GREENWICH never looked more lovely than it did last weekend, autumn in all its vermilion and isabelline brilliance parading through parkland around the Naval College and the Observatory. It is too far from London to be one of the unbearably popular resorts in the region, though tourists certainly do come to Greenwich - and handbag warnings in the pie shop in the village remind us that others do too, heirs to the footpads and highwaymen who relieved travellers to Kent of their temporary possessions and sometimes their less temporary ones too. But the area can absorb its modern visitors, as once it absorbed other, earlier visitors, as Kipling reminds us.
While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin, The tall Phoenician ships stole in.
We nowadays call Phoenicians Lebanese; and no doubt there were Lebanese too at Greenwich last weekend as there was a band of lardy, pallid Russians dressed in their chic manmade fibre dress me downs from the 1950s and looking just about as cool as the contestants in a Roy Orbison look alike competition. There were wandering troupes of Americans and French and Germans and of course the mandatory Irish laughing loud and happy, as the great flat Thames slid brownly towards the sea past the Royal Naval College, past Wren at his most sublime.
Those who see a Wren building from the outside must properly hunger to see the inside to see his grandeur and wit and his pretty raillery with trompe l'oeil and phantom columns: and for those who gaze avidly at the college, its graceful wings shimmering in the October sun beneath Le Notre's sumptuous parkland, the place they must ache to see most of all is the painted room, one of the great rooms of England.
Elegant declension
It was in that room, in that very, great room, last weekend that we gathered to honour that great writer, Patrick O'Brian who now in his eighties has finally achieved the celebrity he has so long deserved and never sought. (I cherish a letter he wrote to me in 1979, in reply to a letter I wrote to him asking for an interview: it was the most graceful and elegant declension I have ever encountered.)
But now fame is his, with the great and good coming to pay homage. It is at once a matter of joy and a source of mild and admittedly graceless irritation that this is so, for there is an odd pleasure to be got from worshipping privately at the shrine. And though one should be pleased that the word has spread, to be jostled where one once stood at one's ease can be irksome.
The guest list for the evening tells me that the American writer Stephen King was there; and Danielle Steele; and so were William Waldegrave MP and Nicholas Soames MP; and a sea chest of admirals from both the US and Britain. Other admirers - such as A.S. Byatt, T.J. Binyon, John Bayley - for whatever tragic reason - were not present; but our small joyous Irish delegation was, and it was a night to savour and to remember as the genius of Patrick O'Brian received its just acclaim.
One of the reasons why Patrick's genius was so long in being recognised was made inadvertently evident in a speech by William Waldegrave, which suggested that the primary subject of the 14 or so novels with which Patrick has illuminated the last quarter of a century was the courage and traditions of the Royal Navy. A groan of despair passed around our table at those fell and uncomprehending words, which could have been uttered by Jack Aubrey, so doltishly wide of the mark were they (Jack Aubrey is one Patrick's two superbly realised fictional characters - the other is Stephen Maturin who for all his naval brilliance is always getting hold of the wrong end of the stick). This is the kind of description which has kept Patrick so long confined to the maritime ghetto he does not in fact belong to.
Yet is easy to see why those eager to celebrate the traditions of the British navy would see the context as the subject of Patrick's novels; for in large part it is. But there is a larger part, the human part, applicable to Chinese and to Hottentot alike. A lover of the French navy can read Patrick O'Brian's novels with pleasure; though not, of course, with as much partisan pleasure as William Waldegrave. The pleasure the Frenchman would take is an altogether more catholic one; Patrick through his novels has dissected the tissue of human emotions - of love, between men and men and between men and women, of ambition, of greed, of loyalty, of jealousy, of duty - with a scalpel honed with wisdom and glittering with humour.
This is the simple but complex, apparently ephemeral but enduring fabric of Patrick O'Brian's novels. Each return to Patrick O'Brian is like reading him anew; as we discovered during readings over dinner, given with splendid grace, and a splendid Irish accent too, by the actor Robert Hardy.
Greatest body of literature
Every admirer of this series of novels about an English sea captain of the Bonapartist wars, Jack Aubrey, and his Irish friend and colleague, Stephen Maturin, declares; each novel stands - but never falls - on its own merits. Each, without exception, is a substantial work of fiction which would outlast the life of its author. But it is together that the works reach their triumphant and symphonic brilliance together the Aubrey Maturin novels constitute the greatest integral body of literature written in the English language this century. I would go further and say with certainty: they are the only novels written in English by any writer now living which are sure to be read in 2096.
Needless to say, Patrick does not inhabit Official Ireland. The Arts Council and the scholars of Anglo Irish literary academia are probably unaware of him. That irritating and smugly druidical contrivance, Aosdana, with its high priests of stately, self conscious Irishry, no doubt assembles its councils with his name never entering its collective wit. No matter. He will outlive the lot of them, and of us.