I AM NOT CONCERNED with making a case for or against Picasso; my aim is to see him whole, as far as ever I can; and to do so one must get the evidence as straight as possible.
—Patrick O’Brian, Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography, 1976
On April 8, 1973, not long after O’Brian had agreed to write a biography of Pablo Picasso, whom he both respected as a man and admired as an artist, the ninety-two-year-old painter died. Europe mourned Picasso’s death. The filmmaker Georges Clouzot, director of The Mystery of Picasso, eulogized, “With Picasso goes the greatest explorer of forms since the beginning of the Renaissance.” Maurice Druon, French minister of cultural affairs, reflected, “He filled his century with his colors, his forms, his research, his audacity, and with his vivacious personality.”
During the next week, Picasso dominated French news with drama that befit him. His family announced the donation of his art collection to the Louvre. And his distraught twenty-three-year-old grandson, Pablito Picasso, the son of Paulo, tried to commit suicide. “He felt abandoned,” his mother, who had been divorced from Paulo since 1953, claimed. “He didn’t have either a father or a grandfather.” As Spain and France absurdly disputed their claims to Picasso, Céret, about twenty-five miles inland from Collioure, announced that it would be the first village in France to make Picasso an honorary citizen, to name a square after him, and to build a monument in remembrance of the time he spent there.
The outpouring of affection for Picasso made clear just how big O’Brian’s biography could be. Richard Simon signed up Collins as the book’s British publisher, and all parties agreed that O’Brian should submit the manuscript first to Ollard, his trusted editor. In London, Simon and O’Brian lunched with Bill Targ at the Connaught Hotel, where the editor stayed and entertained on his frequent visits to London. “You better choose the wine,” the deferential American said to O’Brian, the wine-maker. “We ought to have the family wine,” O’Brian, in a festive mood, replied audaciously, making a play on his name and that of the oldest great château of Bordeaux, “Haut-Brion.” Targ never blinked. They drank the expensive red wine, and the two hit it off. When the O’Brians landed in New York on their way to Philadelphia to study the Barnes Foundation’s Picassos, Targ and his wife, Roslyn, took them to Coach House, an American-style steak house in the West Village, for another feast.
Before O’Brian launched into the life of Picasso, he put the finishing touches on a volume of seventeen short stories titled The Chian Wine and Other Stories. Only six were new. Some had already appeared in both of his previous collections, and many of these he had reworked yet again. O’Brian was relentless. “The Walker” had a new ending and was renamed “The Valise,” and “The Curranwood Badgers” had a more graphically terrifying ending. He delivered the collection to Ollard in the fall of 1973.
O’Brian’s stories were dense, atmospheric, mysterious, at times lyrical, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, reading almost like music. Sometimes they were obscure, and often they were grim, painful to read. “The Chian Wine,” a new, nightmarish tale, was, like many of O’Brian’s short stories, about the dark side of human nature, almost antithetical to the Aubrey-Maturin novels. In the somewhat inscrutable vignette, Alphard, an old man of Saint-Feliu, a fictional walled village that O’Brian modeled on Collioure and also used as the setting for The Catalans, befriends Halevy, an Avignon Jew who has set up an art gallery for tourists in Saint-Feliu. Alphard lives in the past and laments the modernization of the village and the “rough, aggressive, ill-mannered” (p. 66) children raised since the village grew rich from tourists. But he argues with Halevy that “the spirit of the place is quite unaltered” (p. 63). Halevy demurs: “These people have lost their sense of beauty. … Here too the past has died: two thousand years of tradition have died! There is no bridge between the jet-age and the past” (p. 63).
Seeing a priest, Alphard counters: “There is your bridge—one of your bridges. The Church has not changed” (p. 63). Alphard plans to share with Halevy a bottle of Chian wine, an ancient bottle pulled up from the sea by the village fisherman, who gave it to Alphard. However, first he attends vespers. The priest’s anti-Semitic sermon, one that he delivers year in and year out, suddenly incites a youthful mob to storm Halevy’s gallery. Alphard tries to stop them, to no avail. The mob burns Halevy alive.
The story calls to mind Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a sinister tale of ritual murder in a rural community. As he did in Testimonies, O’Brian employed a priest as the catalyst for evil. Though he rarely depicted children sympathetically, in “The Chian Wine” he magnified their disagreeable qualities to monstrous proportions.
“As in every good collection of short stories,” Ollard assessed in October 1973, “there is an immense variety of mood and tone between the tales that compose it. “The Virtuous Peleg’ is enchantingly funny; ‘A Passage of the Frontier’ and “The Chian Wine’ both in their different ways exciting and terrifying; “The Rendezvous’ and ‘On the Wolfsberg’ disquieting and faintly eerie; “The Curranwood Badgers,’ ‘The Long Day Running’ and ‘The Last Pool’ notably good in a setting of hunting and fishing, and the emotions that these sports kindle.”
Ollard, once again, trenchantly praised O’Brian’s writing in his editorial report to Billy Collins: “All of [the stories] are distinguished by a felicity of language, a visual sense and a true originality that distinguish the really good writer from the competent journeyman.” Ollard recommended “certainly to publish” and suggested a printing of seven thousand copies at a price of £2.75. Based on those numbers, he added, “I do not anticipate any difficulty with the agent over terms as O’Brian is not a grasping author.”
These last words of Ollard’s highlight one of O’Brian’s admirable traits. Although he was overjoyed to have a healthy advance for the Picasso biography—one that allowed Mary and him to travel to see Picasso’s paintings in museums in Philadelphia and Moscow—neither Patrick nor Mary was overconcerned about money. Together they had sheared sheep, picked grapes, and grown their own vegetables. Patrick had typed braille and translated, and Mary had baby-sat and tutored English. Patrick had helped build his house with his own hands and borrowed money from Barney to finish it. As long as they could make ends meet, they were happy.
The reviews for The Chian Wine and Other Stories came out in the summer of 1974. Most gratifying must have been Helen Lucy Burke’s review in the Irish Press, which called “The Rendezvous,” “On the Bog,” and “A Passage of the Frontier” masterpieces. “On the evidence of this collection I would place Mr. O’Brian in the very front of short story writers,” she concluded. “His writing is elegant and erudite. His wit is a delight. Without Hemingwayish chest-thumping, he depicts men stretched to the utmost physical limit, or tormenting themselves voluntarily in the cause of sport.”
The same could easily have been said about his Aubrey-Maturin tales, but Burke went on. “And with all that,” she wrote, “there is this bend, this obliquity in his vision, as disturbing as the flaw in a window-pane which turns a garden vista into a wavering menace.” This admiring statement could be applied only to O’Brian’s early non-naval stories and books. And perhaps this is at the heart of why critical approval did not come earlier to his “naval tales.” Critics of so-called serious fiction perhaps took this absence of an “obliquity in his vision” for a lack of vision altogether. Doubtful reviewers simply overlooked his erudition and his language and writing mastery, or called it showing off. Not until much later did many come to understand that there was an obfuscated but more complex, universal vision about this work.
That summer, Collins also brought out O’Brian’s illustrated Men-of-War, a concise look at life in Nelson’s navy. The July 5 Times Literary Supplement judged it a job well done: “The subject, one often over-dramatized, is treated in a clear and easily read style, whilst still managing to interest and excite by the detail of study. The use of dialogue and anecdote brings to life the fighting ships.” O’Brian’s combination of elegant prose and encyclopedic knowledge was making him a force in the field of naval history. He soon became an influential book reviewer on the subject as well.
This was probably the same summer that Nikolai Tolstoy, now thirty-nine and a professional historian and writer, read in Collioure his stepfather’s copy of Dudley Pope’s graphic account of the bloody mutiny on HMS Hermione during the Napoleonic wars. Afterward, O’Brian and Tolstoy engaged in a lively discussion about Nelson’s navy. O’Brian, himself changing gears from naval history to art history, suggested that Tolstoy consider writing a biography of Thomas Pitt, the second Baron Camelford, a naval officer and would-be assassin of Napoleon. Tolstoy liked the idea, and O’Brian guided him to period sources, such as the Mariner’s Chronicle and The Naval Chronicle, a monthly service journal published from 1793 to 1818 with captains’ firsthand accounts of sea actions and shipwrecks and discussions of all naval matters as well as geography and navigation. O’Brian read and critiqued the first three chapters of the book, which Tolstoy titled The Half-Mad Lord and published in 1978.
Pitt’s phenomenal naval career included a voyage with Edward Riou on board the Guardian, which struck an iceberg in the South Seas but miraculously survived. (O’Brian later borrowed the event for his novel Desolation Island.) Pitt also sailed with the explorer George Vancouver and with Edward Pakenham, inventor of Pakenham’s rudder, a jury rudder made of various ship’s parts. Ultimately, motivated by his righteous indignation and perhaps by a touch of insanity, Pitt set out to assassinate Napoleon. In an open boat, he crossed the Channel to France, where he was promptly arrested and locked up in the Temple, the notorious prison in Paris, where Aubrey and Maturin would also be imprisoned in O’Brian’s novel The Surgeon’s Mate.
As usual, O’Brian had set to work on the Picasso biography full throttle, with the gusto he brought to all his books, and with the goal of ferreting out every last important or interesting detail about the artist’s life. At least one reliable written work already existed, that of artist and longtime Picasso associate Jaime Sabartes. O’Brian subjected that volume and many others to his usual incisive scrutiny. But his own firsthand research and analysis constituted the greater part of this dense biography.
The fact that Picasso had spent time in Collioure allowed O’Brian to bring a personal aspect to the book. “He [Picasso] was very moody, and if you were to stand up to him, he was quite apt to trample upon you,” he later recalled to a reporter. Nonetheless, O’Brian felt that Picasso had respected him—not as an equal, for he was much younger than the artist and naturally less accomplished at that period—but with a “human respect,” O’Brian said, adding that he thought it the “correct way.”
O’Brian also reported an instance in which a young writer living in Collioure went up to Picasso one day to ask for his assistance. Jean-Marc Sabatier-Leveque, the brilliant but impoverished author of an autobiographical novel modeled on the form of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, was depressed and had taken to drinking. Although his ambitious novel had merits, it had little chance of gaining an audience, and so no publisher accepted it. However, one had joked that it might have a chance if it were illustrated by Picasso. The author took him seriously and approached Picasso to plead his case. The artist told Sabatier-Lévêque to come to Perpignan the next day, and there he drew fourteen portraits of the young man. The book was eventually published by the respected French firm of Gallimard.
To begin researching, the O’Brians bought a new car and traveled to Spain, combing the regions of Picasso’s childhood, including remote parts of Catalonia, where he had spent his most formative years. Patrick made many contacts and took masses of notes. While exploring, however, he fell and injured his leg in a remote, rocky area. Mary had to hike for several hours to get help.
After recovering, the O’Brians extended their foraging and interviewing to Paris and the south of France. Several photographs show a smiling Patrick, clad in a white jacket and tie, posing on a Paris street with his brother Barney, and Barney’s teenage daughter, Elizabeth, in 1974. Mary traveled with Patrick, and they took great pleasure in their sightseeing.
They then widened their circle of inquiry by making trips to the Soviet Union and the United States to see paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Picasso and his contemporaries. O’Brian was enchanted by the Barnes Foundation, an educational institution in a Philadelphia house, which admitted no more than a hundred visitors a day. To his joy, O’Brian found the paintings beautifully hung, and the viewers all properly studious. He and Mary saw such classics of Picasso’s early life as Woman with a Cigarette (1901), The Ascetic (1903), Acrobat and Young Harlequin (1905), and The Girl with a Goat and Composition (both 1906). No doubt, he and Mary also stopped to admire Henri Matisse’s View of the Sea, Collioure (1906), a warm, colorful scene painted from the shade of the Bois de Py in the hills behind the town. The O’Brians discovered another sublime object in Philadelphia. At the train station, they ate their first American doughnuts.
In the Soviet Union, Patrick and Mary visited the Pushkin in Moscow and the Hermitage in Leningrad, where an incident occurred that amused Patrick. When he asked a docent how to find the post-Impressionist paintings in the vast Hermitage, she responded that it would be too difficult to explain and instructed a young man to show them the way. They walked up an elaborate staircase to get there. When the young man announced that they had arrived, Patrick lifted his eyes to see yet another Matisse painting of Collioure. Delighted, Patrick told the young man, an art student, that they had stopped in front of a painting of his own village. “Yes,” replied the young man impassively but obviously not believing him. Patrick was at first astonished and then amused by this insolence. For him, the event came to typify Soviet Russia, where lying was so prevalent that it was difficult to be believed.
While traveling, Mary often wrote postcards to her friend Odette. The O’Brians returned from Russia with gifts for friends in Collioure. Mary had bought a pair of ornate matching bracelets studded with blue stones. One she kept for herself, and the other she gave to Odette.
Among Patrick’s best sources for the Picasso book was Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite Duthuit, who spent several summer holidays with the O’Brians while Patrick was writing and polishing the book. Duthuit’s intimate acquaintance with France’s art world was most useful to Patrick, who also enjoyed her “fine disillusioned caustic wit.”* She brought Picasso’s early days in Paris to life for him.
As a young girl, Duthuit had known Picasso when he was poor, unsung, and living with his voluptuous mistress, model, and taskmaster Fernande Olivier. Duthuit never forgot the time she went with her father to Picasso’s apartment at the Bateau Lavoir, a seedy apartment building, home to many artists, in Montmartre. Olivier poured cups of coffee and then grabbed a handful of sugar from a cupboard and plopped it unceremoniously on the filthy table for anyone who wanted it.
The result of O’Brian’s exhaustive research was a work containing a stupendous amount of factual material and in-depth analysis, so self-assured that it at times bordered on being arcane. O’Brian’s geopolitical descriptions of Picasso’s world were not of the travel brochure variety, nor even of the travel book kind, but more like those of an obtuse professor racing along on a plane well above his students’ heads.
O’Brian once again hand-delivered his typescript to Richard Ollard, and Ollard was forced to read and digest it as best he could before O’Brian returned to the south of France. After wading through the staggering manuscript—all 225,000 words of it—Ollard recognized that the work, erudite, thorough, and penetrating though it certainly was, needed some revising.
It was the first major test of the author-editor relationship. Never before had Ollard needed to deliver more than a scant amount of corrections and a few suggestions, and even then he sensed O’Brian’s sensitivity to criticism.
Among the important comments he made to O’Brian—and detailed in his October 7, 1975, editorial report to Chairman Billy Collins—was that he thought the book was too self-indulgent. “Anti-feminism and other quirks are given too free a rein,” and “[there is] too much genuflection before everything and everybody French.” “There is also too much lecturing on the special needs and tendencies of the creative temperament,” he noted. “This will certainly irritate the reader and probably the reviewer, who may well feel that they are being categorized as second-class citizens.”
Ollard nevertheless recognized the value of the work, which he strongly supported publishing, “subject to some further work by the author.” He continued: “What I want to establish at once is that this is a book of splendid virtues and some rather alarming defects of a type which would certainly provoke any but the best disposed reviewer and might well stop the book reaching its full potential market, which I take to be—and I stressed this particularly to the author—very large indeed.”
Ollard delivered his criticism to O’Brian as gently as he could. He provided the author with a list of detailed amendments and suggestions. O’Brian probably returned the revised biography in mid-November, when he and Mary traveled together to London, flying from Orly. Mary reported back to friends in Collioure that the weather was fine and that she and Patrick had settled in to the city comfortably and were busy spoiling themselves.
Whatever his revisions, O’Brian, now sixty, held steadfastly to some dated and even extreme opinions and certainly did not rid the Picasso book of matter that would offend certain elements of the audience, primarily women and those sensitive to women’s issues. While Picasso’s relationships with women were far from perfect—as Norman Mailer put it in Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, “No man loved and hated women more” (p. 356)—not only did O’Brian fail to comment on Picasso’s misogyny in many instances, but his commentary indicated his own. He stated that Picasso was “sucked dry and rendered sterile by women, children, routine” (p. 19), offhandedly mentioned “the sorrow and woe that is in marriage” (p. 231), and described a painting in which “classical figures wrestled, conversed, and raped with wonderful serenity” (p. 245).
It is hard to reconcile misogyny with O’Brian’s loving, successful marriage to Mary, yet there is no denying that several passages in Pablo Ruiz Picasso are baldly antagonistic to women, for example:
There are periods when most men hate women, seeing them as eaters of their life, as the enemy. … The toothed vulva is an image to be found in all ages and all countries; and what adolescent boy has not heard tales of lovers being broken, mutilated, or swallowed up entirely? No simple cause can explain the strength of this emotion, the dark side of the sexual drive; but some part of it may have to do with the resentful acknowledgment of the enemy’s indispensability, a resentment all the more furious the greater the male’s vitality. … Latent homosexuality is often put forward as a deep-lying factor, as well as a host of others, including the fact that in a man’s civilization many women are bores out of bed and often in it. (Pp. 261–62)
O’Brian’s objectivity also seems questionable when he writes about children. He refers to Picasso and Gilot’s son Claude as “Françoise’s baby” (p. 389) and their daughter Paloma as “her daughter” (p. 396) and claims that “until babies reach the human stage they are so alike that they can hardly be told apart” (p. 251). About Paulo, Picasso’s newborn first child, O’Brian’s snide dismissal betrays just how disparaging of children he could be: “And as for the baby,” he wrote, “it does not seem to have been markedly less disappointing, troublesome, noisy, selfish, and unamiable than most as it grew to be a child and then a hairy adolescent” (p. 276).
In O’Brian’s portrayal, Picasso comes across as besieged by his own offspring. Other biographies paint a different picture. Gilot stated that Picasso “was obviously very fond of [Claude and Paloma], as he always had been of all small children” (p. 336). And in this passage from Pierre Cabanne’s biography, the artist’s delight in children is evident:
Claude and Paloma were to come several times for long stays at La Californie. Pablo played with them, dressed them up, dressed himself up, painted them in several pictures, watched them draw, or ecstatically listened to their chatter. One of the nicest parts of the day for the children was when their father awoke at 11:00 A.M. Paloma recalls how he would have her climb up on the bed and “steal” his extremely frugal breakfast (a bowl of coffee or hot milk and a bit of bread). After which, they all headed for the beach, and he had a high time with the two of them as well as Jacqueline’s daughter, Cathy—who called him Pablito—and her little friends, and on occasion Juan, Inez’ son, who had been invited for his vacation. (Pp. 461–62)
Of course, as all biographers must, O’Brian had filtered his subject’s life through his own eyes. Throughout his adult life, O’Brian showed discomfort with children, and perhaps to some degree he projected this onto his subject. O’Brian and Picasso had much in common, which may have made it even more difficult for O’Brian to distinguish between their opinions. Both were men of their time—women’s suffrage was not achieved in Britain until 1918, four years after O’Brian’s birth and nearly four decades after Picasso’s; both were creative men, which set them apart from friends and family; and both identified deeply with Catalan culture. One parallel O’Brian could not have known in the mid-1970s: he, like Picasso, would maintain his artistic capabilities to an exceptional degree to very late in life.
The book, Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography (Putnam, 1976), was not a great success in the United States, in part, O’Brian believed, because he had scoffed at Gertrude Stein. “I had had the temerity to say that Gertrude Stein’s inability to read French and Picasso’s to speak it with anything like correctness diminished the value of her reported conversations with him on the subject of painting,” O’Brian later said, “and the book was reviewed for the New York Times by one of Stein’s most fervent worshipers.”
Indeed, James R. Mellow, author of Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, did criticize O’Brian for his treatment of Stein, though not until the end of the review and even then with a light touch, expressing “a few reservations” over some “minor lapses.” Mellow otherwise praised O’Brian’s book, which he declared “has much to recommend it. It is continuously readable and straightforward; the author is relevant and perceptive in his observations about the artist, his art and his social milieu.” He called the book “generally balanced, solid and satisfying” and O’Brian “above all, sympathetic to his subject.” Even so, Mellow’s gentle criticism stuck in O’Brian’s craw. O’Brian rarely forgot a negative remark about his work and often found a way to retaliate, in this case by implying Mellow was biased.
Moderate sales in the United States might have had more to do with the book’s daunting length (511 pages) and its beginning. The dense opening geographic, historical, and social background of Malaga (Picasso’s birthplace) and Andalusia (where he lived as a child) was not conducive to engaging American readers. Elsewhere, the book sold well and received superlative reviews. Many critics, including the prominent British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, who was the curator of the National Gallery, considered it to be the best biography of Picasso.
O’Brian’s life of Picasso, which the author himself later called a “most conscientious piece of work, the result of intense and loving research,” would be translated into many languages, including Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The book was a monument not only to Picasso but to O’Brian’s tenacity, sensibility (and its notable lapses), and powers of concentration, and it would remain a pillar of his intellectual reputation.
* O’Brian is quoted here and elsewhere in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, from his short essay “Second Thoughts: Pleasure and Painting in Spain: Patrick O’Brian Recalls the Easy Path That Led to His Life of Picasso,” an article carrying his byline in the January 14, 1995, Independent.