The Fortune of War
Honor and valor in the shadow of Ukraine
1
Since my last installment, war has leapt out of O’Brian’s and the newspapers’ back pages into the forefront of world consciousness; we have crossed a line back into history as Thucydides wrote it, in which “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Every day I look at the map of Ukraine on the New York Times webpage with its red and blue arrows to indicate the movements of Russian and Ukrainian troops, and feel myself thrown back upon the contradictions that seethe just below the glittering surface of O’Brian’s novels. The valor of the Royal Navy serves an imperial project just a little less evil than Napoleon’s, if only because it is less efficient. Though characters die, sometimes horribly, and we are from time to time reminded of civilian suffering, the horror of war is largely eclipsed by O’Brian’s writing, which for the most part presents war as a grand and glorious game, without which the central characters cannot feel fully alive. And these of course are historical novels, the pleasure of which is partly rooted in the reader’s knowledge of how will all turn out. There is an obvious bad guy—Napoleon—just as Putin is the world’s bad guy now. But O’Brian’s readers know that their bad guy is fated to lose.
War is exciting. I am wary of the feelings aroused by war in the real world, how deeply they draw upon the excitements of narrative, of heroes and villains. Like everyone else, I’m deeply moved by the valor of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the ordinary Ukrainians fighting to defend themselves and their country against the horrors of an invasion ordered by a ruthless, nuclear-armed dictator. But how to separate this emotional involvement in the fate of real people from the feelings stirred by a story? I’m not sure that it’s possible. Zelenskyy isn’t just a leader; he’s a consummate showman who has converted his talents as an entertainer into the stance and rhetoric of a statesman. The contrast in character with that of the cowardly and venal Trump is glaring, yet both men are creatures of television, skilled at simplifying complex situations into easily understood narratives. Both have been successful in arousing the public by turning reality into a show. You can donate to help Ukraine—please do—but does that make it any less of a show to those of us comparatively insulated from the war and its consequences?
I can’t help but read the sixth novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series through the lens of what’s happening now. What is there to learn from reading a war novel during an actual war? Can fiction bring us closer to the real? Is there some insight to be gained from fiction into the perpetual questions of how to feel, what to do?
O’Brian’s interests and zones of erudition are astonishingly wide-ranging, but what interests him most consistently is what Hemingway called grace under pressure and the moral careers of men at war. The Fortune of War is unusual for focusing more directly on the clandestine side of warfare; the series’ nominal protagonist, Jack Aubrey, is sidelined for much of the action, and it is Stephen Maturin the intelligence agent who must act with agility and decision to preserve their lives and win their freedom while the two men are prisoners of war. That they are prisoners of the Americans adds a layer of ambiguity to O’Brian’s depiction of war; unlike the war against Napoleon, the War of 1812 appears here as entirely unnecessary, a waste of resources. The news of the war’s declaration is greeted by the lower deck with something of an uneasy shrug:
Although they liked the notion of prize-money, they could not see much sense in fighting Americans: there were half a dozen Americans aboard at this moment, and they were practically the same as Englishmen – no airs or graces about them – and you could not say fairer than that. Fighting the French was different; they were foreigners, and somehow it came natural. But generally speaking the whole ship’s company looked upon this new war as a matter of no great importance; there might be some advantage in it, but as a contest it was neither here nor there, compared to the war with France.
There is something disquietingly pure about the War of 1812 in O’Brian’s hands: devoid of ideological content (“neither here nor there”), it boils down to a contest between a Royal Navy unused to losing and a younger, pluckier navy advantaged by newer, heavier frigates and all-volunteer crews of highly able seamen. The novel is bookended by lightly fictionalized renditions of actual battles: after La Fleche, the ship carrying Jack and Stephen home from the Antipodes, catches fire due to the carelessness of her pipe-addicted surgeon, they are picked up by the H.M.S. Java, which is subsequently taken in battle by the U.S.S. Constitution. Later, at novel’s end, Jack and Stephen will be aboard H.M.S. Shannon when it defeats the American frigate Chesapeake. But the main action is in the middle, ashore, with Jack convalescing in an unusually salubrious madhouse while Stephen maneuvers to protect them both from the consequences of the spycraft he practiced in Desolation Island.
“We are all subject to the fortune of war,” remarks Mr. Evans, the American surgeon of the Constitution, sympathizing with Jack and Stephen’s situation as prisoners. This may be the only novel in the series in which we never see Jack Aubrey captaining his own ship; he is reduced to the status of a minor character, a witness to two battles in which he does not command. The inevitable result, for me at least, is that I feel more distanced from the battles than usual—not to mention that I have a harder time rooting against my own country than I do against Napoleonic France. Rereading the book now, March 2022, I am struck by how much The Fortune of War is about spectatorship—about being emotionally involved in war without being its protagonist. Jack’s identification with the Royal Navy is total, and the news of its defeats depresses him extremely, to the point of endangering his life after he is wounded in the capture of the Java. Stephen, meanwhile, is surprised to discover his own spirits adversely affected by the news of the Royal Navy’s defeats. He writes in his diary:
I have hitherto regarded the Navy more as a medium in which to work – although I do not feel that the heavens have fallen, nor that the foundations of the universe are subverted – I must confess that I am not unmoved. I feel no hint of animosity against the Americans, except in so far as their action may to some degree help Bonaparte, yet it would do my heart (as I term the illogical area of my being – and what an expanse it does cover, on occasion!) it would do my heart good to hear of some compensating victory.
“A medium in which to work”—for Stephen the Navy has provided a context and means by which to practice the arts that mean the most to him: intelligence, medicine, and natural philosophy. He is surprised to discover “the illogical area of [his] being” invested in the institution’s battles with an enemy irrelevant to his interests. Identification sneaks up on us: no man is an island. I think that with Stephen, O’Brian—a man without a country if there ever was one—is exploring the human tendency to choose sides, even among those of us most aware of the illogic of such attachments.
2
Everywhere I look I see the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The shift from indifference (and, on the political right, outright hostility) to identification with this beleaguered nation has been as sudden as it is total. It helps, of course, that Ukraine is so profoundly the underdog in this conflict, so clearly the victim of unprovoked aggression, and that the Russians are perpetrating war crimes in plain sight. The emotions aroused are unfamiliar, compared to my previous experience hating and protesting against the wars of aggression perpetrated by my own country. I don’t just want this war to stop; I want Ukraine to win. I want to see Putin and his army humiliated. This feels weirdly natural, and extraordinarily dangerous. A humiliated Putin with his finger on the nuclear button and no plausible means of saving face is a danger to every living creature on earth. War is not a game, I remind myself. War is not a show. Then I check my Twitter feed again, hunting for news, pulse quickening.
O’Brian’s novels often present the reader with men seeking to salve their own contradictions through battle: James Dillon and Lord Clonfert each use war to paper over the gaping rifts in their own characters, rifts produced by their divided allegiance. Is Russia’s war doing something similar for those of us watching from “the West”? Certainly it has closed, at least for the moment, the gap between the U.S. and its allies in Western Europe, as it has closed the gap between the Europeans themselves. The entity we call “the West” has been invigorated, and it feels like the balance might finally be tipping against authoritarianism, abroad and at home. At least we are waking to the danger. There’s a direct line to be drawn between the neofascist Republican Party’s assault on our democratic institutions and Putin’s assault on the flawed but functioning democracy next door. In that sense I am not a spectator to the war against Ukraine, and I feel, in logical as well as illogical areas of my being, the necessity of Putin’s defeat.
3
I’ve been trying to write this post on and off for almost a month—the duration of the war—and it feels harder and harder to focus on the fictional-historical rather than our historic present. The best thing may be to admit defeat, send this out to whomever’s interested, and hope that things have somehow changed enough for the next installment, The Surgeon’s Mate, not to feel either irrelevant to my own feelings or too uncomfortably close to the atavistic surge I feel reading a story like the one above in which all my critical faculties are swept aside by the matter-of-fact badassery of Lieutenant Tetiana Chornovol, mother of two, who drives a Chevy Volt—”an ecologically clean killing machine” on missions to destroy Russian tanks. Do we still recognize heroism when we see it, or is heroism out of date in an age of suddenly renewed nuclear brinksmanship? The New York Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg phrases it well in this roundtable discussion with three other Times columnists:
There’s something about this triumphalism, which on the one hand, I understand and feel to a great extent this idea of the West being united and inspired by a leader who speaks the language of liberal universalism and democracy and human rights. And there is a feeling that these values, which had been sort of flaccid, are now vindicated. But I almost feel like there’s an element of kind of stolen valor in us now, feeling a new sense of confidence and purpose, while the Ukrainians are just being crushed under this machine. In many ways, they’re getting weapons, but they are very aware that they are ultimately alone in this fight where it counts.
I’ve been struggling with this, because I’m interested in seeing not just Putin but Putinism be weakened and destroyed. And if that happens, this conflict, I think it would be a net good. But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact of just the sheer horror of what’s being inflicted on these people that the rest of the world is feeling good about their solidarity with them. But that solidarity only goes so far.
“Stolen valor” is an acute turn of phrase. Like many others, I have imagined what it might mean, as an able-bodied man in his early fifties, if I were Ukrainian and called to defend my country against the invader. Would I go? Would something like a desire for honor, that antique value so central to the makeup of Jack Aubrey and the men of the Royal Navy, awaken in my breast? I honor the valor of Lt. Chornovol and the thousands of other Ukrainians fighting for the honor of democracy. But is the sacrifice of others really going to be enough to awaken us to the need to defend democracy at home? Or are we just going to go on complaining about higher gas prices?
For most of The Fortune of War Jack the warrior convalesces, wounded to the soul by the setbacks inflicted on his beloved Royal Navy. Stephen the spy steps into the protagonist’s role, playing a dangerous game to extract himself, his dearest friend, and the woman he loves from the clutches of ruthless French intelligence agents in collaboration with a cruel enslaver. Broadsides and maneuvers are replaced by the cloak and the dagger. Stephen is mostly indifferent to values like valor and honor; only the defeat of Napoleon—the enemy of the liberal-humanist values that Stephen, only slightly anachronistically, holds most dear—matters. He kills two men in cold blood and dumps their bodies in a bathtub. He manipulates the comparatively young and ingenuous Michael Herapath and Louisa Wogan. And Jack, when he emerges from his sickbed, finds that he has to deal with an ally—George Herapath, Michael’s Loyalist father—who is more like a spectator, with little notion of the realities of war or bloodshed, and who becomes increasingly pusillanimous the nearer he comes to actual involvement, rather than simply opening his purse “within reason” to the side he favors. At a crucial moment, Herapath makes a run for it rather than supply necessary help, leaving Aubrey and Maturin to their own (fortunately very capable) devices. They make their escape, and are on board to witness the historic capture of the Cheseapeake by HMS Shannon.
We who are not in Ukraine, who thrill to the heroism of people like Zelenskyy and Lt. Chornovol, are more than a bit like George Herapath, stirred by the defense of what we feel to be our own values, opening our wallets—good!—to the cause, yet safe and complacent at home. Except, of course, that we are very far from safe. As Justin E.H. Smith writes, the very possibility of nuclear war negates all other values; it is hard to disagree with him when he says, “It would be better for Putin to annex the entire continent of Europe, it would be better to have a century-long reign of brutal Putinite totalitarianism from Vladivostok to Cherbourg, than to have a nuclear war.” In this light, honor and valor are indeed, as values, far out of date. But they are also out of date in O’Brian’s novels—in their subtle way, those books are about the clash of pre-modern values with the rising industrial-colonial modernity, as much as are the works of Byron and Shelley (contemporary with the characters if not the composition of the Aubreyad). War and its sacrifices paper over contradictions, but O’Brian is all too aware of this papering. Comparatively few of his novels’ scenes depict battles. It’s the world in between, the world of contradictions, the world on the hinge of modernity, that is his deepest subject.
So I will go on reading O’Brian, braced against accusations of frivolousness, trusting that any text so profoundly (and yes, entertainingly) written will serve as well as Shakespeare or Vergil or the Bible as an interpretive lens for better understanding myself and my age.
