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PATRICK O’BRIAN: A LIFE REVEALED: An Interview with Biographer Dean King

Dean King and his daughter Willa in Collioure, France, the home of Patrick O'Brian.

Patrick O’Brian--biographer, translator, novelist, and creator of the Aubrey-Maturin novels--died January 2, 2000, at a hotel in Dublin, Ireland (where he was planning to establish residency to benefit from Ireland’s tax-free policy for artists). News of the secretive 85-year-old writer’s death was suppressed while his remains were transferred to his family plot in Collioure, France, for burial next to his wife, Mary. Among the first to learn of his passing was 37-year old Dean King, who has spent the past two-and-a-half years researching and writing the new biography Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed (Henry Holt).

After a decade working in New York publishing, King now lives in his boyhood hometown, Richmond, Virginia--where he attended the same Episcopal prep school that produced Tom Wolfe--with his wife and sometime collaborator Jessica King and their four children. He is author, co-author, or editor of nine books on a variety of subjects, including A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales, Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O'Brian, and Every Man Will Do His Duty: An Anthology of Firsthand Accounts from the Age of Nelson .

His favorite authors, in addition to O’Brian, include William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Studs Terkel, and J.R.R. Tolkein. He is currently researching three potential subjects for new biographies: the blind musician Doc Watson, who invented the flat-picking technique of guitar playing, naturalist John Muir of Yosemite fame, and the controversial New York Knick Latrell Sprewell. King is also exploring a work of historical fiction set in the American frontier in the post-Civil War era.

This interview was compiled from from telephone conversations and email exchanges.

IDLER: How did you find out about the death of Patrick O’Brian?

DEAN KING: I was tipped off on Thursday, January 6, by a friend at The Daily Telegraph, who was told by a reporter at the Irish Times. Both were breaking the story in their Friday newspapers. It just so happened that Neil Conan of NPR had scheduled an interview with me that Thursday to keep for a future obituary of Patrick O’Brian. I told Conan that I had heard that O’Brian had died. He hung up and immediately called Starling Lawrence, O’Brian’s editor at W. W. Norton, who did not even know. One thing led to another, and later that night--actually at 1 AM Friday--Frank Prial roused me out of bed for a phone interview for his New York Times obituary to run later that morning. The floodgates opened; I have never seen anything like it. The NPR obituary ran on “Morning Edition” and that night I was on “ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” This was a great tribute to Patrick O’Brian and to the impact his phenomenal novel series had made--and continues to make--in America.

IDLER: How did you feel about the death of your subject?

KING: It was very sad for me when he died.

As a reader, you grow close to the author of these 20 gripping novels, who has an amazingly deep capacity to identify what is important in life--things like honor, duty, friendship, appreciation of everying from music to insects. Through these interests and value judgements, O’Brian connected strongly with the reader. When you identify so closely with anyone, it hurts to lose them. I suppose I also held out a hope that he might one day read my biography and reconcile himself to many of the strange events in his life--maybe even to his son, Richard Russ, to whom he had not spoken in 30 years. In the original epilogue, I wrote that I hoped they might somehow find a way to come together again. When O’Brian died, that hope--even if, realistically, it was never going to happen--died too. Richard, a fine man, was left nothing, except the heartache of a broken childhood.

Everything went to his Tolstoy step-children. O'Brian loved his wife Mary, who was formerly married to the London barrister Dimitri Tolstoy, very much. To O’Brian, that side of the family was socially preferable; it had a great lineage. He was able to see his step-grandson go to Eton, and that meant a lot to him. O’Brian has nephews and nieces living in relative poverty in Birmingham, and being associated with them would have horrified him. This was the rather sad side of O’Brian’s personality. They are fine people, bright people, of the same root but in different circumstances. What O’Brian wrote and how he lived were not always consistent. In his novels he is a champion of the common man, but in life I think he found this difficult.

IDLER: Why do a biography of Patrick O’Brian? Wasn’t he a private man who insisted his work speaks for itself?

KING: Many readers felt that O'Brian’s wish to have his private life left unexamined should be honored. Their reasoning basically went along the lines that he had given us so much to enjoy that the least we could do was to not pry into his private life. But I felt that by not telling the truth to reporters and to his live audiences in the United States during visits here, O’Brian forfeited the right to not have a closer look taken. There’s a right way and a wrong way to go about these things. My motive was not to bring down this man, it was simply to set the record straight, to present an accurate record of a great writer.

In a sense, I think our reputation as readers was at stake. We look foolish if in retrospect critics look back and say: “Here were a group of people who thought this guy was a sailor, who sailed on square-rigged ships. They thought he was Irish and believed this false persona that he had created.”

By presenting the true story, the appreciation for the literature will certainly be no less than it was before--if anything, it will be greater.

IDLER: Why will it be greater?

KING: Primarily, I think, because a comparison of O’Brian’s life and his art reveals the tremendous creative act it took to transform his experience into this joyous, life-affirming fiction. To learn about the hardships he faced, and how he transformed these into his great work of art, this great roman fleuve, is something that we can only do by studying his life and reading his books. His life and work become a great event we can take part in. It makes me think of Ruskin, who said: “It is greater to appreciate art than to create it.”

IDLER: But why the rush? Some say this type of thing should have waited until after he had died.

KING: People die and archives get dispersed or destroyed rapidly. O’Brian was 82 when I started working on the biography. I wanted to interview those who knew him while I still could. Even after I started, O’Brian’s first wife died before I could find her and contact her, and O’Brian’s two surviving sisters slipped deeper into senile dementia. Finally, of course, O’Brian died, never having accepted my invitation to do an interview, though at one point he did call to talk. Unfortunately, I was out of town. By the time I returned, he had decided he no longer wished to talk. I was extremely disappointed.

IDLER: Is the Aubrey-Maturin series autobiographical in some respect?

KING: O’Brian strongly believed that anything of true significance could only be said through indirection. I think you could say the Aubrey-Maturin series was an indirect way of exploring the many issues in his life. O’Brian’s readers strongly identify with the author and his ideals through Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the two protagonists of the great novel series. But if they hold themselves up to these ideals, they will most certainly feel woefully insufficient. I think it is useful for readers to know about O’Brian's life. The picture of friendship in the novels is probably unattainable in reality. Learning that the author himself never experienced that level of friendship is not a bad thing. This in no way denegrates the work.

IDLER: Was O’Brian hiding something?

KING: He wanted his readers see him as a gentleman from wealth, and this, except for a brief time in the family history, simply was not the case. Later in life, he did not want anyone to know that he had built his house in France with his own hands. He had become a social and intellectual snob, and he felt that this was demeaning. But most of all, O’Brian wanted to leave behind his tragic first marriage. Just before World War II, he walked out on his family in circumstances that were about as bad as possible. He left his wife broke, with a five-year-old son and a dying three-year-old daughter. He had found himself in a situation he couldn’t handle, and he walked away from it. He was 25 at the time, and 25 year olds are notorious for making poor decisions.

IDLER: What first got you interested in O’Brian?

KING: I read the Richard Snow article in the New York Times Book Review, on January 6, 1991, entitled “An Author I'd Walk the Plank For”. He called the Aubrey-Maturin books “the best historical novels ever written.” This was the clean, unequivocal assessment that created the O’Brian literary phenomenon. I read the books and it was like falling through the looking glass.

IDLER: Do you share Snow’s assessment?

KING: I think Patrick O’Brian will be read for a long, long time. That is one reason why I chose to write my companion book A Sea of Words in the first place. I wanted to contribute to the understanding of O’Brian’s monumental work and to actively participate in celebrating one of this century’s great moments in literature, probably the finest narrative achievement I will see in my lifetime. Ironically, by being set 200 years before they were written, the novels have been tempered against anachronism. At first, skeptical critics tried to call them dated and irrelevant, but ultimately they couldn’t. I believe this is a good indication that they will be read even in the future--when 2000 is remembered as a quaint yesteryear and the majority of the new literature we consider significant seems hopelessly dated.

IDLER: How did you get started on your first companion book to the series?

KING: In the fall of 1993, I started reading his books. I read all sixteen of them in four months. You can’t put them down. In the winter of 1994, I came up with the idea for A Sea of Words, a dictionary of people, places, and nautical and naval terminolgy to help readers understand the novles. You don’t have to have a resource like this to enjoy O’Brian’s fast plots and brilliant insights, but eventually you really want one. You are investing so much time in this experience, and you realize that if you knew more about this fascinating historical period, you would get even more out of the reading. My book came out in 1995. My advance was pitifully small because nobody had any clue this would work out.

IDLER: Why aren’t you published by W.W. Norton, O’Brian’s publisher?

KING: Norton allowed me to throw my hat in the ring when the idea of a companion book came up, but they eventually turned down A Sea of Words because O’Brian had a friend at Britiain’s National Maritime Museum who was going to do a companion book. Apparently he is a slow and meticulous worker, but I am sure it will be a fine book when it arrives. I thank my stars for David Sobel, my editor at Henry Holt, who had the courage to commission my book even though Holt was not O’Brian’s publisher.

IDLER: Did you bring personal sailing experience to bear in the writing?

KING: Actually, no. I’ve sailed as a passenger many times, but I am not a sailor. Since writing the book, I’ve sailed as a sailor-trainee on board HMS Rose, the reproduction of a 1757 British frigate, from New York to Bermuda, as many O’Brian readers have done.

IDLER: And how long did it take you to write A Sea of Words?

KING: It was an intensive effort. I pulled the book together in less than a year. At one time or another, I had 7 people assisting me, and I nearly went broke doing it. But I had one lucky break. A graduate philosophy student at the University of Virginia, who was helping me, went to the Virginia library E-text department, which makes books available electronically. He and the head of the department were able to send our lists of terms from the sixteen Aubrey-Maturin books that existed at the time through the Oxford English Dictionary electronically. From these electronic files, I could pick the relevant historical and topical definitions I needed.

At the same time, I researched in the library of the New York Yacht Club, which possesses perhaps the finest private maritime collection in the world. Part of Melville’s personal library is in the rare books room there. I spent a lot of time combing through the club’s book cases full of early nautical dictionaries, period publications, and histories of Nelson’s navy. They have a complete set of the Naval Chronicle, one of O’Brian’s favorite sources of information, and an original Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine from 1815, which was invaluable.

But by the end of the project, financially speaking, I was near panic. In fact, I almost took a lowly magazine position in Greensboro, North Carolina, to bail myself out. Fortunately sales of A Sea of Words quickly exceeded expectations, and David Sobel, at Holt, kindly signed me up for another book.

IDLER: And this was Harbors and High Seas?

KING: Yes. It is very easy to get lost in O’Brian’s geography, since many of the geopolitcal boundaries--not to mention our knowledge of remote places--have long since changed. Each chapter in Harbors and High Seas corresponds to one of the Aubrey-Maturin books, and basically I explain the geography traversed, giving background on political entities that might have changed drastically, on how cities and ports might have looked at the time, and on which of O’Brian’s places are really fictional. I had new maps of Aubrey’s voyages drawn for each chapter, and I also included original historical maps and illustrations from the Naval Chronicle to help transport readers back to this era.

IDLER: So you made a living doing this?

KING: I was starting to get royalties from A Sea of Words. Then there was the advance for Harbors. After 50,000 copies of A Sea of Words sold, Holt commissioned a second edition. Publishing is a tough business. I did some other books while I was doing these, and then I assembled an anthology called Every Man Will Do His Duty, which is a collection of first-hand accounts of Navy actions from the Napoleonic wars. I culled these from ancient volumes at the New York Yacht Club, the New York Public Library, and my own growing library. Every Man includes Thomas Cochrane’s account of his phenomenal capture of the 32-gun Spanish xebec frigate El Gamo in the 14-gun Speedy, which O’Brian used as a basis for his first Aubrey-Maturin novel Master and Commander.

IDLER: You mean O’Brian was copying published stories?

KING: No, he was simply basing his story on a historical event. O’Brian’s narrative is far more captivating, but many details are identical. In the novel, the navy captain Jack Aubrey, while fitting out his tiny vessel Sophie, uses the smallest yard from a much larger man-of-war as his biggest yard. But it is still too big, so the port admiral, who is worried that Aubrey will carry too much sail and overpower his little vessel, orders him not to use it. Aubrey cleverly has his carpenter shave off the ends of the yard to make it look smaller and thus fools the admiral. This is exactly what Cochrane did in real life. But Cochrane’s account is clipped, while O’Brian’s is lovely and almost wholly original.

IDLER: You had also been doing some non-nautical writing, hadn’t you?

KING. Yes. I have written or edited about ten books, including one called Cancer Combat (Bantam), which was inspired by my battle against Hodgkin’s disease in 1990. This book is a young-spirited, aggressive, sometimes gritty collection of anecdotes about fighting and beating cancer. I want everyone to know about it because I think it really helps patients and their support people in battling cancer. The book is upbeat, and I have been told by many that it has inspired them to fight harder.

IDLER: How do you feel about columnists like George Will, who claim that O’Brian is a conservative writer?

KING: I’m not really a political animal, but I would say that in certain ways O’Brian was very conservative, yet in other ways he was very liberal.

IDLER: What do you mean?

KING: In his writing, at least, O’Brian is a democrat, on the one hand, abhoring Napoleon’s despotism and deploring his slaughter of humanity for egotistical conquest and championing the rights of small nations to govern themselves. Yet, on the other hand, O’Brian seems to cherish and respect England’s monarchy and its traditions.

Above all, O’Brian writes with a great deal of human compassion. He sympathizes with the common sailor, whose life is extremely difficult and who is frequently taken for granted by the power structure. Yet, he points out that in many ways their lives were not so intolerable as they might seem. There is an evenhandedness in O’Brian’s writing, a lack of overt moralizing. If there is a profound message here, it is shown in all its ambiguity, never simplified and baldly stated. O’Brian’s protagonist Stephen Maturin is addicted to opium and chews coca leaves, yet this is presented so objectively that the effect is quite remarkable.

One never gets a sense that O’Brian is trying to preach or condemn. He understands his characters so well and is sympathetic to their problems.

IDLER: So you feel O’Brian defies simple categories?

KING: Certainly it would be a great injustice to categorize him as a mere writer of adventure stories. Personally, I have always enjoyed history and adventure stories but more so great literature. I read O’Brian to read great writing, writing that constantly surprises and enlightens, not just to read sailing or war stories. I find most writers of naval-adventure fiction unreadable. C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories are readable, but I draw the line there.

IDLER: Was it your perception of the greatness of O’Brian that stimulated your biography?

KING: Yes, in the first place. But then there was something about O’Brian. He protested too much about his privacy. He was so prickly.

It was clear there was something going on behind the scene that needed explaining. I was curious to find out more. But journalists in general were kow-towing to the author. If you loved his writing, you wrote something laudatory, all-praising, for the vast majority who had never heard of him. If you had no interest in O’Brian or if you didn’t like his work, then why write anything at all? So while there were fawning profiles, there was virtually nothing objective about the man in print. In part, this was because journalists were forewarned that any personal questions, any challenges, would immediately end an interview with O’Brian.

I soon came to believe that it would be a collective act of cowardice if no one tried to find out and record the truth about the man.

IDLER: So how did you get started?

KING: One of my first calls was to then free-lance journalist Mark Horowitz (now an editor at New York Magazine), who had profiled O’Brian for the New York Times Magazine in 1993. I didn’t know if anyone would cooperate, but Horowitz did. Though he and O’Brian had gotten along well during the interview process, O’Brian had found something offensive in Horowitz’s profile and had peremptorily cut off communication with him. So Horowitz was perfectly willing to discuss what he knew about O’Brian from his interviews. It turned out that this was not an uncommon situation. O’Brian had abruptly ended new friendships with journalists in England and America, often hurting feelings. Horowitz was encouraging and told me what he knew about O’Brian.

In the summer of 1997, before I had a book contract, I flew to Ireland and spent 10 days there gathering information. Kevin Meyers, a columnist for the Irish Times, who frequently praised O’Brian’s books, had agreed to talk to me while I was there but mysteriously received a letter from O’Brian the day we were supposed to meet asking him not to talk to me. Meyers said he hadn’t told O’Brian I was coming.

Even more mysteriously, the National Archives and other repositories of information contained not a single record of a birth, marriage, baptism or educational degree for Patrick O’Brian. However, there was one birth certificate of a Patrick O’Brien born in 1913 in the Galway town of Ballinisloe, where O’Brian said he was from. So I got in my car and drove to Ballinisloe. Remember, at that point, all I have is a birth certificate from 1913.

I asked a woman in the town’s most active tea shop: “Do you know the O’Briens of Ballinasloe?” She pointed out another woman and said, “She does. She is related to them”: Over the course of two days, I met a number of O’Briens. This story is not in the book, because, of course, O’brian’s clue was a red herring. Finally, I met Michael Dolphin, whose wife was an O’Brien. When I enquired about Patrick O’Brien, Dolphin said to me, “Oh, Patrick O’Brien, I buried him myself. I’ll take you to his grave.” So I went to the O’Brien grave. At that point it was sort of depressing. I was clueless. All I knew was that this Patrick O’Brien was not the author.

In a sense, my trip to Ireland was a bust, and in another sense, it was the beginning of my great adventure to the discovery of the truth about O’Brian’s past. Next, I called a geneaologist I had met in Dublin. He steered me to a colleage in England. Eventually, he turned up name-change document for Patrick O’Brian in London, and I found out that the author’s real name was Richard Patrick Russ. Soon, I turned up listings in the British Library for 3 books written by Russ, the earliest written when he was just 14. No one else knew this connection at the time.

IDLER: How did you manage to get editions of the books? They must have been out of print.

KING: I found copies of his early books on the Internet at unsuspecting book stores around the country. I paid $8.00 for Hussein, which he wrote when he was 22. It was published by Oxford University Press in an edition of 2,700. The book got fabulous reviews in United States at the time. Hussein was set in India. It was Kiplingesque, along the lines of Kim. I also found copies of Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard, but never found a copy of his collection of short stories Beasts Royal.

IDLER: Was that enough information for a biography to go forward?

KING: I had Horowitz’s interview transcripts, he had given them to me right away, and as soon as I found the name change document, I was in business. I tracked down the whole family in England and Canada. Holt recognized this was a hot property and offered me a contract to write the book.

Richard Patrick Russ’s father’s father (his grandfather) was one of 13 children, and Patrick O’Brian was one of 9. It was a large family, and he severed his family ties, so his relatives were willing to discuss him with me. I located his cousin, John Russ, who lived in Canada. He had his -- and Patrick O’Brian’s -- grandmother’s journal. It turned out that his, grandfather had been furrier to Queen Victoria. I read the daybook from when he died. The journal described everything from financial dealings to the family furniture. In the fine print, one could make out the economics of his great aunt’s suicide, including how her share of the family wealth had been dispersed.

I visited Britain and drove to North Wales for dinner with Penelope Roche, who lived 8 miles from where O’Brian had lived for three years after World War II and where he wrote Testimonies, the book Delmore Schwartz praised to the skies. This woman later tracked down a shepherd who had lived on a farm where O’Brian had helped out, 5 miles from Mt. Snowdon. While in Britain, I visited O’Brian’s stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy near Oxford and Richard Ollard, his British editor, at his house on the coast of the English Channel.

IDLER: What papers or documents were available to you?

KING: I had the manuscripts and correspondence of Patrick O’Brian and Richard Ollard, which were in the archives at Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University. I found much of interest there, including all of Ollard’s editorial reports about O’Brian’s books. In England, I found publishers' archives quite useful, and I was able to retrieve some revealing correspondence between O’Brian’s siblings. But perhaps my best find was a letter that O’Brian wrote to one of his French colleagues from his secret service days. This was in the colleague’s file in Paris and was given to me by his son.

IDLER: Wasn’t there a BBC documentary on the life of Patrick O’Brian that questioned his roots?

KING: The story in the BBC documentary came from me.

I had let the BBC producer know that O’Brian was English and not Irish. I had known this for a while. It was touchy since I had to tell them what I knew, but couldn’t tell them all, so it was a very tense interview. After the broadcast, a Daily Telegraph editor assigned reporter Ben Fenton to go crack the story. He didn’t know or use my research, but he broke my story. Of course, I did not want it to appear there, in that manner, or at that time. But it was beyond my control.

IDLER: Do you pass any judgements on the life and work of Patrick O’Brian?

KING: I do pass judgements, but they are subtle:

1. Patrick O’Brian was an extremely complex man, whose work reflects both his life in reality and also in a sort of fantasy version, the way he might have liked it to be. But in either case, to understand his life better is to understand his fiction better. One of the wonders of his writing, one of the mysteries of the artistic process, was his gift for transforming painful experience into joyful fiction.

2. Essentially O’Brian was an extremely hard-working man, who lived for his writing and came to his desk almost every day. I think of him as a man of action, only with a pen instead of a sword. I find his life very admirable for this reason. He never coasted.

3. Despite his testiness and despite the mistakes he made in his life, I would have liked Patrick O’Brian. I admire people who are intense and who are so moved by life that in a good way they seem somewhat extreme. O’Brian was the type of person to whom things mattered. He could be unforgiving but he was never indifferent. This, to me, is encouraging, life-affirming.

Dean King will take questions from readers during an on-line chat at http://www.BN.com on March 21 at 7 PM.