January 7, 2000
Patrick O'Brian, Whose 20 Sea Stories Won Him International Fame, Dies
at 85
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Patrick O'Brian
By FRANK J. PRIAL
Patrick O'Brian, the Anglo-Irish novelist whose stirring tales of
the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars made him a literary
celebrity at an age when most writers have long ceased to ply their
trade, died Sunday in Dublin. He was 85.
Cheryl Clegg/ W. W. Norton |
Patrick O'Brian
|
In recent months O'Brian had acknowledged that he was in ill health
and unlikely to continue his writing much longer. His biographer,
Dean King, said O'Brian's body was being flown back to Collioure,
the village near the Spanish border in the south of France where he
had lived for almost half a century.
[Mr.] O'Brian achieved international fame with his series of novels
featuring Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen
Maturin, an Irish-Catalan physician, naturalist and accomplished
spy who was Aubrey's friend and constant shipmate. [The first of the
series, "Master and Commander," appeared in 1969; the 20th, "Blue
at the Mizzen," was published late last year. Like most of the
Aubrey-Maturin novels, it appeared on the New York Times
best-seller list.]
[When it first appeared,] "Master and Commander" had modest success
in England and Ireland,
and a dozen more books in the series were produced over the next
decade. But it wasn't until 1989, when Starling Lawrence, who was
to become his American editor, read one of the books, "The Reverse
of the Medal," on a flight from London to New York that they were
taken up by serious critics. Lawrence's company, W.W. Norton, began
to publish the books in the United States, and within two years
some 400,000 copies had been sold here.
To date, more than 2 million copies of the Aubrey-Maturin novels
have been sold. O'Brian was compared to Melville and Conrad and
even to Proust. Iris Murdoch, the English novelist and scholar, was
one of his first champions, and his admirers included Eudora Welty
and Tom Stoppard.
Critics likened the O'Brian books to the sequential novels of
Trollope and Anthony Powell, but the comparison that pleased
O'Brian most was to Jane Austen. He revered her as the finest of
all English novelists and kept first editions of her works near him
while wrote, along with first editions of Gibbon and Samuel Johnson
and a battered but still serviceable 1810 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The second book in the series, "Post Captain," set mostly in
country houses and as much a novel of manners as a sea story, was
said to be O'Brian's homage to Ms. Austen.
[Mr.] O'Brian was something of a recluse. Interviewers were warned
away from personal questions, and while he was a paragon of
politeness and 18th-century courtliness, he never hesitated to cut
short any conversation he felt was edging toward his private life.
["I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who
tries to dig into your private life," he once told a New York Times
reporter.] Interviews were granted rarely and only on the understand
that hishometown, Collioure, would not be disclosed.
The residents of Collioure, a fishing village turned tourist
destination, respected his privacy and protected him from the
occasional visitor who came to the Roussillon coast to find him.
"They say they've never heard of me," he said, "or that I've moved
away."
In fact, Patrick O'Brian had his reasons for being an unusually
private person. On those occasions when he chose to speak about his
life, he claimed that had been born in Galway and grew up a Roman
Catholic in genteel circumstances. He had been a sickly child, he
said, and was educated mostly at home. A voracious reader, he
eventually mastered French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan. He knew
some Irish, he said, and read easily in Latin.
After serving as an ambulance driver in London during World War II
and serving in some unspecified branch of military intelligence, he
and his wife, Mary, moved to Wales. "Dear people, splendid
mountains, but a terrible climate," he said. So, in 1949, they came
to Collioure, and they stayed.
Or so [his story went].
Beginning in 1998, British journalists began to unravel the O'Brian
saga. He was not Irish, as it turned out, and not a Catholic. He
was born in London and his name was Richard Patrick Russ. He was
the son of an English mother and a physician of German descent.
[According to Mr. King, who has written extensively about Mr. O'Brian
Russ was born on Dec. 12, 1914, in Walden Chalfont St. Peter, a
village near London. He was the eighth of nine children born to
Charles Russ, a London physician, and his wife, Jessie, who died of
tuberculosi in 1918. At that point the family began to disperse and,
according to Mr. King, Patrick may have spent some time in Ireland
with relatives.
He began writing as a teenager, including, when he was 15, a novel
about a leopard that was published to considerable acclaim. He married at
21 and had a son and a daughter, Jane, who died in childhood. The
marriage ended in divorce.
Richard Russ did drive ambulances in London during the war, according
to Mr. King, and worked for the Political Intelligence Division of
the Foreign Office. During the war he met Mary Wicksteed Tolstoy, an
Englishwoman who was married to Count Dmitri Tolstoy. She divorced
the count and in July 1945 married Mr. Russ. A month later he
formally changed his name to O'Brian and, said Mr. King, completely
cut himself off from his brothers and sisters.
After a brief time in Wales, in 1949 the O'Brians moved to Collioure,
where Mr. O'Brian once again took up his writing career. His novel
"Testimonies," published in 1952, was highly praised by the American
critic Delmore Schwartz. But most of his output in the 1950's and
1960's was ignored by thecritics and public alike. He survived by
translating into English Simone de Beauvoir and other French
writers. It was not until 1959, when he was 54 years old,
that one of his books was widely praised. That was "Master and
Commander," the first of the Aubrey-Maturin saga. In 1973 he produced a
biography of Pablo Picasso that was lauded by Sir Kenneth Clark, the
English critic. But it wasn't until he was well into his 60's that
he became an international success.
He once said that at first, serious writers dismissed his sea novels as
adventure stories and lovers of adventure stories dismissed them as
serious, even difficult books to read.
That was all to change. So popular were his books by the late 1980's
that he became something of a cult figure. Fans followed him from
appearance to appearance on book tours, and he became the subject of
endless Internet chat rooms. His own web site was called "The
Gunroom" after the officers' wardroom on an 18th-century man-of-war.
Aubrey and Maturin were both musicians - violin and cello - and two
CD's have been issued of the music they play at sea. A cookbook, called
"Lobscouse & Spotted Dog," appeared, filled with recipes of the
dishes, including rats, eaten aboard the H. M. S. Surprise and other
ships Aubrey commands. In due course an atlas and geographical guide,
"Harbors and High Seas," appeared, as did a lexicon of nautical terms
used in the books, "a Sea of Words." Mr. King shared authorship of
both books. There was for several years an O'Brian newsletter.
A collection of critical essays and a bibliography were snapped up by
the O'Brian faithful. There were - and still are - O'Brian calendars
and posters.
In recent years, critics were less kind to the Aubrey-Maturin books,
citing looser writing and unexplained characters who appeared and just as
quickly disappeared. And the books were said to appear more like
chapters in a long narrative than as separate novels.
But few commentators on Mr. O'Brian's long chronicle have ever doubted
its overall quality For his many enthusiastic readers, it may seem as
if England has lost its last fine 18th-century writer.
Mr. O'Brian's wife died in 1998. His son from his first marriage is
said to still live in London, and other survivors include a sister, two
granddaughters and a stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy, also of London.]
