From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
A Master and the World He Commands
Pondering Patrick O'Brian and his nautical novels, before Russell Crowe takes over.
A few years ago, I decided that it would be fun to hold a dinner to celebrate the achievement of Patrick O'Brian, the novelist whose 20 books set in the era of Nelson's Royal Navy have given untold pleasure to admirers around the world.
I arranged a date with Patrick, then in his early 80s and notoriously elusive. I booked Wren's Painted Hall at Greenwich, one of the Navy's most cherished historic landmarks, begged the services of the fifes and drums of the Royal Marines, and waited to see who would pay for a place at the table. We did not advertise but merely passed the word around London.
On the night, we were over 500 strong. Thirty-seven Americans attended, along with 17 members of the Cayman Islands Patrick O'Brian Society. Almost the entire top deck of the British secret service appeared. Spies, it seems, love Stephen Maturin, the doctor and secret agent who makes up half of O'Brian's fictional sea-going double act, with Captain "Lucky Jack" Aubrey. Three cabinet ministers came too, and two rock stars, assorted writers, and a galaxy of grandees.
As the slight, white-haired, almost simian figure of O'Brian walked to the top table, we rose and clapped him through the throng. Later I asked if his admirers had done anything like it before. He murmured that, yes, there had been one or two such evenings. The New York Yacht Club had organized one, and the U.S. Navy.
Though O'Brian was English, the U.S. made him a literary star. At his home in southern France, he had been writing worthy, unprofitable novels and biographies since the 1940s. He published a half-dozen titles in the Aubrey-Maturin sequence--the first appeared in 1970--before a couple of big American reviews gave him lift-off. Thereafter the sequence became major best-sellers. Even the French, vanquished villains of the stories, learned to like them. Along the way, the British caught up.
Now, thanks to Russell Crowe and a Hollywood spectacular, a new generation seems likely to embrace the books three years after the novelist's death.
It would be mistaken to suppose that everybody loves them. My friend John Keegan, the military historian, remains faithful to C.S. Forester's naval tales. "Nothing ever happens in them!" he complained of O'Brian's books.
I can see what he meant. The action in O'Brian is far slower than in Forester. Yet herein lies some of the former's power. They move at the pace of their age, not ours. O'Brian's works reveal a mastery of the early 19th century's culture, nautical skills, language, politics, medicine, music and mind-set. Forester was a brilliant storyteller, but his Hornblower books merely dressed 20th-century characters in buckles and breeches.
Reading O'Brian, one learns to appreciate the nature of a world in which movement was utterly dependent upon the elements. A captain finding his ship driving toward a lee shore in a gale could often do nothing to avert catastrophe. Aubrey and Maturin, like seamen for more than 2,000 years, found themselves becalmed for weeks on end amid an escort of the crew's floating excrement. Their frigate, Surprise, is sometimes obliged to lie to among hundreds of other anchored vessels in the Channel, waiting for a change of wind. The battles O'Brian describes were real events, meticulously researched.
Maturin, the secretive doctor whom O'Brian acknowledged as his alter ego, is a passionate naturalist full of cunning and wisdom. Yet he still indulges the medical madnesses of that era, bleeding any man who looks peaky. The descriptions of his operations, performed without anesthetic, are not for the squeamish.
There are occasional anachronisms. O'Brian admitted to causing Aubrey and Maturin to attend a performance of Mozart's "Figaro" three years before the piece reached London. Though the sandwich pre-dated the Napoleonic Wars, I doubt the word and the fare were common during O'Brian's period. Yet in heavy weather Aubrey lives off little else.
I am among many O'Brian fans who loathe going to sea, except in ships so large that we can be oblivious of being afloat. Why do our kind read him? Partly we are drawn by the pleasure that middle-aged men in comfortable homes have always gained from adventure stories: They make us feel grateful not to be climbing aloft in a gale, or tapping weevils out of our biscuit, or accepting a French saber slash in the abdomen.
O'Brian's characterization, of men at least (his women are less convincing), is vastly superior to that of most of his forerunners and rivals. Jack Aubrey is a fighting seaman devoid of imagination or social graces. He gets himself into tangles as soon as he steps ashore. His financial affairs are seldom out of chaos, and his dalliances usually end in tears.
Maturin, conscious of his lack of physical charms, is a tortured soul. His chief misery is caused by his love and eventual marriage to the tempestuous Diana Villiers, who is incapable of fidelity. I once asked O'Brian why, in the 19th book, he kills off Diana in a coaching accident with a casual brutality. He replied: "Well, I don't think poor Maturin could have been asked to wear horns for any longer, do you?"
O'Brian himself liked to be an enigma. An unauthorized biographer discovered that he had perpetrated all manner of deceits about his own origins and life, maltreated his first wife and indulged family feuds of frightening intensity. The novelist once put into Maturin's mouth his intense dislike of "the interrogative style of conversation," which those of us who cherished our acquaintance with him took care to respect. He was deeply unhappy that his personal secrets and agonies had been exposed to the world.
He became desperately lonely after the death of his second wife, two years before his own. My wife and I met him one night at Brooks's, an old London club. He revealed an eagerness for society such as I had never seen before. He died a few weeks later.
His literary achievement commands respect as well as profound affection for the manner in which he sustained his story, and his characters, over so many volumes while teaching his readers so much about the early 19th century. Of course there are lapses and longueurs. I sometimes think I shall scream if I encounter one more passage in which Maturin expresses a yearning for coffee.
But such strictures are trifling. O'Brian fulfilled the first duty of any novelist, by creating a wholly original world and peopling it with sympathetic and believable characters. He wrote beautifully and elevated the boys' adventure yarn to remarkable literary heights. I feel envious of all those who will now seize upon the books after watching Russell Crowe portray Aubrey on screen. Newcomers have a banquet before them that O'Brian veterans would love to be tasting afresh.
Sir Max Hastings's "Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1945" will be published by Knopf in 2004.
