CARP can mean a rather purposeless freshwater fish or an equally purposeless complaint. So when I complain, so softly about The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature by Professor Robert Welsh, it is more than a carp. It is a sturgeon, a sturgeon which applies not only to Professor Welsh's otherwise seriously good and enduring work, which will demand a place in the study of scholar of body of that phenomenon known as literary criticism.
It is quite simply astounding to find that Patrick O'Brian is excluded from the Companion; astounding. Astounding but not surprising, but poor Patrick by this time must have become inured to such neglect - neglect not merely as an Irish writer, but as a great writer of serious work. He has been neglected throughout his life; his works - have been treated with supercilious disdain by the literary world as if they were a mere Cornuflatus revividus, and he no more than a Forester renewed.
They are not and he is not yet there has traditionally been barely a literary editor in the English speaking world who has taken his works seriously. Often enough they have been corralled in the corner reserved for adventure yarns, war stories, and period swashbuckling. He has done or said nothing either to deserve or ridicule this treatment.
Private life
He is diffident and reserved to an eremitical degree. If people do not appreciate his work, so be it. He will do nothing whatsoever to disabuse them of their errors; he will not correct their mistakes or cajole them for their failure to understand the profundity of his work. He declined to give inter views, refused promotional work, will discuss nothing about a private life which is as inviolable as a tabernacle.
Yet I have no doubt that his works will be read and cherished and enjoyed in a century's time when all the other literary forms of the latter part of the 20th century are quite forgotten. The impenetrable and self indulgent fantasies of magic realism, and the terse and conceited non novels of the Booker Prize shortlist will be as dated and unread as the works of Sir Henry Newbold today.
But Patrick O'Brian will endure. That thing called Irish literature has not produced a finer writer in the second half of this century; though he might go awardless to his grave, and though literary grandees might sneer at a literary form which has plots and character and comprehensible narrative, with barely an innovative fictive device in sight, he remains nonetheless a literary giant.
Politically unfashionable
Why is he not appreciated? Firstly, I suppose, because he is deeply politically unfashionable. He writes enthusiastically about a period and a cause which do not attract support from the literary beau monde. His novels are set in the British navy during the Napoleonic war; his heroes are for the most part British sailors, though his most unforgettable character is a half Catalan, half Irish naval surgeon and naturalist called Stephen Maturin. But even this creation does not rescue Patrick from suspicions of lack of political rectitude, for Stephen, though having been a United man, deplores revolutionary violence and detests Napoleon Bonaparte.
And that is perhaps the main reason why the intelligentsia have not taken to Patrick. He wears his colours on his sleeve, and his colours are avowedly anti Bonapartist; and the intelligentsia of the west still nurture affections for Napoleon, the prototype revolutionary despot for all his heirs this century - Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung; all the people, in other words, for whom so much of the intelligentsia have had a soft spot, before, that is, they become disabused.
Blameless democrats who heed public will never had adoring soirees in Bloomsbury as Stalin did; Trotsky, the thrice murderer of democracy in Russia, and the butcher of the garrison of Kronstadt still is warmly and Fondly remembered in the salons of the decorous left intelligentsia.
Sense of privacy
The truly wonderful thing is that intelligentsia is more favourably inclined towards even a Francis Stuart, who consorted with Nazis, because he had leftish republican credentials, than it would with Patrick O'Brian. Patrick insists that his political opinions remain strictly his own affair, and I cannot disclose solely that I know from private contact; but I will say that his scrupulous sense of privacy prohibits him from discussing a wholly honourable record in opposing the Third Reich.
He disdains publicity, avoids personal inquiry, and gets quite indignant if he feels intrusion upon that personal territory is occurring, even though the intrusion be wholly blameless. He wants to be judged according to his work; and that work is peerless, yet it remains critically unrecognised, both in Ireland and elsewhere.
It is true that a couple of years ago he came into vogue in London; but London fashions are a matter of hemlines. Knees, ankles, vanish, reappear. Certain respected writers and critics, A.DS. Byatt, Paul Bailey, have joined the ranks of his admirers, but he remains beyond the pale of university inquiry. No thesis has been written about his works; no young tyros are scribbling about early, late or middle O'Brian. If he is to be taken seriously anywhere, it will be in the US where they have stronger traditions of learned mariners than do the British. The naval scholars of Annapolis revere him.
He has written a dozen and a half novels about the British navy. Not since Scott has any writer in English produced such a thematic body of work; and they can be taken singly and enjoyed singly. But taken as an entity, they stand alone in the literature of this century; as his characters, Maturin the Irish Catalan and Aubrey the priapic, periodically scholarly English sea captain, stand alone also, surrounded by a cast of unforgettable characters.
Patrick O'Brian is from Galway. His first language was Irish. I trust the omission in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature will be rectified in its next edition.