Last Sunday evening the author Patrick O'Brian died suddenly at the age of 85 after recently publishing his 20th novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series.
He died rich, famous, successful, very happy to be in Dublin and to have access to the facilities of Trinity College which had given him a much appreciated honorary degree and fellowship of the college.
Until about 12 years ago he was virtually unknown, though his life had been devoted to writing. He wrote his first novel at the age of 12 and his father had it published a couple of years later. He had endured poverty, indeed great poverty.
His style of life in the French village where he lived had been meagre. He and his wife first lived in a house whose previous inhabitants had been an old woman and her donkey: each evening the donkey had been brought up the rickety stairs to the room which became their bedroom.
His great historical saga of life at sea in the English navy during the Napoleonic wars had been consigned by editors to the section occupied by reviews of bodice-rippers. As he said himself, "What I had not understood when I began these things was what a depraved genre it is in the general mind. I met some very astonishing statements, such as that I was a writer of adventure stories."
The focus for his success was the US in the late 1980s; in these islands only a small but fanatical band of fans esteemed him at his just worth. In England these included William Waldegrave, Iris Murdoch and her husband, in the US Charlton Heston, and in Ireland a few such as David Rose, Kevin Myers and myself.
His small, dedicated coterie of admirers feverishly argued his merits with the various interests to no avail. Only in the 1980s was he so to speak discovered, though still on a fairly low level. Now there are many more than us who consider that he has a valid claim to be the greatest stylist in the English language of the 20th century.
(When I told him this he frowned lightly and asked: "Why only the 20th century, my dear?" He was an extraordinarily good companion: witty, charming and relishing jokes.
It was in the US that his career really took off. Fever for him became intense and obsessional and now whirls forward into astonishing excesses which amused him greatly.
There is an O'Brian Centre of Studies in a university, an O'Brian Music Group which meets to play the music enjoyed by his two main characters, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and even (God help us!) an O'Brian Eating Club which re-creates and eats the seaboard dishes.
Spotted Dick, Drowned Baby and lobscouse are firm favourites, but after consideration the ladies in charge of the meals drew the line at cooked rat. They figure with disturbing frequency in O'Brian's saga, being a recognised source of protein aboard ship in times of hardship, particularly among the midshipmen who called them millers "to make 'em eat better".
O'Brian had a pleasant account of them in one novel, "skinned, drawn, and laid out in lines ready for cooking like tiny sheep". I believe the ladies substituted rabbit.
Last year O'Brian accompanied a group of American fans on the Sea Cloud, a three-master yacht which belonged once to Mrs Merriweather Post, of breakfast food fame. They cruise the Mediterranean each year visiting ports mentioned by The Master. A trip to the Levant is due this year.
O'Brian's research was rigorous. The Naval Museum at Greenwich was a fertile source: he had daily recourse to the Naval History of Great Britain, from the declaration of war by France in 1793 to the accession of George IV, William James's extraordinary work. English friends gave him journals of their midshipmen ancestors.
As a noted ornithologist he was able to incorporate his own knowledge of birds into the persona of his main character, Stephen Maturin. Recently he accompanied me to Dublin Zoo several times, to view the rare and charming Rodriguez bats that were to flap through a chapter in his latest and 21st novel in the saga.
Three-and-a-half chapters of this are written. His precision on such details was as obsessive as his desire for privacy.
The genesis of the Aubrey-Maturin books lay in two 1950s novels for children, both on the subject of Anson's great voyage to the west coast of South America.
The Unknown Shore, which was the second, has the historically real character of Admiral Byron, aka Foul-Weather Jack, as a midshipman, accompanied by a very young English apprentice surgeon, Toby, who has the same obsession with birds, bees and plants as his adult successor, Stephen Maturin, the Irish doctor, naturalist and spy who shares the position of protagonist with Jack Aubrey.
There was some surprise (to put it mildly) when it emerged a couple of years ago that O'Brian was English by birth. All his life he seems to have wished to be Irish, like MacLiammoir. He had a competent knowledge of Irish, and of the Irish history of a particular period which would have been respectable in a historian.
Only that Aubrey who wrote Brief Lives could have done him justice in a short summation, but it might have run thus: "In person He was rather meagre than full-bodied. A Cholerick man. His Eye was very frightening when it was bent in wrath on an Adversary, being a light Brown or rather Ochre colour as it were in a Kestrelle.
"In his Youth he was reputed to frequent the counsels of the Labour Party, tho others say This was not so. He Scribbled constantly in a Book which he carried with him wherever he went, and did not hesitate to call out in a Strong voice if anyone was Bold enough to interrupt Him. He liked Potatoes and flesh Meat but abhorred all Greene Stuff except Spinaches. He Was a great drinker of wine, and preferred the more Costly sort."
He is irreplaceable.
