Read the novels and forget everything else

In 1998, Patrick O’Brian had reached the height of literary eminence. During the preceding decade, he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and received the first Heywood Hill Literary Prize, for “a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of books”—the prize having been presented by the playwright Tom Stoppard, himself a fan. He’d joined the exclusive London club Brooks’s, undertaken two sold-out tours of the United States, earned millions in royalties and become, in the words of editor Starling Lawrence, “a modern-day publishing phenomenon.” The Aubrey-Maturin novels—the twenty-book sequence (one unfinished) chronicling the adventures of Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon—were hailed by the critic Richard Snow as “the best historical novels ever written.”  And then it all went bad. The Daily Telegraph, following up on biographical discrepancy in a BBC documentary, uncovered proof that Patrick O’Brian…was not Patrick O’Brian. He had invented huge parts of his own biography, lying about an Irish childhood (he grew up in England), a prolonged exposure to sailing vessels (he had never worked on a ship, perhaps had never been at sea), and the details of his education (he had never attended the Sorbonne, Eton, or Oxford). His name was not Patrick O’Brian, but Patrick Russ. He had changed it in order to sever ties with his first wife, Elizabeth, whom he had abandoned in the 1940s in order to begin an affair with Mary, Countess Tolstoy. In doing so, he had abandoned two small children—one of whom was fatally ill. He was permanently estranged from his surviving son Richard, who, according to Elizabeth, “thoroughly disliked” his controlling and bullying father. He was, she went on, “a violent and erratic man,” whose “passion for culture…overrode all human considerations.” These revelations did not cool the enthusiasm of his readership. His books, all still in print, continue to sell briskly, more than a quarter-century after O’Brian’s death in 2000. Fan clubs dedicated to the Aubrey-Maturin series proliferate; the Reddit community dedicated to the series receives nearly 5,000 views a week. Prices of first editions continue to climb (£1,500 for a complete UK first edition set of all 20 books as of 2024), and each year sees the appearance of new books designed to explain, supplement, or otherwise adorn the series which now forms the core argument for O’Brian’s literary greatness. Recent years have even seen a revival of popular interest in the 2003 film, Master and Commander, based on several of O’Brian’s novels. If some readers turned against the author—perhaps agreeing with historian Jan Morris’s assessment of O’Brian as “an artificer” whose work lacked the “frisson” one finds “in the presence of creative greatness”—most seemed to go along with John Lanchester’s appraisal that it was “only his family and friends who have a reason to care what he was like,” urging fellow fans “to read the novels and forget everything else.” The distance between biography and art remains a vexed question; the distance between personality and art, less so. O’Brian himself liked to quote Buffon on the subject—le style c’est l’homme même. In O’Brian’s case, l’homme même had spent decades laboring to distort the facts of his own identity. Such intense effort, so long maintained, involves more than a habit of behavior, becoming something more like a core constituent of identity. Stephen Maturin, the Irish surgeon and spy generally regarded as a stand-in for O’Brian himself, would have agreed. In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.” It bears remembering that O’Brian had been publishing novels for decades before Jack Aubrey ever paced a quarterdeck. Cribbe