Patrick O'Brian by Nikolai Tolstoy

Author:Nikolai Tolstoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-09-17T17:00:00+00:00

XI

Muddied Waters

Repeatedly dwell on the swiftness of the passage and departure of things that are and of things that come to be. For substance is like a river in perpetual flux, its activities are in continuous changes, and its causes in myriad varieties, and there is scarce anything which stands still, even what is near at hand; dwell, too, on the infinite gulf of the past and future, in which all things vanish away.

Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, v, 23

The New Year of 1980 began badly: a premonition of what was to prove a strangely unsatisfactory year. ‘Slow bodging at the book [The Ionian Mission]: a couple of pp.’; ‘Frustration, gloom. I wake unhappy’ run typical entries in Patrick’s diary. A self-taught course in Italian was proceeding well, as was his prowess at darts, but these diversions afforded less consolation than did a sprightly gecko who had taken up quarters beneath the Georgian tea-caddy in the sitting room and subsequently shifted to the coal-scuttle, whence it was rescued by Patrick, half-choked with black dust. Two months later, he reproached himself further: ‘How I wish I were not filled with angry (or ready to be angry at the least excuse) gloom from morning till night. Little joy, little admiration, much fault-finding.’

In May he recorded one of those bizarre dreams to which he was prone, which tended to fascinate and alarm him in equal measure: ‘In the night such a painful dream of M being a mad wolf perhaps & of my beating her on the head as though to kill her (some glancing blows, some direct) & she saying meekly that she was born in Shrewsbury – that was all she could offer. Piercing distress.’

When his editor Richard Ollard wrote enquiring about the possibility of his being interviewed on television, the response illustrates his deep-rooted unease at the prospect:

As to my appearing on radio or television. I can imagine nothing more calculated to discourage people from buying what I write. I am a wretched, reluctant, inefficient, mumbling public speaker: I refused the French television with the Picasso book; only the other day I declined an invitation from Sandhurst to address the RMA in May on writing war-novels; and I would beg to be excused as far as the BBC is concerned, were it not for the fact that if your colleagues are right my indulgence may cause your firm to suffer as much or more than myself, which is hardly fair. So in the unlikely event of any really remarkable invitation, an invitation qui vaut le voyage, please tell them that they may count on me.

It can only have been fortunate that nothing came of this at the time, as will become apparent from the consequences eighteen years later when he reluctantly acceded to the BBC’s request for an interview.

Patrick’s depression at this time appears to have been largely visceral, as nothing particular appears to have occurred to dampen his spirits. The Surgeon’s Mate had been completed in the previous year, and

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