Jewels From Master & Commander

Master and Commander is so rich with psychological detail (not to mention shipping and warfare detail) that I kept a running list of phrases that I loved, I call them “jewels”, in my head. There’s a “jewel” on almost every page of Master & Commander which is why I whipped through it so quickly.

I was surprised at how exciting the battle scenes actually were – very hard to make that stuff leap off the page, I think – at one point, two boats swoop out from behind another boat – where they were hidden – and their appearance made me gasp aloud in fright. Literally!! This is all kudos to Patrick O’Brian, because this stuff doesn’t really interest me – in and of itself. It interests me historically, of course – as anyone who reads my blog should realize … but to be in the thick of a fictional battle, with the sound of the sails whipping down, and the clatter of feet on deck, etc. etc. … It is hard to make that come alive, and boy – does O’Brian do so!! But for me, the “jewels” were not just in the battle scenes, which have the feeling almost of an old painting come to life – they don’t feel like a movie, they’re grander than that. A painting on a wall of a ship at sea, a bazillion sails fluttering in the wind … suddenly come to life, heaving up, heaving down, the sound of the orders being thrown about emanating from within the frame … Love it. To me, the “jewels” come from the psychological. O’Brian’s observations, first of all, about how different people operate. He’s a psychiatrist of the highest order. But also – the long meandering conversations between James Dillon and Stephen Maturin – or Maturin and Aubrey … where you get the distinct sensation of two different personalities … talking about this, talking about that … disagreements, humor … God, I could read such conversations all day long. A feast for the mind and soul. Also, his observations on authority – and its potential to corrupt a man – seems to be a running theme. Jack Aubrey feels the isolation of his authority – knows it must be that way – but at times it is lonely. Maturin is more critical of authority – observes that it ruins men.

Anyway, here are random “jewels” I pulled from the book. I kept a running tally.

Page 36:

The tramontana had freshened and now it was blowing a two-reef topsail breeze, rattling the fronds of the palms; the sky was clear from rim to rim; a short, choppy sea was getting up outside the harbour, and now there was an edge to the hot air like salt or wine. He tapped his hat firmly on his head, filled his lungs and said aloud, ‘Dear God, how good it is to be alive.’

Page 42:

‘I have not eaten so well for many a day, nor’ — with a bow — ‘in such pleasant company, upon my word,’ said Stephen Maturin. ‘Might it not be that the difficulty arose from your own particular care – from your explaining in Spanish, in Castilian Spanish?’

‘Why,’ said Jack, filling their glasses and smiling through his wine at the sun, ‘it seemed to me that in speaking to Spaniards, it was reasonable to use what Spanish I could muster.’

‘You were forgetting, of course, that Catalan is the language they speak in these islands.’

‘What is Catalan?’

‘Why, the language of Catalonia – of the islands, of the whole of the Mediterranean coast down to Alicante and beyond. Or Barcelona. Of Lerida. All the richest parts of the peninsula.’

‘You astonish me. I had no notion of it. Another language, sir? But I dare say it is much the same thing – a putain, as they say in France?’

‘Oh no, nothing of the kind – not like at all. A far finer language. More learned, more literary. Much nearer the Latin. And by the by, I believe the word is patois, sir, if you will allow me.’

‘Patois — just so. Yet I swear the other is a word. I learnt it somewhere,’ said Jack. ‘But I must not play the scholar with you, sir, I find. Pray, is it very different to the ear, the unlearned ear?’

‘As different as Italian and Portugese. Mutually incomprehensible – they sound entirelly unalike. The intonation of each is in an utterly different key. As unlike as Gluck and Mozart.’

Page 130:

‘You know Lord Nelson, sir?’

‘I had the honour of serving under him at the Nile,’ said Jack, ‘and of dining in his company twice.’ His face broke into a smile at the recollection.

‘May I beg you to tell me what kind of a man he is?’

‘Oh, you would take to him directly, I am sure. He is very slight – frail – I could pick him up (I mean no disrespect) with one hand. But you know he is a very great man directly. There is something in philosophy called an electrical particle, is there not? A charged atom, if you follow me. He spoke to me on each occasion. The first time it was to say, “May I trouble you for the salt, sir?” — I have always said it as close as I can to his way ever since – you may have noticed it. But the second time I was trying to make my neighbour, a soldier, understand our naval tactics – weather gage, breaking the line, and so on – and in a pause he leant over with such a smile and said, “Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.” I shall never forget it: never mind manoeuvres, always go at ’em. And at the same time dinner he was telling us all how someone had offered him a boat-cloak on a cold night and he had said no, he was quite warm – his zeal for his King and country kept him warm. It sounds absurd, as I tell it, does it not? And was it another man, any other man, you would cry out “oh, what pitiful stuff” and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm, but with him you feel your bosom glow, and – now what in the devil’s name is it, Mr Richards? Come in or not, there’s a good fellow. Don’t stand in the door like a God-damned Lenten cock.’

Page 167:

Dinner was rather a stiff, formal entertainment to begin with, although it was lit by a splendid Byzantine silver hanging lamp, taken by Dillon out of a Turkish galley, and although it was lubricated by uncommonly good wine, for Dillon was well-to-do, even wealthy, by naval standards. Everyone was unnaturally well behaved: Jack was to give the tone, as he knew very well – it was expected of him, and it was his privilege. But this kind of deference, this attentive listening to every remark of his, required the words he uttered to be worth the attention they excited – a wearing state of affairs for a man accustomed to ordinary human conversation, with its perpetual interruption, contradiction and plain disregard. Here everything he said was right; and presently his spirits began to sink under the burden.

Page 169:

‘Or take me,’ said Jack. ‘I am called captain, but really I am only a master and commander.’

‘Or the place where the men sleep, just for’ard,’ said the purser, pointing. ‘Rightly speaking, and official, ’tis the gun-deck, though there’s never a gun on it. We call it the spar-deck – though there’s no spars, neither – but some say the gun-deck still, and call the right gun-deck the upper-deck. Or take this brig, which is no true brig at all, not with her square mainsail, but rather a sorts of snow, or a hermaphrodite.’

‘No, no, my dear sir,’ said James Dillon, ‘never let a mere word grieve your heart. We have nominal captain’s servants who are, in fact, midshipmen; we have nominal able seamen on our books who are scarcely breeched – they are a thousand miles away and still at school; we swear we have not shifted any backstays, when we shift them continually; and we take many other oaths that nobody believes – no, no, you may call yourself what you please, so long as you do your duty. The Navy speaks in symbols, and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.’

Page 172:

Ditto weather: but the sun sank towards a livid, purple, tumescent cloud-bank piled deep on the western horizon, and it was clear to every seaman aboard that it was not going to remain ditto much longer. The seamen, sprawling abroad on the fo’c’sle and combing out their long hair or plaiting it up again for one another, kindly explained to the landmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night ahead.

Page 198:

‘There are times when I am not altogether just,’ said James, reaching for his glass. ‘I am too touchy, I know; but sometimes, when you are surrounded with Proddies and you hear their silly underbred cant, you fly out. And since you cannot fly out in one direction, you fly out in another. It is a continual tension, as you ought to know, if anyone.’

Stephen looked at him very attentively, but said nothing.

‘You knew I was a Catholic?’ said James.

‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘I was aware that some of your family were, of course; but as for you … Do you not find it puts you in a difficult position?’ he asked, hesitantly. ‘With that oath … the penal laws …?’

‘Not in the least,’ said James. ‘My mind is perfectly at ease, as far as that is concerned.’

‘That is what you think, my poor friend,’ said Stephen to himself, pouring out another glass to hide his expression.

Page 202 (Stephen writes in his diary):

It has often seemed to me that towards this period (in which we all three lie, more or less) men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck iunto them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or a channel), until he is lost in his mere character – persona – no longer human, but an accretion of qualities, belonging to this character. James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd -= will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority.

Page 257:

‘No. What is commonly called discipline is quite strict with us. What I mean is something else – the intermediate terms, they might be called. A commander is obeyed by his officers because he is himself obeying; the thing is not in its essence personal, and so down. If he does not obey, the chain weakens. How grave I am, for all love. It was that poor unlucky soldier at Mahon I was thinking of brought all this morality into my mind. Do you not find it happens very often, that you are gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?’

Page 276 (this might be my favorite jewel):

‘Mr Babbington,’ he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. ‘Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?’

Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact a valid accusation. He reddened and said, ‘I don’t know, sir.’.

Page 278:

‘That,’ he said, a little greasy from bacon, ‘that was a point that exercised my mind a good deal during your absence. Would my loblolly boy pay the men back in their own coin? Would they return to their persecution of him? How quickly could he come by a new identity?’

‘Identity?’ said Jack, comfortably pouring out more coffee. ‘Is not identity something you are born with?’

‘The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him – for each, of course, affects the other continually. A reciprocal fluxion, sir. There is nothing absolute about this identity of mine. Were you, you personally, to spend some days in Spain at present you would find yours change, you know, because of the general opinion there that you are a false harsh brutal murdering villain, an odious man.’

‘I dare say they are vexed,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘And I dare say they call me Beelzebub. But that don’t make me Beelzebub.’

‘Does it not? Does it not? Ah?’

Page 284, Stephen’s thought process again:

‘However, I shall oblige him to take a black draught this evening – that at least I can do – and some comfortable mandragora; and in my diary I shall write “JD, required to play Iscariot either with his right hand or with his left, and hating the necessity (the absolute necessity), concentrates all this hatred upon poor JA, which is a remarkable instance of the human process; for, in fact, JD does not dislike JA at all – far from it.’

Page 286:

He would very much have liked to ask Stephen Maturin the reasons for this failure; he would very much have liked to talk to him on indifferent subjects and to have played a little music; but he knew that an invitation to the captain’s cabin was very like an order, if only because the refusing of it was so extraordinary – that had been borne in upon him very strongly the other morning, when he had been so amazed by Dillon’s refusal. Where there was no equality there was no companionship: when a man was obliged to say ‘Yes, sir’, his agreement was of no worth even if it happened to be true. He had known these things all his service life; they were perfectly evident; but he had never thought they would apply so fully, and to him.

Page 287:

… that dormouse, lovebed age that so clings to its warm hammock …

(I love that, God I love that)

Page 306:

‘The man whose name I forget, the money-man, was an eminently curious study,’ said Stephen.

‘Oh, him,’ said Jack, with an utter want of interest. ‘What do you expect, when a fellow sits thinking about money all day long? And they can never hold their wine, those sorts of people. Harte must be very much in his debt to have him in the house.’

‘Oh, he was a dull ignorant superficial darting foolish prating creature in himself, to be sure, but I found him truly fascinating. The pure bourgeois in a state of social ferment. There was that typical costive, haemorrhoidal facies, the knock-knees, the drooping shoulders, the flat feet splayed out, the ill breath, the large staring eyes, the meek complacency; and, of course, you noticed that womanly insistence upon authority and beating once he was thoroughly drunk? I would wager that he is very nearly impotent: that would account for the woman’s restless garrulity, her desire for predominance, absurdly combined with those girlish ways, and her thinning hair – she will be bald in a year or so.’

‘It might be just as well if everybody were impotent,’ said Jack sombrely. ‘It would save a world of trouble.’

Page 310:

Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail – not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch – and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak.

Page 343:

The meal continued with considerations on the art of war, the relative merits of Mahon cheese and Cheshire, and the surprising depth of the Mediterranean only a short way off the land; and once again Stephen noticed the curious skill (the outcome, no doubt, of many years at sea and the tradition of generations of tight-packed mariners) with which even so gross a man as the purser helped to keep the conversation going, smoothing over the dislikes and tensions – with platitudes, quite often, but with flow enough to make the dinner not only easy, but even mildly enjoyable.

Page 367:

Yet within its confusion the Sophie‘s deck showed a beautiful pattern of movement – the powder passing up from the magazine and the shot, the gun-crews with their steady heave-crash-heave, a wounded man, a dead man carrying below, his place instantly taken without a word, every man intent, threading the dense smoke – no collisions, no jostling, almost no order at all.

Page 398:

He tucked the fiddle under his chin, tightening his mouth and raising his head as he did so: and the tightening of his mouth was enough to release a flood of emotion. His face reddened, his breath heaved deep, his eyes grew larger and, because of the extreme contraction of their pupils, bluer: his mouth tightened still further, and with it his right hand. Pupils contract symmetrically to a diameter of about a tenth part of an inch, noted Stephen on a corner of a page. There was a loud, decided crack, a melancholy confused twanging, and with a ludicrous expression of doubt and wonder and distress, Jack held out his violin, all dislocated and unnatural with its broken neck. ‘It snapped,’ he cried. ‘It snapped.’ He fitted the broken ends together with infinite care and held them in place. ‘I would not have had it happen for the world,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I have known this fiddle, man and boy, since I was breeched.’

Page 423:

‘I have been contemplating on emotion.’

‘Emotion,’ said Dr Ramis.

‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘Emotion, and the expression of emotion. Now, in your fifth book, and in part of the sixth, you treat of emotion as it is shown by the cat, for example, the bull, the spider – I, too, have remarked the singular intermittent brilliance in the eyes of lycosida: have you ever detected a glow in those of the mantis?’

‘Never, my dear colleague: though Busbequius speaks of it,’ replied Dr Ramis with great complacency.

‘But it seems to me that emotion and its expression are almost the same thing. Let us take your cat: now suppose we shave her tail, so that it cannot shall I say perscopate or bristle; suppose we attach at board to her back, so that it cannot arch; suppose we then exhibit a displeasing sight – a sportive dog, for instance. Now, she cannot express her emotions fully: Quaere: will she feel them fully? She will feel them, to be sure, since we have suppressed only the grossest manifestations; but will she feel them fully? Is not the arch, the bottle-brush, an integral part and not merely a potent reinforcement – though it is that too?’

Dr Ramis inclined his head to one side, narrowed his eyes and lips, and said, ‘How can it be measured? It cannot be meaasured. It is a notion, a most valuable notion, I am sure; but, my dear sir, where is your measurement? It cannot be measured. Science is measurement – no knowledge without measurement.’

‘Indeed it can,’ cried Stephen eagerly.

Page 452:

The moment the next gun sounded the master-at-arms took the chaplain away, and there was a pause, one of those great lapses of time that presently come to have no flow at all, but grow stagnant or even circular in motion.