GREAT BOOKS SHOULD TELL of good, noble characters and show them in the real trials and sorrows of life, for God knows there are enough in every life, and every one of us wants help to face them.
—Joyce Cary, Herself Surprised, 1941
Nervous irritation is the secret desolator of human life; and for this there is probably no adequate controlling power but that of opium, taken daily, under steady regulation.
—Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1822
As the reviews of Master and Commander came out in British publications in January 1970, O’Brian tackled an extraordinary literary project of a different sort, one that far outshined his own, at least for the moment. In fact, O’Brian later called it “a phenomenon almost unparalleled in the annals of publishing.”*
He had been hired by Rupert Hart-Davis to translate Papillon, the memoir of Henri Charrière, a Frenchman who in 1931 was sentenced to a life of hard labor in a penal colony in French Guiana for the murder of a pimp he claimed he did not commit. Tough and cunning, “Papillon”—Charrière was so nicknamed for his tattoo of a butterfly (papillon, in French)—told a mesmerizing story of life in inhuman prisons and of his almost unbelievable escapes. Though he appears shady to start with, his courageous tale reveals a moral and likable, even admirable, man.
In his “Translator’s Introduction,” O’Brian wrote that the book was one of the most difficult to translate that he had ever worked on.* Stylistically, Charrière “could not get into his stride” (p. 12), O’Brian wrote, and his vivid underworld slang and prison argot defied simple translation, so O’Brian sometimes drew on American slang. He also had to mitigate the use of obscenities, which would be more jarring in English than in French. “I have tried to steer between unnecessary grossness and inaccurate insipidity” (p. 13), he explained.
Charrière had survived fourteen years of hellish prisons and hopeless escapes. Six weeks after arriving in Guiana, he and two companions floated down the Maroni River and sailed across the sea to Trinidad. Captured and imprisoned in Colombia, Charrière escaped again and lived with pearl-diving Indians before setting out once more. He was recaptured by the Colombians, who imprisoned him in an underground cage that flooded with the tides, bringing in sludge, centipedes, and rats. The Colombians eventually handed him back to the French, who imprisoned him on Devil’s Island. Charrière made his final break by fleeing on two sacks of coconuts through shark-ridden waters.
In 1970, the phénomène Papillon, as O’Brian termed it, was in full swing. Readers bought 850,000 copies of the book in the first several months. O’Brian’s version appeared in England in 1970. What really fascinated him was not just the sheer volume of readers, but that they came from all levels of the literary world. Papillon was an action story that broke through genre barriers to be considered a serious work of literature even by the Académie Française. The Times Literary Supplement called O’Brian’s translation “a scrupulous version, more accurate than the American translation.”
Best of all, the publisher had agreed to pay O’Brian a royalty for his work on Papillon, rather than a flat fee. On this he made a tidy sum, which pushed the wolf farther from the door, as he liked to say, freeing him to pursue his fiction writing.
While Papillon scorched perceived publishing barriers (even before the hit film, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, came out in 1973), Master and Commander did not. The book did find a sustaining audience in Britain and the United States, but O’Brian learned a hard lesson. The “historical novel,” a term that to him had little validity, was an acceptable platform for young adults but not in favor among the literati for serious work. What’s more, with the Woodstock generation producing the likes of Tom Wolfe, who published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) on either side of Master and Commander, and Colombian Gabriel García Márquez captivating readers with his brand of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, English translation 1970), O’Brian’s novel—published in the United States several months after the horrifying Manson murders—seemed, in comparison, quaint, even antediluvian. The result was that, despite its popularity, Master and Commander went virtually unnoticed by serious critics and scholars.
Those who did read and review the novel were mostly hung up on Forester. In a begrudging recommendation, Library Journal’s critic advised that “mourning Hornblower fans may prefer to read a good if disappointing new book rather than to reread one of the master’s epics.” “Probably the best of many good novels about Nelson’s navy since the loss of C. S. Forester,” sniffed the Observer. O’Brian’s supposed roots held no sway with the Irish Press, whose reviewer judged the book “not, I think, memorable, at least in the Hornblower way.”
In defense of the Hornblower diehards, C. S. Forester’s hero held—and still holds—a unique spot in England’s literary firmament. Appealing to young and old across social and educational spectra, Hornblower had entered Britain’s psyche on a broad brush, a mythic hero. Winston Churchill was an admirer. The navy historian and business scholar C. Northcote Parkinson even wrote a tongue-in-cheek biography of Hornblower (which one poor American admiral reviewed thinking that Hornblower was a real person). Most readers drawn to Master and Commander had probably been reared on, or at least had read, the tales of the swashbuckling Hornblower. Having laid claim to many of the basic plotlines of Nelson’s Royal Navy, Forester’s books would not easily be dislodged as the genre’s heavyweight champion.
A reviewer in the Sunday Mirror at least recognized that Master and Commander was “not secondhand Forester, but a really fine piece of writing.” O’Brian knew he had written a sound book—he had satisfied history and avoided the pitfalls of sentimentality and enthusiasm—and Master and Commander generated enough sales to justify another volume along the same lines. That in itself was encouraging.
Most important, in Gibbs, Ollard, and Renault, he had found true believers, whose opinions he respected. Removed as he was from the literary world, O’Brian found that Renault provided a useful reality check and a welcome encouraging voice. Gibbs was a supporter in the United States, while Ollard would become a friend and O’Brian’s most trusted reader other than Mary Ollard, who would himself become a noted naval biographer and an officer of the Navy Records Society, could comment with authority on both literary and historical points. He would nurture O’Brian’s career for more than a decade, promote him socially, and become a friend. Prior to Blue at the Mizzen, Gibbs, Ollard, Renault, and O’Brian’s agents, Richard Simon and Vivien Green, were the only people, other than Mary, to whom O’Brian would dedicate an Aubrey-Maturin novel.
O’Brian plunged into the sequel to Master and Commander. He found himself highly content working on his new opus. In subject matter he had discovered a deep well of material that was quite removed from the personal turmoil that had fueled his earlier novels and short stories. He was happy in this place, with two characters in whose lives he could infuse his personal interests and beliefs, as well as his joys and sense of humor. He had, at last, found the vernacular for his life’s work, and in this new book he decided to give Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin a fuller world.
Outside the window of Patrick’s writing room, golden orioles and nightingales frolicked in the O’Brians’ Mediterranean garden, as, inside, he transferred the southern England of his imagination to paper. His pen sped over the pages, forming his compact, orderly script in black ink. Not far into the manuscript, his personal shorthand quickened the pace: “with” became w; “said,” “sd”; “Mrs Williams,” “Mrs W”. When details escaped him, he left spaces to be filled in later. The pages piled up. Notes were added in the margin and, eventually, edits in red ink.
In O’Brian’s first draft, Post Captain began: “Portcncarry\Polcarry Down …” and presented a detailed microcosm of southern England. But he thought better of opening the book there and later inserted a clever eight-page scene on board the homeward bound HMS Charwell, on which Aubrey and Maturin are passengers. The year is 1802. All eyes are on Captain Griffiths as a superior enemy ship of the line bears down on the Charwell, Griffiths must issue the order either to fight or to flee. Before he gives the command, however, a barrage of signal guns blasts from the pursuer. Suddenly, the threat of a furious battle evaporates with the shocking news of peace.
O’Brian then foreshadowed events on land. Given a copy of the Sussex Courier on board the Charwell, Aubrey and Maturin read a classified ad for a gentleman’s house for rent and also a notice for an upcoming fox hunt at Champflower Cross, to be held on November 6. Both figure in their immediate future.
This self-contained opener gave those who had not read Master and Commander a taste of the sea. But they had to wait to return there while O’Brian constructed his turn-of-the-century southern England, setting up the dynamics of more complex personal lives for Aubrey and Maturin. O’Brian then carried the duo through the French port of Toulon, during the peace, and overland to Maturin’s ancestral home in Catalonia. No sea battle occurs in the first hundred pages.
In O’Brian’s Sussex, Aubrey and Maturin set up at Melbury Lodge, the house that they saw advertised in the Sussex Courier. There they meet their neighbors living at Mapes Court, the Williams family, who are destined to play an important part in their lives. A small-minded and formidable widow of “unprincipled rectitude,” O’Brian’s Mrs. Williams could have stepped straight out of a Jane Austen novel. Like Austen’s Mrs. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Williams is “a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper” and the business of her life, like that of Mrs. Bennet, is “to get her daughters married; its solace … visiting and news.”*
Tenacious, manipulative, and greedy, Mrs. Williams scrutinizes all bachelors and targets the ones who pass muster for her spinster daughters: Sophie, a reserved beauty of twenty-seven; Cecilia, several years younger and a frivolous goose; and Frances, long-legged and tomboyish. Mrs. Williams’s lowest priority is for her resident niece, Diana Villiers, an orphan of about Sophie’s age who she is most concerned should not become a rival to her daughters.
Initially, O’Brian described Mrs. Williams in detail: She came from a “banking, brewing, army-contracting family” that had earned its riches in the City in Dutch William’s day (William III, who reigned from 1688 to 1702). The family had lived in the south for three or four generations, “doing nothing heinously wrong & taking great care of their capital.” Mrs. Williams had married a cousin, George, combining the Champflower and Midden properties. In the final version, O’Brian trimmed and sharpened the description, ultimately calling her “a vulgar woman … although her family, which was of some importance in the neighborhood, had been settled there since Dutch William’s time” (p. 19).
At first, Diana Villiers was the daughter of Mrs. Williams’s brother or half brother; in the end, O’Brian decided she was the daughter of Mrs. Williams’s sister. Because she was born in India, Diana was known in the talkative parish as the “Blackamoor,” which became the “Black Lady” in the first typed draft, replaced in red ink with “the Ranee” (a Hindu queen or a raja’s wife), obviously in this case a facetious tide.
For all his speed in writing, the drafts reveal a meticulous and exacting reviser. O’Brian honed, refined, and authenticated. On page 27 of the manuscript, he changed the make of the piano from “Spohr” to “Clementi.” On page 28, he penned in “Hummel” as the composer of the sonata in D major. In the typed version of page 33, in red ink in the left margin by the word “extrapolate,” he wrote a note to check the Oxford English Dictionary to make sure that that word existed in 1800; later, in green ink, “extrapolate,” which according to the OED was first used in the mid-nineteenth century, was stricken and “go too far” replaced it. He also fine-tuned the language for meaning. For example, on manuscript page 1 of chapter 6, he replaced the word “tension” with “nervous excitement.”
O’Brian’s novel was largely written in the first draft. Still, as he carefully refined the prose—a process in which his natural sense of reserve served him well—he elevated his storytelling. For example, on page 36 of the typed version, he toned down an amorous scene involving Maturin and Villiers. Maturin’s diary entry for February 15 originally stated: “Then when she suddenly kissed me, with her virtually naked body pressed against mine, the strength left my legs, my knees, and I could scarcely follow her into the ball-room with any sort of countenance.” In red ink “virtually naked” was stricken. In the published book, “with her body pressed against mine” was also deleted, and following “my knees,” he added the phrase “quite ludicrously” (p. 56).
O’Brian revised the book to rid it of physical description unsuitable to the tenor of the period. He might also have sensed that following the sexual revolution of the 1960s, his original language seemed melodramatic.
Even more important, he made Maturin harder to fathom and more intriguing. In many instances, he shrouded actions and relationships in a veil of obliqueness, leaving the reader’s imagination room to play. O’Brian later explained why: “Outside the exact sciences,” he wrote, “scarcely anything worth saying can be said except by indirection” (Picasso, p. 327).
These drafts and adjustments were all made with astonishing speed. A little more than a year after the publication of Master and Commander, Mary typed up the final draft of Post Captain, Patrick’s longest work yet and one that eventually came to be considered the single most important volume of the Aubrey-Maturin series. The new novel brought the duo’s adventures to more than 750 book pages. With the introduction of the Williams family, Post Captain painted a much broader social picture, with a Jane Austen-like attention to the manners of early-nineteenth-century England.
O’Brian had also opened a door to the Admiralty and the inner workings of the Royal Navy, allowing for a more complex plot. Sir Joseph Blaine, the fictional chief of naval intelligence, an intellectual and a natural philosopher, becomes devoted to Maturin, just as Maturin becomes a trusted and, importantly, unpaid intelligence agent and adviser on Catalan and Spanish affairs. O’Brian later told one journalist off the record that Blaine was based in part on his unit director at the Political Intelligence Department during the war. Leslie Beck was a worthy model. With his Jesuit religious training, Beck had brought to his job a combination of theological scrupulousness and a practical ruthlessness for motivating his people to perform strenuous feats in the office and dangerous tasks in the field.
Just as O’Brian raised Maturin’s presence and his stature in this manner in Post Captain, he also created an Achilles’ heel for the doctor. Maturin becomes and remains through much of the series a heavy user of opium, in the quicker-working liquid form, tincture of laudanum, one of the few effective medicines he has on board ship. He struggles with but defends this habit, much as Thomas De Quincey did in his famous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, serialized in the London Magazine in 1821. While the 1960s hippie culture had made the subject of drug use timely, O’Brian’s fascination with Maturin’s use of opium and later of coca ran deep and would endure for many decades.
As he would throughout the series, O’Brian again used historical events as a framework in Post Captain. However, he left the charted path more often in this book than in the first. In an amusing and somewhat magical episode, he even had Aubrey trek from Toulon to Maturin’s ancestral home near Barcelona while disguised as a bear. Subsequent books would occasionally enter this realm of quasi-believability as well.
O’Brian introduced another significant humorous moment, one that became a running joke in the series. He surely found Maturin’s famous dog-watch pun in Admiral William Henry Smyth’s Sailor’s Word-Book (1867). Smyth’s definition of “dog-watch,” which is one of the two evening half-watches of two hours (a normal watch lasted four hours), informed readers that “Theodore Hook explains this as cur-tailed.” Brilliantly, O’Brian seized upon Aubrey’s delayed but uproarious response to the pun to create one of his character’s defining moments. Later, Aubrey’s side-splitting guffaws upon retelling the pun—his face turns pinched and crimson—give the joke many hilarious lives that dwarf the original humor. One can easily imagine O’Brian sitting in his writing studio chortling to himself each time he resurrected this witticism over the next three decades.
In addition to his fiction writing, O’Brian continued to translate, though not at the pace he had maintained in the previous decade. Among the books he worked on during this period were Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse (1970), which appeared in 1972 as Old Age in Great Britain and The Coming of Age in the United States. Although he enjoyed most of her work, he found this book, about growing old, a bit on the depressing side.
He also translated Henri Charrière’s Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon, the sequel to Charrière’s international blockbuster. With a degree of vicarious pleasure, O’Brian had watched Charrière bask in Papillon’s success—sleighing with Brigitte Bardot, wielding an enormous cigar in his diamond-studded fingers, donning a dinner jacket to party in Paris. But to O’Brian’s relief, Charrière’s rawness and simplicity, among his chief assets as a writer, had not been spoiled.
In the new book, O’Brian must have taken a particular interest in Charrière’s remembrance of his childhood. During World War I, he and his mother used to visit a hospital together to look after patients. She caught a contagious disease and died. In his deep sadness and anger, Charrière grew violent. He frequently picked fights, always with bigger and stronger boys, and he fought recklessly, until finally, at the age of seventeen, he stabbed one boy with a protractor just below the heart and had to join the navy to avoid prosecution. Charrière explained his rage:
I really could not control it; ever since my mother’s death, when I was nearly eleven, I’d had this red-hot iron inside me. You can’t understand death when you are eleven: you can’t accept it. The very old might die, maybe. But your mother, an angel full of youth and beauty and health, how can she conceivably die? (P. 223)
O’Brian’s own sadness had played out differently; still, he could empathize with Charrière’s fury.
Although thoroughly at home in France now, the O’Brians would always need periodic doses of England, to see Mary’s family, to maintain ties with friends and colleagues, and for Patrick, at least, to fill up on fish and chips and suet pudding. In October 1971, Patrick and Mary traveled to Radlett, a village northwest of London, to attend Nikolai’s Protestant wedding. His fiancée, Georgina Brown, was a member of the Church of England, so they were having two ceremonies. This was fortunate for all involved because Dimitry, who refused to be in Mary’s presence, attended the Russian Orthodox ceremony, and the O’Brians attended this one.
Patrick had delivered the manuscript of Post Captain to Richard Simon in August, and he certainly used this time in England to meet with both Simon and Richard Ollard. Things were afoot with Simon, who would soon leave Curtis Brown, which had been bought by a City banking firm. Although he was being groomed for the managing director position, Simon had decided against a life of personnel and finance meetings. Before the end of the year, he would set up his own agency in Covent Garden, and O’Brian would go with him.
Ollard was thoroughly pleased with Post Captain and even more impressed than before by O’Brian’s writing. This was essential for their budding relationship, for O’Brian, the man, could not be separated from O’Brian, the fiction writer. In his September editorial report, Ollard informed his colleagues that the new 135,000-word manuscript was “an even better book than the author’s brilliantly successful debut.”
“The author’s understanding of the Napoleonic navy, its ethos as well as its ships and guns,” Ollard wrote, “is effortless and profound. Altogether this is a very remarkable historical novel and I have no more than a few minor alterations to propose.” He suggested a first printing of between ten thousand and twelve thousand books, a healthy increase over the print run for the first title. The price would rise as well, to £1.80.
When it appeared in 1972, however, Post Captain, like its predecessor, could not escape the skepticism of condescending reviewers. “Maturin is a charmer and Aubrey an amiable bear of little brain—good company on a pleasant voyage for addicts of this genre,” Kirkus Reviews reported in the United States. “The author obviously knows the details of life in the British Navy in the early 19th century, but that’s the best that can be said for this novel, overwritten for so little plot, which consists mainly of adventures at sea and the friends’ feuding over their rather tedious women,” sniped the July 17 Publishers Weekly.
In England, the Observer assessed the book more positively: “The hero of Post Captain … is vigorous flesh and blood, one of Nelson’s ardent disciples who needs the firm hand of his sage and saturnine Irish surgeon. … There is substantial character drawing as well as liveliness and expertise.” In distant New Zealand, one clear-eyed reviewer, writing in the Taranaki Herald, actually saw Post Captain as Ollard did: “one of the finest seafaring novels of the Napoleonic wars.”
While Hornblower still tended to cloud reviewers’ judgments, O’Brian operated under another disadvantage: bad timing. Forester’s novels came out before and after World War II, with nationalism and support for the military at a peak, whereas O’Brian’s series was launched during the Vietnam War, with the West angrily divided over its role in world politics and the military scorned by a large segment of the population. Among the intelligentsia, as Kevin Myers of the Irish Times later explained, “The radical chic opinions of the late 1960s were inclined to view the revolutionary tyrants of the world—Napoleon, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh—as essentially forces for good who had gone off the rails a little. … The founding father of the technique of the totalitarian state was Bonaparte; yet the chic historical perspective of the bien pensant viewed him and the abominable events which produced him, namely the French Revolution, as being essentially good things.” As O’Brian’s two main characters were thorough enemies of Napoleon, they were “desperately unfashionable at the time they made their appearance.”
Sales in the United States were as lukewarm as most reviews. Lippincott was having a hard time marketing the books, as evidenced by the jacket illustration for Post Captain. In the scene, a short-haired, white-toothed Aubrey, sword in hand, crouches for action while a brown-haired beauty gripping a shawl to her breast gazes dreamily at him. The pair resemble Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. Meanwhile, an enemy ship fires a broadside at them from an impossible angle. The back cover features a somewhat less-than-stirring description of Master and Commander from the New York Times Book Review: “It re-creates with delightful subtlety, the flavor of life aboard a midget British man-of-war plying the western Mediterranean in the year 1800, a year of indecisive naval skirmishes.” This created a confusing package. The swaggering art belied the rich, often subtle content of the book, while the jacket copy excited adventure-novel addicts about as much as the writing on the back of a cereal box.
O’Brian wasted little energy fretting about reviews or American sales, however. He was in deep harmony with his own imagination and too driven to let the critical opinions of upstart colonials and Forester diehards bog him down. He set to work immediately on the series’ third book, H.M.S. Surprise. When engrossed in a novel, he was rarely seen around Collioure and remained aloof, so much so that on the street or at the post office, he would walk right past friends without uttering a word. Some of the local peasant women were sure that the “Anglais” did not speak French. But friends knew that he was only absorbed in his work. At home, he narrowed his focus, ceasing to read new books, instead perusing the newspaper for diversion and rereading favorites from his youth, which informed his own writing.
Mary, meanwhile, ran the household, put the meals on the table, and maintained the normal social connections. She and Odette chatted on the telephone daily at three in the afternoon, by which means Mary satisfied her need for a sympathetic ear and kept up on the local gossip.
O’Brian now sent Aubrey and Maturin to the East Indies on board HMS Surprise, a historical French-built frigate, formerly known as Unite and captured by the British in 1796. It was the beginning of a long love affair between ship and captain. More so than any place on land, the twenty-eight-gun Surprise became Aubrey and Maturin’s home. Though old and small for a frigate, she was both a sweet sailor and exalted in battle. In 1799, under Captain Edward Hamilton, she had daringly entered a Spanish port and recaptured the infamous thirty-two-gun frigate Hermione. (In 1797, the Hermione had been turned over to the Spanish after the bloodiest mutiny in Royal Navy history.) The Surprise had been sold out of the service in 1802, so O’Brian could appropriate her for his fiction without trampling upon history.
In her, Aubrey is to deliver Mr. Stanhope, the king’s envoy, to Kampong for a diplomatic mission. While the Surprise is en route, O’Brian took the opportunity to debunk Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s peculiar belief that killing an albatross was considered bad luck by seamen. Aubrey tells Maturin that “people have fished for albatrosses and mutton-birds ever since ships came into these seas” (p. 166). Former South Sea whalers among the crew fish for albatross with baited lines, and the large birds “come flapping in, to be converted into tobacco-pouches, pipe-stems, hot dinners, down comforters to be worn next the skin, and charms against drowning—no albatross ever drowned” (p. 165).
In Bombay, India, where the Surprise stops on her eastward voyage, O’Brian created a scene charged with tension, leading to violence. Living with a wealthy Jewish-British merchant named Richard Canning, Diana Villiers plays the femme fatale, thrusting an anguished, jealous Maturin onto center stage. Maturin deceives Aubrey, with much self-disdain, in order to prevent him from taking a renewed interest in Diana. Maturin also causes two deaths, one intentional—he shoots Canning in a duel—the other not. The latter unfolds in a heartbreaking chapter in which Maturin befriends a poor Indian girl named Dil, whose mother tries to sell her to him as a prostitute. Maturin comes to love Dil for her wise innocence and her solicitous concern for his health, but he also knows that she is fated to end up in a brothel. He ponders what he can do for her but tragically blunders by giving her valuable jewelry. On the street, thieves murder Dil while robbing her.
The proud, innocent Dil represents a variation on an Aubrey-Maturin series theme. She is by no means the only desperate child whom Maturin attempts to aid. Indeed, tenderness for children is one of Maturin’s most endearing qualities. He later rescues orphaned native sisters from the smallpox-devastated Sweetings Island in the Pacific (in The Nutmeg of Consolation) and Mona and Kevin Fitzpatrick, Irish twins who have been captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates (in The Hundred Days). It is not a coincidence that Maturin, the character most based on O’Brian himself, somehow finds and helps these children. Both O’Brian and his wife, to various degrees, had suffered the loss of their children. What O’Brian failed, or was powerless, to do in his own life, he was able to do in his fiction.
O’Brian later explained Dil’s fate as a repercussion of Maturin’s betrayal of Aubrey, to whom Maturin offers advice concerning Sophie under the pretense of friendship but in reality to divert him from taking a renewed interest in Diana. “The point of the death of Dil is that [Maturin] had done a wholly dishonorable thing that has its image in the death of that child,” O’Brian stated in an unpublished conversation with free-lance reporter Mark Horowitz. “You do something profoundly dishonorable and you’ve killed something, you’ve killed a part of your honor.”
Another passage of the novel, as the writer and reviewer Francis Spufford later pointed out in the Independent, was most telling regarding O’Brian’s focus throughout the series:
Without turning his back on the horrors of the age, he insists that the good things were as real as the bad. There is no choice to be made between the amputees howling beneath Maturin’s saw, and the splendid candour of the conversations in the wardroom; but he does choose to develop the latter, while the corpses heaved over the side after a battle soon drop away from the mood of the story too. A passage from early in the series is revealing. For although a novel containing a theory, Proust wrote, is like a hat with the price ticket still on, novelists are allowed a sly reflection or two on their own art, and in HMS Surprise O’Brian has Aubrey wondering how to describe a sea-battle to his fiancée. He has come to his letter-writing fresh from cutting French throats, and the memory “sickened him with his trade … all at once it occurred to him that of course he had not the slightest wish to convey it.”
In other words, O’Brian had made an unfashionable decision to emphasize the positive aspects of life, one that often prevented his work from being considered “serious fiction,” a criticism that he was long in overcoming. But this decision ultimately helped make his fiction eminently popular and influential far beyond the psychological scourges written by many “serious” modern novelists, including himself in earlier years.
With Mary’s assistance in reading, making suggestions, and typing, O’Brian set a breathtaking pace for his new oeuvre. In September 1972, he landed in London with another fat typescript, some 110,000 words, to hand over to Ollard. Barely more than a year after his last editorial report to Billy Collins, Ollard wrote: “This novel … is well up to the standard of its predecessors … very good indeed. There is, in particular, a long account of a storm in the Roaring Forties which is the best account of a sailing ship in a storm that I have read since Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus.”
Over the next decade, O’Brian frequently delivered typescripts in person, as he did now. Ollard read them immediately, and while he did, O’Brian had time to research at various libraries and to stop in at some of his favorite shops for items not easily found in Collioure or Perpignan. He also made sure to visit his agent, Simon, who, following the gentrification of Covent Garden, had moved his offices to the more affordable neighborhood of Islington.
Ollard suggested to O’Brian some small cuts to tighten up certain passages of the third Aubrey-Maturin installment, but little else. The two also had the opportunity to discuss the cover design. O’Brian wanted the new cover to better capture the flavor of the period than had the previous two, with their 1960s-style illustrations. He suggested Nicholas Pocock’s painting of the action between the thirty-six-gun HMS Amethyst and the forty-gun French frigate Thetis, one that he had used as an illustration in Men-of-War, a book he was writing for the children’s department of Collins. Ollard agreed. O’Brian returned to France with the marked-up version of the typescript, which he was to revise and resubmit in six weeks.
In February 1973, Patrick and Mary traveled to England to be with Mary’s father, who was dying. Whatever the family tension had been when her marriage to Tolstoy had collapsed and her union with O’Brian had begun, it was long since behind them. On February 19, Mary bravely held the hand of her eighty-three-year-old father as he died. Mary’s mother would live to be ninety-nine, mentally sharp until the very end, and Mary continued to visit her each year.
In the United States, O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series was in danger. Lippincott’s staff continued to turn over. Editor in chief George Stevens had left in 1970, and now Tony Gibbs, whom O’Brian had never met but much admired from their correspondence, left to pursue a magazine writing and editing career at Motor Boating and Sailing. The staff who had dreamed up the idea for the series and nurtured it through the first two books was gone, and, with weak sales, the publisher hesitated to bring out the third Aubrey-Maturin title. It finally opted to go ahead and publish the book but at a reduced advance. This proved to be Lippincott’s last book in the series; the publisher with the foresight to encourage O’Brian to write Master and Commander would not benefit from the series’ eventual success.
Two reviews of H.M.S. Surprise, one in the Sunday Times of London and the other in the New York Times Book Review, indicate the contrasting fortunes of O’Brian’s “naval tales,” as he liked to call them, on either side of the Atlantic. In the August 19, 1973, edition of the former, Julian Symons wrote: “The language is just right, with a full late eighteenth century weightiness that is still free from any trace of strain or affectation. … In their own field, that of the adventure story which remains faithful in its feeling for place and period, I don’t see that one could wish for anything better than Mr. O’Brian’s sea stories.” Though qualified, the review amounted to high praise.
In the United States, on the other hand, H.M.S. Surprise took one in the hull—below the waterline, as it were. “Mr. O’Brian is constantly becalmed in his own diction, which can take a disturbingly giddy turn. Men-of-war with names like Belle Poule and Caca Fuego just don’t inspire confidence,” wrote a cranky and ill-informed reviewer in the December 9, 1973, New York Times Book Review.*
As O’Brian’s fortunes sagged in the United States at the hands of such misinterpretation, his work was beginning to gain real credibility in Britain. At least the debate was on a higher plane. O’Brian was becoming the first serious challenger to Forester’s predominance in the genre. In the Spectator, a crime-books reviewer, admitting that O’Brian’s “virtues as a scholar and story-teller are displayed to considerable advantage” in H.M.S. Surprise, nonetheless took the Forester stand, writing:
I cannot see the force of Mark Kahn’s judgement (of an earlier book, Post Captain) that “This is not second hand Forester.” The loneliness of the captain, the specific working out of problems of command, the deliberate distance the hero creates between himself and others—all the psychological features of the Hornblower novels, which re-create in the reader’s stomach the same knot as there is in that of the hero as ships sail to battle, are here at a lesser level of tension. When Aubrey tells his men they are not to try to rescue him from a land operation in Port Mahon his words … almost exactly recall Hornblower’s instructions to Brown when he is preparing to land to face El Supremo in The Happy Return, and there are many such echos.
The unimpressed Spectator reviewer concluded that O’Brian “simply labours under the ineradicable handicap of dealing with exactly the same number of limited facts that Forester milked dry over his long career.”
The battle lines were drawn. The contest would endure. But one thing was clear: C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian were the heavyweight writers of fiction inspired by Nelson’s navy.
The next bout had to wait for more than three years, however. An extraordinary opportunity to pursue another subject fell now into O’Brian’s lap. Bill Targ, a senior editor at Putnam who handled O’Brian’s Beauvoir translations, telephoned Richard Simon from the United States to suggest a new book idea. Targ knew that O’Brian spoke French and Catalan, that he was interested in art, and that he was acquainted with the great painter Pablo Picasso. Targ wanted to know if O’Brian would be interested in writing a biography of the Spanish genius. What’s more, he was offering something O’Brian had not seen before: a generous budget for the project.
* In the “Translator’s Introduction” of Banco: The Further Adventures of Papillon, p. 9.
* In an interview in the Independent (March 15, 1992), O’Brian said, “You could type tit] in English as fast as you could read it in French.” But in his “Translator’s Introduction” to the book, he called it “one of the hardest I have undertaken” (Papillon, p. 12) and convincingly described why.
* Pride and Prejudice, p. 5, The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen.
* California rare-books dealer Stuart Bennett later pointed out in “Four Decades of Reviews” in the British Library’s Patrick O’Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography that “O’Brian’s research had been, as usual, meticulous: the French quite certainly possessed a ship called the Belle Poule—she was captured by HMS Amazon on 13th Match 1806. Furthermore, the Spaniards often named their men-of-war Cacafuego: one formed part of the Invincible Armada” (p. 171).