Patrick O'Brian

A Life Revealed

Dean King

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781453238332
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

A revealing and insightful look at one of the modern world's most acclaimed historical novelists
Patrick O'Brian was well into his seventies when the world fell in love with his greatest creation: the maritime adventures of Royal Navy Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. But despite his fame, little detail was available about the life of the reclusive author, whose mysterious past King uncovers in this groundbreaking biography. King traces O'Brian's personal history, beginning as a London-born Protestant named Richard Patrick Russ, to his tortured relationship with his first wife and child, to his emergence from World War II with the entirely new identity under which he would publish twenty volumes in the Aubrey–Maturin series. What King unearths is a life no less thrilling than the seafaring world of O'Brian's imagination.

Part I GREEN

4^th NOVEMBER 1893

CHRISTIAN CHARLES GOTTFRIED RUSS, my dear Husband and our good Father, died at 27 Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood, N.W. on Saturday Nov. 4th at 4:35 p.m.

He was born at Brandis, near Leipzig—on the 10th of February 1842. The fourth child and the second son of Christian Karl Gottfried Russ, citizen, houseowner, furrier and cap manufacturer at Brandis and of his wife Fredericka Wilhelmina geb. Rüdiger; baptized on the 13th of the same month and the following were his godfathers and godmothers:—

Gustav Arudt, tanner in Brandis.

Eleanor Rost, wife of Karl Rost shoemaker in Brandis.

Friedrich Hansmann junr., ropemaker in Brandis. The above details have been taken from the register of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brandis, 16 vol. 1842 according to birth and baptismal certificate[s] sent by M.A. Müller, Pastor, and countersigned and certified by Mr. Döbler, Mayor of Brandis with the official stamp of the Council attached.

He was married January 25th 1872 to Emily Callaway at Albany Street, Regent’s Park by Rev. Burrows. She was born in London December 29th 1849. There was issue of this marriage 13 children, four daughters and nine sons; of whom twelve were alive at the day of his death.

—from the ledger of Emily Callaway Russ, grandmother of Patrick O’Brian

I

A Top Hat, a Clean Collar, and Clean Boots

1850–1900

THY WIFE SHALL BE as the fruitful vine: upon the walls of thine house. Thy children like the olive-branches; round about thy table.

—Psalm 128

It was once the custom in Germany that a young craftsman who had apprenticed for four years, usually with his father, took to the road to work for and learn from other masters at his craft. He was then a journeyman, and he carried a “wandering book,” which the masters inscribed with testimonials and the dates of his service. Before moving on to a new master to serve and learn in another town, the journeyman also acquired the signatures of the burgomaster and police chief and recorded the travel time to his next destination to prove his diligence. After several years on the road, the successful craftsman returned home or to another town where his services were needed and became a master in his own right.

Carl Russ’s good friend Carl Müller, a ropemaker seven years his senior, did just that, wandering from the town of Taucha, six miles northeast of Leipzig, in Saxony, all the way down to Bavaria and back. In 1858, at the age of sixteen, Carl, Patrick O’Brian’s future grandfather and the second son of a furrier in Taucha, a town of two thousand people, set his sights a bit higher. He had already worked in Leipzig, one of the fur centers of Europe. He now traveled to Paris, and after honing his skills there, he and an older cousin caught a ship bound for Edinburgh in 1862. Carl’s father had perhaps urged his son to go abroad, for he had fallen deeply in debt and would soon have to auction off his property.

As family lore has it, after the two cousins disembarked, they were walking along and saw a sixpence lying on the ground. They picked it up. A little farther along, they found a half crown, which they also collected. “There’s money in this city,” the cousin said to Carl. “I’m staying. You go down to London.” Russ dutifully headed south.

In London, the fur capital of the world, he found a burgeoning industry ripe for an ambitious young man. Pelts of every imaginable sort arrived there from around the globe: those of fur seals encrusted in salt, wrote an industry observer, were “moist, dirty, brown and most repulsive objects”; of beaver, “flat and hard as a board”; and of mink and ermine, “frequently inside out; exhibiting a singularly unpleasing appearance.” Sold at auctions in Mincing Lane, they were then transformed by the furrier.

By 1869, Russ had settled in Clerkenwell, a workingman’s district just northwest of the City, where he Anglicized his given name to Charles (although, for the purposes of this story, I will continue to call him Carl to differentiate him from his oldest son). Once a breezy hillside known for its spas, Clerkenwell had absorbed wave after wave of immigrants after the Napoleonic wars, creating a quagmire of sweatshops and noisome alleys.

The process of converting a “skin” into a “fur” took hours of tedious, often noxious, labor: blubbering, washing, unhairing, leathering, dying, fluffing, and combing, among other things. Only then was the skin called a fur, ready to be matched, styled, and assembled as a garment. A creative and enterprising sort, Russ fared well at his trade, which he knew thoroughly, from the dullest tasks of transforming the foul hide to the most artful: designing a voluptuous garment to sit on the shoulders of a rich woman. At twenty-six, he established his own business, leasing a residence and shop on Northampton Square for ten years at £50 per year.

Russ would do well both in business and family-making. After pledging his loyalty and fidelity to Queen Victoria and to the United Kingdom, he married Emily Callaway, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a manager of one of London’s old-line furriers. By 1876, Emily, a raven-haired beauty with sparkling black eyes, a deep voice, and a curvaceous figure, had given birth to four of the couple’s thirteen children: three daughters and a son, Charles, Patrick O’Brian’s future father.

Russ set up a shop on New Bond Street, in London’s fashionable shopping district, and he quickly made a name for himself as one of the most innovative furriers of his day. By improving dressing and dying techniques, he popularized alternatives to expensive Russian sable. His work won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition in 1878, and his furs caught the eye of Queen Victoria. But, as his advertisement indicates, he was not too proud to appeal to all women:

[Carl] Russ, court furrier, invites inspection of his Large Assortment of all articles of Fashion in Furs, Embracing all the newest designs in Jackets and Paletots, lined and trimmed fur. Sortie de ball, etc, etc. Specialties. Genuineness of quality and excellence of workmanship at manufacturer’s prices. 70 New Bond Street.

“Never have sealskin jackets been so well and so elegantly shaped, and for the first time they fit the figure accurately,” the Queen, a women’s newspaper, wrote about his furs in 1888. And if sealskin was too expensive, one could try his musquash (muskrat), which resembled seal quite nicely.

Russ was not just good at his trade; unlike his father, he was a shrewd businessman as well. He owned several London properties and shares in four merchant ships: John Redhead, Carl Rahtkens, Fernbrook, and Baron Clyde. He grew rich and moved the family to St. John’s Wood, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where nurses watched children playing in gardens and men in bowler hats commuted into the City on horse-drawn omnibuses. Russ’s grand home, Clifton Villa, filled with mahogany and walnut furniture and brass beds, was a monument to success. Thirty-one gilt-framed oil paintings and four watercolors decorated the dining room, which was furnished with a table for twelve, a couch and chairs, a massive mahogany sideboard, and both a Story and Clark organ from the United States and a pianoforte. After dinner, Russ and his male guests retired to the garden and smoked pipes or Egyptian cigarettes of the finest tobacco.

Clifton Villa teemed with children. Nonetheless, Emily, with her piercing eyes and lively manner, always looked the part of an elegant woman from a fine family. She wore gold spectacles, a sable cape, and diamond jewelry. She was unflappable, with a firm but pleasant manner that made the servants prompt and demure.

Carl was a stout, taciturn man, commanding, sometimes stern, but not unkind. His broad face was defined by an imposing beard, close-cropped on his square chin but hanging Poseidonlike from his cheeks. A dense mustache bridged his sidebeards. Naturally, to a man in his field, dress was important. At age sixteen, Fritz Müller, the third son of Russ’s boyhood friend Carl Müller, came to stay with the Russes in London, and Carl often admonished the boy, “Never forget, a top hat, a clean collar and clean boots make a gentleman.” But Russ had few words for his children, though he was good at providing for them. With Teutonic precision, he saw to it that they were all baptized at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square and given accounts at Westminster Bank. The family went to church twice on Sundays, and grace was said before each meal.

This industrious and happy life was tragically interrupted shortly after Emily delivered Walter, her twelfth and next-to-last child, on July 13, 1886. Five months later—on the evening of December 13—a cinder sparked from the fireplace and caught fire to the linen in his crib. Walter burned to death.

Soon thereafter the eight surviving boys were dispatched to Shebbear College, a long-established boarding school in North Devon. Charles, at age eleven, and his younger brothers Emil, Percy, and Sidney (who was just eight years old) left home in 1888. Ernest, Albert, Frederick, and William soon completed the Russ contingent at Shebbear, a school founded by a Low Church group and later affiliated with the Methodist Church. The brothers often remained at school even during holidays.

Boarding school was primarily a privilege of the rich, but conditions at Shebbear did not betray that fact. The boys took to eating their peach pits to stave off hunger, a habit that little Sidney would maintain the rest of his life. When at home, the brothers proved that they had absorbed their Latin lessons, calling their mother “Mater.” But they were not coddled at home either. “Pater” would not tolerate idleness or airs in his boys, who were put to work during holidays learning the furrier trade.

In 1891, the Russes’ oldest daughter, Emily, married Otto Müller, Carl Müller’s second but more enterprising son. Russ, perhaps feeling the stress of his intense career, retired the following year, and it was soon thereafter, during a trip to the Continent with Emily and Charles, that the first signs of his ill health appeared. On November 2, 1893, while Emily was in Germany helping with the birth of her second grandchild, Carl suffered a stroke. He had just finished celebrating his son Emil’s sixteenth birthday. Two days later, at the age of fifty-one, Carl died with his son Charles and Fritz Müller by his side.

Emily received a telegram informing her of her husband’s death. Charles, who at seventeen became the male head of the family, met her at Victoria station. “What terrible news,” she said, with remarkable composure. They took a cab home and ate supper. Then Emily went to the mortuary to see her husband’s body, remained there for an hour grieving, and returned to her home as unruffled as when she had arrived from Germany.

Despite Emily’s apparent stoicism, the loss of the almighty Russ patriarch shook the family profoundly. Patrick O’Brian’s grandfather was said to have been a spiky, brilliant, driven man, intensely private. He had been proud and showy in his newfound wealth but had never forgotten where he came from. These traits would travel farther in his descendants than the small fortune he had amassed. Russ’s children inherited a fair amount of money, and his sons were gratefully freed of the expectation of becoming furriers. But they also found themselves without their father’s discipline and practical guidance, which would prove financially disastrous for Charles, whom Mater particularly indulged. At one point, for example, Charles was enthralled with photography and owned twenty-three cameras. Charles’s extravagant ways and poor business sense would eventually color the lives of his children, particularly the younger ones, like Patrick.

One last sad event needs to be recounted before moving on to the next century and the next generation. Mater had already suffered the strange death of her youngest son. In June 1898, she lost her second daughter, Paulina, under distressing circumstances that would become a haunting fixture in the family lore.

At twenty-four, Lena, as she was called, was purportedly suffering from long-standing acute indigestion, which had led to low spirits. Her doctor recommended sea air, so she and Mater went to a boardinghouse in Cliftonville, on the coast of Kent. Soon Lena seemed to perk up, and Mater relaxed her vigilant watch over her daughter. One rainy, blustery morning, Lena slipped out of the boardinghouse to mail a letter, or so Mater later rationalized when she discovered the girl was gone. In fact, Lena had wandered out to the edge of the forty-foot cliff at Foreness Point, where she sat wild-eyed in the pouring rain.

Upon seeing Lena, a startled walker cautioned her: “It is a silly thing to sit so near the edge of the cliff, especially on such a day as this is; the cliff has been falling away lately and the cliff might go down and you might go with it.” Lena made a show of moving back. The man continued on the path down and around the cliff. But when he was below, Lena called out to him, “Please pick up my umbrella!”

The man found the umbrella lying on the rocky beach beneath the bluff and began to climb back up the path with it. But, at a bend, he looked up and saw a ghastly sight: Lena was teetering on the brink of the cliff, her arms raised in front of her, as if she were being beckoned into the precipice. As he raced up the path, he heard a dreadful scream. At another bend, he caught a glimpse of the girl. She was lying on the ground and slowly pushing herself over the ledge.

The man, Mr. Stephen Brown Balcome, a vacationing stockbroker from West Kensington, continued his frustratingly slow ascent. Jogging around a corner, he lost sight of Lena. When he finally arrived at the top, only the wind and rain greeted him. Lena had fallen to the beach below. Panicked, Balcome ran to a nearby restaurant for help. But when they reached Lena, she was barely alive. She died on the way to the hospital.

Charles, then a medical student, rushed to Cliftonville. At the inquest, Mater testified that Lena was happily engaged and that there had been nothing wrong other than the misery of her physical ailment. “The day prior … [Lena] had been for a long walk by herself and brought home a lot of wild flowers,” she recounted. “I think she was getting wild flowers and it being such a wet morning she must have slipped over the cliff.” But Balcome told the jury he thought the fall was intentional. Charles countered with pointed questions for Balcome: “To what incident in particular do you attribute your belief that she voluntarily went over the cliff? You did not exactly witness the fall of the body to the sands? Do you think it possible she might have become giddy?”

According to the newspaper, the jury ruled that Lena had “committed suicide whilst temporarily insane.” Over the years, family lore would go one better. The story passed down that Lena had been madly in love with a Catholic priest, but she could not persuade him to renounce his priesthood for her.

No matter the reason, Mater was devastated to lose “such a dear girl.” Once again, Charles escorted his mother home after a family tragedy.

2

Walden

1914–1922

I AM STRUCK BY THE fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.

—Henry David Thoreau, journal, November 5, 1860

That the strength of his understanding, the accuracy of his discernment, and ardour of his curiosity, might have been remarked from his infancy, by a diligent observer, there is no reason to doubt. For, there is no instance of any man, whose history has been minutely related, that did not in every part of life discover the same proportion of intellectual vigour.

—Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Sydenham,” 1742

When Britain entered the Great War in August 1914, Emily Russ’s two youngest sons, Frederick and William, both decided to serve their country. Frederick, who was still living at home, volunteered for the army. He would fight in the trenches in Belgium. After his second bout of pneumonia, however, the army refused to send him back to the front, so he became a balloonist in the Royal Flying Corps. William, the baby of the family, joined an artillery unit and was stationed outside London, not far from the home of his brother Charles, a medical doctor who commuted into London, and Charles’s wife, Jessie, and their seven children. Whenever Willy rode over for a visit, his nephews, eleven-year-old Godfrey, Victor, nine, and Michael, five, raced out to greet him and to lead his horse to the backyard, where it grazed on the Russes’ ample lawn.

The house the Russes called Walden lay in a wooded area in rural Buckinghamshire County, halfway between the towns of Chalfont St. Peter and Gerrards Cross. As the house’s name would indicate, it was an idyllic place to raise a family. Charles’s brother Sidney, also a London medical doctor and scientist, and two servants lived in the big house as well.

Though a quiet man, Uncle Sidney, whom the children called “Beany,” was much loved, especially when he arrived home in the evening with pockets full of candy. He usually placed the candy on a tray and held it over the children’s heads so that they had to jump up and knock it off, resulting in a mad scramble to see who could retrieve the most. Any sweet the youngest obtained in the melee was a gift from a protector or held in reserve by Beany, who, being a seventh child, understood the plight of the underdog.

By no means did the tranquillity of Thoreau’s Walden apply. In the long, bellicose winter of 1914, the house was close with children, and Jessie was again about to give birth. On December 12, in the big bedroom at the back of the house, she clutched her youngest’s hand as a roaring bird flew overhead. Through the window, the boy, Bernard, or “Bun,” as everyone called him, gawked with fascination. It was the first time he had seen an airplane. Shortly thereafter, Bun was tugged away from his mother and ushered from the room. Though not yet three years old, he sensed a momentous change.

Later that day, Jessie gave birth to a boy, her fifth. At last, Bun was allowed back into the room. He was shown his mother’s mysterious new parcel. The miracle being not nearly so wondrous as an airplane, he soon lost interest and was relegated to the floor. Deposed as the baby of the family, he crawled about forlornly on the large sheets of brown paper spread there, perplexed at just why such a small thing had required so much wrapping.

At least that’s how Bernard Russ recounted the story of Patrick’s birth some three-quarters of a century later in Lady Day Prodigal, his autobiography privately published for the family. Whether he could have experienced such consciousness at the age of two is debatable, as are a number of his other colorful recollections. What is certain is that Bun, later known as Barney, could spin a good yarn. Perhaps it was in his blood.

Actually, Patrick was not yet named, and the Russes were in no hurry to do so. In February 1915, when his birth was registered, he remained nameless. Finally, in a special certificate of naming, he was dubbed Richard Patrick. “Pat,” as they would call him, was not a healthy youth. He suffered from what was sometimes identified as bronchitis and sometimes as asthma or, as his brother Barney put it, “a weak chest.” According to a letter written much later by his brother, Pat would at some point in his younger years, like his mother, suffer from tuberculosis. But Pat proved to be a remarkably resilient ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Green
• Part II: Red
• Part III: Slate
• Part IV: Azure
• Part V: Deep Blue
• Part VI: Gold
• Copyright