Patrick O'Brian is a Great Conservative Writer

His concern is the problem of right authority

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As a rule, I try to write one post a week for this site, and don’t fret when I miss, so long as it doesn’t start becoming a habit. This is this week’s fourth post, thanks to a series of accidents (stuff getting published more quickly than expected; things other people said that I really wanted to respond to). After nuzzling up against a fishing trawler’s trolling line - a fairly obvious effort by Janan Ganesh to get outrage-clicks - I’m swallowing the bait. But I have an excuse! I’ve been planning to write this post for months anyway, and Ganesh is just serving up the occasion.

Ganesh argues that we should read highbrow books and lowbrow books, but not, under any circumstances, middle-brow ones.

It is rude to name names. But if we imagine a writer called something like Elena Murakami or Patrick O’ Le Carré, someone whose prose is neither the most expeditious nor all that deep, who doesn’t trade in incident-driven high jinks or profound digression, someone who is challenging enough, doesn’t the reader lose twice over?

So too for movies and TV. I don’t particularly recommend that you read the original article - it doesn’t have any argument beyond what I’ve already given you. But I do want to push back - to push back vigorously - against one of the meticulously calibrated sneers (the others likely deserve pushback too - but that is not my job).

Patrick O’Brian is one of the great conservative writers of the last century. I hesitate to say the great conservative writer, because I am not a conservative myself, and hence not the best judge. But I am prepared to argue that he is the writer who is most capable of bringing out the best points of conservatism in a way that non-conservatives like myself can understand and find sympathy with.

It shouldn’t be me writing this - I’ve been trying to egg on Sam Goldman (who is a conservative) to do something like this piece for years, because I know that he would do this much better. But so it goes.

The great problem in Patrick O’Brian is the problem of right authority. When you have complete authority over others, what does that do to them and what does it do to you? How do you exercise it without destroying them or becoming a monster yourself? This is a problem that standard issue liberals and lefties have great difficulty thinking about clearly, because it doesn’t fit easily with their understandings of how the world works. But authority relations riddle our society, even if we might prefer to ignore them.

O’Brian returns to this question again and again. The first chapter of the first book, Master and Commander, describes Jack Aubrey taking command of the sloop Sophie. Aubrey feels very great happiness, but also an ‘aliquid amari’: a bitterness that leavens his joy. An invisible wall now separates him from his crew and his officers:

He was no longer one of ‘us’: He was ‘they.’ Indeed, he was the immediately present incarnation of ‘them.’ In his tour of the brig, he had been surrounded with deference - a respect different in kind from that accorded to a lieutenant, different in kind from that accorded to a human being: it had surrounded him like a glass bell, quite shutting him off from the ship’s company; and on his leaving the Sophie had let out a quiet sigh of relief, the sigh he knew so well: ‘Jehovah is no longer with us.’

To be in command is to have the right to exercise absolute authority, but it is also to be isolated in a most profound sense from the human beings that one has life-and-death authority over. Aubrey cannot be friends with them in any true sense; the authority of his position must be the foundation of their relationship. The reason ‘popularity’ is so loathsome to Jack Aubrey is that it mistakes authority for friendship. A captain who wants to be loved, rather than respected, by his crew, is liable to arbitrariness and favoritism, to do the wrong thing when the right thing ought be obvious.

But of course, a great friendship of equals is at the heart of the books, which are, after all, commonly described as the “Aubrey-Maturin” novels. This friendship operates outside the ordinary relations of authority. Stephen Maturin’s nearly complete incomprehension of naval ways allows O’Brian to explain all sorts of shipboard technicalities without it obtruding too much on the narrative. But it also allows Maturin and Aubrey to have a relationship that works across the usual formalities of rank, turning an understanding of authority into a dialogue about it.

It would be a profound mistake to see Aubrey and Maturin as the representatives of abstract philosophical positions. That would not only prevent the novels from being novels, but utterly undermine O’Brian’s position. I suspect that Stephen speaks for him when he says:

I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman … The only feelings I have - for what they are - are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are individual humans with a particular relationship, and it is only because of this that their relationship can bear the argument.

But there is an argument, which emerges again and again throughout the books about right authority. Stephen usually takes the position that authority is a profoundly corrupting force. This instance - famous at least among those who read the books:

'As for mutinies in general,' said Stephen, 'I am all in favour of 'em. You take men from their homes or their chosen professions, you confine them in insalubrious conditions upon a wholly inadequate diet, you subject them to the tyranny of bosun's mates, you expose them to unimagined perils; what is more, you defraud them of their meagre food, pay and allowances -- everything but this sacred rum of yours. Had I been at Spithead, I should certainly have joined the mutineers. Indeed, I am astonished at their moderation.'

'Pray, Stephen, do not speak like this, nattering about the service; it makes me so very low. I know things are not perfect, but I cannot reform the world and run a man-of-war. In any case, be candid, and think of the Sophie -- think of any happy ship.'

'There are such things, sure; but they depend upon the whim, the digestion and the virtue of one or two men, and that is iniquitous. I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.'

Aubrey, being less a philosophe than a practical man, can’t properly explain what he means. But he regularly displays it in his practice. In the very earliest moments of his command he knows what to pay attention to, and what not (“he was blind to the things he was not meant to see - the piece of ham that an officious fo’c’sle cat had dragged from behind a bucket.”) Despite his absolute authority, he allows himself to be bullied by his steward, Preserved Killick. He recognizes the various little perquisites of the men and those in the society around him, the douceurs and acceptable corruptions that underpin a general satisfaction. And he is exquisitely attentive to the ‘moral advantage’ - the sense of what is owed and who it is owed to.

Most importantly, he believes that knowing one’s men, as individuals and as a group, is crucial to proper command. Some people who read O’Brian reasonably complain about the detailed description of ship’s rigging and equipment. Far fewer note the nearly equally omnipresent philosophical discussions and asides, which frequently counterpose both Aubrey and Maturin’s lively attention to the individual to Whiggish abstractions. The abominable banker Mr. Ellis is naturally a friend of Jeremy Bentham, whom he lauds as “the gentleman that wrote the Defense of Usury (it deserved to be printed in gold) [and] had invented a whipping machine.”

Bentham’s whipping machine would certainly be more efficient than the cat’o’ninetails but efficiency is not the summum bonum. When Jack has his men punished in an earlier scene, he reproves a midshipman for not being properly dressed for the occasion: “these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony - all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.”

The books are set in that moment when the old ways are giving way to the new, and their politics favor the hunters more than the Whigs. One of the great political set pieces in the books is a description of an attempt to enclose land, on the usual grounds of efficiency, where Jack, in his capacity as country squire, is emphatically on the side of the small tenant farmers. There is a lot that is wrong in the old ways, with their amiable small corruptions, but the new ways too have their corrupt elements, and are unattractive even when they are done right.

As Aubrey describes a ship he is in temporary command of in H.M.S Surprise:

although Jack prized and admired the frigate’s efficiency and her silent discipline - she could flash out a full suit of canvas with no more than the single quiet order ‘Make sail’ and do so in three minutes forty-two seconds - he could not get used to it. The Lively was a fine example, an admirable example, of the Whiggish state of mind at its best; and Jack was a Tory. He admired her, but it was with a detached admiration, as though he were in charge of a brother-officer’s wife, an elegant, chaste, unimaginative woman, running her life on scientific principles.

This is counterposed against the Tory notion of the ship as an organic society, in which the rules are administered so as to provide a kind of general comfort, a belief in an order that is undoubtedly harsh but that still provides some comfort in its harshness. When the Articles of War, with their threats of capital punishment are read out:

Death rang through and through the Articles; and even where the words were utterly incomprehensible the death had a fine, comminatory Leviticus ring, and the crew took a grave pleasure in it all; it was what they were used to - it was what they heard the first Sunday in every month and upon all extraordinary occasions such as this. They found it comfortable to their spirits, and when the watch below was dismissed the men looked far more settled.

There is much in this that is alien - even obnoxious - to modern sensibilities. The claim that it is “what they were used to” is regularly invoked throughout the books as justification for this or that sordid practice. But there is also something that the liberals and left could stand to learn from.

If O’Brian is unfair to Bentham - and he certainly is - he is not entirely unfair. And we are all (for values of ‘we’ that encompass most people who I think read this kind of newsletter), Bentham’s children to some greater or lesser degree. We are often more comfortable dealing with abstractions - introducing measures to help the poor or the working class; improving general ‘prosperity’ - than in talking to, or engaging with the sweating, breathing, imperfect and complicated people whom we affect to help. Even the most supple forms of democratic authority work through abstractions, formalities and complications, rather than face to face relationships. There isn’t an organic relationship between those who rule or at least influence rule, and those who are ruled. We do not like to think of ourselves as exerting authority, but we most certainly are, through collectively and abstractly legitimated forms of coercion.

Conservatism in its attractive form discovers the troubles of this means of organizing society. I think of Chris Arnade, who makes walking into a form of political discovery, spending days and weeks on foot, going through ordinary neighborhoods and seeing and talking to the people there. The implicit, and sometimes explicit reproach to liberals and the professional left is that we don’t much have these kinds of contacts, except for those of us who do it in a professional capacity. And for many of us (myself included) he’s right. The Whiggish mode of organizing society tends towards a radical disconnection.

And that is the burden of O’Brian’s books. He lays out a conservative alternative - an understanding of authority that ought properly be organic, based on a recognition of relations of authority and power that liberals might prefer to pretend do not exist. A good captain - a good exerciser of authority - ought accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection. They should be ‘taut,’ perhaps sometimes even a ‘right hard horse,’ but they should never be a tyrant. O’Brian’s claim - again voiced through Maturin - is that this is very unlikely, but not impossible.

there are many good or at least amiable midshipmen, there are fewer good lieutenants, still fewer good captains, and almost no good admirals. A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. In the nature of the service this immunity cannot be detected until late: but it certainly exists. How otherwise are we to account for the rare, but fully human and therefore efficient admirals we see …

[‘Efficient’ in the last sentence presumably meaning not Whiggishness, but the capacity to get what needs to get done, done.]

This is the great theme of the O’Brian books as I read them, and their great contribution too. Condemning them as middlebrow is silly nonsense. They have their faults, as Dickens does - frequent longueurs; sometimes grotesque contrivances of plot. But so too they have their greatness, and the larger part of that greatness comes from their statement of a particular view of human beings, and their perpetual return to the vexed problem of right authority. We exercise authority over each other; sometimes verging on the absolute. How can we do it well, without becoming monstrous?

From the last passage cited, it is notable that O’Brian doesn’t pull the frequent conservative trick of justifying authority in society at large on the basis of the kinds of authority that are exercised within the patriarchal family. Both, for him, are likely to be greatly problematic, because they dissolve the individual into their role. And there are many ways in which that relationship may turn disastrous. The various ships described in his books, with their various captains and officers, are so many miniature societies, so many exercises of authority. We can discern the many different ways in which authority goes wrong, and the occasional ways in which it can go right.

I don’t agree with O’Brian’s philosophy - but I do think that there is a great deal that liberals and the left can and should learn from his attention to this question. Some come by this sensibility naturally: leftists like Ursula Le Guin and Randall Jarrell; Dickensian liberals like Peter Ackroyd. Those, like me, who abstract for their livelihood are not likely to happen upon it in the course of their profession. They ought read O’Brian and writers like him, and what happier way can there be to learn the lessons they ought learn? Patrick O’Brian is a great and a glorious writer. The various examples above are drawn from the first three books, because that’s where I am in my current re-read (or more accurately, re-listen: I recommend the Patrick Tull audiobooks), but there is far more, not just argument, but wonder at the world and the ways of human beings. Just yesterday, I laughed out loud when Maturin described lime juice that had been adulterated as “sophisticated.” What joy in language, what delight!