My late friend Patrick O'Brian was at his happiest, with his wife Mary, before fame and fortune came his way; but unaided he did not truly know it. What writer does not yearn for celebrity and critical acclaim? What person but a fool ever put pen to paper in order to be ignored? Yet, as is so often the case, in neglect Patrick did not know when he was well off; but he was, as the years ahead were to show.
Patrick was a wonderful story-teller: yet it is hard to say how much of his output was due to the steadying influence and guidance of his second wife Mary, whom he met on night-time air-raid duty in London during the blitz. He was then Richard Patrick Russ, she was Mary Tolstoy, both of them married to other people, both of them working for British intelligence. What he actually did for British intelligence matters less than his subsequent and highly successful creation of an aura that he was an agent in the field. He was an inventor of fables, and the greatest of all the fables he created was himself when, at war's end, he changed his name by deed poll to Patrick O'Brian.
Guarded privacy
In this creation, Mary was his wife and his fellow artist: and it was her iron will down the coming decades which guarded their privacy and their history - though admittedly, in those early days there were few enough people who wished to intrude upon their idyll in Collioure, that artists' colony where the Mediterranean meets the Pyrenees. He wrote works which were applauded well and sold little, and he ate by translating French authors into English - the most spectacular example being Henri Barbusse's best-selling farrago of fiction masquerading as fact, Papillon.
The relatively large amount of money Patrick earned from that gave him - for the first time - a sense of financial security. Shortly afterwards, he began the first of the now legendary - but then largely ignored - series of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. His work with Mary was collaborative; though the writing inspiration came from him, she supplied much of the critical rigour.
In retrospect, it is clear that this was probably the best time of his life. He was revered by his publishers and adored by his admirers; and though the money he was earning was modest, so too were his and Mary's requirements.
They had a marvellous life. They made their own wine, they mixed with the artistic community of Collioure, they had their music; and he produced these astonishing novels, unwavering in their quality, undiminishing in their vigour, unfailing in their integrity, for year after year. Perhaps to conceal his non-Irishness, he shunned publicity: when I first wrote to him in 1978, asking for an interview, he replied by declaring courteously that he had often wondered what he should do if ever he were approached for a press interview to discuss his works. He had decided, he said, that he would let the works speak for themselves. The request for the interview was thus rejected.
Media curiosity
Nonetheless, many years later, he and his wife and I became friends.
The greatest mistake of his life was to waver from his resolve against publicity; and perhaps he wouldn't have done, had Mary remained in good health. As she grew unwell, by chance, the growing critical acclaim for his works began to translate into sales, and with popularity came media curiosity. We all of us are vain; but perhaps there is no vanity so vulnerable to seduction as that of the great writer whose undiscovered greatness suddenly becomes apparent both to a vast audience and to the great and good.
And Mary died. His great authority and guide now gone, he started giving press interviews; and enquiring minds began to ask, "Who is this fellow Patrick O'Brian?" Had Mary been alive to guide him, she would never have consented to his appearing on a 1998 BBC documentary about him, which left a trail of clues for the curious to follow; but she, alas, was dead. Those clues revealed the great falsehood of Patrick O'Brian's life: it was not Patrick O'Brian's life at all.
Honorary doctorate
He was desolate at the disclosure, especially since it came at a time when he had rooms at Trinity, which had just honoured him as a genuine Irishman - to his very great joy as an undiscovered, self-invented Irishman - with an honorary doctorate. His mortification caused him much paranoia, though he need not have worried. No more steadfast friends existed than those who minded him in Trinity, respecting his imperturbable courtesy, his gentle humour, his ceaseless deference to ladies.
Money and fame were now his, in his eighties: were either ever more worthless? To be sure, aided then by his residence at Trinity, and by the sedulous assistance of a close friend, he was able to finish his last novel, Blue at the Mizzen. But asthmatic, tired, worn by the recent cold, his time was surely soon to come; and last Sunday it did. His greatness will illuminate the literature of the English language through the coming decades of a century from which he departed after experiencing just two days of it. I suspect he didn't like what he found, and finally went where he truly belonged: to Mary.