Master & Commander (56 page)

   Then, though he was conscious of the singular ineptitude of this speech, he shut his mouth tight and stood looking straight ahead of him, while the clerk's pen squeaked nimbly after his words, writing '
and cut several of the ropes'
. Here there was a slight pause, in which the president glanced left and right and coughed again before speaking. The clerk drew a quick flourish after ropes and hurried on:

Question by the court: Captain Aubrey, have you any reason to find fault with any of your officers or ship's company?

Answer: No. The utmost endeavour was used by every person on board.

Question by the court: Officers and ship's company of the Sophie, have any of you reason to find fault with the conduct of your captain?

Answer: No.

'Let all the evidence withdraw except Lieutenant Alexander Dalziel,' said the judge-advocate, and presently the midshipmen, the master and Stephen found themselves in the dining-cabin again, sitting perfectly mute in odd corners, while from the one side the distant shrieking of the parson echoed up from the cockpit (he had made a determined attempt at suicide) and from the other the drone of the trial went on. They were all deeply affected by Jack's concern, anxiety and rage: they had seen him unmoved so often and in such circumstances that his present emotion shook them profoundly, and disturbed their judgment. They could hear his voice now, formal, savage and much louder than the rest of the voices in the court, saying, 'Did the enemy fire several broadsides at us and at what distance were we when they fired the last?' Mr Daiziel's reply was a murmur, indistinguishable through the bulkhead.

   'This is an entirely irrational fear,' said Stephen Maturin, looking at his wet and clammy palm. 'It is but one more instance of the . . . for surely to God, surely for all love, if they had wished to sink him they would have asked "How came you to be there?"? But then I know very little of nautical affairs.' He looked for comfort at the master's face, but he found none there.

   'Dr Maturin,' said the marine, opening the door.

   Stephen walked in slowly and took the oath with particular deliberation, trying to sense the atmosphere of the court: he thus gave the clerk time to catch up with Dalziel's evidence, and the shrill pen wrote:

Question: Did she gain on the Sophie without her studdingsails set?

Answer: Yes.

Question by the court: Did they seem to sail much faster than you?

Answer: Yes, both by and large.

Dr Maturin, surgeon of the Sophie, called and sworn.

Question by the court: Is the statement you heard made by your captain respecting the loss of the Sophie, correct as far as your observation went?

Answer: I think it is.

Question by the court: Are you a sufficient judge of nautical affairs to know whether every effort was used to escape from the force that was pursuing the Sophie
?

Answer: I know very little of nautical affairs, but it appeared to me that every exertion was used by every person on board: I saw the captain at the helm, and the officers and ship's company at the sweeps.

Question by the court: Was you on deck at the time the colours were struck and what distance were the enemy from you at the time of her surrender?

Answer: I was on deck, and the Desaix was within musket-shot of the Sophie and was firing at us at the time.

Ten minutes later the court was cleared. The dining-cabin again, and no hesitation about precedence in the doorway this time, for Jack and Mr Daiziel were there: they were all there, and not one of them spoke a word. Could that be laughter in the next room, or did the sound come from the wardroom of the
Caesar?

   A long pause. A long, long pause: and the marine at the door.

   'If you please, gentlemen.'

   They filed in, and in spite of all his years at sea Jack forgot to duck: he struck the lintel of the door with a force that left a patch of yellow hair and scalp on the wood and he walked on, almost blinded, to stand rigidly by his chair.

   The clerk looked up from writing the word
Sentence
, startled by the crash, and then looked down again, to commit the judge-advocate's words to writing. 'At a court-martial assembled and held on board His Majesty's Ship
Pompée
in Rosia Bay . . . the court (being first duly sworn) proceeded in pursuance of an order from Sir James Saumarez Bart. Rear-Admiral of the Blue and . . . and having examined witnesses on the occasion, and maturely and deliberately considered every circumstance . . .'

   The droning, expressionless voice went on, and its tone was so closely allied to the ringing in Jack's head that he heard virtually none of it, any more than he could see the man's face through the watering of his eyes.

   '. . . the court is of the opinion that Captain Aubrey, his officers and ship's company used every possible exertion to prevent the King's sloop from falling into the hands of the enemy: and do therefore honourably acquit them. And they are hereby acquitted accordingly,' said the judge-advocate, and Jack heard none of it.

   The inaudible voice stopped and Jack's blurred vision saw the black form sit down. He shook his singing head, tightened his jaw and compelled his faculties to return; for here was the president of the court getting to his feet. Jack's clearing eyes caught Keats' smile, saw Captain Stirling pick up that familiar, rather shabby sword, holding it with its hilt towards him, while with his left hand he smoothed a piece of paper by the inkwell. The president cleared his throat again in the dead silence, and speaking in a clear, seamanlike voice that combined gravity, formality and cheerfulness, he said, 'Captain Aubrey: it is no small pleasure to me to receive the commands of the court I have the honour to preside at, that in delivering to you your sword, I should congratulate you upon its being restored by both friend and foe alike; hoping ere long you will be called upon to draw it once more in the honourable defence of your country.'

ALAN JUDD

S
OMETIMES THINGS
come together as they should. They recently have for the novelist and biographer, Patrick O’Brian; within a week of the announcement in the Birthday Honours of his CBE for services to literature, he became the first ever winner of the £10,000 Heywood Hill Literary Prize.

   World-wide publishing success already threatens to lionise this energetic and very private octogenarian, but it was clear at the prize-giving that the pleasures of literary recognition do something to render tolerable the passing inconveniences of fame. They do something, too, to make up for decades of unremitting endeavour, for early years of poverty and for numbers of good books written blind—that is, without the comforting assurance of a reading public. It has been a long haul for O’Brian.

   Ill-health and parental death resulted in a peripatetic Anglo—Irish childhood, while an education that unusually combined rigour and breadth fed the autodidact in him. Fluency in French, Spanish and Catalan found him useful employment in Intelligence during the Second World War, on which subject he remains firmly discreet, and also led to his marriage to Mary, mother of Count Nikolai Tolstoy. After the war they settled in Wales, then partly for health reasons moved to the coastal village near the Franco-Spanish border where they have lived ever since.

   It was easier to be poor in a warm climate.

   There was never any question for O’Brian that he should—must—write, and never any wavering or compromise in Mary’s essential support. Short stories, reviews, translations and early novels appeared, outstanding amongst which was
Testimonies
, an intense and obsessional love story set in rural Wales and now published by HarperCollins. For years, how ever, it was the translations from French into English—
Papillon
, for instance, and all of de Beauvoir—that kept the wolf from the door. Luck helped; Picasso was a neighbour and became a friend, which subsequently led O’Brian to write a vivid and perceptive biography of him, still acknowledged in Spain (and by the late Lord Clark) as the best.

   In 1969 O’Brian published
Master and Commander
, the first of a series of novels—‘tales’, he modestly calls them—set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Although he thought there might be others he no more anticipated that the series would extend to seventeen (so far—the eighteenth is on the way) than that it would ensure his place in the literary pantheon. Indeed, despite early support from such as Mary Renault, T. J. Binyon and John Bayley, the books were not an immediate sensation and actually went out of print in America.

   Gradually, however, word-of-mouth, astute publishing, literary merit and—dare one say it?—sheer readability have combined to produce during the last five years a rare tidal wave of literary recognition and commercial success. Sales are now over the million, translations are into nineteen languages, British Library has published its first bibliography of a living author (with an introduction by William Waldegrave), the University of Indiana is buying the manuscripts and forming an O’ Brian study centre, a ship is being built in Chile to the specification of that most often sailed by O’Brian’s heroes, his American publishers (Norton) issue a regular newsletter and in the Cayman Isles there is a dining club called the Patrick O’Brian Widows, formed by ladies whose husbands are addicted. Better known admirers include people as diverse as Iris Murdoch and Max Hastings, Antonia Byatt and Charlton Heston.

   Master and Commander
begins in Port Mahon where the impoverished Lieutenant Jack Aubrey and the impoverished physician, Stephen Maturin, meet and fall out at a concert. Next morning, in the euphora of a longed-for but unexpected promotion to command, Jack offers Stephen a place as ship’s surgeon, so beginning a friendship that will surely prove one of the most enduring and endearing in our literature. They are quite different: Jack is English, beefy, cheerful and generous, a fool ashore but a genius afloat; Stephen is Irish—Catalan, moody, subtle, brilliant, a passionate naturalist (O’Brian is also the biographer of Sir Joseph Banks) and a determined spy against Napoleon. They are united by sympathy, respect, acknowledgement of difference, a sense of fairness and justice and affection. All this is suggested more in the spaces between words than expressed directly, except when they make music together. In the portrayal of this friendship we learn something of all friendship, just as in the series as a whole we learn of loyalty and betrayal, love and mutability, interest and humour.

   These novels are neither Forester nor Marryat, though O’Brian pays the respect due to both. There is adventure and there are battles. The historic furniture and vernacular you can trust absolutely because O’Brian is so steeped in his period but there is also something of his heroine, Jane Austen. He writes with her irony, humour and moral toughness, almost as she might have written of the adventures of her naval brothers. Above all, they are accessible novels, so well written that you settle into each as into a warm bath, knowing you are in good, considerate hands. In evoking so vividly what it was like to be alive then, O’Brian shows by reflection elements of what it is to be alive now, and of how we should live. He achieves that simultaneous dislocation and bridging that is the essence of all imaginative art and is what distinguishes it from everything else.

   The Heywood Hill Literary Prize was the suggestion of the Duke of Devonshire, a director of the bookshop. The judges were John Saumarez Smith, Mark Amory and Roy Jenkins. It is awarded not for somebody’s latest work, but for a ‘lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of books’ and could easily have gone to a publisher such as Rupert Hart-Davis or the late Jock Murray. For an author to win it his or her books must have held up well over a period of years among the customers of Heywood Hill; in the words of John Saumarez Smith,
‘we wanted to strike a blow for reading’
.

   There is a feeling that one or two well-known prize-giving bodies have lost sight of what they think of as the reading aspect of books.

   O’Brian was handed his award by another admirer, Tom Stoppard, amidst the bucolic elegance of a large mixed crowd on the lawn at Chatsworth. The sun shone, the bands played cheerfully, the literati were littered about and the gliterati glittered—though not as brightly as the chains adorning the assembled mayors of Derbyshire. The RAF laid on a timely unintended fly-past, the Chatsworth dogs proved that if you’re handsome enough you can scrounge any number of free lunches and at the end a lady danced extempore upon a table.

   It was, O’Brian told us, his first literary award; in fact, his first prize of any sort since he was given a pen-knife by the headmaster of his prep school in Paignton for keeping on running when everyone else was way ahead and out of sight. Well, they’re out of sight now, but no longer ahead, and Patrick O’Brian is running still.

This article first appeared in the
Spectator
of 1st July 1995, and is reprinted here by kind permission of its literary editor, Mark Amery.