Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed
Masculinity as narrative gap
The most recent issue of The New York Review of Books includes Ben Tarnoff’s assessment of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography: Musk comes across as nigh-sociopathic, a cold character intent on building an empire by pushing the bodies of his employees to “hardcore” levels of exertion. “To be a man,” Tarnoff writes at the start of his review, “is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it.”
I have little interest in reading about Musk, yet some of what Tarnoff has to say about him could apply to the protagonist of Dean King’s biography Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, which I finally got around to reading right before 2023 fizzled to its close. The subtitle is misleading; little is revealed of O’Brian the man, and not much more of O’Brian the writer. I knew that his real name was Richard Patrick Russ and that he wasn’t Irish, as he let people believe; I knew that he had little or no nautical experience. These things didn’t bother me; if anything, they enhanced the aura of the Aubrey-Maturin novels as works of imagination. Scratching away at my own attempt to write a historical novel set in mid-century America and featuring mostly real people as its characters, it is reassuring to recall that a work as immersive and somehow as authentic as, say, The Mauritius Command, though based on actual events, is the pure product of one man’s mind. O’Brian’s fabulism bothers me less than his heartlessness, most vividly toward his own children, whom he abandoned, along with his first wife. The daughter died of spina bifida at three, and it’s hard not to see in her loss the shadows of characters like the unfortunate Dil and Stephen’s autistic daughter Brigid; his son Richard persisted in having a relationship with him but was rejected definitively by his father once he’d grown up.
The father of Richard Patrick Russ was a feckless doctor more devoted to inventing new ways of curing syphilis than he was to caring for his family, financially or otherwise; his older brother Mike was a rugged character who emigrated to Australia, volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force during WWII, and was shot down over Germany in 1943. Paired, these figures seem to suggest negative and positive images of the traditional masculinity that traps so many of us. Another bit from Tarnoff’s review: “The nerd is not the opposite of the jock but a different iteration of the same logic. Nerds have their own flavor of macho. Rather than relinquishing the script, they find alternative ways to perform it.” Nerd is a bit anachronistic, but seems to describe well enough O’Brian’s scholary and impractical father, while the elder brother (the first to change his name to O’Brian, thus maybe symbolically assuming the role of the father in Patrick’s eyes) assumed a kind of masculine purity made permanent by his death in action. Certainly these two sides of the masculine coin appear vividly enough in the forms of Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey. Inevitably, as a sickly youth O’Brian more closely resembled his father while idolizing his brother. These facts do something to illuminate O’Brian’s difficult character, but other peculiarities go unexplained. He was a prolific translator of Simone de Beauvoir, and he created many memorable and sympathetic female characters, yet the man left a record of sourly misogynistic remarks. (He also seems to have resorted to homophobic taunts now and again, though the novels take a broadly tolerant view of homosexuality.) There is of course a fairly consistent disparagement of marriage in the Aubrey-Maturin books, but how then are we to understand what appears to have been the loving and lasting bond with his own wife, Mary? We learn little about the actual dynamic between them, except that O’Brian was twice responsible for car crashes in which she was seriously injured. And O’Brian’s wartime record as an intelligence agent goes also almost entirely undescribed, though this is perhaps to be expected.
The notoriously secretive O’Brian refused to cooperate with King on the biography, as did many of his intimates—that deepens the gaps in the book. There’s also the peculiar nature of O’Brian’s own long life and career. Up until the age of fifty he labored in literary obscurity, writing gorgeous but rather humorless and unpleasant books for adults (at least that was my impression of Testimonies; I have yet to read his quasi-autobiographical Richard Temple) and charming nautical adventures for younger readers (The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore). After C.S. Forrester died in 1966 he was cajoled into writing the Hornblower-esque novel that became Master and Commander, published in 1969, when O’Brian was in his mid-fifties. But the Aubrey-Maturin series didn’t bring him wide recognition until the early 1990s, when the man was deep into his seventies. I’m reminded of the career of another cantankerous genius, the American poet Louis Zukofsky, whose “poem of a life,” “A”, written over the course of many decades, went virtually ignored until both poem and life were nearly at an end. Zukosfky was too embittered to enjoy his late success; O’Brian, on the other hand, seems to have been deeply gratified by the boost in status (and income) that his novels brought him, and the biography ends with a rather touching scene of O’Brian being celebrated by men of the actual Royal Navy.
Filling in gaps is a dubious practice, especially when it comes to narrative. Though Nelson may have told Jack Aubrey to “Never mind maneuvers—always go straight at ‘em,” in actual practice O’Brian maneuvers quite a bit. Sometimes there is a deliberate and playful bit of misdirection, as at the beginning of the fifth chapter of H.M.S. Surprise:
The sun beat down from its noon-day height upon Bombay, imposing a silence upon that teeming city, so that even in the deepest bazaars the steady beat of the surf could be heard – the panting of the Indian Ocean, dull ochre under a sky too hot to be blue, a sky waiting for the south-west monsoon; and at the same moment far, far to the westward, far over Africa and beyond, it heaved up to the horizon and sent a fiery dart to strike the limp royals and topgallants of the Surprise as she lay becalmed on the oily swell a little north of the line and some thirty degrees west of Greenwich.
What a marvelous sentence! Chapter Four ended with the Surprise just embarking from England on its embassy to the Sultan of Kampang; the reader is surprised and even indignant when the first clause suggests that the entire voyage has been radically abridged. Then, just as we are getting our bearings (almost literally), we are sent hurtling back to the Atlantic Ocean, temporally as well as geographically reset at a much shorter distance than we’d imagined.
That’s one kind of play with readerly expectation. More frequently, to the point of its being almost a motif, O’Brian will present us with the aftermath or consequences of an action rather than the action itself; often this constitutes a form of emotional elision, as when Jack and Stephen call off their duel in Post Captain without the reader seeing or hearing it. Action and emotion do a kind of pas de deux in the novels: frequently a character with unresolved feelings of anxiety, guilt, or despair will not express them directly but takes refuge in actions ranging from foolhardy to openly suicidal. James Dillon in Master and Commander takes greater and greater risks in his struggle to assuage the agony of his dual loyalties (to Ireland and to the Royal Navy); he dies in battle. Lord Clonfert in The Mauritius Command, a hollow man with a dashing exterior, strains to fulfill the demands of masculinity until they leave him hideously disfigured. Stephen Maturin would seem to be the exception: we go more deeply into his subjectivity than with any other character in the form of diaries, letters, and meditations. When he is drawn into action, however, his tendency is to inscribe his own feelings of pain on the bodies of others, as when he (mistakenly?) kills his rival Canning in a duel, or when he dispatches a series of American spies in the most gruesome possible manner, or when he coldly dissects the bodies of his enemies Ledward and Wray.
The strong, silent type: I think we know by now that this is a contradiction in terms and that silence is a kind of suffering imposed upon those, mostly men, who have received little guidance or encouragement in exploring their emotions, let alone expressing them. These are men who fear domination and so try to dominate others, sometimes overtly (as jocks, finance bros, etc.), sometimes by weaponizing their ressentiment in messianic terms (Elon Musk, etc.). O’Brian was a sickly boy, unable to follow his brother Mike into the skies (he was disqualified as a pilot, though there’s a nice photo of him in uniform in the King bio), taking refuge as so many sickly children have done in the world of books. At his best he purged his terror of loneliness and vulnerability by creating characters crushed by masculinity (Clonfert, et al), larger than life enough to survive it (Jack Aubrey), or inverting it (Stephen Maturin). At his worst, well, his life shows plenty of evidence of the damage done by masculinity in its more toxic forms. The books, however, try to discover a path for men who feel, and who are eloquent in feeling: he gives words to their silence. The eloquence of the frequently tongue-tied Jack is found in the precise and exciting descriptions of his actions. The multilingual yet often silent Stephen has a more complex eloquence at his disposal, blooming into warmth with his intimates, chilled into that famous “reptilian” gaze with others—the emotional frigidity in which a sensitive man hides from a world that seems neither to see nor appreciate him.
There is another biography available, written by O’Brian’s stepson Count Nikolai Tolstoy (yes, he’s distantly related to that Tolstoy), which perhaps I’ll try to acquire. But King’s bio has done little or nothing to enhance my pleasure in O’Brian’s novels and I’m not sure that Tolstoy’s would be any different, though it promises a more intimate and comprehensive view. It has become commonplace to claim that human character can be explained by childhood experience, especially traumatic experience; commonplace to assume that the shape of an artist’s wounds dictate the shape of their art; commonplace to believe that art is a form of therapy, and that readers as well as writers choose what’s most “relatable” as a form of therapy or balm. Still, only flawed people make great art, since there are no unflawed people. O’Brian’s peccadilloes dismay because his novels offer a form of intimacy and companionship that’s impossible to find off the page. Yet it is not the author who is my companion—it is his characters, his world, his narrative voice, which collectively invite more of my selves—the masculine and the unmasculine, the nerd and the jock and something beyond those categories—than almost any other writer. So we go on voyaging.
