HAVING IN A PREVIOUS issue, called The Road to Samarcand one of the best boys’ adventure stories I had read, I am now rather at a loss for superlatives to apply to this book, which is even better. It has humour, brilliant description, pace and wisdom, and I defy any boy to put it down before he’s finished it.
—Margery Fisher, review of The Golden Ocean for Housewife magazine, October 1956
O’Brian channeled his energy and his emotions into his work. He had returned to writing short stories. A perfectionist, he was also still revamping stories from his earlier collection, The Last Pool, which had not been published in the United States. By the spring of 1955, he shipped off a manuscript consisting of eighteen new stories and seven from the previous collection to Harcourt, Brace, which paid him $500 as an advance on royalties.
In his search for greater seclusion, O’Brian now decided to look closer to his Catalan home. The solution lay not in Portugal or Cornwall, but just on the other side of Faubourg. In France, land by law is divided equally among children, resulting in smaller lots with each successive generation. O’Brian bought one such curious subdivision, a long, narrow sloping strip dropping down to a gulley that flowed into the south side of the Collioure bay. The property, which belonged to a carpenter who had done some work for Patrick and Mary, lay in the middle of a hillside covered in mature grenache vines, with a well and a water pump at the bottom.
It was here on the slope beneath Fort St. Elme, the round, high-walled lookout constructed in the sixteenth century by King Charles V of Spain, that the O’Brians settled for good, but not just yet. The land needed some loving attention first.
The area was known as Correch d’en Baus (Catalan for “Valley of Mister Baus”). On the far side of the gully at the bottom of Correch d’en Baus was very fertile land, where a hefty farmer, whom the O’Brians labeled “Young Fatty,” grew beautiful garden crops for the market, and Patrick made plans to start his own garden and vineyard. He took great satisfaction in owning land and, as with the garden in Wales, was determined to be systematic in his planting. But even with his vendange experience, he had much to learn. He and Mary borrowed a pickax from their friends the Atxers to work in the vineyard. The stiff handle stung their soft hands whenever they struck rock.
The relative solitude and view of the sea from the O’Brians’ new property offered some compensation for the lack of level ground for building. Patrick hoped to blast a hole at the top of the slope in which he could construct a writing grotto. He planned to do the work himself and, in the nearby town of Banyuls, bought dynamite, which, astonishingly, he kept under Richard’s bed, though he stored the detonator safely elsewhere.
On the day of the big blast, Patrick accidentally used too much dynamite. Rock showered down on father and son, scaring Patrick enough to compel him to hire two Catalan miners, who knew what they were doing, to help with future work. These were tough men who made a living terracing mountainsides, and one of them, Richard would always remember, a squat, powerful man, could hold his arm out to the side while gripping the butt end of a sledgehammer, also extended, and then bend his wrist, raising the fourteen-pound hammer head until he could kiss it.
Together, using sledgehammers and chisels, the four of them cut holes in the rock, inserted dynamite, packed in explosive charges with clumps of heather, and sealed them with sheet metal weighed down by rocks. They had decided that it would be too difficult to blast out a grotto; instead, they aimed at leveling an area big enough to hold a stone writing hut. It was slow work, and they were only a third of the way through by June, when Richard had to leave for London to take his exam.
O’Brian and his helpers continued their laborious excavation and eventually built the hut by hand, something that O’Brian ironically would be ashamed of and very touchy about later in life when he became more established. Richard passed his exam in June, and in the fall he began his national service in the Royal Navy, eventually rising from ordinary seaman to able seaman during his two-year stint. He never returned to Collioure to see the hut or the house that later grew around it. His relationship with Patrick was not close, even during the busy year they spent together in Cornwall and Correch d’en Baus, and though he felt loved by Mary, he would become more resentful of his reserved father as he grew to be a man, away from Patrick’s influence. No grievous final scene or row occurred, but a definite break came later.
Patrick eventually built living quarters of whitewashed wood on top of the hut, and he and Mary moved from the cramped and noisy center of town to the hillside and rejoiced in their quirky little house in the maquis and vineyards. For them, nightingales and black-eared wheatears, cicadas, and tree frogs made the most desirable neighbors. The two would cultivate their sloping garden with grapefruit and orange trees, vegetables, herbs, and flowers. A tall cypress hedge, walling off their private world, would grow thicker and thicker at the same time as Collioure’s development encroached ever closer.
In the spring and summer of 1955, reviews of The Road to Samarcand trickled in. The naval historian Oliver Warner wrote, in an omnibus review of adventure stories in Time and Tide magazine: “It is not very probable adventure but it keeps admirably within its own convention. There is a splendid hurricane for good measure, and it would be a jaded creature who complained of a lack of things happening.”
A review in the July 1 Times Literary Supplement carped that “the dénouement of The Road to Samarcand is as absurd politically as it is geographically.” But Scout magazine called it “the year’s best story-book so far. … Filled with real adventure and quick with incident.”
In August, Harcourt, Brace published The Walker and Other Stories in the United States. (The British edition of this collection, which was slightly different in content and was titled Lying in the Sun and Other Stories, was published the following year.) Four of these stories had appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, which, at the time, was also publishing stories by the likes of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.
But the book was not well received; critics found the tales cryptic and excessively bleak. In the September 23 issue of Commonweal, William Dunlea relegated his praise to the review’s final paragraph, in which he called “The Clockmender” a “startlingly original nightmare,” “The Voluntary Patient” a “smart fantasy-satire of auto-suggestive psychotherapy,” and “A Journey to Cannes” the “most authentic story, a la Maupassant, of all.” But, in general, he dismissed the collection, writing that “the human element here is the crucial deficiency, being saturated in a battery of secretive nature symbols. … What [O’Brian] lacks is sensibility.” In this case, Dunlea was perhaps not entirely off base, but his criticism is ironic in retrospect, given that it is the humanity of O’Brian’s writing, and his deeply nuanced sensibility, that would one day elevate his sea novels to high acclaim.
In the New York Times, Orville Prescott, who had generously praised The Catalans, seemed in a particularly foul mood, baldly stating: “When Mr. O’Brian writes short stories, he omits human character altogether and writes about faceless shadows called ‘the man,’ shadows whose gruesome or trivial adventures are supposed to have some portentous meaning but which frequently seem flat and a little silly.” He added for good measure: “If he would discipline his imagination and devote his verbal dexterity to better purpose, he could write books that would not leave his readers provoked, perplexed and exasperated.”
Other reviewers focused on the stories’ sometimes forced endings, trying and failing to find great meaning there. In the New York Times Book Review, Donald Barr—making the mistake about O’Brian’s birthplace that became the assumed fact—wrote, “This young Irish born, English-educated writer can make all the wounds our common humanity suffers turn into speaking mouths.” It was a double-edged compliment, one that captured the tone of much of O’Brian’s angst-ridden work, but not one that sold books.
Barr’s and other reviewers’ mistake about the author’s birthplace derived from the book jacket and perpetuated O’Brian’s dissembling biographical information, dating back to his biography in the December 1952 and March 1953 issues of Harper’s Bazaar. These stated that he was born in the “west of Ireland.” Similarly, the book jacket for The Walker declared that “O’Brian was born in the west of Ireland and educated in England.” At least one reviewer, in The New Yorker, had doubts: “A collection of sensitive and imaginative sketches,” the penetrating critic wrote, “related with a poetic intensity whose Celtic cadences do not always have a natural ring.”
The book jacket also stated that O’Brian had “produced four novels before the war, as a kind of literary exercise.” Who knows how or why this line was crafted or, for that matter, what it means? Who would believe that anyone would write four novels as a “literary exercise”? The fact was that as Patrick Russ, the author had published a collection of short stories, a novella, and a novel.
In the August Harper’s Bazaar, which featured O’Brian’s story “Lying in the Sun,” timed to correspond with the publication of the collection in the United States, his brief biography was one of the most candid of his career. Despite repeating that he was born in Ireland, it revealed that he had been living for six years with his wife and son on the Mediterranean coast of France and that he had recently bought a small vineyard.
At least in the United States, O’Brian felt he could recreate himself. In England, where the collection, titled Lying in the Sun, was published in the spring of 1956, he remained under wraps. His strange and bitter-sounding jacket biography expressed a discomfort with the world. Perhaps it was an attempt at cleverness. It came across as a caustic jab at an innocent public:
As to the personal side, the Spectator for March 1st 1710 begins, “I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other particulars of the like Nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author.” To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, we may state that Mr O’Brian is a black man, choleric, and married.
From this point on, with few exceptions, O’Brian jealously guarded his private life, and his terse book-jacket biographies revealed little. Never again did they mention his son.
In England, the reviews of Lying in the Sun were no better than in the United States. The Times Literary Supplement dismissed the collection in one paragraph: “In The Frozen Flame the mood of his writing was quiet, controlled, mature, his style as clear as the seas off the Costa Brava that was its setting, but in most of these stories his mood is angry, assertive and adolescent, his style obscure. By comparison they seem unfinished, and although his publishers do not say so, one would surmise that they are mostly earlier work. … One tends to look forward to his next work much more than to remember his present one.”
Some of these reviews were perhaps overwrought. O’Brian’s powers of description, observation, and characterization often glowed. His hunting and fishing stories, particularly “The Dawn Flighting” and “The Last Pool,” quite brilliantly evoked those sports. But other stories could be obscure in the body and inscrutable in the ending and had a tendency to bring out the worst in a reviewer, who grew frustrated, like a person feeling along a dark passage and finally finding a light switch that does not work.
The unenthusiastic reviews of this collection set O’Brian back; it would be nearly a decade before he produced another volume of short stories. Nevertheless, he was clearly a writer driven by an inner force, a need to say something about human love and suffering and about nature and adventure. And just as clearly, although he had produced some work of great clarity that stands with the best of his writing, he had not yet found his milieu.
Two months prior to the publication of Lying in the Sun, O’Brian had published The Golden Ocean, the book he had whipped off as a breather between writing his two wrenching novels—Testimonies and The Catalans—and the painstaking work of editing and polishing his stories for the collection. Perhaps too drained and elated after finishing up The Catalans to take on another emotionally weighty effort, he had cranked out the novel on a whim, indulging himself in his lifelong interest in the sea and particularly in exploration and the Royal Navy.
It is difficult to say why The Golden Ocean might have sat around for more than two years before it was published in February 1956, but it seems that no publisher—let alone the author—was expecting this surprising little book. Rupert Hart-Davis had brought out The Frozen Flame in the fall of 1953. They were publishing The Road to Samarcand in the spring of 1955 and Lying in the Sun in the spring of 1956. That is a lot of books by one author. Perhaps it was a question of finding the right publishing slot for the novel.
The Golden Ocean was billed by the publisher as a book for children, but later O’Brian described it as a book for “readers of no particular age,” pointing out that works such as David Copperfield and Kidnapped could be enjoyed whether you were twelve or seventy-two. In fact, his novel did have an ageless quality.
On February 24, 1956, The Golden Ocean was published in London by Rupert Hart-Davis, which printed 3,500 copies (binding 2,000). J. Day and Company bought U.S. rights from O’Brian for $750 and published the book the following year. By the critics’ estimation, the publishers more than got their money’s worth. If the reception of The Walker/Lying in the Sun was devastating, then this at least softened the blow.
The May 11 Times Literary Supplement—coincidentally the same issue that panned Lying in the Sun—led the charge for The Golden Ocean, giving O’Brian one of his best reviews ever. It began with the gratifying analogy that The Golden Ocean related to Anson’s voyage in the same way that War and Peace did to the Napoleonic wars. “It is a big, rollicking, joyous book, in no narrow sense a book for children but likely to appeal to any reader who will meet the challenge of its length, its breadth of canvas, its uninhibited vocabulary,” wrote the unnamed reviewer. “The story has in it something like greatness. It is naïve, matter-of-fact; tragic, richly funny; closely detailed, but with a bold sweeping action.”
As if that were not enough, the reviewer complimented O’Brian’s realization of Peter Palafox as whole and individual—unlike the many familiar and unrealistic heroes of most adventure stories—as well as the author’s convincing portrait of all the crew and his ability to evoke both the drudgery of such a long, difficult voyage and the dramatic storms and battles. He (or she) concluded:
The story is written with fine restraint, with a proper appreciation of the big moments but with no “fine” writing. The Golden Ocean is indeed that rarest thing in children’s books, a highly capable piece of professional narrative, allied to a great heroic theme, and developed with humour and absolute integrity. It goes alongside Big Tiger and Christian on that very small shelf reserved for the authors who, disregarding fashions, age-ranges or reading aptitudes, spin a story out of the heart and soul of their experience and the joy of living.
In October, Margery Fisher attested to its sheer readability in Housewife magazine: “Having in a previous issue, called The Road to Samarcand one of the best boys’ adventure stories I had read, I am now rather at a loss for superlatives to apply to this book, which is even better. It has humour, brilliant description, pace and wisdom, and I defy any boy to put it down before he’s finished it.”
Oddly, O’Brian later said in his autobiographical essay that the book “made no great impression”; he subsequently strengthened the statement in a Weekend Telegraph article, calling the public’s reception of this book “frigid indifference.”* But both his English and American publishers liked the work and encouraged him, so much so that in his next novel, The Unknown Shore, O’Brian returned to Anson’s epic voyage.
Not only had The Golden Ocean allowed O’Brian to indulge in his youthful fantasies of serving in the Royal Navy, but being particularly poor at the time, he savored the voyage’s outcome: having suffered severely and lost many men, the survivors grew rich after taking a treasure-laden Spanish galleon. Like a good many of these lucky men once they were no longer bound to the sea for a living, O’Brian took the money he earned from the book’s success and bought land—a vineyard, in fact. Soon he was making use of the wine press that Monsieur Atxer had given him upon retiring from winemaking. Patrick would become an accomplished vintner, using and caring for Atxer’s press as if it possessed the secrets of hundreds of years of winemaking magic.
The end of the decade brought political turmoil in France. In 1958, while Queen Elizabeth opened the three-hundredth session of Parliament in England, de Gaulle was elected president again and granted a six-month rule by decree as he prepared a new constitution and formed the Fifth Republic. French leftists protested, and the government called for additional gendarmes, press censorship, and a ban on public assemblies in Paris. In northern Africa, French colonial rule continued to deteriorate, with fifteen thousand French troops blockaded by nationalist forces in Tunisia and Frenchmen seizing government buildings in Algeria.
O’Brian, meanwhile, slipped into the warm bath of history, a refuge from adult worldly strife as effective as his animal kingdom had been during his childhood. This time he told the story of the crew of HMS Wager, one of Anson’s storeships, which wrecked on an island off the coast of Chile in 1741. A grim story of mutiny and starvation, The Unknown Shore introduced the stalwart midshipman Jack Byron and his particular friend Tobias Barrow, a brilliant but eccentric surgeon’s mate.
O’Brian based these characters on two historic figures: John “Foul-Weather Jack” Byron was a midshipman on board the Wager. He published a well-known narrative of the shipwreck in 1768, which his grandson, Lord Byron, used as his source for the description of the storm and wreck in his epic poem Don Juan. The character Tobias Barrow was based on a hanger-on at the Byron household who accompanied Jack on the voyage.
Whereas in The Golden Ocean O’Brian had created two characters, Peter Palafox and Sean O’Mara, who are to his later heroes Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin as a caterpillar is to a butterfly, in The Unknown Shore his two central characters are unmistakably Aubrey and Maturin in their early forms. Barrow, like Maturin, is largely oblivious to Royal Navy decorum and totally devoted to his study of the natural world. Byron, like Aubrey, is a consummate navy man. Their differences are frequently the source of conflict and humor in the novel: “There were a good many points upon which Jack and Tobias did not see eye to eye, apart from the desirability of chatting with captains and commodores; one difference concerned the proportion of their cabin that could reasonably be devoted to reptiles, and another was about the relative worth of their ship, considered either as a man-of-war or as a home” (p. 203).
The Unknown Shore, indeed, proved to be the seed from which the Aubrey-Maturin series eventually sprang, but not until a decade later. In May 1959, Rupert Hart-Davis published the book, with a Charles Brooking painting of an Indiaman in a fresh breeze on the cover, courtesy of the National Maritime Museum. The publisher printed 4,500 copies, 1,000 more than it had printed of The Golden Ocean. However, The Unknown Shore did not gain critically from the praise of The Golden Ocean. No mention of the earlier book was made in the dispassionate review of The Unknown Shore in the July 24 Times Literary Supplement, which tepidly praised O’Brian’s eighteenth-century London and Royal Navy patronage system and his descriptions of the bleak Patagonia coast. This was sad treatment given the TLS’s enthusiasm for The Golden Ocean.
The editors at Rupert Hart-Davis had found O’Brian, who dropped into their offices at 36 Soho Square during production on several occasions that summer, a pleasure to work with—punctual, courteous, deferential, and realistic in his expectations. He charmed the three secretaries who worked downstairs in the big house; they were always delighted to see him walk through the door. But for now O’Brian’s run at sea was over.
* O’Brian’s article, supporting the publication of The Commodore and titled “Just a Phase I’m Going Through?,” appeared in the August 27, 1994, Weekend Telegraph