IN CAPTAIN AUBREY’S MIND there had been a conflict between loyalty to his shipmates and loyalty to his ship; the ship had won, of course, but a certain guilt haunted his conscience, still tender for these things if for little else.
—Patrick O’Brian, The Far Side of the World, 1984
In the spring of 1978, while O’Brian was in the thick of writing his next novel, Desolation Island arrived in British bookstores. The device that he had employed to carry Aubrey and Maturin down to the iceberg to meet the same fate that Edward Riou had in 1789 was so well conceived that it stole the show. In the June 18 Observer, Stephen Vaughn wrote, “For Conradian power of description and sheer excitement there is nothing in naval fiction to beat the stern chase as the outgunned Leopard staggers through mountainous waves in icy latitudes to escape the Dutch seventy-four.” Christopher Wordsworth, writing in the June 29 Guardian, concurred: “Good history, fascinating erudition, espionage, romance, fever in the hold, wreck in lost latitudes, and an action at sea that for sheer descriptive power can match anything in sea-fiction.”
If, as George Colman, the Younger, once wrote, Samuel Johnson had hewed passages through the Alps and Edward Gibbon leveled walks through parks and gardens, then Patrick O’Brian was busy taming the sea, sometimes by whipping it into a frenzy. With the publication of The Mauritius Command and Desolation Island in 1977 and 1978, he now found the wind on his quarter. During the next six years, even as he and Mary recuperated from their devastating car accident, Patrick produced five more Aubrey-Maturin novels. Helping him sustain this remarkable pace was the fact that he now had a clear vision of the length and form of his novels, as well as the process of writing each chapter and structuring the book to maximize narrative tension.
With few exceptions, each new novel in the series would contain ten chapters, just as The Mauritius Command and Desolation Island did. Each chapter would include ten thousand to twelve thousand words.
While O’Brian carefully regulated the book’s structure and diligently maintained a strict work regimen, the creative process remained mysterious and uncontrollable. He often experienced creative bursts during the middle of the night. Waking at two or three in the morning, he drove up the mountain into the vineyards, frequently beneath a dazzling canopy of stars and planets, to an intersection where a military road, marked by distance stones, climbed even higher. He chose a span and then walked steadily, not too briskly, to the designated marker and back. As he paced, the thoughts turned in his mind. His characters spoke to each other, and observations surfaced. He let the ideas flow naturally, not exerting too much control over this mental process. In this way, he relieved his restless mind and was able to return to bed and sleep, allowing his subconscious brain to sort things out.
In the morning, O’Brian had fresh, though hard-earned, material. This was the most vital part of his writing day. To start, he read the previous day’s work, edited it, and then pushed ahead. He could see a parallel between his writing and Aubrey’s sailing. Like Aubrey, he had a destination to reach, and just as Aubrey had to tack his ship according to wind, course, and current, O’Brian constantly checked his plot markers, as well as his narrative flow, and steered accordingly.
In his sixth Aubrey-Maturin novel, titled The Fortune of War, he recreated two significant historical frigate battles in authentic detail, other than the fact that his heroes, Aubrey and Maturin, were present. O’Brian was able to do the research in France thanks to the beneficence of the British Public Record Office and the National Maritime Museum, which copied logbooks and ship plans and sent them to him.
When he reached the end of a chapter, O’Brian pecked it out on the typewriter in his rudimentary fashion. If he was totally in rhythm, the typing might fall on a Saturday, bringing the week’s work to a tidy conclusion. Next, he reread the chapter, making small edits and notations. The typescript of the finished chapter then went to Mary for her reading, while Patrick plowed ahead.
He usually broke for lunch around half past twelve and afterward took time out to work in the garden that sloped down so gracefully behind the house. Or he busied himself in the vineyard. Teatime, at around four o’clock, was an essential element of the day. He felt that the tea lofted his consciousness to a new level, where it was capable of grappling with and articulating the most abstract of matters. Some days he returned to his fiction. Other days, he worked on correspondence, translations, or reviews.
O’Brian planned to submit the new book to Ollard before the vendange of 1978. He had been anxious to write about the war with the United States. The prospect of American prizes and battles with heavy American frigates had even elicited a rare moment of unbridled enthusiasm when he laid out his twelve-page plan: “American war. Goody,” he had remarked.
O’Brian built his plot around two historic frigate battles. He placed Aubrey and Maturin on board HMS Java, which was taken by USS Constitution, a devastating blow to the proud sailors of the Royal Navy, who were used to ruling the waves and winning battles even against heavy odds, and especially to Aubrey and Maturin, who become prisoners of war in Boston. Aubrey is hospitalized and loses spirit. Maturin finds Diana Villiers in the United States, living with Harry Johnson, a wealthy Maryland landowner with political interests. Together Aubrey, Maturin, and Villiers escape Boston and board Captain Philip Brake’s HMS Shannon in time to participate in another of the famous frigate battles of the Napoleonic wars. On June 1, 1813, the Chesapeake, under James Lawrence, left Boston Harbor to answer Brake’s challenge to battle. The Shannon shattered the poorly manned Chesapeake with superior gunfire in a battle that lasted only fifteen minutes and did much to revive British naval pride.
On October 19, 1978, Ollard addressed his chairman regarding O’Brian’s new 110,000-word novel. Again he felt as if O’Brian was on the verge of reaching a much larger audience, and this time his imagination ran to even grander levels: “It might be well worth, on the basis of this book, approaching a film tycoon to see whether the whole series might not offer a television series,” he wrote. “There are so many well defined and established characters who have by now emerged and the variation of incident is extraordinary for anyone working in this comparatively restricted medium.”
O’Brian’s study of 1813 Boston was impressive, without being pedantic, but Ollard particularly appreciated the development of O’Brian’s female characters. Both Diana Villiers and Louisa Wogan played substantial roles in the novel, more substantial than those previously played by any women in the series. Indeed, the author’s tales had come a long way from featuring women who, as Ollard had noted in his first editorial report, “appear for strictly utilitarian purposes.”
O’Brian had put a shoehorn into the genre and was working back the stiff leather. He was blurring the lines between historic fiction and literary fiction set in history. Ollard was so impressed with the new book that his ambitions for it roamed not only to the movies but to something that would appeal far more to the author, who knew next to nothing about movies and movie stars: “Simply as a novel this [is] very high class stuff and I think we should make some serious effort to have it considered for a literary prize,” Ollard wrote. “It is a much richer, more interesting book than J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur and at least as well written.” Farrell’s saga, set during the India Mutiny of 1857, had won the 1973 Booker Prize.
Despite Ollard’s constant entreaties to push O’Brian’s books harder, however, the sales force had apparently grown complacent. Some saw O’Brian as caviar for a limited audience of intellectuals and ex-military men, in which case, selling four or five thousand hardcover copies of each title was not a bad number. O’Brian had not swept England off its feet as Forester had with Hornblower, his nearly mythical hero. So booksellers generally lumped O’Brian with such company as Dudley Pope, C. Northcote Parkinson, and Alexander Kent, whose fiction filled a niche but did not rise above it.
At Collins’s sales conference, when the time came to discuss The Fortune of War, Deputy Chairman Ian Chapman, who had grown frustrated with the fact that, in spite of the books’ quality and critical acclaim, O’Brian’s sales seemed to be hitting a glass ceiling, turned to a new editor at Collins for a fresh perspective, “Mr. MacLehose, you say, if you would, what you think about Patrick O’Brian.”
Christopher MacLehose, editor of George MacDonald Fraser’s witty historical novels featuring Harry Flashman, a self-proclaimed cad and poltroon, knew the genre. Ever since Murdoch and Bayley had introduced him to the Aubrey-Maturin series, he had relished the idea that he might one day work with the author. Before arriving at Collins, MacLehose had once broached the subject with Richard Simon, letting him know that he thought the Aubrey-Maturin novels were woefully underpublished, and that Chatto and Windus would like a crack at them if the opportunity ever arose.
MacLehose now stood up and told the Collins sales force that he thought O’Brian was the best writer on the Collins list, bar none. “He is underrated,” he challenged them, “and undersold.”
Chapman pounded his fist on the podium. “Look here,” he shouted. “There are people outside Collins who believe in Patrick O’Brian! What are we doing?”
Despite the enthusiasm at William Collins and much to everyone’s frustration, Stein and Day, after publishing only two books in the Aubrey-Maturin series, now called it quits. Based on the success of the novels in Britain, O’Brian’s agent had upped advance demands. But Desolation Island, which had hit U.S. bookstores in January 1979, had received only a tepid notice in Kirkus Reviews, and sales were not brisk. Stein and Day had no choice but to bow out. It had been an uphill battle for Day, who had struggled to convince her salespeople that she, a woman and a nonsailor, knew anything about books involving the Royal Navy two centuries ago. Borchardt could not find an American publisher for The Fortune of War. Ironically, with the Constitution’s victory over the Java and the scenes in Boston, this was the most America-centric book of the series.
In 1979, O’Brian gained the distinction of being published in Japan, by the publisher Pacifica, which was bringing out Master and Commander. But his nautical tales had hit the horse latitudes in the United States. During the long, windless stretch that followed—more than a decade—many notable American editors rejected the series as impossible to revive. Meanwhile, devoted readers had to import British copies.*
In the fall of 1979, The Fortune of War reached British bookstores. On that side of the Atlantic, publication of a new Aubrey-Maturin novel now constituted something of a literary event. A growing number of fans hustled into bookshops as soon as word of the book’s arrival leaked out. Critics greeted The Fortune of War with pleasure, but expectations had grown dangerously high.
T. J. Binyon’s February 15, 1980, assessment in the Times Literary Supplement was among a new breed of review. With each new book, a reviewer had more to contend with—to summarize and to comment upon—to place the new title in context within the series. Increasingly, reviews had to speak to two different audiences: those who had read previous books in the series and the larger reading public, who had not. In his review, Binyon spoke primarily to O’Brian aficionados, stating that “though Patrick O’Brian writes as brilliantly as ever, his latest novel does not arouse the deep satisfaction engendered by Aubrey’s earlier adventures.” Unsure why, he reasoned that it might be because Aubrey was often on shore, and when he was at sea, not in command of a ship.
Certainly, another cause is that in setting the novel in the War of 1812, O’Brian was dealing with emotionally more complex material. Napoleon was clearly an evil despot who threatened the sovereignty of Britain and his forces therefore to be proudly opposed. The undermanned navy of the United States occupied a less clear station. In addition, the courageous and determined U.S. Navy frigate commanders scored some bitter triumphs over the Royal Navy.
Although his endorsement of the novel was not always rousing, Binyon concluded with an unequivocal recommendation for the benefit of those not comparing it to others in the series but to all other books: “The Fortune of War is … a marvellously full-flavoured, engrossing book, which towers over its current rivals in the genre like a three-decker over a ship’s longboat.”
After submitting the Fortune of War, O’Brian had simply carried on with his naval saga. Before the reviews for that novel had even appeared, he had already handed Richard Ollard his next episode, which he had provisionally titled The Temple, after the infamous French Revolutionary state prison where Louis XVI was kept and where his son, the Dauphin, was later murdered,’ and in which Aubrey and Maturin found themselves lodged toward the end of the new novel. While O’Brian had missed with the title—book titles not being his forte—he had not missed with the novel. On October 1, 1979, Ollard reported enthusiastically to his colleagues: “This book has a much broader balance of activity on sea and land and between men and women than in a number of the earlier books. This is an O’Brian [novel] that can be sold right across the whole market, and as soon as we have got a good title for it, we should plan a Jack Aubrey campaign.”
O’Brian had set the first two chapters of the novel, which would come to be called The Surgeon’s Mate—a clever double entendre, since the book is much about Maturin’s relationship with Diana Villiers—in Halifax, where the victorious Shannon sails with her prize, the Chesapeake. He used the town, a British naval station, as a backdrop to return to his exploration of human relationships, in particular the nature of love. Halifax is in a festive mood and plans to celebrate the decisive frigate action with a ball. But Aubrey broods. While a prisoner of war, he lost his promised command of a powerful frigate, the Acasta, and grew homesick for Sophie, from whom he received no mail. Maturin, on the other hand, reunited with Diana Villiers, his erstwhile love, is now unsure if he loves her. “Although he still admired her spirit and beauty, it was as though his heart were numb,” O’Brian wrote. “What changes in her or in himself had brought this about he could not tell for sure; but he did know that unless his heart could feel again the mainspring of his life was gone” (p. 19).
This theme—the inability to love—O’Brian had explored in his novel The Catalans, but now he did so much more gently. Whereas The Catalans revealed the stridency and bitter emotion of a young writer caught up in his subject, The Surgeon’s Mate showed the reflection of a seasoned, mature writer, who handled the material with great finesse.
Likewise concerning Jack and Sophie Aubrey, O’Brian wrote with a flexibility that evoked the emotional complexity of sex and love and of the turmoil that Aubrey was suffering. In one instance, O’Brian wrote: “Their marriage, firmly rooted in very deep affection and mutual respect, was far better than most; and although one of its aspects was not altogether satisfactory for a man of Jack Aubrey’s strong animal spirits, and although it might be said that Sophie was somewhat possessive, somewhat given to jealousy, she was nevertheless an integral part of his being” (p. 18).
But a few nights later, when Aubrey is made to feel jealous at the victory ball by an inimical Colonel Aldington, who tells Aubrey he has danced with Sophie at an assembly, Aubrey’s mood swiftly turns sour: “Although he was not much given to righteous indignation his angry mind thought of her dancing away, never setting pen to paper, when, for all she knew, he was languishing, a prisoner of war in America, wounded, sick, and penniless,” O’Brian wrote. “She had always been a wretched correspondent, but never until now a heartless one” (p. 46). That same night Aubrey drinks heavily and is willingly seduced by Amanda Smith, a tall, buxom young adventuress.
Before this last scene, Aubrey and Maturin are walking down the street and Aubrey is beckoned by a prostitute who calls him husband. Wrote O’Brian: “Jack smiled, shook his head, and walked on. ‘Did you notice she called me husband? … They often do. I suppose marriage is the natural state, so that makes it seem less—less wrong’” (p. 28).
Maturin responds, perhaps simply for the sake of argument, “On the contrary, as one of your great men of the past age observed, it is so far from natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together” (p. 28).
Just as Aubrey’s marriage seems to be in crisis, O’Brian shows Maturin and Villiers reacquainting themselves with each other, and slowly forming the bonds that will lead to their marriage. Altogether, O’Brian presented a varied picture of male-female relationships in the novel, and he would continue this intricate exploration of love and marriage throughout the series.
Ollard took particular pains to synopsize the fast-moving novel in his editorial report. He explained that, in leaving Halifax:
Jack and Stephen Maturin and Diana Villiers … take passage for England in a dispatch vessel which is hotly and excitingly pursued by two American privateers known to be commissioned by Diana’s ex-lover, the rich and vindictive American landowner who is also the key operative of French intelligence in the New World. The chase through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as good as anything the author has done in this kind, and disaster is only averted at the last minute by the original device of the over-hauling privateer striking a submerged iceberg.
Back in England, Aubrey finds himself blackmailed by his Halifax lover, dogged by his father’s outspoken antiestablishment politics, which damage his prospects for a new naval command, and caught in a foolhardy investment with a knavish prospector. As Ollard continued:
Fortunately for him, Stephen Maturin is invited to undertake a very dangerous mission in the Baltic, which will mean that he will have to be taken through the Narrows in a fast naval sloop, to which of course Jack, in spite of great seniority as a captain, is appointed. The island of Grimsholm, which dominates the Pomeranian coast and thus the supply routes of Napoleon’s army in retreat from Moscow, is garrisoned by a Catalan regiment. Since Stephen’s entry into the service of British Intelligence is entirely motivated by his Catalan nationalist passions and his desire to overthrow Napoleon, he represents a slender chance of inducing these birds to change sides. This is most excitingly accomplished—O’Brian’s skill in making one part of the narrative develop without impeding the main forward motion is very well seen here. Part of the deal is that the Catalan garrison shall at once be put aboard the British transports and taken back to Spain. Stephen and Jack of course are part of the convoy but dirty weather in the Channel separates them and eventually drives them on the Breton coast, where the whole ship’s company is made prisoner.
Stephen’s past exploits in the last book very naturally lead to him and Jack being whisked off to Paris, where they are imprisoned in the Temple and torture and death seem imminent for Stephen after preliminary interrogation.
Maturin rescued Diana Villiers in the previous novel, however, and now she returns the favor, sacrificing her “Blue Peter,” a very valuable diamond that represents her entire wealth, to finance a successful escape just as Aubrey and Maturin are about to make a desperate attempt to break out of the Temple. Ollard liked the way O’Brian tied the novel up neatly:
The war is fairly obviously lost and Talleyrand, amongst others, is very willing to take out a reinsurance policy by conniving at the escape and flight of the party. The book ends with Stephen and Diana at last being married aboard the vessel that carries them across the Channel. Jack’s blackmailing harpy has also been effectively dealt with by matrimony and all is set fair for the next round of adventure.
Collins published The Surgeon’s Mate in the summer of 1980. One colorful and enthusiastic reviewer, Frank Peters, who had previously declared that Jack Aubrey’s “annual appearances are now rated, quite justifiably, a literary event,” was so convinced of O’Brian’s superiority to Forester that he quipped in his Northern Echo review of The Surgeon’s Mate, “And whaur’s your Hornblower noo?” But the ante was about to be upped. The Wadham College, Oxford, professor T. J. Binyon was busy making the case that the Aubrey-Maturin novels should be compared not just to the best naval war novels but to the best of all novels.
Again writing in the Times Literary Supplement, on August 1, Binyon hit on an important point at the heart of O’Brian’s unique skills: “Here there is nothing of your ordinary historical novel, in which plausibility is vainly sought through a promiscuous top-dressing of obvious contemporary references and slang, which then stand out against the rest as glaringly as the fruit in a naval plum duff. Instead each incident or description is saturated by a mass of complex and convincing detail.”
Binyon noted that the detail was effectively buoyed by “the superabundant liveliness of the characters; and by the pace and excitement of the narrative.” In fact, the text was so very readable, he asserted that “it is easy to ignore the fact that—largely, though not exclusively, through Maturin—they are, on one level, addressing themselves seriously to questions of human actions and behaviour far beyond the compass of the normal adventure story.”
In this unassuming review of three short columns, Binyon had hit on the three sides of O’Brian’s effective writing triangle—pace, detail, moral depth—each well measured, each crucial to the whole, and each supporting the other in a symbiotic relationship elevating the work from the confines of its genre, and then some.
Binyon made one last salient point, aimed particularly at series devotees. Readers, like sailors, he reasoned, were basically conservative; they liked their routine, and they wanted to read about the same characters. He lamented the fact that O’Brian too often abandoned his players. While regulars William Babbington, Barrett Bonden, and Preserved Killick each made brief appearances in this book, others whom readers had come to know had unceremoniously disappeared: the earnest master’s mate and poet James Mowett had been written out of the plot; Aubrey’s eager lieutenant Thomas Pullings, having contracted gaol-fever (a virulent form of typhus), had disembarked at Recife and remained unseen since Desolation Island; and the bungling thief Adam Scriven, a literary hack who tried to rob Aubrey in the novel Post Captain and promised to shine under Maturin’s stewardship, had vanished almost as quickly as he had appeared. O’Brian would never become fully hardened to bad reviews, but, conversely, he took joy in positive ones, especially from reviewers he respected. He now wrote Binyon, assuring him that Mowett, at least, would soon reappear in the series.
“Ordinary historical fiction,” as Binyon called it, had long had a poor reputation; most of it did not really work. The fact was that in all of literature, and most certainly in this genre, few authors had ever possessed O’Brian’s level of concentration, erudition, diligence, and talent. He loved what he was doing, and this allowed him to immerse himself in his subject matter. Spiritually and intellectually he was beginning to exist in his historical period. His language and his tastes, his insistence on formalities, all harked back to an earlier age.
Even Collioure, with its timeless rhythms and ancient stone structures, colluded in transporting him back in time. Isolated by mountain and sea and pride, Roussillon fiercely preserved its Catalan language and customs. The fortresses of earlier centuries still dominated Collioure’s landscape. Thick stone walls, rather than air-conditioning, still gave relief to the inhabitants from the region’s searing heat. And the locals, including the O’Brians, still produced their wine very much as Catalonians always had.
O’Brian’s days had settled into a productive routine of work and relaxation. Awaking before half past seven, he made coffee and toasted the previous day’s pain de campagne, which made a crusty plank for Mary’s homemade orange marmalade. In spring and summer, he often strolled in the garden to see the roses, lilies, or plumbago, which flowered for months, before descending to his narrow gallery for work. He had planned to hang paintings there, but books had taken over, enveloping the room like kudzu, and only one aquatint of frigates in action embellished the walls.
O’Brian preferred a smooth, steady diet of work, a slow hatching of the tale. He rarely wrote more than a thousand words in a day. He now returned Aubrey and Maturin to the Mediterranean, where their adventures had begun and where they remained for two consecutive books. In the Gulf of Lions, O’Brian’s home waters, he described the sudden appearance of lightning-streaked western clouds that could turn wicked, “a confused turmoil of water, high, sharp-pointed waves apparently running in every direction” (The Ionian Mission, p. 250). To eighteenth-century warships, this sea “threatened not the instant annihilation of the great antarctic monsters but a plucking apart, a worrying to death” (p. 250).
In this book, O’Brian conceived of two principal missions for Aubrey and Maturin, involving an almost impossible confusion of beys, pashas, and sultans. The primary action carried the Surprise to the Seven Islands, in the Ionian Sea, where Aubrey, with Maturin by his side, had to choose an ally from among three feuding rulers: Ismail, Mustapha, and Sciahan Bey. Although he crowned the novel with a rousing battle scene, O’Brian cleverly withheld the outcome of Aubrey’s mission for the next book, Treason’s Harbour, and even then he did not give a full description until near the end.
In mid-December 1980, Ollard took pleasure in reviewing for his colleagues O’Brian’s latest 110,000-word effort, The Ionian Mission, which, he pointed out, “displays the author’s virtuosity undiminished.” With the eighth book in hand, it was no longer necessary for Ollard to extol the familiar to his Collins cohorts. Instead, he focused on the nuances of working with an author of subtle and sometimes difficult prose, and one who knew his own mind:
The structure of the story is intricate and I do not think any crude suggestions of bringing in some mayhem and making the scuppers run with blood early in the book would be useful or productive. Where I think the author has indulged his whims rather far is in the use of not only words but expressions so unfamiliar as to present a real difficulty. I have made some notes of these and I will do my best to point out the disadvantages of this kind of thing to the author as tactfully as I can, but it cannot be said that he accepts criticism readily or acts on it often.
Sales had slackened off somewhat since the publication of Master and Commander, but they were steady and profitable. The economic recession of the 1970s had not benefited the publishing industry, but O’Brian’s sales were of a relatively stable nature. Some readers would have skipped a meal to buy the next installment. Ollard calculated that, taking into account recent library cutbacks, Collins could safely print 4,500 copies of the new book.
Upon publication of the novel in the fall of 1981, O’Brian’s reviewers came through with several good notices. Among them, Stephen Vaughn, in the September 13 Observer, called O’Brian “one author who can put a spark of character to the sawdust of time” and produced a most memorable line: “Maturin and … Aubrey may yet rank with Athos-d’Artagnan or Holmes-Watson as part of the permanent literature of adventure.”
In the September 3 Irish Press, Helen Lucy Burke added to Binyon’s position on the literary merit of O’Brian’s work and established a useful frame of reference for argument’s sake:
O’Brian has chosen to set his novels in the early 19th century, and to use the genre of the historical novel to say something important and interesting not only about the times, but about a set of passionate human beings. Those who dismiss the historical novel as a piece of pish-tushery should recollect that Tolstoy’s War and Peace was also a historical novel. Not that I am drawing a comparison—as easy to compare champagne and port—but I am saying that O’Brian’s work should be judged by the highest critical standards.
It was not the last time that the name Leo Tolstoy would be invoked in comparison to O’Brian.
After five consecutive years of an annual Aubrey-Maturin release, 1982 broke the string. Instead, O’Brian’s translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s Quand prime le spirituel: Roman was published in England by Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson and in the United States by Pantheon Books. When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales, as it was titled in English, was O’Brian’s sixth translation of Beauvoir’s work. Soon thereafter, he was enlisted to translate her book La Cérémonie des adieux, suivi de, entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre: Août-Septembre 1974 (in English, Adieu: A Farewell to Sartre), and Jack Aubrey had to compete with Simone de Beauvoir for O’Brian’s attention during these two years.
In Treason’s Harbour and subsequent novels, O’Brian enlisted a fictional second secretary of the Admiralty, Andrew Wray, who had once been accused by Aubrey of cheating at cards, to complicate Aubrey’s and Maturin’s lives. The pair find themselves stranded without a ship in Valletta, Malta, a British naval base for the Toulon blockade but one that is crawling with secret agents from multiple branches of the military and government on both sides. A traitor, Wray manages to have Aubrey dispatched on a fool’s errand to the Red Sea. O’Brian ended the book by sending Aubrey to Algeria on another futile mission.
As always, Mary read the manuscript and typed up the book. She laughed out loud at Patrick’s attempt at Scottish dialect in his character Professor Graham’s dialogue. Though she had forgotten most of it, Mary had once spoken Scots better than the king’s English. While her parents were abroad serving in World War I, her nanny had taken her off to Scotland from the time she was an infant to age five, and she had returned to her parents unwilling to speak proper English at first. Mary generally admired Patrick’s effort at dialect and his passion for words. He had a gift for remembering particularly colorful ones and producing them at just the right moment. Some even defied definition, such as when Professor Graham mentions the dish “neeps hackit with balmagowry” (p. 74). While “neeps hackit” is mashed turnips, “balmagowry” is untraceable.*
In the spring of 1982, as Britain waged war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, O’Brian delivered to Ollard his ninth Aubrey-Maturin novel, 85,000 words in length, which he had titled The Dey of Mascara. In his June 2 report, Ollard noted that “the author is not averse to our finding a better title though he has no suggestions to offer beyond expressing a wish that we should find a Shakespeare quotation about treachery that is not too hackneyed. All suggestions gratefully received.” The eventual tide, Treason’s Harbour, was certainly a play on a line from Henry VI, Part II (“and in his simple show he harbors treason,” 3.01.54).
Ollard suggested a print run of 5,250 copies and a price of £7.95. At a 10 percent royalty, a standard rate for the first 5,000 hardcover copies, O’Brian could expect to make around £3,500 after the agent’s fee, enough for him and Mary to live on in Collioure, but hardly a bounty. Of course, if the book went into additional printings, the O’Brians would benefit accordingly, but by now Ollard was fairly on target with his print-run calculations. Fortunately, O’Brian, whose rare diversions now included outings with the Roussillon Ornithological Society, which he joined that year, worked with great intensity.
In the fall of 1982, he was deeply involved in his two side-by-side endeavors, Aubrey-Maturin and Beauvoir. His latest naval tale in progress, The Far Side of the World, an Odyssey-inspired title of which he was very fond, was advancing regularly. With rueful glee, he was about to strike Aubrey’s frigate Surprise, sailing on the edge of the doldrums, with lightning. But working on both projects simultaneously began to drain him, and the fiction moved less quickly than he wished.
In the meantime, Simon and Ollard did their best to find O’Brian a new publisher in the United States. A letter from Sol Stein, president of Stein and Day Publishers, dated November 19, 1982, indicates that Stein and Day considered resuming publication of the series, but Stein decided against it, explaining that regardless of O’Brian’s merits as a novelist, the genre did not sell well in a country where more than 90 percent of hardcover fiction was bought by women. He noted that the two biggest chains, representing 25 percent of all book sales, did not even stock such books. There were still no takers in the United States.*
In the summer of 1983, Treason’s Harbour reached British bookstores to relatively little fanfare. In the July 17 Observer, Vaughn called Aubrey “the best thing afloat since Horatio Hornblower,” hardly inspiring at this stage. It was easy to top, and Frank Peters did in the London Times: “Pope, Kent and Parkinson were all first-class naval constructors, plot-smiths to a man, adept at buckling every swash in sight. But none holed Hornblower below the waterline. Then, suddenly, Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey was hull-up over the horizon and all was changed.”
Ollard sent the Times review to O’Brian. Although O’Brian found Peters’s commentary somewhat baffling, he was sure the intent was kind. Perhaps he was just bored with the Forester comparison, which he did not consider flattering even if he was judged the better writer. However, for practical purposes, all of this mattered little. He was deeply engrossed in his translation and novel and battling off the summer distractions in a land where the sun slowed work to a halt, sending natives into the depths of their thick-walled homes for noontime siestas and tourists sprawling virtually naked on the beaches.
O’Brian hoped to finish The Far Side of the World before the end of August, in time to take it to London, to let Mary visit her ninety-three-year-old mother in Minehead, and to return to France for the vendange. But what with the Beauvoir translation, summer guests, and the time pressure of publishing schedules, his usual nighttime creative roving degenerated into severe insomnia. As he grew more and more exhausted, his writing pace became slower than he had hoped. To complicate matters, the grapes, which rarely consulted his schedule, ripened early.
Exhausted and on edge but pleased with his work, O’Brian finished the book on September 15. He had carried Aubrey and Maturin around Cape Horn in pursuit of the frigate Norfolk, an episode historically inspired by Captain David Porter’s famous (some would say infamous) cruise in the Pacific on board USS Essex and his pursuit by the Royal Navy. But O’Brian was feeling the stress a little more than usual. He postponed his five-day visit to London until October 17, after the vendange, when he hoped to dine with Ollard and his friends Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, followed by an excursion to see Mary’s mother.
Ollard had grown accustomed to working around O’Brian’s schedule. The two had, at least in one regard, a relationship not dissimilar to Aubrey and Maturin’s in that, though they might bestow favors upon each other, there was no such thing as being in debt to one another.
Professionally and personally, Ollard employed a combination of sensitivity and silence in dealing with O’Brian, who bristled at perceived intrusions into his affairs. A minor point or a mistimed question could grow into a misunderstanding and thus into a conflict. Or O’Brian would snub a valid, subtly delivered suggestion. Sometimes he played the intellectual snob, halting a conversation by growing arcane. One could not be thin-skinned around him. Ollard’s editorial mission, as he saw it, was to catch any factual mistakes or anachronisms that might have slipped by O’Brian and, when possible, to deter him from being egregiously obscure. But he could not push the latter point too far, for he knew this about his brainy author: like many who have struggled, O’Brian enjoyed making others, including his readers, struggle a bit, too.
On the other hand, O’Brian could be absolutely charming, especially to publishing staff. Richard Simon’s striking young assistant, Vivien Green, to whom O’Brian often brought an orchid when he visited their office at 32 College Cross in the Islington section of London, had recently begun handling foreign rights for Simon. After one sale, she received a tremendous many-stemmed cymbidium orchid in a huge pot, delivered by Moyse Stevens, London’s most elegant florist. Simon thought the deliveryman must be mistaken. No, it was O’Brian expressing his joy at the sale. For O’Brian, these pennies from heaven were meant to be dispatched—no matter how needed at home—at least partly with prodigal flair.
Perhaps this feeling of munificence inspired O’Brian to indulge in a book-buying spree as well, for in November, he confessed in a letter to one fan, an alumnus of the Royal Naval College who had written and compared O’Brian’s writing to Jane Austen’s, that he thought she had no rivals as a novelist and that he had recently indulged himself in buying a first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (published jointly in four volumes in 1818) and an early edition of Pride and Prejudice. O’Brian told the writer that few things gave him so much pleasure as discriminating praise, and he generously offered to send copies of The Unknown Shore and The Golden Ocean for his children.
The publication of The Par Side of the World in 1984 marked a passing of the torch at Collins. Ollard, who turned sixty that year, was retiring from full-time publishing to write books. He had written his last official editorial report. Stuart Proffitt, a protégé of editorial director Marjorie Chapman, the wife of Ian Chapman, now Collins’s chairman, would take over the responsibility to “look after Patrick.” This was more a matter of diplomacy and humoring than anything else, for as MacLehose later put it, “Who is Patrick’s editor? He doesn’t need an editor.” Proffitt was to read attentively, to praise, and to expect not to be listened to except in the correcting of typographical errors. As a Collins consultant, Ollard would continue to read O’Brian’s typescripts and comment sparingly.
Despite the absence of Ollard, O’Brian’s support at Collins ran deep, in the form of the energetic and eccentric MacLehose, who now oversaw the publishing of O’Brian as an editorial director. Just as T. J. Binyon had passed the Aubrey-Maturin fever to Murdoch and Bayley, who then alerted MacLehose, he too spread the word. On hikes in Europe with his friend Joe Fox, a Random House editor in New York, MacLehose toted along Aubrey-Maturin books or proofs of a new title, from which he read passages to Fox at breakfast. But MacLehose could not get Fox over the threshold of skepticism that exists with any fictional world, especially one so peculiar and so apparently irrelevant. Fox finally told him to lay off. He was not going to publish O’Brian.
At home, MacLehose had a better effect. With piercing dark eyes and a patrician air, the editor was known for his flair. (In one meeting, when an editor could not produce sales figures for a book, MacLehose leaped up, climbed out a window, and scrambled down some scaffolding to the sales manager’s window to get them.) With the change of guard at Collins, he decided on a bold show of support for O’Brian. Collins would reissue all of the out-of-print Aubrey-Maturin titles in hardcover. Brimming with satisfaction at the news, Ollard congratulated O’Brian in a letter on December 13: “I cannot think of any better way of showing the world what complete confidence we have that this is a roman-fleuve that will still be flowing when many more voguish works are forgotten.”
This good news was much needed in Collioure, where the O’Brians were recuperating from another cruel car accident. While bird-watching with their telescope along the tidal pools of the Camargue, near the mouth of the Rhône River, Patrick had let their 2CV veer off the road. The car rolled over into the water. Mary, who had turned sixty-eight in November, found herself trapped inside the car. Fortunately, a passerby came to her aid, pulling her out. Mary’s health had not been the same since their previous accident, and this only compounded her troubles.
In the spring of 1984, The Far Side of the World reached bookstores. Although he had not communicated with Tony Gibbs for some time, O’Brian showed that he had a long memory for those whom he respected and who supported his work. He had tracked down Gibbs, who, since working at Lippincott, had become editor of Yachting magazine and then executive editor of The New Yorker, to tell him that he wanted to dedicate the book to him. After more than a decade, Gibbs was surprised and touched by O’Brian’s thoughtfulness. The author inscribed The Far Side of the World, “For Wolcott Gibbs, Jr., who first encouraged these tales.”
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, MacLehose and Proffitt were orchestrating the rerelease of the first two Aubrey-Maturin novels. They knew that the covers, like every other detail, mattered to O’Brian, and they wanted something special. Ollard pitched in by asking John Bayley and Iris Murdoch if they might consider writing a brief endorsement of the books for use in promoting them.
With the publication of The Far Side of the World and the reissue of Master and Commander and Post Captain, 1984 would be a big year for O’Brian, especially because writing The Far Side of the World had presented a particular challenge. Having begun the series in 1800, instead of at the onset of the Napoleonic wars in 1793, he had at last run out of historical maneuvering room for Aubrey and Maturin’s adventures. Although O’Brian was proud of his adherence to historical fact, he was not going to let this impediment slow down or end the series. In his preface to The Far Side of the World, he confessed to readers that he had been required to create a wrinkle in time to continue the narrative.
Writing in the Irish Times, Dublin-based columnist Kevin Myers marveled at how his favorite author was plowing new literary turf: “Patrick O’Brian has now reached the point in his mammoth series … where he creates his own laws. Not merely has he openly abandoned the chronological imperatives which are the normal sine qua non of historical dramas simply because they no longer suit his purpose, but he also eschews many of the conventions of novel writing.”
Myers had been an O’Brian observer for many years. Following the publication of The Fortune of War, in 1979, he had written, “No one else writing in the genre today can match his erudition, humour, inventiveness and flair. Incredibly, he is almost unknown in [Ireland].” Little had changed. This time Myers worked himself into a froth: “Some of you—alas most of you—have never read a Patrick O’Brian novel. I beseech you to start with Master and Commander, which should be available in paperback from your nearest bookseller. And if he—or she—does not have a copy then beat the wretched fellow.”
In the fall, Master and Commander and Post Captain would each rise like a phoenix in a splendid new cover with serene vignettes drawn by Arthur Barbosa, who also illustrated the cover of The Far Side of the World. Barbosa was a seasoned professional, whose work could be brilliantly evocative and lavishly colorful. He had made his name in the 1940s, illustrating the covers of Georgette Hayers’s novels. He was also the illustrator of the bright, stylized, often lusty covers of George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman books.
The new Master and Commander cover—Titian red with a decorative gold border, including a hawser motif—featured a finely detailed illustration of a tall Jack Aubrey, an epaulet on his left shoulder, a looking glass in his hand, and a sword by his side, standing above a pale Maturin, seated on a quay, presumably at Port Mahon. The cover was subtle, elegant, literary; it did not advertise “adventure,” and Jack Aubrey sported no movie star hairdo, no shimmering white teeth. At last, the book’s appearance was worthy of the treasure it contained. On the back cover, it wore its critical decorations proudly, like Nelson.
At the top of the inside back flap of Master and Commander was Bayley and Murdoch’s quietly powerful endorsement. It had come scrawled in Murdoch’s hand on a postcard, and after Ollard’s editing, it read:
We have long been devotees of C. S. Forester and thought that nothing could fill the gap left by the creator of Hornblower. Then we discovered Patrick O’Brian. His series about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars are beautifully assembled. In some ways they are more sensitive and scholarly than Forester’s tales and every bit as exciting. Captain Aubrey and his surgeon, Stephen Maturin, compose one of those complex and fascinating pairs of characters which have inspired thrilling stories of all kinds since the Iliad.
While all of this was happening, O’Brian had, as usual, been hard at work. This time he toiled on one of his more painful novels, The Reverse of the Medal, one that plunged Aubrey to the nadir of his naval career, in fact, removed him from the service and the all-important post captains’ list, just as had happened to Cochrane in the year 1814.
Once again O’Brian wove an intricate tale on a number of different planes. The story, which climaxes with Aubrey’s being framed for financial fraud, tried unjustly, and dismissed from the service, opens forebodingly with the Surprise in Barbados and a heavyhearted Captain Aubrey sitting on the courts-martial of captured Hermione mutineers, who perpetrated the bloodiest mutiny in Royal Navy history in 1797 and delivered their frigate to the Spanish. With grim inevitability, the accused are convicted, sentenced to death, and promptly hung at the yardarm. Aubrey and the Surprise are now free to sail for home. They chase the American-French privateer Spartan across the Atlantic but to their great frustration are prevented from capturing her after suddenly encountering the British blockading squadron off France. Aubrey, to his horror, is ordered to report on board the admiral’s ship, as his chase escapes unseen by the squadron.
In England, Maturin discovers that, due to his apparent indiscretion with a woman in Malta, his wife, Diana, has left him for a former shipmate, the handsome Swedish officer Jagiello, and is now living in Stockholm. Maturin’s letter to Diana explaining the situation and entrusted to the traitor Andew Wray, an Admiralty secretary with a personal vendetta against both Aubrey and Maturin, had never reached her. Distressed, Maturin returns to his unhealthy use of laudanum, while Aubrey is easily duped by Wray’s scheme to frame him for rigging the stock market. Aubrey is arrested and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and Maturin, despite his anguish over his failing marriage and his urgent desire to repair it, springs into action with all his energy and focus to exonerate and protect his guileless friend.
In consultation with Sir Joseph Blaine and Aubrey’s attorney, Maturin soon realizes that political forces are at play, and that Aubrey has no chance of winning his case. So he attempts to prepare his friend for the inevitable guilty verdict. Here O’Brian was at his best. Nothing in the novels is more moving than Maturin’s anxiety for his friend, his attempts to explain the complex situation to Aubrey, and his efforts to soften the blow. Part of O’Brian’s mastery lay in remaining true to his characters in this emotionally charged atmosphere. Visiting Aubrey in prison, the distraught Maturin shows no excessive signs of pity and remains his old irascible self. Arriving late, he fears being scolded by an understandably peevish Aubrey. “In the event, however,” O’Brian wrote:
Jack was playing such an energetic, hard-fought game of fives in the courtyard that he had lost count of the time, and when the last point was over he turned his scarlet, streaming, beaming face to Stephen and said in a gasping voice, “How glad I am to see you, Stephen,” without a hint of blame. “Lord, I am out of form.”
“You were always grossly obese,” observed Stephen. “Were you to walk ten miles a day, and eat half what you do in fact devour, with no butcher’s meat and no malt liquors, you would be able to play at the hand-ball like a Christian rather than a galvanized manatee, or dugong.” (Pp. 223–24)
Maturin has just come from seeing Sir Joseph Blaine. “Jack Aubrey, dismissed the service, would go stark mad on land,” he had confided to Blaine, “and I have no great wish to stay in England either. I therefore think of buying the Surprise, since Jack will no longer have the means of doing so, taking out letters of marque, manning her as a privateer and desiring him to take command” (p. 223). Maturin’s plan will come to pass, and his influence will to a large degree determine Aubrey’s career through the rest of the series.
In the trial of Aubrey, though O’Brian simplified the events, he faithfully reproduced the spirit of that controversial court case, the verdict of which long remained in dispute. Aubrey, like Cochrane, is found guilty of rigging the stock market, fined, and sentenced to be pilloried in front of the Royal Exchange in the City of London.
While Cochrane’s sentence also included a year in prison, he avoided the pillory thanks to the intervention of Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary and leader of the House of Commons. “The reason for such an excess of generosity was their fear of the consequences if Cochrane was forced to undergo such an ordeal,” wrote the naval historian Christopher Lloyd in his biography, Lord Cochrane: Radical, Liberator, Seaman, which O’Brian considered the best Cochrane biography. “It would have been a signal for a riot” (p. 129). Here O’Brian saw an opportunity to alter history to great effect. The event Castlereagh dreaded was a dramatic show of support for the popular naval officer and against the government.
O’Brian wrote the emotionally charged scene as it might have been, and it became the climax of the novel and one of the landmarks of the series. Throngs of sailors crowd the square in which Aubrey is to be pilloried. They are not there to stone and abuse a helpless officer. On the contrary, they show up to protect him from those who would. These common sailors—many recruited by barbaric means and forced to live in deplorable conditions, under brutal discipline—have plenty of reasons to resent Captain Aubrey, who at sea holds the power of life and death over them. But they do not. Aubrey is one of theirs, a fair and humane captain. Ashamed and bitter over his treatment, especially the loss of his rank, Aubrey cannot savor the poignant moment but remains admirably stoic. However, O’Brian used the crosscurrent of emotions—Aubrey is redeemed even while being publicly humiliated—to create a deep impact on his reader.
O’Brian had foreseen Aubrey’s downfall in his brainstorming session before Desolation Island, but nothing could have prepared him for the personal impact, the melancholy, of so humbling his beloved fictional character. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the chaplain and surgeon’s mate Nathaniel Martin, the poet-lieutenant Mowett, and Maturin engage in a conversation in this novel on the misery of being an author, citing John Dryden and Edmund Spenser among others who died in poverty, and quoting Tobias Smollett and Ovid.
To add to O’Brian’s gloom, his cherished mountain vineyard burned. The summer of 1984 was dry, incendiary, throughout the region. As the sun lashed the maquis in July, fires ignited without warning on inaccessible hillsides. It was as if some evil deity had hurled bolts down from the sky, but these blazes were caused by the carelessness of humans. In August, flames fueled by violent winds consumed more than thirty-five acres near Port Vendres, just to the south of Collioure. Firefighters from those two towns, as well as from Banyuls and Elne, battled the blaze for more than twelve hours. Several days later, fire ravaged forty more acres in the area. On August 22, a midnight flare-up destroyed property near the Collioure train station.
One such fire wiped out O’Brian’s 1984 upper vineyard grape harvest. However, green vines do not burn well, and all but about a quarter of the plants would survive. The red-clay vineyard, impossibly rocky and sunburned in any season, was now bare and ashy in places and bordered by blackened and withered forest.
In early September, not long after the gratifying reissue of Master and Commander and Post Captain, O’Brian shipped off a typed version of The Reverse of the Medal to Ollard. Little could he have known that in taking Aubrey so low he had written the scene—in the pillory—that would carry Aubrey and Maturin to such great heights. Eventually, it would capture the attention of a New York editor, who would gamble his reputation on it, and one day it would even be read on stage in Los Angeles by an admiring actor named Charlton Heston.
In October, Ollard congratulated O’Brian on the new manuscript. The same month, Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, a convivial retired Royal Navy commander and a descendant of the great frigate captain Michael Seymour, who had distinguished himself on board the Amethyst during the Napoleonic wars, visited the O’Brians. An energetic seventy-year-old, Sir Michael, whose wife, Lady Faith, daughter of the ninth earl of Sandwich, had died the previous year, took solace by swimming in Collioure’s cold October sea.
Sir Michael arrived in time to help out with the melancholy vendange. As a naturalist, O’Brian took a certain grim pleasure in strolling with Sir Michael through the charred remains of his vines, where nature was already capitalizing on the death to build anew.
Even without the wildfire, it would have been a disappointing vendange for the soon-to-be-seventy author. His remaining downhill vines had benefited from a good flowering time, only to suffer a cool and ruinous August. He feared the harvest would be reduced by about two-thirds. Not only that, but he doubted whether the quality of the grapes was high enough that year for him to make Banyuls, the area’s famous brownish red vin doux naturel, a distant cousin of port.
Also that fall, MacLehose informed O’Brian that Norah Smallwood was very ill and probably dying. She was a great admirer of Jack Aubrey. “Why do you waste your time with that thin intellectual?” she had teased MacLehose about his preference for Maturin. “Absolutely characteristic of you. Aubrey’s the thing: English, brave, peccable, glorious, lovable. You’re young, of course, didn’t see England at war.”
MacLehose asked O’Brian, who also knew and liked Smallwood, a grande dame of the London publishing set, if he might give her proofs of the latest book. O’Brian agreed, and MacLehose delivered a typescript to her in the hospital. She was delighted. For MacLehose, there could be no greater testimony to the power of O’Brian’s roman-fleuve than its ability to please and comfort his friend, so near the end of her life.
* In 1981, Stein and Day would bring out The Mauritius Command under their Day Books paperback imprint. This was to be the last Aubrey-Maturin publication in the United States for ten years.
* O’Brian later said that he thought he had culled the word “balmagowry” (which he believed meant “slightly sour cream”) from the eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns, but a thorough search of Burns’s work reveals no such word.
* According to Publishers Weekly (November 4, 1983), in the year 1982, because of a recession in the economy, the book publishing industry suffered one of its worst years in recent memory. The two largest retail booksellers at the time were probably Walden Books and B. Dalton.