Minor Characters: Pretty Jagiello

The Gentleman's Relish

Rembrandt, The Polish Rider (1650s).

Gedymin Jagiello makes his first appearance in The Surgeon’s Mate, the seventh novel in the series and the conclusion of what I’ve come to think of as the first movement of the symphony that is the Aubreyad. I think of it that way because, as the title suggests, it concludes with Stephen Maturin’s achieving his heart’s desire—Diana Villiers—after a long, self-brutalizing quest. The marriage, performed at sea by Captain Babbington, has an asterisk floating next to it—as we learn in the following novel, The Ionian Mission, Diana refuses to marry Stephen “properly,” in a Catholic church, and they dwell in separate domiciles; it’s far from the end of misunderstandings and estrangements for the two of them, in which the gorgeous hussar will play a central role. The end of The Surgeon’s Mate also represents a certain decay in the series’ commitment to realism: we are about to enter the impossibly extended 1812 required for Jack and Stephen to have the adventures of the second movement, beginning with The Ionian Mission and ending, I think, with Napoleon’s final defeat in The Yellow Admiral. The novels of this movement are every bit as gripping as those of the first, but the grind of narrative gears is more audible. The third, briefest movement deals mostly with Jack and Stephen’s post-Napoleonic career—there’s an eerie, nearly posthumous quality to those novels, with their shocking by-the-way losses. They carry the stamp of having been written near the end of O’Brian’s life shading into the eternal voyage begun but forever unfinished in 21.

But to speak of Jagiello, I really should have begun my minor characters series with him, because not long after he is introduced to Jack and Stephen (and to us) he offers up a metafictional discourse on that very subject. Many of O’Brian’s minor characters amount to case studies: profiles in jealousy, cowardice, lasciviousness, greed, vengefulness, absent-mindedness, etcetera. Jagiello is something else. A Swedish army officer of Lithuanian origin—a cavalry officer who refuses to remove his spurs, despite their dangerous impracticality when not actually riding a horse—is, like Stephen, rather unhandy, not to say unlucky, aboard ship. On Jack’s urging, Stephen warns Jagiello not to risk his neck climbing the ship’s rigging, which leads to the following exchange:

“[I]t would please the Captain if you would confine yourself to the lower platforms, technically known as tops.”

“Does he believe that I shall fall?”

”He believes that the laws of gravity bear more severely on soliders than on seamen; and since you are a hussar, he is convinced that you will fall.”

“I shall do as he wishes, of course. But he is mistaken, you know: heroes never fall. At least, not fatally.”

“I was not aware that you were a hero, Mr. Jagiello.”

The dryness of Stephen’s last remark reads very nearly as a rebuke: there’s only room for two heroes in this series, mate! But it’s really an implicit question as to the nature of heroism, and by extension an inquiry into the genre of adventure fiction to which the Aubreyad belongs. A hero is more than a mere protagonist, after all; there is a romantic elevation to the title, suitable to the magnified experiences of delight and suffering that Jack and Stephen undergo. Up to this point the relation between our dual protagonists has been more than a little like that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the idealistic man of valor and the pragmatic man of disillusion.¹ Or have I got that backward? Jack is certainly a hero on the quarterdeck, appearing larger than life to his men, but ashore he’s a bumbling figure driven from pillar to post by his own appetites. Stephen, meanwhile, doesn’t know port from starboard but his work as an intelligence agent, though often sordid and even gruesome, is inspired by the very highest idealism.² It may be, therefore, that a “hero” like Jagiello is necessary at this point in the series because the dialectic of Aubreyesque heroism and Maturinish disillusion that dominated the first movement of the series has become blurred.

“Jagiello had a good hold on the table, but a lee-lurch unseated him and he slid to the deck, where for a moment his spurs, caught in the matting, held him prisoner.” That sentence is doing quite a bit of work. Not only does it foreshadow his imprisonment, alongside Jack and Stephen, in the Temple Prison in Paris later in the novel but it also suggests that the role of hero, represented by the spurs, can be a confining one. But it’s Jagiello’s subsequent discourse that enables a remarkable moment of metacommentary on the nature of heroes and of the Aubreyad itself:

“Of course I am a hero,” he said, getting up and laughing very cheerfully. “Every man is a hero of his own tale. Surely, Dr. Maturin, every man must look on himself as wiser and more intelligent and more virtuous than the rest, so how could he see himself as the villain, or even as a minor character? And you must have noticed that heroes are never beaten. They may be undone for a while, but they always do themselves up again, and marry the virtuous young gentlewoman.”

“I have noticed it, indeed. There are some eminent exceptions, sure, but upon the whole I am convinced you are right. Perhaps it is that which makes your novel or tale a little tedious. (199-200)

This is not the first time in the series that Maturin engages in literary criticism; The Fortune of War features a spirited discussion between Jack, Stephen, and the literary-minded Captain Yorke with whom they’re sailing, in which Jack expresses his discontent with the novels he sometimes reads to Sophie in the evenings: “Every novel I have ever looked into is all about love” (Fortune 53). Yorke’s spirited reply speaks to the role love plays in heightening experience: “What else raises your blood, your spirits, your whole being, to the highest pitch, so that life is triumphant, or tragic, as the case may be, and so that every day is worth a year of common life?” Yorke, who is described as a lover of his own ease, and who has devised a clever system for maintaining an entire library of novels aboard his post-ship, HMS La Flèche, represents the feminized reader of novels in the tradition of Jane Austen, where the marriage plot is all.³ Jack comes back with a plea for boys’ own stories: “what do you say about hunting, or playing for high stakes? What do you say about war, about going into action?” Yorke responds:

“Come, Aubrey, you must have observed that love is a kind of war; you must have seen the analogy. As for hunting and deep play, what is more obvious? You pursue in love, and if the game is worth engaging in at all, you play for very high stakes indeed. Do you not agree, Doctor?

“Sure, you are in the right of it. Intermissa, Venus diu, rursus bella mores. And yet perhaps full war, martial war, may wind even more emotions to the breaking-point—the social emotions of comradeship, extreme joint endeavor, even patriotism and selfless devotion may be involved; and glory rather than a humid bed may be the aim.” (53)

Stephen follows this with a question as to how to represent war in a novel, since a love story can be told in linear fashion, “[w]hereas in a martial contest so many things happen at once, that even the ablest hand must despair of drawing the appearance of a serial thread from the confusion” (54). O’Brian is patting himself on the back here, and maybe also offering a special plea for any confusion the reader might feel in trying to follow one of the canon’s more complex scenes of battle. But the Latin tag, taken from Horace’s Odes, suggests that a love plot has its own qualities of entanglement: “Venus, long interrupted, returns to her beautiful ways.” Love and war are the twin threads of the Aubreyad, after all: the war of love and the love of war are woven finely together to make its textures.

Eight volumes later, Stephen meets John Pautlon, a novelist stranded in Australia, who suggests diffidently that a scientific cove such as Stephen probably has no interest in fiction. Stephen responds with a defense of the novel as spirited as Captain Yorke’s:

‘Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them – I look upon good novels – as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints. Had I not read Madame de La Fayette, the Abbé Prévost, and the man who wrote Clarissa, that extraordinary feat, I should be very much poorer than I am; and a moment’s reflection would add many more.’ (The Nutmeg of Consolation 253)

We have wandered pretty far once again from poor Jagiello. But in spite of his conviction that he, like every man, is the hero of his own life, Jagiello is very much a minor character and serves, as minor characters do, to highlight the course of a particular theme rather than to direct the plot. He is not only a minor character but a comic one. Jagiello is absurdly beautiful, a “sweet young gentleman” in the words of virtually every female character who encounters him, rather in the Timothée Chalamet mode. Jack cannot understand what women see in the girlish young man, and neither can Jagiello himself. During their mission in the Baltic a number of women, including a high-class sex worker with the sobriquet of the Gentleman’s Relish, hurl themselves at Jagiello, to his own bewilderment. Jack and Stephen discuss the matter:

‘It is a very curious thing,’ said Jack to Stephen over breakfast, ‘but I learn that Jagiello went ashore while we were aboard the flag, and he had not been back above half an hour before three young women put off to the ship. Two were the Swedish admiral’s daughters – amazingly pretty, says Hyde – and the third was the Relish, who kills at a mile. But what I cannot for the life of me understand is what they see in him. He is a good fellow, to be sure, but he is only a boy; I doubt he shaves once a week, if that. And indeed he is rather more like a girl than anything else.’

‘So it seems was Orpheus; but that did not prevent women from tearing him limb from limb. His head, his beardless head, floated down the swift Hebrus, together with his broken lyre, alas.’ (The Surgeon’s Mate 272-273)

Jagiello is an ephebe, neither boy nor man—”more like a girl than anything else”—in training to become a warrior, but not quite there. He is meltingly attractive to the fair sex (and no doubt to many men as well), to his own consternation. He wishes to be in a war story, but is constantly enrolled in narratives of love, mostly against his will. Ultimately his androgynous beauty serves our heroes well: his flirtation with a young French widow while they are imprisoned in Paris not only means they get the best possible food, but also smuggled tools with which to make their escape. In The Ionian Mission Stephen starts to receive anonymous letters accusing Jagiello of carrying on an affair with Diana; Jagiello has become a pawn in the hands of the malevolent Andrew Wray. Stephen doesn’t believe the rumors, but when he returns to England after a supposed dalliance with the beautiful Laura Fielding, he learns that Diana has in fact run off with the beautiful Lithuanian. But even here Jagiello seems more object than subject, a useful foil with which Diana can wound her faithless husband, as well as a dagger directed by Wray. We are told by Sir Joseph Blaine that Jagiello is not in fact Diana’s lover, but is “about to marry a young Swedish lady” (The Letter of Marque); when Diana reconciles with Stephen she tells him that she in fact arranged it. He does get himself promoted somehow to the rank of colonel in the Swedish hussars, but never once in the five novels in which he appears do we see Jagiello take any action he was not pushed into, sometimes literally.

The Polish Rider, reproduced at the top, is one of the most famous paintings in the Frick; mostly I remember it because it gets a shout-out in Frank O’Hara’s great love poem, “Having a Coke with You.” I think of it when I think of Jagiello, though he’s a Lithuanian in the Swedish service and not a Pole at all: a beautiful young warrior in vaguely androgynous garb, lipstick-red leg suggesting sensuality more than war, even as the the flicker of the same shade of red on top of the rider’s fur hat gives him a slightly clownish look. “I look / at you,” Frank O’Hara tells his lover, “and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world / except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time.” Like O’Hara’s version of Rembrandt’s Rider, Jagiello is a figure of desire but also a figure of fun, neither aspect really compromising the other. His role is ornamental more than it is structural, but I say this to demean neither Jagiello nor ornaments! I have been listening to an audiobook of Tristram Shandy, and the eighteenth-century comic stylings of Laurence Sterne are most certainly one of O’Brian’s chief influences.⁴ Sterne makes a mockery of the novelistic conventions that were already gelling into cliche in the mid-eighteenth century—conventions of reading as well as writing. In particular he scorns the idea of writing, or reading, for the plot. Consider Tristram’s defense of his own rather ornamental digressiveness:

For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various

Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
Pasquinades at that:——

Jagiello is one such personage, a motif in the Aubreyadic symphony of accounts and anecdotes, panegyrics and pasquinades. A would-be warrior and inadvertent lover, he is not as he believes a hero but a kind of aesthetic object for the reader to contemplate, abetting his escape. He is the real Gentleman’s Relish—a little something extra to make the love plot of these boys’ adventures more savory.⁵ Or as O’Hara concludes:

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

1. I came across an old review of The Commodore, originally published in The Atlantic in 1995, in which Katharine A. Powers writes that Stephen’s “name, when spelled ‘Mathurin’ (as O'Brian pointed out to me in an interview), meant ‘half-wit’ or ‘fool’ in eighteenth-century France.” I can’t find any evidence to support this claim from O’Brian, who like his creation was somewhat given to lying, but it does reinforce the notion of Stephen as something of a Sancho Panzo figure. It’s fascinating, by the way, to read this piece, titled “An Eighteenth-Century Voice,” which came out before the revelations about O’Brian’s dissimulations about his past; Powers calls him “this ancient Irishman” and uncritically repeats his claims about sailing, his work for British intelligence, etc. Still, it’s a piece well worth reading. I was intrigued by this claim: “O'Brian's work has two great themes: from and mutability as they apply to human relations and to the constitution of character.” She goes on to associate Jack Aubrey with form (as a Tory, always speaking up for tradition, the good of the service, and what the men are used to) and Stephen Maturin with mutability (as naturalist, as close observer of the human condition, and as anti-colonial revolutionary). Perhaps there’s a theory to explore here about the place of minor characters in this dialectic: must they represent one pole or the other? Can a minor character prove mutable? Hmm.

2. Stephen is also more romantic than Jack in his pursuit of his “prime illusion,” Diana Villiers, than Jack ever was in his courtship of his wife, Sophia. Jack may be more prepossessing in appearance than the meager Doctor, but his dogged, self-sacrificing, sometimes self-pity-inducing pursuit of Diana makes Stephen more of a Heathcliff than Jack could ever be. (He is also almost certainly a more skillful lover than Jack, but that is neither here nor there, at least at present.)

3. The carelessness of the surgeon of La Flèche with his pipe leads to a fire that destroys Captain Yorke’s library, along with the rest of the ship; Stephen and Jack barely escape with their lives. Every time I read this section I am shocked anew.

4. I chuckled on my latest reread of The Ionian Mission when the Mediterranean Commander-in-Chief, frustrated at the lack of coordination between the various branches of British intelligence, remarks to Stephen, “They order these things better in France.” This is a close paraphrase of the opening sentence of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, in which the narrator is immediately hoisted by his own petard when his interlocutor asks him, “with the most civil triumph in the world,” if he has ever actually been to France. (The answer is no, and the result is the ensuing book.) Stephen would like to do something similar (“Stephen mastered a strong desire to contradict”), no doubt because the whiff of authoritarianism appertaining to the gentleman’s wish. But since the gentleman in question is an admiral, he holds his peace.

5. I am not the first to make this comparison.