IN DIFFICULT OR DOUBTFUL attacks by sea—and the odds of 50 men to 320 comes within this description—no device can be too minute, even if apparently absurd, provided it have the effect of diverting the enemy’s attention whilst you are concentrating your own. In this, and other successes against odds, I have no hesitation in saying that success in no slight degree depended on out-of-the-way devices, which the enemy not suspecting, were in some measure thrown off their guard.
—Thomas Cochrane, Autobiography of a Seaman (1860)
In the calendar of rural France, the two most interesting months are August, the month of vacations and fetes, and October, when the all-important vendange occurs. August 1967 brought record dryness to France, especially the south and west. Perpignan recorded well less than half its normal rainfall. Vacationers heading for the seashore jammed the coastal roads of Pyrénées-Orientales, and there seemed to be a special madness in the air in Collioure.
Moviemaker Robert Dhéry was filming Le Petit Baigneur in the village, and he brought with him a boat made on Lake Michigan, a hot-air balloon, fourteen cubic meters of sand, a special tractor for riding above the grapevines, and the white horse that had appeared in La Plume de Ma Tante in the United States. To complete the spectacle, the director had requested a police motorcycle escort.
One victim of August’s madness was Manolo Gallardo, a twenty-seven-year-old matador, who was gored in his femoral artery by a bull at the corrida on August 16. An ambulance rushed him, bleeding, to the hospital in the neighboring town of Argeles, where he was saved. Another victim was O’Brian, whose tormentor—the infamous French bureaucracy—was even more tenacious than a mad bull.
In March, O’Brian had filed a proposal to build an addition onto his house, complete with blueprints and a list of materials to be used. Although the mayor of Collioure had approved the plans, on August 29 a village policeman showed up at the O’Brians’ door with a stop-work order. The departmental administrator in Perpignan had denied the proposal because Collioure’s town-planning commission had not yet completed its plan for O’Brian’s neighborhood.
In October, the mayor interceded on O’Brian’s behalf, informing the departmental administrator that the commission’s plan had now been ratified and requesting that O’Brian’s building permit be granted. Nevertheless, in February 1968, O’Brian received a notice that his modest plans had again been rejected—this time by the regional urban planning agency—on the grounds that the type of roof O’Brian proposed had never been used in Collioure and thus could not be sanctioned by the town-planning commission.
That May, in Paris, a minor dispute involving students at Nanterre and Sorbonne universities swelled into a major revolt for reform of the centralized, authoritarian educational system. Along Boulevard St. Germain, ten thousand students overturned cars and buses, barricading themselves in. Bonfires smoldered in the streets. Riot police charged students in the Latin Quarter, who responded by heaving cobblestones and café chairs at them.
Given O’Brian’s own entanglement with the unbridled French bureaucracy, he might have felt more than a twinge of sympathy for the frustrated students. They refused to take it sitting down, and so did he. Somehow the O’Brians’ much-needed house addition, including a new bedroom with a balcony overlooking the garden, a bathroom, and a garage, eventually got built.
Meanwhile, good news had arrived to offset O’Brian’s aggravations, and to provide him with some manner of revenge. The Philadelphia-based publisher J. B. Lippincott Company called to suggest that he try his hand at another sea novel. Their rationale was simple: C. S. Forester, whose Hornblower novels were widely popular among adults and young adults, had died in 1966. Lippincott wanted to launch the next Forester. There were, and would be, other writers who tried to follow Forester’s lead. In 1965, Lippincott had published Dudley Pope’s Ramage, introducing his fictional seaman Nicholas Ramage, but Lippincott editor in chief Robert White Hill did not expect Pope to be Forester’s successor. Hill had read The Golden Ocean and thought that O’Brian might have the talent, so he tracked him down.
Lippincott specifically asked O’Brian to write the book for adults. O’Brian liked the idea. He considered the sea exploits of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars—the age of Horatio Nelson—to be one of the defining moments in the history and lore of the English. It was their Trojan War tale—with heroes such as Richard Howe, John Jervis, George Keith, and Thomas Cochrane and great single-ship and fleet actions, including the Glorious First of June, the battles of Cape St. Vincent, the Nile, and Trafalgar—and it was a story that he wished to explore.
He had read and absorbed much of the great naval histories of Robert Beatson and William James, and he had enjoyed Forester’s Hornblower novels. Still, Hornblower left something to be desired. Although O’Brian admired Forester’s masterful action scenes, his characters, other than Hornblower, had little depth, and his presentation of the human experience lacked richness. While the era was well documented in contemporary accounts and by historians, no one, aside from Captain Frederick Marryat, who had actually served in the Royal Navy under Cochrane, had yet breathed real life into it, and his pre-Victorian picaresque novels were growing dated. Having thoroughly enjoyed his previous forays into nautical historical fiction, O’Brian was willing to give Lippincott’s idea a try.
On September 19, 1967, at the age of fifty-two, O’Brian signed a contract agreeing to submit a manuscript for the new book in a year. Lippincott was to write a check immediately for $2,500. O’Brian would receive the same amount on showing evidence of satisfactory progress and a third installment on delivery of the manuscript. Even better, in London, Macmillan, which had published Richard Temple, agreed to jointly commission the book for British publication.
O’Brian decided to base the novel on a historical episode involving the Scotsman Thomas Cochrane, later the tenth earl of Dundonald. An outsider and an idealist, Cochrane was the Nelson of frigate commanders, fearless, cunning, and admired by his men, whom he enriched with prize money as a result of their victories at sea. Like Nelson, Cochrane was not afraid to ignore or expand orders when he believed he could strike a blow for England by doing so. His first command resulted in one of the great single-ship actions in Royal Navy history. In the fourteen-gun brig Speedy, which Cochrane called “a burlesque on a vessel of war,” with a crew of 54 men, he fought and defeated the thirty-two-gun Spanish xebec frigate El Gamo and her crew of 319.
Although O’Brian modeled the book’s action on Cochrane’s cruise, he deviated from the Scotsman’s character in creating his fictional captain, Jack Aubrey. Cochrane was at times rash, confrontational, and disagreeable, particularly when it came to politics. O’Brian wanted his captain to be a thorough Englishman, reflecting the good qualities of the English. At least in part, he visualized his brother, Mike, a tall, powerful, and spirited man of action, and a sociable one.
O’Brian already had the rough forms of the two main characters he would create for this book, and whose lives he would write about for the next three decades. Peter Palafox, midshipman, and Sean O’Mara, surgeon’s mate, from The Golden Ocean, were the first incarnation of his fictional seafaring friends. The Unknown Shore’s Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow, the one orphaned, the other sold by his parents for a philosopher’s experiment, were even better models. In Jack Aubrey, a bluff, likable officer in the Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, an odd, frequently irascible, and almost always rational surgeon and natural philosopher, O’Brian crystallized his two archetypal characters, whose lives and friendship would allow him to express a great deal about the world and the nature of friendship and at the same time to maintain the dramatic tension necessary to engage readers throughout what would become a multi-volume series. Eventually, Aubrey and Maturin would be compared to the great literary tandems: Holmes and Watson, Quixote and Panza, Achilles and Patroclus.
Maturin was “a good old Irish name,” according to Somerset Maugham, who used it in The Razor’s Edge, with “a bishop in the family, and a dramatist and several distinguished soldiers and scholars.” Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), an Irish novelist and dramatist, wrote half a dozen Gothic romances during the Napoleonic wars and after, as well as several tragedies. O’Brian’s Maturin was a medical man, and O’Brian certainly had models from whom to work. His father for one, but also his uncle, Dr. Sidney Russ, who had conducted radiobiological studies of tumors and was so preeminent in his field that the King Edward’s Hospital Fund, which held the main supply of radium for London’s hospitals between the wars, was placed under his care.
O’Brian would explore the most complex moral themes—love and fidelity, the nature and boundaries of loyalty, the importance of being discreet, drug dependence—primarily through Maturin, who by all accounts closely resembled the author in many ways. But it was Aubrey’s naval career—albeit as the series progressed more and more shaped by Maturin’s secret political missions and influence at the Admiralty—that would drive the novels.
O’Brian combed logbooks, official letters, memoirs, and period published accounts for details. In addition to Cochrane’s memoirs, he studied Admiral Sir James Saumarez’s dispatches and reports of Saumarez’s famous naval battles at Algeciras and in the Strait of Gibraltar—actions the fictional Aubrey observes, but unhappily cannot take part in, late in the novel. Meticulous by nature, O’Brian consulted with officials at the Public Record Office in London and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and even with the current commanding officer of Nelson’s ship HMS Victory. He also traveled to Port Mahon, Minorca, a Royal Navy base for the Mediterranean Fleet at the time of his novel, to see for himself that strategic, long, narrow harbor and the island’s Spanish fortifications.
The result was Master and Commander, the novel that led off O’Brian’s magnum opus, a twenty-novel series that would become one of the longest and perhaps best-loved romans-fleuves of the twentieth century. O’Brian’s epic of two heroic yet believably realistic men would in some ways define a generation—but not for two more decades.
O’Brian set Master and Commander in the western Mediterranean, where Cochrane’s famous cruise on board the tiny sloop Speedy took place. While visiting Port Mahon, where Cochrane was based, O’Brian conceived what became one of the series’ most famous scenes: Aubrey and Maturin, both down on their luck, meet for the first time at the Governor’s House during a concert of Locatelli’s C major quartet, Lieutenant Aubrey, passionately beating time with his fist, irritates Maturin, a small, unfriendly-looking man in a grizzled wig, and the two exchange harsh words. It appears they are headed for a duel the following day, but before that can happen, Aubrey is promoted to the rank of master and commander and given command of the brig Sophie. In his joy, instead of fighting Maturin, Aubrey apologizes to him, and Maturin invites him for a pot of chocolate. Aubrey soon asks the penniless Maturin to be the Sophie’s surgeon and then sets about attacking Spanish merchant vessels, which makes him rich in prize money but also induces the Spanish merchants to hire a powerful xebec frigate, the Cacafuego, to hunt down and destroy the Sophie.
While Cochrane’s exploits served as a framework for the novel and provided the obvious plot, O’Brian constructed a subplot around the divided loyalties that resulted from the failed Irish Uprising of 1798. Aubrey’s first lieutenant, James Dillon, a wealthy Irish aristocrat, played a part in that armed rebellion against Britain, as did Maturin, both having belonged to the United Irishmen. Although their exact roles in the event remain obscure, both must hide elements of their past lives and certain of their deeply held beliefs while they serve in the Royal Navy.
In addition to Aubrey and Maturin and the saturnine Dillon, a man bent on self-destruction, O’Brian introduced some intriguing shipmates, who would live on in the series. Among them were the master’s mates Thomas Pullings, an elder midshipman who has passed his lieutenant’s examination but has yet to be promoted, and the cheerful, versifying James Mowett. Barrett Bonden, coxswain and captain of the maintop, is a powerful seaman with long pigtails and gold earrings. The young midshipman William Babbington, who is described to Aubrey as a blockhead but not a blackguard, becomes a protégé of the captain. And the grumbling, back-talking steward Preserved Killick, hilarious in his peculiar form of solicitousness, also proves to be a loyal follower of Aubrey, and equally devoted to Maturin, who brings the ship honor in his surgical skills if not in his frequently slovenly appearance and ineptness at sea and in naval customs.
The writing, less angst-ridden than that of his previous non-naval novels but still intended for adults, came fast. For O’Brian, the heat of writing was like taking a hedge on a horse. You don’t fret or ponder, he would explain. You simply take the fence, or not. For him, the creative process was largely an inexplicable one, some magical combination of conscious and subconscious, of instinct and intellect, all clicking at once. Fiction writing involved a welling up of one’s life experience into a separate entity, a child of sorts. The act of creating that child was exhilarating. But there was a personal transformation too. “The man at his desk is another being,” he would later tell a reporter.*
The drawback of choosing Cochrane’s cruise on the Speedy would not become apparent until O’Brian decided to carry on with his characters in subsequent books. Cochrane’s improbable defeat of the El Gamo had occurred in May 1801, near the end of the War of the French Revolution, making it impossible to use earlier events of this war and still remain chronologically correct. So O’Brian was limited to setting future tales in the Napoleonic War, which lasted from 1803 to 1815, and the War of 1812, until finally, with his twentieth novel, he superseded these wars.
Although to begin with he had no idea how much pleasure he would take in writing about Aubrey and Maturin and did not foresee the lengthy series to come, O’Brian purposely left the book open-ended. He thrived while writing it, and he felt that he had engaged in the work as in nothing else since Testimonies. In fact, he had connected the two, perhaps subconsciously: the surnames Aubrey and Maturin both appear in Testimonies.
O’Brian delivered the typescript to his agent, Richard Simon, who sent it to the two publishers. But before it even got to Lippincott, Simon had to report bad news to O’Brian. Robert Hill, the editor who had commissioned Master and Commander, had left the company, which meant the book would have a tougher time finding acceptance there. It was the literary equivalent of an orphan looking for a foster, parent to shepherd it through the various editorial, production, promotion, and marketing processes necessary to turn a typescript into a viable book—after ensuring that it did not disappear altogether, a victim of the contentious interoffice politics so common in publishing houses after a new editor in chief has assumed the helm.
The typescript of Master and Commander landed on the desk of Lippincott newcomer Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., the son of the witty and urbane New Yorker drama critic, and a former publicist at Doubleday. Tony Gibbs, as he was known, was a Princeton graduate and a passionate sailor who had read and reread Forester’s novels, not just the Hornblower books but also The Gun and Rifleman Dodd. He much admired those books and was skeptical of Hornblower imitators. However, nobody at Lippincott would force him to accept an unwanted book, commissioned by a past regime, so he read Master and Commander with an open mind, knowing his word would probably either scuttle or float the project.
Gibbs was bowled over by the quality and perceptiveness of O’Brian’s writing. He was behind the book. The only question at Lippincott—raised by O’Brian himself—was whether there was too much explanation of square-rigger terminology too early in the book. Gibbs, however, defended O’Brian’s novel as it was. He thought that the information had to be given and that it might as well be dealt with early on. He also felt that O’Brian had accomplished the difficult task quite gracefully.
In England, Macmillan did not reach the same conclusion. Richard Garnett, a former Hart-Davis editor and the grandson of Edward Garnett, who had helped discover John Galsworthy, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad, found Master and Commander too loaded with nautical jargon. Garnett admired O’Brian’s The Golden Ocean and could still quote the closing line of The Unknown Shore, when Tobias, the returning sailor, says to Georgiana, the girl for whom he has been pining, “Come and sit by me, and let us talk of bats.” But Garnett was disappointed by Master and Commander. He became bored while reading it, and a colleague concurred. Macmillan rejected the book.
Richard Simon had to find another British publisher, but he already had an idea. The forte of William Collins, where he had worked for six years as a publicity manager, was popular, not literary, books, but one editor there might take a special interest in O’Brian’s novel. Richard Ollard was a World War II Royal Navy veteran who had taught at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich for a decade before joining Collins in 1960. If anyone could appreciate Master and Commander, he was the one.
Before the typescript reached him, Ollard knew little of Patrick O’Brian other than that he had published a children’s book with Hart-Davis and a novel with someone else, both well received. Philip Ziegler, another Collins editor, spoke enthusiastically of O’Brian’s recent Simone de Beauvoir translation. Ollard respected Simon’s opinion, and on his recommendation, he was willing to take a look at the 110,000-word novel. To his great surprise and joy, he quickly grasped that he was reading a challenging work by an exceptionally talented author. Master and Commander possessed both the action of Forester’s Hornblower books and the literary legs of a Mary Renault novel. He could not put it down.
As at most serious publishing houses, it was customary for editors at Collins to circulate among their colleagues reports of books they wanted to acquire. The report generally contained a brief synopsis of the book, the pros and cons of acquiring it, special information about marketing the title, and the suggested print run.
Although he had a pleasantly retiring manner, Ollard, an Oxford graduate with expressive hands and intellectual authority, was a convincing man. In his March 13, 1969, editorial report addressed to the chairman of the company, William Collins, known as Billy, Ollard wrote: “It is a novel of the C. S. Forester/Dudley Pope type, done with originality, gusto, and a really astonishing knowledge of the sources. … What he has got is first-class narrative power. … This is a book of high literary quality and I think we could sell it well. It is more of the Mary Renault … type of historical novel than the Graham Shelby, which is quintessentially popular.”
Ollard’s only caveats were that “very occasionally the author’s expertise in the technicalities of sailing ships or his fondness for parodying 18th century turns of phrase leads him into faint tiresomeness, but these are the most minor blemishes, easily removed.” Ollard added that O’Brian’s female characters “do not seem to me up to much.” But, he noted, women had only a small role to play in a book about Nelson’s navy.
Ollard pointed out, in the book’s favor, that O’Brian was willing to write more of this kind “if sufficiently encouraged.” Ollard further enticed his publisher with the news that Aubrey was to be made the commander of a third-rate in the next novel. He speculated that Captain Aubrey might even be present at Trafalgar, a topic with considerable appeal to book buyers in Britain. This only proved that Ollard, like everyone else, had much to learn about this surprising “new” author, who possessed an inveterate tendency to deviate from the obvious path.
Ollard concluded his report with calculations relevant to the print run and the author’s royalty advance: “If we were to offer royalties of 12 ½ to 5 [thousand copies], 15 percent thereafter, an advance of £750 would be earned on a Home sale of 4,000 which seems to me a conservative target.” Ollard knew Simon wanted £1,000 for the book. The editor wanted to try to get it for £750, but he suggested that Collins pay the asking price if necessary. In either case, in hindsight, O’Brian’s book was one of the great publishing bargains of our time.
Stamped at the top of the first page of Ollard’s report was his overall opinion on whether the house should publish Master and Commander. “Emphatically yes,” he wrote. Collins okayed the purchase. Ollard telephoned Simon and bought the rights to publish the book in the United Kingdom. Ironically, a year after the launch of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War—to the West the epitome of demoralizing modern warfare—O’Brian’s novel about sailing ships and the formal, comparatively civilized combat of the Napoleonic wars was put into production at Collins.
In a stroke of deft marketing, Ollard sent a set of Master and Commander page proofs to Mary Renault, whose novel The King Must Die (1958) recounted the story of the Greek hero Theseus and had been dubbed the best historical novel of modern times. Although Ollard did not know her personally, he had reviewed her work anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement. He thought her an extraordinarily talented writer, and in his experience, good writers were usually generous in their praise of other good writers.
The proofs reached Renault in South Africa. She loathed writing such appraisals, which inevitably tended to be glib and self-serving. Nonetheless, she looked at the proofs. Soon she was hooked, and, like Ollard, she was floored by what she read. She knew immediately that O’Brian had jumped directly to the front of the pack of historical fiction writers.
Renault’s passion for reading good literature overcame her concern for privacy. Not only did she fire off an enthusiastic line for the book jacket, but she also wrote O’Brian a letter acknowledging her admiration for the novel. The two began a regular correspondence. No doubt Renault’s support helped sustain O’Brian when the ill-informed and condescending reviews that followed rankled. For her part, Renault, who had studied under and much admired J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford, now found great literary inspiration in O’Brian. On her deathbed in 1983, she was anxiously awaiting the arrival of his next novel.
Ollard set about promoting the book among the ranks of his knowledgeable friends as well, including Sir Francis Chichester, the famous sailor and author who lived near Collins’s offices in St. James’s Place. Chichester, who had recently published a book about his remarkable 226-day circumnavigation of the world on a fifty-three-foot yacht, provided a clean assessment of the book: it was the best sea story he had ever read. The naval historian Tom Pocock, whom Ollard had met at Haslar military hospital during the war, also received a copy. “The book is frightfully good,” Ollard told Pocock. “I urge you to read it.”
In the United States, Master and Commander was critically well received, though not unequivocally. Gibbs had drawn up a clever press release based on a poster recruiting hands for the warship HMS Sutherland at the beginning of the Hornblower novel Ship of the Line and garnered some attention for the book. The October 1, 1969, Kirkus Reviews advised, “lively and very much i’ the eighteenth century vein. A welcome treat for sea hounds who care more for belaying pins than ravaged bodices below decks.” And the Chattanooga Times wrote that the book “will enthrall the aficionado from first to last page, and leave him waiting expectantly for the next adventure of Captain Jack.” The December 14 New York Times Book Review, by Martin Levin, called it a “sophisticated sea story [that] belongs to the blue-ribbon category.” But the December 15 issue of Library Journal found that “despite O’Brian’s gift for dialogue and his inclusion of many excellent details taken from carefully researched sources, his book suffers in comparison [to C. S. Forester’s work].”
On the strength of these mostly favorable reviews, Master and Commander sold well enough to effect a second hardcover printing and to interest Lippincott in a sequel. In England, the book—with Renault’s heartfelt jacket quote: “A spirited sea-tale with cracking pace and a brilliant sense of period. In a highly competitive field it goes straight to the top. A real first rater.”—fared well too, and Ollard’s assessment was affirmed. The first printing in January 1970 was quickly followed by another in February. Also in February, Lippincott rewarded O’Brian with a contract to write another Aubrey-Maturin novel on the same terms.
For O’Brian, the 1960s, a decade of the inglorious and underpaid labor of translating and of sliding into middle age—he had turned fifty-six—ended on an encouraging note. But the future could have looked even brighter had he not relinquished his paternal role. Though he probably did not know it, toward the end of the decade Patrick had become a grandfather twice over. Richard and Mimi Russ had given birth to a daughter, Victoria, in June 1967, and another daughter, Joanna, in March 1969.
* The Sunday Telegraph, “A Man from a Better Age,” December 15, 1996.