I KNOW OF NO redeeming qualities in me but a sincere love of some things, and when I am reproved I have to fall back on to this ground. This is my argument in reserve for all cases. My love is invulnerable. Meet me on that ground, and you will find me strong. When I am condemned, and condemn myself utterly, I think straightaway, “But I rely on my love for some things.” Therein I am whole and entire.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, December 15, 1841
In 1948, the O’Brians moved several hundred yards down the valley into a larger house, one in need of renovation, which suited them well since the rent increase came in the form of sweat. Built on the crest of a hill in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a residence for the quarry manager, Moelwyn Bank possessed a view and a large garden. It had once even had electricity, but no longer. It did boast, however, a lavatory with running water provided by a diverted stream.
Like Ybryn, an even grander quarry executive house, Moelwyn Bank was considered by the locals to be somewhat undesirable, fine in summer but hopeless in winter. Being so large and having no geologic protection from the frigid northeaster, it was damp and drafty. Slate shingles covered the stone walls, but even this armor was not considered sufficient to combat the driving rain and winds of Croesor. During the war, the house had been given over to evacuees from the big cities and had fallen into disrepair. Now the O’Brians, with the help of Edgar, spent weeks fixing up the place, peeling old paper off the walls and scraping the ceilings. They painted and stenciled the interior with a floral pattern. They cleaned the chimney and replaced broken windowpanes.
Nearby, at Ybryn, the grass tennis court was now grazed by sheep. An English sculptor named Sydney Whitehead Smith and his wife had lived there since before the war. He was a patronizing John Bull with a modern car that was the envy of the valley. O’Brian did not like the man, and the two were barely cordial. O’Brian even wrote a tale, “It Must Have Been a Branch, They Said,” with an inimical Englishman whom locals recognized as Smith. Not that O’Brian would have gone out of his way to make friends with the likes of Smith. The fictional Pugh perhaps expresses O’Brian’s own somewhat misanthropic feelings in Testimonies when, after moving to his cottage in Wales, he states:
“I had understood that there were practically no gentlefolk within calling distance, and this seemed to me in many ways an advantage. Perhaps, having rubbed shoulders for so long with more people than I liked, I saw it as a disproportionate benefit; but with all allowances there is something to be said for the absence of formal, enforced intercourse. One may be lucky and chance upon a set of amiable neighbors, liberal and informed, who can make life much more pleasant. It is more probable that no such thing will occur.” (P. 103)
As the O’Brians prepared for the move, Patrick was struck with an acute case of appendicitis. Harry Roberts and Edgar answered Mary’s call for help, and the two carried him semidelirious and spouting oaths (though this was quite out of character) down the steep steps of Fron’s loftlike second floor. With his free hand, the powerful farmer lifted the garden gate right up off its hinges as they carried the writhing author out to a waiting ambulance.
The hospital stay for appendicitis lasted a fortnight or so, and by the time Patrick returned, Mary had moved into the spacious new house, which had three bedrooms and a washing room upstairs. On the front porch, they could hang coats and leave Wellington boots. For writing, O’Brian had his own room off the stairway landing, where his special fountain pen and his machine for typing braille were installed. Downstairs, on one side of a center hallway, a large kitchen and dining area led to a small second kitchen and then into a lean-to scullery with a steep corrugated tin roof, resting on a low stone wall, used for cold storage. On the other side of the hallway, in the drawing room, O’Brian drilled holes into the plaster, inserted wooden plugs, and then screwed in supports for shelves. Here he installed his growing library.
Settling into their new home were the couple’s three dogs, Mary’s particular delight. Buddug (pronounced “Bithig”), a Welsh farmyard terrier, was not pedigreed but admirably tough and smart. Her two corgis went by the names Bronwen and Nan. A cat named Hodge, after Dr. Johnson’s “very fine” cat (which Johnson fed oysters), rounded out their family—almost.
Patrick and Mary could no longer afford to pay for tuition, room, and board at Southey Hall, so Richard was brought to Moelwyn Bank. It was a far cry from the manor house at Fulford, where Southey Hall had operated during the war and where in the magnificent dining hall, the boys were forbidden to carry their pocketknives for fear that the oak paneling or the enormous oil paintings might suffer. The move was but another twist in the boy’s already overeventful youth. Just eleven, he had seen his parents separate, his little sister die, his city bombed and burned, and he had spent four years away at boarding school. He had lived in rural Suffolk, in Norwich, in London, in Devon, and in Surrey, and now he found himself in remote Wales. At times he grew desperately homesick for his mother and his pet boxer, Sian (Welsh for “Jane,” after his sister).
O’Brian’s reserve did not help the situation. He perpetuated the parenting attitudes of both his father and his grandfather. Like them, he was not inclined to relate to a child on his level. He never spoke of his own childhood to him. Though warm and sensitive to Mary, he was very much an authority figure, the master and teacher, to his son. He always chose a lesson in fortitude over a sympathetic response, such as the time Richard dissolved into tears after stepping on a drawing pen that jabbed into his heel. O’Brian took him aside and told him the fable of the Spartan boy, who hid a fox cub under his tunic and carried it home. His parents were entertaining guests, and, instead of interrupting them, the boy sat down and waited quietly. Even when the fox began biting him, the boy kept silent. He eventually bled to death rather than interrupt his parents. The moral of the story was not lost on young Richard, but it provided little comfort at a time when it was sorely needed. (O’Brian later put the tale of the Spartan boy to better use in a hilarious rendition in his novel The Golden Ocean [pp. 130–31]).
Patrick and Mary were determined not to let Richard’s education suffer. Mary instructed him in French, which she spoke fluently from her days on the Continent. In the evenings, she gave him singing and music lessons. Patrick, whose ability to parse a sentence impressed even his son, taught him English, Latin, history, and mathematics. When Richard mixed up his multiplication tables, Patrick made him write out sentences as punishment. He was a demanding schoolmaster, who required learning by rote. Richard also memorized Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Lars Porsena of Clusium,” which quite suited him since it was about the heroic Roman Horatius, who with two companions defends a bridge against an invading army and slays its fiercest warriors. Richard also read widely from Patrick’s diverse library: from Arthurian legend to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and George Catlin’s North American Indians.
O’Brian was perhaps too stern a taskmaster for the young boy, and it did not help that Richard struggled with Latin, his father’s pet subject. Patrick found it difficult enough to dole out commendation when it was merited. Without praise to counterbalance it, his criticism stung the boy. As a result, while Richard did emerge with an impressive vocabulary, he had few fond memories of being taught by his father.
However, outside class the boy took pleasure in the constant flow of activity resulting from his father’s abiding interests. He developed a life-long fascination with birds. Wheatears, stonechats, flycatchers, ravens, and peregrines graced the Welsh hills. The O’Brians loved nature and treated it with respect, often picnicking in the wild but never leaving behind a trace. Richard learned to make and repair things. When Bessie Roberts, who hand-churned butter and made lovely round pats with a floral design on top, found a crack in her mold, Patrick volunteered to repair it. He carefully applied a delicate strip of brass using tiny screws so that it wouldn’t mar the pats.
Richard also learned the basics of gardening from his father. With his usual energy and enthusiasm, Patrick planted a vegetable garden at Moelwyn Bank. To get it just right, he followed the instructions of a wartime government manual from the “Dig for Britain” days of World War II. With the help of Mary and Richard, he sowed seed on half an acre, enriched with the Robertses’ abundant farmyard manure. This labor paid off in a harvest of potatoes, leeks, red and black currants, gooseberries, cauliflower, and marrow, which in the cool scullery lasted well into winter. This experience so boosted O’Brian’s zeal for farming that he grew keen on becoming the tenant of a little farm, Ynys Giftan, about four miles away, on the estate of Lord Harlech. O’Brian discussed the idea frequently with Edgar, but the property, on a ten-acre island in the River Dwyryd, was let to someone else.
In their spare time, Mary and Patrick and Richard played Ping-Pong on the air-raid shelter and Racing Demon, a card game of hand speed and memory. With so few distractions, the games grew quite competitive. In the evenings, they sometimes listened to a wireless that ran off a battery they charged at the power station up the mountain. Patrick was especially fond of the outlandish comedy The Goon Show, in which Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe played multiple roles. Other times, Mary played the accordion and sang songs such as “Barbara Allen” and “Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.” In the hallway, they kept a wind-up His Master’s Voice gramophone. Richard cranked the machine and changed the records. To the music of Haydn and Mozart, the three read by kerosene lamps and the light of the fireplace.
Although the valley largely circumscribed the O’Brians’ existence at this time, they did venture outside it. In good weather, they rode bikes to the beach to swim. At the insistence of his mother, Richard regularly attended the Roman Catholic church in the coastal town of Porthmadog, a hilly eight-mile walk or bike ride away.
Between Porthmadog and Croesor lay the lowlands estate of the Jones family, called Ynysfor (“Big Island”), where the O’Brians sometimes hunted. Ynysfor sat on a hill that had been nearly an island before the tidal Glaslyn River was dammed at Porthmadog during the Napoleonic wars to create farmland.
While the briny soil of Ynysfor bore salty grass that produced especially savory lamb, the Joneses’ reputation rested on their fox hunt, established in 1765. A succession of Joneses served as masters of the hounds until the fall of 1948, when fifty-nine-year-old Captain John “Jack” Jones was killed in a hunting accident. A hound had been lost, and as usual in such a situation, an impromptu hunt took place the following day in the hope that the lost dog would come to the baying of the pack. A fox was raised and went underground in a rockfall. Jones, who was master of the hounds, rolled back some of the large rocks to examine the hideout. The destabilized pile collapsed, crushing him.
This was sad news for O’Brian, who had hunted with Jones, and for some time the accident was the talk of Croesor, where little love was lost for the lowland gentleman farmers. O’Brian comforted himself about his friend’s death by telling Edgar that Captain Jones was not the sort of man who would have wanted to die in bed.
No male Jones remained to lead the hunt, so Major Edmund Roche, whose mother had been a Jones, took over. A Sandhurst-educated officer in the famous South Wales Borderers infantry regiment, Roche was an accomplished sportsman who raced horses and played polo while serving in India, Africa, France, and with Viscount Allenby in Palestine. He inherited a farm in disarray, as well as several resident spinster aunts. The gruff forty-year-old half-Irish veteran went about setting the place to rights. He soon installed a wife, Primrose Buchan-Hepburn, the daughter of a Scots baronet, and packed off the aunts to an auxiliary house on the estate. He bought more land and, after a respectful hiatus, returned to the hunt. Hunts typically started after breakfast and ran until teatime, the participants returning to the house for refreshment and gossip presided over by Primrose and Aunts Sybil (a farmer) and Minnie (a justice of the peace), tough but handsome women who hunted fox and spurned suitors.
While the Ynysfor hunt, which took place every Wednesday and Saturday from October through March, was a social event for the local upper crust, it was no picnic. Unarmed but clad in a proper tweed jacket, Patrick, and sometimes Mary too, walked or biked down to Ynysfor and then hiked the ten to twenty miles over brutal terrain, across bogs, over slate walls, up faces of shale, wherever the fox led, keeping pace as best as possible with the hounds. It was the performance and cry of the pack, the teamwork and the reactions of each dog to the combined music, that stimulated the hunter.
Since the hounds often ran out of sight during the chase, the hunter followed their sound and the sporadic visual clues. When the fox—usually a red fox, whose color could be anything from reddish brown to nearly black—finally went to earth, the hounds marked the spot and then most went silent. Only one or two, the most valuable dogs, kept baying so that the hunters could find them.
The first time Patrick took Richard along, the boy was overwhelmed by the stench of the hounds, which fed on the carcasses of livestock (kept in a river pool until needed). The dogs sensed his fear. They forced their wet noses into his coat pockets and tried to steal the two sandwiches that Mary had carefully wrapped in greased paper. But the mugged boy braced up and returned for more. On one hunt, Idwal, the kennel master, put him in charge of a brace of Lakeland terriers, which came into play only if the fox went to earth. Getting them where they had to be was quite a task, though. The terriers would not climb, so Richard had to lift them over the many walls they encountered while he tried to keep up with the pack.
O’Brian enjoyed the strenuous yet exhilarating hunts. On the severe slopes of Snowdon, this exhausting and dangerous activity exposed his fears and weaknesses and allowed him to test himself. He demonstrated courage and perseverance as well as a love of nature and a respect for its brutality. Hunting on Snowdon with Walter Greenway, who was staying at Moelwyn Bank, O’Brian had a chilling experience one bleak winter day. The two became separated on the mountainside as Greenway lagged behind. The shale was slick. On a steep slope, O’Brian lost his footing. He found nothing to grab as he helplessly slid down a face of shale and scree. When he finally came to a halt, well below the ledge he had been walking on, he was scraped and bruised, but he had broken no bones. Badly shaken, he had lost his taste for hunting that day, and as there was no easy way back up to the trail, he headed down. Before walking back to Croesor, he left a message with a local to tell the master of the hounds that he had headed home. The message never made it to Roche, however, and Greenway finally began the long walk back to Croesor by himself with a heavy heart. As far as he knew, Patrick had disappeared on the mountain, and he had to tell Mary.
When Greenway climbed the last hill to the house, he saw O’Brian anxiously awaiting him in the yard. O’Brian apologized for the misunderstanding. Elated at seeing his friend safe, Greenway forgave him at once. But Roche remained angry about the incident and reprimanded O’Brian for not making sure that the head of the hunt knew of his departure.
Fox hunting at Ynysfor inspired two riveting short stories—perhaps the most successful of all of O’Brian’s hunting tales. Both explore the intense emotions the hunters experience as they race over the craggy, desolate Welsh hills in pursuit of a pack of baying hounds. In both, the hunter is an outsider, new to the sport, and loath to prove unworthy. In both, he teeters on the brink of exhaustion, danger, and self-discovery. O’Brian dedicated “The Steep Slope of Gallt y Wenallt” to Major Roche and the ladies of Ynysfor and the “The Long Day Running” to Greenway. In “The Steep Slope,” Greenway served as the model for the mildly unsympathetic character Gonville, who has an intellectual disagreement with Brown, the main character, in a conversation on the nature of birds’ flight. O’Brian later apologized to Greenway for the unflattering portrayal.
During Greenway’s stay in Croesor, he and O’Brian resumed their old conversations on clocks and naval literature. It was then that O’Brian introduced Greenway to C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories. Forester had begun writing them before the war, producing a trilogy by 1938 and two new tides, The Commodore and Lord Hornblower, after the war. “You must read this book,” O’Brian declared, handing Greenway the red-cloth one-volume trilogy.
In the spring of 1949, the peace of Cwm Croesor was disrupted by repairs to the dam in the hanging valley above. The Robertses’ fields served as a landing pad for the helicopter employed in the work. On May 24, the chopper, carrying a load of dry cement in a vessel suspended from a cable, roared up the valley, but it got caught in a downdraft and dropped like a stone, crashing in a cloud of cement dust. Miraculously, the pilot emerged on his own two feet. People came from near and far to gawk, and Richard made a sport of finding pieces of the helicopter’s shattered windshield. But a new helicopter soon arrived, hauled off the wreckage, and finished the work. The dam was repaired by mid-June.
It was a fine, sunny early summer, and O’Brian, now thirty-five, polished up his short stories. But he and Mary, no longer so world-weary, also considered moving. Cwm Croesor had offered them the simple, clean life that they had coveted after the war and a degree of freedom within their means. But life in the Welsh valley, which was cold and damp much of the year, aggravating ailments, was remote, harsh, and monotonous. They also had to consider Richard’s welfare. So far, his boyish transgressions were minor. Out of boredom he had attempted to pop a tire of one of the quarry trucks by positioning a slate shard on the road, and he had stoned a neighbor’s cowshed, creating a minor stampede. (For the latter, Patrick had punished him with a judicious wallop with a walking stick.) But Richard would soon need the company of children his own age, proper schooling, and additional activities to occupy his teenage mind.
After his two-year apprenticeship, Edgar Williams had moved on to another farm the previous November, and now the O’Brians felt the urge to find a more salubrious situation. London seemed to offer little besides more gray skies and financial hardship. Paris promised much the same, but southern France appealed to them, with its sunny weather and low cost of living. The Mediterranean coast would do nicely, and they had a place in mind. Patrick traveled to France as a scout. One day, an envelope arrived in the mail for Mary. In a romantic gesture, Patrick had wrapped inside a glowing letter a tiny glass vial of seawater taken from the bay of a fishing village. He had found their new home: Collioure, the village along the escape route from Vichy France to Spain and the purported departure point for Goëau-Brissonnière’s aborted submarine getaway.
Patrick returned full of enthusiasm. The blessed sunshine, the clear sky, and the temperate sea of Roussillon suddenly made Wales look impossibly grim. Food grew abundantly there; wine seemed to spring from the sun-baked rocks; and, though it was far from a major city, Collioure had much of cultural interest. Not the least of the attractions was that it would be even cheaper to live in Catalan France than in Wales. As they prepared to move, Patrick and Mary bubbled with the prospect of a cheerful climate, but until then the slate-and-shale Welsh hills continued to suffuse Patrick’s writing.
The major literary achievement of O’Brian’s three years on the far side of Offa’s Dyke would be his celebrated novel Testimonies, published originally in Britain as Three Bear Witness in April 1952. The more immediate product was a collection of short stories written in Cwm Croesor, which would eventually be titled The Last Pool.
Under the influence of the dolorous north Wales landscape, where abandoned stone huts stood like monuments of lost causes, O’Brian wrote dark, foreboding tales with an edge of horror. Lost and forlorn protagonists fish and hunt in eerie Irish and Welsh countrysides, often possessed of a malevolent spirit. With minimal plots, the tales tell of discontented or damaged men usually from broken families or living with unsympathetic wives. O’Brian’s rendition of the human condition was dismal. Thematically, his stories suited the confusing world that followed two global wars and an economic depression, but they seemed more to reflect his own personal disillusion.
One ruined house in Cwm Foel, a particularly solitary high valley, in the pass between Cnicht and Moelwyn Mawr, inspired O’Brian’s story “Naming Calls.” Dafydd Foel (“Bald David”), a legendary chieftain, who was said to have fought the invading English at the bottom of the mountain, slaughtering many, once lived in the house in Cwm Foel. In O’Brian’s tale, his house, Llys Dafydd, is rented out by Abel Widgery for a solitary stretch of reading and bird-watching. But Widgery comes to realize that Llys Dafydd is “unfit for the habitation of any man but a hermit, a man able to struggle with loneliness and devils” (p. 167). Widgery has trouble sleeping and in his mind relives a haunting scene following the death of his father, a “formidable, roaring tyrant,” in which his nanny is about to mention his father’s name when her sister stops her: “Naming calls, you know. God between us and harm” (p. 168). When a storm blows the roof off the hut, and an ominous rockslide shakes the mountainside, the most terrifying sound to Widgery, who is haunted by this memory of his father’s death, is that of the door creaking.
According to Edgar Williams, the hunt in the story “The Drawing of the Curranwood Badgers” had its origin when he, Patrick, and Harry Roberts once hunted for fox in Cwm Foel, the same desolate high valley of “Naming Calls.” Unaware that their fox terriers had lit upon badgers, they sent a pup into the underground warren, where it was badly mauled. In O’Brian’s story, set in Ireland, he transformed this real event into a scene of restrained horror when Aloysius FitzGibbon, an aging red-faced Irish huntsman, and the protagonist, Gethin Jones, the son of a Welsh gardener, send FitzGibbon’s terriers into a badger holt. A furious subterranean battle rages, with the two listening above. When they hear one dog killed, FitzGibbon starts madly digging. What he encounters is not a badger.
In “The Happy Despatch,” O’Brian placed Woollen, an Englishman born to lose, in a remote section of County Mayo, where he fishes in a lonely stream for tiny trout. Raised in a foster home by an unloving parson, Woollen had joined the army and emerged with a “glaze of military stupidity … and a kind of superficial arrogance—a protective colouring of which he was wholly unconscious” (p. 50). Now broke and living a despairing existence with a “vile” bedridden wife, he finds in the stream a hidden treasure and his doom. Likewise in “The Last Pool,” O’Brian pits James Aislabie, another sportsman destined to lose, against his dream fish, a thirty-pound salmon. O’Brian stacked the odds against Aislabie by giving him a rod and reel meant for a two-pound trout. A furious struggle ensues, in which just as an improbable victory is his, Aislabie’s courage fails him, leading to a grave injury.
In “The Little Death”—the story that O’Brian dedicated to Armand Goëau-Brissonnière, his French colleague at the Political Intelligence Department—O’Brian offered a glimmer of hope and a clue to what spawned the dismal scenes and hopeless predicaments in his short stories from this period of his life. This story is about a former combat pilot struggling to come to terms with the war. Here again O’Brian’s protagonist, Mr. Grattan, has had an abnormal upbringing, living in the “celibate house” of his uncle and aunts. Unemployed and aimless, Grattan has lost touch with reality. While hunting, he relives shooting down a Messerschmitt. He watches the fighter plane plummet and anxiously waits in vain for the pilot to parachute. The chilling memory fuels Grattan’s depression. But on this day, while bird hunting, he has an epiphany: he will never kill again.
While these stories, along with the forbidding hunting tales “The Long Day Running” and “The Steep Slope of the Gallt y Wenallt,” perhaps best reflected O’Brian’s disposition and concerns while he was living in Wales, he was not always quite so saturnine. During this time he wrote at least two other outstanding stories, both mythic and mischievous, something like adult fairy tales, very different from the hunting narratives. They revealed a more supple imagination and a dry wit. In “The Green Creature,” he opposed a handsome, powerful would-be priest named Daniel Colman and a fiend in the form of a beautiful woman known only as “the green creature.” She drowns fishermen at her lonely mountain lake in western Ireland and drinks their blood because her god, Aog, has led her to believe it necessary to maintain her beauty. But Colman, who is lured into her lake, survives and, in an underwater cave, while naked and dining on kippered trout with his nemesis, squares off with her in a battle of words. It is their gods who lose, as she renounces Aog for Colman, and he abandons his priestly vows for her.
As strange as that story was, O’Brian topped it in “The Virtuous Peleg,” which stood out from his other stories like a glorious speckled trout in a goldfish pond. Most of his spare, serious man-in-nature tales relied on detailed physical description. In this tongue-in-cheek parable, O’Brian dropped his guard, let his wit run free, and previewed the humor and nimble dialogue for which he later became famous. When a flawed angel leads two monks—the bungling Peleg and Kevin, his sanctimonious cousin—on a voyage to a heathen shore, they encounter a pack of bloody-minded but charming devils who argue about how to win the monks’ souls. In a bit of repartee worthy of Aubrey and Maturin, the angel asks Peleg if he wants to wrestle. “If it would not be too forward in me, sir, I should welcome it of all things,” Peleg responds. “To try a couple of falls with your reverence would give me all the pleasure in life.” The angel warns him, “I shall dust your jacket, mind” (p. 69).
The decision to relocate and the completion of the collection of tales lifted the heavy yoke of Welsh mountain life, and the O’Brians now ached to run free. To fund the move, they sold some of Mary’s family furniture through an auction house in London. Then they packed up their most valued possessions—carefully crating Patrick’s books—and offered the rest to their friends in the valley.
Even pets were given away. Edgar’s younger brother Gwilym took home Richard’s white angora rabbit, and his father conveyed its hutch made from half a cask down the hill in his wheelbarrow. Mary left her two Welsh corgis, Bronwen and Nan, to friendly families, but she would not part with Buddug. She would have to learn French.
Spirits might have been higher had the custody issue for Richard not flared up. In May, Elizabeth Russ had married a widower named John Cowper le Mee-Power, an army veteran, a company executive, and the son of the director of a Ceylonese tea and rubber estate. Word reached her that Patrick and Mary intended to move to France and to take Richard with them. Possibly on Dimitry Tolstoy’s advice, Elizabeth went to court to guarantee that Richard, now twelve, would not move abroad.
One day a constable appeared at Moelwyn Bank. Although Patrick told Richard that the visit concerned their dog, Richard later came to believe that the officer delivered papers notifying his father that he had been barred by a court order from taking Richard out of the country. Elizabeth’s second marriage would not last long, but she would have her son by her side.
At this point, there was no turning back for Patrick and Mary. Wales had been both a sweet and a bitter phase of their lives, but it was over now. For most of their neighbors, there was no way out of those doleful, inlooking hills. For the O’Brians, there was no way to remain, even if it meant leaving Richard behind with his mother. He would still be allowed to visit them during school holidays.
Before they left, Patrick went to the village and called at the Williams house to invite Edgar to dinner. He told the boy’s mother he had a special gift for him. With visions of owning Patrick’s shotgun, which he had freely borrowed for hunting, the sixteen-year-old boy showed up for dinner in great anticipation. The .410 was merely a popgun compared with the twelve-gauge shotguns that most farmers used, but it was still a gun.
That night, Patrick presented Edgar with the couple’s piano accordion. “You can teach yourself to play,” he told him, with a benevolent smile. “I am sure you will get much pleasure out of this.” Astonished, disappointed, but touched by Patrick and Mary’s kindness and the honor of their attention, Edgar was speechless.
In the summer of 1949, O’Brian submitted his story collection, which he titled Country Contentments, to his agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, who sent it on to Fred Warburg at the publishing house Seeker and Warburg, one of London’s most prestigious literary publishers, the house of H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Thomas Mann, Colette, and Andre Gide. Brown had recently delivered Warburg a first collection of stories (The Wrong Set) from another young writer, Angus Wilson, which would establish his reputation as a brilliant satirist.
On August 18, Warburg wrote back to Brown telling him that several of O’Brian’s story endings needed some tinkering and that the title of the book should be changed to The Last Pool but that Seeker and Warburg would like to publish O’Brian’s remarkable collection.
Warburg, from a poor branch of the banking family, believed strongly in promoting good writing and that sales would eventually follow. He suggested a contract similar to Wilson’s.
Brown wrote back four days later to tell Warburg that by good fortune O’Brian, who was in the process of moving to France, would be in London for two weeks and could discuss the title change and alterations with him. He told Warburg that while a £50 advance, the same as Wilson’s, was acceptable, he did not want to include as many subsidiary rights as he had with Wilson, who was an unknown. O’Brian, Brown reminded Warburg, had already been published by Oxford University Press and Home and Van Thal.
Two days later Warburg took O’Brian out to lunch. They discussed the editorial changes, and Warburg felt O’Brian took the criticism well, so much so that he informed Brown the agent need not be involved with the minor alterations that O’Brian was going to make. Warburg and O’Brian had gotten on well, and O’Brian had told the publisher about his plans to write a novel set in Wales and another about the French Catalans. Warburg was intrigued. He now advanced the planned publication of the short story book from the fall of 1950 to the summer.
This optimism was justified. O’Brian, who was staying with the Wicksteeds at the Cottage, went straight to work, adding clearer foreshadowing of the diabolical ending in “The Drawing of the Curranwood Badgers,” lessening the obscurity of “The Little Death,” and correcting an error in a fishing story. He also cobbled together a promotional blurb for the book and some biographical information. On August 28, four days after having lunch with Warburg, O’Brian submitted to him the revised typescript. In a handwritten postscript, he meekly suggested a new, lyrical tide for the book, Dark Speech Upon the Harp, which Warburg rejected, preferring The Last Pool. But O’Brian had impressed the publisher. In return for additional subsidiary rights on The Last Pool and an option on the planned book about the Catalans, Warburg upped the advance by 50 percent. While Warburg and Brown haggled over the details in early September, the O’Brians departed for Paris.
Shortly thereafter, Patrick wrote to Roger Senhouse (though he mistakenly called him “Spenhouse”), who would become O’Brian’s primary editor at Seeker and Warburg, to continue an ongoing conversation. Senhouse, a former assistant to Lytton Strachey and Warburg’s partner, who had kept the house afloat during the lean prewar years by continually raising money from friends, had questioned the name “the Prawn” for the hunt in the story “It Must Have Been a Branch, They Said.” The name was a play on “Quorn,” the most famous hunt in England, held in the county of Rutland. (“Prawn” and “Quorn” rhyme in English pronunciation.) O’Brian told Senhouse that when he had written the story, he had thought the name droll but now found it unpleasantly facetious. He was not pleased with “the Bagworthy” or “the Wheatsheaf,” the alternatives he had thought up. He asked the editor if he would mind coming up with an appropriate name and inserting it for his approval in page proofs.
This was as cavalier as O’Brian would ever be about his work. Perhaps he was intoxicated by the City of Lights and the exciting new life that lay before him and Mary. After all, the note to Senhouse was penned in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens, where, O’Brian noted with delight, there were woodpigeons in almost every tree and children playing—at a suitable distance.