Nikolai Tolstoy - Patrick O’Brian

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Nikolai Tolstoy 2019

Cover image: Marinepics Ltd/Shutterstock

Nikolai Tolstoy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All photographs courtesy of the author

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008350581

Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008350604

Version: 2020-09-25

I dedicate this book to my late cousin Adrian Slack and his sister Julia, the dearest of friends as well as closest of relatives since those distant days of childhood at Appledore beside the Severn Sea.

At home in the cloister of Correch d’en Baus

Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life .

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1793), i, p. 6

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page PATRICK O’BRIAN A Very Private Life Nikolai Tolstoy

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

I Collioure and Three Bear Witness

II The Catalans

III New Home and New Family

IV Voyages of Adventure

V In the Doldrums

VI A Family Man

VII Master and Commander

VIII The Green Isle Calls

IX Pablo Ruiz Picasso

X Shifting Currents

XI Muddied Waters

XII Travails of Existence

XIII Family Travails

XIV The Sunlit Uplands

XV Epinician Acclaims

XVI Triumph and Tragedy

XVII Melmoth the Wanderer

Envoi

Appendix A: Collioure: History and Landscape

Appendix B: Patrick and His First Wife Elizabeth

Appendix C: Patrick’s Sailing

Footnotes

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Nikolai Tolstoy

About the Publisher

A fortnight after Patrick O’Brian’s death, the playwright David Mamet wrote of his literary achievement:

Recently I put down O’Brian’s sea novel ‘The Ionian Mission’ and said to my wife, ‘This fellow has created characters and stories that are part of my life.’

She said: ‘Write him a letter. He’s in his 80s. Write him and thank him. And when you are in England, look him up, go tell him.

‘How wonderful,’ she said, ‘to be alive, when he is still alive. Imagine living in the 1890s and being able to converse with Conan Doyle.’

Mamet promptly rehearsed the eulogium with which he would address his literary hero, and began preparing a letter of introduction at his breakfast table. Then, glancing at the newspaper beside him, he saw to his dismay an announcement of the melancholy news of Patrick’s death.[1]

I have no doubt that Patrick would have been delighted by such praise from his acclaimed fellow writer, and that had my mother still been alive she would have inserted the letter in her box-file ‘Valuable Fans and very good reviews’. My hope is that, while nothing can quite replace a face-to-face conversation, this book may compensate by enabling Mamet and others of Patrick’s worldwide legion of admirers to learn much more of his life and personality than might have been obtained from any interview with the famously reclusive writer.

This book covers the latter part of Patrick O’Brian’s life, from the moment of his and my mother’s arrival at Collioure in the south of France in the autumn of 1949. It is the period during which he wrote all his major works. Since my mother’s death twenty years ago, I remain the sole intimate observer of Patrick’s astonishing career from impoverished and little-known writer in 1955, when I first met him, until his death at the height of his international fame at the turn of the millennium forty-five years later. Nevertheless, it never occurred to me at any point during his lifetime to compile his biography – not least because I was well aware of his detestation of inquisitive enquiries into his private life.