I WISH THAT EVERY human life might be pure transparent freedom.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Blood of Others, 1946
Mr. O’Brian writes as though the weight of the world were on his shoulders.
—The New Yorker, review of Testimonies, September 6, 1952
In 1949, when the bar at Café des Sports in Collioure, France, collapsed under its own weight, René Pous, the owner, hired a carpenter to build a new one in the shape of a local fishing bark. The carved figurehead of the new thirty-foot bar—a mermaid wearing a round-brimmed sailor’s hat—suckled a babe clasped in her arms. Around her, Pous’s patrons—artists, fishermen, and vintners—drank pastis or Pernod, played cards, and smoked cigarettes. Offshore, a German boat sunk with all hands by a British torpedo, served as a silent reminder of the Occupation, but otherwise Collioure had returned to celebrating its abundant gifts: wine, weather, art, and anchovies.
That summer, Patrick and Mary arrived in this isolated, self-absorbed village of sand-colored stone and red-tiled roofs. Lying fifteen miles southeast of Perpignan on a spit of land jutting into the Gulf of Lions, Collioure inhabited a stunning landscape. On one side of the town, past a seventeenth-century church bell tower, the sails of fishing boats glowed like tiny day moons on the azure sea. On the other, beneath Fort St. Elme, a sixteenth-century watchtower standing guard to the south, the hillsides of the Albères massif were terraced in vineyards of fat black grapes.
In 1905, Henri Matisse and some fellow painters had discovered the colorful village and its crisp, clear sky. Inspired by what Andre Derain described as its “clarity and luminosity that is opposed to sunlight” (Matisse, p. 16), the artists turned their shocking palette of bright, bold colors to nature and nudes on the beach, creating Fauvism and forever placing the village of three thousand souls on the map of Western civilization.
Thus was launched Collioure’s love affair with itself, a narcissism that had justification: at one time or another, the Romans, the Moors, the Francs, and the Spanish had all occupied Roussillon—the region at the eastern corner of the southernmost part of France, roughly equivalent to the sixteen-hundred-square-mile modern-day French department Pyrénées-Orientales.* Each of the conquering peoples contributed to a rich culture, with distinct music, art, food, and wine. Tourists were quickly seduced, or repelled, by a gritty but sensual paradise of sorts. Collioure’s most notable architectural feature—irresistible to artists—was the cylindrical pink-capped church bell tower that watched over the harbor and its beaches looking unmistakably like an erect phallus.
World War II had killed fishing as a way of life in Collioure, but the long process of memorializing that passing tradition had just begun. Bright colors and Catalan themes prevailed. The proprietors of Café des Sports. Rene and Pauline Pous, often accepted art in lieu of cash, which meant that their establishment, where hardy staples included bouillabaisse and boar, was a pilgrimage site for migratory artists and writers. The gregarious abstract painter Willy Mucha, an expatriate Czech who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, was the soul of the place, which was sandwiched between a twelfth-century chateau and the narrow winding hillside streets of the old town, but still with a view of the harbor. Mucha inaugurated the café’s guest book with the inscription: “to glorify Collioure, the last stronghold of free spirits, errant poets and painters thirsting for pure colors.”
Collioure welcomed visitors warmly, as O’Brian had discovered when he was scouting out the village. He had stayed with a Madame Perpignane, on the Rue du Soleil in Faubourg, a poorer residential enclave outside the town wall. Walking in her garden, he had met a shapely young woman washing laundry in a basin. Odette Boutet, for whom Madame Perpignane had once been a nanny, was the picture of Mediterranean beauty, soft but sturdy, suntanned, with bright teeth and a ready laugh. She was the wife of a painter, François Bernadi, whose mural covered a wall in the train station. She was self-assured and open, even to a foreigner. O’Brian and Odette chatted. Their friendship was spontaneous. Odette represented all that was charming and that delighted O’Brian about Roussillon.
O’Brian recognized in Collioure an authentic people and place, with a tolerance for individuality that suited him. Here his poverty, which he was determined to endure in order to write, would not be so degrading as in England. To his later fictional character Richard Temple, who would also move to the Continent, France was like an odd, sometimes unpleasant relative, full of character and vitality, never a bore, as England could be. France was also, in contrast to England, “not a facetious country—a sense of humour was not obligatorily hung out all day long” (Richard Temple, p. 183). Far from glum and entrenched Britain and from the postwar cynicism pervasive among European intellectuals, Collioure had a rugged, earthy physicality and raw beauty, the people of Collioure (Colliourenques) a wild, dark attraction.
For Patrick and Mary, the fall and winter of 1949 was a time of adapting to a new rhythm of life. They had seen enough of the dark side of humanity during the war and the dour side of nature in Wales to last a lifetime. They rented a small third-floor apartment in the main part of town (known as “the village”), at 2 Rue Arago, a central thoroughfare that locals called the “route of coffins” for the funeral processions that passed along it on their way from St. Vincent Catholic Church to the town cemetery. Financially, the picture looked good. The French economy was still in shambles from the war, and in mid-September the franc was devalued by 27 percent, dropping to 350 francs to the dollar and 980 francs to the British pound. Though unfortunate for the French, it made living in France even more attractive for the O’Brians, since their scant income continued to originate from abroad and would now stretch even further. But the Pyrénées-Orientales’s frolicsome weather, if not the copious stores of red wine, vanished prematurely that year. In early October, heavy rain spoiled the vendange, or grape harvest: “How wretched has been the grape harvest of 1949!” read the newspaper headline. “May it draw to a quick close!” Several weeks later, violent winds struck the area from the southeast, followed by a glacial tramontane from the north.
The O’Brians’ new apartment lay in the heart of the village, not forty paces from a town gate leading onto the harbor and just several doors from an anchovy factory, whose unctuous aroma filled the street. The priest, a squat, heavy man, lived beside the gate, and in the Mediterranean tradition, parishioners left food and wine outside his door. Three times a day, a uniformed town crier came to the gate, blew his bugle, and announced important news, such as a death or the arrival of goat cheese in the market. In summer, he announced in French, but in winter, his cries were in Catalan. Two dozen steep, uneven steps led from the narrow street to the O’Brians’ landing, where Patrick had to duck to avoid cracking his skull on a low beam. The L-shaped apartment had neither electricity nor hot water, but it now possessed the crates of books shipped from Wales, as well as Patrick’s treasured clocks.
Three windows faced onto Rue Arago, and from his desk at the farthest window from the door, O’Brian looked out onto the triangular intersection of Rue Arago, Rue Mailly, and Rue de la Prud’homme, broken by the town gate leading onto the quay and the stony harbor beach.
At the end of September, O’Brian received a reply to his letter to Roger Senhouse. Picking up where they had left off, Senhouse (who, in his turn, spelled O’Brian with an “e” and replaced it by hand with an “a”) suggested that “the Prawn” be replaced with “the Rutland,” which is the county where the Quorn takes place and a name that he felt evoked the Shires. A handsome, affable man, educated at Eton and Oxford, Senhouse had a wide circle of literary friends. At lunch one day, he had run the name by Nancy Mitford, who approved of it. O’Brian, too, thought it was just right. Senhouse also mentioned that Warburg had gone to the United States and was confident that he would sell the book there. This, however, never transpired.
As he worked, O’Brian could watch the carts and townspeople passing through the village gate and heading either toward the church, which Mary attended and whose celebrated clock tower rose straight up from the bay, or toward the Place de La République, near which the couple could buy everything from hand-sewn espadrilles at Jean Palau’s store to food at the fishmonger’s, the bakery, the grocery, and Boucherie Maillol, the butcher shop operated by Odette Boutet’s aunt Alice. Just as he had in Wales, O’Brian absorbed the scene zealously. His trenchant examination of French Catalan culture would infuse a novel and numerous short stories over the next half decade.
By making a concerted effort to get to know their new neighbors and offering sincere friendship—Patrick’s reserve notwithstanding—the O’Brians ingratiated themselves in the local society on more than one level. Mimi Atxer, who ran the grocery shop, fondly remembers Patrick bursting into her store one morning, in a writing frenzy, desperate to know the names of the three wise men. He could remember only two of them. As soon as she responded—”Les trois rois mages? Gaspard, Melchior, et Balthazar!”—he thanked her and dashed off again. But it was Mary who especially thrived among the Colliourenques. While both she and Patrick immediately began to speak Catalan, she mastered the language faster, always chatting with the shop owners in Catalan. The first time she took Buddug into Boucherie Maillol, she met Odette, who was a fellow animal lover and doted over the lovably scruffy dog. Just as Patrick had, Mary hit it off with the garrulous young Catalan immediately, and soon she knew all about her.
Despite their many differences, Mary and twenty-three-year-old Odette, who had left school at age twelve to apprentice as a seamstress, became close friends, helping each other in many ways. Odette could make a dress or blouse for Mary from a picture torn out of a magazine. Odette’s extended family accepted the O’Brians as if they were their own. There was Alice, the butcher, who always had a packet of meat scraps for Buddug, and another aunt, Fifine Atxer, whose husband, a customs officer in nearby La Nouvelle, would teach O’Brian how to make wine.
Odette frequently ate dinner with Patrick and Mary. Mary often made a pudding, while Odette brought a side dish or a piece of meat from the butcher shop. The three had fun together, though Patrick rarely joined in their carefree laughter. He was working on a novel and often remained preoccupied, thoughtfully smoking his Gauloise in a holder.
By November, money began to grow tight for the O’Brians. England had restricted the export of legal tender to £250 per year, but Patrick did not worry at first because he was convinced that he would be able to have the £75 advance for the planned book on France sent over, above his £250 annual allotment.
Toward the year’s end, he wrote Barclays, his bank, requesting the funds, but he could not get them, or even a straight reply. He sent another letter with his questions spelled out in numbered paragraphs and still received vague answers. Then he read in Le Figaro that in 1950 the amount that one could export from England would increase to £1,250, and so he relaxed again, feeling certain the money would be sent. The funds never arrived. Another letter to Barclays, when the O’Brians were nearly broke, produced a response telling them that the bank was still unsure of the new regulations. O’Brian finally got the facts from Spencer Curtis Brown: the new allowance applied only to those who left England after January 2, 1950.
The O’Brians were out of money. In early February 1950, Patrick wrote a desperate letter to Roger Senhouse asking him if someone at Seeker and Warburg could intercede with the Bank of England or the Treasury, whichever held jurisdiction in the matter. He was beside himself with anxiety. Nonetheless, he managed to return the corrected proofs of The Last Pool to Senhouse toward the end of the month, apologizing for having no concrete suggestions for the cover other than that he thought it should be green.
Senhouse wrote back to O’Brian in early March complimenting his careful revisions, informing him of the progress on the cover, which would feature a vignette of a salmon fisherman among the reeds, and making a somewhat preposterous (from this vantage point at least) suggestion for his money woes. He had heard of English fishermen near Pau in the Pyrenees selling their salmon catch to French restaurateurs for large sums of money. O’Brian could travel inland to Pau and fish for a fortnight to earn the money he needed to tide him over.
O’Brian responded to Senhouse that he thought the fishing idea had merit and he would look into it. Whether or not he was serious is hard to say. He informed Senhouse that his most sensational catch so far had come while fishing for loup de mer (sea bass) with a spoon. He had hooked an octopus, a small one but an unpleasant business nonetheless. He concluded his letter by asking if Senhouse might return his typescript of The Last Pool, not because he wanted it for a keepsake, but because he needed the scrap paper.
For a while it looked as if the O’Brians might be forced to abandon their new life before it really got under way. They cut expenses to the bare minimum and still did not always have enough food to eat. As the news of their situation circulated, however, gifts started to arrive from their new friends: wine from family cellars, vegetables from their neighbors’ storerooms, anchovies from the day’s catch. The scraps that Odette’s aunt Alice always wrapped up for Buddug started getting bigger—big enough for three. On these gifts from their Catalan friends and neighbors, along with rice and olive oil, Mary managed to feed them.
This generosity was not surprising among the Catalans, who had a tradition of looking out for one another. In fact, when the fishing boats came in, the fishermen with a fresh catch from their nets handed out sardines to all those who desired them. The villagers lit fires of vine clippings in the, streets, and the smell of roasting sardines filled the air. This was a heavenly scent to the O’Brians, and the food truly a godsend during this desperate year.
As spring broke, the Pyrenees, rising in intervals to the west and to the south until they towered like a wall against the industrialized world, beckoned them. O’Brian had produced more than one meal “out of the hedge,” as he once put it, and now the time was ripe for hedge hunting. An abundance of cold mountain streams meant that he could also fish for trout. He and Mary, with Odette, whose husband had run off with an older woman, camped for a month in the mountains southwest of Collioure, in the sloping vineyards near Tour de la Massane. It was wild country, and one morning, Buddug, whom Odette called Pedyc Dea—that’s how she heard “Buddug, dear” in Mary’s English accent—began to bristle. Patrick muzzled the dog with a hand and whispered, “Quiet, something’s coming!” Then he pointed, and they all watched as a family of boars came trotting by, a large grungy male leading, a brood of neat sucklings in the middle, and the engorged mother bringing up the rear.
Back in Collioure, Odette and Mary took their first swim of the season, jumping into the brisk water and swimming the quarter mile from the beach of St. Vincent to that of La Balette. When they reached the rocky shore, each gallantly offered the other the first exit from the cold water. Neither wanted to admit that she could barely walk after the intense descent from La Massane, topped by the long swim.
In the summer of 1950, Richard arrived to spend his school holiday with Patrick and Mary. While in Wales, the boy had wished desperately to be back in London with his mother and his dog. He got what he wanted but found life there not as pleasant as he might have hoped. Le Mee-Power, his stepfather, was a frighteningly big man and a drunk, who could be abusive. Since the end of the war, Elizabeth had struggled to make a living. She had repaired nylon stockings in a shop and then gone into business for herself doing the same. Later, she donned a black-and-white service uniform and worked in the dining room of the Chelsea Arts Club, bringing home leftover pudding, beef, or custard for her son after shifts. Despite scant resources, Elizabeth was scrappy and did her best for the boy. She had persuaded a Roman Catholic priest to help get Richard accepted at the first-rate Cardinal Vaughn Grammar School. And now, though she seethed at her ex-husband—“May that bastard rot in hell,” Richard would later hear her exclaim on more than one occasion—she sent Richard to France for his own good.
Little could she have known how inopportune the timing was for him to arrive in Collioure. For several weeks he, Patrick, and Mary ate mostly homemade marmalade on toast. Mary baby-sat to bring in some money and taught English when she could find students. She stretched what little they had, and she never made Richard feel like a burden.
Fortunately, poverty could not prevent a thirteen-year-old boy from London from finding plenty to occupy his mind and body in this fascinating region of France: the mountains, the sea, the bustling village, where even the boisterous garbagemen, with their German shepherd, named Mazoot Diesel, who barked madly from atop the cab of their truck, helped entertain him. Collioure was exotic and communal, never more so than at dinnertime, when fires suddenly appeared in street-curb grills and villagers traded stories and laughs as the day’s catch sizzled in the dim glow.
Richard would also get to experience better times in Collioure, returning each of the next four summers. On these visits, he snorkled in the sea and hiked and camped with Patrick and Mary in the mountains of Andorra, where golden eagles big enough to snatch a dog circled overhead. He attended the seaside Catholic church, as he promised his mother he would, and Collioure’s dusty bullfights with the nephew of the priest. He fished with the truant artist Bernadi, whose idea of fishing was to throw a net out in the water and then take a nap on the shore. He also came to admire Odette, with her dark velveteen glow, so unreserved, so un-English, as well as the fine spectacle of Yolande Mucha, painter Willy Mucha’s wife, who sunbathed with Mary on the beach beside the church in a postage-stamp bikini.
O’Brian found the Catalans agreeably direct, sensitive and discreet, and sincere in friendship. They were also passionate about people and life. They were of a tough, self-reliant stock, devoutly religious and utterly without pretension, and, as the O’Brians had discovered, capable of great generosity even to outsiders. In his fiction, O’Brian would sympathetically portray a Roussillon housekeeper named Fifine, who was strong-minded and worked incessantly without discontent—cleaning, washing, tending to the garden and poultry, cutting firewood, and cooking. She spoke a harsh regional patois and was of some inscrutable age between thirty and fifty. Her religion, wrote O’Brian, trying to capture the ineffable spirit of the people, was “immensely practical … and yet it was lit with a fine unself-conscious mysticism … a church of Fifines was likely to outlast time” (Richard Temple, p. 54).
In their poverty, the O’Brians remained literally down to earth, close to the smell of dust and grapes and salt, and to the sea. For exercise and entertainment, they swam in the Mediterranean. Just as they had lent a hand on their neighbors’ sheep farms in Wales, they helped their new neighbor René Alouge, a tall, lean Catalan fisherman and vintner, during the vendange, deepening their relationships with the Colliourenques by sweating in the field alongside them.
Under the ferocious sun that parched the area’s rocky soil, Patrick and Mary helped pick grapes off the low vines. It was backbreaking work, but wine was the region’s lifeblood, and the labor-intensive vendange, with its centuries-old rituals, brought the community together just as the communal sheep shearing had in Croesor. Families overcame disputes to work side by side harvesting each other’s grapes in a process that had to be well-timed and swift or a year’s fruit could be lost.
O’Brian appreciated the act of creating his own sustenance, and, as he had been in Wales, he was fascinated by the cycle of the harvest: man working with nature, and sometimes against it, men working side by side in unison, the very essence of civilization. He cherished the fruit of that labor, the robust southern wine, and would actively take part in this work for many decades to come. He took notes on the atmosphere and the science, the ritual and the superstition of the harvest. There were the rapid, skillful flashes of razor-sharp sickles, the inevitable wounds quickly bandaged. There were, for the sustenance of the laborer, the thirst-quenching Muscat grapes strategically planted at the ends of rows of wine-making Grenache grapes. There were the elaborate dawn and noon meals, including hard-boiled eggs, ham, chops, anchovies, rabbit stew, white and black puddings, bread, and olives. A remarkable amount of wine was quaffed at noon with seemingly no effect. There was the ritual smashing of the grapes at the foot of the last vine to ensure the next year’s harvest. These traditions were crucial, he realized, in perpetuating a way of life, and he drew upon them in his fiction, especially in the novel The Catalans.
On August 17, 1950, Seeker and Warburg published The Last Pool* whose Irish and Welsh landscapes were distant memories now that O’Brian felt so rooted in France. O’Brian dedicated the book: “MARIAE CONIUGI MEAE AMICAE CARISSIMAE HUNC LIBELLUM DEDICO DONUM INDIGNUM”: “Mary, my wife, dear love, I dedicate this little book, this insufficient gift, to you.”
The September 1, 1950, Times Literary Supplement praised the thirteen tales, noting that “unsuspected subtleties lurk beneath their surface of almost Trollopian simplicity” and that those involving the supernatural “are most dexterously handled in the manner of [Sheridan] Le Fanu or M. R. James.” The reviewer called them “models of such tales, belonging to an unfashionable but very interesting tradition.”
The Irish Times and the Observer also reviewed the collection enthusiastically. The former admired the stories, which were sometimes “gay ironical variations on old themes” and other times “violent encounters of man and beast with danger.” The paper’s critic commented, “There is unease at the brittleness of pleasure, the sudden thrust of affinity with the victim, or a wariness when nature averts her face.”
In the Observer, the London-born Irish novelist, poet, and playwright Lord Dunsany wrote, “This charming book by an Irish sportsman is a genuine collection of tales of the Irish countryside.” Like Dunsany, many would be fooled by O’Brian’s name (even though it is not a common Irish spelling), and, surprisingly, no reviewer would ever link O’Brian to his former life as Richard Patrick Russ.
Despite their favorable tone, the reviews perplexed O’Brian. He thought Dunsany’s review silly, as he wrote in a February 12, 1951, letter to Roger Senhouse, the Irish Times’s overwrought, and a short notice that appeared in the Spectator foolish. (He had not seen the TLS review at the time he wrote the letter.) But even if he did not consider The Last Pool’s positive reviews intelligent, they at least provided him with some sense of relief and renewal. With this first work of fiction written under the name Patrick O’Brian, he had finally and successfully, from a critical standpoint at least, emerged after more than a decade out of print.
Secker and Warburg had optimistically printed three thousand copies of the book and bound two thousand. Only about a thousand copies sold; the company lost money on the book, and O’Brian ended up £30 shy of earning royalties on top of his advance. However, along with their other resources, the anthology and The Last Pool had generated enough money to allow the O’Brians—once the cash flow issue was resolved—to install both hot water and electricity in their small flat. Still, there was little fat on the calf.
Fortunately, O’Brian’s pen was hot. He had swept into his next work, which he would finish by the end of the year, showing sections as he went to Mary, whose opinion he valued immensely. Few authors have the opportunity to rewrite their debut as a novelist, but O’Brian was getting that chance. He had achieved much in the first instance, but he had been a very different person then. Richard Patrick Russ had been naïve, writing more from his heart and his instinct than his intellect. The impulses and motivations that governed him then did not apply now. He had been oblivious to the possibility of failure. He had been blind to some of the sources of his own pain. Now more thoughtful, more self-conscious, and having a more complex vision of the world, he was, in a sense, starting from scratch. With the newly installed electric light, he worked well into the night, scrawling his narrative in longhand.
Although he used a risky artifice—telling the story from the other side of the grave—it seemed to work. In the novel, which he called Testimonies, he placed a paleographer and ex-Oxford tutor, John Aubrey Pugh, in a remote farming valley in Wales. Pugh has retreated to the valley to recuperate from ill health and emotional exhaustion and to sort out his future. He hopes that the hiatus will refresh him for his work on a monograph titled The Bestiary Before Isidore of Seville. This was the subject that O’Brian later said he had himself been working on before the war, and perhaps this acknowledgment of that stillborn effort was his way of bringing a sense of closure to a lost cause.
In Wales, the weary Pugh finds unexpected complications when he falls in love with Bronwen Vaughn, a provincial farmer’s wife. O’Brian played with the tensions and dynamics inherent in this scenario. Having lived so long in London and then in remote Wales and now France, he juxtaposed rural perspective, born of a simple, hand-to-mouth existence and a closeness to nature, with that of his world-weary protagonist.
Vaughn thinks the world is getting better because there are now anesthetics, injections for cows, and health insurance. Perhaps shedding light on O’Brian’s own self-sequestration from mainstream society, the jaded teacher thinks the opposite, explaining:
We are an evolutionary mistake. We evolved too quickly, and now with the instinctive equipment of apes we are faced with a social life as complicated as a beehive. Men cannot live that kind of life; it cannot be done, and I am sure the attempt will kill us as a species.
The root of the unhappiness is that man’s instinctive sense of right clashes with that of society: and it is not surprising that it does, when you consider the speed of our evolution. (P. 176)
O’Brian’s microcosm for the novel, the remote Welsh valley, functioned as a hothouse, just as the enclosed world of a naval warship would in the Aubrey-Maturin novels. In his fictional Cwm Bugail (“Shepherd’s Valley,” in Welsh), even small misdeeds grow into oversized problems, creating an often oppressive atmosphere, where the malevolence of a powerful person can mean disgrace, even death, for those at whom it is aimed. After the necessary economy of short story writing, O’Brian reveled in the spaciousness of the novel. His valley was both harsh and lovely, simultaneously liberating and stultifying. He achieved a complexity there that he felt was close to the truth.
O’Brian found his rhythm in the work. He was writing well, and he knew it. He finished the novel late one night, in one final push of nervous, creative energy. The work exhausted him, yet he felt that this fast, intense writing had elevated his life to another level. Just as a mountain climber lives most fully on the face of a challenging mountain, and a sailor craves a strong wind on the sea, he found exhilaration in this fluid act of creation. He savored what he felt was a breakthrough in his writing.
Mary typed up a final, clean version, and they delivered the manuscript to Spencer Curtis Brown, probably during a Christmas trip to England. Early in the new year, 1951, the book landed in the editorial offices of Seeker and Warburg, where Roger Senhouse read it. By the end of January, Brown had negotiated a £100 advance for the book. Half was due on signing, and the other half on publication, but Brown went ahead and advanced the second half to O’Brian from the agency, since he knew O’Brian needed it. “Even agents can have kind hearts on occasion,” Brown joked in a letter informing David Farrer, an editor at Seeker and Warburg, of this arrangement.
On February 4, O’Brian wrote Senhouse expressing his happiness that the editor liked the book and telling him that he had come up with a brilliant idea. His good friend and neighbor Willy Mucha, a well-known artist, was interested in illustrating the jacket of Testimonies. O’Brian acknowledged to Senhouse that the jacket was solely the editor’s domain, but he felt confident that Senhouse would see the value in having Mucha’s work there. Mucha, O’Brian wrote enthusiastically, had recently had a successful show in Paris and was much admired by Matisse, Dufy, Braque, and Léger, with whom he had exchanged paintings.
Senhouse quickly wrote back. His letter of February 8 foretold the eventual demise of his relationship with O’Brian. He was not opposed to using Mucha, whose work he had seen in a show at the Royal Academy, as long as they could agree on a fee and the illustration was abstract, using no more than three colors. Because O’Brian’s book was so steeped in Welsh flavor, he did not want Mucha to attempt from afar a representational work, which might differ from O’Brian’s authentic description. But if everything could be worked out, he was excited about the possibility. Thereafter in the letter, however, it became apparent that it was the book itself that he was not so excited about, even though he certainly played a major role in acquiring it.
Although friendly and mostly deferential in tone, Senhouse was also frank. He did not believe that the way O’Brian had structured the novel—dividing it into sections from the various points of view of Pugh, Vaughn, and Lloyd (the schoolmaster)—made the deepest emotional impact or the most chronological sense. He found some of the writing—on first and second readings—unnecessarily obscure. He told O’Brian that none of the three readers of the book liked the ending, and he expected O’Brian to work on it. He explained that he had detailed all of his suggestions on the typescript, which O’Brian would soon receive. In the meantime, Senhouse expressed regret that the two could not hash out the editorial process over tea in Chelsea, as they had with The Last Pool, and he begged O’Brian to read his notes without mounting exasperation.
O’Brian took the critique well. He responded calmly on February 12, assuring Senhouse that he would read his remarks with interest and that he resented the criticism of only fools and show-offs. He eased Senhouse’s concern by admitting that he had been unable to gain enough distance on this book to observe it as a whole and that he had compromised Mary’s ability to do the same by having her read the work in progress. O’Brian did not seem in the least dismayed by the extensive criticism. In fact, he spent most of the letter informing Senhouse of his recent conversation with Willy Mucha about the jacket illustration, in a roundabout way telling him that Mucha would take for payment whatever the going rate was.
In the meantime, on February 14, Senhouse sent O’Brian’s marked-up typescript to Spencer Curtis Brown. His accompanying letter was perhaps offensively blunt. It stated plainly that no one at Seeker and Warburg liked the presentation of the book. He told Brown that the narrative conceit—the account of Bronwen Vaughn’s death being delivered as if to a heavenly inquisition—was too artificial and would have been problematic even for a veteran novelist. Senhouse had accumulated many pages of very specific criticism, both his and other readers’, ranging from overuse of Welsh names and syntax to chronological difficulties and the unsympathetic nature of Pugh, a hypochondriac cold fish; one female reader found the idea of Pugh in love repulsive. Senhouse’s underlying message was unmistakable. He felt O’Brian was caught up in his own cleverness, in both the construction of the book and in the writing, which he called “a false Celtic utterance.”
O’Brian received the manuscript before the end of the month. Presumably Senhouse did not include all of the readers’ reports and Brown did not show O’Brian Senhouse’s letter, for O’Brian remained on friendly terms with Senhouse. O’Brian revamped Testimonies with his usual decisiveness, in his usual meticulous hand—but only in small ways. He disregarded Senhouse’s structural suggestions and his advice to reduce the use of Welsh words and names. There would be no major overhaul. As he would throughout his career, O’Brian essentially stood by his original work.
That spring, O’Brian was already working on a new collection of short stories, which he would finish in the fall. But money was still tight, and he and Mary also felt the need to get away from their bustling little village. With a tent and Buddug, they took a train west to Andorra, where the high mountains lay covered in snow six months of the year, and the climate, though cold, was said to be salubrious. A remote, independent state sandwiched between Spain and France and largely populated by Catalan-speaking shepherds, Andorra had attracted pilgrims and various other transients for many centuries. With plans to remain for a considerable time, Patrick and Mary established a mail drop, where Patrick could be reached by his publisher into August. The two camped, living off the land and occasionally surfacing at farms for milk and cheese and at small villages for other provisions. Patrick fished for trout, which were plentiful.
They had made plans for Odette to join them after the weather warmed up. At the agreed-upon time, Mary and Buddug went to the train station to meet her and her red-haired rat-terrier, Rubill (“Rusty,” in Catalan). They stayed the night in the small town. When a pack of menacing dogs greeted Buddug and Rubill less than politely, the two beautiful but tough women bravely fought off the assault until help arrived. The next day, the four of them hopped on the bus into the mountains, where they met Patrick. For two months, the trio and their two beloved mutts wandered into remote high valleys on dirt roads and hiked on animal tracks. Occasionally they visited the churches and religious shrines of Andorra, a Roman Catholic state where many of the best vistas were occupied by religious edifices. When inspired, O’Brian wandered off by himself and wrote in his journal.
In subsequent years, O’Brian often pointed out that it was through these mountains, the rugged, untamable Pyrenees, that many Allied agents had infiltrated occupied France and a steady flow of escaped prisoners and war refugees, as well as intelligence agents, had, with the help of the locals, eluded the Nazis and fled to freedom. He held a deep emotional attachment to these hills from his war service and they would appear in several short stories, as well as in the Aubrey-Maturin series. In Post Captain, to escape imprisonment after Napoleon suddenly declares war in 1803, Aubrey and Maturin desperately cross the eastern Pyrenees to Recasens, Spain, where Maturin’s ancestral castle provides a haven.
Back in Collioure, O’Brian spent the fall polishing his short stories. In November, he sent the new collection, titled Samphire, after one of the tales, to Spencer Curtis Brown. Brown delivered the typescript to Fred Warburg, mentioning in his cover letter that O’Brian hoped to hear about the collection before Christmas. O’Brian had asked Brown whether a publisher could still make a profit from a book that sold a thousand copies. Brown answered that to cover its expenses, a publisher needed to sell close to three thousand copies. Perhaps neither Brown nor O’Brian expected to sell the stories, for O’Brian asked Brown if he could find him work translating books from French to English, and Brown suggested the idea to Warburg, who had published many significant translations.
At around this time, the final stages of the editing and crucial steps in the marketing of O’Brian’s Welsh novel were taking place. Seeker and Warburg was still searching for an acceptable title for the book. The editors and sales staff thought Testimonies sounded too much like a treatise or codicil and not enough like a novel. They worried that the title might be confusing and cause their “travelers” (salesmen) to have a problem getting orders from bookstores. Someone had suggested titling the book Bronwen Vaughn, after the heroine. O’Brian objected to this, however, and the publisher produced the title Three Bear Witness.
O’Brian now saw the proofs of his novel, which he received in a package along with his original typescript and a proof copy for Mucha to read before executing the cover illustration. This step proceeded more smoothly than the title selection. O’Brian had only a minor typographical suggestion and a dedication request (he wanted the book dedicated to his friends in Collioure), which Senhouse apparently was not able to accommodate; the book carries no dedication leaf. O’Brian asked if he might keep the dummy of the book that Senhouse had sent for Mucha to look at while doing the cover illustration. O’Brian thought it would make a charming journal.
Senhouse wrote in early December to inform O’Brian that Three Bear Witness was, in fact, to be the title of the book. He noted that the detective novel overtone might help sales and that he liked the urgency of the three witnesses. Though he still preferred his original choice, O’Brian must not have objected strongly to Three Bear Witness. In the same letter, Senhouse snubbed O’Brian’s request for the book dummy. It was too expensive for him to surrender, he said, and so he must have it back as soon as Mucha was finished with it.
Whether prompted by this petty stroke, by his growing belief that in Senhouse he did not have a strong enough supporter at Seeker and Warburg, or for some other reason, such as the fact that an illustration by Willy Mucha would not grace the cover of the book after all, O’Brian informed Spencer Curtis Brown that he no longer wished to work with the editor. Brown wrote a confidential letter on December 14 to Fred Warburg saying that O’Brian did not get along with Senhouse and that if he wanted to keep the author on his list, he should deal with him directly. Brown told Warburg that he had never found O’Brian difficult and that he did not think the writer would be a burden to Warburg.
The last word on the subject, however, many years later, was O’Brian’s. In his novel The Letter of Marque, Senhouse, the name at least, makes a cameo appearance. While testing a device for preventing a hot-air balloon from rising too high, “poor Senhouse” (p. 27) flies too high and is never seen again. And so the editor who once suggested that O’Brian fish for a living received poetic justice.
But who was to deal with O’Brian became largely a moot point. Five days later, Warburg wrote back to Brown that, according to his staff’s editorial report on Samphire, some of the stories were quite good while some failed. So he had determined that it was essential to publish Three Bear Witness before he committed to Samphire. Seeker and Warburg, which was itself struggling financially, had lost money on the first short story collection, and he felt that if the novel did not sell well and additionally was not reviewed well, he might have to decline on any more books by O’Brian. Nevertheless, Warburg, a conscientious publisher willing to buck sales figures for authors in whom he strongly believed, told Brown he still considered O’Brian a potentially brilliant author.
In early January 1952, O’Brian received a letter of encouragement from Warburg. Because he had been in the United States at the beginning of the previous year, Warburg had not actually read Three Bear Witness. He had finally read it over the holidays, and he was extremely impressed. Although he had criticisms—he found Pugh unappealing, though well conceived—Warburg considered them trivial next to what O’Brian had accomplished in his description of the Welsh hills, the Welsh villagers and farmers, and the eternal cycles of farm life. Vaughn and her husband were exceptionally well done, he thought, and the sheep-shearing scene was magnificent. Despite the fact that Warburg could not currently accept Samphire, he wanted O’Brian to know that he thought his mature vision and his powers of novel construction boded well for his future. As it turned out, though, the firm never again published O’Brian.
Seeker and Warburg brought out Three Bear Witness that spring. The first review from England was not favorable. Bunched with three other titles in the “Recent Books” column of the Saturday, May 10, Times, the book suffered at the hands of a pompous unnamed reviewer who set the scene by judging that in “the high and dry pastures of current English fiction it is often hard to choose between the excesses of the visibly experienced writer and the deficiencies of the relatively unpracticed writer.” The critic, concurring with Senhouse, then called Three Bear Witness “a slight and technically immature piece of work, loose-jointed and clumsy in construction to the point of amateurishness.” He sniped that Pugh “is for some reason middle-aged, while in point of fact almost everything he says and does belongs to a man in his thirties,” but he also added that the book “is fresh and individual in tone and leaves an impression of genuine talent.”
While the May 16 Times Literary Supplement called the literary device of the novel “clumsy” as well, it also had positive words, describing the book as “a quiet little story of much merit … of unaffected simplicity.” The reviewer noted that O’Brian’s “old-fashioned style” suited the work.
In the United States, Harcourt, Brace and Company, which had anted up $750 for the rights to the book, used Patrick’s original title, Testimonies, and published it on August 15.* As had been the case with Hussein, the book’s reception was quite different west of the Atlantic than it was east.
In the August 24 New York Times Book Review, Pearl Kazin called it a “rare and beautiful novel, deceptively modest in tone, never faltering in the unobtrusive skill of its poetry and dramatic dimensions.” She especially admired O’Brian’s heroine, whom she called “an altogether touching and marvelous woman, so persuasively and sympathetically portrayed that she deserves a place among the great heroines—for all the differences of setting and scale, Bronwen Vaughn has some of the stature of an Anna Karenina.” The same day, in the Herald Tribune Book Review, Sylvia Stallings observed: “So many ‘love stories’ are written; so little is told about love. Mr. O’Brian has set a text to learn from; he has also written one of the finest books to come along for some time.”
In the August 23 Saturday Review, the novelist Oliver La Farge commended O’Brian’s “believable characters, not quaint, but at once universal and creatures of their locale, as we all are.” La Farge concluded, “Mr. O’Brian has made a story that moves to its end with the Tightness and inevitability we think of as Greek.” As if to bolster this assessment, the review was anchored by the book’s cover photo of the handsome, dark-haired author, clad in a houndstooth jacket, tie, and button-down shirt. His fair skin gave him a delicate, alabasterlike quality, while his wide, dark eyes peering out from beneath bushy brows and his unsmiling, dun lips cast him as intelligent and serious. What the photo could not reveal was the extent to which the clean-cut author remained in turmoil with himself and his own identity.
That summer his brother-in-law, Howard Wicksteed, who had been in Africa during the war and whom he had never met, came to France with his wife, Dorothy, and Mary’s mother. They only briefly met Patrick before taking Mary with them on a holiday in Spain. According to Wicksteed, Patrick introduced himself as Dr. Patrick O’Brian. Wicksteed asked if he was a medical doctor. O’Brian replied that he was not but that he had been awarded a doctorate from Padua University, the oldest university in Europe. Wicksteed had no reason to doubt this at the time, but he never heard O’Brian called doctor again.
Although the London Times review of Testimonies had been disheartening, if not infuriating, to O’Brian—how exasperating to receive esteem from abroad and scorn at home, where the emotional and intellectual ties were—the accumulated praise far outweighed that stinging criticism, and the best was yet to come. In the United States, acclaim for Testimonies had tangible results, too. Perhaps tipped off by Kazin, a former editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Alice Morris and Linda Brandi, the magazine’s fiction editors, wrote immediately to ask whether O’Brian had any short stories available. He sent them seven. The editors were so impressed that they set a precedent for the magazine by buying two at the same time.
In December, they reprinted “The Green Creature,” from The Last Pool, along with a brief biography that included the incorrect information that O’Brian was born “in the west of Ireland,” an error, perpetuated by the author, that would continually reappear in reviews and even on the back of one of his subsequent books, The Walker and Other Stories. O’Brian published four more stories in the American Harper’s Bazaar (and one in the British edition) over the next three years.*
That month, in the December Partisan Review, the literary world read Delmore Schwartz’s omnibus review, “Long After Eden.” First, Schwartz, a poet, story writer, and the Partisan Review’s fearless editor who never blinked before the establishment, leveled the ground, as if before a great monument. He called the heroine of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden a “systematic, unrelieved, entirely incredible caricature of villainy,” and the book he deemed filled with “bogus naïveté.” Of The Old Man and the Sea, Schwartz complained that Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of the old man’s emotions revealed “a margin of self-consciousness and a mannerism of assertion which is perhaps inevitable whenever a great writer cannot get free of his knowledge that he is a great writer.” But mostly Schwartz faintly praised Hemingway’s book, concluding that it offered hope that, after the “bluster, bravado and truculence” of Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway was back on track and might yet produce another masterpiece.
Schwartz bulldozed Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms and Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After, comparing them to a startling newcomer: “It is only when one reads Patrick O’Brian’s Testimonies that it becomes apparent how Waugh and Wilson have permitted their subject matter to cripple their point of view and sensibility.” With the mountains now flattened, Schwartz erected his monument to the new kid on the block, launching right in with no transition from his pounding of Wilson:
To read a first novel by an unknown author which, sentence by sentence and page by page, makes one say: he can’t keep going at this pitch, the intensity is bound to break down, the perfection of tone can’t be sustained—is to rejoice in an experience of pleasure and astonishment. Patrick O’Brian’s Testimonies makes one think of a great ballad or a Biblical story. At first one thinks the book’s emotional power is chiefly a triumph of style; and indeed the book is remarkable enough for the beauty and exactness of phrasing and rhythm. … But the reader soon forgets the style as such—a forgetting that is the greatest accomplishment of prose—in the enchantment and vividness of the story.
Schwartz made two other penetrating comments about the beauty of O’Brian’s writing, which would hold equally true for the Aubrey-Maturin novels. A plot summary, he cogently observed, did Testimonies little justice, “for the comparative simplicity of the action when thus formulated conceals the labyrinthine complexity of attitude, motive and feeling.” Schwartz further noted of Testimonies that “the reader, drawn forward by lyric eloquence and the story’s fascination, discovers in the end that he has encountered in a new way the Sphinx and riddle of existence itself.” Schwartz concluded his review by comparing O’Brian to the Irish literary lion W. B. Yeats:
What O’Brian has accomplished is literally and exactly the equivalent of some of the lyrics in Yeats’ The Tower and The Winding Stair where within the colloquial and formal framework of the folk poem or story the greatest sophistication, consciousness and meaning become articulate. In O’Brian, as in Yeats, the most studied literary cultivation and knowledge bring into being works which read as if they were prior to literature and conscious literary technique.
Schwartz had held up Testimonies as a reminder that exquisite, profound writing happened on the page and not in social columns. Nothing could make words come alive except the words themselves.
At the age of thirty-eight, O’Brian had reached one of the pinnacles of his literary career. All at once, he was thrust onto the literary landscape with the masters of the day. But, of course, now there was a new question: could he sustain this position? Who was correct in his assessment of O’Brian’s writing, Schwartz or Senhouse?
* The historical name Roussillon is still in use in the region. Roussillon was united with Catalonia in the Kingdom of Aragon in 1172 and still has many affinities with the Catalan region of Spain. Roussillon was acquired by Louis XIV in 1639 in the Treaty of the Pyrenees.
* The cover of the book bears the title The Last Pool, but the title page has The Last Pool and Other Stories.
* O’Brian continued to prefer this title. In 1994, when a revised edition of Three Bear Witness was released in Britain by HarperCollins, it was renamed Testimonies.
* All subsequent references to Harper’s Bazaar in this book are to the American edition.