The author of the wildly popular 18th century seagoing
saga created, out of his own life, a fiction nearly as elaborate.
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By
Jan. 13, 2000 |
O’Brian’s fans declare that his work will live forever, but perhaps the most fascinating reading will be his own life story, which he had crafted as a fiction believed almost to the end by most reviewers and readers. Working as an honored guest at
O’Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ in Chalfont St. Peter,
During World War II he left his wife and two children to move in with the wife of Count Dmitri Tolstoy. Both were involved in British secret service activities. At the end of the war he changed his name by deed poll to Patrick O’Brian and married the now ex-countess. They lived first in
He saved his discursiveness for his books, and his notorious reluctance to give interviews, or at least to give any accurate information in them, broke down only in the last years of his life after his wife died in 1998, which is when his Irish Catholic persona was peeled away by investigating journalists. Far from detracting from his reputation, the mystery of the practical joke he played on decades of reviewers and interviewers is more likely to enhance interest in his life and work.
In a touch worthy of one of his own novels, his now-considerable estate may well go to his stepson Count Nikolai Tolsoy. Unless he took precautions, and deeded his estate to Tolstoy’s stepchildren, then over $2 million of it would go to pay a libel suit incurred when Tolstoy accused a British officer of sending Russian and Yugoslav prisoners to their certain execution by the Communists at the end of World War II.
O’Brian’s involvement with the sea began in the 1950s when he worked on “The Golden Voyage,” a story based on the 18th century circumnavigation of the world by Capt. Anson. He discovered a rich vein of material that could be mined for fiction. In the late ’60s an American editor suggested the maritime theme for what became the Aubrey/Maturin series of which the first volume, “Master and Commander,” was published in 1969 when O’Brian was 54.
For most O’Brian fans, it’s probably heretical to suggest it, but a recently created vacancy may have inspired his editor. C.S. Forester, creator of Capt. Horatio Hornblower, had died in
Hornblower was haunted with self-doubt, totally tone deaf, Spartan and solitary in his habits, but with sharp intellect. Aubrey, with some time out for introspection, as in the last book, is a sybaritic, convivial soul whose love for music has him and
However, while Forester knew how to sail, O’Brian’s specialty was sailing in late 18th century English, redolent with archaisms and technical arcanae. In fact, he admitted to one interviewer that he occasionally made some of it up, but for most of us who couldn’t tell a futtock shroud from a gudgeon, it would be impossible to tell. His other big step forward was to double the attraction by having two lead figures, of contrasting but complementary personalities.
O’Brian transposes Hornblower’s icy intellect into the brooding Stephen Maturin, half Irish and half Catalan. A Catholic in a Protestant navy, he is prepared to leave the plight of
Like Hornblower before him, Aubrey and his career were modeled on several colorful characters, although Thomas Cochrane, who later went on, in disgrace from the Royal Navy, to head the Chilean navy, is clearly a major inspiration. And
Historical fiction is often unfairly relegated to a genre niche, and O’Brian’s series was appreciated by only a small coterie until Norton rediscovered him 20 years after he had begun it and reissued the earlier books under heavy pressure from readers. It was only then that, in his 70s, he began to get the critical recognition and royalty checks that he so clearly appreciated, no matter how belated.
For anyone who wants to start the series, it is perhaps even more essential than usual to begin at the beginning. Each book is clearly a chapter in a much longer work, in which the characters and situations are built up from the beginning. Some readers might find the leisurely pace — Jane Austen on the quarterdeck — difficult to get into, but once they have, the never-tedious attention to detail and his wry humor will carry them along.
There is indeed a great deal of hyperbole from his readers, who at times can have the fervor of Trekkies at a sci-fi convention. But once you are caught up in the rhythm of what is now, effectively, an unfinished 20-volume picaresque novel, O’Brian is almost as good as his fans say he is.
salon.com | Jan. 13, 2000
O’ BRIAN
_________ a life revealed
BY DEAN KING
HENRY HOLT AND CO.
NONFICTION
397 PAGES
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By
March 21, 2000 |
King’s work necessarily suffers from O’Brian’s almost total refusal to cooperate. Unlike most public figures who become the subject of such an endeavor, O’Brian remained, almost to the end of his very long life, such a recluse that a biographer has few outside sources to set against the novelist’s own, as it turns out, almost entirely fictional version of his life. King completed the book before O’Brian died in January, and his epilogue barely catches up with the event.
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He may have missed a tremendous opportunity, for during this final period, for the first time in half a century, O’Brian had abandoned his reclusive work habits to write in Dublin, Ireland, where he was for once surrounded by people of the nationality that he had long claimed as his own. Did any of them tease out any concealed details, notice any inconsistencies? One thing we can be sure of: If O’Brian ever visited
But while King suffers the typical problems of the pioneer, to him belong the laurels of discovering that his idol did not, in fact, have feet of peat. O’Brian was not Irish. He probably did not, as he claimed, go to the Sorbonne in
It says a lot for O’Brian’s literary skills that his admirers remained admirers even after King, before his book was published, ripped open the tissue of fiction with which the writer had surrounded himself. King draws material from the novels to substantiate his biographical hypotheses, not always successfully, as he depicts a vulnerable and insecure man haunted with memories of former affluence and station.
King should have spent less time exploring the novels for psychological insights and more on the neuroses the English class structure inflicts on its victims. He records, for example, that once O’Brian was accepted in higher circles, he tried to hide the fact that he had built his home with his own hands — as, indeed, he hid his family. And he bridled when his work was compared with its obvious inspiration, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels.
King writes of his subject at one point, “His novels championed civility, and reinforced such basic principles as the importance of self-discipline [and] respect for authority figures” — which is, of course, why the William F. Buckleys and Charlton Hestons of this world love him. But despite the arriviste snobbishness of his later days, O’Brian was no knee-jerk conservative, as his opposition to the enclosure of common land and to the death penalty, as well as his hero Stephen Maturin’s persistent indulgence in opium and cocaine, all suggest.
King also mentions that by the end of O’Brian’s career, editors hardly dared edit him. I think he has overlooked a more general trend: Editors don’t edit anymore, at least judging by the evidence of his own book. For a biography of a writer who was thoroughly meticulous (if occasionally inventive with history), the book has many elementary bloopers. For example, King has the young O’Brian living near the ruins of Lewes Priory, “destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1638.” Intrigued by what Cromwell was up to destroying a priory a century after the Reformation and four years before the English civil war, I checked: It had in fact been demolished by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, a century earlier.
Later, King describes the title Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), which the queen awarded to O’Brian in 1995, as “a centuries-old tribute”; it was in fact established in 1917, just as tributes to empire were starting to lose their luster. (Ironically, if O’Brian hadn’t put the story around that he was Irish, he might have actually been knighted — an elevation that would have delighted his snobbish old heart.)
This is certainly a warts-and-all biography, all the more brave as the work of an O’Brian admirer. But it does not explain what drove O’Brian to his strange alternate personal universe, not to mention his literary one. King has ably charted the shores, but unless he returns to the task, someone else will get the honor of sounding the depths.
salon.com | March 21, 2000