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O’Brian’s World

This is the third and last part of a short sequence on Patrick O’Brian’s twenty naval novels. ‘A Friendship of Opposites’ (in Issue 40) was about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, two great originals of twentieth-century fiction, and how they draw us not just into the warfare of wooden ships but into the whole Georgian era, which O’Brian makes as fresh as if we were part of it, living in the midst of its chaos and energy, experiencing its harshness, courtesy, relentlessness, absurdity and the rest. ‘The House that Jack Built’ (in Issue 42) turned to the two men’s marriages, which are easily as compelling – affectionate, complicated, believable relationships, full of misunderstanding and comedy as much as of love. It also touched on Jack’s other great love, the Navy, which for him is almost the staff of life despite its radical flaws – most the result of folly and greed – and its casual cruelty. This last piece is about a different sort of relationship, that of the author and his subject. It’s largely about Stephen, because when O’Brian drew Stephen he had one eye on himself.

Everyone who knew O’Brian spotted at once that he and Stephen Maturin appeared to be very alike – both outsiders, both odd-looking, learned, extremely reticent men who were not what they seemed. But in reality it was the likeness that was not what it seemed. Stephen’s reticence concealed feats of espionage, cryptography, black propaganda, political intrigue and sudden violence, O’Brian’s that sadly he couldn’t lay claim to anything in that line. He might well have been very effective but he was never given the chance he wanted, even during the War. So he didn’t, as some authors do, put himself into his books, he put his invented self into them. He liked to suggest that he’d sailed in a square-rigged three-master, but it seems he never did, nor did he experience the seas he described so dazzlingly well. He did live for years in Collioure, so he knew Catalonia, but on the other hand there was nothing Irish about him at all – he hardly went there. He was not even Patrick O’Brian before he chose to be. His early life as Patrick Russ was so disastrous he ruthlessly put it behind him, and

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This is the third and last part of a short sequence on Patrick O’Brian’s twenty naval novels. ‘A Friendship of Opposites’ (in Issue 40) was about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, two great originals of twentieth-century fiction, and how they draw us not just into the warfare of wooden ships but into the whole Georgian era, which O’Brian makes as fresh as if we were part of it, living in the midst of its chaos and energy, experiencing its harshness, courtesy, relentlessness, absurdity and the rest. ‘The House that Jack Built’ (in Issue 42) turned to the two men’s marriages, which are easily as compelling – affectionate, complicated, believable relationships, full of misunderstanding and comedy as much as of love. It also touched on Jack’s other great love, the Navy, which for him is almost the staff of life despite its radical flaws – most the result of folly and greed – and its casual cruelty. This last piece is about a different sort of relationship, that of the author and his subject. It’s largely about Stephen, because when O’Brian drew Stephen he had one eye on himself.

Everyone who knew O’Brian spotted at once that he and Stephen Maturin appeared to be very alike – both outsiders, both odd-looking, learned, extremely reticent men who were not what they seemed. But in reality it was the likeness that was not what it seemed. Stephen’s reticence concealed feats of espionage, cryptography, black propaganda, political intrigue and sudden violence, O’Brian’s that sadly he couldn’t lay claim to anything in that line. He might well have been very effective but he was never given the chance he wanted, even during the War. So he didn’t, as some authors do, put himself into his books, he put his invented self into them. He liked to suggest that he’d sailed in a square-rigged three-master, but it seems he never did, nor did he experience the seas he described so dazzlingly well. He did live for years in Collioure, so he knew Catalonia, but on the other hand there was nothing Irish about him at all – he hardly went there. He was not even Patrick O’Brian before he chose to be. His early life as Patrick Russ was so disastrous he ruthlessly put it behind him, and almost came to believe in the past he would rather have had. O’Brian certainly was like Stephen, though, in the range of his knowledge. It’s amazing to read that he spent only three years at school, and otherwise was largely self-taught, because one of the qualities that make his novels such a pleasure is the deep but unassertive erudition that runs through them. It’s not just that his naval operations are generally based on fact (with Jack often in the role of Lord Cochrane) or that historical admirals appear absolutely in person, it’s more that O’Brian has a complete sense of his period in all its aspects. Every detail can be trusted, though none is ever put on obvious display. He knows everything about the construction of ships and their handling, and also about naval notions of honour, which at that time were shadowed by sloth, corruption and greed. He knows about uniforms of course, but also about ball gowns and what they say about their wearers. He’s very good on minor religious sects like the Sethians or the Knipperdollings and their modestly self-righteous bearing which masks all the usual sins. Likewise he has an exact sense of musical taste in those not quite at the cutting edge; or of superstition on the lower decks (and the quarterdeck too); or prejudices and hypocrisies among the gentry – or equally among the prostitutes, swindlers and hard cases of the underclass. Naturally he’s good on eighteenth-century science and medicine, and on how knowledge was achieved. Here is Stephen advising a younger man he’s taken under his wing:
More than any book I do most earnestly recommend a private corpse. Your school cadaver, tossed about in wanton play, your odd heads and parts indifferently picked by the porter’s wife, are well enough for the coarse processes; but for the fine work, give me a good fresh private corpse, preferably a pauper, to avoid the fat.
O’Brian’s mastery of language is most wonderful of all. He manages to capture that mixture of toughness and grace which, for me at least, makes formal eighteenth-century English so attractive. Also the verbal violence that makes demotic eighteenth-century English so vivid. He catches Stephen’s subtle Irishness, or the slightly unidiomatic English of highly educated South Americans, or the competitiveness of children, or the way one wife can make her opinion of another very clear without expressing it, or Jack can make his authority absolute without disrespect – and he does it all in the language of the time. ‘He catches it all flawlessly. Yes, you think, reading the witty, textured exchanges. This is surely what they were like.’ That’s from Charlton Heston (I was surprised too). There is never the least visible strain; one never feels his characters are putting on a historical act, but always that they are revealing themselves, unknowingly, in everything they say. None of this erudition interferes with the storytelling. It’s true there are plenty of naval battles from which it’s hardly possible to look away, and plenty of danger on land too, even in a balloon. But O’Brian’s narrative skill propels scenes of every kind. When Jack’s malevolent mother-in-law proposes to intervene in Stephen’s upbringing of his damaged daughter (her great-niece), their dialogue almost makes the page vibrate. The court case where Jack is accused of defrauding the Stock Exchange, believes that his innocence will protect him and comes to see that it won’t, is completely compelling in a quite different way. Incidentally, O’Brian’s stepson Nikolai Tolstoy believed this episode had its origin in his own – Tolstoy’s – libel battle with Lord Aldington. They had similarly happy outcomes too, in the end. The storytelling is enhanced by O’Brian’s extraordinary inventiveness. Confining examples to Stephen alone: we find him at a levée, with sycophants like flies around the Duke of Clarence; or in a kind of animal Shangri-La where he is shown around by an elderly orangutan, who takes a dim view of the morals of other apes. We see him sneak a look from a high cell in the Temple Prison towards a window in the wonderfully named rue des Neuf Fiancées, where there’s a pretty widow who may help with escape if she fancies his younger companion; or in the high Andes in a storm of unbreathable powdered snow, protected only by a dead llama. Here he is on board ship, following a hurricane:
The Boadicea was lying to under a scrap of mizzen staysail, riding the tremendous seas nobly, shouldering them aside with her bluff bows: her fore and main topmasts had gone by the board; wild ropes by the score stretched horizontally aft from the wrecked tops, sometimes cracking as loud as a gun; her remaining shrouds were packed with scraps of terrestrial vegetation – a palm-frond was clearly recognizable. But this was not the curious sight. From the drowned forecastle aft, and particularly on the quarterdeck, wherever there was the slightest lee, there were birds. Seabirds for the most part but right by him a little creature like a thrush. It did not move as he approached it, nor even when he touched its back. The others were the same, and he looked into the lustrous eye of a bosun bird from within a few inches.
O’Brian’s inventiveness extends to his characters as much as to incident, and his characters naturally age and grow more substantial as we get to know them better. What a shame it would be never to meet small, priapic William Babbington, who first appears as a piping midshipman and in the end commands his own small ship; or Preserved Killick, Jack’s sour, shrewish, devoted steward, always on hand to overhear sensitive conversations in the captain’s cabin and pass them round the ship’s company; or the naked and scrawny little Melanesian twins Lucy and Emily – ‘so plain, poor things’ – rescued from an island devastated by smallpox. They jointly become Stephen’s loblolly boy, cleaning up blood, slime and body parts in his surgery, and learning seamen’s and officers’ English as two different languages. They eventually become Londoners and add cockney too. And there is Sam, who provokes smiles whenever he appears because he’s the spitting image of Jack – is so obviously his son from an early fling – despite being black and still more incongruously a priest, making his way up the Roman Catholic hierarchy. All these characters are portrayed in the round, with an inner life and a life off the page that one can easily imagine. O’Brian writes all their parts with humour – the sometimes serious humour of comic opera. He looks on them with clear-sighted generosity and understanding, so one can grasp the fears and uncertainties of even the worst. In fact one can see oneself in them quite often, in a world which A. S. Byatt said ‘is our own but not our own’. It’s not escapist but curiously encouraging to read of others coping in such different circumstances, and not always competently, with some of what we have to cope with too. It’s helpful that they suffer, as occasionally we all do in life, from a shocking disconnect between deserts and rewards – the way fate or arbitrary power can deliver undeserved happiness or undeserved tragedy. And just in case it’s the second, we can always keep by us these lines of cod Pope, written by a sailor poet called James Mowett who comes second in a mid-ocean poetry sweepstake:
Even calamity, by thought refined, Inspirits and adorns the thinking mind.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 44 © Grant McIntyre 2014


About the contributor

Grant McIntyre has worked with books and with sculpture, but is all at sea when it comes to ships.

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