Are your “influences” all classical, or are there moderns as well among them?īefore I comment on “influences” may I first take up Delmore Schwartz’s “conscious literary technique”? Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years. This interview took place by correspondence over a period of months in 1994.ĭelmore Schwartz wrote of Testimonies, “In O’Brian, as in Yeats, the most studied cultivation and knowledge bring into being literary works, which read as if they were prior to literature and conscious literary technique.” Homer and Hesiod come to mind. He is surely “one of the best storytellers of the age,” as one eminent admirer put it, and his work accomplishes nobly the three grand purposes of art: to entertain, to edify, and to awe. He lives on good terms with his neighbor and with Homer, with the birds in his garden and with Mozart, with his readers and with Linnaeus. In our bizarre age of masquerade and mammon, of footlights and flashbulbs, of tabloids and television, O’Brian seems extraordinary: he is his own man, he does his work, he values history, the arts and sciences, morality. He values privacy and dignity, loves his work and his home, resents interruptions but is unfailingly courteous. He is also a reader, of course, and the range of his knowledge is rather daunting, but the tact and skill with which he uses that knowledge are remarkable. O’Brian knew early that he was a writer, and seems never to have been tempted by other vocations. Afterward they lived briefly in Wales, but presently “sun and wine came to seem essential,” and they settled in a little fishing village in the Roussillon. During the war he and his wife drove ambulances and served in intelligence together. although I never became much of a topman, after a while I could hand, reef, and steer without disgrace, which allowed more ambitious sailoring later on”). The young man met the sea, and canvas, with delight (“. The young O’Brian spent long periods in England, “but it was Ireland and France that educated and formed me, in so far as I was educated and formed.” The reservation is too modest he studied philosophy and the classics formally, and certainly has a way with languages. O’Brian does not just have the chief qualifications of a first-class historical novelist, he has them all”), actors, judges, professors, reporters-and thousands upon thousands of fervent readers who thank the gods for him, quote him, thrust him confidently upon friends, and give whole sets for Christmas. O’Brian’s eloquent admirers include not merely distinguished critics and reviewers but noted novelists (Mary Renault wrote, “ Master and Commander raised almost dangerously high expectations Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them. (“I had been reading naval history for years and years, and I knew a fair amount about the sea: I wrote the tale in little more than a month, laughing most of the time.”) The novel is a lark, and had, as its author later noted, “pleasant consequences.” Among those are the now seventeen volumes of the Aubrey-Maturin series, which are in many languages, including Japanese, and are justly famed. Fifteen years earlier O’Brian had written The Golden Ocean, a cheerful fiction based on Anson’s expedition to the Pacific in 1740. Testimonies had been preceded by a collection of short stories, and was followed by novels, more stories, several poems, many translations from the French (including Papillon and most of Simone de Beauvoir’s books), more lately biographies of Joseph Banks and Picasso, a constant flow of book reviews, and of course the Aubrey-Maturin series, beginning with Master and Commander in 1969. Delmore Schwartz, in an omnibus review (which has lately become famous along with O’Brian) including novels by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Waugh, and Angus Wilson, gave O’Brian pride of place and praise. But the earliest brilliant flicker of lightning dates back to 1952, when his first novel, Testimonies, appeared. They were greeted with yelps and growls of satisfaction rising rapidly to a thunderous ovation as deserved as it was belated. The serious American publication of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels began in 1987. Interviewed by Stephen Becker Issue 135, Summer 1995
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |