The Truelove, aka Clarissa Oakes
Male fragility sets sail
Before I get to the fifteenth installment of my series on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, a bit of news and housekeeping:
Last month was the one-year anniversary of this little newsletter, and I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by experimenting with paid subscriptions. For now, you can continue to read everything I write here for free, but if you are inclined to throw a few bucks my way, I won’t say no! Founding members get a free copy of my new novel How Long Is Now and maybe a couple other books of mine. Everyone else gets to feel smug about belonging to a very, very small club!
Today is my 52nd birthday! What better present to give me than paying for a subscription, eh?
If you’re in or near Lake Forest, Illinois, and you’re interested in studying creative writing with me, I’ll be offering a new section of Writing by the Lake from 9 to 11 AM on four Mondays: Oct. 24, Nov. 7, 14, and 21. Haven’t done this since before the pandemic but it’s always a lot of fun—I get poets, fiction writers, memoirists, you name it. Click the link to learn more!
Sooner or later I’m gonna run out of Aubrey-Maturin novels, and while I could write about them forever, I’m thinking of moving on to other topics. One idea: when I saw the new Confess, Fletch movie coming out, it reminded me of how much I loved the Gregory Mcdonald novels back in the day (the less said about the Chevy Chase version, the better, though I know a lot of people like it). I’ve got a stack of the old mass-market paperback editions and I’ve been tearing through them on my lunch hours; they’re almost entirely (hilarious) dialogue. Fletch is a man out of time: as written in the 70s and 80s he’s a “barefoot boy with cheek,” a young, preternaturally handsome Vietnam vet turned investigative reporter, anti-establishment to his bones, an outlaw jonesing for the truth. Does such a character still resonate in our era of fake news?
My other idea is to write about the oeuvre of Charles Portis, perennially underrated and unknown—but everyone who comes to know his work loves it. True Grit is the acknowledged masterpiece, but Masters of Atlantis may be the funniest goddamn book I’ve ever read. There are only five novels, but each one’s good for an essay, for sure. Both Mcdonald and Portis got their start as newspapermen; there’s something about that profession that lends itself to prodigious feats of storytelling and wit. Maybe I should do a series on journalists who write fiction: Pete Dexter, Joan Didion, Ben Hecht: the list is long and would keep me busy for years.
Some of you are new to the Fiend; welcome! If you don’t know about the other stuff I write, consider my shaggy dog story about grief or my free ebook shelter in place, a book of one hundred one-hundred-word prose poems from the pandemic’s first hundred days.
S’alright? S’alright.
Now back to Jack and Stephen and one of the series’ most intriguing secondary characters, a young woman by the name of Clarissa Oakes…
What to call this novel? The American edition is called The Truelove—like the book that precedes it, taking its name with one of the story’s vessels, in this case a captured British whaler that the Surprise must liberate from the French. But the British edition is called Clarissa Oakes, in the eighteenth-century tradition of titling novels after main characters, reminding us how interwoven the history of the novel is with that of biography. (Think for example of the 1719 blockbuster Robinson Crusoe, the full title of which presents the book as a work of autobiography while promising a series of exciting incidents and adventures: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Whew!)
It is the first and only such title in the series, unless you count the various titles of rank associated with our hero, Jack Aubrey: Master and Commander, Post Captain, The Commodore, The Yellow Admiral (the latter not an actual rank, but a fate Jack hopes desperately to avoid: to be nominally promoted to rear admiral without being given an actual squadron to command; forced retirement, in other words). Clarissa Oakes centers our attention on a character who shapes up to be a new variation on the type struck by Diana Villiers: the valiant woman of unconventional morality, on the cusp of modernity. Unlike Diana, however, or the semi-competent spy Louisa Wogan, Clarissa’s unusual personality is rooted in trauma. She is a more realistic, darker version of the “woman of pleasure” who narrates novels like Fanny Hill or Moll Flanders, whose sexual exploitation from a young age has turned her into a kind of dangerous innocent. Incapable of recognizing the unspoken laws that keep female sexuality in bounds, she becomes to the men and officers of the Surprise something like an open flame carried into a powder magazine. Stephen’s sensitivity, and Jack’s obtuseness, working in tandem as they so often do, are all that preserve her from an ugly fate.
Clarissa Harvill is a convict, transported to Australia for murder, smuggled aboard the Surprise by a rather undistinguished midshipman by the name of Oakes. To Jack Aubrey’s fury, that means the Surprise has become haven for not one but two escaped convicts, the other being Stephen’s Irish servant Padeen. Captain Aubrey threatens to maroon the couple, only backing down out of a mix of humanity and pragmatic recognition that his authority as captain of His Majesty’s Hired Vessel Surprise is less than it was than when he had had a complement of marines at his disposal. Parson Martin marries the couple, turning Clarissa Harvill into Clarissa Oakes. The name is significant: Harvill is just a syllable away from Harlowe, the last name of the eponymous heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, one of the longest novels in English and a favorite of O’Brian’s (and of Stephen’s; it was recommended to him by the bookish Captain Yorke back in The Fortune of War, and he praises it to the novelist character Jack Paulton in Nutmeg). Richardson’s Clarissa is fundamentally innocent: pursued, tormented, and raped by the villainous Lovelace (pronounced loveless), she nonetheless retains her spiritual virtue and triumphs in death over the remorseful libertine. Clarissa Oakes, née Harvill, has a similar, though less sentimental and far more grotesque, tale to tell, though she her eventual fate is a reasonably happy one.
Before we, via Stephen, learn Clarissa’s story, we infer her effect on the men and officers of the Surprise as operating rather like a plague. Jack is clueless at first, musing that “something seemed to have happened to [his crew] in Sydney. Now they were fuller of mirth than before; now they had private expressions that caused gales of laughter in the forecastle; and now he often saw them look at him with a knowing smile. In any other ship this might have meant mischief, but here even the officers had something of the same oddness.” Once Clarissa has been discovered, looking fetching in one of Oakes’ midshipman’s uniforms (O’Brian has an eye for androgyny; Stephen is drawn to women whose gracefulness is augmented by masculine “dash”), Jack is unaware of her destabilizing effect. Although he was angered by the initial deception, he receives Clarissa herself very kindly and seems to find her every inch the gentlewoman. It never occurs to him that such a friendly, modest, and polite young woman of modest deportment could be the cause of increasing animosity between two of his lieutenants, or of Tom Pulling’s drawn expression, or even the tense, guilty furtiveness of the surgeon’s mate, Parson Nathaniel Martin.
Part of O’Brian’s brilliance as a novelist lies in the counterpoint between vivid, explicit, living detail and what goes unsaid and unexplained. Often we are presented with the consequences of actions rather than the actions themselves, which we infer by a kind of ripple effect that happens between the lines. Clarissa’s open friendliness leads to suppositions on behalf of the officers that lead to numerous sexual or at least sexually charged encounters that are never shown or described. This gives an extra piquancy to a passage such as the following, in which Jack hears a “more than usually discordant shriek” as he and Stephen sit down to play a Clementi duet:
“Lord,” said Jack, “I have heard poor Martin make many a dismal groan, but never on all four strings at once.
“I believe that was Mrs Oakes,” said Stephen. “He has been trying to teach her to play the instrument for some time now.”
“I never knew. Why did you not tell me?”
“You never asked.”
“Has she any talent?”
“None whatsoever,” said Stephen. “Pray do not, I repeat do not, endeavour to conceal my rosin in your breeches pocket.”
Clarissa’s mere presence is enough to turn practically every line of a passage like this into innuendo, lending something of an erotic flicker even to the image of Stephen’s rosin in Jack’s pocket. As Hamlet said to Ophelia, “It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.”
It plays like comedy, even when jealousy (and, in Martin’s case, guilt and terror of having possibly contracted syphilis) sets Jack’s officers at one another’s throats. But Clarissa’s story, when we finally learn it, is a tragic one. It is eventually drawn out of her by the wily patience of Stephen, who like Clarissa feels deeply that “Question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation.” Orphaned as a child, she was sent to a man she refers to as “Cousin Edward,” who repeatedly raped her and another girl, his niece, until they were sent to a convent to be educated. “We knew far more Latin than the other girls,” she tells Stephen. Latin is a mark of education and authority, so much so that the seamen under Stephen’s care feel comforted and reassured to hear Stephen and Martin “talking foreign twenty to the dozen”; in Clarissa’s case it has been perverted, like the rest of her education. “That was one of the reasons for our unpopularity: my violence was another.” Her guardian’s fortunes decline and Clarissa is put to work at Mother Abbott’s, a high-end London brothel. Crucially, for Stephen’s purposes, she there bears witness to the sexual peccadilloes not only of the late unlamented Ledward and Wray but of the higher official who continues to damage the operations of British intelligence; he will be able to use this information later to ensure that Clarissa will not be in danger of being returned to Australia or hanged.
What I find most touching in Clarissa’s character are her repeated attempts to repair or complete her education. “‘It is an odd thing, living in a brothel,’ said Clarissa, ‘and it has a certain likeness to being at sea: you live a particular life, with your own community, but it is not the life of the world in general and you tend to lose touch with the world in general’s ideas and language – all sorts of things like that, so that when you go out you are as much a stranger as a sailor is on shore.” Referring to her work there, she says she found it “absurd to make fidelity a matter of private parts: grotesque. I took no pleasure in it, except in giving a little when I happened to like the man—I had some agreeable clients—or felt sorry for him. It was sometimes from them that I tried to find out what the world in general really thought.” Later, she and Stephen have a conversation about seamen as a class and how they handle loneliness. “Wives,” Stephen tells her, “are uncommon—almost unheard-of on long voyages, I believe. And mistresses are in general disapproved of by everyone, from the Lords of the Admiralty to the ordinary seamen. They take away from an officer’s character and his authority.”
“Do they really? Yet neither seamen nor naval officers are famous for chastity.”
“Not by land. Yet at sea a different set of rules comes into play. They are neither particularly logical nor consistent, but they are widely understood and observed.”
“Really? Really?” she asked leaning forward with intense interest: then she sighed and shook her head, saying “But then, as you are aware, I know so little about men—men in the ordinary sense, in ordinary everyday life: men by day rather than by night.
Men by day rather than by night; men at sea versus men on land. Clarissa knows one world intimately, to the point where perfect familiarity has bred a kind of perfect contempt, mitigated it may be by kindness or pity in individual cases. But she has no conception of the rules of engagement for men and women in the daylit or maritime worlds. Stephen communicates to her the significance of her chastity—without challenging the arbitrariness of its logic—just in time, before her innocent efforts to please and befriend the men of the Surprise—upon whom, after all, her life and safety depend—bring about the complete destruction of the functioning of the ship.
Meanwhile, Stephen tries to infer, at a very great distance, how his wife Diana might be doing now that she is mother to his much longed for daughter. Her letters are not reassuring; after dismissing the “agonizing bore” of childbirth she informs her husband, “She seems rather stupid. Do not expect too much.” Diana, unlike her cousin Sophie, Jack’s wife, will never be one of the “mother-women” regarded with alienated wonder by the heroine of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, “women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.” Stephen, who ought to have known better, is disappointed. “He had hoped that having a baby would make a fundamental change in Diana. The hope had not been held with much conviction, but on the other hand he had never thought that she would be quite so indifferent a mother as she appeared in these letters, these curiously disturbing letters.” Stephen is a good deal more interested in and sympathetic to women than any of the other male characters in these novels, but he has his limitations. One stems from his being a man of his time and a Catholic, with no notion of a woman’s right to choose. The other has to do with his tendency to permit fantasy to obscure the humanity of a woman whom he desires, to the point where he had deluded himself into thinking that Diana might become the sort of nurturer she has never been, save briefly to Stephen himself when he was almost killed by a laudanum overdose at the end of The Letter of Marque.
What I’ve called the counter-characters in the Aubrey-Maturin series trouble the clear lines of masculinity that govern a world halfway to modernity, a world in which a man might discover a new species of beetle in the morning, kill another man in a duel in the afternoon, and take part in urbane dinner conversation the same night. James Dillon tries to compensate for the unease of divided loyalty by losing himself in battle; as a result he loses himself entirely, to death. Lord Clonfert tries to hide his vulnerability and sensitivity with wild feats of derring-do that lead him inevitably to destruction. Edward Fox’s efforts to conceal his homosexuality turn him paranoid, quick to take offense, and like Clonfert too willing to accept the flattery of inferiors to buttress his crumbling self-esteem. The masculine dash of Louisa Wogan not only makes her attractive to Jack and Stephen, but underlines the sensitivity and frailty of her lover Michael Herapath, who self-medicates with opium in order to withstand the pain of loving a woman who depends upon him for nothing. Now Clarissa Oakes joins the roster as an even more challenging figure, whose perverse innocence serves to highlight the fragility of nearly every male character’s ego.
“It is my belief, brother, that your misogyny is largely theoretical.” So Stephen tells Jack when Jack launches into another of his tirades about how much he hates women—women afloat, that is. I don’t think that Jack really hates women, but neither he nor Stephen are immune to the toxins of patriarchy. At the same time, Patrick O’Brian’s series-long celebration of the homosociality of an early ninteenth-century ship’s crew shows what’s worth preserving of the masculine ideal: comradeship, a can-do attitude, stoicism in the face of adversity (tempered by compassion and mutual aid), and an unselfconscious delight in nature and in each other. Clarissa is delighted by her life aboard the Surprise, and maybe even a little envious of the independence of the seaman’s life, though her comparison of life aboard ship with life in a brothel reminds us of the brutal and distorting side of sexual segregation. However much she admires it, however, she cannot truly become part of its community. Her attempts to join that community, by means of the tools the brothel taught her—the only tools she knows—nearly destroy it.
I seem to have less and less to say about the actual plot of these novels. Well, what of that? In The Nutmeg of Consolation, you’ll recall, Martin hypothesizes that novels may not need endings; what matters is “a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause.” If a novel doesn’t need an ending, a discussion of the life of a novel may not require much ado about plot, either.
A series on journalists-turned-novelist!? Huzzah!