I’ve just started re-reading Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels of British naval life in the early 19th Century. I’ve gone back to the first one, “Master and Commander,” and am at that point, about halfway through, when young Jack Aubrey, the newly minted, newly successful captain of the Royal Navy brig Sophie, has had too much to drink during a party at his commandant’s home. Recounting his capture of a French merchant ship, Aubrey is overly boisterous, to say nothing of ribald, and his friend Stephen Maturin, the Sophie’s physician and a bookish sort, is required to hustle him away. Now Aubrey, suffering from a hangover, is rushing Sophie to sea, hoping to avoid the potential repercussions of his breach of decorum. He orders the departure to take place quietly, in part so as not to bring attention to the leave-taking and in part because of “a cruel darting agony in his head that made the prospect of roaring and bellowing (commands) wonderfully disagreeable.”
Re-reading the 20 books–a literary voyage of some 6,000 pages, or more than 2 million words–seemed like the thing to do as a sign of respect to the memory of O’Brian, who died Jan. 2 at age 85. Even more, it has been something of a tonic, a way of dispelling the fogs of controversy and personality that beclouded O’Brian in his final years, obscuring the high quality of his work.
Initially there had been a fairy-tale quality to O’Brian’s story: Here was a writer who had labored in obscurity, winning reviews of high praise for his finely crafted novels and short stories but needing to support himself by doing translations from French. Then in 1969, at age 55, he published “Master and Commander,” beginning the series of adventure novels that would occupy him the rest of his life. The series was a modest success in England but made not a dent in the American market until 1991 when Richard Snow, the editor of American Heritage, in an essay on the front page of The New York Times book review section, called the books “the best historical novels ever written.” Suddenly the series, newly reissued by W.W. Norton, caught fire, and O’Brian was, after a life of poverty, a rich man and (much to his chagrin) an international celebrity.
O’Brian’s disdain for the prying questions of reporters and interviewers had been endearing at first. He had had the aura of a dusty, tweedy scholar, with his mind back two centuries, unlearned and perhaps a bit naive about the modern world. Then came the revelations.
Nothing horrible, really. O’Brian, it turned out, was actually Richard Patrick Russ, not Irish, as he had led everyone to believe, but English born and bred. As a young man he had walked away from a crumbling marriage and a dying baby daughter. Remarried, he had changed his name and begun anew, leaving behind what certainly appears to have been a life filled with pain.
The upside of the revelations was the disclosure of three books written by the young Russ, previously unknown to O’Brian’s fans. Two of these were republished in limited editions last year by the British Museum and will be more widely available in May when issued by Norton: “Caesar,” a delightfully naturalistic tale of an imaginary cross between a panda and a leopard, written when O’Brian was 12 or 14 (like much of O’Brian’s life, his age at the writing of this first book is in question), and “Hussein,” a marvelously entertaining evocation of early 20th Century India, produced when O’Brian was in his early 20s and without his ever having set foot on the subcontinent.
The downside was that the revelations hardened the author in his insistence on privacy at the same time they whetted the appetite of journalists for facts. Last November I was one of those journalists, and during an interview in his editor’s condominium off Park Avenue, O’Brian displayed a hair-trigger prickliness concerning any question, however meek, that seemed to veer toward his personal life. No longer the quaint ancient of the fairy-tale story, he also seemed all-too-human in his snobbishness and general orneriness.
It’s the all-too-human O’Brian who is on display in Dean King’s new biography, “Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed” (Holt, $27.50). He was always, it seems, the touchiest of men, quick to take offense, quick to cut off contact with family, friends and colleagues for the mildest of offenses, or no offense at all. But for all the petty dirt that King has unearthed, there’s little that sheds much light on O’Brian’s writing. He refused to cooperate with King and urged others not to talk. And King had to take the unusual approach of discounting virtually everything O’Brian said and wrote about himself since those supposedly biographical comments were always aimed in one way or another at masking his earlier identity.
As if to counterbalance this lack, King, like many Aubrey/Maturin fans, has a tendency to overstate O’Brian’s significance as an author, calling the series “one of the century’s major literary accomplishments.”
I don’t see it–much as I am a fan myself and have deeply enjoyed reading these books. For all their undeniably high literary quality, they remain historical novels, with the essential limitations of the genre: Except that they age, Aubrey and Maturin don’t change over the course of the 20 books, remaining, as they were at the beginning, opposites that attract. They don’t die–they couldn’t die, otherwise the series would have had to have ended. Despite occasional setbacks, they ultimately always win, Aubrey rising up through his naval world, Maturin finding scientific and medical oddities to feed his mind.
But if O’Brian’s books don’t belong in the same class as Joyce’s or Faulkner’s, they do stand apart from–and above–the competition as historical novels. Readers (mostly men, mostly successful in their careers, if the various O’Brian message boards on the Internet are any indication) cherish the books, in part because they’re a challenge. O’Brian wrote in a complex, almost baroque, style that seems to ask, Can you keep up? It feels like an accomplishment to be able to do so. And O’Brian himself, with his esoteric vocabulary, seemed highly accomplished: Even if I can’t understand all or, for that matter, many of O’Brian’s descriptions of the intricacies of sailing, he nonetheless gives me the comforting sense that he, at least, is thoroughly conversant about such arcana (even though it now appears that he never did much sailing in his life).
Ultimately, though, the secret of the Aubrey/Maturin books is that they are books about relationships for people (i.e., men) who don’t usually read or talk about relationships. At their heart, these are books about friendship (between Aubrey and Maturin) and community (the tight human world of a sailing ship). And something else: joy.
O’Brian, the reticent celebrity, had a knack for communicating the deep feelings of his male characters. It’s not that the characters talk much about these emotions, but, as they sit at quiet dinners or make noon sightings or launch themselves into battle, they feel, their inner states bubble and boil and sing with emotion. And often what they feel is happiness–delight at doing a job well, comfort in their company with each other.
“I give you joy!” That’s a common phrase often used by O’Brian’s characters. It also sums up the unusual gift he offers his readers. “I give you joy!”
