PATRICK O’BRIAN
A Very Private Life
Nikolai Tolstoy
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Nikolai Tolstoy 2019
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cover photograph © Steve Pyke / Getty Images
Nikolai Tolstoy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All photographs courtesy of the author
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008350581
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008350604
Version: 2019-09-30
I dedicate this book to my late cousin Adrian Slack and his sister Julia, the dearest of friends as well as closest of relatives since those distant days of childhood at Appledore beside the Severn Sea.
At home in the cloister of Correch d’en Baus
Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life.
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1793), i, p. 6
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
I Collioure and Three Bear Witness
II The Catalans
III New Home and New Family
IV Voyages of Adventure
V In the Doldrums
VI A Family Man
VII Master and Commander
VIII The Green Isle Calls
IX Pablo Ruiz Picasso
X Shifting Currents
XI Muddied Waters
XII Travails of Existence
XIII Family Travails
XIV The Sunlit Uplands
XV Epinician Acclaims
XVI Triumph and Tragedy
XVII Melmoth the Wanderer
Envoi
Appendix A: Collioure: History and Landscape
Appendix B: Patrick and His First Wife Elizabeth
Appendix C: Patrick’s Sailing
Footnotes
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Nikolai Tolstoy
About the Publisher
A fortnight after Patrick O’Brian’s death, the playwright David Mamet wrote of his literary achievement:
Recently I put down O’Brian’s sea novel ‘The Ionian Mission’ and said to my wife, ‘This fellow has created characters and stories that are part of my life.’
She said: ‘Write him a letter. He’s in his 80s. Write him and thank him. And when you are in England, look him up, go tell him.
‘How wonderful,’ she said, ‘to be alive, when he is still alive. Imagine living in the 1890s and being able to converse with Conan Doyle.’
Mamet promptly rehearsed the eulogium with which he would address his literary hero, and began preparing a letter of introduction at his breakfast table. Then, glancing at the newspaper beside him, he saw to his dismay an announcement of the melancholy news of Patrick’s death.[1]
I have no doubt that Patrick would have been delighted by such praise from his acclaimed fellow writer, and that had my mother still been alive she would have inserted the letter in her box-file ‘Valuable Fans and very good reviews’. My hope is that, while nothing can quite replace a face-to-face conversation, this book may compensate by enabling Mamet and others of Patrick’s worldwide legion of admirers to learn much more of his life and personality than might have been obtained from any interview with the famously reclusive writer.
This book covers the latter part of Patrick O’Brian’s life, from the moment of his and my mother’s arrival at Collioure in the south of France in the autumn of 1949. It is the period during which he wrote all his major works. Since my mother’s death twenty years ago, I remain the sole intimate observer of Patrick’s astonishing career from impoverished and little-known writer in 1955, when I first met him, until his death at the height of his international fame at the turn of the millennium forty-five years later. Nevertheless, it never occurred to me at any point during his lifetime to compile his biography – not least because I was well aware of his detestation of inquisitive enquiries into his private life.
My unanticipated decision to undertake the task began in the aftermath of Patrick’s death at the beginning of the year 2000. I was witness