Читать книгу Caesar - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 4

It is a curious experience looking back from a distance of more than seventy years at the little creature who shared one’s name, bones, and indeed a good deal of one’s essential being, as far as it can be made out at all objectively. Curious and by no means entirely agreeable: I doubt if my present self would have liked the twelve-year-old boy who wrote this tale — he was certainly not very popular among his brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, that remote being and myself, his aged descendant, are linked by a common delight in reading: the boy read voraciously, often in bed, by the light of an electric torch. And when he was very young his stepmother, the kindest of women, took him to see her sister, who gave him the Reverend Mr Wood’s Natural History, a mid-nineteenth-century edition illustrated with a fair number of engravings. Since he was already something of a naturalist (an admired, much older brother had practically invented birds), the boy devoured the book, which was written by a sensible, well-informed, scholarly man. The boy was also something of an invalid, which interfered with his education and worried his father, a bacteriologist in the early days of vaccines and electrical treatment: the young fellow (pre-adolescent: a sort of elderly child) therefore spent long sessions in the incubator room, sitting at a glass-topped metal table and doing the simple tasks set by his tutor. But the tasks left a good deal of time unoccupied, and since it was obviously unthinkable to bring a book to read, the boy, by some mental process that I can no longer recall, decided to write one for himself, thus discovering an extraordinary joy which has never left him — that of both reading and writing at the same time.

It may seem absurd and pretentious, above all apropos of this piece of juvenilia, to say that writers, once they have experienced this intense delight, live fully only when they are writing fast, at the top of their being: the rest of the time only the lacklustre shell of the man is present, often ill-tempered (deprived of his drug), rarely good company.

PATRICK O’BRIAN

Trinity College, Dublin 1999