Claire Tomalin: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

Reviewed by KEN LARSEN*

It's difficult to find the right word to describe Samuel Pepys, the most famous of 17th-century diarists.

"Libertine" sounds uncaring, but Pepys always cared for his wife. "Lothario" is too dashing, because Pepys often chased after the tawdry. "Don Juan" suggests repeated success, but Pepys often failed in the pursuit. "Philanderer" is too technical and dry. "Compulsive womaniser" is probably right, but Pepys was frequently racked with guilt about his conquests and alleviated his remorse by buying his unsuspecting wife presents as compensation.

We know all this because Pepys wrote a diary for 10 years from January 1, 1660, writing of many things, as Claire Tomalin says in her biography, including his bowel movements and ejaculations.

He wrote the six volumes of his diaries in shorthand and before his death hid them among his vast library, clearly intending they should be found, transcribed and distributed. He included near them a copy of Sheldon's Tachygraphy (speed-writing) which he had used for his shorthand. But no one over the centuries was aware of the diaries' key stacked nearby.

For various reasons, including the bawdy, the diaries were not transcribed and published in a full, unexpurgated version until 1970.

Even without the diaries Pepys would have been worthy of a biography. As a boy of 15 he had wagged school on Tuesday, January 30, 1649 to go to Whitehall and see Charles I, that royal actor, lose his head. Watching executions was a practice he would follow all his life.

He wore one of the first periwigs in England. He gave a first-hand account of the plague that struck London in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. He gave the imprimatur in 1686 to the greatest of mathematical works, Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica. He was possibly England's finest Secretary to the Admiralty and reconstructed the Navy as a body of professional sailors.

He was a consummate musician, exceptional entrepreneur, drank copiously and daily both wine and ale (and suffered dreadfully from stones). He was a public and historical figure whose role as witness to history and whose private life stand out in his diaries.

Tomalin has written earlier biographies of Shelley, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Austen. With Pepys she has set a public man in his private setting. The diaries are pivotal to her purpose. To them she accords the stature of greatness in literature, on a par with Chaucer, Milton or James Joyce.

Pepys' diaries are marked by the ordinariness and the vigour of their writing. Tomalin arguesthey show a man able to analyse his affairs while in the midst of them. Even when he is part of conflict or jealousy or political affairs, he is able to stand back and objectively view his performance and that of others.

Tomalin is at her best when setting the observations of the diaries against the everyday affairs of the period 1660-70. Her description of Pepys' earlier and later years lack the sparkle of her account of the middle years.

She reconstructs a life of Pepys before 1660 through his relationships with known political figures, among them Oliver Cromwell. She shows his rise from a mere clerk in the Admiralty to a position of power. But, comparatively, it is a flat account and lacks the engagement she shows in treating the diary years.

The first words of the diaries, censored in earlier editions, show a public/private edginess sustained throughout. Pepys begins, "Blessed be God", and complains, now famously and poignantly, "My wife, after the absence of her terms for seven weeks, gave me hopes of being with child, but on the last day of the year she hath them again. The condition of the State was thus. Viz. the Rump, after being disturbed by my Lord Lambert, was lately returned to sit again."

Once again Pepys' hopes for a child had been dashed - he never fathered a child. But right beside the dejection is an observation about the affairs of state. The Rump (Parliament) was about to sit. Tomalin makes much of the placement of private and public side by side, often incongruously.

She paints Pepys as an awkward man, often insecure, but with melancholic detachment about his insecurity. She could, though, have presented a warmer man. Pepys rose morning after morning to devote himself to music as he played on a variety of older stringed instruments such as the lute or viol, or on an ancient recorder called a flageolet.

She never points to a great irony about Pepys: that although he had such distance on himself and all things, he lacked humour.

He was proud and vain as someone who was once a servant might well be. He could be ironic and censorious about others as much as himself. But he couldn't laugh at himself.

In the end Pepys remained always a man of affairs as much as a man of affairs of state. He was a good reporter and throughout her work the reporter in Tomalin is clearly attracted to him. It is her fondness for him that allows her to shape again a figure who, though wanting to be part of events, knew how to live on their edge.

This biography has already been praised and won prizes, including the prestigious Whitbread. They are well deserved - but they don't indicate how engagingly Tomalin writes. Her work is never dry or stolid in the way biographies can be. It is a volume not easily put down and Pepys himself would have revelled in it.

Viking/Penguin $39.95

* Ken Larsen teaches English at the University of Auckland.