When it turned out that Patrick O’Brian’s talent for fiction extended to inventing the story of his own life, his many devoted readers were dismayed. O’Brian left Britain in 1949, aged thirty-four, and for the next fifty years he lived in Collioure, a small town on the French Pyrenean coast, at a carefully cultivated distance from his growing audience. Enquiries about his early life were not welcome. But some details were provided, or at least suggested – an upbringing among the impoverished Anglo-Irish Catholic gentry, a governess, time spent at the Sorbonne, long experience of sailing, wartime service in an Allied intelligence unit connected with the French Resistance. None of it was true. Suspicions had begun to accumulate during his lifetime (greatly to O’Brian’s distress), and an unauthorized biography by Dean King, published three months after the novelist’s death in 2000, confirmed them all.
O’Brian was born in 1914 as Patrick Russ, the eighth child of a struggling doctor, and brought up in genteel poverty in Buckinghamshire and London. Schooling was intermittent and he did not go to university. There was an early and mostly unhappy marriage to Elizabeth Jones, a working-class Welsh woman, who gave birth to two children – Richard, then Jane, who died from complications of spina bifida in 1942. O’Brian had by then largely abandoned the family and was living with Mary Tolstoy, the well-to-do wife of Count Dmitri Tolstoy. Both divorced their partners, and in 1945 O’Brian married Mary and changed his name by deed poll. There was a protracted and bitter custody battle over Richard, whose loyalty was torn between his mother and father. At first he spent time with both parents, but later he severed any connection with his father, and before his marriage he reverted to the name of Russ. In a stiff article written after his father’s deathhe concluded that “as a man he was not respectable” (the Guardian, November 28, 2003).
O’Brian would have been hurt by that judgement. The shabby privations of his childhood had left a lasting wound and he longed for respectability. As a writer he certainly earned respect – even from his disaffected son (“he was a marvel at telling stories, and I have full respect for him in that way”). For years O’Brian lived precariously on meagre earnings as a translator, biographer and novelist, attracting little notice from critics or readers. He never gave up, but success came late. He was in his mid-fifties before he published the first of the seafaring historical novels that were to make his reputation and fortune, describing the shared adventures of Jack Aubrey, a newly promoted naval captain, and Stephen Maturin, the Irish-Catalan doctor and naturalist who becomes his friend and shipmate. Master and Commander (1969) was to be followed by nineteen further high-spirited Aubrey-Maturin novels, with engrossing plots and much incidental detail about life on board a fighting ship in the early nineteenth century.
O’Brian cared about the historical authenticity of his fiction, and if you have ever wondered about the difference between a flying jib and a main topgallant, he is the man to explain. But these novels amount to more than rattling nautical yarns. They explore tensions between activity and reflection, the development of science, the roots of European conflict, the bonds of masculine comradeship formed in moments of intense activity and danger. These preoccupations are woven into lively depictions of the natural world, frequent accounts of hearty meals (there’s an enthusiastic cookbook based on his fiction, Anne Chotzinoff Grossman’s Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, 1997), descriptions of the intricate social customs of the period, its music and fashion, and much else besides. The novels are addictive. It’s not for nothing that so many fellow writers are admirers – for, alongside his huge popularity with history-loving readers, O’Brian is a writer’s writer. He has a formidable list of fans, including Tom Stoppard, John Updike, A. S Byatt, Eudora Welty, Iris Murdoch, Louise Erdrich and John Lanchester. Most readers have been inclined to follow the example of Richard Russ, who had more to forgive than anyone other than perhaps Elizabeth Jones, choosing to appreciate the work rather than condemn the life.
Despite his instinct for concealment O’Brian could not quite keep his buried life out of his fiction. Aubrey, like O’Brian, is in flight from his domestic difficulties in England; Maturin, with painful experiences of poverty behind him, is enmired in secrecy and divided identities. O’Brian is, to a surprising extent, an autobiographical writer. This is still more apparent in his poems and short stories. Not all of his poetry is fully achieved and little was published in his lifetime. His reverence for countryside untouched by modern development underlies many of the poems collected in The Uncertain Land – which first appeared in hardback in 2019 – often in the unforgiving context of the “ancient bitter, shallow soil” of Collioure. Their homage to the birds and animals that (like his fictional Maturin) he observed at first hand is engaging. At their best these poems are intimate and direct, revealing O’Brian’s introspective uncertainties with real force. The stalwart cheerfulness that underpins the briskly described events of the Aubrey-Maturin novels appears only in brief glimpses. More evident is a fear, sharply realized, of ageing, loneliness and death. “Old Men” is relentlessly bleak:
It is a crime against humanity
that old people
racked with ignominies, weak
should be made to pay pay pay
and then pay
for a life that has already been lived
Still more desolate is “Labuntur anni (the advancing years)”. The portentous and over-directive title does O’Brian no favours, but the poem is strong:
The years flow by and
Presently you find
that with the sly gliding malevolence of dreams
those flowery meads
Lord lord those old flowery meads enamelled
have turned into a thin sheet of black ice thinner
in some places than others and everywhere unsafe
with here and there a pool open to the void
At intervals of staring you blunder on
the sheet growing thinner thinner mere webs of cold
and yourself dwindling in size virtue beauty sense
always on and on: no choice.
O’Brian’s short stories were mainly published before his Aubrey-Maturin series was under way. Like the poems they are often bleak. Murder, the supernatural and unrelenting isolation are frequent themes, and they are usually set in wild landscapes – though rarely, perhaps surprisingly, by the sea. These are tales about men on the move. Over and over again the protagonist (almost always male) finds himself committed to a long and almost impossibly arduous journey: uphill and downhill, across narrow tracks next to terrifying precipices, slithering down treacherous scrambles of loose stones and scree, braced against icy winds or drenching rain. “Always on and on: no choice.” Usually, but not certainly, the traveller proves himself against daunting challenges and struggles through to his destination. Gruelling walks are described with a degree of physical detail (cold, hunger, shock, exhaustion) that makes them compelling, but more allegorical frames of reference resonate. Death and the fear of death shadow these driven figures, who often seem to be passing through a border between life and oblivion. This metaphorical framework is sometimes explicit, sometimes abstract, as in “The Soul” (1955), where the walker is, exceptionally, female: “The light was infinitely remote. But it was no good waiting: all the hope that there could be was in the traject; and in the faint light she bent to see the winding of the path”. More frequently the courage and endurance needed for the journey is seen to be masculine, as in “A Passage of the Frontier” (1974):
Backwards, forwards, sideways, up and down, climbing, sliding, sometimes falling, it was not until the evening sky flushed red that he was down to the two small lakes, fetching them at last by a long tack that had lost him an hour or more. “But once I am round this pool”, he said, forcing his exhausted body through a bog, “I am certainly on the one true path: then if I do not fall again I may very well get there by night.”
O’Brian’s stories, like his poems, grew more powerful as his understanding of the world darkened. Glimpses of experience, personal and political, add complexity to his characters’ motivation, and the prose grows crisper and more succinct. Journeys described in The Walker and Other Stories (1955) and Lying in the Sun and Other Stories (1956) move beyond the definitions of traditional male heroism. The best of the later stories, “The Chian Wine” (1974), is a devastating indictment of antisemitism in the context of rural tradition and its sanctioned treacheries. A local Good Friday ceremony had always included a ritual condemnation of Jews: “Death to the Jews!”. The story turns on the moment when this centuries-old curse is interpreted literally by the children of the village. “The fun had turned oh so sour: the smell of a bull-fight or worse.” O’Brian’s first collection, The Last Pool and Other Stories (1950), is more limited, if often disarmingly exuberant. Many of the tales describe hunting, fishing and shooting, and an ideal of sturdy endurance in the context of the ruthless pursuit of foxes, fish or game is vividly evoked. Welcome variety is supplied by enjoyably boisterous digressions into Irish folklore.
The entries in The Complete Short Stories, like O’Brian’s oeuvre as a whole, were designed to appeal to a primarily male readership. Women rarely appear, and when they do they are firmly kept in their place. A predatory water spirit in “The Green Creature” (1950) meets her master in a strong man whose prowess she cannot resist, despite her magical powers. “She bowed her head and followed him out of the cave.” One of the things to be learnt from these early tales, alongside much technical detail about the experience of following a Welsh hunt on foot, or the skills involved in fly-fishing, is how radically the presentation of women has been transformed over the past century. O’Brian’s perspectives on women reflect the values of a vanished world. He later became an important translator of Simone de Beauvoir, an educative experience that shifted the dial a little, though the precepts of feminism were never to transform his thinking. Some features of this world, however, remain recognizable. His descriptions of destructively malign weather seem a little ahead of their time. O’Brian spent four difficult years trying to get by in an isolated cottage in Wales: “Dear people, splendid mountains, but a terrible climate”, he later observed. “Naming Calls” (1950), a haunting story of the violent return of an evil submerged in childhood, includes an unforgettable Welsh rainstorm. Here, too, boundaries dissolve with unsettling effect:
The wind had increased, and it was tearing the water from wherever it lay on the mountain; there was not a puddle that could stand five minutes before a blast whipped its surface back into the air. It was impossible to see now which was rain and which was not: the air was full of water, and every standing rock streamed without cease on its windward side.
The author had found shelter in books in his own turbulent early years, and he began to write as a boy. His first novel, an animal story, was published, with some success, when he was fifteen, and it was the starting point for his unwavering ambition to create his own fiction. There followed stories about exotic animals (a white cobra, a condor, a shark, a rhino), heavily influenced by Rudyard Kipling, and many were published in annuals for boys. An anthology of these, Beasts Royal, appeared in 1934, and they are reprinted in this collection. Like his views on women, the approach to animals on display was very much of his class and generation, and it has worn badly. No contemporary reader will find the hunting of giant pandas or snow leopards exhilarating, no matter what perils might be involved. Nor does the slaughter of sea otters for their pelts now seem anything other than repellent. It would have been better to leave these distasteful stories in obscurity. As a writer Patrick O’Brian is among those men who improve with the years.
Dinah Birch is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool
Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS at the TLS Shop
The post Always on and on appeared first on TLS.
