The House that Jack Built

Most people would agree that Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, set when Britain’s Navy had first Napoleon and then the USA to confront, are among the best historical fiction the twentieth century produced.

In fact plenty would drop that word ‘among’, since the books contain so much variety, perceptiveness and subtle comedy, so many wonderful themes and inventions of genius which add to the fun of reading them. There’s the constantly evolving contrast between Jack Aubrey, audacious and tough-minded commander, and his ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin, secretive natural philosopher and political agent. There’s the fascination of the ships themselves, complex, almost living things. Also the continuous interplay, like soap opera, among her crew, fighting men shut up together without space or privacy, hundreds or even thousands of miles from land. Some of those men we get to know pretty well. And there’s the drama of warfare at sea – or in some weathers just survival at sea – drama so intense the reader nearly forgets to breathe. I wrote a little about these things in Issue 40. But in fact there is much more in the books than war and ships. There is almost the whole of eighteenth-century experience. Likewise, O’Brian’s characters are much more than their rôles. We see them pretty complete. Jack, for instance, straightforward and confident at sea, is endearingly helpless on land, his optimism and goodwill undermined by the crudest swindles and frauds, or just by the intricacies of life. Even his friend Stephen, shrewd enough as political agent and spy, can’t always read his own heart. So, while the first article was about life at sea, this one is about life ashore, and the loves of the two men’s lives. Jack marries Sophie Williams, fending off opposition from her widowed mother, who’s ‘a deeply stupid, griping, illiberal, avid, tenacious, pinchfist lickpenny, a sordid lickpenny and a shrew’. Sophie is not like her mother. She’s tall, with wide-set eyes and a wonderful sweetness of expression, a ‘reserved creature, living much in an inward dream whose nature she [does] not communicate to anyone’. At one point in their overlong courtship Jack finds himself giving her a lift between ports in his ship. His bumbling efforts to please show an imperfect sense of married reality. He sets his men to make a cabin for her.

‘Tell me, who of the officers is the most remarkable for taste?’ ‘For taste, sir?’ cried Simmons. ‘Yes, yes, artistic taste. You know, a sense of the sublime.’ ‘Why, sir, I don’t know that any of us is much gifted in that line. I do not remember the sublime ever having been mentioned in the gun-room. But there is Mallet, sir, carpenter’s crew, who understands these things. He was a receiver of stolen property, specialising in pretty sublime pieces, as I understand it – old masters and so on . . .’

Sophie is actually not much attuned to the sublime, and anyway the cabin turns out like a brothel, with a touch of undertaker’s parlour. Meanwhile, her idea of Jack is as wide of the mark as his of her; for one thing she decides that he can’t really love her unless she understands the political scene, and behaves as is right. ‘Of course,’ she says, asking advice from Stephen, ‘I do know it is the French who are so wicked; but there are all these people who keep coming and going – the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Russians. Pray, are the Russians a good thing now? It would be very shocking – treason no doubt – to put the wrong people in my prayers.’ Finally married, Jack and Sophie acquire a damp cottage on wretched land and Jack sets about adding on grand wings and stables – by that means enriching any dishonest tradesmen, charlatans, horse-copers or others who can spot an opportunity. ‘Runninghorses, cards, building, and even God forbid silver mining,’ says Stephen in despair. ‘All that lacks is a navigation-canal at ten thousand pound a mile, and the perpetual motion.’ O’Brian gives us a wonderfully subtle sense of a couple who love and respect each other very dearly but never quite become one flesh. Jack feels he has the wrong notion of marriage altogether. ‘I had thought there was more friendship and confidence and unreserve in it than the case allows . . . When you are in command, you get so sick of the loneliness, of playing the great man and so on, that you long to break out of it; but in the nature of things it don’t seem possible.’ Yet probably theirs is as good a marriage as constant absence can support, and it produces a son plus twin girls Jack can’t quite tell apart – lively, ignorant children with a one-legged sailor as governess. The passionate Jack does regret Sophie’s almost absent-minded lack of interest in sex, and her possessiveness, but at the deepest level each is crucial to the other’s life. Stephen’s marriage is far stranger than Jack’s, and takes far longer to happen. Diana Villiers is Sophie’s cousin, widowed and reluctantly living in the same household. Where Sophie is willowy and languorous, Diana has a ‘quick, flashing rhythm . . . for her, style and grace take the place of virtue’. She’s spirited and brave, a fine rider and prodigious driver, who would ‘send a team of camels through the eye of a needle at a brisk round trot’. Diana is attractive to any man, even to Jack when the siege of Sophie is making no progress, and she’s not one to let morals keep her from living high. Stephen is drawn to her strongly, though he knows he’s not attractive in the least, ‘has no advantages of person, nor family, nor purse’. It’s true she has a trusting fondness for him – though not of the kind he’d prefer, and that is a continuing torture when he’s sure his unpossessive love and concern would bring happiness to both. ‘She might love careless extravagance, but she would do little or nothing to come by the means of it: certainly nothing against her inclination . . . She hated being pinched and confined; but she hated being commanded even more.’ However, feelings fade in the end if not cherished, and sometime later when Stephen is bringing her back from America, ill and wretched, he sees her in a different light.

He tried to put a name to his feeling for her but found no word or combination of words. It was certainly not the passion of his earlier days . . . nor did it resemble friendship – his friendship for Jack Aubrey for instance. Affection entered into it, tenderness, and even a kind of complicity, perhaps, as if they had long been engaged in the same pursuit. Possibly the same absurd pursuit of happiness.

Even while thinking such thoughts he has in mind that she’s become an American citizen and that because war has broken out she is now an enemy alien. If he marries her he’ll save her from arrest.

‘Surely [she says] you must know, surely you must feel that any woman, even a woman as battered as I am, must look for something more – more, what shall I say? – more romantic in an offer of marriage? Even if I were to marry you, which is totally inconceivable, I should never, never do so after such a grovelling, such an utterly mundane and businesslike proposal. It is really a question of common good manners, of ordinary civility. Really, Maturin, I wonder at you.’

This, in a manner of speaking, is a yes. Their marriage is like Jack’s and Sophie’s, not one of quite perfect happiness. Stephen, always squalid, cannot be house-trained. Diana still adores high living. He decides that if they are to be happy together they must live apart, ‘all the more so since Diana was as intransigent as himself and far more apt to fly into a passion about such things as a pancreas in the drawer of the bedside table or orange marmalade ground into the Aubusson’. Jack muses on the baby that fairly soon follows:

Why Stephen should be so pleased with a baby I cannot tell. He was born to be a bachelor . . . quite unsuited for marriage, above all for marriage with Diana, a dashing brilliant creature to be sure, a fine horsewoman and a capital hand at billiards and whist, but given to high play and something of a rake – quite often shows her wine – in any case quite improper for Stephen – has nothing to say to books – much more concerned with breeding horses. Yet between them they have produced this baby; and a baby girl at that.

The baby girl though has a disability, perhaps like autism, which prevents her from speaking or responding to others, and though O’Brian’s ideas about such things aren’t quite in tune with today’s, it’s clear to anyone who’s ever read fiction that Stephen’s relationship with Diana won’t end in slippers by the fire. Sophie may be Jack’s love, but the Navy is his life. Coping with natural disasters, navigating to small islands in far distant seas, calculating in his head the play of shifting winds and tides, leading his men by force of character – those are second nature to him. But on land, there’s almost nothing that he can get right. Apart from shysters to whom for some reason he’s given power of attorney, and leaving aside obviously dicey card rings, his main problem is his father. General Aubrey has retired from the Army and is MP for a rotten borough, voting for any measure that may embarrass the government in the hope he’ll be bought off with a sinecure. Jack is inevitably tarred with his father’s brush and his career suffers badly, since promotion at that time followed from influence and favouritism. But he repays unpaternal treatment with intended kindness, passing on word of stocks he’s been tipped off to buy. Any reader can see at once that the word is a trap, and sure enough both father and son are convicted of rigging the market, defrauding the Stock Exchange; it’s nakedly political but Jack finds himself sentenced to the pillory and, worse, dismissed the Service. Of course shipmates turn out in force and make the pillory a kind of apotheosis, but even that is no help.

Stephen saw . . . that the underlying pain was quite untouched . . . The fact of no longer belonging to the Navy counted more than a thousand pillories, the loss of fortune, loss of rank, and loss of future. It was in a way a loss of being, and to those who knew him well it gave his eyes, his whole face, the strangest look.

Not only is Jack out of the Service but his favourite ship, the old but quick and beautiful frigate Surprise, objective correlative of his beliefs and aspirations, is to be sold out of the Service too. Stephen, so intelligent, undemonstrative and coolly unsentimental, is the friend he needs in a predicament like this. Over time he’s moved far from his uppers and now can seize a chance to acquire the Surprise privately, and through his contacts to have Jack made her captain. She is to be a Letter of Marque, not part of the Navy but operating unofficially and deniably as a privateer, and serving the King’s interest in unconventional ways, maybe in collaboration with unacknowledged allies. Her mission is to the other side of the world, and will keep Jack afloat till justice can be done, and naval being officially restored.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Grant McIntyre 2014