Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist, 1914-1949

by Nikolai Tolstoy

A complex, layered portrait of the man considered by many to be the greatest British novelist of the twentieth century. This is the story of Patrick O'Brian's life up to his decision to move to Collioure in the south of France. His childhood; his precocious writing success; his sailing experiences; and the truth behind his first marriage, divorce, and name change are set forth with candor and sympathy. Along the way Nikolai Tolstoy reveals the seeds of inspiration that would one day lead to comparisons to Jane Austen and even Homer. Tolstoy was O'Brian's stepson, and their acquaintance lasted forty-five years. He stayed with his mother and O'Brian at their French home and was a frequent correspondent with the reclusive author, discovering facets of his character and creative genius that were hidden from others. Over the years he accumulated a vast collection of the author's papers, correspondence, and notebooks, many of which are reproduced here. On the basis of this trove of original material, Tolstoy has written the definitive biography that O'Brian and his admirers deserve. 16 pages of illustrations

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky (Russian: Николай Дмитриевич Толстой-Милославский; born 23 June 1935) is an Anglo-Russian author who writes under the name Nikolai Tolstoy. A member of the Tolstoy family, he is a former parliamentary candidate of the UK Independence Party.

Source: Wikipedia

The photograph by Justin K Prim.

Reviews

[Neil R. Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read the entire Aubrey/Maturin series, and then having read Dean King's biography of Patrick O'Brian, I was eager to read Nikolai Tolstoy's book, which is part-biography and part-response to Dean King. With only two major biographies of O'Brian published, it's easy to look at both and, perhaps, come to a fuller understanding of the man. I was particularly interested in Tolstoy's account, since Tolstoy was O'Brian's stepson by his second marriage, so I assumed Tolstoy would have significant insider knowledge that King lacked. I'd enjoyed King's biography, but also found its tone a bit giddy and flippant. I was prepared to prefer Tolstoy's book if it was more serious and thorough.

Tolstoy does in fact write with a more serious tone, and with quite a bit more detail on every page. However, I was very disappointed that his ambition was not limited simply to producing a more accurate and complete biography of O'Brian; instead, he felt the need to question many of King's assertions. The end result is that Tolstoy's book suffers from a juvenile, "I know more than this guy knew, and I'll prove it" attitude. Tolstoy's primary criticism of King is that King had to make assumptions without the benefit of O'Brian's journals and private papers, and without the cooperation of O'Brian and most of his family and friends (O'Brian advised those closest to him not to cooperate with King's research, and O'Brian himself never consented to speak with King; O'Brian died at just the time that King published his biography). While that's a fair criticism, it seems to me distasteful to then continually nitpick King's writing--especially as Tolstoy himself is one of the people who did not assist with King's research. So if King's biography is inaccurate, it's partly Tolstoy's fault. It would have been fine for Tolstoy to mention, perhaps in the Introduction, that King's book exists and is not as good as the book you're about to read. But to then keep ridiculing King's best efforts throughout the book hinders Tolstoy's account. What should have been a better biography too often becomes an embarrassing rant.

The irony in comparing these two biographies is that King, even with the limitations in his research sources, put together O'Brian's story in a remarkably accurate way. Yes, there are details throughout King's reconstruction that are incorrect, but in general his portrait of O'Brian is right on. The reader who only reads King would come away with completely adequate knowledge of O'Brian's life. I do not see the "egregious errors" (xiv) in King's book that Tolstoy does.

Sometimes Tolstoy's corrections to King are valuable, as when Tolstoy knows from letters or journals that O'Brian was not living where King thought he was living at various points in his life. But other times the corrections seem negligible at best. For example, Tolstoy mocks King's suggestion that when O'Brian changed his name from Russ to O'Brian, he was possibly thinking, "What the name change signified was this: Farewell, Richard Patrick Russ. You bore your pain. You made your mistakes. You served your country. Now, thank God, the madness is over" (qtd 316). But Tolstoy's own explanation of the name change, on the next page, is this: "Patrick grasped the opportunity of making a formal move symbolically consigning his early life--above all his wretchedly unhappy childhood and distressing first marriage--to the past" (317). This seems to me almost exactly what King said. The pettiness to which Tolstoy descends in his attacks is best exemplified in his need to correct King's assumptions about the pedigree of one of O'Brian's dogs (454, fn2). Seriously? That was just sad.

A recurring and disturbing aspect of Tolstoy's portrait is the way in which he excuses O'Brian's family difficulties--and especially in his poor relationship with his son from his first marriage, Richard (who was one of King's primary sources). This attitude makes its first appearance at the end of chapter 7, where we are told that "the inordinate revulsion which babies aroused in Patrick was undoubtedly instinctive and uncontrollable" (172). To be sure we're in subjective, difficult territory, but I'm troubled by the glib explanation that yes, O'Brian was terrible with children, but you know, he couldn't help it. Later, Tolstoy writes that "[O'Brian's] introverted character made it impossible for him to sustain a sympathetic relationship with children" (264), and that "It must be acknowledged from the outset that Patrick was constitutionally incapable of being a good father to a child" (398). I don't require a biographer to offer moral judgments on his subject, but if Tolstoy is going to bring up O'Brian's obvious failings as a father, can he not just call it what it is, and assume better of O'Brian, that he could have been a better man than he was?

O'Brian's relationship with his first wife, Elizabeth, suffers from Tolstoy's perspective as well. At one point while married to Elizabeth, O'Brian worked as a tour guide in Switzerland (with Elizabeth still in London). While in Switzerland, O'Brian had an affair with a young English tourist, while concocting a false life history for himself (a practice that was to become rather common to O'Brian). Tolstoy's comment on this affair is this: "While Patrick's infidelity to Elizabeth is not creditable, he should perhaps not be judged too harshly, given the girl's willingness and the near-impossibility of his wife's ever learning of the brief holiday affair" (183). My oh my!

That unfortunate and unnecessary attitude aside, Tolstoy generally creates a full picture of O'Brian's early life, especially as he reads O'Brian's short stories and novels for autobiographical detail. But the lingering nuisance with this book is that it ends at just the point at which Tolstoy himself entered into O'Brian's life and began to know him. Also, it ends many years before O'Brian began writing the Aubrey/Maturin novels. Since almost anyone who is interested enough in O'Brian to read a biography will have found O'Brian through Aubrey/Maturin, it feels odd to deny the reader a glimpse of that moment of first composing Master and Commander. If Tolstoy had written a companion biography that covers those years, that would be all right. But since King's biography covers the whole of O'Brian's life, it's hard not to prefer that book over Tolstoy's.

A final comment is whether or not it's worth reading even one book about Patrick O'Brian's life. The lasting impression I will retain of O'Brian is of a rather unpleasant, gruff, impatient man. I don't know that my knowledge of his life history adds a lot to the enjoyment of Aubrey/Maturin. Certainly it adds something, knowing a bit of the context from O'Brian's experience that emerged on the pages of his novels. But I don't see O'Brian's biography in any way as a key to fuller appreciation of Aubrey/Maturin. Therefore, I would recommend at most a readthrough of King's biography for anyone who is interested; it's quicker, more pleasant in its tone, covers O'Brian's whole life, and conveys the general nature of O'Brian's character and activities in life. But if someone wanted to know O'Brian only through his novels--which, in fact, is how the man himself preferred the world to know him--that would be completely fine, too.

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stick close to your desks and never go to sea and you all can be rulers of the Queen's Navy!

The man most of us know as Patrick O' Brian did just that or the literary equivalent . He became the best author of fictional wooden sided naval warfare. Along the way he nearly bests Jane Austin for capturing British life during this early 19th century. And all along he was never a sailor, never even Irish. If somehow this reads as an overly done fictional plot; wait, there is more!

An unprepossessing, marginal writer, Richard Patrick Russ was born and raised an Englishman. He may or may not have disputed his parentage, but there is no case for him being Irish. His first marriage would be a disaster. It would end with him living in marginal circumstances. He would then charm away a beautiful titled Russian bride, convince her to give up life a of comfort and follow him into a bare existence. Did I say titled Russian nobility? How about he stole away the bride from Count Tolstoy. Not That one but that family. They would live mostly, off the land in remote minimal cottages while he struggled to make keep them alive and make some money as a writer.

Ultimately Richard would reinvent himself as the Patrick O'Brian author the 20 (plus one published as unfinished) Aubrey/Martin seagoing/espionage adventures.

It may look like I have given away all of the O'Bian's secrets. There are more and there is the skilled writing of Nikolai Tolstoy. Professor Tolstoy was O'Brian's stepson and witness to many of the events described. That this Tolstoy is also an accomplished historian and writer is a happy coincidence. Tolstoy is clearly a fond and friendly biographer, but his style is engaging.

Being a fond biographer, he is perhaps too forgiving of several of Patrick's many human failures. If they are recounted without proper censure they are not whitewashed. You can accept Tolstoy's excuses or not, the facts are recounted. Tolstoy is also a somewhat defensive biographer. A fair amount of what is recounted is documented for the express purpose of refuting portions of O'Brian's life that a previous biographer either could not have known or was not written to Tolstoy's satisfaction. Some of this is not as important to O'Brian's fans or to one who may have read the previous biography.

My conclusion is that Patrick O'Brian; The Making of a Novelist is a fascinating story. Part of the fascination is its extremes and its improbability. My biggest let down is that in the nine years since the publication of this book, we have not heard what Professor Tolstoy has to report on the O'Brian from 1949 until his death in 2000. Half of his step fathers life and everything from his formally changing his name to the arrival of world-wide fame. In The Making of the Novelist, we have the "rags" part but not the "to riches". More exactly Nikolai Tolstoy gives us the picture of the writer as a young man. I want the rest of the story.

[Catherine Mayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with Nikolai Tolstoy’s biography of Patrick O’Brian was a passing one. It was 2005, the book had just been published, and an English review syndicated in my local paper portrayed it as a stinging attack on this extraordinary historical novelist. “Disgruntled stepson claims ‘My stepfather was a nasty man’” would pretty much summarise it. Was I going to read Tolstoy’s book? Never in life!

I didn’t give a toss what kind of man O’Brian was. All I cared about was that he had written some of the most brilliant historical novels in the English language. His Aubrey-Maturin tales had enthralled me; friends and family I had introduced them to were equally passionate. O’Brian had created a world so rich and detailed, his characterisations were so insightful and three-dimensional, his language so skilled and so evocative of the period, he had surely earned the right to keep his private life private.

This embittered stepson, I thought, should go get a life. Or, if he was incapable of doing that, he should at least keep his opinions to himself.

There the matter rested for almost ten years. Late last year I realised that my collection of Aubrey-Maturin books, at eighteen, was two books short. In a state of suspended excitement, I ordered the last two – “The Hundred Days” and “Blue at the Mizzen”. How had I missed these final volumes?

Simple. My husband Ken and I had discovered and read the first eighteen in the early-mid 1990’s. We were fertile ground. Ken had joined the British Army as an armoury apprentice at fifteen, and on leaving the army three years later, had worked for Holland and Holland in London’s New Bond St – a gun shop run on truly Victoria lines. He was passionate about military uniforms of the Napoleonic period, and had made many beautiful miniature soldiers, modelled and painted in exquisite detail. I came from a sailing background, majored in history at university, and reread all of Jane Austin at regular intervals.

Together we explored the world of Nelson’s navy, buying reference books and even a large kitset model of an early nineteenth century English frigate. Then tragedy struck. Ken had a massive stroke; within three days he was dead.

Life limped along in a grey haze punctuated by bursts of black grief when I ran out of things to keep my brain busy. I was lucky – after four years, the haze dispersed and I met someone new. But by then I had realised that a number of things had died with Ken – some shared music for example, I still can’t revisit. The kitset frigate went into the attic, where it still hides.

Consequently I missed the entire 1998 controversy over O’Brian’s nationality, something I am deeply grateful for. I think we had gained the impression from somewhere – perhaps from the dustjacket of one of O’Brian’s pre-Aubrey-Maturin books – that O’Brian was Irish. And again, I couldn’t have given a toss whether he was or not. All I really cared about was the glorious Irish-Spanish-ness of Stephen Maturin, which O’Brian brilliantly created.

So … the two last Aubrey-Maturin books arrived just before last Christmas, and it was only then, utterly infuriated and flummoxed by O’Brian’s casual obliteration of Diana Maturin at the start of “The Hundred Days” that I decided to find out more about him. Perhaps, I thought, he had lived a charmed life. Perhaps everything he wanted had conveniently fallen onto his plate; the two-dimensionality of Maturin’s grief was because O’Brian had never experienced true loss himself.

The internet told me enough to want to explore further. And finally, reluctantly, I decided to read Nikolai Tolstoy’s biography. And what an achievement it is.

A paradoxical one, to be sure, because O’Brian was intensely private. When he was cursed by fame around 1990, he found the whole experience not merely distasteful but intensely distressing. Far from hating his stepfather, as the 2005 review had indicated, Tolstoy was very close to him for many years, right up to O’Brian’s death. O’Brian had loathed the idea of having any further public delving into his life, so it is with some irony that Tolstoy decided, after the publication of Dean King’s unauthorised biography (“Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed”) to put the record straight.

Despite his deep affection for, and understanding of O’Brian, Tolstoy has not written a hagiography. He is a historian, and in the process of being scrupulously fair and honest, he has often been brutal. O’Brian was, by his account, frequently prickly, competitive and paranoid unless he was with people he trusted and in an environment where he felt secure. Why this became so makes fascinating reading.

Tolstoy has restricted himself to O’Brian’s earlier years and the account ends in 1949, when O’Brian and his second wife, the adored and adoring Mary (prototype for both Sophie and Diana in the Aubrey-Maturin books) left Wales and moved to Southern France. Tolstoy’s thesis is that O’Brian’s miserable and isolated childhood at the hands of his arrogant and terrifying widowed father, went a long way towards creating O’Brian the man. What is even more frightening is that the imprint of his earlier years perhaps led O’Brian to repeat his father’s mistakes, at least in part, with his own son. One is reminded of Monica Dicken’s powerful exploration of this syndrome in “Kate and Emma”.

Characteristically, O’Brian destroyed many of his private papers. But in another twist of irony, he seems to have drawn extensively on his own life in his writing, especially in some early novels and stories. It is through these, coloured by his own personal knowledge of O’Brian, that Tolstoy is largely able to reconstruct O’Brian’s childhood and youth. There is, perhaps understandably, a certain amount of repetition through the whole book – how do you write a fairly long and detailed biography about someone with so little raw material to hand? Consequently, much of Tolstoy’s construct of O’Brian is based on hypothesis, albeit well-argued.

Tolstoy does succeed in debunking some of Dean King’s wilder guesses, and – certainly for this reader – he does explain why O’Brian wrote Diana Maturin so cursorily out of his narrative in “The Hundred Days”. Far from feeling nothing, in the period shortly before and during his wife Mary’s death in 1998 – the same year that “The Hundred Days” was published – O”Brian probably felt too much. Burying feelings is one way of hiding them, and as Tolstoy so eloquently portrays, O’Brian was intensely private. What he felt for Mary (aka Diana) was none of anyone’s business.

The final irony is that, in the context of the novel, the treatment of an important character is indeed the reader’s business. A book is the meeting point of writer and reader, the latter taking their own imaginative journey to complete the process. And alas, “The Hundred Days” remains deeply flawed by O’Brian’s public retreat from his private grief.

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tolstoy is a very good writer (his book on Merlin is amazing) but this book is a curious failure.

First of all, I think it's fair to say that the average reader of this book is a fan of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series and might therefore be expected to have an interest in O'Brian's life during the writing of those novels . . . but Tolstoy's account stops rather abruptly (after 250,000 ponderous words) with O'Brian at age 35, i.e., with another twenty years to go before he begins publishing the Aubrey/Maturin novels.

One of the most obvious shortcomings of this volume is that Tolstoy is related to O'Brian and is ridiculously, comically biased in favor of his stepfather, and repeatedly excuses the fact that O'Brian abandoned his wife and small children (one of whom had spina bifida) to marry a woman who also abandoned her children, an act which is objectively terrible and can hardly be mitigated, let alone defended.

This book is also reminiscent of Ayn Rand's crazed marginal notations in C. S. Lewis's Abolition of Man, insofar as literally every chapter includes a dozen or more references to a previous biography of O'Brian, Dean King's far more brisk and readable account. At times I found myself longing for King's narrative instead, despite the latter's occasional errors.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

First off, this edition is the 500-page Century edition, which does not appear to be listed here.

As for the book itself, it is a slog of a read. I have the second, recently released book "A Very Private Life" on loan from the library and am hoping that will be better. This book could probably have cut out about a hundred pages without doing any harm, but Mr Tolstoy seems to think a biography needs to have Every. Single. Detail of the subject's life, no matter how small or irrelevant.

He also spends most of the book nit-picking seemingly every criticism or mistaken claim that any other biographer, journalist etc has ever written about his step-father. On one hand, you can understand that, being family, he wants to put the record straight on key issues. That said, he goes into micro levels of detail, at one point even criticising Dean King's biography over the way it questioned the pedigree of one of the family's dogs. Does it make any difference to the Aubrey/Maturin devotee whether the dog was pedigree or not? No. But that's just one example of Tolstoy's apparent need to correct literally every factual mistake or misinterpretation that King and others have ever published about PO'B.

Having said that, he does do a good job of explaining PO'B's early life; the problems - and lasting mental scars - caused by an over-spending father who essentially neglected his children after their mother died, how a lack of formal education gave young Patrick insecurities that he never got over. In that respect, you get a vivid sense of his formative years - and perhaps some explanation of why he struggled to connect with his own son, given that Patrick himself spent much of his childhood isolated and not always even able to spend time with his own siblings. The analyses of his works for possible autobiographical clues are interesting up to a point - although some of them do get a bit repetitive.

The book covers his earliest literary ventures up to PO'B's move to France with his second wife (the author's mother) Mary - a convenient fresh starting point at which to divide his life. Here's hoping the second book is not such a slog-fest.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although Patrick O’Brian first published a book as a teenager in 1930, his real success as a novelist only came late in his career, when the fifteen volumes of the series set in the Royal Navy at the beginning of the nineteenth century began to claim an increasingly wide audience.

O’Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ, but for various reasons decided to ‘remake’ his own history, renaming himself, changing his nationality and concealing his first marriage and subsequent divorce. Tolstoy recreates that previously hidden life, shared on and off with eight brothers and sisters, a difficult, self-centred and yet creative father (who makes various disguised appearances in the novels), and a warm and loving step-mother who never quite managed to replace O’Brian’s own mother.

This biography, unlike the one Dean King produced in 2000 around the time of O’Brian’s death, has claims to be definitive, since Tolstoy was O’Brian’s stepson and had access to a vast collection of letters, notebooks and photographs not available to King, as well as being part of O’Brian’s family for forty-five years.

The first of two volumes, it takes the reader up to the time O’Brian decided to move with his second wife to Collioure in the South of France. It’s jam packed with detail, and there are times when Tolstoy tests his reader’s patience by repeating information to remake a point. Nevertheless, fans of O’Brian’s books will be enthralled to learn the real history of this extraordinary writer.

[Catherine Langley]

A rough/magic read. Rough with Mr Nikolai Tolstoy's flensing of Mr Dean King's fact versus fiction biography. Magic with Mr Tolstoy's definitive and insightful biography. I remain in awe of Mr Patrick O'Brian's brilliance and a lover of his Aubrey/Maturin novels.