The Surgeon's Mate
Happy endings with Jack and Stephen
1
It would be perfectly absurd to say that O’Brian hits his stride with The Surgeon’s Mate, the seventh novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series. The man hit the ground running with Master and Commander, immeasurably deepened the emotional worlds of his characters with Post Captain, and the books continue at this very high level for many volumes thereafter. Yet there’s something especially characteristic and especially pleasurable about the action of The Surgeon’s Mate. For me perhaps because this another cello novel that focuses as much or more on Stephen Maturin as it does on Jack Aubrey. Not to spoil things, but this is also the novel, at long last, in which Stephen achieves his heart’s desire.
But in what condition in his heart? When Stephen was preparing to re-encounter Diana Villiers in Boston in The Fortune of War, after she’d thrown him over not once but twice—first for the estimable Canning, then for the execrable Johnson—he was in full lover’s flutter. But when the longed-for reunion occurs, he is chagrined to discover that his essential feeling for Diana—the attachment inspired by the grace and dash that seemed as essential to her being as the physical courage routinely displayed by Jack and his fellow naval officers—has disappeared. Is it because Diana has been coarsened by colonial living, high and loose? “‘She has forgotten the distinction between what can and what cannot be said,’ he reflected. ‘A few more years of this company, and she would not scruple to fart.’” Or does the cause run deeper, into Maturin himself? Have the years of disappointment numbed him past the point of finer feeling? The metaphor that occurs to him, in both that novel and this one, is that of a clock that has wound down. In The Fortune of War he puts it this way:
‘If I no longer love Diana,’ he wrote, ‘what shall I do?’ What could he do, with his mainspring, his prime mover gone? He had known that he would love her for ever – to the last syllable of recorded time. He had not sworn it, any more than he had sworn that the sun would rise every morning: it was too certain, too evident: no one swears that he will continue to breathe nor that twice two is four. Indeed, in such a case an oath would imply the possibility of doubt. Yet now it seemed that perpetuity meant eight years, nine months and some odd days, while the last syllable of recorded time was Wednesday, the seventeenth of May. ‘Can such things be?’ he asked. He knew from examples that this had often happened to other men; and that other men also lost their minds or contracted cancer. Could it be that he was not, as he had implicitly supposed, exceptionally immune?
Perhaps there is only so much tension one organism can bear; perhaps Stephen, that meagre and distracted man, is as unromantic on the inside as he appears to be on the outside. The moment of disillusion is recalled early in The Surgeon’s Mate as Jack, Stephen, and Diana, having escaped imprisonment in Boston and survived the battle between HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake, arrive in Halifax, very nearly the last stage on their journey home. Stephen returns to the metaphor of the mainspring:
They made a curious group there in the stern-sheets as the boat pulled for the shore, a group bound together by strong, intricate relationships; for not only had the two men competed for her liking in the past so that it had very nearly broken their friendship, but Diana had been the great love of Stephen’s life, his prime illusion. She had thrown him over in India in favour of an American, a very wealthy man called Johnson, whose company she found increasingly unpleasant on their arrival in the States and, after the declaration of war, quite intolerable. It was when Maturin reached Boston as a prisoner of war that they came together again and that he found that although he still admired her spirit and beauty, it was as though his heart were numb. What changes in her or in himself had brought this about he could not tell for sure; but he did know that unless his heart could feel again the mainspring of his life was gone.
A mainspring that winds down can be wound up again; a numb limb can recover feeling; but what can return a “prime illusion” to life? This question resonates with the resurrection of another sort of illusion, another kind of love: Jack’s for the Royal Navy after a series of calamitous and unexpected defeats. ”His whole being was suffused with deep happiness, for although this victory was none of his, he was a sea-officer through and through, wholly identified with the Royal Navy from his childhood, and the successive defeats of the last year had weighed upon him so that he had been hardly able to bear it.” The victory of the Shannon has liberated Jack from his unnatural depression, and he is confident that “the stars had resumed their natural march.” Jack’s own natural march will soon land him in bed with an entirely unsuitable woman not his wife, so that both protagonists will have love problems, in very different registers, plaguing them till very near the conclusion of The Surgeon’s Mate.
In the meantime we will experience the tense pursuit of our heroes by a pair of determined privateers as they sail from Halifax to England; Jack will seek legal counsel to defend him from the depredations of the projector who’s been bankrupting him; Stephen will address the Institut in Paris on the subject of the deceased avifauna of Rodriguez; and a desperate mission will be launched to the Baltic to persuade the Catalan soldiers manning a strategically significant island fortress to defect from France to England. Oh, and Jack and Stephen will be prisoners—again! And we meet a couple of new characters who will stick around for a while: the ingenuous, gorgeous Jagiello, a young Lithuanian cavalry officer, and Duhamel, a French intelligence agent who will switch sides at a crucial moment. All this is very entertaining and superbly drawn, as usual. But all the time I’m wondering: will Stephen’s illusion be restored to him? And if not, what are we to conclude about O’Brian’s views of the nature of love?
2
Jack’s indiscretion with one Amanda Smith, “a flighty, histrionic, unsteady, headstrong, extremely active and ill-judging young woman” is the product not simply of his strong “animal spirits” but a blurring in the mental image of his own wife, caused by the total absence of any letters from her at the Halifax post office. Lonely, resentful, and worried about his business affairs, Jack is ripe for Miss Smith’s “never mind maneuvers, always go straight at ‘em” approach to seduction at the ball in Halifax, especially after he learns from a coarse cousin of his that Sophie was dancing at an assembly at home while Jack was lying wounded and forlorn in Boston. He ends up “in Miss Smith’s predictable bed,” only to learn the next day that there is a large packet of letters for him that the postmaster had set aside; this is enough to restore his sense of connection with Sophie marred by the barest twinge of guilt (he is more worried about the machinations of the projector, Kimber). Later, however, when he’s home in Hampshire and begins to receive begging letters from his paramour, claiming pregnancy and a wish to imitate the actions of Lady Hamilton, he feels the gap yawning again between himself and his wife. “He could not talk to her with his usual complete openness; the deceit and the small ignoble lies set him apart; and he felt extremely lonely, sometimes quite desolate.” Jack, we are told, is not an imaginative or introspective man, yet this experience spurs in him an unexpected insight into Stephen’s character, and what it must be like for him, as an intelligence agent, to “lead a peculiarly solitary, cut-off life, perpetually watching himself, wholly free and candid with no one.”
Jack’s intuition into the nature of intimacy demonstrates its contradictions. Sexual desire may lead, as Stephen remarks, to knowledge, if only in the Biblical sense: “We read enter in unto her and know her: very well, and for the space of that coming together there is perhaps a true knowledge, a full communication; but after?” The complex rigging of desire more often than not lead us blundering into a lee shore, thwarting the deeper forms of intimacy—that free and open communication that Jack takes for granted and that Stephen has hardly ever known. Stephen’s intelligence work only partly explains his “solitary, cut-off life”; there is something in his nature, as there likely was in O’Brian’s, that makes free disclosure of his thoughts and feelings a rare event . Certainly we have to wonder just what kind of marriage he might have with Diana—it will have to be of a very different nature than the marriage of Jack and Sophie. If anything, the positions will be reversed: Diana seems to have more energetic animal spirits than Stephen does, while Stephen has a more nurturing and sensitive disposition.
But first Stephen’s heart must defrost—he must unshield himself by completing the process of mourning for his prime illusion. Delivering the results of his latest coup to Naval intelligence chief Sir Joseph Blaine, Stephen meditates on the changing nature of his feelings for Diana:
Stephen was deep in Cuvier’s argument; it was persuasive, it was elegantly put, yet somewhere there was a fallacy: he turned back two pages, keeping his finger on the weevil’s rostrum, but the references to the illustration were obscure. The error might perhaps have become evident if he had not had a long day’s travelling, and if part of his mind was not so taken up with Diana. It was an ill-regulated mind and if it were not carefully watched it would mourn Diana’s death, or at least the death of his infinitely cherished myth; a dark, bitter, monotonous grieving. Yet the mourning was not pure – it no longer invaded him entirely, perhaps because often and often, in the most unexpected ways, the old myth and the new reality tended to coincide. Perhaps, he reflected, this had a certain relationship to marriage: they had been together a very long time and although they might essentially be strangers they were inextricably entwined. Diana Villiers: he stared into the declining fire, and Cuvier receded, faded, became infinitely remote.
The coincidence of “the old myth and the new reality” is Stephen’s first real insight into what the other characters in the series refer with woeful jocularity as “the marriage state.” To be essentially strangers, yet inextricably, if not inexplicably, entwined—is this sheer disillusion, or the pathway to a more durable, livable, essential sort of myth?
Diana herself is not immune from these kinds of thoughts. Having at last agreed to marry him, she hesitates: Diana is pregnant with her former lover Johnson’s child, which puts her in her own mind at least in a humiliating position. More significantly, she has pierced the veil that hung about her in The Fortune of War, when her need for Stephen’s help obscured her ordinarily keen perception of his feelings. Now she sees that Stephen no longer loves her as he once did. When he protests, her “sad, disillusioned smile,” suggests that she had cherished her own myth of Stephen as the one man who would never desert her, who valued her for something more ineffable than mere sex appeal. A disconcerted Stephen, intent on doing the right thing, puts on blue spectacles to hide from that demystifying gaze.
3
If there’s one myth that Diana seems to cherish more than her idea of the perpetually faithful Stephen, it’s the myth of the diamonds gifted her by Johnson—the rivière that she wore so proudly in Halifax, a gesture that wounds Stephen with its crassness: “by some mental process of her own she had entirely dissociated them from their source; Stephen had not.” Later, delirious on the packet fleeing Johnson’s privateers, she is convinced that she and the diamonds are his sole object:
‘Johnson would do anything, spend anything, to get us back. He is perfectly capable of hiring privateers, whatever they cost: he would spend money like water, he would move heaven and earth to get hold of me. And my diamonds,’ she added. She turned uneasily, throwing the bedclothes about. ‘They are all I have,’ she muttered after a while: and then ‘I shall never escape from that dreadful man.’ And after still another pause ‘But he shall never have them, not as long as there is breath in my body. No, by God.’
Diana, of course, is unaware of Johnson’s other motive: revenge against Stephen Maturin for killing two French agents in Johnson’s bedroom and stealing his private papers. But she is not wrong when she mutters, “They are all I have.” Diana truly has nothing at this point in the story: no husband, no property of her own, not even her own nationality (she still carries an American passport). She has even lost sovereignty over her own body, pregnant as she is—and Stephen, consistent with his Catholicism and his understanding of his Hippocratic oath, refuses to giver her an abortion. Does she not have reason, in this moment, to feel as betrayed by Stephen’s insensitivity as he feels betrayed by hers? Why should a man who doesn’t hesitate to slit an enemy agent’s throat hesitate to help her free herself from the danger and onerousness of carrying to term the child of a man they both have reason to hate? Diana wields her diamonds like a sword; if Stephen feels cut by them, it’s hard not to think that in this way, at least, he deserves it.
“You are much attached to those diamonds, Villiers,” Stephen says to her in Paris. We are told he says it “kindly”: perhaps he subtly acknowledges here that the diamonds are a symbol of Diana’s independence, her self-sovereignty. Diana seems to confirm this with her reply:
‘Yes, I am. I truly love them,’ she said. ‘Above all the Blue Peter.’ She detached the pendant stone and put it into his hand, where it lay, strangely heavy, sending out countless prismatic flashes at the slightest movement. ‘I don’t give a damn where they come from,’ she went on, raising her chin. ‘I love them passionately. I should not part with them for anything on earth and I shall certainly be buried in them. You will remember that, Stephen? If things do not go well this autumn, I am to be buried in them. I may rely on you?’
‘Certainly,’ said Stephen, looking straight into her eyes and then quickly away at the sight of the painful emotion in them.
She puts the Blue Peter into his hand, instead of her heart. It flashes there, the representative of Diana’s body—that much-pursued body—that she claims as utterly her own, even as she permits Stephen, for a moment, to caress it. For his part, once again he can scarcely meet her eyes. Something is transmitted here, between them. Some new understanding is forming, some new foundation on which the fate of their relationship will turn.
4
Jack’s heroism is bound up with his myth: the myth of Lucky Jack, of the far-seeing commander who regularly and almost literally becomes larger than life at moments of decisive action. We have not caught a glimpse of this Jack for quite some time—he has not commanded a ship since the horrible old Leopard limped into Port Jackson at the start of The Fortune of War. The Surgeon’s Mate takes an unusually long time to really get going, plotwise; as Mike and Ian point out, the dual inciting incidents of this novel’s plot—Amanda Smith’s hysterical letters and the failure of Catalan poet Pompeu Ponsich’s mission to persuade the Catalan soldiers manning Grimsholm, a strategically critical island fortress in the Baltic—don’t arrive until very near the halfway point. Together, these incidents are enough to return our heroes to sea, where Jack assumes command of a sloop called H.M.S. Ariel and Stephen takes Ponsich’s place, to see if they cannot avoid his fate of being blown out of the water by Grisholm’s great guns.
One of O’Brian’s tricks is to bring a third character into the Jack-Stephen dynamic to put one or another of them into high relief—usually a kind of rival or frenemy (think James Dillon, Canning, Lord Clonfert, etc. This time it’s Captain Gedymin Jagiello, an absurdly handsome young Lithuanian cavalry officer detached to service with the Royal Navy, who offers a number of interesting points of similarity and contrast between our heroes. Like Jack, he is a habitually cheerful man of action; like Stephen, he is a natural linguist perpetually underfoot on a ship; unlike either of them at this stage in their careers he is young, naive, and completely irresistible to women (and probably not a few men). There is a touch of the fool to Jagiello’s fundamentally comic character: he is forever getting entangled with the rigging (insisting as he does in wearing his spurs aboard ship) and seemingly oblivious to the fascination shown for him by one woman after another. The other men are alternately annoyed and amused by Jagiello’s appeal, which they claim to be perplexed by: “I cannot for the life of me understand is what they see in him,” Jack tells Stephen. “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.”
Jack’s failure to understand androgyny’s appeal highlights another of the series’ major themes, which is masculinity and its various forms, toxic and non-. Jack Aubrey is far from the crudest man we meet in the series—he is certainly more evolved than his boorish father—yet he is the bearer of a heroic masculinity that sometimes awes and intimidates other characters (it basically killed Lord Clonfert). Jack himself has his androgynous side, as seen in one of this novel’s amusing sidebars: catching sight of Elsinore as on the coast of Denmark, Jack reveals that as a midshipman he played Ophelia in a shipboard production of Hamlet. This is played for laughs, yet Jagiello’s feminine presence reminds us that Jack and Stephen’s homosocial wooden world permits, in some ways, finer gradations of masculinity than life ashore. Maybe one of the reasons that Jack deplores women aboard is that the presence of a woman freezes the crew and sailors into heterosexual postures less labile than what is possible in her absence? Something to revisit when we get to volume 15, known as The Truelove in the U.S. and Clarissa Oakes in the U.K.
The mission to Grimsholm is a success, but afterward the Ariel runs afoul of a lee shore on the French coast and Stephen, Jack, and Jagiello end up prisoners together at the Temple in Paris. There is always something oddly congenial about these sequences in which our heroes are taken prisoner; we have here something of a reprise of the Boston sequence in The Fortune of War, in which the heroes are menaced by the foes who have captured them but also end up forming new relationships with them. In this case, Jagiello’s flirtation with the pretty widow who cooks food for the prisoners (shades of Fabrice in Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma) and the surprising conversion of the spy Duhamel from enemy to ally lead directly to our heroes’ liberation—and not a moment too soon, as Stephen’s cover is definitively blown when Johnson arrives on the scene. But the most surprising and moving outcome of the novel is Diana’s decision—she has been living in Paris, the better to avoid the eyes of gossips as her pregnancy proceeds—to give up the Blue Peter for the sake of winning Stephen’s freedom. It is a completely selfless, loving gesture, of the kind neither Stephen nor the reader may have thought her capable, and it leads to the following extraordinary exchange:
Stephen leapt out and limped up to her, she running to meet him; they kissed and he said ‘Dearest Diana, how profoundly I thank you: but I have cost you the Blue Peter.’
‘Oh how happy I am to see you,’ she said, holding his arm. ‘Be damned to the necklace: you will be my diamond.’
Look at the colons. A colon sets up an equivalence (I thank Eva Sandor for this insight): it balances the sentence: O’Brian is an exquisite deployer of colons. Stephen thanks Diana, but his deliverance is weighed up with the extremity of its cost. He knows full well what the diamond meant to her—nothing less than herself. And her response is similarly balanced, equivalenced: be damned to the symbol of her bodily sovereignty, for she will take Stephen—and his name, and the position in society it offers her—instead.
That sounds a bit cold and unromantic, contrary to the tenderness of the scene; but I think the real tenderness is to be found near the very end, though even this tenderness is not unshadowed. The prisoners, thanks to the intervention of the turncoat Duhamel, have made their escape and are aboard H.M.S. Oedipus, a fast-sailing brig commanded by none other than master and commander William Babbington. As they make sail, Jack lingers with Babbington on the quarterdeck, unwilling to go below where Stephen and Diana “are at it hammer and tongs… They might have been married this twelvemonth and more.” To distract himself, he and Babbington consider the figurehead of the Oedipus and its associated tragic hero. “I was never any great fist at the classics,” says Aubrey, but he follows that remark with this reflection:
I do not mean the least fling at your figurehead, still less your brig, Babbington, but that family was not really quite the thing, you know. There were some very odd capers, and it ended unhappy. But then the relationships between men and women are often very odd, and I am afraid they often end unhappy. How do you find your martingales answer, led single like that?
There is nothing especially Oedipal about the relationship between Stephen and Diana, or for that matter between Jack and Sophie: neither man has the misfortune of having married his mother, though it’s true that Jack might have sometimes secretly wished to kill his obstreperous father, and Stephen might resent that his father never married Stephen’s mother. Still, it’s an ominous note to strike that touches on the fated quality of the desire that leads to marriage—the deep vein of the irrational that hinges on some sort of recognition of the other person as being for you, whether or not that person is capable of making you happy. But from this shadowed moment we pass to an exquisite piece of comedy:
‘I only said that Johnson was in Paris, that the English ports were closed against you as an enemy alien, and that you had no choice,’ said Stephen, looking miserable, confused and upset. ‘I have been trying to get that into your thick head this hour at least, Villiers.’
‘There—there you go again,’ cried Diana. ‘Surely you must know, surely you must feel that any woman, even a woman as battered as I am, must look for something more—more, what shall I say?—more romantic in an offer of marriage? Even if I were to marry you, which is totally inconceivable, I should never, never do so after such a grovelling, such an utterly mundane and businesslike proposal. It is a question of common good manners, or ordinary civility. Really, Maturin, I wonder at you.’
‘Yet indeed, Diana, I love you dearly,’ said Stephen in a dejected tone, looking down.
Reader, she marries him. And it would take a heart of stone not to be happy for them both, particularly for Stephen, even as the shadow of Oedipus, the shadow of the illusory if not delusive nature of love, looms.
If you like this sort of thing, I’ve written some other things you may like. Consider acquiring a copy of my new novel, How Long Is Now. Here’s how the writer Joe Pan describes it:
By turns lyric and hypnotic, How Long is Now examines the delicate membranes separating past and present, authenticity of experience and transgressive truth. A Jewish-American writer, plagued by poetry and history, leaves his dying father and faithless marriage to travel to Germany and later Morocco to attend a William Burroughs conference, an unwritten novel on his plate. Enter a mysterious film, a cocktail of wild characters, and a fractured narrative that attempts a reimagining of his parents’ early courtship while his own life destabilizes into a sad, metaphysical travelogue, and we’re left beguiled by the wondrous, bitter nature of a reality that’s more cut-up than consistent, a Beckett play on deepening failure and paranoia. Hope is not lost, however—it just comes with a price—and as we’re ushered through a lengthening series of psychological obstacles and aesthetic quandaries, we come closer to understanding what that price may be.
You can buy it directly from the publisher, or there’s always rhymes-with-Ramazon.