May 16, 1993

Patrick O'Brian's Ship Comes In

By MARK HOROWITZ

tarling Lawrence, an editor at W. W. Norton in New York, first heard about the Irish novelist Patrick O'Brian in 1986. Lawrence was having a friendly drink with a literary-minded cousin when he unexpectedly found himself the target of a belligerent tirade. "How can you call yourself a publisher?" his cousin demanded. "Here is this genius Patrick O'Brian and you're not publishing him. Nobody in the United States is."

He was half right; none of O'Brian's work was in print here, but some had been. In 1952 his first novel, "Testimonies," was praised extravagantly -- Delmore Schwartz compared him favorably with Yeats -- but his next novel failed and American publishers ignored him for nearly two decades. Then, in 1969, well past his 50th year and with six out-of-print novels and several volumes of short stories behind him, O'Brian accepted an offer from Lippincott to write a naval adventure set during the Napoleonic Wars.

"Master and Commander," with its two mismatched heroes, Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, a penniless Irish scholar and physician, was O'Brian's best novel to date. After a modest success it was followed by two sequels, "Post Captain" (1972) and "H.M.S. Surprise" (1973). The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, as the series came to be called, attracted a small but loyal audience in England and Ireland, enough to inspire the author to write 12 more, with another due out this year. But in the United States they failed to catch on and the series was dropped after the fifth installment.

Sea novels were hardly Starling Lawrence's cup of tea -- his own nautical experience was limited to one miserable summer of sailing lessons on Fishers Island -- but early in 1989 he found himself in the London office of Vivien Green, the literary agent who happened to represent Patrick O'Brian. He borrowed a paperback copy of "The Reverse of the Medal" for the flight home. Expecting another tired clone of C. S. Forester's classic Hornblower saga, he began to read. "It was a slow fuse," Lawrence said later, "but it took hold."

JACK AUBREY AND STEPHEN Maturin first meet in April 1800 at a performance of Locatelli's C major Quartet in Governor's House in Port Mahon, Minorca. Jack is beating time with enthusiasm; annoyed by the thumping, the small man seated next to him drives an elbow into Jack's ribs. In a review of the series, the Oxford fellow T. J. Binyon called the blow "the most productive affront in fiction since April 1625, when d'Artagnan, rushing headlong down the stairs of M. de Treville's house on the rue du Vieux-Colombier in pursuit of the Chevalier de Rochefort, accidentally insulted three musketeers."

The series is a minor miracle: it offers readers the naive pleasures of "The Three Musketeers" or Sherlock Holmes -- that is, high adventure and characters who become our friends for life -- while providing the more complex rewards of serious fiction. The expected duel never takes place. The next day, Jack gets command of his first ship and Stephen signs on as surgeon. Over the course of 5,000 pages they survive shipwrecks, pitched battles, disease, betrayal, storms, imprisonment, bankruptcy and heartbreak. Through their utterly improbable and wholly believable friendship -- they have little in common at first except their love of music -- O'Brian re-creates the spirit of an entire age.

Ashore, Jack is clumsy and guileless, incapable of managing his financial affairs and foolish with women; in command of a British man-of-war, the most complex machine his age could build, he is an instinctive leader and a perfectly efficient predator. Stephen is Jack's antithesis. The son of an Irish officer and a Catalan lady, he is a disillusioned Irish revolutionary who has made common cause with his natural enemy, the British crown, to defeat a greater evil, the tyrant Napoleon. Stephen is a physician, naturalist, linguist and intelligence agent. Where Jack is garrulous and annoyingly self-confident, Stephen is divided and alone.

O'Brian is as fascinated by the destructive force of sex as he is by war. In "Post Captain," Stephen and Jack fall in love with the same woman, the formidable Diana Villiers. She is too much for Jack, who by the fourth volume settles into a complacent marriage with her less-threatening cousin, Sophie Williams; but Diana's recklessness is a perfect match for Stephen's self-destructive melancholy, and their painful folie a deux runs the length of the series, a bittersweet counterpoint to the two men's rapport.

"Have you ever contemplated upon sex, my dear?" asks Stephen, examining a peacock's tail feathers in the cabin of H.M.S. Surprise, somewhere in the Indian Ocean:

" 'Never,' said Jack. 'Sex has never entered my mind, at any time.'

" 'The burden of sex, I mean. This bird, for example, is very heavily burdened; almost weighed down. He can scarcely fly or pursue his common daily round with any pleasure to himself, encumbered by a yard of tail and all this top-hamper. All these extravagant plumes have but one function -- to induce the hen to yield to his importunities. How the poor cock must glow and burn, if these are, as they must be, an index of his ardour.'

" 'That is a solemn thought.'

" 'Were he a capon, now, his life would be easier by far. These spurs, these fighting spurs, would vanish; his conduct would become peaceable, social, complaisant and mild. Indeed, were I to castrate all the Surprises, Jack, they would grow fat, placid and unaggressive; this ship would no longer be a man-of-war, darting angrily, hastily from place to place; and we should circumnavigate the terraqueous globe with never a harsh word.' "

WHEN Starling Lawrence proposed publishing the Aubrey/Maturin Novels in the United States, the response at W. W. Norton was not exactly warm; serious historical fiction is always a hard sell, and the news that two other American publishers had already tried and failed should have been the kiss of death. "But one of the nice things about working at a place like Norton," Lawrence said later, "is that you get enough rope to hang yourself with."

In the fall of 1990, as the first volumes began to appear, history seemed to repeat itself; the critical response was tepid. Then, after an essay by Richard Snow appeared on the front page of the Jan. 6, 1991 New York Times Book Review, the tide turned. Snow, the editor of American Heritage magazine and himself an accomplished novelist, called the series "the best historical novels ever written. . . . On every page O'Brian reminds us with subtle artistry of the most important of all historical lessons: that times change but people don't, that the griefs and follies and victories of the men and women who were here before us are in fact the maps of our own lives."

More glowing reviews followed, including a lengthy piece by John Bayley in The New York Review of Books, and word of mouth blossomed. In little more than two years, 400,000 books have been sold. Sales figures are magnified by the series format: each new reader, once hooked, buys the whole shelf. In one particularly good week last summer, 18,000 volumes were shipped. Booksellers also report a surprising statistic: as many women seem to be buying O'Brian as men.

O'Brian has become a cult phenomenon. Norton puts out a Patrick O'Brian newsletter, and a Patrick O'Brian calendar, featuring the book-cover art of Geoff Hunt, is on the way. The WELL, a popular West Coast computer bulletin board, offers an O'Brian forum where readers have the chance to discuss ship armaments, naval cooking and Stephen's taste in music; Recorded Books says the unabridged 12-tape cassette version of "Master and Commander," read with gusto by Patrick Tull, is a top seller, and they plan to have all the Aubrey/Maturin Novels available by 1994.

This summer, two more Aubrey/Maturin Novels are due out in paperback, and No. 16, "The Wine-Dark Sea," arrives this fall. In response to renewed interest in O'Brian's earlier work, Norton is reissuing "Testimonies" this month.

IN THE ROUSSILLON region, at the southernmost edge of France, a corduroy patchwork of ancient vineyards blankets the foothills of the Pyrenees. The carefully tended vines are rigorously aligned in orderly rows, in contrast to the natural curves of the terrain. Patrick O'Brian has lived here for more than four decades: he and his wife, Mary, have acquired a sloping vineyard of their own, small enough to cultivate themselves but large enough to provide an adequate supply of the region's full-bodied red. When sleep eludes him, O'Brian leaves their modest Mediterranean-style house and drives high up into the hills, parks his car and walks for hours among the vineyards. That is when so much of what he will write the following day comes, in the starlit hours between dreaming and dawn.

He is a compact, austere gentleman. His face is deeply lined and his gait is slow, as one would expect of someone in his late 70's, but his pale, watchful eyes are clear and alert, like those of a young and vigorous bird of prey. More than one visitor, upon meeting him for the first time, has felt a frisson of recognition: surely here is Dr. Maturin himself, alive and well. Like Maturin, O'Brian is exceedingly formal and polite; there is the same precise language, and the familiar erudition on all matters natural and literary: a long walk in his company becomes a master class in botany, viniculture, zoology and ornithology.

"Have you ever been to Tierra del Fuego?" O'Brian asks, staring fixedly at a nearby cork tree. "Because if you had, you might have seen there the eagle owl." He goes on to explain how he once saw an eagle owl sitting on that very branch, and how they stared at each other for several minutes until the owl, "tiring of the spectacle, flew off." O'Brian walks on, pointing out the fresh tracks of wild boar, then stoops to pluck a harmless-looking flowering plant, one of many poisonous euphorbias, whose juice, he remarks with a certain relish, can cause instantaneous and permanent blindness if rubbed in the eye.

Unlike Stephen and Jack, O'Brian does not play an instrument, and although Stephen occasionally uses laudanum, O'Brian's only vices appear to be strong coffee, red wine with meals and books.

Until recently, he refused all interviews. Those authors we know the least about, he says, are the ones we get in their purest form, like Homer. In "The Truelove," Stephen warns would-be interviewers that "question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation." O'Brian deflects direct inquiries about his private life, and when asked why he moved to the south of France after World War II, he stops and fixes his interrogator with a cold stare. "That seems to be getting rather close to a personal question," he says softly, walking on.

Reliable facts about his early life are not easy to come by. The only source is O'Brian himself, and over the years, says one friend, the story has varied a bit.

He was born in 1914 into an Irish family of some distinction. There seem to have been French lessons, books, horses, travel, fox hunting and a governess, but by the Great Depression his people had fallen on hard times. According to an acquaintance, O'Brian came from "an impoverished gentleman's household," a not-uncommon situation for the Catholic gentry of that era.

His mother died when he was a child, and a lung illness, which troubled him into adulthood, sometimes kept him at home, where he was privately tutored. A voracious reader, he once found a chest full of unbound copies of The Gentleman's Magazine, an 18th-century publication edited for a time by Dr. Johnson. He read them all.

He has been a sailor most of his life; sea air was often the recommended cure for his illness. A relative owned a two-ton sloop, and other friends had boats. But best of all, one family acquaintance owned a converted bark-rigged merchantman, which offered the opportunity to "hand, reef and steer" in the old manner.

A peripatetic education, including a stint at the Sorbonne, was grounded in the natural sciences and the classics. O'Brian speaks French, moderate Irish, Catalan, Spanish and Italian and, like Stephen, knows his Latin. His Greek, apparently, has grown a bit rusty. Though he spent time in England -- his stepmother was English -- O'Brian feels that he was formed, as Stephen Maturin was, by Ireland and France.

Rejected for active service, he drove ambulances in London during the blitz, then spent the rest of his war serving in an Allied intelligence unit connected with the French Resistance. When the war ended he refused the post of third secretary in the Paris embassy and resolved to be a writer at all costs. All that was needed was a quiet and inexpensive place to live -- near, if possible, mountains and a trout stream. He tried Wales, the setting for his first published novel, then moved to the south of France.

Since 1949, O'Brian has lived by his pen alone, producing 21 novels, several volumes of short stories, a biography of the 18th-century naturalist and explorer Joseph Banks, who, along with the young Charles Darwin, is an obvious model for Stephen Maturin's scientific bent, an illuminating life of Picasso and, when necessary, translations, including works by de Beauvoir and Colette.

O'Brian's perfect manners and impressive erudition are intimidating, and he is not above flaunting them. Richard Ollard, a naval historian, calls this particular habit, "blowing people out of the game." Ollard, who edited the early Aubrey/Maturin Novels, urged O'Brian to tone down the most obscure allusions, though the books remain crammed with Latin tags, antiquated medical terminology and an endless stream of marvelous sounding but impenetrable naval jargon.

"Like many who have struggled themselves," Ollard said of his friend, "he thought others should struggle, too." One longtime acquaintance put it more bluntly: "Patrick can be a bit of a snob, socially and intellectually."

O'BRIAN'S 18TH Century runs "from Dryden to Byron," and includes Jane Austen, born in 1775, whom he holds in the highest esteem. "That was the mass of my reading, other than nonsense," he says. "I was soaked in Johnson, and for lighter things, Smollett and Fielding; and, of course, Defoe and Swift." After Austen, his favorite 18th-century novelist is Samuel Richardson. Proust is one of the few moderns he admits into the pantheon.

"Richardson is of Proustian length and psychological intricacy," he says. "Johnson said very well of Fielding and Richardson that if you were to read Richardson for the story, you would hang yourself. Fielding is a man who shows you a watch that tells you the time; Richardson is a man who shows you how the watch was made." O'Brian not only shows how the watch is made, or how a new mast is installed in a man-of-war, or how a naval dish like figgy-dowdy is prepared, he even makes watches, or at least clocks: he is an amateur horologist, and the clock that hangs on his living-room wall -- "ancient in Nelson's time" -- boasts replacement parts he fashioned himself.

"A novelist must know everything about his time," O'Brian says, meaning in his case the 18th century. He has not merely researched that world, he prefers it, and wherever possible, he lives it. "I know their politics inside out, but I can't tell you who is in the Cabinet right now."

Says Christopher MacLehose, publisher of Harvill, an imprint of HarperCollins in London: "There is something the English would say is at times a bit precious about Patrick, something even a bit incomprehensible. His language, his address. He doesn't really belong in this century."

O'Brian is old enough to recall a time when horses and carriages were still often seen on the streets of London and Dublin. Occasionally it is as if the lost world of his youth and the more distant past of his reading have merged; this in-between world is, perhaps, one source of his fiction.

He feels the 18th century has much to teach our own: "The absolute refusal of any kind of insult," for example. "In a day when if you insulted a man it might cost you your life," he observes dryly, "you were probably more civil." O'Brian especially savors the apparent contradiction between the 18th century's "fairly detached attitude toward sexual relations" and the raw emotions always boiling just beneath the surface. "When this rather cool convention comes up against very strong frustration or desire for possession, then it blazes out extremely strongly, more strongly than perhaps it even does now."

In his living room, he proudly displays his early editions of Richardson, Austen and Voltaire, along with a very well thumbed 1810 Britannica. He doesn't merely collect, he uses these volumes. "You see the print that they saw," he says. "You have the smell of the binding in your nostrils. It makes the era palpable and helps its apprehension. Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book."

A. S. Byatt, author of the best-selling novel "Possession," believes that O'Brian's faith in a real, knowable past, is a very radical position to take in the current intellectual climate. "It has been fashionable for so long now to say that we can't know the past, or that it is irrelevant," says Byatt. "When I was a child one supposed there was such a thing and it was different and we could find out about it; indeed, we were not complete people without finding out about it."

To understand Nelson's Navy, O'Brian steeped himself in the sources. At the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the British Public Record Office, he read the logs of captains, masters and lieutenants; studied ship plans; scoured the memoirs and correspondence of the great commanders -- Collingwood, Saumarez, Howe, Hood, Nelson -- and immersed himself in The Naval Chronicle, a monthly journal that ran through the entire period, full of firsthand accounts of battles, personal information concerning sailors, scientific letters and anything else connected with the day-to-day life of the Royal Navy.

Starling Lawrence of Norton doesn't deny the historical power of the novels, but he also insists on their sometimes-unacknowledged success as fantasy. "There is certainly an element of wish-fulfillment in the world that he creates, and, even if there are all sorts of cruel things within it, you still end up in a place where the sails are white and the air is clean and there is an endless possibility of things that don't happen in our world -- civility and friendship -- things that we would like to be true but most of the time just aren't."

AT FIRST, MOST professional critics in England ignored the series, but a small though formidable group promoted it in reviews and essays whenever and wherever they could. Oxford was the unofficial base for this early O'Brian Underground, and T. J. Binyon was a founding member. He ranks the series with the best of 20th-century historical novels, but he thinks it was a victim of two different prejudices; literary types looked down their noses at naval-genre fiction, where they ghettoized O'Brian without reading him, while readers of nautical potboilers couldn't abide O'Brian's literary complexity. "He was tarred with the genre brush," said Binyon in the Senior Common Room at Wadham College, "while being too good for the kind of people he was being grouped with. He was caught between two worlds."

Binyon shared O'Brian with John Bayley of Saint Catherine's College, who, in turn, alerted his wife, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. The couple's love for Jack and Stephen is anything but academic; in their cozy north Oxford house, overflowing with books and papers, Murdoch and Bayley discussed the two men with the keen familiarity usually reserved for good gossip.

"Thrilling stuff," said Murdoch, "Beautiful literature."

Said Bayley: "O'Brian's style is very subtle. Aubrey and Maturin are the converse of Holmes and Watson. In O'Brian the leader is the less intelligent one, while the follower is the clever one."

Murdoch sees something of Achilles and Patroclus in them, though without the homosexual aspect. "Achilles is a big fighter, blunt and instinctive. While Patroclus is very tender toward women. It is a very touching picture."

As for the two major women characters, Diana Villiers and Sophie Williams, Bayley said, "Diana is a fine portrait of that perfect bitch you can never resist."

Murdoch interjected: "I don't like Diana, and Sophie is pretty soppy."

Bayley disagreed. "Oh, I like Sophie, nothing wrong with Sophie, especially since she's not around very much." He guesses that women readers like the female characters.

"No!" answered his wife. "They like the men."

The couple revels in the complete fictional world O'Brian has created. "It all plays like an Irish fairy tale," said Bayley. Murdoch compared it in that respect with J. R. R. Tolkien, whose novels she is fond of. Bayley rejected the comparison. He thought the intimacy of O'Brian's drama -- and despite the epic setting, there are never more than a few main characters throughout the entire series -- recalled nothing so much as Jane Austen. "Mansfield Park-sur-mer!" he said with a contented smile.

O'BRIAN WRITES IN A long, cool gallery blasted out of the rock beneath his home. During the summer months, when the tourists on the coast make too much of a din, he moves to a small stone building -- what the Catalans call a casot -- higher in the hills.

On good days the words come in a rush. "When you're taking a fence on a horse, you don't think much; your body does all the thinking, and you're over or you're not over. It's much the same when you are doing a tricky thing with a pen. There are times when I'm writing very, very fast. You have to see it to know how it's done. It's very like taking a hedge, or doing some rather dangerous thing that has to be done just so or not at all. It's not something you can dwell upon."

He approaches his material as if it were music, the alternating perspectives of Stephen and Jack representing two sides of a single argument. "It's the way one composes theme and variations," he says, "You state, restate and counterstate."

The genesis of each book "is impossible to explain, like describing how one walks." First drafts are done with pen and ink in a small, spidery script with remarkably few blottings. Here and there a word is changed, a sentence crossed out and started again, but he proudly claims that there are few false starts and very little rewriting, and the manuscripts bear this out. O'Brian does not suffer editing well, except from his wife, a formidably learned Englishwoman, who types the final version. Nearly every book is dedicated to Mary, with love.

O'Brian and his wife have shared their one-bedroom home within sight of the sea for half a lifetime. The recent acceleration in his popularity has had little noticeable effect on their lives. An ancient Deux Chevaux Citroen has been replaced by a sportier model, but in all other respects they continue to live in ascetic simplicity. Since his novels have not yet been translated into French, few neighbors realize that the silver-haired gentleman in their midst is a famous author.

When asked how the Aubrey/Maturin series will end, O'Brian is customarily vague. He has no plans for a grand finale: "I see it much more in the Proustian sense, where the time is found again and the wheel comes full circle."

As a character says in "The Nutmeg of Consolation," No. 14 in the series: "Are endings really so very important? Sterne did quite well without one; and often an unfinished picture is all the more interesting for the bare canvas. I remember Bourville's definition of a novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or as you might say without an end, an organized end. And there is at least one Mozart quartet that stops without the slightest ceremony: most satisfying when you get used to it."

O'Brian recently wrote that he never knew what a "despised genre" the historical novel was until he had written one himself. "But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more."