Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O'Brian, CBE (12 December 1914 – 2 January 2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is ''Master and Commander'', is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished 21st novel in the series was published posthumously containing facing pages of handwriting and typescript.

O'Brian wrote a number of other novels and short stories, most of which were published before he achieved success with the Aubrey–Maturin series. He also translated works from French to English, and wrote biographies of Joseph Banks and Picasso.

His major success as a writer came late in life, when the Aubrey-Maturin series caught the eye of an American publisher. The series drew more readers and favourable reviews when the author was in his seventies. Near the end of his life, and in the same year that he lost his wife, British media revealed details of O'Brian's early life, first marriage, and post-war change of name, causing distress to the very private author and to many of his readers at that time.

Personal life and privacy

Childhood, early career and marriages

O'Brian was christened as Richard Patrick Russ, in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire, a son of Charles Russ, an English physician of German descent, and Jessie Russ (née Goddard), an English woman of Irish descent. The eighth of nine children, O'Brian lost his mother at the age of four, and his biographers describe a fairly isolated childhood, limited by poverty, with sporadic schooling, at St Marylebone Grammar School from 1924 to 1926, while living in Putney, and then at Lewes Grammar School, from September 1926 to July 1929, after the family moved to Lewes, East Sussex, but with intervals at home with his father and stepmother Zoe Center.

His literary career began in his childhood, with the publication of his earliest works, including several short stories. The book ''Hussein, An Entertainment'' published by Oxford University Press in 1938, and the short-story collection ''Beasts Royal'' brought considerable critical praise, especially considering his youth. He published his first novel at age 15, ''Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard'', with help from his father.

In 1927 he applied unsuccessfully to enter the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. In 1934, he underwent a brief period of pilot training with the Royal Air Force, but that was not successful and he left the RAF. Prior to that, his application to join the Royal Navy had been rejected on health grounds. In 1935, he was living in London, where he married his first wife, Elizabeth Jones, in 1936. They had two children. The second was a daughter who suffered from spina bifida, and died in 1942, aged three, in a country village in Sussex. When the child died, O'Brian had already returned to London, where he worked throughout the war.

The details of his employment during the Second World War are murky. He worked as an ambulance driver, and he stated that he worked in intelligence in the Political Intelligence Department (PID). Dean King has said O'Brian was actively involved in intelligence work and perhaps special operations overseas during the war. Indeed, despite his usual extreme reticence about his past, O'Brian wrote in an essay, "Black, Choleric and Married?", included in the book ''Patrick O'Brian: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography'' (1994) that: "Some time after the blitz had died away I joined one of those intelligence organisations that flourished during the War, perpetually changing their initials and competing with one another. Our work had to do with France, and more than that I shall not say, since disclosing methods and stratagems that have deceived the enemy once and that may deceive him again seems to me foolish. After the war we retired to Wales (I say we because my wife and I had driven ambulances and served in intelligence together) where we lived for a while in a high Welsh-speaking valley..." which confirms in first person the intelligence connection, as well as introducing his wife Mary Tolstoy, née Wicksteed, as a co-worker and fellow intelligence operative.

Nikolai Tolstoy, stepson through O'Brian's marriage to Mary, disputes that account, confirming only that O'Brian worked as a volunteer ambulance driver during the Blitz when he met Mary, the separated wife of Russian-born nobleman and lawyer Count Dimitri Tolstoy. They lived together through the latter part of the war and, after both were divorced from their previous spouses, they married in July 1945. The following month he changed his name by deed poll to Patrick O'Brian.

Sailing experience

As background to his later sea-going novels, O'Brian did claim to have had limited experience on a square-rigged sailing vessel, as described within his previously-quoted 1994 essay:

However, in 1995, venture capitalist Thomas Perkins offered O'Brian a two-week cruise aboard his then sailing yacht, a ketch. In an article about the experience written after O'Brian's death, Perkins commented that "... his knowledge of the practical aspects of sailing seemed, amazingly, almost nil" and "... he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course, and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe. I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful."

Life after the Second World War

Between 1946 and 1949 the O'Brians lived in Cwm Croesor, a remote valley in north Wales, where they initially rented a cottage from Clough Williams-Ellis. O'Brian pursued his interest in natural history; he fished, went birdwatching, and followed the local hunt. During this time they lived on Mary O'Brian's small income and the limited earnings from O'Brian's writings.

In 1949 O'Brian and Mary moved to Collioure, a Catalan town in southern France. He and Mary remained together in Collioure until her death in 1998. Mary's love and support were critical to O'Brian throughout his career. She worked with him in the British Library in the 1940s as he collected source material for his anthology ''A Book of Voyages'', which became the first book to bear his new name – the book was among his favourites, because of this close collaboration. The death of his wife in March 1998 was a tremendous blow to O'Brian. In the last two years of his life, particularly once the details of his early life were revealed to the world, he was a "lonely, tortured, and at the last possibly paranoid figure."

Media exposure and controversy in his final years

O'Brian protected his privacy fiercely and was usually reluctant to reveal any details about his private life or past, preferring to include no biographical details on his book jackets and supplying only a minimum of personal information when pressed to do so. For many years reviewers and journalists presumed he was Irish, and he took no steps to correct the impression. One interviewer, Mark Horowitz, described the man in his late seventies as "a compact, austere gentleman. ... his pale, watchful eyes are clear and alert." He is polite, formal, and erudite in conversation, an erudition that Horowitz said could be intimidating. He learned from those who worked with O'Brian that the erudition did not go unnoticed, while they remained friends.

Richard Ollard, a naval historian, calls this particular habit "blowing people out of the game." Ollard, who edited the early Aubrey–Maturin novels, urged O'Brian to tone down the most obscure allusions, though the books remain crammed with Latin tags, antiquated medical terminology and an endless stream of marvellous sounding but impenetrable naval jargon. "Like many who have struggled themselves", Ollard said of his friend, "he thought others should struggle, too." One longtime acquaintance put it more bluntly: "Patrick can be a bit of a snob, socially and intellectually."

In 1998, a BBC
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