Post Captain
Jack Aubrey, Jane Austen, and the limits of language
1
Master and Commander is a ripping yarn, an investigation into the vagaries of male friendship, and an education in the reality effect woven by an arcane jargon that is the warp to the narrative’s woof. But it doesn’t in itself represent so very great an advance on the boys’ adventure story cum historical novel as produced by the likes of C.S. Forrester. Post Captain is something else again, a novel of considerable depth and nuance that with its rambling plot is also the nearest the series comes to a Tom Jones-style picaresque. This is the novel that sets the tone for the rest of the series, layering high adventure onto detailed investigations of social relations and the moral intricacies of character. It is the novel that begins to earn the oft-made comparison of Patrick O’Brian to Jane Austen—a comparison that might make the uninitiated stare. What can the swashbuckling adventures of a Royal Navy captain and his saturnine sidekick possibly have to do with the marriage plots that preoccupy Austen? As it turns out, quite a lot—not least because a dual marriage plot begins to unfold in Post Captain that will take several more volumes to resolve. The complex unfolding of this plot will eventually lead to more-or-less happy marriages for both of our heroes. But it’s the “marriage-state” between Jack and Stephen that most preoccupies readers of the series, whether they think of it that way or not.1 That bond, as firm as it is unlikely, will be pushed to its breaking point by the action of Post Captain.
Austen was far from unacquainted with the Navy—two of her brothers, Francis and Charles, were sea officers, both eventually rising to flag rank. There are significant naval characters in the later novels: William Price, brother of Fanny, serves as a midshipman in Mansfield Park, and his promotion to lieutenant thanks to the efforts of Fanny’s otherwise feckless suitor Henry Crawford is a major plot point. The plot of Persuasion (probably my favorite Austen novel) turns around Anne Elliot’s courtship with Frederick Wentworth, R.N., thwarted by the disdain of her vain aristocratic father for the navy, one of the rare vehicles of social mobility in Regency England capable of elevating a commoner like Wentworth to high rank. Of course in Austen’s fiction, the naval actions are offstage and unseen, unwitnessed by heroines who are permitted no closer to the scene of battle than the beach at Lyme Regis or the squalor of Portsmouth.
Post Captain devotes a great deal of its action, especially in the novel’s latter half, to nautical adventure, yet the Austenesque tone set in its first section is something that the series will sustain throughout its length. When I first read the series through, I read it for the plot; now I reread it, again and again, for the Austen note—the penetration of character—that deepens on every pass.
2
The first part of Post Captain casts Jack Aubrey, of all people, in the role of that single man in possession of a good fortune who must therefore be in want of a wife. The novel opens with a tense scene at sea that dissolves into anticlimax when the characters learn that the Peace of Amiens has been declared. We then dissolve cinematically to a fox hunt on the Sussex downs, where Jack and Stephen have taken “a neat gentleman’s residence” together. The difference between the two characters manifests in their choice of mount: Jack, who is more enthusiastic than skilled when it comes to horses, rides a powerful but dangerous gelding “mourning for its lost stones: a discontented horse” that ends up throwing its rider; Stephen favors a mule that “swarms in its inhuman way” into the horse’s path so that Stephen can rescue its fallen rider. The moment is emblematic of the two men’s relations when on land: Jack is forever misjudging events and people, biting off more than he can chew and throwing himself into difficulties; Stephen, by frequently devious means, sets him rights to again. But a fresh difficulty comes into view in the form of a young woman who has joined the hunt and who sits her horse “with the unconscious grace of a midshipman at the tiller in a lively sea.”2 This is Diana Villiers, one of the series’ most complicated and controversial characters, who will become the object of a rivalry between Jack and Stephen that stretches their friendship to the breaking point.
From the fox-hunting scene we are taken to Mapes Court, the home of the Williams family, and the most explicitly Austenesque situation imaginable: a wealthy widow with a household full of unmarried daughters, each with the proverbial ten thousand per year, plus the requisite impoverished cousin, herself a widow, the aforementioned Mrs Villiers.3 She is of an age with her cousin Sophie Williams, the oldest daughter: fair where Diana is dark, innocent where Diana is worldly, dutiful where Diana is willful, kind where Diana is cruel. They are a little like the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility and even more like Fanny Price and Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park. Sophie’s mother Mrs. Williams is perhaps O’Brian’s greatest comic creation, a perfect monster of small-minded rectitude. He sketches her character with affectionate ruthlessness:
Whether Mrs Williams liked her daughters at all was doubtful: she loved them, of course, and had “sacrificed everything for them,” but there was not much room in her composition for liking—it was too much taken up with being right (Hast thou considered my servant Mrs Williams, that there is none like her in the earth, a perfect and an upright woman?), with being tired, and with being ill-used. Dr Vining, who had known her all her life and who had seen her children into the world, said that she did not; but even he, who cordially disliked her, admitted that she truly, whole-heartedly loved their interest. She might damp all their enthusiasms, drizzle grey disapproval from one year’s end to another, and spoil even birthdays with bravely-supported headaches, but she would fight parents, trustees and lawyers like a tigress for “an adequate position.”
I love this passage, particularly the parenthetical, and also for the way it uses free indirect discourse to form the nutshell of the community’s view of Mrs. Williams surrounding the meat of her aggrieved self-regard. The passage’s layers of irony, which distribute and redistribute the points of view of individual characters, of the community surrounding them, and of the author, show us O’Brian at his most Austenesque. Needless to say, Jack Aubrey is hardly a match for Mrs. Williams’ machinations, especially once his newly earned fortune dissolves into air with the failure of his man of business. Only Sophie’s determination—a bit like the resolve of Anne Elliot in Persuasion—will serve to bring about the happy denouement between them in the face of her mother’s opposition. Though as mentioned above, it will take another novel or two for the understanding between Jack and Sophie to ripen into actual marriage.
3
A series of hair’s-breadth escapes follows. First Jack learns that his prize agent has gone bust and the fortune he’d earned cruising in the Mediterranean is gone, poof, leaving him deeply in debt. Mrs. Williams carries Sophie and her sisters to Bath, out of his reach, but Diana remains behind at Mapes Court, where she is a continual temptation to both men. She establishes a kind of divided intimacy with them. With Jack, as Diana says, she is “tempted to play the fool, terribly tempted,” and she does in fact begin an affair with him after Jack has been led to believe (mistakenly) that Sophie is engaged to marry someone else. But the physical intimacy with Aubrey is largely veiled from the reader; we are treated instead to a progressively more verbal intimacy between Diana and Stephen as they test one another’s mettle. Stephen is enchanted by Diana’s grace and her “ram-you-damn-you air”; there is something very modern about Diana, who chafes against the many restrictions laid upon her as a Regency-era woman without a fortune. Diana finds Stephen an engaging companion, to whom she can freely vent her spleen. Jack, as always, is the man of action who pursues Diana while his courtship of Sophie hangs fire; Stephen’s more contemplative approach to amorous pursuit strands him in the friend zone. Gradually, each friend becomes aware of the attentions the other is paying to Diana; each becomes conscious of becoming lost in a kind of moral maze.
The crisis is postponed when bailiffs come to arrest Jack for debt and the two friends flee to France, putting them out of reach for the moment of the complications of love. Here begins the complication of Stephen’s character as Jack has understood it. After dining well with Captain Christy-Pallière—a French captain who took Jack and Stephen prisoner in Master and Commander (but in the friendliest possible manner; Christy-Pallière has English cousins and is something of an Anglophile), Jack is told that Stephen has been spotted with a telescope near a military installation and is in danger of being taken up as a spy. Jack’s incredulous response is so purely amused—“to think of poor good old Stephen being laid by the heels for a spy! Oh, ha, ha, ha!”—that he rescues Dr. Maturin from arrest. But Stephen is a spy, though we don’t know exactly when he was recruited, and in the next scene we see him in conference with one Dr. Ramis, working for the French but in fact an agent, like Stephen, devoted to the cause of Catalan independence.4 (At some future point I want to reconcile, if I can, Stephen’s proclaimed indifference to politics in Master and Commander with his work in intelligence in all the subsequent books, but this is not that point.) Thanks to Ramis, Stephen is apprised early the next morning that war has been declared and that he and Jack, as British subjects, are in immediate danger of imprisonment. Time to flee again!
What follows is one of the funniest and most harrowing episodes in the series: we are introduced to a convoy of British prisoners being marched under the walls of Carcassonne, but we do not find Jack and Stephen among them. Instead, the prisoners, among them a sailor named George, are diverted by a scruffy one-eyed man with an exhausted, flocculent bear on a chain, which after many importunities and a few hurled stones is induced to dance a few steps of a hornpipe. After the convoy has moved on, the man with the eyepatch inspects the contents of the hat he has passed:
“Two livres four sous,” said the bear-leader. “One maravedi, two Levantine coins of whose exact provenance I am uncertain, a Scotch groat.”
“When one sea-officer is to be roasted, there is always another at hand to turn the spit,” said the bear. “It is an old service proverb. I hope to God I have that fornicating young sod under my command one day. I’ll make him dance a hornpipe—oh, such a hornpipe. Stephen, prop my jaws open a little more, will you? I think I shall die in five minutes if you don’t.”
Stephen has a Spanish passport, a native’s command of both Spanish and Catalan, and resources of cunning hitherto unsuspected by Jack—who, as a six-foot blond Englishman, would have no chance of passing unnoticed without resorting to wearing the unspeakably uncomfortable bearskin Stephen has found for him. Jack is astonished by the change in his friend: “Stephen was strangely reticent these days. Jack had supposed he knew him through and through in the old uncomplicated times, and he loved all he knew; but now there were new depths, an underlying hard ruthlessness, an unexpected Maturin; and Jack was quite out of his depth.”
Out of his depth—a commonplace saying with more than its usual bite when applied to a man fantastically able while at sea, yet nearly always at sea when on land. It is Stephen who knows how to navigate their dangerous situation—Stephen who guides them to the French border and beyond it, down to the dilapidated Catalonian castle he owns. Much later in the novel, Jack witnesses Stephen’s unexpected prowess with smallsword and pistol, and must again re-evaluate what he thinks he knows about his friend:
Jack, watching from his side of the quarterdeck, was wholly amazed: he had no idea that Stephen could hold a sword, nor yet load a pistol, still less knock the pips out of a playing-card at twenty paces: yet he had known him intimately. He was pleased that his friend was doing so well; he was pleased at the respectful silence; but he was a little sad that he could not join in, that he stood necessarily aloof—the captain could not compete—and he was obscurely uneasy. There was something disagreeable, and somehow reptilian, about the cold, contained way Stephen took up his stance, raised his pistol, looked along the barrel with his pale eyes, and shot the head off the king of hearts. Jack’s certainties wavered….
The king of hearts, forsooth. The crisis in their friendship is very near. Soon after this, Stephen’s intelligence work sends him back to Spain, and when he rejoins the Polychrest—the misbegotten double-keeled experimental sloop that Jack commands—he tries to warn Jack against the risks he takes by seeing Diana so often. The attempt at an intervention goes very badly indeed:
“It is time [said Jack] we ha a clear explanation about Diana Villiers, so that we may know where stand.”
“I desire no explanations. They are never of any use, particularly in matters of this kind, where what one might term sexuality is concerned—reason flies out of the window; all candour with it. In any case, even where this passion is not concerned, language is so imperfect, that…”
“Any bastard can cowardly evade the issue by a flood of words.”
“You hav said enough, sir,” said Stephen, standing up. “Too much by far: you must withdraw.”
“I shall not withdraw,” cried Jack, very pale. “And I will add, that when a man comes back from leave as brown as a Gibraltar Jew, and says he had delicate weather in Ireland, he lies. I will stand by that, and I am perfectly willing to give you any satisfaction you may choose to ask for.”
“It is odd enough,” said Stephen, in a low voice, “that our acquaintance should have begun with a challenge, and that it should end with one.”
What follows is the lowest emotional point in the series, still wrenching to reread. Jack and Stephen will face many hardships in the novels to come, sometimes stupefyingly so; but never again will they come so close to murdering each other and the affectionate bond at the series’ heart. A duel now seems inevitable, though Jack comes deeply to regret his rash words. Yet he cannot apologize: “what should I have the air of, suddenly growing abject now that I know he is such a deadly old file?” Stephen, meanwhile, finds himself entering a state of spiritual purification, preparing in the dunes outside Dover for the fight that must certainly end their friendship, if not their lives:
“[T]here are days,” he reflected, “when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity—perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However,” he said, guiding the horse left-handed into the dunes, “doing of some kind there must be.”
As is so often the case in this series—as was the case for the discontented Jack and James Dillon in Master and Commander, who were also on the brink of dueling each other—the solution to the problem of being comes in the form of doing—of action. Entanglements insuperable by land are dissolved by sea, one way or the other. And the action in this case—ordered maliciously by Jack’s enemy, the cuckolded Admiral Harte—amounts to nothing more nor less than a suicide mission, to attack a corvette at anchor in a well-defended French port, using a barely navigable sloop that, thanks to dockyard corruption, is literally coming apart at the seams.
4
The action, needless to say, is successful, though it costs Jack his sloop (no great loss) and he sustains some bloody wounds in the process. Not only does it finally lead to Jack’s longed-for promotion to post captain, but it miraculously heals the breach between him and Stephen without a word speaking spoken by either man. One of the more remarkable qualities of O’Brian’s writing—and in this he closely resembles Austen—is his skill at omission: not only does he leave a great deal of the connective tissue that lesser writers strain after, but he strategically omits key moments, scenes, and even characters. I think this strategy is of a piece with O’Brian’s sea language, creating a kind of imaginative space for the reader—a suspension of disbelief sustained by the impossible profusion of authentic-seeming details that trains us to fill in the blanks while building profound trust in the narrative architecture (the rigging, if you like) that supports us and carries us along. He is a far more visual writer than Austen is, and yet much of what I find most moving in his work comes in the form of strategic omissions. In the later novels, this takes its most brutal form, in the offhand way O’Brian depicts the deaths of major characters; in Post Captain he uses this power to bring about a reconciliation.
In this case, Jack’s valor and his willingness to face death serve as a kind of atonement; seriously wounded in the battle, he is met by Stephen on the deck of the French corvette: “‘Come, brother,’ said Stephen in his ear, very like a dream. ‘Come below. You must come below—here is too much blood altogether. Below, below. Here, Bonden, carry him with me.’” The dream of brotherhood that their friendship represents is redeemed and restored by Jack’s blood sacrifice, carrying the two of them below (the word’s repetition emphasizes this movement as a kind of katabasis or restorative journey to the underworld). They will resume their old intimacy after this, and it will never be shaken quite so deeply ever again.
5
But how do you solve a problem like Diana Villiers? Like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, she is “the daemon of the piece,” though her defiant, witty personality and her experience (as a once-married woman who used to hunt tigers in India) makes her as different from Fanny as is imaginable. She has a penchant for saying the quiet part out loud, at least to Stephen Maturin, whom she adopts as a confidant because she sees him as being out of the common run of men—which is to say, scarcely as a man at all:
“What do you think my life is like, without a sou and under the thumb of a vulgar, pretentious, ignorant woman who detests me? What do you think it is like, looking into this sort of a future, with my looks going, the only thing I have? Listen, Maturin, I speak openly to you, because I like you; I like you very much, and I believe you have a kindness for me—you are almost the only man I have met in England I can treat as a friend—trust as a friend.”
‘You have my friendship, sure,” said Stephen heavily.
She’s just not that into you, Stephen! And Stephen knows it, and knows that in the sexual arena he can’t hope to compete with his handsome, conventionally manly friend. Yet Diana’s desire for Jack is shaded with contempt; “I should prefer a man more—what shall I say? More grown up, less of a boy—less of a huge boy.” Later, when she invites Jack to come see her and he tells her that he dare not do so because of the danger of being arrested, she all but accuses him of cowardice: “you must certainly consult your safety: of course you must consult your safety.” The wound to Jack’s sense of honor is very deep, exacerbating the touchiness that will lead him to the point of dueling with Stephen. A woman whose sexual allure threatens to ruin the friendship of two men: are we not on all-too-familiar, all-too-misogynistic ground?
Diana is a polarizing character; many of O’Brian’s readers cordially despise her. O’Brian himself does not. Her outrage at her own dependence—a dependence rooted entirely in social circumstances—resonates as modern and pro-woman if not actually feminist. Stephen, always the naturalist, a bit detached from the values that the other characters take for granted, sympathizes with her position—that’s why she adopts him as a friend, even as she’s unable to take him seriously as a lover. At the same time he has few illusions about her capacity for cruelty:
I see a hardness that chills my heart, and not my heart alone. Hardness and a great deal else; a strong desire to rule, jealousy, pride, vanity; everything except a want of courage. Poor judgment, ignorance of course, bad faith, inconstancy; and I would add heartlessness if I could forget our farewells on Sunday night, unspeakably pathetic in so wild a creature. And then surely style and grace beyond a certain point take the place of virtue—are virtue, indeed?
This confusion of style with substance will haunt Stephen for the entire series. His quasi-scientific detachment from the world bestows upon him a sympathy and insight that will serve him well as a physician, an intelligence agent, and as a friend. At the same time, there is a want of emotional decision in Maturin, a reluctance to commit himself—not in action but in spirit. We must wait to see how time, events, and Maturin’s nearly inhuman patience wear Diana down to the point of her accepting him, many novels hence. But the question even then will linger: is she good for him? Is he good for her?
“‘I may be wrong,’ [Sophia] said, after a pause, ‘I know very little about these things, or anything else; but I do not believe Diana knows what love is at all.’”
5
Stephen said, “Have you ever contemplated upon sex, my dear?”
“Never,” said Jack. “Sex has never entered my mind, at any time.”
[HMS Surprise, chapter 8]
One of the notable facts about Austen’s novels is how she never depicts men together without women listening in—a form of authorial integrity, perhaps, since she would never have had the opportunity herself to witness men alone with each other without eavesdropping. Her world is a women’s world, in which the men are reduced to love-objects and it is only the women’s choices that have consequences for the plot—a clever and telling reversal that is perhaps the deepest and most structural instance of Austen’s irony. O’Brian, I believe, is up to something similar in his series, but with a difference. There is nothing new, of course, about all-male stories; we wouldn’t need a Bechdel test otherwise (frankly, I doubt that O’Brian’s novels could pass that test). Yet there is something very Austenesque, and if we stretch the point, feminist, about O’Brian’s focus upon the emotional lives of men—specifically, his effort to articulate those emotional lives.
Jack, the most stereotypically masculine of O’Brian’s characters, is usually at a loss when trying to express a fine non-nautical point (this connects, maybe, to his comic penchant for malapropisms). Unable to put his feelings into words, he resorts to action, often violent action made socially acceptable or even prestigious by the fact of his military service. Stephen, a gentler though far less sentimental soul, is better able to find words for his feelings, but he does this more often in his diary than he does in his dialogue—where Diana is concerned, words largely fail him. Yet between Jack and Stephen there is a bond that words do not essentially touch. Their connection, remember, begins not with words, but with a nudge—and with music.
That music will be tuned to a finer and higher pitch in the next installment.
At one point Mrs. Williams wonders whether “those strange tales about sea-officers might possibly be true in his case. Was it not very odd that he should live with Dr Maturin?” And Diana tells Stephen point blank, “Anyone would think you are married to that man.” Impossible not to think of other male homosocial literary pairings—Holmes and Watson, Frodo and Sam, Ishmael and Queequeg, Achilles and Patroclus, et al. At some point I must needs devote an essay to the homosexual subtext of these novels—there exists, no doubt, volume upon volume of Jack-Stephen fan and slash fiction if one cares to look for it.
This is not the first time that Diana will be characterized as androgynous or compared to a boy, and the novels leave no doubt that this is a significant part of her appeal, particularly to Stephen.
I am rather fond of the English habit of foregoing the period or full stop after abbreviated honorifics such as Mr and Mrs; it somehow connotes the full significance of those titles and the more formal world than ours that produced them. Don’t expect consistency from me in punctuating them, however.
In Master and Commander Stephen presents himself as a disillusioned idealist, doubly disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution and of the United Irishmen: “with what I saw in ‘98, on both sides, the wicked folly and the wicked brute cruelty, I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium.” He was also disappointed in love, though we only find scattered allusions to the affair. But idealism in Stephen is, it appears, something of a renewable resource, albeit tempered by a new willingness to choose the lesser of two evils over fond impossibility.
I agree that Post Captain is a step forward from Master and Commander, but for me it is H. M. S. Surprise that elevates the books to true greatness. Which is not to say that the first two aren't wonderful reads. And, I really should reread Post Captain!
This time through as I read Post Captain, I was particularly looking for how O'Brian resolved their duel. I finally came to the same conclusion you offer here; that it's the battle of Chaulieu that heals the breach. My literal mind still wanted Aubrey to apologize, but I like your thoughts on O'Brian's use of the power of omission, of not explaining every little thing.