He is a completely flawed man. The books are borderline flawless (will admit when I reread them now I skip the last 2 or 3 because he clearly felt the creep of time and started killing off characters I loved deeply).
>O’Brian as “an artificer” whose work lacked the “frisson” one finds “in the presence of creative greatness”
Absolutely zero idea what that even means. The books are wonderful as escapist superhero stuff, as an entry into British history and as a study of human relationships. "Jane Austen on the high seas" isn't far from the truth. The books track an incredible friendship, a couple of hard-won marriages and the meaning of work. A lot of what I learned/ think about the management of multi-person projects is influenced by Jack Aubrey: you don't necessarily have to be right, but you have to decide if you're going to lead. And trying to manage a team larger than can fit in a longboat is a hard road to choose.
The article skips my favorite funny line, "Your friend has a singular genius for striking the wrong note."
I loved the Peter Weir adaptation and was always hopeful there would be more, particularly with that ending leaving it open like that. I picked up the first book recently so that I could read through it on vacation. I do tend to agree with Jan Morris in that only people who knew the author have reason to care about his personal life. Of course there are limits, and given the author has been dead for 26 years and the events he is accused of happened 70+ years ago, O'Brian can no longer atone for his past misdeeds. I'm not certain if knowing that O'Brian was a horrible family man will change my enjoyment of the first book, but that remains to be seen. I may not even get through reading it due to other factors, anyway.
I was curious if his family ever wrote about him and his son Richard Russ did in below article. I think this gives a good insight into how his son felt about his father, and particularly how his mother felt until her death.
I haven't read Master and Commander and likely never will after reading this article. I couldn't get over the bad taste in my mouth I don't think. Fortunate for you to have read the book before the article.
Too many good novels that weren't written by dispicable people.
I stopped after Malloreon more because my interests changed. Finding out their history hasn’t changed anything for me. But Marion Zimmerman Bradley for some reason has and I have no desire to read any of her books ever again.
I still like those books, and, for some reason, that didn't affect me. Other people, however, have. Science fiction/fantasy has a long, turgid history of weird and unsavory authors. I tend to ignore that.
I think books have a firewall between the author and the characters on the page. Actors, however, are a different matter. They are the medium.
I've always enjoyed H P Lovecraft and was disappointed to learn about his racism and xenophobia. AI tells me its was way beyond what was normal at the time.
I read Atlas Shrugged recently. I went in not knowing anything about the book or author. I liked it for maybe half way through and despised it by the end. Reading about the author after finishing the book, it had a lot of her personality in it.
Sometime in the mid-90s, after I'd read M&C and the two following books, I heard Patrick O’Brian interviewed on the radio as I was driving to work in Sunnyvale. The interview included about 20 minutes of his reading from M&C.
After listening to him read for about 30 seconds, I pulled onto the shoulder of 101 around Ames lab, shut down my car and just listened to him. I'd never before heard someone give voice to the English language in what sounded to me as such a profoundly perfect form. I remember thinking that I'd love to have heard him read Shakespeare.
I appreciate the post. I had no idea he was such a flawed person, and it's illuminating to learn that. But it doesn't affect my happy memory of hearing my native tongue (if I may claim that, even though I'm American) employed with such superlative skill.
Maybe I should look into training an AI in the audio style of Patrick O’Brian and have it read Shakespeare for me.
>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.
About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).
I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.
The "human connection to the artist" is believed to be important by some, but I disagree. People tend to create an image of a musician and are too often disappointed because, for example, they disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social or political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar.
I think it is best to appreciate an artist's creation and leave it at that. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
I don't, especially when the artist flows into the art.
Take H.P. Lovecraft. Very big name in supernatural horror, created Great Cthulu and various other tropes that survive and are influential to today. Famously misogynistic and racist. Particularly on the racism side it's not really even fair to say he was 'of his time', it seems to go beyond that.
And it's all there in the fiction. Fear of the other, racist tropes about clothing and appearance and mistrust of women. The works are pretty amazing, he spins an atmosphere so well. His ideas of horrors beyond time and space are well realised (with a lot of emphasis on what is not seen) and his dreamy fantasy sequences really work and draw me into a dreamlike state. But they're all run through with racist stereotypes about people (or demons) with darker skin or racialised features.
Does this mean no Cthulu for anyone? I don't believe that's a good answer either, but I also don't believe one should consume the art in ignorance.
(And I very much enjoyed reading Lovecraft Country a few years back)
Some authors are indeed very hard to separate from their work, and Lovecraft is one of them.
I still enjoy reading him, but I always struggle reading his passages about mongrels, halfbreeds or dark skinned people being evil or deceitful, because that's what he truly believed. So yes, it flowed into what he wrote.
A much less odious -- and better! -- writer who I also had trouble with was Jack London, who also wrote some racist descriptions of blacks and Native Americans, doubly troubling because he was a socialist.
> he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person.
I don't consider that to be something worth worrying about. On the contrary, I find the obsession that some have with moral purity and not ever supporting the wrong type of person to be a serious mark of immaturity. Every person, without exception, is a collection of both good and bad traits. I believe that the adult thing to do is to encourage and reward the good, while discouraging and punishing the bad. When I support an artist's work, I do not thereby endorse everything that person does. I think that the desire to reduce everyone to "good guy" or "bad guy" (and acting towards them accordingly) is literally the sort of thing one would expect from a child, not an adult who has learned to have some nuance in thinking.
I had a similar author shock when I learned James Herriot’s books were not the autobiographies I thought they were but instead were the fictionalized compilations of stories from multiple veterinarians. I had such a great time reading the books as a young man and was dismayed to learn they weren’t authentic. I appreciated learning the truth but wondered if perhaps believing the lie would’ve been better for something relatively unimportant.
A practising vet introduced me to Herriot. He told me they were like PG Wodehouse but with animals.
Surely the enjoyment they provided was that counts: why stress out over "authenticity."
(Banksy comes to mind for some reason: he vandalises property over various causes and no one questions his authenticity. Does anyone think he's suffered like the caricatures he depicts?)
I think they remain enjoyable even as fictional; I just would’ve preferred having them described that way to me at the start rather than the pretense of them being autobiographical.
I dunno. In the case of Herriot, whose books I utterly love, I only half believed in my teenage years they were truly autobiographical (too funny, too neat to be true), and I wasn't surprised when I found they weren't. Well, they have some tidbits from his actual life, but yeah, a blend of multiple stories, some from others, some made up.
I still believe they are undiminished as books and enjoy them from time to time.
Some things hit harder when you know stuff from his real life, for example those stories about depressed people (I remember the story of the young man who takes his own life when his dog dies, and how cheerful he seemed) and then I read the real Herriot suffered from depression. So I guess he was somewhat writing about himself?
Also, somewhat contradicting what I said above, the stories might be fictional but they ring "true" of the English countryside and the farmers of the transitional time Herriot describes. That the stories aren't true doesn't detract from that, because they ring true. It's a bit what American author Tim O'Brien explores in his writings, that verosimilitude can be as important, if not more, than actual truth.
Excellent books, full of understated spectacle and really excellent wordplay. If you get into them you may want to pick up "A Sea of Words" as a guide to some of the more esoteric terminology. Pretty much guaranteed you'll be stumped quite a few times in every book.
One of the great things about reading on the Kindle is that you can just highlight the esoteric words and the dictionary will explain it to you. Or you can use wikipedia if you need more info.
It's genuinely a great feature, especially when reading in non-native languages. (Can also translate the words then as needed)
That can be difficult, depending on who the "author" may be.
I still love Apple, even though Steve Jobs was a ... shall we say ... complicated ... man; but I have a problem, watching certain movies or TV shows, because the actors or producers got up to some unsavory hijinks.
It’s Jack talking through his hat again. I think he’s trying to determine if a woman is married or not and when it turns out they having a roving eye, he conflates “porcupine” (no idea what a porcupine-lay might be) with “concubine”.
As a percentage, most of my 'reading' has been outputs of frontier AI models. Need to increase my ratio of consuming human-written and human-produced text. Sometimes I fear drifting away from the 'core reality' of everyday life here in the US Midwest given how much I use AI.
I had no idea floccinaucihipilification was a real word. I saw it in a fake spelling bee for a commercial decades ago and assumed it was just a comically long fake word.
I find it difficult to understand the immaturity of not being able to separate the art and artist. It’s really not difficult. I think some of it is performative for signaling to one’s peers that they are on the “right side” of some issue or imagined virtue.
It's not about immature people being unable to separate art from artist because it's difficult. The issue is whether it's the right thing to do.
I feel pretty confident that I could describe to you a case (either real or hypothetical) where you would reject an artist based on their personal behavior, rather than their art. You would find it quite difficult in such a case to separate the two.
So the question is where to draw the line, and everyone answers that question differently.
Forgetting the infelicities of Patrick Russ is reasonable because he's both dead and his estate isn't (to my knowledge) funneling money from the sale of his books to odious causes. Would that I could say the same about other authors.
>O’Brian as “an artificer” whose work lacked the “frisson” one finds “in the presence of creative greatness”
Absolutely zero idea what that even means. The books are wonderful as escapist superhero stuff, as an entry into British history and as a study of human relationships. "Jane Austen on the high seas" isn't far from the truth. The books track an incredible friendship, a couple of hard-won marriages and the meaning of work. A lot of what I learned/ think about the management of multi-person projects is influenced by Jack Aubrey: you don't necessarily have to be right, but you have to decide if you're going to lead. And trying to manage a team larger than can fit in a longboat is a hard road to choose.
The article skips my favorite funny line, "Your friend has a singular genius for striking the wrong note."
(I don't agree)
I was curious if his family ever wrote about him and his son Richard Russ did in below article. I think this gives a good insight into how his son felt about his father, and particularly how his mother felt until her death.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/28/fiction.film
Too many good novels that weren't written by dispicable people.
Woody Allen films are very much soaked through with Woody Allen. I don't get the sense that O'Brian's books are to the same degree.
As a teen I voraciously read my way through the Belgariad, and later the Malloreon, Elenium and the Tamuli.
Shocked to learn that Eddings and his wife were both convicted and jailed for child abuse prior to writing those novels.
I think books have a firewall between the author and the characters on the page. Actors, however, are a different matter. They are the medium.
After listening to him read for about 30 seconds, I pulled onto the shoulder of 101 around Ames lab, shut down my car and just listened to him. I'd never before heard someone give voice to the English language in what sounded to me as such a profoundly perfect form. I remember thinking that I'd love to have heard him read Shakespeare.
I appreciate the post. I had no idea he was such a flawed person, and it's illuminating to learn that. But it doesn't affect my happy memory of hearing my native tongue (if I may claim that, even though I'm American) employed with such superlative skill.
Maybe I should look into training an AI in the audio style of Patrick O’Brian and have it read Shakespeare for me.
About 15 years ago, I decided to know as little as possible about the musicians/artists/writers whose work I was consuming, because I didn't want my enjoyment of their work to be influenced or spoiled by what I knew about them (even superficial things, e.g., how they looked).
I remember mentioning that to a co-worker, when discussing a band I had just learned about and enjoyed, and he pointed out that by insisting on maintaining ignorance, I could be funding a very bad person. I figured if the person was bad enough, the information would get to me somehow.
I think it is best to appreciate an artist's creation and leave it at that. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
Take H.P. Lovecraft. Very big name in supernatural horror, created Great Cthulu and various other tropes that survive and are influential to today. Famously misogynistic and racist. Particularly on the racism side it's not really even fair to say he was 'of his time', it seems to go beyond that.
And it's all there in the fiction. Fear of the other, racist tropes about clothing and appearance and mistrust of women. The works are pretty amazing, he spins an atmosphere so well. His ideas of horrors beyond time and space are well realised (with a lot of emphasis on what is not seen) and his dreamy fantasy sequences really work and draw me into a dreamlike state. But they're all run through with racist stereotypes about people (or demons) with darker skin or racialised features.
Does this mean no Cthulu for anyone? I don't believe that's a good answer either, but I also don't believe one should consume the art in ignorance.
(And I very much enjoyed reading Lovecraft Country a few years back)
I still enjoy reading him, but I always struggle reading his passages about mongrels, halfbreeds or dark skinned people being evil or deceitful, because that's what he truly believed. So yes, it flowed into what he wrote.
A much less odious -- and better! -- writer who I also had trouble with was Jack London, who also wrote some racist descriptions of blacks and Native Americans, doubly troubling because he was a socialist.
I don't consider that to be something worth worrying about. On the contrary, I find the obsession that some have with moral purity and not ever supporting the wrong type of person to be a serious mark of immaturity. Every person, without exception, is a collection of both good and bad traits. I believe that the adult thing to do is to encourage and reward the good, while discouraging and punishing the bad. When I support an artist's work, I do not thereby endorse everything that person does. I think that the desire to reduce everyone to "good guy" or "bad guy" (and acting towards them accordingly) is literally the sort of thing one would expect from a child, not an adult who has learned to have some nuance in thinking.
Does your friend use a smartphone?
He could be funding very bad people.
https://voiceofenvironment.com/2019/06/21/conflict-minerals-...
Surely the enjoyment they provided was that counts: why stress out over "authenticity."
(Banksy comes to mind for some reason: he vandalises property over various causes and no one questions his authenticity. Does anyone think he's suffered like the caricatures he depicts?)
I still believe they are undiminished as books and enjoy them from time to time.
Some things hit harder when you know stuff from his real life, for example those stories about depressed people (I remember the story of the young man who takes his own life when his dog dies, and how cheerful he seemed) and then I read the real Herriot suffered from depression. So I guess he was somewhat writing about himself?
Also, somewhat contradicting what I said above, the stories might be fictional but they ring "true" of the English countryside and the farmers of the transitional time Herriot describes. That the stories aren't true doesn't detract from that, because they ring true. It's a bit what American author Tim O'Brien explores in his writings, that verosimilitude can be as important, if not more, than actual truth.
It's genuinely a great feature, especially when reading in non-native languages. (Can also translate the words then as needed)
I still love Apple, even though Steve Jobs was a ... shall we say ... complicated ... man; but I have a problem, watching certain movies or TV shows, because the actors or producers got up to some unsavory hijinks.
As a percentage, most of my 'reading' has been outputs of frontier AI models. Need to increase my ratio of consuming human-written and human-produced text. Sometimes I fear drifting away from the 'core reality' of everyday life here in the US Midwest given how much I use AI.
I feel pretty confident that I could describe to you a case (either real or hypothetical) where you would reject an artist based on their personal behavior, rather than their art. You would find it quite difficult in such a case to separate the two.
So the question is where to draw the line, and everyone answers that question differently.