Dean King's PATRICK O'BRIAN: A LIFE REVEALED

Throughout life, O'Brian had been a consummate outsider: an intellect who had not gone to Eton or Oxford; an elite who was not from the upper classes; a citizen of the twentieth century who was more at home in the eighteenth. O'Brian was an Irishman who was not Irish; an Englishman who lived in France; a brilliant author in a spurned genre. He had even given up his family name and abandoned his family ties.

Recently I discovered that there is, at long last, a podcast devoted to the Aubrey/Maturin novels* that are so dear to my heart, and that is called, delightfully, The Lubber's Hole. I haven't listened to any of it yet, because of course I decided I wanted to re-read the whole series again and listen to episodes as I went, but before I got to that, I remembered that long ago I hit a big sale on nonfiction ebooks that included a biography of the man himself, Patrick O'Brian.

Having now read Dean King's excellent volume, I can conclude that Mr. O'Brian (real name: Russ. And therein lies a tale best covered in the book itself) must join the likes of Harlan Ellison on my mercifully-still-small list of Authors I Admire Utterly But Am Glad I Never Got To Meet. Because, well, look at that mug, for a start. There are people who do not suffer fools gladly, and then there's this man. Who would incinerate them with a fiery glance (which, doesn't he kind of look like David Troughton playing the Duke of Wellington in the Sharpe TV adaptations?) in nanoseconds, if that were a thing human anatomy would allow. 

And, as one quickly learns in reading Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed, he earned that face, both by how he interacted with others even from young childhood (which was an unfortunate one in many respects; he was not born into the happiest of families, for all that he did not lack for siblings) and by how his work seemed never to get its due until relatively late in his life. But ultimately, neither he nor we would want it any other way; he would not have achieved the attention and praise he did late in life by writing what was common or popular, and we, well, there are plenty of nice authors in the world (and I am lucky enough to know many, some quite well) but there was only ever one Curmudgeon of Coullioure,** and I, for one, forgive him his brattiness as fair exchange for his books.

I love a good literary biography and have a handful of favorites in the genre (Mary V. Dearborn's The Happiest Man Alive, about Henry Miller, and Victoria Glendenning's Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West are two that I've read to pieces and can almost quote by heart). I believe I'll be adding this one to the list, for if nothing else, it does what even these favorites of mine don't do very much of: look in on some of Patrick O'Brian's detailed processes. We don't see them firsthand, don't get a lot of descriptions of how his prose went from inspiration to final typescript, but we do get to peek in on correspondence between O'Brian and his various editors and agents over the years in which he passionately defends his choices of verbiage, the correctness of his research, etc, all while also making great wine, plowing and tilling and planting and harvesting and immersing himself so completely in the 19th century that even his edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was one from the Napoleonic War era, the better not to include any anachronistic knowledge or ideas in his fiction.

We also get, delightfully, quite a lot of insight into his pre-Aubrey/Maturin fiction, and his work as a professional translator of no less than Simone de Beauvoir.*** And a pretty thorough (as thorough as possible under the circumstances, anyway) account of his time in World War II as a member of British Intelligence, which, yes, the guy who wrote the single greatest fictional spy of all time (I see you, Ian Fleming fans, and John LeCarre fans, but come on), Stephen Fucking Maturin, was himself a spy! Or at least an intelligence analyst! I had no idea!

And, of course, since just this last summer I read the biography of Noor Inayat Khan, I got to entertain myself with the idea that, while it doesn't seem their actual paths crossed, their work certainly did, as she was embedded with the French resistance while he was involved somehow with that nebulous organization on behalf of the UK. Or at any rate, his work chiefly concerned France...

Above all, Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed is simply an enjoyable read, whether you're an established fan of the man, or just thinking about having a look at him. I, for one, am now going to embark on another Aubrey/Maturin re-read with a lot of new insight for having read this, and I'm also planning to seek out O'Brian's non-Napoleonic fiction one of these days, as well, because Dean King got me very interested. Which a biographer should, if at all possible.

*Which, you may note, I haven't covered to completion on this blog. As I approached the end of the series on my first go-through, I found I couldn't bring myself to finish it (kind of like what I've done with rationing Philip K. Dick). Each time I re-read the series, though, I go one book closer to the end. Ah, me.

**My own coinage, as far as I know. Coullioure is the region of France near the Pyrenees where he and his second wife, Mary, settled down to farm, raise grapes for wine, and write books that are among the great treasures of 20th century literature.

***And of Papillon! Which means that I'd read Patrick O'Brian decades before I first picked up Master and Commander!

Clifford Irving's FAKE! THE STORY OF ELMYR DE HORY, THE GREATEST ART FORGER OF OUR TIME

I dearly love a hoaxer, and Fake: The Story of Elmyr de Hory, The Greatest Art Forger of Our Time, Clifford Irving's I-think-mostly-true biography of the Hungarian painter Elmyr de Hory who probably at one time had more of his art in the museums and tony private collections of the world than any other artist (just, you know, not under his own name), is part of a veritable matryoshka of fakery, flim-flam, and fabulosity the likes of which we'll never see again.

Technology may someday allow someone to achieve what Elmyr did materially -- there may already exist an algorithm that can create the perfect fake Matisse, Renoir, Picasso, etc and do in seconds what took Elmyr minutes todo -- but no one will ever duplicate anything like Elmyr's actual career, and that of his two ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome) partners in crime, Fernand Legros and Real Lessard.

I might once have thought I'd learned everything I needed to know about Elmyr from Orson Welles' amazing sui-generis sort-of-documentary F for Fake, which not only tells a good chunk of Elmyr's story but that of his biographer, Clifford Irving, as well* and lets Welles indulge in the art a bit himself. Which is to say that here's where the matryoshka comes in. Here, just have a look at the trailer for the film:


But had I left it at that, my loving study of Elmyr, I would have missed out on the real joke of it all, which is that the great forger was himself kind of a patsy. For, well, let us just say that Legros and Lessard saw Elmyr coming, a goose laying golden gouaches and drawings and paintings, and penned him up and kept him hungry so he'd keep doing that while they made a fortune off his work, and lived in high, hissy-fit throwing style, as globetrotting art dealers to the well-heeled and the gullible.

It's all terribly, terribly entertaining. But really, none of it would be possible had not Elmyr really been that good, so good that one time when one of his forgeries was brought before the artist whose work it purported to be, the artist claimed to remember having painted it! Well, at least, according to legend...

Another way this book is fascinating to the 21st century reader is the extraordinary time capsule of lost freedoms it provides. Elmyr's and Legros' and Lessard's escapades would be impossible in our modern, globalized, internet-connected world. They traveled across mid-century Europe and the Americas at speeds faster than anyone but science fiction writers could have dreamed information would, one day. Found out, or in danger of being so, in one city/nation/continent/time zone, they could trip gaily across international borders with their easily forged passports, never having to remove their shoes, long before their victims could even begin to figure out who to tell. Not that too many of their victims caught on before the story finally broke in the early 70s. Not when the forgery of customs stamps and "expertises" certifying the genuineness of the work were so easy to create and come by. Not when the story of how that beautiful Derain came to be for sale sounded so wonderfully plausible -- a Hungarian aristocrat escaped from the Nazis with a small part of his family's art collection and is now selling it off in pieces to stay alive! How romantic! How wonderful! Why, you're almost a part of art history yourself in buying it from him!

Of course, Elmyr's buyer-victims have become part of art history, as some recognized right away when the scandal broke. One man who had been considering buying one when the news became public insisted to his surprised dealer on buying it any way, on condition that the dealer certify that it was a genuine Elmyr forgery.

Loving the man as I do, I, too, would love to have a genuine Elmyr forgery, but I would demand a provenance of how it came to be sold, by what chain of crooks and puffed-up authenticators and dealers and museum "experts" it had come to me. I would want to know who all it fooled, and which of Elmyr's partners in crime put it on the market. Alas, I'm priced out of the market for those, as we learn in Clifford Irving's author's postscript, in which he reveals that much of his knowledge of Elmyr's doings came first-hand; Irving lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza where Legros and Lessard kept Elmyr in luxurious semi-bondage, and was Elmyr's friend right up until Elmyr saw the page proofs of Fake! and disliked, not the admiring tone, not the all but hagiographical charm of the work, but the fact that he, Elmyr, was being admired as a successful crook.

No pleasing some people.

But I, I am very pleased.

*Who, it seems, was so inspired by his experience writing this biography -- and knowing Elmyr personally long before the biography project was hatched -- that he later perpetuated a famous hoax of his own, a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. I include this note mostly for those of you who are too lazy to watch that nine minute film trailer I've embedded above. But really, you should watch it. It's its own little work of art.

100 Books #29 - Joseph Frank's DOSTOEVSKY: THE SEEDS OF REVOLT 1821-1849

Though the event is not actually depicted or described in Seeds of Revolt, the specter of Russian uber-novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's arrest, mock execution and sentence to Siberia looms large over this first of Joseph Frank's five-volume biography of the man. This should not be a spoiler for anyone; this fact and its timing (1849) are quite possibly the best-known and most-talked-about biographical detail in all Dostoevskiana, mentioned in every introduction, foreward, sketch and essay I've ever seen about the man. I might say it's as impossible not to know Dostoevsky was sent to Siberia as it is not to know that he wrote The Brothers Karamozov and Crime and Punishment, but then I run the risk of wandering into bless-me-what-do-they-teach-at-these-schools-ism.

What is not generally known to the casual Dostoevsky fan (which is what I would call myself; I certainly could not hold forth with Michael at Pink's for any length of time*) is the details of why and how this pivotal event came to happen. Enter the redoubtable Joseph Frank, whose staggering work I learned of, as is probably the case with everyone in my cliques and circles, through an essay by the late and much-lamented David Foster Wallace.** And before you ask, yes, I plan to read the other four volumes, for having completed this one I find myself a much less casual Dostoevsky fan and a Frank fan as well.

Frank could definitely go toe-to-toe with Michael at Pink's, and wouldn't even have to serve up a hot dog to keep the ordinary punter's attention while he did so.

As I said, the arrest looms large over this account, ominous and always feeling just around the corner even as Doestoevsky grows up with his strict father, suffers through military school, attracts the praise and attention of the great critic Vissarion Belinsky with his first novel Poor Folk (which I have yet to read but now very much want to) and then falls out with him, takes up other, nicer friends and watches them move away, writes, writes and writes and always wrings his hands over the plight of the enslaved peasantry of Russia (among whom he had had mostly happy formative experiences as a boy on his family's little estate) -- and then meets Petrashevsky, he of the circle accused of subversion and revolution and all sorts of other things that autocratic regimes do not like.

Frank's painstaking examination of the Petrashevsky circle -- a very informal salon in which members of the intelligentsia gathered of a Friday night to talk Socialist ideas, religion, politics and, occasionally, literature -- frankly gave me the chills, not so much because of what happened to them per se, or how they conducted themselves or what they talked about as what they resembled: they resembled Twitter, if not the entire internet. Everybody got a chance to spout off or argue, there was rarely a set agenda, anyone who wanted to could participate (within limits, of course, in St. Petersburg of the 1840s, of course), anyone could get sucked in and, potentially (and later actually), everyone could become tarred with the same brush. So when some members started up a secret society with the aim of actually staging a revolution in Russia, everybody got busted.

Back then, of course, the government had to work hard at it, to infiltrate the circle with an actual person hanging out at actual gatherings at specific times; nowadays, we've turned everything inside-out, having our conversations in full public view, asynchronously, trusting the First Amendment and the odd pseudonymous identity and that those in power won't confuse rhetoric with intent. This may be very foolish of us. Especially as things like NDAA have been allowed to happen. I do not fear being mock-shot or sent to Siberia, but I do fear an internet fettered and stunted by corporate/government interests, or being cut off from it and thus my world. I fear falling into the prison of my own flesh.***

Such are the dark thoughts a good Dostoevsky biography can inspire. And this one is very, very good. And, as I said, I'm itching to get my hands on the other four volumes.

And I'll be sleeping with one eye open, and tweeting with a little more concern (though I'm sure I already damned myself long ago out of my own typing fingers. I've always been free with my opinions, and have paid the price for this before when they were misconstrued, misunderstood, or just unpopular. Dostoevsky was not a revolutionary or even much of a socialist, Frank says, but if you got him going defending literature that wasn't written purely as a dialectical tool for social reform, or, worse, on the plight of the peasantry, then he could potentially wind up out in the streets screaming and waving a red flag. As a friend of mine once observed, some people have buttons to push, others have a whole keyboard. Unca Fyodor had perhaps a modestly sized keyboard; mine is vast and varied).

But what of it, Orson Welles might ask. Go on singing.

*Wink wink at Unca Harlan Ellison, the modern writer of whom I was most reminded as I read this biography of Unca Fyodor. Go watch the YouTube video I linked to above, or better yet, get your hands on a copy of Angry Candy, far and away my favorite of his short story collections and the one containing the amusing and awesome "Prince Myshkin and Hold the Relish."

**Which appears in his last essay collection Consider the Lobster, if you're wondering. I could not find a link to the complete text online. The book is worth acquiring or at least reading, though, and not just for the Frank/Dostoevsky piece!

***Wink wink at William Gibson. Of course.

100 Books: 9 - Nancy Mitford's MADAME DE POMPADOUR

Madame de Pompadour - By Nancy Mitford - NYRB Classics

I wonder how many people out there were finally provoked to curiosity about Madame de Pompadour by the famous Doctor Who episode, "The Girl in the Fireplace," in which an ailing spaceship named for her has opened multiple time windows into various points in her life in order to check to see if she is "done" enough for them to harvest her brain to use as a CPU for the ship. When the TARDIS lands on it, The Doctor gets involved and blunders into becoming "Reinette's" semi-imaginary friend (pre-figuring what his next incarnation will be to Amy Pond) as he explores those windows. It's a charming episode which I treated myself to just the other day again, and this time I was left definitely wanting to know more about this woman.

A few mouseclicks, and I find that none other than Nancy "Highland Fling" Mitford wrote a biography of her! I had Mitford pigeonholed as a satirist and a Jazz Age "Bright Young Thing" so this came as a pleasant surprise. I expected a breezy tour of late Ancien Regime France as well as a celebration of a woman whom history has often seemed to revile -- and that is exactly, delightfully, what I got.

I must say, though, that were it not for two happy accidents in my life, this book would have been much more opaque to me than it was. The first is that I was lucky enough to grow up in a most rare household, one in which resided a nearly-complete collection of old Horizon magazines. I have long maintained that these are a liberal arts education in themselves, lovely, slim hardbound (!) volumes through which a dazzling array of thinkers omnivorously surveyed history, art, politics, literature, philosophy, architecture, even, occasionally, space, in greater depth and with greater knowledge than any magazine I've ever found before or since. Our modern Smithsonian occasionally comes somewhat close to what Horizon did so well, but never at such length or completeness. It was in the pages of Horizon that I first learned about the Sevres porcelain manufactory, whose great patron Pompadour was, for instance. I have these magazines still; they are one of my greatest treasures, and I have added to the collection over the years they've been in my care.*

The other happy accident is that I became a devoted fan of Neal Stephenson and have read his amazing Baroque Cycle several times. A modern reader could not ask for a livlier or more entertaining (or thoroughly researched) guide to 17th Century England and Europe, and the court of Louis XIV, the famous Sun King and predecessor of Madame de Pompadour's beloved Louis XV, is the site of many scenes, historical and invented. Stephenson goes into great depth to explore how much of our own society and institutions harken back to those extraordinary times, with a great deal of wit and style -- which means what the reader learns from these books sticks with her long after she has closed and shelved them.

I had cause to turn to both of these sets of sources a few times as I read Mitford's book on Madame de Pompadour, for it would otherwise have been rather a bewildering experience.

Mitford was very much a child of her age and class, which meant she knew what she knew and expected that anyone who cared to converse with her would, also. Not big on explaining herself, was Mitford, at least not in her books; her narration conveys the impression that one has sidled up to her at a large and fancy party to hear from her perspective what is going on there. She is a wealth of information and perspective and, above all, gossip, but does not consider it her job to tell you who all those Ducs and Comptes are so much as what they've done to help or hinder her heroine. The effect is rather like watching a play or opera (a thing Madame was famous for staging in Louis XV's private theater at Versailles) in a foreign language (Mitford also assumes you have at least a passing command of French) with no libretto handy. Figures march on and march off, bow and curtsey and fight, all maintaining a definite orbit around Pompadour but never quite seeming real or fleshed out.

Which is to say that NYRB Classics would have served its buying public well to include a family tree or two, or, even better, a dramatis personae. Despite this lack, the book is a most pleasant read, sympathetic to its heroine, orderly in its presentation of the facts and anecdotes of her life (which is to say not baldly chronological: orderly. Chapters detail her various sub-careers as courtesan and lover of the King of France, as builder and taste-maker, as politician, ranging back and forth in history a bit in the service of clarity, which I applaud), a little bit wry, informative in its way, and always charming.

*My Own Dear Personal Mother, the Little Old Lady with a Computer will call me out quickly if I do not disclose that my first "use" of these magazines was as building blocks rather than as reading material. Flat and slim and sturdy, they made perfect and colorful "floors" for the bizarrely complex houses my sister and I built out of wooden blocks and legos for our Tonka Toy people to live in. She used to admire those and dream that one of us would become an architect. Sorry, Mom! But at least you found someone to treasure the books!