SAMUEL PEPYS: THE UNEQUALLED SELF, A Biography

THE FARCE, STRUGGLE, AND PLEASURES OF LIFE ITSELF

Samuel, a high official in the British Admirality, is worried about his young wife Elizabeth's relationship with her dancing master. He steals home from the office and is relieved to find Elizabeth and Pembleton merely dancing. But is Elizabeth wearing drawers beneath her skirts? He sneaks off to rummage through the dirty linen for evidence, finds nothing. Samuel retires to an ale house and one of his favorite strumpets, manages to fumble his hand up her bloomers to touch her "chose" -- in the British manner of reverting to French to describe what is south of the belt -- but someone in the street spies them through the window, and they flee hastily out separate doors. Samuel writes a sincere letter to his benefactor, the Earl of Sandwich, informing him that the Earl's recent sexual indiscretions have been observed in the highest places, pledging his own undying loyalty, but imploring the great man to be more careful, assuring him that he will hold these matters (which he has already discussed in the office) in the utmost confidence. Home again, he tells Elizabeth, and she informs him - perhaps not without relish -- that the Earl, in fact, has made advances to her, too, that she was tempted, but remained faithful. Samuel wins national praise addressing the Parliament for three hours on the state of the Navy. Samuel sails with the English fleet in 1659 to the Baltic to aid Carl X in his war with Denmark, is privileged, in 1660, to join the landing craft returning Charles II from exile in Holland and observes the royal dog "shit" in the royal boat: it "made us laugh and me think that a King and all that belong to him are but just as others are." Celebrating the king's coronation, he drinks wine and wormwood ale and sack, wakes in a pool of his own vomit and once again swears off drink, vows to live soberly, work diligently, save his money to buy a grand coach for himself and Elizabeth.

Are these details from some ribald, fanciful, farcical novel, laced with historical facts for the sake of verisimilitude? No, they are a true account of Samuel's behavior, recorded in shorthand code from 1660 to 1669 in the secret diary of Samuel Pepys (pronounced "Peeps"), in which this brilliant, shameless, ambitious, historically factual social climber spared few details to record a true picture of his life and times, a man who rose from the son of a tailor and a washerwoman to become a member of the English Parliament and First Secretary of the Admiralty.

The diaries remained a secret until the early nineteenth century when they were discovered and decoded by a scholar , but not until 1970 were they published in unexpurgated form, at a time when frank human sexuality was all the vogue and anybody who was anybody danced or at least sunbathed naked somewhere or other.

Now Claire Tomalin's scholarly and enormously entertaining biography of Pepys has placed the diaries in context with other existing documents of the time and set his life in perspective with the history of the tumultuous events of English history during his lifetime, from 1633-1703: the beheading of Charles I which so rocked Europe in 1649, the take-over of government by the Puritan Parliament with Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Republican England, the ultimate restoration of the monarchy to Charles II who dug up Cromwell's corpse and piked his head where it remained in public view for 25 years, the great fire of 1666 (which Pepys viewed from an alehouse), the plague that came and went and came and went.

Tomalin shows us a man whose diary is "the first account ever written of how young men with meagre jobs, sharp wits, and an appetite for experience live and work in a modern city." As well as their appetites for women who took "a cheerful pagan view of sex and its possibilities." She tells a life of "work, ambition, avarice, worldly pleasure in all its forms, jealousy, friendship, gossip, cheating and broken vows."

Finally Pepys' life in Tomalin's telling is as multifaceted as all of life and strangely modern, despite certain barbaric features of his times - where blasphemy could be punished (by the MP Pepys served as a clerk) by 310 strokes of the whip, branding, and the boring of the tongue with a hot iron. Yet Pepys character shows traits of twentieth century man as depicted in the fictional characters of Sinclair Lewis (Babbit, the businessman climber, always swearing off his vices), Kingsley Amis (One Fat Englishman, the shameless womanizing literary critic), John Updike (all the unfaithful Couples of his Tarbox), John Cheever's "Country Husband" fondling the baby-sitter, Andre Dubus's farcically voyeuristic husband of Voices from the Moon, Nabokov's Humbert Humbert's rationalized plotting to have the young Lolita, even Joyce's Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, snuggling up to his wife's feet at the end of his 600-page long Odyssey of a day.

Pepys was a ruthlessly objective observer of his own behavior - as ruthless as any of the above satirical authors' observations of their characters - and between the ages of 27 and 36 saw with his own eye and recorded in his own words not only the events of his society, but also the many contradictory features of human nature observed first-hand from within his own real-life character: hypocrite, opportunist, survivor, a crass and corrupt and comic buffoon, an eloquent speaker, a shrewd and capable administrator, clumsy womanizer who beat his wife - though getting as good as he gave - boxed the ears of servants, underwent the grueling removal of a kidney stone the size of a tennis ball with no anesthetic, watched with approval the execution of a king, then changed his coat to accommodate the reinstatement of that king's son.

Clearly the star document to which Ms Tomalin had access in the preparation of this book were the words of Pepys himself - the text is divided into three parts covering 70 years, with the 10 year diary segment filling nearly half of it. And throughout Tomalin cannot conceal her admiration of this respectable rogue and his indefatigable energies and love of life and all its pleasures.

In the end, if we read his diaries and this biography with open heart and reflective mind, perhaps Pepys' greatest achievement is to leave us with a question: How would we ourselves appear in such an exacting mirror as the one Pepys held before his own clear eyes? How do we really behave at work, at home, amongst friends, colleagues, associates, and neighbors, in our struggles to succeed and pursue our pleasures, in our heart of hearts?

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Thomas E. Kennedy's books include seven works of fiction (most recently the novel, KERRIGAN'S COPENHAGEN, A LOVE STORY, 2002, and the forthcoming BLUETT'S BLUE HOURS, 2003 -- both from Wynkin de Worde), four books of literary criticism, a collection of essays on the craft of fiction (REALISM & OTHER ILLUSIONS, Wordcraft, 2002) and several anthologies.

He is an American, resident in Denmark, and his stories, poems, essays, reviews, interviews, and translations from the Danish appear regularly in American and European anthologies and periodicals and have won O'Henry, Pushcart and other prizes. He serves as Advisory Editor of THE LITERARY REVIEW and International Editor of STORY QUARTERLY. You may reach him at:tek@adslhome.dk.

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