A MAN IN PURSUIT of his living will immerse himself in any number of difficult tasks required of him, but when it comes to reading novels nothing will induce him to attempt anything difficult; a publisher who thinks he will induce a public or find a readership for novels that have never achieved popularity, is of course a mad philanthropist, a self-righteous lunatic if he thinks he can influence or change general taste.
—Herbert van Thal, The Tops of the Mulberry Trees, 1971
Just why the Aubrey-Maturin novels had never caught on in the United States is hard to say, but following the dismal experiences of Lippincott and Stein and Day, U.S. publishers for years had not dared pick up the series again, no matter how positive the reviews in Britain. Still, as in the early days there, O’Brian’s books had found some fertile soil in the New World. Throughout the O’Brian-less decade, a small, potentially influential group doggedly followed his work. They prevailed upon English friends or American expatriates living in England to mail over each volume in the series, or they relied upon book dealers to mysteriously produce the coveted work, almost as if it were contraband.
Among these devotees were New York City writers Mark Horowitz and Richard Snow. They and their friends devoured each new novel—bootlegged from England—like a brotherhood of monks anxiously awaiting the next gilt-lettered scroll. “We would show the books to our publisher friends,” recalls Horowitz. “But they wouldn’t get it. No one would publish him here.”
As O’Brian’s reputation increased in Britain, however, friends of a New York City editor named Starling Lawrence urged him to take a look at the books. A 1965 Princeton graduate, Lawrence had done stints at Cambridge and in the Peace Corps, where he taught English to French-speaking Cameroonians, before becoming a reader for Evan Thomas and Eric Swenson, prominent editors at W. W. Norton, one of the more staid and cerebral Manhattan publishers. Lawrence had proven his good eye when he plucked James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (1974) from the slush pile. The spy thriller became a best-seller. Around the same time, he became involved with another of Norton’s major successes, Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974), the prosecutor’s story of Lawrence’s Charles Manson murders.
Lawrence, a tall, gangly man, with deep-set eyes and a boyish sense of humor, had a knack for pushing the boundaries at Norton and scoring big. One of his lucrative discoveries was Dr. Martin Katahn, whose third diet book, The Rotation Diet (1986), sold 800,000 copies. The year 1989 would be the most momentous of Lawrence’s editorial career. He published Liar’s Poker, a colorful exposé of greed, gall, and testosterone on Wall Street by the former Salomon Brothers bond trader Michael Lewis. The book quickly became a best-seller. Lawrence’s other big discovery that year could not have been more diametrically opposed in subject matter to the cynical, money-loving world of Wall Street.
While in London scouting for books, the editor happened to be in the offices of the literary agency Sheil Land, which had bought Richard Simon’s agency upon his retirement. There Lawrence saw Vivien Green, who had joined Sheil Land and oversaw Simon’s clients. Lawrence noticed several paperback copies of O’Brian’s books on a shelf. He remembered the words of his cousin: “How can you call yourself a publisher and allow this man to remain unpublished in the U.S.?” And he recalled Stephen Becker’s enthusiasm for the books. A sudden, fortuitous impulse overcame what Lawrence later laughingly called his “deep abiding aversion to boats of every sort,” a condition he had acquired after one distressing summer of sailing lessons at Fisher’s Island, where he came in last in every race.
Green gladly gave Lawrence the books. On the flight home, he opened The Reverse of the Medal and fell into the rhythm of O’Brian’s prose. He had virtually no background in nautical history, and he simply let the language wash over him, he later recalled in Publishers Weekly, like “the high sea off the side of the deck,” feeling fully satisfied that this author “wasn’t’ talking through his hat.”
“It was a slow fuse,” he said later, “but it took hold.” Slow for a New York publisher perhaps; a quarter of the way through the book, he decided that he wanted to publish O’Brian. This was not Hornblower redux, he had discovered, much to his delight, but a subtly written, multi-textured novel of manners that gained energy and appeal by being set during Nelson’s age. Unlike so many Forester copycats, it did not owe its existence simply to the action of that era and to Britain’s nostalgia for the days when its empire stretched around the globe.
But it was the climax of the novel, where Jack Aubrey is pilloried for rigging the stock market, a crime of which he is innocent, that convinced Lawrence of O’Brian’s greatness. O’Brian had brilliantly tapped the emotional potential of that moment to create a heartrending scene. If it wasn’t clear before that O’Brian was looking deeply into the human soul through his naval stories, then it was now.
Lawrence was under no illusions. Relaunching the series would not be easy. Taking over a mature author in midstream was hard enough, but when it was one whose work already had the taint of failure, it was almost a no-win situation. Just convincing his own sales staff to put their hearts into selling books that had already proven to be nonstarters in the marketplace was a daunting task. He would be sticking out his neck, and if he lost credibility on this seemingly perverse and personal mission, it could damage his influence for the rest of his authors. Nonetheless, convinced that O’Brian’s writing was extraordinary, he was willing to give it a try. From a business standpoint, the fact that thirteen titles existed and O’Brian was still writing meant that even with marginal sales, the potential upside was meaningful.
Deciding to give O’Brian another chance was perhaps the highest hurdle to leap, but there were plenty more. As Lawrence set about persuading financial and marketing executives at W. W. Norton to revive the series in the United States, the world’s biggest book market, there were many ponderous questions: Should they launch the series in hardcover or paperback? Should they start at the beginning or with O’Brian’s new novel? If the latter, how would they bring the readers up to speed on what had already transpired in the series? If the former, were they risking a repetition of failure? (Lawrence felt that Master and Commander, though, of course, the natural place to enter the series, was one of the more difficult books.) How would they create a fresh image for the series?
Adding pressure to complication was the fact that the launch needed to happen quickly if Norton wanted to capitalize on the publication of O’Brian’s upcoming book, The Nutmeg of Consolation. Reviewers, after all, would be far more likely to write about this new hardcover book than paperback rereleases of old books. Despite some skeptics at Norton, Lawrence convinced the publishers to make a big play.
The editor negotiated through Anne Borchardt, Vivien Green’s corresponding agent in the United States, for a package of rights, including new releases and the backlist, meaning that if Lawrence’s instincts proved correct, Norton stood to benefit greatly from O’Brian’s revival. When Norton finally published Master and Commander and Post Captain in paperback in August 1990, it became evident that many lessons had been learned since the days when Lippincott and Stein and Day had groped in the dark to convey to readers that these books were the rarest of species: well-written page-turners.
Norton had a tradition of publishing good-quality nonfiction books about the sea and had taken the high road, where it was clear from the critical acclaim in Britain that there should be some appeal. The cover of Master and Commander carried a beautiful painting by Geoff Hunt of the tiny brig Sophie in port at Minorca. Inside, an elegant nineteenth-century illustration from marine painters to the Crown Dominick and John Thomas Serres’ Liber Nauticus named the sails of a square-rigged ship. On the back cover was a thoughtful quote from Stephen Becker: “O’Brian is literature, and I read and reread him with awe and gratitude. … If I could keep only half a dozen contemporary writers O’Brian would be one of them.”
It was just the right touch, sophisticated but not too heavy. Norton’s tactics worked. Compare Publishers Weekly’s original review of Post Captain in 1972 (“overwritten for so little plot”) to its enthusiastic July 6, 1990, review of The Letter of Marque: “The early-19th-century locutions are fascinating, as are the evocation of period shipboard life (including ship-provisioning and naval lingo), Whitehall politics (rotten boroughs, etc.) and drug addiction (coca leaf-chewing as well as opium-eating). Seafarers and landlubbers alike will enjoy this swift, witty tale of money and love.”
However, on October 7, 1990, the bottom appeared to fall out of Lawrence’s courageous effort to revive O’Brian’s series. In the New York Times, Newgate Callendar, a pseudonymous reviewer, sneeringly reviewed The Letter of Marque. “Most likely Patrick O’Brian snarls with rage every time a reviewer points out that his sea stories are derived from C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series,” he wrote. “But it is true, and never truer than in The Letter of Marque.”
Callendar must have skimmed the book, and he certainly had not read the rest of the series, for he continued: “[O’Brian] does not have Forester’s flair. His Capt. Jack Aubrey has none of Hornblower’s complexity and charm. And Mr. O’Brian’s writing is rather long-winded, even turgid … [Aubrey] does pull off a brilliant coup, and it’s a shame that it’s hard to grow interested in so colorless a figure.” It is difficult to imagine anyone truly acquainted with the series calling Aubrey colorless. Bluff, absolutely; insensitive and imprudent, yes; simple-minded, certainly, at times; but Aubrey—whose face had “the mark of a cutlass-slash from one ear right across the cheek-bone and another scar, this one from a splinter, along the line of the jaw to the other cat” (The Surgeon’s Mate, p. 49)—was anything but colorless.
One can easily sympathize with O’Brian’s pain at seeing his opus, so long underrated, assassinated so glibly. Calendar’s comparison of O’Brian to Forester hardly needs to be addressed now. By contrast, consider Oxford don John Bayley’s far better informed assessment of the Aubrey-Maturin novels in the London Review of Books in 1987: “These are emphatically not adventure stories, or the sort of mechanical marine thrillers which sprung up in the wake of C. S. Forester. Smollett and Marryat are being re-written less for the excitement than for the feeling.”
But the damage, in the most influential newspaper in the United States and in the publishing industry, was done. O’Brian’s hopes of redemption, so near, seemed to be dashed. How terribly ironic it was to have had his book Testimonies praised in a comprehensive review at the expense of Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson, and Ernest Hemingway, and now, some forty years into his career, to have The Letter of Marque denigrated beside the novels of Peter Tonkin, Bernard Cornwell, and Paul Bishop.
O’Brian was heartsick. For a while, he found it impossible to work, and he set aside the manuscript of the next book. In this dark moment, it looked as if the idea to revive the series in the United States had been a mistake. The dread of having to suspend publication of the series halfway through had haunted Lawrence from the very start. It would be like abandoning an orphan on the street. It would be a public embarrassment. In fact, ever since he had convinced his colleagues to publish the series, Lawrence later confessed, he had been motivated to succeed more by the fear of failure than by the potential of selling thousands of copies.
Callendar’s review aside, some inexplicable barrier to commercial success seemed to thwart O’Brian’s novels in the United States. Perhaps it was the crossing of genres. It was, and remains, an axiom of publishing that a book needs to fall into a specific, nameable category to sell. Publishers want to know exactly which bookstore shelf a title will be sold on before they will commission it. The Aubrey-Maturin novels were too well written, too nuance-laden, and too challenging to be classified as adventure-genre stories. They certainly weren’t for children or even for any but the most advanced young adults. But could historical fiction, a genre generally shunned by critics and scholars, make it in the literature section? At this point, it looked as if the answer was no.
Come what may, Lawrence had no doubt that he could bear up; however, he worried about O’Brian, whom he deemed to be the most deserving author he knew. It distressed him that O’Brian quite likely would have to suffer the humiliation of failing all over again in the United States.
Fortunately, Mark Horowitz, now living in Los Angeles, had already set other wheels in motion. He had not forgotten the many years of reading bootleg copies of Aubrey and Maturin and the rebuffed suggestions to publisher friends. When he had found out that there was an editor brave enough to give O’Brian another shot, he decided to help out. He called his old friend Richard Snow, who had since become editor of American Heritage magazine. “You have to do something,” Horowitz told Snow, who had not yet heard the news of O’Brian’s rerelease in the United States. “O’Brian has an American publisher for five minutes.” Snow said he would see what he could do.
Meanwhile, Norton busily played catch-up. The company had made a commitment to the author, and it was not going to cave in at the first signs of adversity. It still planned to issue the next four titles—books three to six—in paperback in 1991.
Urged on by Horowitz, Snow took advantage of this opportunity. Hence sprang O’Brian’s, and indeed Lawrence’s, redemption—in the form of a lucid, unequivocal statement about O’Brian’s work. In his front-cover essay, “An Author I’d Walk the Plank For,” in the January 6, 1991, New York Times Book Review, Snow not only praised The Letter of Marque but also stated that the Aubrey-Maturin novels constitute “what I continue to believe are the best historical novels ever written.” This clean assessment sliced through the usual book babble like an arrow through straw, and it lodged fast in the consciousness of the nation’s fiction readers.
Snow went on to say, “On every page Mr. O’Brian reminds us with subtle artistry of the most important of all historical lessons: that times change but people don’t, that the griefs and follies and victories of the men and women who were here before us are in fact the maps of our own lives.” Snow’s eloquent endorsement pierced, if only for a moment, the stigma associated with historical fiction. And if these works were, as he claimed, the best ever written, they had the potential of elevating the genre, perhaps even changing it. Now even literary snobs could afford to give O’Brian a chance. And they did. Positive word of mouth began to flow.
While Snow’s watershed review was seeping into the minds of American book readers, The Nutmeg of Consolation, book number fourteen in the Aubrey-Maturin series, arrived in British bookstores. T. J. Binyon’s February 23 review in the Independent contained another powerful and emphatic statement in support of the author:
On 1 April 1800, during a performance of Locatelli’s C major quartet in the music-room of the Governor’s house in Port Mahon, Minorca, a penniless Irish physician drives a hostile elbow into the ribs of a naval lieutenant without a ship. It is perhaps the most productive affront in fiction since April 1625, when d’Artagnan, rushing headlong down the stairs of M de Treville’s house on the rue Vieux-Columbier in pursuit of the Chevalier de Rochefort, accidentally insulted the three musketeers.
Binyon went on to make a favorable comparison with Leo Tolstoy.
Shortly before Binyon’s critique, fittingly on February 14, the anniversary of the Battle of Cape St. Vincent (where Admiral Sir John Jervis, with the help of Captain Horatio Nelson, defeated the Spanish in 1797), British author and 1990 Booker Prize-winner A. S. Byatt had reviewed the book with great enthusiasm for the Evening Standard. Byatt had begun reading the series on the recommendation of her friend Iris Murdoch; Murdoch had recommended O’Brian’s books several times to her, but she kept forgetting his name. Finally, she had tried Master and Commander a few times and had given up. It was too complicated and moved too slowly. But another writer friend, Francis Spufford, had brought her a copy in France, where she did much of her creative work and where her library was dominated by the likes of Nietzsche and Freud. She had taken O’Brian to bed with her one night. This time the mood had been just right, and off she had sped into a deep romance with the series.
Praising the wide-ranging plot of The Nutmeg of Consolation, Byatt concluded: “I experienced desolation on reaching the end of this, O’Brian’s 14th book—but am told that the next is half written. I can hardly wait.”
Since O’Brian was now in his late seventies, Byatt wasn’t the only reader to find the author’s progress with the saga—not just completing the next episode but moving toward some grand, or otherwise, conclusion—a topic of speculation. How would he end the series? He couldn’t possibly leave his readers hanging, with Aubrey and Maturin halfway through some remote mission for the Admiralty. Or could he? Certain important events in Aubrey’s life and career were based on the life of Thomas Cochrane, the legendary frigate captain. Would O’Brian turn to historical events to find a conclusion? Following the stock market scandal that destroyed his reputation, Cochrane found vindication by leading the navies of Chile and Peru in overthrowing Spanish colonial rule. Here he displayed his intrepidity and leadership abilities on a grander scale than he could have as a cog in the Royal Navy, and he was restored subsequently to the post captain’s list.
But while O’Brian might have felt some pressure to push to a grand conclusion, he was ambivalent about neatly tying up the series. After all, life is rarely endowed with tidy endings. Besides, his writing output had not fallen off, nor had his reviews begun to suffer. As Byatt, herself a capable literary technician and a shrewd critic, wrote in her review of The Nutmeg of Consolation:
O’Brian’s narrative pace is always gripping: it shifts its speed and provides endlessly varying shocks and surprises—comic, grim, farcical, and tragic. An essential of the truly gripping book for the narrative addict is the creation of a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit, and O’Brian does this with prodigal specificity and generosity The writing is as strong and delightfully various as the people and plots. And everything—skies and seas and ports and creatures—is vivid and sensuously present.
Prodigal specificity and generosity! There was no condescension here, no kindly comments suggesting that the tales were nice for a writer rapidly approaching his ninth decade but not what they used to be. In fact, the voyage that began in The Thirteen Gun Salute had, to many minds, revitalized the Aubrey-Maturin epic.
Indeed, perhaps by necessity from his own frail youth, O’Brian had set an enviably mellow pace for his life, ripening slowly and fully. As a writer he was a methodical craftsman who gave everything to that craft and received in return the satisfaction of knowing he did a job well, the only reward he could ultimately expect. This is not to say that he did not crave popular and critical recognition. However, such recognition was beyond his control. His greatest accolades would come very late in life. His mind and body were still telling him that he had many more miles to travel with his beloved characters. But perhaps, also, O’Brian did not plan any great crescendo for the series.
In fact, he intimated just this in chapter 9 of The Nutmeg of Consolation in a discussion on the endings of novels. There, Maturin’s close friend and fellow natural philosopher, the chaplain turned surgeon’s mate Nathaniel Martin, questions the importance of endings, citing one Bourville, who he says defined the novel “as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end” (p. 256). Maturin agrees, quoting an unnamed Frenchman: “La bêtise c’est de vouloir conclure*The conventional ending, with virtue rewarded and loose ends tied up is often sadly chilling; and its platitude and falsity tend to infect what has gone before, however excellent” (p. 256).
Those who knew O’Brian well did not expect him to tie off the series in a neat bundle. So inextricably interwoven was his life with his fictional characters and their world that for him this would be tantamount to saying: “Right, I’ve had a long wonderful life. It’s time to end it now.” Indeed, as he later approached that seemingly unattainable twentieth novel, the one that for many years he held out as the carrot, the one that would take Aubrey full circle in his naval career, the one that he had predicted would probably wrap up the series, he began to back off his prediction: “I’m not sure whether I shan’t take him a bit beyond full circle, with one or two incidents at the very height of the Royal Navy’s glory,” he later told Time magazine. “I should like simply for my own amusement—and because I don’t really see how I can bear easily to live without writing—and at least for my own pleasure—to write one more, or perhaps two.”
In the winter and spring of 1991, while U.S. book sales began to mount beyond anything O’Brian had ever seen, he worked on a new Aubrey-Maturin novel, Clarissa Oakes (The Truelove, in the United States), a largely self-contained episode in the series, which may have drawn its inspiration from U.S. Navy captain David Porter’s battles with natives on the South Pacific island of Nuka Hiva. The beginning of the novel saw Aubrey irritable and frustrated, not the least reasons for which were that Maturin had gotten into a bloody duel in Sydney, leading to a distinct lack of cooperation from port officials, and that he had helped a convict escape on board the Surprise. “Profound attachment to Stephen Maturin,” O’Brian wrote, from Aubrey’s point of view, “did not preclude profound dissatisfaction at times: even lasting dissatisfaction” (p. 11).
O’Brian had long since settled on a pattern of reintroducing the characters and updating readers on their recent exploits in the first twenty pages. This also eased him back into the flow of his fictional world. As he wrote, using a detailed outline, he numbered the pages in each chapter separately so that he could carefully control its length. Upon his request, HarperCollins’s editorial assistants helped with minor historical research, allowing O’Brian to write without interruption.
But O’Brian was in no hurry to bring Aubrey and Maturin back to the Atlantic. Their eventual arrival in South America to conduct the political mission with which Maturin had been charged so long before in The Letter of Marque would be put on hold for another 256 pages while O’Brian took them on a sudden detour through the Pacific. He had contrived a special assignment, involving two cannibalistic tribes warring on a remote fictional island named Moahu: Aubrey simply needed to make sure the victor in the struggle remained loyal to the Crown.
But first O’Brian planted a stowaway on board the Surprise, an escaped female convict named Clarissa Harvill, who has been hidden in the cable-tier of the frigate by her lover, the rather hairy but very popular midshipman Oakes.* Aubrey, who discovers that the entire crew, including Maturin, has kept her presence a secret from him, is irate. “Everyone knows how I hate a woman aboard,” he erupts to Maturin. “They are worse than cats or parsons for bad luck. … It will be the lower deck full of Portsmouth brutes next, and a Miss in every other cabin—discipline all to pieces—Sodom and Gomorrah” (p. 33). But Maturin counters, “It is perfectly well known throughout the ship that when you were Oakes’ age you were disrated and turned before the mast for hiding a girl in that very part of the ship. Surely you must see that this pope-holy sanctimonious attitude has a ludicrous as well as a most unamiable side?” (pp. 33–34).
Aubrey threatens to turn the couple ashore as soon as he can, and in a droll turn, Maturin orders Aubrey, whom he happens to be treating for a stomach disorder, to bend over a chest for an enema. From his “position of great moral advantage,” Maturin lectures his patient in a mutinous manner. “Damn you, Stephen Maturin,” Aubrey finally responds, pulling up his pants. “And damn you, Jack Aubrey,” Maturin retorts. “Swallow this draught half an hour before retiring: the pills you may take if you do not sleep, which I doubt” (p. 34).
The scene was vintage O’Brian, capturing the complex Aubrey-Maturin relationship like time in a bottle. The two are best friends, but O’Brian never let that friendship grow flabby. Instead, it feeds on its own tension, the pair sometimes struggling to abide each other, to communicate, to convince, pushing the limits of tolerance, but above all tolerating. This last was a commodity the O’Brian family, particularly Patrick, had often been short on. He was certainly not one to suffer a fool. But in this fictional relationship he could demonstrate how friendship should work, and by infusing the scene with his slightly absurd sense of humor, he was able to do it without a heavy hand. It was precisely such passages that his increasingly large devoted readership had come to expect and cherish.
In resolving the matter, Midshipman Oakes marries Clarissa Harvill, and Clarissa Oakes became an important new character for O’Brian, in some ways a female counterpart of Maturin. Oakes, as she later confesses to Maturin, was a sexually abused orphan, who consequently cannot experience sexual desire as an adult. (She is yet another O’Brian character struggling with an inability to love.) Oakes and Maturin form a strong attachment. While they are perhaps too similar to fall in love (not to mention the fact that Maturin is married), their relationship has the tension of a courtship and is the subject of speculation on board ship. O’Brian was pleased with his new character, who allowed him the rare opportunity to explore platonic love between the sexes, and he was anxious to find out how convincingly he had portrayed this unusual female character.
In his notes, O’Brian mapped out Moahu, hourglass-shaped, standing north to south and not too tightly cinched at the waist. He drew five rows of hash marks to indicate hills dividing the island in half, and a circle to denote an old volcano. In the southern half lay the territory of Puolani. A stream ran from the hills to a bay on the south coast, called Eeahu, protected by semicircular shoals to the east and west. The northern half of the island was controlled by the ruler Kalahua. The inlet Pabay, around which this tribe lived, lay to the northeast and was protected by a single bar of shoals. Beneath his map of Moahu, O’Brian drew an inset of Pabay with the path a ship would take in tacking into the harbor.
As he had done in The Nutmeg of Consolation, O’Brian created a land battle that proved he was as effective there as he was at sea. The battle occurs offstage. Maturin, who is stationed, as is the reader, downhill from the action, learns of the victory only after two natives come running down the path, each gripping a human head by the hair. Aubrey then relates the ambush and the effect of ten rounds of case shot on a surprised enemy in a narrow jungle lava cleft.
In the spring of 1991, Barney contacted Patrick again. They had not corresponded since 1989, when Patrick reacted so peevishly to Barney’s autobiography. Barney had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Patrick sent a sympathetic letter and his two latest books, which greatly pleased his brother. Their relationship, though far from perfect, was restored, which was fortunate since Barney did not have long to live.
Mary’s health was very fragile too. She was weak and taking an array of pills and drafts prescribed by a Perpignan doctor. Patrick fretted about her health all summer, but still he finished Clarissa Oakes. He found he was proud of his new character Clarissa, but he also knew that he had walked a fine line in pulling her off successfully. Mary assured him that he had. Ollard read the manuscript and concurred, though he once again warned O’Brian about excessive arcaneness. As a concession, O’Brian agreed to define a Pyrenean “desman,” which he did as “that rare ill-natured cousin to the shrew” (p. 185). But as for the Latin phrase “foeda est in coitu et brevis voluptas” (p. 165) (meaning, there is a filthiness in sex and only brief pleasure), readers were still on their own.
Now that O’Brian was becoming an established name in less rarefied literary circles, the Washington Post asked him to review Tom Clancy’s 798-page The Sum of All Fears. The behemoth novel clearly caused O’Brian some consternation. In his July 28 review, he even resorted to public self-reference, a rarity for him: “To be sure my first introduction to the book was unpromising: an ill-printed set of pages that would not hold together, an inept blurb and a curiously authoritarian note from the publisher.” Despite a slow start, he had read the proof until midnight one night, keeping running notes. He was impressed by Clancy’s skill in recounting a series of complex events involving the CIA, the FBI, the Vatican, Arab terrorists, East German intelligence, Israelis, and even a disgruntled Sioux, all leading up to the brink of world war. But he found Clancy’s inability to effectively inhabit his characters and to make them come alive disappointing. Each new character, he complained, arrived on the scene with an “artless but interminable interior monologue.”
O’Brian presented a theory regarding Clancy, who, he wrote, was “by nature a storyteller, like those sennachies who used to recite genealogies, history, legends and tales in the great Irish houses.” Oral storytellers speak primarily of events, O’Brian reasoned, and their characters are revealed by statements and inferences. The storyteller comes at his characters mainly from the outside. On the other hand, the capable novelist has far greater freedom and can come at his characters from the inside, even to the point of presenting streams of consciousness. O’Brian admired Clancy’s descriptive powers, just as he admired Forester’s, but, he wrote, when Clancy “deals with his people from within it seems to me that he is out of his element, that he labors too hard, that he becomes verbose.”
In August, the American reviews of The Nutmeg of Consolation, no less approving than the British, rolled off the presses. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote that “all of O’Brian’s strengths are on parade,” although he deemed the book “primarily for insiders—many of whom no doubt will pepper me with missives taking exception to that judgement.” In the Boston Globe, Robert Taylor called O’Brian’s novels much trickier and more complex than Forester, and less farcical than [George MacDonald] Fraser. … O’Brian’s off-slant techniques, his renunciation of big bow-wow scenes—even amid a cannonade, Aubrey pauses for “a cold collation in the gunroom”—require close attention, likewise the far-ranging web of wit and allusion. Consider the odd title here, the name of Aubrey’s ship, which is derived from a Malayan phrase. The series is idiosyncratic and, once you’ve found your sea legs, captivating.
After all these years, O’Brian was winning an audience in the United States on his own terms, and soon this exuberant nation, in so many ways the antithesis of his beloved eighteenth-century England, would do its best to win him over. The advance on royalties in America now gave way to royalties, money in the bank. Although neither he nor Mary were at all avaricious, there were many pleasant ways to employ the new funds.
Among them for Patrick was setting himself up as a proper gentleman in London, much in the fashion of Aubrey and Maturin. In October 1991, he attended a dinner at Brooks’s, the St. James’s club where he was a proud new member and which became his home base in that city. At the dinner, Richard Ollard introduced him to John Saumarez Smith, a member of the club’s library committee and managing director of the noted Curzon Street bookshop G. Heywood Hill, where Nancy Mitford worked during World War II.
The next day, O’Brian and Smith ate lunch together in the informal Spencer Room at Brooks’s. Smith mentioned to O’Brian that there were book dealers who seemed to be making a living selling the relatively rare first editions of the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
“I am afraid I am going to spoil your lunch,” O’Brian responded. “The publisher is always very generous with copies. But I don’t like to give them to friends because I feel like it puts them under an obligation to read them. So there they are. They stack up, gather dust, take up space …”
“How many books? “ asked Smith, his eyebrows arching.
“I should think thirty or forty,” replied O’Brian.
“What exactly did you do with the books?” asked the bookseller, a chagrined smile creeping across his face.
“Just in the last two or three weeks, I took them to the local tip,” O’Brian said.
Toward the end of lunch, during coffee, O’Brian looked squarely at Smith and said softly, “Tell me, how much are my books worth?”
“Well, it would be very unusual for them to go for less than thirty or forty pounds,” Smith said.*
“Now you’ve spoiled my lunch,” replied O’Brian.
Coming on top of the laudatory reviews of The Nutmeg of Consolation, O’Brian had a new honor in which to bask. In December 1991, he received an invitation to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He strongly suspected that his friend Richard Ollard, himself a member, had something to do with his election, and he was right. O’Brian joyfully accepted the invitation to join this august group, and he felt special gratitude toward Ollard.
Meanwhile, O’Brian worked on his next installment in the series, The Wine-Dark Sea. He at last carried Maturin to South America, where he had been bound since The Letter of Marque, four novels earlier. But things do not go well for Maturin there,’ and he is forced to march through the High Andes to escape. O’Brian had never been to the Andes himself, but he used his copy of Abbé Prévost’s Histoire générale des voyages, which collected accounts of many early voyages of discovery, as well as the 1810 Encyclopaedia Britannica, to provide him with the descriptions of flora, fauna, and landscape that he needed to see the ever-observant Maturin through the trek. Although O’Brian had disparaged Prévost’s book in the foreword to his anthology A Book of Voyages, over the years it had proven to be an indispensable tool in writing the series.
In December, O’Brian, celebrating his fortunate autumn and the accumulating royalties, replaced his eleven-year-old Citroën 2CV, which had a hole in the floor under its rubber carpet. The 2CV was no longer manufactured, so he bought a long, gray, fin-backed Citroën BX, more car than he actually wanted, though he valued its power for climbing the steep, rutted road to the high vineyard.
It was holiday time, and the O’Brians planned a stay in England, which they usually visited about twice a year. These days, travel constituted O’Brian’s starkest exposure to the twentieth century, and he loathed it. In a 1990 book review, he summed up in a single sentence his feelings on modern-day travel: “Anyone who has travelled even as far as Paris, threading with more or less success the Kafkaesque corridors of Heathrow or God preserve us Gatwick, will agree that a man’s soul has to be riveted to his body to survive it.”
Once in London, however, he could in many ways still buffer himself from the twentieth century. He banked at Coutts, an ancient institution, now part of NatWest but nevertheless maintaining something of its own identity. He shopped for books at the venerable Hatchards, at 187 Piccadilly Street, which had opened in 1797. He bought his hats from James Lock and Company, the hat shop of Nelson and the duke of Wellington, located at 6 St. James’s Street. Collins, his publisher, had occupied a number of buildings along St. James’s Place before moving to Mayfair in 1983. All of these establishments were in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace, and none was far from Brooks’s, which had changed little in more than two centuries.
It was the rarefied halls of Brooks’s (fictionalized as Black’s in the Aubrey-Maturin series) that truly and most benevolently anachronized London for O’Brian. There he was attended to by the always helpful but never too personal staff. There the throbbing anonymity of London’s depressing multitudes was reduced to a village of distinguished gentlemen; he could bump into fellow members Richard Ollard and Philip Ziegler (another Collins editor and biographer of Lord Melbourne, King William IV, and King Edward VIII) or the likes of Max Hastings, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Roy Jenkins, chancellor of Oxford and president of the Royal Society of Literature, and Cambridge don Sir John Plumb, a biographer of Sir Robert Walpole. Although the club’s membership had recently grown to 1,400 after hovering in the 600-to-850 range in all the years up to 1960, the makeup of its members had hardly changed; all were either wealthy, powerful, intellectual, or from England’s first families, and usually a combination of these.
On this trip, however, the O’Brians stayed not at Brooks’s but at nearby Boodle’s, whose “ladies’ side,” with its spacious rooms, was open to Brooks’s members and their wives. Brooks’s remained resolutely opposed to admitting women. This was fine by O’Brian, who much respected the club’s traditions.
He had recently contributed an essay on the notable World War I members of Brooks’s to a collection called Edwardian Brooks’s: A Social History. The book was edited by Ziegler and historian Desmond Seward. In his essay, O’Brian used as his departure point the club’s entrance hall, with its fireplace and mantel clock, where members, relaxing in comfortable chairs, frequently waited for their guests to arrive. On the walk hung a marble plaque commemorating the members and club servants killed in the two world wars of the twentieth century.
No fewer than forty were killed in the First World War, O’Brian related in the essay, from a membership of just 609, only two-fifths of whom were of an age eligible to serve. O’Brian estimated that including wounded, the casualty list for the club would have included about 134 of the 244 age-eligible members, a remarkably high percentage, which he attributed to the fact that the members were far better off than most of their fellow citizens and “took it entirely for granted that they should pay for these privileges.”
He was unapologetically proud of Brooks’s and the values it stood for. “Varied as their backgrounds were,” he concluded his elegy of the most noted members to be killed at war, “they were all clubbable men and they all shared a liberal attitude towards the world: not so much Liberal in the party sense—indeed, many of them may scarcely have been politically-inclined at all—but liberal as one says the liberal arts or a liberal education, which surely encourages a certain openess and candour.”
For O’Brian, to step into the hallway at Brooks’s was to enter another world, “a wholly traditional place untied to any of the set periods and surviving them all.” Founded in 1764 by William Almack and known for its high-stakes gambling, Brooks’s later became the Whigs’ club and had as members the prime minister William Pitt the Younger, the actor and dramatist David Garrick, the man-of-letters Horace Walpole, and the philosopher David Hume. As John Campbell, later Lord Campbell, the lord chancellor, wrote of Brooks’s in 1822, when elected a member despite recently losing his estates: “To belong to it is a feather in my cap. … The Club consists of the first men for rank and talent in England.”
Brooks’s was, indeed, physically and in spirit a manifestation of what O’Brian had now spent the greater portion of his life capturing on paper. When one enters the halls of Brooks’s, he wrote—and one could apply the statement as easily to O’Brian’s fiction—one steps “into a timeless way of life, a material and spiritual civilization that has almost vanished.” His membership in the club was also the most obvious manifestation of what he had ardently desired and become: accepted by the wealthy and intellectual upper crust of England. Now in his seventy-seventh year, he was immensely proud of this status and took pleasure in throwing lavish dinners there for his friends and editors. He was also proud that his books were on the shelves there and that they were often borrowed by his fellow members. He distanced himself from his past poverty and especially did not like to talk about having built his house, at least in part, with his own hands, which he now thought made him look vulgar.
At Brooks’s, O’Brian, ever wary of the media, could also host interviewers at great advantage, as he did in late February 1992. There was no confusion about whose ground rules applied; the interviewer was officially a guest and so had to mind his manners. Not only that, but in these hallowed Old World halls, a nonmember, no matter how determinedly iconoclastic, was smothered by the member’s moral superiority. It was an intimidating place, and a humbled inquisitor was far less likely to probe in sensitive spots.
Francis Spufford, a soft-spoken Cambridge graduate and freelance literary critic, who was writing a profile of O’Brian for the Sunday edition of the Independent, was unlikely to do that anyway. As a child of twelve, he had read The Golden Ocean, beginning a long devotion to O’Brian’s work, and when O’Brian, out of the blue, had written him a postcard admiring a narrative poem he had published in the London Review of Books, Spufford was grateful beyond words. He had had to work hard to convince the Independent to commission the piece on O’Brian, and he was crestfallen when an IRA bomb threat delayed his train and made him three hours late for lunch at Brooks’s with the author.
Much to Spufford’s relief, however, O’Brian was not aggrieved. In fact, he could not have been more gracious. Other than the fact that he had arrived too late for lunch at the club, it was as if Spufford had been perfectly punctual. The two walked to an upscale pub hidden in a nearby lane, ate steak and kidney pie while perched on bar stools, and then returned to the club’s library, where they sat on either side of a death mask of Napoleon (whom O’Brian, Spufford later wrote, called in his “accent-less patrician English … ‘the ogre’ “). The impeccably dressed author, who was scheduled for a photo session later that afternoon, was relaxed and conversational. Spufford, who was all too aware of O’Brian’s pronouncement against question and answer in his new novel Clarissa Oakes, behaved well, needing from the chat only a little flesh to add to his well-reasoned theories regarding O’Brian’s work. The two parted company on the best of terms, with Spufford promising to send him a copy of the story before it was published.
In March, Clarissa Oakes reached bookstores in Britain, and in April the same book, renamed The Truelove, hit bookstores in the United States. Norton’s print run quadrupled that of just two years earlier for The Letter of Marque. Indeed, O’Brian was on the verge of becoming a modern-day publishing phenomenon, a literary phoenix. Through Norton he now had 250,000 copies in print, and the publisher sensed that this was merely the beginning. Norton planned to revive O’Brian’s short stories and to print calendars featuring Geoff Hunt’s cover art. Another publisher, David R. Godine, however, had wrestled away and just brought out O’Brian’s Banks biography, which had appeared only in England in 1987.
On March 15, Spufford’s profile, “Navigating Through Stormy Genres,” appeared in the Independent. As promised, he had previously faxed the story to O’Brian at Brooks’s for review. O’Brian had telephoned to inform Spufford that he was satisfied with the piece and suggested only a minor revision. However, subsequently the editors at the Independent insisted that Spufford spice the piece up a bit. The young journalist complied with a somewhat smug jab at O’Brian’s supporters—“John Bayley, Iris Murdoch and the old guard of literature lining up to back an escape into fantasy and politesse”—only to turn around and defend O’Brian. Spufford had thought the ribbing innocuous enough. However, O’Brian felt betrayed by the changes. He was irate. When Spufford heard of this through a HarperCollins friend, he was shocked at O’Brian’s extreme sensitivity and upset that he had unwittingly violated O’Brian’s code. Thus crashed before it even got rolling a promising relationship based on respect for each other’s work.
O’Brian took such interviews very personally, scrutinizing them as if under a microscope. Although he still fed reporters his enigmatic version of his past, if any, he lacked the modicum of cynicism it took to give an insincere interview for the sake of publicity. He was usually polite and endearing while artfully dodging questions. But he was unforgiving when he felt crossed, and even the faintest criticism from a journalist infuriated him.
Not all interviews ended badly. In the August 2, 1992, Washington Post, Ken Ringle wrote in his feature story about O’Brian and his novels titled “Is This the Best Writer You Never Heard Of?” a memorable assessment of the author: “To compare even the best of his predecessors to him is to compare good straightforward table wine with the complexity and elegance of Bordeaux. … Though each book is essentially self-contained, the Aubrey-Maturin series is better thought of as a single multi-volume novel, that, far beyond any episodic chronicle, ebbs and flows with the timeless tide of character and the human heart.” A sailor himself—he once even served a brief stint on a square-rigged schooner—Ringle had not run afoul of O’Brian during a phone interview for his story. The two talked of sailing, and Ringle reported that O’Brian had “shipped out on square-rigged ships as an adventurous youth ‘on long vacations and that sort of thing,’” an idea that would creep into the scant body of information about O’Brian and be often repeated. Never mind that in his “A Life in the Day of Patrick O’Brian” essay in the Sunday Times Magazine, O’Brian had already said, “I am acquainted with most fore-and-aft rigs, but only once alas was I ever in a square-rigged ship.”
On a whim, Ringle decided to send O’Brian a book, about the speedy sailing vessel known as a Baltimore Clipper. He also slipped in a copy of a letter from a former colleague, who had turned to the Aubrey-Maturin books based on Ringle’s story. O’Brian received the package at a low point. He had bogged down toward the end of his current manuscript, The Wine-Dark Sea. Mary was ill and needed attention, and he was drained. He wondered if perhaps his creative fire had been doused. However, he was much taken by the Baltimore Clipper, and reading about the craft, much used for blockade running and privateering during the War of 1812, gave him a fresh spark. Lo and behold, Aubrey’s good friend Heneage Dundas finds adrift off Cape Horn an abandoned vessel—an “American contraption” (p. 259), as Aubrey calls it—a Baltimore Clipper.
O’Brian was grateful for the inspiration. To show his appreciation, he dashed off a postcard to the reporter. Would you mind very much if I named the vessel the Ringle, after you? he asked. And so she took the journalist’s name. In the years to come, O’Brian and Ringle continued to correspond and even traded visits.
O’Brian was now on the verge of a financial windfall; however, in the fall of 1992, he could not yet fully feel the relief either monetarily or literarily. He worried about his ability to provide for his extended family. O’Brian had never met his two granddaughters, Richard’s children, and they played no role in his life. But he was involved with Mary’s grandchildren, of whom he was proud. His step-grandson, Dimitry Tolstoy, attended Eton, a fact that pleased O’Brian, for both its social and intellectual implications. However, Eton cost £3,800 a term, an expense that the O’Brians had agreed to bear after Nikolai’s bankruptcy.
Dimitry was happy at school and especially delighted with Rugby football, but O’Brian disagreed with his academic decisions. The boy planned to give up Greek because he did not like the master and because he was doing better in history, but O’Brian felt that Greek was best learned at an early age and, if necessary, as his son had discovered long before, under an uncompromising master. History, O’Brian believed, should be tackled once the mind was better fed. A more concrete reason for his concern was financial. Proficiency in Greek, he thought, would give Dimitry the best shot at one of Eton’s scholarships. With his books selling well in the United States, O’Brian could continue to pay Dimitry’s tuition for now, but after so many years of struggling, he was reluctant to depend on this run of good fortune. A scholarship would put that question to rest.
The author was wary that fall, perhaps the more so for his recent taste of fame and good fortune. Could it possibly be so? Would it last? Or would it vanish like a genie after granting three wishes? He was on guard, and in his September 10 review of The Oxford Book of the Sea in the London Review of Books, he seemed testy and protective of his turf. He picked apart the book and the editor’s unrealized intentions before begrudgingly admitting that “although the ideal Book of the Sea … has yet to be written, this foretaste of it makes a very agreeable companion.”
In fact, there was some history behind this review. The book was edited by the popular English travel writer and novelist Jonathan Raban, who was edited by Christopher MacLehose. While Raban, an expatriate living in the United States, was editing the book, MacLehose urged him to use a passage by O’Brian. Though not convinced by what he had read (he found O’Brian’s books a little too bluff), Raban respected O’Brian’s reputation and agreed to include a passage by him if the right one could be found. He asked MacLehose to suggest an excerpt of about a thousand words that focused on the sea. MacLehose in turn asked O’Brian. This was perhaps ill-advised, since the excerpt still had to pass Raban’s approval and had to suit the specific needs of the anthology, creating a situation ripe for misunderstanding.
A suggestion was made. But Raban felt it did not fit and decided that he would not be able to include a passage by O’Brian. “You must,” MacLehose, in his own good-humored way, urged him, “and if you don’t, not only will you infuriate me but your anthology will be much less good.” However, Raban never did find a suitable passage.
In his review of the anthology, when he wasn’t subtly damning Raban, O’Brian took the opportunity to anoint certain of the writers: Richard Walter’s account of Commodore Anson’s voyage in the Le Maire Strait he deemed “very fine—this was a true seaman’s sea”; William Cowper’s “Castaway” was “prodigious”; and the American biologist Rachel Carson’s “splendid” The Sea Around Us (1951) was “deeply informed, lucid, accessible.” O’Brian had recently reappraised Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which was also excerpted. The poem had been spoiled for him as a schoolboy when he had been forced to memorize it, later by so often being parodied and by his eventual realization that the poet had gotten his facts wrong. Having read Richard Holmes’s book Coleridge: Early Visions, however, O’Brian revisited the poem and now felt a qualified awe for it, for while “the sea, the ship, and her company may not belong to this world in any literal sense,” he commented, “at times they blaze with a most uncommon splendor.”
Although he had reconciled with Coleridge, O’Brian was not yet ready to forgive Raban. The second paragraph of the review began: “Before ever I began my heart felt for the editor. Pope had not gone far into his Homer before he hoped that somebody would hang him, and the same wish may well have filled Mr. Raban’s bosom.” O’Brian was shedding crocodile tears. (He was no fan of Pope’s Homer either.)
In October, Alan Judd, unlike Raban a devotee of O’Brian’s work, also experienced some public discomfort at the author’s hands. As part of the promotion of Clarissa Oakes, the novelist and biographer of Ford Madox Ford, a former paratrooper and still a foreign office operative, interviewed O’Brian on Third Ear for English radio. In several amusing bits of repartee, O’Brian, just shy of seventy-eight, complained that he had a “wretched memory” but showed just how keen his intellect and focus remained. When Judd brought up the fact that O’Brian had met Picasso in Collioure, O’Brian responded that Picasso, who liked the sea, had looked like “a turtle swimming in the bay.”
Judd said, “Yes, you have a beautiful description of him. Is it like a bald-headed turtle swimming … ?”
“I don’t think I could have said bald-headed turtle,” chimed in O’Brian impishly, “because turtles are so rarely really hairy.”
“Was it round-headed then?” asked Judd.
“I suppose it was,” O’Brian deadpanned, hanging Judd out to dry.
A little later, O’Brian praised Joseph Banks’s courage for landing on New Zealand, where in those days one was likely to be cooked for dinner by unfriendly natives. “Licking their lips, as it were, and sharpening their knives,” Judd responded innocently, only to be corrected by the author: “They did not have them, but they had frightful clubs. They did have some obsidian knives, it’s true. But they essentially bashed your skull in.”
It was a fine demonstration of how the gentlemanly O’Brian kept his intellectual counterparts on their toes. Challengers—even if they did not view themselves as such—had to be prepared, for the author would ever so precisely pull the rug out from under them. It paid to have a sense of humor when interviewing O’Brian because inevitably he cornered you, and, more often than not, you became the butt of the joke—much to the audience’s howling delight.
Back in Collioure, the vendange was just under way. Over the years, O’Brian had developed his own formula for a full-bodied red wine. He grew primarily black, gray, and white Grenache grapes, but also some Carignan and a small amount of muscat. He found it made a very fine vin nouveau, which turned into an acceptable wine for four or five years. With even more aging, it showed significant and steady improvement.
With the banner 1988 and 1989 vintages safe in the bins, 1992 was not a make-or-break year, and that was a good thing. O’Brian had little hope for the year’s wine. Bad weather had led to a great deal of decay and damage by wild boars, which lived in the maquis above the vineyard and in the cork-oak forest below. And despite twice as much spraying—grapevines are highly susceptible to diseases and insects—he estimated that the vineyard would yield half as much wine as usual, and that of inferior quality.
The boars did not actually eat the grapes, but their young knocked ripe bunches from the vines as they scampered about and wreaked havoc with the dry-stone walls protecting the vines from harsh Mediterranean storms. The adults, on the other hand, grubbed up O’Brian’s stone-pine seeds, which he had planted in the hopes of a grove to yield piñons, the prized nutlike seed in the tree’s reddish brown cones. They also rooted up the earthworks he had built to protect his stone writing house and its path from foul weather.
As much as he liked to complain about the exasperating boars, O’Brian secretly loved them and all the wildlife of his mountain terraces, where golden orioles, bee-eaters, eagles, ocellated lizards, badgers, and genets foraged. In the spring, the northward flight of the honey buzzards to the south of France, thousands of the big gray bee-eating birds darkening the sky at a time, filled him with joy and admiration. But O’Brian liked to walk here and think in all seasons.
His brother Barney had died in British Columbia that summer, on July 26, at the age of eighty, leaving O’Brian with only two sisters alive. He was approaching seventy-eight himself, and Mary had grown frail. In his quiet vineyard, these facts had an added poignancy. O’Brian could see over the unchanging hills to the Spanish border on the south and a thirteenth-century watchtower to the west, reminding him of the gyre of humanity upon which he was lofted and in which he would soon be absorbed.
He often retreated to his stone writing house, especially in the summer, to escape the hordes of loud, fleshy vacationers who created a great din in Collioure from July to September. A thousand feet above the fracas it was considerably cooler, stiller, and, despite the exposure to nature’s occasional violent outbursts, a far more reasonable place to be. As summer merged into fall and the vendange, here, a little closer to God and a little farther from humanity, O’Brian’s inexorable work, physical and mental, the wellspring of his youthful energy, carried on. The vines would always be there, and more and more he had the conviction that what he put down on paper would be too.
That fall, O’Brian polished up The Wine-Dark Sea and sent it to Ollard. He was particularly pleased with a passage he had derived from Garcilaso de la Vega, the Peruvian-born Spanish soldier and chronicler who wrote an account of Hernando de Soto’s expeditions (1605) and a two-part history of Peru (published in 1609 and 1617). In the passage, Maturin tells those assembled at Captain Aubrey’s dinner table about the magnificent golden chain that Huayna Capac, the Great Inca, ordered to be made for a ceremonial dance to celebrate the birth of his son Huascar. The chain was as thick as a man’s wrist, seven hundred feet long, and so heavy that it required two hundred men to lift it.
In December, O’Brian dispatched The Wine-Dark Sea to Norton and checked his three-month-old vintage, bemoaning the fact that every week his seven wooden barrels greedily absorbed a liter and a half of the fermenting wine. It was especially irksome given 1992’s meager and sad-looking crop. But, much to his surprise, the beverage was clear, fragrant, and had an excellent taste. It was already round and potent, and, although he wondered how it would age, the taste of the fruit juice raised his spirits. The weather, too, had taken a notable turn for the better. The winds were unusually subdued; the air was warm and pleasant. The season’s grapefruit were already ripening.
These fruit were especially dear to Patrick because Mary had grown the tree herself, grafting a grapefruit pip to the trunk of a Spanish tangerine tree, some thirty years before.
* In English, “The absurd thing is the desire to come to a conclusion.”
* While O’Brian probably derived the name “Harvill” from Jane Austen’s character Captain Harville, “Clarissa” was inspired by Clarissa Harlowe, the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s second novel, a cautionary tale against the misconduct of parents and children in relation to the latter’s marriage and one that ends in tragedy.
* Today they sell for ten times this amount.