Nikolai Tolstoy - Patrick O’Brian - A Very Private Life

I suspect that Patrick’s voracious reading as a boy in Willesden Green or his Devonshire preparatory school included Under the Chinese Dragon: A Tale of Mongolia , published in 1912. The author, Captain F.S. Brereton, was a prolific creator of rousing boys’ adventure stories. The hero of his tale is a brave orphan boy, David, who outwits dangerous Russian anarchists, and afterwards joins Professor Padmore on the China Station. Among the crew is an excitable French cook Alphonse (who must in turn be derivative of the more celebrated comic cook Alphonse in Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain ), whose quaint speech is juxtaposed with that of faithful Chinese attendants. They are attacked by pirates, undergo stirring adventures in China and on the Mongolian frontier, and conclude by finding a hoard of valuable objects, including documents which enable David to recover the inheritance of which he had been cheated.

Although well written and fast-moving, Samarcand may perhaps be regarded as a retrograde step in Patrick’s writing at this time. To do him justice, I think it likely that the novel represented a distillation of half-remembered early reading, rather than overt plagiarism. In any case, much of it, as has been seen, was written at an early stage of his literary evolution. Although it was published at the time in Germany and Sweden, a publisher could not be found in the United States until 2007.

Nevertheless, 1955 was to prove a pivotal year in Patrick’s life. It was purely fortuitous that his son Richard’s final departure coincided with my first arrival in Collioure. As has also been seen, it was in this year that my mother and Patrick established themselves permanently at Collioure, buying the vineyard at Correch d’en Baus, and beginning work on building the casot and upper room of the home they would inhabit for the rest of their lives. Finally, January 1955 saw what may be regarded as the inception of Patrick’s enduring contribution to world literature.

Here I would emphasize that nothing in the unhappy contretemps arising during my first visit (described in the previous chapter) stinted one of Patrick’s most amiable characteristics: his unfailing generosity. I had returned to England laden with presents, ranging from an open razor and leather strop, which I used for years, to a precious copy of The Trial of James Stewart in Aucharn in Duror of Appin, for the Murder of Colin Campbell, Esq (Edinburgh, 1753). This is the now rare book which inspired Stevenson’s Kidnapped . When Patrick bought it in early 1945, he noted in his diary:

Before reading Catriona [the sequel to Stevenson’s Kidnapped ] I went through James Stewart’s trial, which was very good, if somewhat repetitious reading. Unfortunately I chanced to see the result before reading it, which rather spoilt the suspense for the last speeches, but before that it was positively exciting. It is impossible to see it objectively, having read Kidnapped but I am sure I could never have made such a tale of it.

Despite this rueful acknowledgement, while being fortuitously in a position to compare it with its prime source, Patrick’s diffident self-criticism provides a premonition of his eventual mastery of one of the most difficult (yet oddly underrated) of literary achievements, the historical novel. In 1945, a month after reading Catriona , he had skimmed through:

Dr Goldsmith’s History of Rome [1782], abridged by himself, as a preparation for Gibbon. A poor piece of work, I think, though I liked ‘through desarts filled with serpents of various malignity’. All somewhat Little Arthur-ish. [2] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. One gets the impression that the Romans were an appallingly bloody-minded lot – true maybe – but what is far worse, and quite false is the impression that they were modern men (insofar as they were men, and not names) acting in an incomprehensible way in a vacuum. It is not history – hardly chronicle. It seems to me that works like the Hammonds’ English labourer are worth more than a dozen such works, as far as inculcating an historical sense goes.

This trenchant criticism might be levelled at all too many historical novelists. Indeed, the indications are that it was about this time that Patrick himself came to shed his earlier jejune concept of historical fiction. In January 1940 he had written a melodramatic short story about a crusading knight, John of Bellesme, which owes more to the romantic novels of high adventure written by the Sussex novelist Jeffery Farnol than to anything actually occurring during the Middle Ages. Although Patrick preserved the manuscript, he must surely have been relieved in later years that it was never published. [3] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

His only other transitory attempt at historical fiction appears to have been written about the same time. Published in The Last Pool , ‘The Trap’ is much inferior to its fellow tales set in Patrick’s own day. Although as ever well written, its tale of a daring youth who fares forth to poach in the grounds of a tyrannical squire is too reminiscent of the stock characters and standard predicaments of juvenile fiction to carry much conviction. [4] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Following a flurry of creativity over the momentous winter of 1939–40, it seems that Patrick’s wartime employment, first as an ambulance driver in the Blitz, then as an operative with Political Warfare Executive, effectively diverted him from writing. Finding himself, for the first time in his life, unexpectedly in possession of a settled income, he bought many books, chiefly in the second-hand shops of Cecil Court. These he read and clearly absorbed, but it was only as the War drew inexorably towards its close over the winter of 1944–45 that his authorial ambition became reawakened.