A Naif Among Cineasts!

Last eve, I went the movies (unusual for me) to see the latest blockbuster vehicle for Russell Crowe: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Afterward, I attended a soiree at Donna and Dick Moseley's home. I mumbled to Dick that I thought Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey were an interesting contrast. This review goes further and deeper than I could (last night OR now). If this be (fair & balanced) cinema critcism, so be it.

[x National Post]
Tall tales on the high seas
Naval novelists' public personas were as fictional as their characters
by
Jeet Heer


During the last decade of his life, Master and Commander author Patrick O'Brian became widely celebrated, but this had the unwanted side effect of making people curious about his past.

For those who love a good sea story, two writers stand out as the foremost naval novelists of the 20th century: C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian. The work of both men has been ripe for adaptation: Forester's adventures of Horatio Hornblower have won legions of viewers for the A&E cable network, and the release tomorrow of O'Brian's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is expected to be just as successful.

The two men responsible for spinning these yarns were alike in another way, biographical research reveals: Both fudged the facts of their lives, creating public masks as imaginatively fictional as the beloved characters in their novels.

From 1937 until his death in 1966, Forester wrote a multi-volume best-selling series featuring the dauntless hero Hornblower, a British sailor who rises from a midshipman to an admiral in a career spanning the Napoleonic era. After Forester died, two cagey publishers, feeling there was still an ample market for aquatic derring-do, recruited novelist Patrick O'Brian to develop a series in the Hornblower tradition. O'Brian complied by writing Master and Commander (1969), the first of a 20-volume series featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and his mysterious friend, naval surgeon and spy Stephen Maturin. Also set during the Napoleonic era, these novels traced how Aubrey rose in the British navy with Hornblowerian distinction. Like their best-selling predecessors, the Aubrey-Maturin novels won a wide popular audience by celebrating the courage and moral rectitude of the British navy at its best.

As biographer Dean King notes, O'Brian's most popular novels "chiefly concern ethical characters operating in a generally benevolent world." The same could be said of Forester's main work. Yet in their own lives, the two bards of the British navy inhabited a murky and morally complex world.

C.S. Forester was born under the name Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith, in 1899 in Egypt, where his father worked as a school teacher. Forester was a frail young man who spent his boyhood voraciously reading. Even during the First World War, when the British army was hungry for recruits, the young Forester was rejected because of his weak heart. Later in life, Forester cultivated the false impression that he saw wartime service.

After failing to join the army, Forester tried to follow in the footsteps of a successful older brother who was a doctor. However, Forester lacked the medical aptitude of his brother, and while faltering from his studies, pursued a career as a writer. He took the pen name Forester, since he believed Smith was a dull byline. Around this time, he also broke ties with his family.

Forester's early novels were shoddy pulp confections he hacked off with great speed and little regard for plausibility. But over time he became a more conscientious author, so that when he wrote historical novels like the Hornblower series he made sure he got the period details right. Aside from their confident and accurate descriptions of naval battles, the Hornblower books benefited from their timely publication. In the late 1930s, as in the Napoleonic era, Britain found itself a beleaguered island fighting against a Continental tyranny. As British soldiers and sailors took up arms against Hitler, Hornblower made for morale-lifting light reading.

The British government certainly realized Forester's value as a propagandist. During the war he served the minister of information by writing films that celebrated the British navy.

Forester had two sons from his first marriage, John and George. During his father's lifetime, John Forester regarded his father as "the embodiment of the Enlightenment, standing for truth, reason, and competence in every aspect of life." Yet after his father died, John started coming across many facts that darkened this idealized image. In an important 1997 essay in The American Scholar, John described how documentary evidence, including many family letters, proved to him that "the stories that [C.S. Forester] had told me about himself and his family had a large admixture of lies."

Among the more memorable tales that Forester concocted was the story that he was only half-English because his mother had had an adulterous love affair with a prominent Egyptian. It's difficult to know why Forester fictionalized his past, although John has offered the interesting speculation that his father "despised his parents" and all his life dreamed of having a better, or at least more colourful, lineage.

Patrick O'Brian's life strikingly parallels Forester's troubled personal history. Like Forester, O'Brian underwent a significant name change. O'Brian was born in 1914 as Richard Patrick Russ, the son of a sprawling Anglo-German family. His mother died when he was three, leaving the young boy and his numerous siblings in the care of their scatter-brained father, Dr. Charles Russ. A daffy inventor, Dr. Russ spent much of his career developing bizarre and frightening gizmos designed to cure venereal disease through electrolysis.

Finding life under Dr. Russ's chaotic care rather unsettling, O'Brian retreated into the imaginative pleasures of literature. In 1930, O'Brian published, under his real name, his first novel, an animal fantasy titled Caesar: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard. As a fledgling writer, O'Brian continued to write Kipling-inspired adventure stories, often about animals or the British Empire in India. (At that time, O'Brian knew India only from books, but one reviewer praised him for his authenticity.)

In the mid-1930s, O'Brian fell in love with a spirited Welsh woman, Elizabeth Jones, whom he married in 1936. The couple had two children, a son named Richard and a daughter, Jane, who suffered from spina bifida and would die when she was only three.

Possibly unable to deal with the emotional strain of raising a handicapped child, O'Brian abandoned his family in the summer of 1940. O'Brian and Elizabeth finally divorced in 1945. During the onset of the Second World War, O'Brian tried to join the army but was rejected as unfit. Instead, he served his country, first in the ambulance service (where he met his future wife, Mary Tolstoy) and later helping the British government develop propaganda to bolster the European resistance against Nazi rule.

Shortly after the war in Europe ended, O'Brian married Mary and officially changed his name (along with that of his new wife and his son, Richard).

Why did Richard Patrick Russ become Richard Patrick O'Brian? As with so many important life decisions, a host of reasons came together: O'Brian wanted to bury his painful early life and failed first marriage; he sought to cut ties with his embarrassing father and intrusive siblings; his work as an intelligence agent gave him a taste for secret identities; he desired a more romantic ethnic identity than being a simple Englishman; and he admired Irish writers such as James Joyce.

Under his new name and with his new wife, O'Brian relaunched himself as a writer. Although still rooted in the tradition of Kipling and Conrad, his fiction now had a greater maturity and seriousness. He wouldn't achieve fame until the Aubrey-Maturin novels started gaining an audience in the 1970s and 1980s. During his last decade, he became widely celebrated, but this had the unwanted side effect of making people curious about his past. In 1999, a year before he died, The Daily Telegraph revealed the secret of O'Brian's identity make-over.

As scaffolding for his Irish name, O'Brian had constructed an elaborate structure of lies. "The accepted view was that he was born in Ireland, the son of well-to-do Anglo-Catholic parents," the Telegraph noted in a forgiving obituary. "His upbringing was supposedly with relatives in Connemara and County Clare and with family friends in England. The boy took up small-boat sailing for the sake of his health. He also crewed on a friend's barque -- a type of vessel which is partly square-rigged." Of course, most of this was false.

What are we to make of fictive lives created by the make-believe Egyptian Forester and the pretend Irishman O'Brian? Although O'Brian inspired Master and Commander, in many ways his story (and that of Forester) calls to mind a much quieter film, The Human Stain. Coleman Silk, the hero of The Human Stain, is born a light-skinned African American, yet in the 1940s he finds it advantageous to pass as white. While this act of imposture gains him social mobility, it costs him the love of his mother and siblings. Skillful liars, Forester and O'Brian gained fame as writers even as they became estranged from their kin. Their talent as storytellers made them too confident in refashioning themselves. They would have been wiser to keep their fictions confined to the novels they wrote.

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