On Patrick O'Brian and Fraudulent Identities

This year I have been reading the entire Aubrey and Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. I had tried the first book, Master and Commander, years ago; I had been aware of the series for years. The idea of the heroic naval captain and the intellectual doctor was intriguing and the books got great reviews. But the first one was too hard to get into—I tried a few pages and then stopped. I thought maybe it was just too male for me, like Moby Dick, Thomas Pynchon (with his cartoonish characters) or John Updike. But I really enjoyed the movie when I saw it in December—although it was an strange experience to watch the Napoleonic-era English-French battle scenes in English with French subtitles, in a theater on the Champs-Elysées, and actually accompanied by a British naval captain. I was going on a long trip soon afterward and bought the first book on tape to hear as I drove. After that I was hooked on the series and was off and reading. I am just starting number 16, The Wine-Dark Sea. Yes,I love the books in spite of the many, many times I, and no doubt many other readers, have had to skip blithely over phrases like, “Double the clench-bolts” or “slung by its train-loops, side-loops, pommelion and muzzle.”  What makes them so wonderful is their acute vision and language, and the humor and humanity of the characters.

Here is an example from the first book, picked at random just now.

On his knees, and with his chin level with the top of the table, Stephen watched the male mantis step cautiously towards the female mantis. She was a fine strapping green specimen, and she stood upright on her four back legs, her front pair dangling devoutly….[The brown male] advanced lengthways….even in this strong light Stephen could see the curious inner glow of his big oval eyes. [Stephen watches the insects mate, and as they do so, the female eats the male, who continues in motion] still firmly anchored by his back legs. “There you are,” cried Jack. “I have been waiting for you this quarter of an hour.” “Oh,” said Stephen, starting up. “I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon….” he said, very gently covering the mantis and her dinner with a hollow ventilated box. “I am with you now.” “No you aren’t,” said Jack. “Not in those infamous half-boots. Why do you have them soled with lead, anyhow?” ....it was clear to Stephen that he had not spent a pleasant afternoon with the admiral; and all he said, as he changed into his shoes, was, “You do not need a head, nor even a heart, to be all a female can require.” “That reminds me,” said Jack, “have you anything that will keep my wig on? A most ridiculous thing happened as I was crossing the square: there was Dillon on the far side with a woman on his arm—Governor Wall’s sister, I believe—so I returned his salute with particular attention, do you see. I lifted my hat right off my head and the damned wig came with it. You may laugh, and it is damned amusing, of course; but I would have given a fifty-pound note not to have looked ridiculous with him there.”

A few years earlier, I had read that Patrick O’Brian, the famous Irish writer of the Aubrey and Maturin series, had turned out not to be Irish at all, but English, of partly German descent. It had puzzled me at the time. I have been in England enough to know that the Irish are not particularly admired there. By the time I had gotten through my fifth or sixth book of the series, I was quite curious about the author. Apparently many people were, because in one of the books there was a note from him, saying that as a writer, his life was irrelevant to his work, but giving a few details—how he had grown up in Ireland, in Connemara, been ill as a child, but “fortunately there was a governess, dear Miss O’Mara,” and that “although I spent long periods in England, liking the people very much…it was Ireland and France that educated and formed me, in so far as I was educated and formed.” He gave another few pages of details about his life, mostly since he had moved to France long ago, and came across as a reclusive but charming man.

Unfortunately by then I had read the damning truth on too many websites: Patrick O’Brian’s real name was Richard Russ, he was not in the least a well-connected Irishman from Ballinasloe, County Clare, but middle-class English, and he had changed his name, among other reasons, to hide the fact that he had walked out on his wife, small son, and dying baby daughter, vanishing and leaving them penniless, at the beginning of World War II. I think there is not much that can be said to redeem this bald fact. 

He was in his mid-twenties then, and later had a long, happy marriage with a much posher wife who had been Countess Tolstoy. Her grandchildren, not his own, are his legal heirs; he cut off all ties with his son (whom he had sent to school) when the young man changed his name back to Richard Russ upon marrying. The son explained why in the Guardian in November 2003:

When I was 27 and about to get married, something happened that completely changed the way I thought about my father. I had met a man at work, an ordinary Battersea guy, who had been in the army. I asked him how he could settle down in civvy street after all the excitement of war. He said he had three youngsters and that he had come home to find his wife dying of cancer. So he buttoned down and got on with it. He didn't walk away. And I thought, "Good on you. That's how a man should behave."… [My father] was a marvel at telling stories, and I have full respect for him in that way, but as a man he was not respectable.

It is hard not to keep this in mind, at least in the back of your mind, when you are reading these wonderful books. The main character in the earlier books, Jack Aubrey, is a lovable optimistic bluff sea-captain, intelligent but blunt and down-to-earth. But gradually, as I read through the series and advance in time, Jack’s friend the surgeon, Stephen Maturin, has become both more important to the plot and less lovable. Maturin is a spy as well as a surgeon and naturalist. “Now listen, Jack, will you?” he says to his closest friend in the second book, when Jack has just found him out. “I am somewhat given to lying: my occasions require it from time to time. But I do not choose to have any man alive tell me of it.”

In the book I have just finished, Clarissa Oakes (called The Truelove in America), Stephen Maturin is speaking to the young woman of the title, a runaway convict who has her own dark secrets.

From some context he could not recall Stephen had mentioned his dislike of being questioned: “Question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation.” “Oh how I agree,” she cried. “A convict is no doubt more sensitive on the point but quite apart from that I always used to find that perpetual inquisition quite odious: even casual acquaintances expect you to account for yourself.” “It is extremely ill-bred, extremely usual, and extremely difficult to turn aside gracefully or indeed without offence.” Stephen spoke with more than common feeling, for since he was an intelligence-agent even quite idle questions, either answered or evaded, might start a mortal train of suspicion.

N’est-ce pas?

Comments

[David V.]

I enjoyed this post, having discovered it by Googling “Patrick O’Brian fraud”. Have not read the books yet, but am strongly considering diving into them, and thought I’d try to learn a little about the author first. According to Wikipedia, it appears that his supposedly voluminous knowledge of ships and seamanship were either lacking (explaining why his prose was impenetrable in that respect, even to experienced modern sailors) or acquired purely by research, not experience.

As a former police detective myself, and no stranger to “questioning”, of convicts or otherwise, I suspect O’Brian/Russ was beginning to realize too late, at the close of his life, that elaborate fictions about oneself never survive the passage of time. They always unravel, particularly in the age of the internet, which he could not have foreseen, but which was beginning to dawn at his death.

In spite of all that, do you still recommend the books?

[Sedulia]

Yes, absolutely! Especially the earlier ones—they're excellent.