills and vales, villages and villagers, and the eternal life of the farms and the treatment of animals, and the surely magnificent description you give of the sheep shearing which stands out in my mind with a clarity and vividness which prove how well you have done it.

One issue on which Patrick expressed a forceful view was the design of the dustjacket. At Collioure his good friend Willy Mucha had agreed to provide an abstract illustration, an offer which Patrick was anxious to see implemented. As he pointed out to Senhouse, Mucha was an artist of considerable reputation: ‘Matisse, Dufy, Braque and Léger think highly of him. (They have given him pictures that I envy enormously).’ The suggestion was however declined by Secker, as also by Harcourt Brace in America, and the collaboration of novelist and painter had to await publication of the more appropriate vehicle of The Catalans.

Finally, there remained the delicate issue of the author’s customary biographical notice. Both the promptness with which he had despatched one for The Last Pool (subsequently mislaid by the publisher), and the accuracy of its information, suggest that it was he who provided that which appears on the back sleeve of Three Bear Witness:

Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914, and started writing early. He produced four books before the war, and also worked for many years, in Oxford, Paris and Italy, on a book on Bestiaries. Most of this valuable material was, however, lost in the war.

During the war he drove an ambulance in London during the blitz, and later joined the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.

He and his wife lived at one time in a remote Welsh valley, where Mr. O’Brian fished, shot and hunted whenever possible. He is at present living on the Mediterranean coast of France.

It will be noted that this broadly accurate autobiographical notice contains no allusion to Ireland, still less any claim to Irish nationality or origin. A close paraphrase of this potted biography features on the dustjacket of the American edition of Patrick’s later work Lying in the Sun, which was entitled The Walker and other stories in the USA. However, there it begins with the additional words ‘Patrick O’Brian was born in the West of Ireland and educated in England.’ It looks as though this item was added by a copywriter at Harcourt Brace – especially as Patrick omitted the notice altogether in the English edition.

The extent to which well-intentioned publishers occasionally made up for Patrick’s dislike of supplying personal data is illustrated by a comment made by my mother in 1952: ‘Irish Writing came with N.L.T.P.T.R.A.;[fn21] very surprised to find biographical notes after I’d refused them because P. doesn’t like it.’ Fortunately, this issue remained for the present a minor irritation. Two overriding concerns exercised Patrick and my mother throughout this critical period in their lives. How was he to relaunch his literary career? And, still more pressingly, how might the impoverished couple survive financially?

II

The Catalans

When a man wakes in the night and finds his head filled with remorse and bitter, old regret, if he chose he could reflect that no other man in the world would be suffering precisely that remorse nor exactly that regret … Of course, he would not choose to do so, for he would be too busy dodging about in his mind, trying to escape – unless, that is, he were occupied with feeling the wound to see how much it still hurt and trying to persuade himself that there was virtue in mere remorse.

Patrick O’Brian, ‘The Voluntary Patient’

With Secker & Warburg’s acceptance of Three Bear Witness in February 1951, Patrick had reason to feel confidence in his regenerated career as a writer. Not only was it his first adult novel, but the first novel he had published since Hussein in 1938. At last he had emerged from the creative chasm inflicted by the War with his accompanying personal crises of divorce and remarriage, followed by the dire impact of his troubled exile in North Wales.

At the same time, he had come to feel he had finally shed the oppressive effect of his father’s dark shadow. In the summer of 1949, shortly before his and my mother’s departure from Cwm Croesor, a solitary walk brought him to a precipitous, sunless valley amidst the mountains. ‘When I was going up to Llyn yr Adar there seemed to be a thing at the top of the high black barren cliff that forms the backside of Cnicht.’ What it was he found hard to identify:

I watched it for some time, but it did not move; and all the way along the valley I kept looking up, but it seemed immobile … When I came back it was still there. Gargoyle-ish, brooding, jutting out, small in the distance, but menacing and in control. The next time I went up to the lake it was not there.

This uncanny experience occurred when Patrick had attained the nadir of his increasingly frustrating Welsh exile, shortly before he made the dramatic decision to escape to sunny France. Returned from his walk, he wrote the powerful story ‘Naming Calls’, which was later published in The Last Pool. It recounts the terrifying experience of a writer who withdraws to a small house set in the sinister valley explored by Patrick. The tale concludes with the destruction of the frantic outcast, when a raging storm drives up the valley and dislodges ‘a vast mass of rock’ from the mountainside above: ‘Abel shrieked high and the door burst open, swinging wide and shuddering on its hinges.’ The elemental force of the tempest is unmistakably intended as an evocation of the man’s father, ‘a formidable, roaring tyrant’, whose spirit he had inadvertently conjured forth.

It is clear that Patrick had come to associate his oppressive malaise with his frequently bullying giant of a parent, who had repeatedly afflicted him with demoralizing terror during his infancy. Now, however, when in Three Bear Witness he adverted to the same uncanny episode, it was to dismiss it comfortingly as an unpleasant memory banished to the past. After a spasm of apprehension, ‘I felt positively merry – a glance upwards showed it there, of course, an insignificant rock, though curious. When I had finished my sandwiches it was gone.’[1]

Unfortunately, the couple’s financial predicament remained as alarming as ever. Secker’s acceptance of Three Bear Witness brought only the briefest respite. An advance of £100 was contracted on 1 February 1951, half on acceptance and half at publication. Sympathetic to his client’s worrying predicament, Spencer Curtis Brown charitably forwarded him the second £50, which was not otherwise due to be paid for at least another year. ‘Even agents can have kind hearts on occasion,’ he wrote to the publisher, who failed however to reimburse Curtis Brown in turn. Sadly, Curtis Brown’s generosity was all but negated by the rapacious grasp of government. As my mother learned: ‘C.B. now has to deduct income tax at 9/- in the £: with that & his 10% Testimonies £100 has shrunk to £49.’

While the prospect of his novel’s publication went far to restore Patrick’s self-esteem, until it was published openings for further literary employment remained constricted.[fn1] Shortly before their move to France, Patrick confessed to Warburg that he had ‘written himself out’, so far as short stories were concerned. Gradually, however, the colourful turbulence of Collioure brought him a fresh harvest of imaginative themes. During the year following November 1950, he composed no less than thirty-three short stories. Many were set in and around Collioure, drawing on his observations of the town, its inhabitants, customs and traditions.

Why then did he not launch at once into the work on Southern France, which he had discussed with Fred Warburg, and for which an option was stipulated in the contract for Three Bear Witness? It looks as though one of his recurrent failures of confidence inhibited his undertaking a full-scale book during the anticlimactic year which stretched between his completion of Three Bear Witness and its publication in the spring of 1952. Ever his own sternest critic, it was about this time that he penned this frank assessment of his approach to writing:

I often, or at least sometimes, like my writing when I am doing it, but so much more often I feel uneasy and ashamed afterwards. All the affectations, poses and ‘special’ attitudes stare out – hideously pimpled youth smirking in the looking-glass yet finds his confidence decay and enters a public room fingering himself – and often the ‘clever pieces’ appear shallow and dull as well as quite unauthoritative, the ‘poetic touches’ arty, long-winded and false, and dreadfully often the whole thing comes to pieces at the end – shuffles off in the lamest manner possible. This is because I think of a good beginning, grow excited and embark upon the story, taking it for granted that it will finish itself.

In November 1951 Patrick sent off his collection, provisionally entitled Samphire and Other Stories:

I have just posted the MS to Curtis Brown: yesterday I sent six stories to the New Yorker and one, with two poems, to Irish Writing.[fn2] That they may prosper. The postage was very expensive: I did not think about Spain [for cheap postage] until this morning. But even so I do not think I would have posted them from there; they are too precious, and I want to hear soon. After re-reading and re-typing both, I am fairly sure that Samphire is much better than The Lemon: not so clever, much more concentrated (the Lemon tries to say too much and grows diffuse) and because of the hatred in it, more lovingly handled. So I have called the book Samphire and put that story first. It was a slimmer parcel than usual, but it is between 60 and 65 thousand … I feel rather low now, with the typewriter folded up and the MS gone: I regret my hurry; I could have polished more.

Sadly, disappointment swiftly followed. A month later Fred Warburg wrote to Curtis Brown:

I have now had a report on the new stories of Patrick O’Brian, SAMPHIRE, and some of them are good, though others seem to us basically to fail. However I think it is absolutely essential that we publish the novel now called THREE BEAR WITNESS instead of TESTIMONIES and see if we can do well with it before committing ourselves to further work from O’Brian particularly in the short story field.

Eventually most of the stories were published in book form, although not for some years. It was an eclectic selection that Patrick had despatched. ‘Samphire’, on which he particularly prided himself, is simply summarized. A young couple is walking beside a seacliff: he complacent, insensitive, and possessed of a tiresomely adolescent sense of humour; she a quiet, nervous, sensitive girl, whose nerves are stretched to breaking point by her husband’s relentlessly patronizing jocularity. When he stretches down to pick a sprig of samphire, she suddenly loses self-control and vainly attempts to push him over the edge. Even the insensitive soul to whom she is married recognizes with shock the impassable gulf suddenly opened between them, and realizes that nothing will ever be the same again.

In 1985, Patrick explained to the publisher Bell and Hyman how he came to write the story:

I was reflecting … as I walked along the cliffs that overhang the sea near our house [at Collioure], and a striking example occurred to me – that of a particularly elegant, intelligent woman who in her extreme and utterly inexperienced youth had married a bore or, at least a man who had developed into a bore, a didactic eternally prating bore. At some point in my walk I noticed some plants growing quite far down on the rock face: the lines about the samphire-gatherer in King Lear drifted into my mind, & as I walked on in a vague, uneasy state of the two notions combined and this took form without any conscious effort on my part.

This account is not entirely candid. The story makes uneasy reading for me, since the husband is unmistakably a recognizable, if uncharitable, portrait of my father, and the delicate young wife my mother, who was eighteen when they married. It was lingering guilt, I suspect, that impelled Patrick to write a story stressing that the marriage was doomed from the outset, regardless of intervention by any third party.

The extent to which Patrick at this experimental stage of his literary career utilized his fiction as an instrument of attack or defence in relation to aspects of his own life is exemplified by two other stories in the collection. In the first, ‘The Flower Pot’, a couple of Germans, living in what is manifestly Collioure, lovingly tend six flower pots on their windowsill. A fierce tramontane blows up, an increasing gale tearing through the streets: one of the pots is dislodged, and kills a fisherman below. The man responsible is filled with horror:

A man struck dead, or maimed for ever: struck down and by his fault. The great wave of hatred rising from the street. The foreigners at René’s have killed père Matthieu. The pointing and the great just wave of hate; and his head only, peering from the window, peering down to meet the hatred and the pointing.

One might imagine this gloomy little tale arose from a flight of fancy, but for this notice in my mother’s diary for St Patrick’s Day 1951:

P. finished the Flower Pot yesterday … after we had been on the jetty. There was a fantastic dry warm wind three days ago which knocked the pinks off bedroom window-sill. It landed just beside M. Ribeille, who only laughed. We felt terribly guilty & P. has fastened all the pots with wire.

Their dismay was understandable, but Patrick’s emphasis on the great wave of collective hatred arising against the hapless outsider plainly reflects his continuing sense of isolated insecurity, originating in the damaging circumstances of his solitary childhood.

Another tale illustrates Patrick’s propensity, at least in the early days of his literary career, to deploy his fiction as a weapon of psychic attack. ‘The Lemon’ concerns a man whose isolated existence has transformed him into a psychopath. The first part of the story comprises an arresting analysis of his bewildering condition, and its symptoms. Despite this, he is on good terms with his neighbours, who are:

working people, kind, sensible, very tolerant. Good people, my neighbours: all except the man and woman who kept the restaurant on the ground floor. They were a bad couple; the man a flashy, smarmy-haired little pompous rat; the woman a short-legged, hard-faced shrew of about forty … They drank heavily, quarrelled and screamed until dawn sometimes. Their place was frequented by their friends and by foreigners on the spree, and they bawled and sang and shrieked above the blaring wireless until four or five in the morning.