The Thirteen-Gun Salute
The dissection of character(s)
1
Patrick O’Brian’s arsenal of insults, put-downs, and terms of disapprobation are Shakespearean in their plenitude, from the garden-variety “grass-combing bugger” (a sailor’s term of contempt for a mere tiller of the land) to an admiral’s characterization of Jack as a “wicked contumelious discontented froward mutinous dog”1 to Stephen’s description of Jack’s mother-in-law Mrs. Williams as “the most unromantic beast that ever urged its squat thick bulk across the face of the protesting earth.” By far the worst insult that can be offered throughout the canon, the most disparaging thing one person can say about another, is to call them a scrub. Its meaning of “a mean, insignificant fellow” dates to the 1580s, according to the OED, and in the mouths of O’Brian’s characters it signifies a person beneath contempt. Some are born scrubs, like “that one-eyed son of a blue French fart” Admiral Harte; some, like the pitiable Andrew Wray, achieve scrubness; yet others, like the starchy old Lieutenant Grant who abandons Aubrey and the Leopard to their fate in Desolation Island, only to blame Aubrey ever after for his failed career, have scrubness thrust upon ‘em. It is perhaps this third category to which we must consign Edward Fox, the envoy whose mission to the Sultan of the fictional Malaysian nation of Pulo Prabang drives the plot of The Thirteen-Gun Salute.
O’Brian is fond of casting what I’ll call a contrast character onto the scales represented by his two heroes, measuring them according to where they fall between Doctor Maturin’s yin and Captain Aubrey’s yang. He does this in the very first novel with the character of James Dillon, tragically torn between Aubreyesque valor and Maturinesque subterfuge. He does it again in The Mauritius Command with the unfortunate Lord Clonfert, whose real qualities of bravery, leadership, and rather touching vulnerability cannot preserve him from a fatal case of insecurity. A lesser, more overtly scrublike contrast character would be Lieutenant Grant, whose skills as a seaman cannot compensate for his bitterness over going unpromoted for the sin of never having seen action. All these contrast characters suffer from a species of loneliness; they lack that counterpart or second self that Aubrey and Maturin have in each other, balancing them and very often literally saving one another’s life.
Unlike the examples above, Fox is not the least bit nautical or military, though he is very much what Stephen Maturin likes to call a man of parts, whose value is tragically effaced by his emotional neediness and compulsion to dominate others. O’Brian follows his usual pattern in his excavation of such characters: Stephen, reflecting in his journal or simply in his own mind, compares the subject in question to Jack, and this subject is invariably found wanting. He begins thinking of Jack—and, inevitably, of himself:
Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own; but on this occasion he was thinking about it less as a virtue than as a state, the condition of being whole; and it seemed to him that Jack was a fair example. He was as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be; and in all the years Stephen had known him, he had never seen him act a part.
The lowest form of scrub, the truly contemptible sort, is probably as unselfconscious as Jack; but these are not the sorts of characters that really interest O’Brian (or Stephen). It is rather those who, however admirable their qualities (and think of how a “man of parts” intrinsically lacks the “integrity” Stephen invokes) are in some way divided against themselves. Stephen, the bastard half-Irish half-Catalan secret agent, is one such. The envoy is another:
Fox, on the other hand, occupied a more or less perpetual stage, playing the role of an important figure, an imposing man, and the possessor of uncommon parts. To be sure, he was at least to some extent all three; but he would rarely let it alone—he wished it to be acknowledged…. Stephen thought the performance was by now almost wholly unconscious; but in a long voyage its continuity made it plain, and on occasion the envoy’s reaction to a real or imaginary want of respect made it plainer still. Fox did not seek popularity, though he could be good company when he chose and he liked being liked; what he desired was superiority and the respect due to superiority, and for a man of his intelligence he did set about it with a surprising lack of skill. Many people, above all the foremast hands of the Diane, refused to be impressed.
What is the source of Fox’s self-division, his anxiety? Why the need to play a part? His situation is a bit different than that of James Dillon, the United Irishman turned Royal Navy lieutenant, tormented by his divided loyalties. (As Jack reflects with unconscious cruelty in conversation with Stephen, “Upon my word, I cannot see what you mean by double loyalty. You can only have one King. And a man’s heart can only be in one place at a time, unless he is a scrub.”) Fox is more like Clonfert, whose anxiety is specifically masculine or hypermasculine. We are told that, one on one, Clonfert is “capable of an almost female delicacy”; but when he has an audience, he turns into a show-off, an insufferable bore in the drawing room and a danger to himself and others on the battlefield. Clonfert lacks integrity in Stephen’s sense because he cannot reconcile what is most lovable in himself—the vulnerability that excites affection in Stephen and others—with his hypermasculine warrior ethos. His reckless overcompensation leads ultimately to the loss of his ship, the death of many of his men, and the grievous personal injuries that prefigure his suicide.
Unlike Clonfert (or Dillon), Fox is not a fighting man; he has neither the desire nor the ability to quash his ambiguities by losing himself in the red mist of battle. But he does resemble Clonfert in his susceptibility to flattery, even from obvious toadies and suck-ups; he is pathetically grateful for any sign of esteem and indignant a perceived slight. Clonfert is attractive to women, but cares more about his impact upon men, though he doesn’t seem sexually attracted to them. Fox’s situation is more ambiguous. He bitterly despises his namesake Edward Ledward, Wray’s more dangerous counterpart, a treasonous British official who joins the the French embassy to Pulo Prabang and seduces the Sultan’s young male lover in pursuit of his aims. The intensity of Fox’s hatred suggests s a kind of disavowed identification, or the fury of a lover betrayed. Feeling friendless on the Diane, he draws Stephen into a conversation on the brink of unwelcome confidences. He quotes to Stephen a wildly anachronistic stanza of A.E. Housman’s:
When the bells justle in the tower
The hollow night amid
Then on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
Stephen somehow discerns that this poem, which went unpublished in Housman’s lifetime, amounts on Fox’s part to a sort of confession of sexual self-hatred. It is not the first time that Stephen has been in this uncomfortable position; a Catholic doctor who sails with Protestant shipmates becomes used to being treated as a substitute priest. His response to Fox is laceratin:
I must suppose it to be of a sexual nature, since a thief is not always stealing nor a murderer always murdering, whereas a man’s sexual instincts are with him all the time, day and night. Yet it is curious to see how the self-hater often succeeds in retaining his self-esteem in relation to others, usually by means of a general denigration: he sees himself as a worthless creature, but his fellows as more worthless still.
O’Brian is not above playing fast and loose with chronology—as he admits in the “Author’s Note” to The Far Side of the World, the quantity of action he will eventually cram into the next half-dozen novels may require him “to make use of hypothetical years, rather like the hypothetical moons used in the calculation of Easter: an 1812a as it were or even an 1812b.” But it’s one thing to expand 1812 like an accordion; it’s another to drop a twentieth-century poem into a novel set in 1812 (a, b, or c as the case may be). Anachronistic virtue-signaling is the vice of historical novelists; O’Brian usually skirts the more egregious varieties, though the multicultural tolerance displayed by the officers and crew of the joyful Surprise (often contrasted with the ignorance and racism of assorted grass-combing buggers) is a little too good to be true. But in this case it seems O’Brian couldn’t resist borrowing from a poet whose neoclassical austerities so strongly suggest the sufferings of the closet.2
Fox ends up alienating everyone, refusing to share credit for the diplomatic victory that wins the Sultan to the British side (leading, almost incidentally, to the final downfall of Ledward and Wray, whose bodies Stephen and a colleague cold-bloodedly dissect). When the Diane is wrecked on a reef Fox will not wait for Aubrey and his crew to build a weatherly schooner, but sets off in the ship’s pinnace on a two-hundred mile voyage Batavia, so eager is he to share the news of his triumph and receive, at last, the reward he believes he deserves. As so often happens in these novels, he gets exactly what he deserves: a typhoon wipes Fox and the pinnace and its crew from the face of the earth. O’Brian’s contrast characters, caught in the balance and found wanting, rarely survive the novels in which they’re introduced.
2
Does Stephen Maturin lack integrity? Nothing could be more cold-blooded than his dispatch of Ledward and Wray, who no longer seem to interest him or arouse much in the way of animosity; he kills them in nearly the same spirit he might shoot a nondescript booby for the purpose of anatomizing it. Yet he spends much of this novel in happy anticipation of his wife Diana’s delivering him a daughter—”Can you imagine her being brought to bed of anything else?” he asks Jack, who can of course very well imagine it. (Jack’s firstborn children were twin daughters, and he was quite depressed by the fact, wanting a son whose naval career he could advance; Stephen, on the other hand, can only imagine himself delighting “in the company of this little hypothetical daughter.”) Stephen’s character welters in contradictions—that’s a great part of its fascination. In the past, he took the edge off of those contradictions with increasingly heroic doses of the alcoholic tincture of laudanum, but having as it were hit bottom with the overdose that concluded The Reverse of the Medal he has finally sworn off the stuff. As a result the edges of his character make themselves felt much more sharply than in the past. The opium had dulled his sexual appetite; abandoning it, he (and Diana) discover an “ardent temperament…. quite certainly the cause of this baby.” He is a more irritable, excitable character in this novel, and his new habit of ingesting cocoa leaves (not to mention his love of smoking tobacco) does not prevent him from straying into sometimes turbid waters.
Within the mini-sequence of novels that begins with The Reverse of the Medal and concludes with The Nutmeg of Consolation, Maturin’s integrity is tested by an unexpected foe: wealth. Having inherited a preposterous fortune from his godfather, Stephen, who is used to being penniless, becomes extremely liberal with big purchases (the biggest of which has to be the Surprise itself) and comically cheap with little ones. Frustration with his bankers leads him to change to a smaller, more active house; later in the novel, rumors of a stock exchange crash and the failure of his new bank are heard. Wealth, like opium, can be a form of insulation; O’Brian has begun a process of stripping Stephen’s defenses away, bringing us closer to his core contradictions. In the novels to come, we will see that focus intensify, making definitive the bias that’s been increasingly clear since at least The Fortune of War. A series that began with its focus divided equally between the interiorities of two heroes is increasingly more interested in one. We will keep getting Jack’s thoughts, of course, not to mention his letters to Sophie, and he will show a capacity for searching self-reflection most consistently when trying to understand the social dynamics of his crew. Jack will remain the hero of these novels, but Stephen is their true protagonist.
To put this point another way, in O’Brian’s writing there is a productive tension between the demands of the Dickensian social novel and the demands of the novel of psychological interiority, as in late James or Proust. The unlikely bridge between these two territories is the adventure story, and Jack is always manning that bridge (or walking that quarterdeck). But Stephen is the “student of human nature” who makes these books so re-readable.
This one ends on a cliffhanger: once again our heroes are shipwrecked, though on an island less desolate than Desolation Island. We will see what consolation the Nutmeg offers in the next volume.
Somehow, I am on the program for several events at Chicon8, the big science fiction and fantasy convention taking place next weekend, September 1 - 5 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago. If you’ll be in Chicago and want to say hey, here are the events in which I’ll be participating:
Saturday, Sept. 3, 1 PM, Crystal Foyer: Table Talk with Joshua Corey! You can sign up by visiting this link starting on Wednesday, August 31. Depending on who shows up I’ll be prepared to talk about Hannah and the Master as speculative poetry, How Long Is Now as speculative fiction about the past, the Aubrey-Maturin series, or my as-yet unpublished post-apocalyptic AI cli-fi trilogy. Or we can just, you know, chat.
Sunday, Sept. 4, 1 PM, Michigan 2: I’m moderating a panel called “Technology and Challenges of Imperial Systems,” with two panelists presenting papers that sound fascinating. Dr. Jenna Hanchey will present on “Using Alien Technology Against Colonialism in Africanfuturism,” and Dr. Clare S. Kim’s paper is called “‘Specters of the “Oriental Mind’: Techno-Orientalism and the Making of Technoscientific Identities.” This panel will also be presented virtually in “Airmeet 7”; you can learn more about attending virtual Chicon panels here.
Sunday, Sept. 4, 4 PM, Michigan 2: “Teaching Science Fiction at a Liberal Arts College: An Interdisciplinary Panel.” Me and three of my Lake Forest College colleagues—Religion prof. Ben Zeller, Biology prof. Sean Menke, and French prof. Tessa Sermet—will talk about the opportunities and challenges presented by teaching science fiction in a liberal arts college setting. This one too can be attended virtually in Airmeet 7.
A good example, incidentally, of O’Brian’s characteristic method of cataloging adjectives without commas, serial or otherwise, generally deployed to create an effect at once suggestive of informal speech yet so over the top and excessive that it can only be the product of writing. Somewhere in this intersection of the speechlike with the rhetorically excessive lies O’Brian’s own peculiar territory of writing, more akin I think to that of Dickens than of any other novelist.
I can’t resist recalling the production of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love that I saw in San Francisco in 2000, and this delightful, semantically-charged exchange:
CHAMBERLAIN: We discuss what we should call ourselves. “Homosexuals” has been suggested.
HOUSMAN: Homosexuals?
CHAMBERLAIN: We aren’t anything till there’s a word for it.
HOUSMAN: Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity?
CHAMBERLAIN: What’s wrong with it?
HOUSMAN: It’s half Greek and half Latin!
CHAMBERLAIN: That sounds about right.