Dean King - Patrick OBrian: A Life Revealed

For Jessica, Hazel, Grace, Willa, Nora, and Betsey, with love

Patrick is sixteen, the son of a London doctor. He began this story when he was fourteen and finished it in March of this year. I did it mostly in my bedroom and a little when I should have been doing homework.

Caesar, 1930

Patrick OBrian was born in the West of Ireland and educated in England. During the war he drove an ambulance in London and later joined the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. Mr. OBrian began writing at an early age and had already produced four novels before the war, as a kind of literary exercise.

The Walker and Other Stories, 1955

As to the personal side, the Spectator for March 1st 1710 begins, I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other particulars of the like Nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author. To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, we may state that Mr. OBrian is a black man, choleric, and married.

Lying in the Sun, 1956

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues, which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.

The interest which the corrupt part of mankind have in hardening themselves against every motive to amendment, has disposed them to give to these contradictions, when they can be produced against the cause of virtue, that weight which they will not allow them in any other case. In moral or religious questions alone, they determine the sentiments by the actions, and charge every man with endeavouring to impose upon the world, whose writings are not confirmed by his life. They never consider that they themselves neglect, or practise something every day, inconsistently with their own settled judgment, nor discover that the conduct of the advocates for virtue can little increase, or lessen, the obligations of their dictates; argument is to be invalidated only by argument, and is in itself of the same force, whether or not it convinces him by whom it is proposed.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 14, May 5, 1750

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of coexistence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 1954

WHEN AN AMERICAN AND AN ENGLISH publisher jointly commissioned Patrick OBrian to write a naval novel in 1967, no one expected it to be a great work of literature, and certainly no one knew that they had set in motion what would become one of the publishing phenomena of our time. The book was the commercial brainchild of an American editor who hoped to find the next C. S. Forester. A master of depicting naval battles, Forester had died the year before, leaving behind ten novels and a companion book about the exploits of Horatio Hornblower, officer of the Royal Navy. These well-written naval tales, published over the course of three decades, had captured the imagination of British schoolboys and statesmen alikeWinston Churchill includedand sold well on both sides of the Atlantic.

Based on OBrians previous historical naval novels, The Golden Ocean (1956) and The Unknown Shore (1959), the editor at J. B. Lippincott, a Philadelphia publishing house, felt that the fifty-three-year-old novelist, whom he believed to be Irish, was well suited to duplicate Foresters success. The editor knew he could expect an entertaining adventure story, including black squalls, weevils in the hardtack, and graphic sea battles, liberally dusted with OBrians sprightly humor.

What he got from OBrian was vastly more profound.

Master and Commander, published in 1969, was the first volume of what would turn out to be a monumental extended novel set during the Napoleonic wars, a roman-fleuve that filled twenty volumes, currently having sold more than three million copies in twenty languages and changed the lives of countless devotees, in the way that only great books can. However, at first, this seemed an unlikely scenario; neither of the publishers that commissioned Master and Commander would succeed with the series. Macmillan of England rejected the manuscript out of hand (William Collins published it instead), and Lippincott, after several poorly selling sequels, also dropped the author.

Nevertheless, OBrian toiled away on the saga of his two fictional charactersthe bluff Royal Navy captain Lucky Jack Aubrey and his disheveled particular friend, the naval surgeon and political intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, whose many passions included nature, music, and opium. Each new book was anxiously awaited by a small dedicated group of British intellectuals and naval veterans. OBrian was routinely praised by scholars for his accurate naval history and his portrayal of Regency England. They also raved about his prose, which evoked the period authentically without the woodenness of so much historical fiction. Ironically, the books suffered from their own success at verisimilitude. Critics classified them as historical novels, a lowly genre that by definition precluded them from serious attention.

But OBrian, a serious-minded writer, knew that his work was unfairly pigeonholed. His reputation had once briefly flared in the literary firmament in the 1950s when his novel Testimonies received a stunning endorsement from Delmore Schwartz. Testimonies makes one think of a great ballad or a Biblical story, the critic wrote. The reader, drawn forward by lyric eloquence and the storys fascination, discovers in the end that he has encountered in a new way the sphinx and riddle of existence itself. Schwartz placed the book above recent works by Angus Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway.

But OBrians reputation had receded as he continued writing tortured novels and short stories. He had turned to translating to make money, doing many of Simone de Beauvoirs books and dozens of others, including the international best-seller Papillon. Returning to fiction in the Aubrey-Maturin novels, he had in a sense started writing afresh, with greater distance and less anger, about his former themeslove and friendship.

The essence of my books is about human relationships and how people treat one another, he later told the Financial Times. That seems to me what novels are for. In fact, he made that clear at the beginning of his naval series. In Master and Commander, when Aubrey, newly made captain of the pint-size warship HMS Sophie, asks Maturin to sign on as her surgeon, Maturin responds:

For a philosopher, a student of human nature, what could be better? The subjects of his inquiry shut up together, unable to escape his gaze, their passions heightened by the dangers of war, the hazards of their calling, their isolation from women and their curious, but uniform, diet. And by the glow of patriotic fervour, no doubt.with a bow to JackIt is true that for some time past I have taken more interest in the cryptogams than in my fellow-men; but even so, a ship must be a most instructive theatre for an inquiring mind. (P. 43)