THE IGNORANT AND THE weak only are idle; but those who have once acquired a good stock of knowledge, always desire to increase it. Knowledge is like power, in this respect, that those who have the most are most desirous of having more. It does not clog, by possession, but increases desires; which is the case of very few pleasures.
—Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son, August 23, 1748
Entering this gray decade in England, Patrick Russ, a shy fifteen-year-old, was a promising writer of stories, with a mental library far beyond his years and emotional baggage too ponderous for so young a man. Leaving the 1930s, he would be a worldly veteran of the air force and a father of two children. Once again he would find himself in an unhappy house. Again his health would fail. While life did its best to confuse and cause chaos, Patrick would read and invent. And again his written words would amaze and delight.
Under the most stable of conditions, the transition from teenager to adult is trying, and Patrick’s life was anything but stable. The boy with a tumultuous childhood and adolescence became a restless young man. By now his five oldest siblings were out on their own. Godfrey, an electrical engineer, and Victor, a bank clerk, were making careers for themselves. Olive had succeeded as a secretary and married well. Mike and Barney were struggling in Australia.
Patrick would later claim in an autobiographical essay and in published interviews some unlikely adventures during this time, including sailing on an uncle’s two-ton sloop. (This uncle was certainly not a Russ, and there appears to be no Goddard uncle or Blakeway stepuncle who would be a likely candidate.) He also said that he sailed on a French-built three-masted yacht owned by the wealthy cousin and guardian of a friend named Edward, with whom he shared a tutor. The man loved to sail and to test out his theories regarding new sail configurations. The yacht sometimes moored in Bantry Bay off Cork, and presumably that is where Patrick and his friend boarded her.
According to Patrick, the vessel sailed to the Azores and down the coast of Africa to test her owner’s sailing theories on the edge of the trade winds. Shellbacks crewed her, but she also carried a few adventurous schoolboys who performed the lowliest duties, such as deck swabbing and rope pulling. But eventually the boys learned to climb the masts and work on the yards, to hand and reef a sail, and to steer, the skills of an ordinary seaman.
Perhaps Patrick did have such an experience, or perhaps it was a convenient invention when some claim to square-rigged sailing expertise was desirable. In either case, it made no impact on his prewar writing; one friend with whom he would later discuss naval strategy and literature would not recall ever hearing him talk about such an experience; and Barney would later write to Joan that Patrick’s “apparent knowledge of seamanship under sail and the naval terminology never ceases to amaze me. As far as I know he has never been to sea in a tall ship or any other for any distance.” Such an experience was never mentioned in any of the biographical sketches accompanying Patrick’s early stories or sea books. What does infuse his stories from this decade is his continuing fascination with animals and his burgeoning interest in colonial India.
By the end of May 1930, Charles Russ had negotiated a deal with G. P. Putnam’s Sons to publish Patrick’s first book. Charles and editor Geoffrey Lackstead met at the Press Club in St. Bride’s House, near Fleet Street, and signed a contract. Pat’s advance on royalties came to £10. He dedicated the book, titled Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, to his stepmother, Zoe.
With subdued pride, the doctor wrote a foreword, focusing on the nature of the panda leopard invented by his son. “As the author of the story is only fifteen years old,” Charles noted, “he may have unwittingly provided zoologists with a small problem in prophecy as to Caesar’s distinguishing features. Fortunately the story does not, I think, chiefly rely for its interest or attraction on its zoological aspect.” The book’s illustrator, Harry Rountree, simply ignored the mixed parentage of the hero-beast, depicting him entirely as a leopard.
Charles concluded his foreword, “I believe the author’s immaturity of literary style and method—which are quite unspoiled by any senior pen—may also contribute to its favourable reception.” Putnam’s Sons published Caesar in October 1930.
Charles was correct in believing that his son’s prose gained from this ingenuousness. In the first place, few would attempt a story in which the narrator is an animal, let alone a predator, and one who understands the words of men, and fewer still would have gotten away with it. But Patrick did. With the clear conscience of youth, he neither blushed nor blinked nor rationalized. He wrote clean, active prose, and he successfully entered Caesar’s mind, as when the captive beast confesses, “I was given at a regular time every day a smelly, stale and bony lump of flesh with no blood in it. That which I missed most of all was the killing of my own food” (p. 47). And when Caesar kills in the wild, whether an animal for food or a man in self-defense, there is no great human moralizing, no struggling with the meaning of existence (though he raises many issues in the reader’s mind), but an elegantly straightforward presentation of the story.
In fact, Patrick displayed in his first published work a remarkable number of the techniques of his most accomplished writing, a quarter century away. Already, he deftly undercut potentially melodramatic scenes. He established his authority with pithy facts: many wild animals drink only in the evening; pythons like to eat monkeys; leopards break the necks of their prey; elephants kill their foes by kneeling on them. His narrative style relied on a tight point of view, seeing through the eyes and mind of the beast, while the author remained almost wholly invisible. The story benefited from this immediacy as well as from the animal-narrator’s flawed perception of his environment.
Caesar was a worthy first manifestation of Patrick’s skill at characterization. Likable and moral, given his own understanding of the world, Caesar is, nevertheless, a killer of men who slays out of rage. “When I calmed down enough to stop the useless killing, I found myself alone covered with blood, with two dead men,” he tells us after fighting shepherds. “I dimly felt sorry that I had needlessly killed these two useless things, for though I was hungry I could not bring myself to eat these smelly men” (p. 20). Yet Patrick did not fall into the trap of trying to impress the reader. Caesar does not become the stereotypical king of the jungle. In fact, he frequently pursues the weak and the young—natural behavior in the animal kingdom, for which Patrick made no apologies.
Another strength Patrick demonstrated was a knack for the telling detail. On a hunting trip after long being caged, Caesar says, “My master gave me a large piece of the antelope’s shoulder, and I remembered that I always used to begin my meal at the shoulder of my prey instead of at the haunch, as I had seen some animals doing” (p. 56). Not only does this passage make the reader pause to consider that a ferocious animal might have idiosyncrasies but, more important, it helps define the relationship between Caesar and his master. The man knows things about Caesar that the animal in captivity has himself forgotten. In fact, they become particular friends, a relationship Patrick never ceased to explore in his fiction.
The book was a critical success. In December 1930, the New Statesman included Caesar in its Christmas recommendations for children. Putnam’s sold Danish translation rights in February 1931, and the book reached stores in the United States that summer. In August, the New York Herald Tribune wrote, in a generally favorable review, “Caesar may be too human—or boylike—in his reactions for complete plausibility, but his sleek, catlike nature, his carnivorous appetite, his ruthless skill in killing for food, all these are clearly pictured in simple, adequate, straightforward narrative.”
The Saturday Review of Literature commented that the book was written in the “spirit of an explorer relating his adventures. … There is rapid action, copious bloodshed, and later, the extraordinary devotion felt by the mammoth killer for the master who trains it to hunt for him. Boys themselves will love all that.” However, the publication warned, “The question in our minds is this: what effect will such a dish of mental food have on the growing boy, and what kind of dreams will it cause the sensitive child to have? “
Before departing for Australia, Barney Russ had harbored a secret (and never realized) dream: to ride his bike from London to Rome to pay homage to Keats at the poet’s tomb. Like Barney and their father, Patrick was prone to enthusiasms. He too had a propensity for fantasizing, which might have been in reverse proportion to the family’s ability to display emotions. On Joan’s fourteenth birthday, July 10, 1931, Pat gave his sister an inscribed copy of Caesar, a kind and personal gift, but with the dry inscription “To Joan from Pat.” Love was not a topic to be mentioned. Other subjects were taboo as well. Neither Charles nor Zoe offered advice regarding the facts of life, a matter that affected Joan deeply. Barney was also kept in the dark, though his experiences were more comical. At seventeen, handsome in the mold of his father, but not as tall, he had departed for Australia a sexual naïf. As might be expected, the Dreadnought Scheme attracted the bold and the outcast. At sea, Barney marveled at the hanky-panky in the supposedly strictly segregated bunk rooms. In Australia, when an attractive married woman lured him to her hotel room, he carried on an honorable conversation with her all the while ignoring the fact that she was half naked.
Later, Patrick, too, would find himself the object of an older woman’s affection, one whose powers of seduction were more impressive than those of Barney’s Australian temptress.
Pat and Joan, it seems, were left to discover the world on their own, and this they did primarily through Pat’s passions—“tearing and painful ones,” he later confessed to the BBC—which came in waves. Perhaps under the influence of Ernest Bramah’s clever mock-Chinese Kai Lung stories, Pat became fascinated by the Far East. He drank exotic teas and ate litchis, and he gave Joan a flat metal Chinese mirror decorated with a dragon on one side and polished to a reflective gleam on the other. He collected Japanese Samurai swords. He also developed a fervor for India, perhaps through Uncle Emil’s tales of his years there and certainly deepened by Kipling’s writing. Several years later, under the influence of the writings of James Joyce, he developed a passion for Ireland and claimed to be Irish, a charade he maintained the rest of his life.
Books, nature, and music were his abiding interests. When they could afford it, Pat and Joan attended the popular and inexpensive Proms concerts of classical, patriotic, and show music at Queen’s Hall. Sometimes Victor, who loved music, joined them. Literature played a big part in Pat and Joan’s fantasy lives. They read endlessly, mostly novels and the Strand, the magazine whose catchy illustrated articles, political pieces, interviews, and fiction, mainly detective stories and tales of the weird, were originally chosen to appeal to the railway commuter. The Strand had launched Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in 1891, and in the 1930s featured the writing of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, among others. The stories combined the clever and witty with the thrilling and sensational, feeding the young Russes’ imaginations and love of reading. Patrick was not the only writer in the family. Joan wrote well, and in high school, she won a copy of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage as a literary prize. She later published a chapbook of poetry.
But Patrick simply had to write. It was his chief form of expression and a substitute for the physical activities that his delicate constitution so limited. He published his first story in a fall 1931 issue of Chums Weekly, a London boys’ magazine, which reported that the sixteen-year-old had “produced what may be described as the boys’ best-seller” and that he had been “hailed as the boy-Thoreau.” Not only had Caesar found its way to the United States and Denmark, but it had been translated and published in Sweden, Norway, and Japan. Despite the success, the magazine noted, “he is exceedingly modest about his achievement and is much more interested in watching the behaviour of the dog-fish and cat-fish in his aquarium than discussing his book.”
“Patrick is a great lover of Nature and a keen observer, and that perhaps is the secret of his success as a writer of Nature stories,” wrote the magazine. “In truth, Patrick is not a book-worm, but prefers to draw his inspiration from the countryside.” Or the sea.
His first venture into the deep blue concerned not naval life but nature. The story, “Skogula,” follows the rise to adulthood of a bull whale, whose mother is one of the seven wives of the pod leader, a powerful sixty-foot bull who rules “with his ten-foot ivory-clad under-jaw.” During a migration south, a whaler harpoons Skogula, but he escapes when a second harpoon, attached to the first by a short length of rope, snags a whaler boat. The force of Skogula’s dive rips the harpoon out of his flesh. At their destination, a southern seas lagoon, the behemoth leader of another pod challenges Skogula’s father. As they fight, the sea grows pink. Frenzied sharks gather for the kill. The struggle rages out of sight, and Skogula never again sees his father.
The new chief bull is a great traveler, leading the pod to the Indian Ocean, Zanzibar, and the coast of Brazil. He is also a tedious bully. Skogula eventually comes of age while fighting three giant swordfish off St. Helena. One stabs him, causing him to spout blood. He responds with fury. Wrote Patrick, “For the first time, using his full strength, he lashed with his tail hard enough to blind his enemies, and then turning, he bit one right through the middle of the body.” Off the Falkland Islands, Skogula finally challenges the leader over rights to an attractive cow named Miska. The ruthless old warrior rips the blubber from the sides of Skogula’s head in long strips and dislocates his jaw before a freak occurrence saves his life. The leader bumps against a contact mine that explodes and destroys him. In “Skogula,” as in Caesar, Patrick used a tight third-person narration very effectively, entering the minds of the whales when he chose. What allowed him to do this was his command of the details of their lives and his ability to anthropomorphize with a minimum of human emotion. In his first story published in a magazine, Patrick proved that the success of Caesar was no fluke.
England was now in the thick of the global depression, with unemployment surpassing two million people. The Russes were essentially broke, though there does seem to have been a reserve of cash, perhaps coming from Zoe, who certainly at one point loaned her husband money. Somehow Charles and Zoe preserved at least a minimal middle-class lifestyle. Though information about this time is sketchy, they apparently lived for a while south of the Thames, in Putney, close enough to the river to see the start of the Oxford-Cambridge boat races from their house in the summer. Perhaps inspired by Patrick’s success,’ Charles indulged in a literary endeavor of his own. In July and August 1931, Warwick James repertory company performed his four-act play, Hidden Power, at King George’s Theatre on Great Russell Street.
Intrigued by the potential for doctors to misuse their powers (he noted that in the previous seventy years at least four doctors had been executed for murder in Britain), Charles constructed a love triangle resulting in a murder during surgery and leading to another love triangle. The Lancet wrote in its August 1 issue: “It is a drama full of medical interest, for its opening (and only) murder is committed by the anaesthetist during an operation, and his guilt is subsequently discovered by hypnosis. This gives Dr. Russ a good opportunity for discussing, through his characters, some important aspects of mind and body, and he makes suggestive comments on psychological analysis as practised by doctors and clergy.”
But the journal conceded that the play “lacks surprises, and it certainly requires ruthless compression.” In fact, it was a dubious distinction that during “moments of crisis in the consulting room” the reviewer took great delight in perusing the “names of well-known surgical instrument makers in place of the usual ‘wigs by Clarkson’” in the program.
In September 1932, at the depths of the depression, Patrick’s oldest brother, Godfrey, now an electrical engineer, married the daughter of a clerk in London. Victor, who had become a bank clerk, witnessed the ceremony. Not present were Michael and Barney, who were still struggling to survive in Australia, which was no better off than England. National income had plummeted by a third, unemployment had skyrocketed, shops lay deserted and factories idle. Ironically, Mike, the grandson of a furrier to Queen Victoria, found himself on the bottom rung of the ladder in the fur trade, and an outlaw at that. Mike had become, among other things, a platypus poacher, killing the aquatic mammals for their valuable pelts.
Since Mike was a bit of a star in the family no matter what he did, Patrick almost certainly heard of his illicit trapping in the wilds of Australia through his letters home. No doubt Mike’s exploits sounded romantic to the teenager, who was fascinated by the animal kingdom and who had so often been confined to bed, but perhaps he was saddened by his brother’s hunting of such a rare and exotic species. Sixty years later, Patrick would allow the duck-billed platypus a measure of revenge in his novel The Nutmeg of Consolation, when a male of the species viciously barbs Stephen Maturin with his venomous spur. Maturin’s exaggerated reaction, a near-death coma (the sting would usually require only a painkiller), paid the platypus back with interest.
What Patrick and the others did not know was that Mike was living the life of a scoundrel in other ways too. He had previously impregnated a farmer’s teenage daughter, married her a month before she gave birth to a son, Stanley Charles Russ, and then run out on them to Queensland. He also changed his name. Just why he picked the name O’Brien is hard to say. However, the founder of his school, Shebbear College—and indeed of the Bible Christian Church, a tributary of the Methodist Church of England—was named William O’Bryan, and it could have been a name that resonated for him. If so, Mike ironically renamed himself for a very pious man.
In the midst of these oppressive times, when his family, like others, was learning to live on a more down-to-earth scale, Patrick turned, as he always would, to his writing. In March 1933, he published another story. “A Tale About a Great Peregrine Falcon” ran in the Edinburgh-based Great-Heart: The Church of Scotland Magazine—for Boys and Girls. The magazine, aimed at the under-fifteen set and costing a penny, noted that “R. P. Russ has made a name for himself by Nature stories, although he is not much older than Great-Heart readers.”
In this story, as in “Skogula,” Patrick described the life of the animal in detail, evoking the female peregrine’s flight, her hunt on the downs for food, her battle with a pair of falcons who attempt to steal her prey, and her relationship with her relatively weak mate, who is unable to fend off the human intruder of their nest. The story’s mood is rather glum, in part because Patrick did not name the falcons and did not romanticize their plights at all. When a nameless and doomed oologist raids their aerie, placing the eggs he is stealing in his mouth to protect them as he tries to escape, the peregrine attacks him with the passion and determination of a mother defending her offspring—so different from that of the ineffectual father—a theme that Patrick returns to on several occasions in his early work.
As Patrick advanced through his teen years, finding success writing stories, it is not surprising that he developed a bit of a swagger. At times he played the sophisticate, wearing colorful waistcoats and silk dressing gowns a la Noel Coward, whose comedy Cavalcade had taken the British stage by storm in 1931. Patrick smoked French or Turkish cigarettes in holders and even acquired a hookah. He continued to smoke for many years, and Joan, his teenage sidekick, never quit.
In 1933, Patrick also published his first story in Oxford Annual for Scouts, a publication of Oxford University Press. “Wang Khan of the Elephants” introduced his latest passion: the culture of colonial India. India was Rudyard Kipling’s and E. M. Forster’s literary turf, but Patrick was not intimidated. He wrote fearlessly.
Young or old, he always wrote best when plunging headfirst into another world, be it the animal kingdom, India, or the Royal Navy of 1800. Freed of the demons of his daily existence, he roamed in each of these fictional worlds with uncanny detachment, examining both its particular minutiae and the eternal truths.
Though it was still an animal tale, “Wang Khan” was Patrick’s first work with central human characters. In the hot summer dust, Wang Khan, a three-ton bull elephant in the employ of the Amalgamated Teak Company, carries his mahout, Mod Lai, and Moti Lai’s young son, Little Moti, on his back as he roots up stumps with his tusks and drags trees to the river. As Wang Khan labors, the boy chastises the powerful beast, calling him “fat pig” and “sluggard.” When a logjam forms in the river, the negligent superintendent orders Moti Lai to fix the problem with his mighty elephant. However, just as Wang Khan, working on the downriver side of the dangerous snarl, frees it and moves to safety on the bank, Little Moti falls into the river. Knowing that his own escape is impossible, the elephant again heaves against the mounting timber and weight of the river. Moti Lai rescues his son, but Wang Khan is lost.
In this relationship between man and beast, Patrick found a rich vein to mine. An elephant often served several generations of a mahout family, allowing for comparisons between grandfather, son, and grandson, each of whom in his turn commanded, cared for, and established his unique rapport with the elephant. The mysterious dynamics of Indian culture—with its outcastes and gods, curses and magic—had also captured Patrick’s imagination. It was a world in which the good, intelligent common man had to make his way against the tide of petty tyranny, corruption, and slothful governance that existed in the moral conundrum of English colonialism. For Patrick, harmony with nature and animals was one way for the native to maintain the moral high ground. He would explore this theme in a number of stories and ultimately in a novel.
With “Wang Khan,” Patrick began a lasting relationship with the editors of Oxford University Press’s story collections Oxford Annual for Scouts and Oxford Annual for Boys. From 1933 to 1940, he published eight stories in editor Herbert Strang’s two annuals, which were run primarily by Charles John Kaberry, a juvenile department veteran and children’s book author who encouraged the young, talented writer.
The 1934 Scouts annual included “The White Cobra,” an especially noteworthy tale because here Patrick created his first human protagonist, and a complex one. Hussein, a Sufi Muslim snake charmer, is determined to steal from the Hindu village Kurasai a rare white cobra called Vakrishna, considered by the villagers to be an incarnation of the god Vakrishna and a bearer of good luck. Over a period of days, Hussein befriends the village’s headman and priest, dupes them into trusting him, and hatches a scheme to steal the snake, which lives in a hole beneath a pipal tree.
Hussein paints one of his own snakes white, feeds Vakrishna a drugged rat, and then swaps the two. He flees with the white cobra, but that evening, the imposter snake sheds its painted skin. Hussein wakes up the next morning in a village ten miles away to face an angry mob that has pursued him overnight. They beat him unconscious and leave with Vakrishna. The priest remains behind, revives Hussein, beats him again, more fiercely than before, and leaves him for dead. It was the first but not the last time that Patrick would turn a story on the hypocrisy of a priest.
Patrick wrote with the sure voice of an experienced tale spinner, as when he succinctly characterized the villagers through their own factionalism and stereotypes: “It transpired that Hussein was a Sufi—a freethinker, as opposed to the orthodox Shiites. This at once raised him in the estimation of the villagers, whose neighbors towards the north were strict Shiites, and great cattle thieves.” He once again showed an uncanny ability to establish his authority on an unlikely subject and to almost effortlessly transport the reader to another world, one that he had only learned about vicariously. While much is made of the importance of writing from experience, Patrick, even at this young age, showed a genius for the opposite. He could convincingly roam India like a mahout, climb into the soul of a falcon, or hunt as remorselessly as a leopard. This extraordinary capability would find its full fruition years later in the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
It was probably in the winter of 1933–34 that Patrick put the finishing touches on a collection of tales, which included the four he had already published, with minor edits (though he much improved “A Peregrine Falcon” by subtly honing the ending), and eight new ones. His father sold the manuscript, “Twelve Animal Stories,” to G. P. Putnam’s Sons in May. Patrick’s advance tripled to £30. Of the eight new stories, six had animals as main characters, the last Patrick wrote of this sort, and two continued the adventures of the snake charmer and mahout Hussein. Although Patrick had completed the animal-centric phase of his writing career, he maintained a personal devotion to animals, particularly birds, and his eventual literary alter ego, Stephen Maturin, would delight in the discovery and care of animals throughout the Aubrey-Maturin books. While in these early stories Patrick examined the lives of animals very seriously, later he frequently found humor there, particularly in Maturin’s animal keeping on board ship. In one amusing incident, the sailors get his potto (a slow-climbing African primate) drunk, and in another, Maturin proudly brings an active beehive into the captain’s cabin so that they can have honey on the voyage.
Patrick dedicated the story collection, titled Beasts Royal and issued in September 1934, “To my father.” To illustrate it, Putnam’s chose Charles Tunnicliffe, a budding master at natural history illustration who had recently established himself in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter. (That book was not illustrated originally, but Tunnicliffe sent Putnam’s several aquatints of Tarka that were so exquisite the publisher reissued the book with art.) It was a good match. Both Tunnicliffe, who drew birds that were accurate to within a millimeter, and Patrick cherished detail, and Tunnicliffe’s illustrations stood up reasonably well to Patrick’s dense, often brooding tales.
Beasts Royal featured prominently in an omnibus review of nature books in the November 22 Times Literary Supplement, where an enthusiastic reviewer called Tunnicliffe’s illustrations “very striking” and managed to give away the endings of several of the animal tales. He rightly reserved the highest praise for the Indian stories: “The best things in the book are four Indian episodes concerned with one Hussein, ex-Mahout and elephant-thief, snake-charmer and swindling discoverer of cobras with which he had ‘salted’ likely bungalows with the aid of the bribed staff. These are very well told, and have every appearance of truth to fact.”
This encouraged the nineteen-year-old, who had by no means exhausted his enthusiasm for India.