On the High Seas
LAMB, RICHARD
On the High Seas Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed By Dean King Holt. 398 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Richard Lamb Richard Patrick Russ, born in 1914, was a man with a strong desire to hide....
...Jack Aubrey is a bluff naval careerist...
...Enraptured reviewers were soon comparing ?'Brian to Jane Austen (whom he revered) and pointing out that War and Peace is similarly a sprawling historical novel of the Napoleonic Wars...
...He spent years ruinously seeking a means of curing syphilis with electricity, a process apparently neither less painful nor more efficacious than it sounds...
...None caught on, despite glowing reviews from the likes of Delmore Schwartz...
...O'Brian was an unobtrusive psychologist, awriter generously attuned to the physical world and man's labors in it...
...Even Sherlock Holmes fades under the twin assaults of adulthood and rereading...
...O'Brian is, moreover, a master at pacing a scene so that the reader's sense of the passage of time is richly actual, a talent that Nabokov argued accounts for Tolstoy's eminence among novelists (he also called War and Peace a mere boys' adventure story...
...But more to the point is his achieving the practically impossible: enabling an adult to recover the hypnotic pleasure of childhood reading...
...In 1967, Lippincott asked O'Brian to write a swashbuckling naval tale of the Napoleonic Wars along the lines of CS...
...Most thrillers are rather threadbare...
...It would be more accurate to say that O'Brian is a curious amalgam of Tolstoy and Tom Clancy...
...It is improbable enough that this sublimely archaic figure existed in the 20th century...
...Forester's Horatio Hornblower books...
...Her divorce was not facilitated by the fact that her husband, Count Tolstoy, was England's most prominent divorce lawyer...
...He was the first living author to have the British Library publish a critical bibliography of his works...
...The newly minted Celt was in fact the grandson of a venturesome German who had made good as both immigrant and tradesman, ending up furrier to Queen Victoria...
...There followed the most spontaneous and exuberant standing ovation I have ever witnessed...
...What King principally lacks are his subject's subtlety and historical sensitivity...
...At a recent appearance in New York, the author informed several hundred fans packed in to hear him that he was on chapter three of the latest installment in the series...
...Norton in 1991...
...At the same time, there is the invisible: Plenty of blood flows during his battle scenes, but it is the wind that captivates as his ungainly ships are slowly blown— one desperate to escape, the other to engage—into proximity...
...Over the next 30 years, as Russ and then as O'Brian, he published nine more books of fiction, increasingly aimed at adult audiences...
...by W.W...
...Twenty volumes later, with sales in the millions, it has become relatively wellknown that the series follows a friendship of opposites during the decades of hostility between Britain and Napoleon's France...
...He repeatedly hit the bestseller lists and was feted by powerful fans...
...There are numerous cliffhanging sea chases, and two Burgess and Mcleanstyle antagonists meet one of the most gruesome fates ever concocted...
...Narrative addicts, particularly those seeking something slightly more interior than an evening in the Hollywood crackhouse, owe O'Brian much...
...But the series is rife as well with brilliant flourishes of melodrama...
...But fame revealed certain facts O'Brian would rather have kept secret: that he was not Irish...
...Although he had eight siblings, his was a lonely, sickly childhood...
...His last two chapters are a litany of successes...
...Togetherthey engage the enemy, seek far climes, marry and have (vividly evoked but somewhat neglected) families, gain a great deal of prize money, fight disgrace, achieve political success, and witness the battle of Trafalgar—among other escapades...
...that he was estranged from his son and had never met his grandchildren...
...His books' verisimilitude and emotional power are extraordinary...
...Dean King's biography is workmanlike...
...Patrick left his spouse, too, walking out on a young son and a daughter who would shortly die of spina bifida...
...He was, however, on good terms with his stepson (whom he did not raise) and his family, the decidedly more glamorous Tolstoys, and even contributed to his stepgrandson's education at Eton...
...After World War II and the spell in rural Wales, the still unknown O'Brian moved to the village of Collioure on the Mediterranean coast of France with his second wife, Mary...
...O'Brian was made a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II (an honor just short of being knighted...
...He did not inhabit them as Russ...
...His pages are filled with the forgotten rituals of shipboard life: the holystoning of decks, dog watches, meals of lobscouse and spotted dick...
...For in 1945, having already earned something of a reputation as the author of boys' adventure tales, he adopted the name Patrick O'Brian...
...It was translated into five languages...
...His son Charles Russ, Patrick's father, became a doctor...
...Patrick's mother died when he was three...
...Yes, O'Brian was snobbish, exasperating, perfectionistic, easily enraged, and as reptilian as Maturin in his emotions...
...They met when both were ambulance drivers in wartime London...
...Sadly, O'Brian died a few weeks later...
...But Charles' great talent was for impracticality...
...He spent his adult life living first in writerly poverty amid the folds of the Welsh hills, then in the sort of tiny French coastal village Britons of a certain generation disappeared to...
...Stephen Maturin is a saturnine Irish-Catalan doctor and spy for the British...
...At 17, as Patrick Russ, he published a children's book featuring a bloodthirsty cross between a Leopard and a Panda...
...The series remained a cult favorite (Iris Murdoch and John Bayley were fans) until released in the U.S...
...He has very valuably unearthed Patrick Russ' early works, which show that he started out as a writer of imaginative yet violent boys' stories akin to those of Kipling...
...Never have adventure stories fallen into the hands of someone so erudite, so capable of painting in scenery and gesture, so deft at setting up conflict...
...He survived only two days into the 21st...
Vol. 83 • March 2000 • No. 1
