Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
By Claire Tomalin
Knopf, 470 pages, $30
Three hundred years ago next May, Samuel Pepys died near London after a phenomenally productive life of seven decades. During one of them, the 1660s, when he was in his late 20s and early 30s, he kept a diary reckoned by many as the first and best in the long history of that wildly variegated genre: about 11/4 million words, narrating 3,429 days in exuberant and unbroken succession.
That proportion–one decade diarized amid seven lived–poses problems for any would-be biographer. At its Greek root, “biography” means life-writing, and Pepys was a pioneer in the craft, setting down in prose at once plain, precise and passionate a running counterpoint of public events and private intimacies. Attending the coronation of the new King Charles II, he rejoiced in the costumes and protocols, in “the pleasure of the sight of these glorious things,” but celebrated so hard and drank so much that when he woke up the next morning, “I found myself wet with my own spewing.
Thus,” he concludes, “did the day end, with joy everywhere.”
Sturdily staying put in London during the year-long depradations of the bubonic plague, Pepys noted with surprise that in his personal life (work, wealth, friendships) he was enjoying “the greatest glut of content that I ever had; only, under some difficulty because of the plague, which grows mightily upon us.” A year later he tracked almost street by street the annihilatory progress of London’s Great Fire, where “with one’s face in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops–this is very true,” and “we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill, for an arch of above a mile long. It made me weep to see it.”
Between these Big Moments he sustained a narrative of more routine experience (meals, marriage, music, theater, politics, commerce, colleagues, clothes, gossip), couched in language that continually points up his capacity to savor all experiences twice over, to live them out and then write them down with (in the diary’s recurrent phrase) “great pleasure.”
Confronted with this plethora, what’s a biographer to do? How far should this single, spectacularly documented decade be permitted to dominate the account, and to overshadow the more scantily chronicled others?
In “Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self,” Claire Tomalin, accomplished biographer of writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen, and actresses Ellen Ternan and Dora Jordan, solves the problems of Pepysian biography by a design different from any predecessor’s. She devotes fully half her page count to the decade of the diary, and she makes the choice pay off plentifully.
It is in many ways justified by the facts alone. As diarist, Pepys timed things well. Setting down his first entry on New Year’s Day 1660, he guessed right from the outset that the coming years would prove pivotal for his country and himself. The restoration of the monarchy, after years of civil war, regicide and Puritan rule, brought a shift, in culture as well as clothing, from Puritan black and white to continental color, a recrudescence of the great pleasures (plays, parties, science, shopping, sex) that pervade the diary.
Pepys promptly acquired the means for pursuing them. A well-connected cousin who had helped orchestrate the king’s return drew Pepys early into the new government. There, by dint of diligence, cunning and a passion for particulars, he became (in a phrase that pleased him) “a very rising man,” ascending from near-penury at the diary’s start to prosperity and power at its end. The intoxicated onlooker at the coronation couldn’t have guessed that within five years he would become one of the king’s most astute advisers and one of the chief administrative architects (tough, efficient, obsessive) of the British navy, which would in turn, over the course of the ensuing century, shape and sustain the empire. Tomalin rings these changes skillfully, making clear what an important cusp the Restoration was, how sharply it ushered Pepys, and many of his contemporaries, “into what feels like the modern world.”
There are at least two ways to grasp whole so huge a document as Pepys’ diary. One is to read it straight through, more or less as Pepys wrote it (though he sometimes backtracked to make revisions): an ongoing life story whose outcome is endlessly deferred, since tomorrow is always another day. The other approach is to work the index (which, in the definitive edition, takes up a volume of its own), gathering together all the diary’s data on one topic or one person, in order to tease out links, implications, trajectories of emotion that may have eluded even Pepys himself. Tomalin balances both methods but proves matchlessly adroit at the second. She devotes some chapters to straight narrative (of the plague year, of the fire), others to subtle reckoning of specific themes: Pepys’ relations with the king; his habits and rhythms of work; his interest in science; even his relationship (in the chapter’s intriguing title) with “Three Janes”–three very different women of that name with whom Pepys sustained three very different friendships.
Tomalin’s triumph of collation comes in her account, spanning several chapters, of Pepys’ marriage: the imprudent but abiding love match, sealed at a church wedding when the groom was 22 and his penniless French bride, Elizabeth St. Michel, had just turned 15; the ensuing exasperations and jealousies (on both sides), and the infidelities (on his), which beset the union but didn’t break it. Tomalin, long skilled in the close reading of complex lives, manages to reconstruct from Pepys’ words not only his own experience but also Elizabeth’s, and even to surmise persuasively the feelings of the other women Pepys pursued. Extending sympathy and critique in every direction, Tomalin makes good on her pronouncement that the diary’s “great achievement is to map the tidal waters of marriage, where the waves of feeling ebb and flow from hour to hour and month to month.” No biographer before has drawn up the Pepyses’ tide charts as exactly and as feelingly as Tomalin does here. Later in the book, working from more scattered evidence, Tomalin offers a similarly nuanced, moving account of the decline in Pepys’ power, pleasures and health (though not his acuity and curiosity) during his final years.
At other times, Pepys’ signal gets somewhat muffled in transmission. Tomalin occasionally paraphrases or summarizes the diary where she might more profitably quote it. And her emphasis, from her curious subtitle onward, on Pepys’ “enthusiasm for himself” can be misleading. Though Pepys, as she shows, is perhaps without peer as a near-scientific observer and recorder of his own experience, behavior and emotions, the self operates a little differently, and in a way less prominently, in his diary than in many that came later. He is no self-psychoanalyst. He spends very little ink on introspection; he rarely lets himself get lost in the labyrinth of psychological cause and effect. Pepys treats the self as not maze but lens, as a means of seeing the world more acutely, of taking it in–to his mind, to his manuscript–more powerfully.
The pleasures of sight pervade the diary. Early on, Pepys praises a boy he knows who “like myself, is with child [i.e., bursting as though pregnant with curiosity] to see any strange thing”; often when Pepys encounters some new strange thing, he abducts it onto his page by means of a simple, fervent exclamation: “But Lord! to see . . . ” whatever it is he has freshly seen. In “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce worked the near-inevitable pun on the diarist’s name as it is commonly pronounced: he called Pepys “Peeps.”
In the end, Pepys stopped writing the diary because he feared, mistakenly, that he was going blind, and that his nightly work in the manuscript’s minuscule shorthand cipher was hastening his loss of sight. He wrote, in the final paragraph, that to make this ending cost him “almost as much as to see myself go into my grave.” Still, in that phrase, the privilege of sight persists past blindness and death. Who, after all, will provide this posthumous seeing? It’s tempting to guess that Pepys is envisioning not a celestial afterlife but an earthly one, achieved by means of ink and paper. Decades later, he bequeathed his diary to the library of his alma mater, along with the shorthand textbooks to help in its deciphering. Surely, eventually, someone would (as several did) see, decode, transcribe and perhaps even publish the text, inviting other readers to make of it what they might.
Tomalin has made much, and produced a book teeming, like the diary, with clarity, momentum and great pleasure. She has supplied the second-sharpest pair of eyes, the second-richest skein of words, to witness and assess this astonishing life. The sharpest and richest, as Joyce’s pun implies and as Tomalin confirms on every page, belonged to the diarist himself.
