On Not Reading 21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

Unfinished business and absent friends

I am reading it slowly, slowly. I am not reading it at all but going back to Post Captain and HMS Surprise. I am watching it move talismanically around the apartment, finding it in the kitchen and at my bedside and on the toilet tank and in the living room hammock, swinging gently under the breeze from the overhead fan. I study the image of O’Brian’s handwriting and the seating chart he drew for what would be the last described of Jack Aubrey’s naval dinners. It’s so very hard to let go.

For the most part these essays have avoided engaging with details of O’Brian’s biography and taken the books at face value, as they have most directly impacted me. I did not consider, as Mike and Ian are doing over at The Lubber’s Hole, how the death of O’Brian’s wife Mary might have impacted his shocking depiction of Diana Maturin’s death in The Hundred Days. At the same time, I have come to understand the character of Stephen Maturin as a projection of O’Brian himself: scholarly, secretive, easily offended, probably a bit autistic. Jack Aubrey, meanwhile, is something like the opposite of a Jungian shadow self, everything that O’Brian was almost certainly not: a congenitally cheerful extrovert and man of action. Still, I have not tried to overlay the details of O’Brian’s life on my experience of the books; I have deliberately avoided reading Dean King’s biography, which I suspect will be both demystifying and dismaying. Again, I’ve wanted to encounter the novels as much as possible on their own terms.

That isn’t possible with 21 because it’s not, strictly speaking, a novel: it’s a transcription of three chapters’ worth of corrected typescript (printed on the verso page) and handwritten drafts (reproduced on the recto page), written in Dublin where O’Brian was leading what was by all accounts a bitterly lonely life in the weeks before he died on the second day of January, 2000. The strange haunted presence of the man floats over these pages, which is physically wider and taller and a great deal thinner than the paperbacks I’m used to toting.

Art moves me by its singularity of vision. I prefer TV shows, like The Prisoner or Fleabag, that are very clearly the product of one person’s peculiar mind; furthermore, that art is at its most compelling when the artist is clearly reckoning with unconscious forces that they can’t otherwise articulate or understand. (That’s why I think David Lynch is the paradigmatic popular artist of our times.) One expects this perspective from painters, poets, and novelists more than from collaborative media that require massive resources, of course. But when an author achieves the level of fandom and of scrutiny that O’Brian achieved there is a curious sort of leveling up that happens. The artist and his work become a sort of public property, forever in tension with the privacy of the living author and the idiosyncrasy of writing that works, a bit like poetry, to guard its heart from those readers who lack the fortitude to tackle its more abstruse references, its jargon, etcetera.

Now, posthumously, the door has been cracked on O’Brian’s workshop, the space in which he composed, in rather beautifully crimped handwriting, Jack and Stephen’s floating world. There is an intimacy that verges on the indecent, peeking over O’Brian’s shoulder like this, knowing how guarded a man he was. Yet I find infinitely touching his notes and questions for himself as he looked forward to the novel he would never complete. The man died in harness, and who can really ask for more?

What shall I do with him, indeed? If that’s indeed what that last line says.

I am living this book, not reading it.

I am grieving it.

I am like Stephen attending the burial rites of Dil.

I am of his caste.