Several Strangers
Page 26
The Times Literary Supplement, 1998
Carpe Diem
The Diary of Samuel Pepys (eleven volumes) edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews
If the authenticity of Pepys’s Diary were in doubt, what a piece of fiction it would seem – the work of a novelist of genius, more inspired than Defoe, franker than Smollett, deeper than Dickens, subtler than Proust. To support the theory, begin by pointing out how carefully the Diary is structured. It covers the ten years in which a young man is making it. His narrative charts a steady upward curve as he rises from nothing – just a clerk, with barely £25 saved up against trouble – to a position as a supremely successful administrator, courted, envied and admired, trusted and valued by the King; a man about town boasting a fortune of £10,000.
Then look at the choice of decade – the 1660s – with its unparalleled sequence of public events: the Restoration of Charles II, the Great Plague, the Fire of London, the wars with the Dutch, when their fleet struck panic into the English by sailing up the Medway, burning and seizing ships. Next, the panoramic account of London, laid out in brilliant flashlit views, with its river and river craft, streets and horses, alleys, hurrying servants, shop people, Members of Parliament, sea captains, beauties, theatres, gardens and palaces. Place, time and season follow one another in vivid novelistic sequence. Now it is the heat of summer, and a sweaty Pepys is stealing an afternoon off to take one of his unofficial ladies to Highgate for a fumble in a hired coach. Now it is freezing so hard that the streets are emptied of horse traffic but have filled up with football games instead; a woman slips on the ice and breaks her thigh as he walks past. Now it is May, and – certainly too good to be true, this – Nell Gwyn herself, ‘pretty Nelly… is standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock-sleeves and bodice’. Now it is July, and Pepys is by the river near the Tower, feeling ineffectually sorry for a group of women whose husbands have been taken by the press gang: ‘Lord, how some poor women did cry, and in my life I never did see such natural expression of passion as I did here.’ And now it is March 1668, and he is to address the House of Commons in defence of the Navy Board, having worked late into the night in preparation, giving himself last-minute courage with half a pint of mulled sack at the Dogg and a dram of brandy in Westminster Hall. So warmed, he addresses the full House for three hours and, according to the solicitor-general, ‘spoke the best of any man in England’.
Pepys appears as a brave, not a prudent hero. At twenty-two -before the start of the narrative – he had married a penniless French girl of fifteen; love always hit him hard and he declared later that he had been literally sick for her. When the Diary ends, although they are sharing a fine house with what he calls his ‘family’ of servants, his marriage is in tatters because of his persistent unfaithfulness, culminating in a passionate affair with Elizabeth Pepys’s young companion, Deb Willet. On discovering this, Mrs Pepys’s anger and grief are such that she does not wash for five weeks, a fact Pepys notes not unsympathetically, although he himself was relatively keen on soap and water. There are no children to distract her, and she swears vengeance, threatening to slit Deb’s nose, and extracting repeated expressions of penitence and promises of reform from her husband. Pepys has not only to dismiss Deb and swear never to see her again, but also write and tell her she is a whore. This she is not: it was he who corrupted her, and who is now responsible for the precariousness of her situation. Frightful as these events are to him, in his account of them he gives both sides of the case, like the good civil servant he is: he loves Deb, longs for her and fears for her future, but he also acknowledges that his sin is great and his wife is justified in her rage.
When he ends his diary, depressed and believing his eyesight is failing, he notes sadly that, although he has been seeing the beloved girl secretly, ‘my amours to Deb are past’. Within months of laying down his pen, his wife died, of a fever. What novelist would dare to shape events so?
But every word is true. And while many of the events that crowd one after the other through the pages are thrilling, the supreme feat of the Diary is its laying out of private human feelings and experiences, the whole spectrum from the grossest to the finest-spun. Pepys’s openness shocked the nineteenth century and is still disconcerting. Are we to laugh at a man who describes how he goes out to look for a woman and then praises God for not letting him find one? Or feel contempt for the way he uses Mrs Bagwell (a novelist’s name if ever there were one), the wife of a ship’s carpenter, for his purposes, while giving Bagwell contracts, all three well aware of the nature of the exchange? Are we to cheer him for his healthy sexual appetite, or pity his ill-used wife? The answer is, all these things, as in life.
The oddity in his accounts of sexual transactions is that, after the early years, he wrote of them in a private language made up of French, English, Spanish and Latin words: ‘jo haze todo which I had a corason a hazer con ella’; ‘I did the cosa con much voluptas’; ‘toccar ses mamelles’, etc. Since the whole Diary was protected by being in shorthand, there seems no reason for this special language, particularly as it is so easy to follow. It looks as though he adopted it, not as a protection but as a distancing device, out of some inner embarrassment. Something in his conscience – or his masculine pride – made him keep the record of his adulteries; yet he seems to have wanted to suggest that the Pepys who did those things was not entirely the same as the Pepys who recorded them – whether they were recorded only for himself, or for God, or for posterity. It remains a puzzle, if a comical one.
One of the greatest attractions of the Diary is that it is the voice of a young man, full of good humour, optimism, energy, ambition and commitment to his career. The buzz of enthusiasm sounds on every page. He is a meritocrat on the make, yes, enthusiastic in his hatred of certain colleagues, sometimes nervous of his great masters, but also scornful of their laxities. Often he works far into the night, but how he enjoys the great range of pleasures outside his work: music, which he composed and performed; the theatre, a passion; pictures, which he bought and also commissioned; books, devoured and collected; even science, for he was a member of the Royal Society. To these add his taste for rearranging his house and possessions, plate, clothing, furniture and money-boxes; an enjoyment of good food and good conversation, a discriminating interest in sermons, and an eye for landscape when he rode out of town. Few people have felt the fullness of the world’s possibilities so keenly.
He was also blessed with the sense that his life had a shape and a meaning. Each year he kept the anniversary of his operation for the stone, which he knew he was lucky to have survived. He records dreaming of his mother, and being much affected by the dreams, both before and after her death. When he visited Ashtead at the age of thirty, a large part of his enjoyment lay in his recollection of being there as a small boy, and walking in a particular wood where he first consciously experienced pleasure in a woman’s company. Nothing is known of the woman, a Mrs Hely, who may have been simply a servant, but in his galaxy she has her allotted place, part of the pattern of his life.
Pepys’s origins were humble, though the larger clan of Pepys had its successful lawyers and other well-to-do members; but he was the son of a mere tailor and a quite uneducated woman, and one of eleven children. Still, he was a bright enough boy to be noticed and plucked out of the family, sent to a grammar school, to St Paul’s, and on to Cambridge. As a schoolboy he watched the execution of Charles I and applauded it, which caused him some anxiety later. He was a thorough pragmatist in politics, and when a cousin, Edward Mountagu, became his patron, and was concerned in the Restoration, for which Charles II gave him an earldom, Pepys, who had clerked for him, was rewarded by being appointed to the Navy Board. There his efficiency, diligence and passion for understanding how things work made him the outstanding public servant he became.
After the end of the Diary, Pepys lived a long and richly interesting life. He did not lose his eyesight, but seems never to have attempted to renew writing in th
e same form. At his death he left it with all his books and papers to a nephew, with instructions that they should go to his Cambridge college, Magdalene, for the benefit of posterity. The Diary remained unread until 1819, when a scholar, one John Smith, was paid £200 to decipher it. Although he did it well, the editor, Lord Braybrooke, hashed and cut it severely for publication in 1825. This edition was reprinted several times, with additions over the years. Two larger, newly deciphered editions followed in the 1870s and 1890s.
Robert Latham’s eleven-volume edition of 1970 was the first complete one, based on his study of the original over a period of thirty years, and is surely as near definitive as can be hoped for. The Companion and Index volumes add significantly to the pleasure. Pepys’s language is surprisingly close to ours and presents few real difficulties; and whoever he thought he was addressing, it turns out he has something to say to all of us, even across three hundred years. What is it the best writers do? They infuse the world with their energy, making it more real, more immediate, more troubling than most of us can be bothered to notice most of the time. That infusion of energy, quite as much as the historical record, is Pepys’s great gift to us.
Guardian, 1995
* T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, 4 December 1922 in Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London, Hogarth Press, 1972), Volume II, p. 88.
* Quoted from Jane Novak, The Razor Edge of Balance: A Study of Virginia Woolf (Miami, University Press, 1975).
† Quoted from Novak, The Razor Edge.
* Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London, Chatto & Windus, for Sussex University Press, 1976).
* Quoted from Novak, The Razor Edge.
* Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 25 November 1908, Letters of Leonard Woolf ed. Frederic Spotts (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989).
* William Dunbar, Scottish poet (d. 1513), ‘London’, 1.16.
* Efts are small lizards.