Patrick O'Brian: The Thirteen Gun Salute

The book was politely received in England, much more enthusiastically in the States where the intellectual journals praised it very highly indeed. It did not sell well, but New York magazines asked me for stories, and once American royalties started coming in our material difficulties faded away. Indeed, we bought a motor car, the little tin Citroen 2CV, and drove right round the whole Iberian Peninsula, looking in vain for an even better village.

Coming back, I wrote some more stories, a fair amount of verse and another novel. One of its basic ideas was quite good - dryness of heart, inability to love or even to feel ordinary affection, and the distress arising from the perception of this state (this not very unusual state, I believe) - but the execution was not. I read an Italian translation a little while ago and blushed for my tale. English reviewers were quite kind but the Americans tore it to pieces and the source of dollars ran almost dry.

Before this book was published I wrote another for fun. It was called the Golden Ocean and it took an ingenious Irish midshipman round the Horn in Anson's expedition to the Pacific in 1740, when the one surviving ship took the Acapulco galleon with 1,313,843 pieces of eight aboard as well as great quantities of other spoil. I had excellent contemporary material, I had been reading naval history for years and years, and I knew a fair amount about the sea: I wrote the tale in little more than a month, laughing most of the time. It made no great impression, nor did I expect it to do so; but it had pleasant consequences.

About this time we bought a piece of step-sloping land outside the village and built first a small stone writing-house deep in the rock for coolness (we blasted out the space with dynamite) and later a small dwelling on the flat ground above. With the growth of tourism the village had become very noisy, and some degree of quiet was necessary for writing. Perhaps at this point I should say a little about my working day. After an early breakfast I sit at my desk and write till noon; when lunch is over I play - walking, swimming, gardening or looking after the vineyard - and at five or so, when I have floated my powerful mind in tea, I sit down again at my desk. In the evening, when we are not dining out or have no guests, we listen to music or read. Anything that disturbs this pattern - letters that require an answer, telephone calls, unannounced visitors - is most unwelcome. I write with pen and ink like a Christian, correct my manuscript at the end of the week, type it, correct the typescript, and when a chapter is finished I show it to my wife, whose comments I value most. It is a slow process, but with perseverance it allows me to cover a great deal of paper (at the cost, admittedly, of cutting oneself off from immediate contact with one's fellow men).

In this retreat (a retreat no longer, alas, since the tide of concrete has reached and even passed us) we had not only tranquillity but also a well, a garden, and enough vineyard for a year's modest drinking. Although I quite often went back to Ireland for short visits or both of us to London for a week or so, it was not a place one left willingly for long; yet as time went by family crises, illness and the like, called for prolonged stays in England. Life there was obviously very much more expensive, while creative writing was difficult if not impossible; and in 1960, when we had to spend the best part of a year in London, I asked my literary agent to find me some translation: this he very kindly did almost at once - Jacques Soustelle on the Aztecs - and after that I did many books (all Simone de Beauvoir's later work, for example) fitting them in with my own writing or even writing in the morning and translating in the evening, without much difficulty. Prose translations of the usual kind seems to me to call for little more than a certain feeling for both languages, a kind of higher crossword puzzle ingenuity in finding equivalents, and unremitting industry; and more than anything else shows the strain of true creative writing, which has to be done with all one's powers at full stretch. For translation is only a steady of laborious walk along a clearlymarked road of stated length, as opposed to a breakneck run along a tightrope that may have no clear end in sight and that certainly has no safety net below. In translation other people can help you: in writing you are entirely alone.

In the late Sixties an American publisher wrote suggesting that I should write an adult book about the sea: this it seems arose from a recollection of both Testimonies and the cheerful little Golden Ocean. The suggestion came at an opportune moment; I agreed and quickly wrote Master and Commander, setting the tale in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic wars, the glorious days of the Royal Navy. I am sorry to say that the Americans did not like it much at its first appearance (they have changed their minds since then, bless them), nor did Macmillan, then my English publisher. Collins did, however, and they sold a most surprising number in hardback: many more of course in paperback. And to my astonishment it was translated into Japanese.

This encouraged me and I carried on with the series until 1973, when still another American publisher asked me whether I should like to write a life of Picasso, offering a princely advance. By all means: I had long admired him, I knew him moderately well and some of his friends quite intimately. It was clearly a book that would require a very great deal of work, but at that time I had the unthinking health and energy for it and the resources. We travelled all over the great man's Spain and above all his Catalonia, we went to Philadelphia, to New York, to Moscow and St Petersburg, to countless galleries and libraries. It took over three years, and I think the book was quite good. At all events Kenneth Clarke said it was the best in existence. Its reception was mixed: poor in the United States (I had scoffed at Gertrude Stein), moderate in England, good in France (which gratified me extremely), Italy and Sweden, very good in Germany, even better in Spain.

Yet on the whole I was glad to get back to my naval tales, where I could say what I liked, and control rhythm and events, if not the course of history. They followed one another at a steady pace, interrupted only by a life of Sir Joseph Banks, that amiable naturalist and circumnavigator. By now there are sixteen of them, and for the last ten or twelve it had been borne in upon me that this is the right kind of writing for a man of my sort.

Obviously I have lived very much out of the world: I know little of present-day Dublin or London or Paris, even less of post-modernity, post-structuralism, hard rock or rap, and I cannot write with much conviction about the contemporary scene. Yet I do have some comments, some observations to offer on the condition humaine that may be sound or at least of some interest, and it seems to me that they are best made in the context of a world that I know as well as the reader does, a valid world so long as it is inhabited by human beings rather than by lay figures in period clothing.

The historical novel, as I learnt with some concern after I had written two or three, belongs to a despised genre. 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 two thousand years and more.

This essay first appeared in

Patrick O'Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography,

A. E. Cunningham (ed), British Library,