In the following month Patrick read the latest Hornblower novel, on which he commented in his diary:
Forester’s The Commodore is, I think, the first new novel I have ever bought. It seems much more extravagant than paying a guinea for, say, the learned job. It’s a good tale, but not as satisfying as the other Hornblower stories. Smacks a little of formula and wants design. Also, it has not a great deal of meat, or if it has, a greater length is required to give it body.
Patrick could not have dreamed that he would one day write his own novel The Commodore, which I imagine most readers would concur entirely avoids the faults he ascribes to Forester’s work.
Patrick’s criticism of Hornblower seems not unjust. However, as his comment on Stevenson’s Catriona indicates, he did not at the time feel sufficiently confident of his own abilities to attempt a ‘meatier’ historical novel. It was not until nearly a decade later that inspiration struck quite suddenly. On 4 July 1954 my mother wrote in her diary: ‘I typed fourth story,[fn5] & P. thought of Anson juvenile.’ It is intriguing to note that Patrick remained caught up by the notion that exciting adventure stories were exclusively appropriate to a youthful readership, despite his having appreciated Kidnapped and Catriona, which enthral readers of any age.
The remainder of the year was taken up with house-hunting, concluding with the disastrous visit to Cornwall in October and November recounted in the previous chapter. By the New Year of 1955, however, Patrick with a flash of clarity grasped the way forward. It was on the cold evening of 19 January that:
P. wrote boy & thermometer tale & I got so depressed. But today he showed me wonderful notes & pieces of Stag[7] & synopsis of Anson which are quite beautiful & very exciting … P. wrote to Phebe Snow who answered that yes, Hart-D. might advance on synopsis of Anson.
Rupert Hart-Davis had already proved happy enough with The Road to Samarcand to agree a contract for ‘the next Boy’s book to be written by the PROPRIETOR following “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’.
The ‘boy & thermometer tale’ to which my mother referred is the indignant autobiographical account of Patrick’s childhood terror of his generally grim, authoritarian father. ‘The Stag at Bay’ seems also likely to reflect some aspect of Patrick’s psychological breakthrough. The story concerns a self-righteous, priggish author unwittingly cuckolded by his young wife.
The protagonist Edwin is portrayed as suffering from an attack of writer’s block. He has been commissioned to write a piece on marriage for a women’s magazine:
The article was proving much more difficult than he had expected. It was not for lack of raw material … and it was not for lack of experience or thought. Marriage was a subject that he had thought about a great deal, deeply, and he had supposed that the profound part of the article would be the easiest: yet although he was in the right mood, costive and solemn, the words would not form themselves into an orderly and harmonious procession. They remained in his head, swirling in grand but indeterminate shapes; or if they had any concrete existence at all it was in the form of scrappy notes, odd words jotted down …
Meanwhile, as he struggles with an article intended to define the high ideals of marriage amid the squalid débris of a neglected flat, Edwin’s wife has engaged in an affair with an elderly playboy cousin – not from love or lust, but merely ‘to know, to really know, what adultery was like’: ‘She sloughed the anxiously contriving housewife, dropped ten years from her appearance, and responded to his cheerful obscenity with an assured impudence that no longer shocked her inner mind.’
The moral of the tale is clear. Life is overtaking the drudgery of the laborious author, who writes with ponderous difficulty about an institution which has in his case atrophied, while his amoral young wife instinctively grasps at fleeting pleasure before it becomes too late. The writer’s block is plainly Patrick’s own. The ‘pink, virginal and inviting’ young wife was doubtless suggested by the ever-present figure of my mother, while the customary pristine neatness of the flat in the rue Arago happened at the time of writing to be uncharacteristically chaotic, owing to the need to dry and iron quantities of dirty clothes brought back from their extended trip to Cornwall. As my mother acknowledged, ‘place looks like inferior old clothes shop’. The fictional wife’s flighty enjoyment of a sensual affair possibly suggests a metaphor for Patrick’s dawning realization that successful writing should be fun. Certainly nothing suggests that Patrick ever suspected – still less, had reason to suspect – infidelity on my mother’s part.
It is nevertheless a measure of Patrick’s commitment to the ideology of high-mindedness that he regarded rollicking adventure stories as essentially immature: ‘Anson juvenile’, as he termed it. This derogation may indeed have proved fortunate, enabling him to cast away inhibition, writing from the heart. His cheerful tentative opening passages have survived in a notebook:
At half-past eight on the drizzling morning of Tuesday May the 22nd, 1739, the uproar outside the rectory of Ballynasaggart reached its height; for at that moment Peter …
The Rev. Mr Septimus O’Toole behaved extremely well in the troubles of 1715; he was also a very considerable scholar – his commentary upon the Stoic philosophers of the Lower Empire had given him …
When the troubles of 1715 broke out upon the land, the Rev. Mr Octavius Murphy published a little small pamphlet entitled The Idea of an Expedient King in favour of the Hanoverian succession; and this did more for him, in the matter of worldly success, than the three octavo volumes of his Commentary upon the Stoic Philosophers or the square quarto of his Pelagius Refuted …
All three drafts were discarded, possibly because Patrick came to realize that in reality the Jacobite risings of 1715 exerted little impact on repressed Ireland. He further toyed with the idea of ‘Funny lower deck character who spells with a wee [substitution of w for v] and patronises Irish person on a/c of he don’t speak English proper or at least not wery.’ Eventually, he decided to open in medias res, with Peter Palafox riding away to Cork and high adventure across the glimmering billows of the western sea. Almost at once the writing began to flow with wonderful facility. As my mother happily observed, ‘P. wrote beautiful beginning for Golden Ocean after days of pain.’
On 22 January 1955 she posted a synopsis of the novel to Curtis Brown. A week later: ‘Things go well. Rupert will … give advance & contract for The Golden Ocean.’ So inviting was the encouragement from all sides, that progress continued unchecked. As my mother excitedly commented on 2 April, ‘P. is back at work since 31st: Golden Ocean is perfectly splendid.’ The book was completed in July, and posted to England with high hopes. On the 27th my mother returned from the doctor after tearing a muscle when working on the foundations of the new house. ‘P. met me, Oh Joy bringing kind letter about Golden Ocean from Ruth Simon (H[art-]D[avis]). She thinks too that it is quite lovely.’
Changes to chapter I were proposed by the publisher (did the original version begin with one of the trial opening paragraphs?). Patrick was happy with the suggestions: ‘P. & I worked on G. Ocean, P. cutting & substituting, I reading for a list of sea-terms. It is such a LOVELY book,’ enthused my mother. By the end of October, ‘P. finished beautiful diagram of Centurion for Ocean, I typed list [of sea-terms] he made.’ Both diagram and sea-terms drew extensively on Patrick’s copy of Dr Burney’s revised edition of Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine.[8] It was not until 1971 that he obtained a copy of the original (1769) edition, which was more apt for the chronological setting of his novels. Burney, however, served him well – so much so, that the spine came clean away from overuse, and as has been seen was eventually rebacked by Patrick in vellum in 1989.
The Golden Ocean is indeed a wonderfully happy book: lively, good-humoured, exciting, and convincing as a vision of a past era to an extent which only a tiny modicum of historical novels ever attains. At last Patrick had succeeded in weaning himself off gloomy and introspective