Patrick O’Brian

Patrick appears to have persuaded Secker that the prime motive of their journey was to gather material for the ‘book on Southern France’. Either way, the money came in extremely handy towards meeting the expense of their move. In the event, they arrived at Collioure shortly before the contract was completed. The removal cost £9.10/-, and since the rent of the flat in the rue Arago amounted to some £10 a year (which their genial landlord, M. Germa, seems to have collected erratically), for a while at least they should have been quite comfortably off. However, by next February they were alarmed by a statement from their bank in London, explaining that no more money could be forwarded, as they had attained the limit of £250 which it was at that time permitted to take abroad. Towards the end of May Patrick was still struggling to liberate Warburg’s £75 advance from an impassive bureaucracy. He noted grimly: ‘Wrote to C.J. Foreign Div. & Parry – The last two letters Mrs O’Brian wrote to you are still unanswered. This sort of treatment is really intolerable, and I must insist upon an immediate final.’

Unfortunately, it turned out that they did not qualify for remission of the advance.

At Warburg’s invitation, Patrick forwarded from my grandparents’ house in Chelsea (whose lease they had taken over from him at his departure in 1945) ‘some biographical scraps’ for inclusion on the dustjacket. Although Warburg thanked him for ‘the biographical material, which is excellent’, nearly eight months later he oddly repeated the request for ‘your biographical details, i.e. date and place of birth, education, appointments held and any other relevant information … speed is of the essence’. Since it was Patrick’s persistent habit to preserve copies of such material, it is hard to conceive of any reason why he should have failed to comply with the second request after being so prompt in fulfilling the first. It seems likely therefore that in the event Warburg decided against inclusion of a potted biography. As the sizeable dustjacket blurb implies that the tales arose out of the author’s own communing with the countryside which provides their setting, this may have appeared to suffice for a personal description.

The Last Pool was published on 17 August 1950. Its best stories contain some of Patrick’s finest writing, while all are entertaining. A Latin dedication ‘To Mary, my wife and Dearest Friend’ acknowledged her indispensable support and help. The book’s atmospheric green dustjacket design by Edward Bradbury, depicting three fine trout in the foreground, and shadowy images reflecting country sports circling dimly through refracted water, make it a handsome volume, now much sought by bibliophiles.

Reviews in the press were largely favourable: in some cases, enthusiastic. The novelist L.A.G. Strong perceptively described him as ‘A real new writer, with a voice of his own. He shows a real power to describe physical sensations.’ Patrick’s response to all this was guarded. In a letter to his editor Roger Senhouse written in the following February, he provided an assessment of critics which came from the heart: ‘I do grow passionate about criticism from fools, from people who have not really read what they criticise and from those whose aim is to show off; but I am really grateful for genuine criticism.’[fn12]

He welcomed Senhouse’s comments on his next book, but clearly had coverage of The Last Pool in mind, for he continued with some sharp reflections on ‘the damned silly review Dunsany produced in the Observer. Did you see any worthwhile reviews of The Last Pool? I only saw a long and offensively fulsome one in the Irish Times, and a short and stupid one in the Spectator, apart from the Observer.’

At first glance, Patrick’s testy dismissal of the Observer review appears perverse. Lord Dunsany, a well-connected Irish peer, literary figure and keen rider to hounds, was surely ideally placed to review such a book. What seems particularly to have riled Patrick was a well-intentioned laudatory comment, much canvassed since: ‘This charming book by an Irish sportsman is a genuine collection of tales of the Irish countryside.’ For a start, it might suggest that Dunsany had done little more than glance through the text. Although five of the thirteen tales have Irish settings, a careful reader would have noted that the three located in Wales evince a much more fundamental grounding in local toponymy, landscape and speech.

Still more upsetting appears to have been Dunsany’s gratuitous allusion to the author as ‘an Irish sportsman’. This was presumably inferred by Dunsany from Patrick’s surname,[fn13] together with the Irish setting of several of the stories. That an influential Irish writer publicly hailed him as a compatriot placed Patrick in an embarrassing quandary. As was explained in the first volume of this biography, his change of name was selected in order to banish an unbearable past – not to invent a new one. An obsessively private individual, the last thing he wanted was to find his personal life paraded before an inquisitive public. After all, Dunsany’s erroneous assumption could lead to his being derided as an imposter. What could he do? A correction (in the unlikely event of the newspaper’s publishing it) must inevitably invite enquiry into his actual background.

While this might be criticized as an absurdly paranoid reaction, it was to become unexpectedly justified when belated revelation of his change of name half a century later aroused bitter diatribes in the media beyond anything Patrick at his most vulnerable might have anticipated. He instinctively believed a substantial body of the literati to be an innately envious and consequently malevolent crew. Sadly, he lived to find this jaundiced view not altogether mistaken. It may surely be enquired, were he as concerned to lay claim to Irish ancestry as ill-natured critics have proclaimed, why he did not seize the opportunity to do so in The Last Pool, nor seek to profit from Lord Dunsany’s flattering allusion.[fn14]

When Patrick came under pressure by publishers on other occasions to provide autobiographical notices, he either evaded doing so altogether, or submitted some patently humorous fantasy. The dustjacket of his early novel Hussein (1938), for example, informed its readers:

Patrick Russ has seen much of life in his 26 years. When he was stoking a Portuguese tramp steamer, he came to Rabat and made the acquaintance of two professional story-tellers with whom he wandered up and down French Morocco for a couple of months. It was from them, conversing in mixtures of French and Berber Arabic that he got much of the material widely current throughout the Mohammedan world, which goes to form the story of Hussein.

It is presumably the rarity of this dustjacket which has thus far protected Patrick from being accused by humourless critics of intending these imaginative exploits to be taken au pied de la lettre.[11]

Although beautifully written, the stories in The Last Pool proved to be no more than a swansong to the otherwise alarmingly arid period from which he was at last emerging. I have described in the first volume of this biography how they were spasmodically compiled over the decade of 1939–49, during which time the interruption caused by wartime employment, followed by nearly four years of mounting writer’s block, eventually brought to fruition no more than this sparse collection. After their luncheon meeting in August 1949, Fredric Warburg noted: ‘I gathered that in this field he had, for the moment, written himself out.’ In fact, all he had had in mind for further writing was ‘a book on the French Catalans’.

It appears, however, that not long after their arrival at Collioure, Patrick began to find memories of life at Cwm Croesor flooding back. Now distanced from the life of hardship and frustration they had endured there, he began to picture it all anew in his mind’s eye. In a notebook he jotted down a plan for a novel set in the dark valley:

Do not forget the idea of having the man (or one of his friends) a sociologist nor overlook the possibility of presenting slabs of Welsh life in the manner either of direct reporting or now I come to think of it, what about having the farm situations seen from many angles – all the others 3rd person – no one being wholly true. From each slab one could regard the farm.

The ‘sociologist’, professional observer of the workings of humanity, is clearly derived from Patrick himself, and indeed in the finished work he appears under palpably thin disguise as its protagonist Pugh, who arrives as a visitor in the valley. The name itself was possibly drawn from ‘old Pugh’, a servant who worked at the house at Kempsey where Patrick had lived as a boy in 1923–24. He had retained in his mind a vivid picture of life in Cwm Croesor, as also its inhabitants, with whom he and my mother maintained warm if intermittent contact for several years after their departure. In January 1952 Bessie Roberts, the neighbouring farmer’s wife, sent them a charming photograph of their two young sons Gwynfor and Alun (‘Taken at school in September / With there love and many thanks to “Antie Vron”’),[fn15] which my mother lovingly preserved.

Gwynfor and Alun Roberts

In September 1951 ‘Pierce sent £5 for the old bikes’ they had left behind to be sold, and four years after their settlement in France my mother was still singing Welsh songs. In addition to his memories, Patrick drew on the journal he had kept during the first nine months of their Welsh existence, on which he relied extensively for descriptive passages in his novel.

Long afterwards he provided this summary analysis of his work:

About forty years ago I did write a mildly experimental book called Testimonies in which all the main characters, having left this world, sat peacefully in the next, each independently delivering an account of his or her recent life to a simple, objective being whom readers of the fifties at once understood to be a kind of non-sectarian recording angel. The novel has just been reissued and to my astonishment many of those who read it today, or at least many reviewers, though very kind about the tale itself, are sadly puzzled by my angel. ‘Who is this investigator?’ they cry. ‘Who him? What is this guy doing around the joint?’

On another occasion he explained further:

I was writing hard, working on a novel called Testimonies, which I placed in Wales, though the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia: I finished it very late one night and, in a state of near-prostration – how I wish I could, in a line or so, convey the strength of generalised emotion and delight at times like this, when one feels one is writing well. (I speak only for myself, of course.) The book was politely received in England, much more enthusiastically in the States where the intellectual journals praised it very highly indeed. It did not sell well, but New York magazines asked me for stories.[12]

The claim that ‘the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia’ must be taken with a large grain of salt. The valley setting is described with wonderful vividness, reflecting the fact that it is indeed the Cwm Croesor, unchanged (save for some readily identifiable toponyms), of their four years’ exile. In addition, so far as I have been able to identify them, virtually every character reflects a real individual. Broadly speaking, it is the melodramatic plot alone that derives from Patrick’s imagination.

It is not my purpose to analyse the story. With my mother excluded from the story, Pugh is a combination of Patrick as he really was, and in some respects what he wished to be. Pugh is a university Fellow at Oxford, who is preparing a learned tome on The Bestiary before Isidore of Seville. This was the topic selected by Patrick for a book he hoped would establish his scholarly credentials, on which he had worked in the British Museum before the War. He had also nurtured an early ambition to go up to Oxford, and enjoy the prestige of gaining academic qualification.

Pugh’s antecedents confirm the self-portrait. A forebear had established himself as a draper in Liverpool, while ‘my father, a sociable man, living in a time of acute social distinctions, felt the Liverpool-Welsh side of his ancestry keenly.[fn16] He dropped all Welsh contacts and added his mother’s name, Aubrey, to ours. He had never cared for me to ask him about it.’[13] Patrick’s grandfather had been a successful furrier in London, while his father embarked on a medical career. It is needless to emphasize the change of name, nor (in another context) the selection of ‘Aubrey’ as a gentlemanly alternative. (Pugh further has a close friend named Maturin!) For ‘Liverpool-Welsh’ may be read ‘German’, the original nationality of the Russ family.

The tall red-haired farmer Emyr Vaughan is Patrick’s neighbour Harri Roberts, while his comely wife Bessie provided the model for Bronwen, tragic heroine of the novel.[fn17] Readers may wonder, but for myself I doubt that Patrick himself indulged in serious fantasies about Bessie Roberts. He admired and appreciated attractive women, but was too innately monogamous and devoted to my mother to harbour dangerously improper thoughts. Bessie was simply the model for the fictional Bronwen. Moreover it was a dramatic requirement that the heroine be living immediately below the brooding Pugh in his tiny cottage, while the Roberts farm was the only house adjacent to Fron Wen.

The taxi driver who brings Pugh to his cottage at the beginning was in real life Griffi Roberts, owner of the garage at Gareg, while the gwas (farm boy) John, Pugh’s informant on Welsh lore, was Edgar Williams, our good friend who still lives in Croesor. The originals of other characters are less readily identified today, but there can be little doubt that they reflect to various degrees others with whom Patrick came in contact.

The unmistakable extent to which Patrick drew on real people for his novel dismayed his friend Walter Greenway, who had stayed with him in Cwm Croesor. As Walter later told me, he feared it could cause offence in the valley. However, cordial Christmas greetings and other occasional communications continued to be exchanged annually between Collioure and Cwm Croesor,[fn18] and doubtless Patrick assumed with good reason that few if any people there were likely, or even able, to read a book published in English.

Three Bear Witness (his American publisher retained Patrick’s preferred title Testimonies) was written in 1950, and as my mother only began keeping a diary from January 1951 I do not know as much as I could wish about its composition. With the physical hardship and mental turmoil of life in Cwm Croesor distanced in time and space, Patrick could contemplate his former existence dispassionately, even with nostalgia. Observing the mountains above Collioure, he noted one day: ‘I love the absolute hardness and contrast of the mountain and just that pure sky: the Cnicht ridge had it often.’ At about the same time he jotted down this verse:

The raven of the Pyrenees

Cries harsh and folds his wings to fall.

On Moelwyn Mawr the watcher sees

The folded tumble, hears the call.[fn19]

The contract for The Last Pool provided for the publisher’s retention of an option on his next book, together with an opportunity to consider the proposed book about Southern France. Four months later, on 1 February 1951, Patrick signed the contract for Three Bear Witness. It was in many ways an experimental work, with the imaginative contrivance of the protagonists interrogated in turn for their versions of the same events by an unidentified ‘Recording Angel’. In later life he recalled that ‘I do remember that writing parts of it quite destroyed me’. He also felt it was the best book he had written, and remembered the night he finished it:

‘I was writing very hard that evening, and at three in the morning I went like so on my desk,’ he says, folding himself over his elbows in an exhausted swoon. ‘When I knew it was done I had the feeling of achievement and loss simultaneously’.[14]

Although Patrick, always ill at ease when conducting interviews, was on occasion prone to modify or embroider his memories, it does indeed seem likely that the book was written under considerable stress. Poverty at the little apartement at 39, rue Arago was extreme at the time, and there was no knowing whether anyone beyond my mother would appreciate a book that meant so much to him. In fact her initial reaction was one of disapproval: ‘P. finished T.B. which I did not like.’ However, I suspect this was due to alarm at the extent to which their kindly Welsh neighbours featured in largely recognizable guise throughout the tale. Or was she disturbed by its hero Pugh’s silent adoration of the attractive farmer’s wife next door?

At Secker & Warburg, on the other hand, his editor Roger Senhouse expressed approval. He added some reservations – what he conceived to be excessive use of Welsh words and placenames, a need to locate the ‘Recording Angel’ in time or space, ‘the whole conception of the physical side of Pugh’s infatuation needs careful revision’, and so forth. Since it does not appear that the manuscript or proof of the book has survived, we have only glimpses of its original state, and the alterations Patrick was persuaded to accept. As the contract was signed on 1 February 1951, and Senhouse’s fairly drastic ‘improvements’ were forwarded via Curtis Brown a fortnight later, the book must have made its mark as it stood. By March, however, Patrick was expressing extreme annoyance with Senhouse. When in August they learned that he had been in their neighbourhood, my mother wrote: ‘We are relieved to have been away from Collioure & to have missed him. You can tell by his letters he is a pansey.’[fn20]

Although no one at his publisher’s could guess the extent to which Pugh represented a self-portrait, Patrick resented Senhouse’s verdict:

Character of Pugh. Naturally I don’t want to make him a romantic hero, but there is surely no reason why even a middle-aged scholar should be so unsympathetic. He gives himself away: his hypochondria, his lack of affection, his timidity … and ineptitude (as opposed to mere helplessness and vagueness). All this is really sordid, and as a result I have found something repellent about the idea of his being madly in love.

The criticism is not altogether unfair, and naturally could not take into account Patrick’s unconscious motive, which was I believe in part to purge himself of characteristics of which he continued deeply ashamed. Pugh is endowed with much of the ‘difficult’ side of Patrick’s character, while being denied almost any of his compensating virtues: his mischievous humour, exemplary patience, pertinacity, resilience, courage, unselfishness and generosity. The underlying confessional function of the book meant that a more balanced portrayal of the real-life Pugh might not have acted as confession at all. The same process may be detected in Patrick’s other largely autobiographical novels, The Catalans and Richard Temple. In the latter case, the protagonist provides an extensive confession of his earlier degraded (‘silly’) existence. Significantly, this confession is vouchsafed during a protracted spell of imprisonment and torture, inflicted in order to extract ‘the truth’, and concludes with Temple’s liberation (by the French Resistance). Although it does not appear that Patrick was ever formally admitted to the Catholic Church, he occasionally implied that he was a communicant, and it is not difficult to imagine how the confessional would have appealed to his deep-rooted feelings of shame and guilt.

On one point to which he attached importance, Patrick felt compelled to give way. His title Testimonies was objected to by his English publisher on grounds that ‘it sounds far more like a treatise on codicils, or last words and testaments’. Next: ‘Senhouse wrote: they (or he alone) want to change the title from Testimonies to Bronwen Vaughan. I am against it, but I don’t want to offend them just at this point, so I left it up to him if they feel very strongly about it.’

Finally, the publishers settled on Three Bear Witness.

In her diary my mother reports that Patrick continued to find Senhouse patronizing, petty-minded and obstructive. In March 1951, ‘P. sent C[urtis].B[rown]. a card this morning, worried for Manuscript, & this afternoon had a letter from C.B. with loathesome comments from Senhouse & “a femal[e] reader” on Testimonies.’

Another irritating obstruction, likewise apparently ascribable to Senhouse, was a perverse disregarding of Patrick’s request for inclusion of the dedication: À mes amis de Collioure. This was no empty gesture, and in due course he presented complimentary copies to friends and neighbours. He even managed to sell one to a more prosperous acquaintance.

By the end of the year Patrick declared he could no longer work with Senhouse, and Spencer Curtis Brown wrote to Fred Warburg:

The confidential part of this letter is that apparently Patrick O’Brien really does not get on at all well with Roger Senhouse, so that if you want to keep him on your list, as I hope you will do, it might be a good plan if you could take over most of the correspondence with him. I have never found him in any way a difficult author, and I don’t believe that you would do so.

Warburg had been away in New York during the early part of the year, and now promptly complied with Spencer’s suggestion. In due course Patrick was to wreak characteristic punishment on his troublesome editor. Nearly forty years later, in The Letter of Marque (London, 1988, p. 27), Stephen Maturin learns of the fate of ‘poor Senhouse’, who ascended into the sky in a hot-air balloon whose excessive supply of gas ensured that he ‘was never seen again’.

On 3 January 1952 Warburg sent Patrick strong praise for the book, which he had at last found time to read:

I think you have written an extremely promising first novel and indeed even better than that, for in many ways the novel shows a maturity of outlook and a power of construction which augurs well for the future. I cannot somehow take too much interest in your male hero, although he is clearly and distinctly drawn …

On this issue Warburg was broadly at one with Senhouse. After explaining his reasons, he continued:

But these minor criticisms pale before the accomplishment in other directions, above all the splendid rendering of the Welsh Hills and vales, villages and villagers, and the eternal life of the farms and the treatment of animals, and the surely magnificent description you give of the sheep shearing which stands out in my mind with a clarity and vividness which prove how well you have done it.

One issue on which Patrick expressed a forceful view was the design of the dustjacket. At Collioure his good friend Willy Mucha had agreed to provide an abstract illustration, an offer which Patrick was anxious to see implemented. As he pointed out to Senhouse, Mucha was an artist of considerable reputation: ‘Matisse, Dufy, Braque and Léger think highly of him. (They have given him pictures that I envy enormously).’ The suggestion was however declined by Secker, as also by Harcourt Brace in America, and the collaboration of novelist and painter had to await publication of the more appropriate vehicle of The Catalans.

Finally, there remained the delicate issue of the author’s customary biographical notice. Both the promptness with which he had despatched one for The Last Pool (subsequently mislaid by the publisher), and the accuracy of its information, suggest that it was he who provided that which appears on the back sleeve of Three Bear Witness:

Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914, and started writing early. He produced four books before the war, and also worked for many years, in Oxford, Paris and Italy, on a book on Bestiaries. Most of this valuable material was, however, lost in the war.

During the war he drove an ambulance in London during the blitz, and later joined the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.

He and his wife lived at one time in a remote Welsh valley, where Mr. O’Brian fished, shot and hunted whenever possible. He is at present living on the Mediterranean coast of France.

It will be noted that this broadly accurate autobiographical notice contains no allusion to Ireland, still less any claim to Irish nationality or origin. A close paraphrase of this potted biography features on the dustjacket of the American edition of Patrick’s later work Lying in the Sun, which was entitled The Walker and other stories in the USA. However, there it begins with the additional words ‘Patrick O’Brian was born in the West of Ireland and educated in England.’ It looks as though this item was added by a copywriter at Harcourt Brace – especially as Patrick omitted the notice altogether in the English edition.

The extent to which well-intentioned publishers occasionally made up for Patrick’s dislike of supplying personal data is illustrated by a comment made by my mother in 1952: ‘Irish Writing came with N.L.T.P.T.R.A.;[fn21] very surprised to find biographical notes after I’d refused them because P. doesn’t like it.’ Fortunately, this issue remained for the present a minor irritation. Two overriding concerns exercised Patrick and my mother throughout this critical period in their lives. How was he to relaunch his literary career? And, still more pressingly, how might the impoverished couple survive financially?