Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
Voyeurism has become a common ailment in the West, turning biographies into best sellers and providing authors with advances in the millions.
My latest reading is Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin, winner of the Whitbread Award.
Samuel Pepys is one of the lesser-known writers of the 17th century who started keeping a diary on New Year's Day in 1660 at the age of 26.
Why, asks Tomalin. It is just possible, she ventures, that he knew and was impressed by the fact that both his employers kept journals. But they had reason for this, being high state officials who attended meetings and travelled. He, on the other hand had no such reason "coming from an undistinguished family, poor and without prospects". In preparing to keep a journal, she goes on to say, "he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously."
Which he did, producing six 282-page notebooks in which he covered not only his own life and escapades but important public events of his times: the Restoration, the plague of 1665, the Great Fire of 1666, the Civil War and the Protectorate.
Typical diaries of the 17th century were devoted to spiritual life, politics or accounts of travel and sightseeing. Pepys, however, "looked at himself with as much curiosity as he looked at the exterior world, weighing himself as he wrote a report on his own condition". He kept track of everything from the serious details of his work, to his erotic dreams about the Queen, his hangovers, his fears and hopes and his frequent quarrels with his wife. He also lists places visited by people encountered and chronicles contemporary history -- Londoners building bonfires to proclaim good riddance of a detested parliament or the festivities accompanying the coronation of the restored king. His is a tale of ambition and acquisition. When the diary starts Pepys has hardly £25 to his name; when it ends less than ten years later he has a fortune of £10,000.
The diary is history, writes Tomalin, though parts of it read like a novel, parts like a farce. Tomalin compares his fiction to that of Chaucer, whom he admired. Like Chaucer, Pepys was a Londoner who worked in colloquial language. While Chaucer put his anatomy of English society into poetry, Pepys put them in scurrilous stories and gossip.
In a simple and flowing style, Tomalin gives the story of Pepys's life including the many political scrapes, his relations with the king, Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard, his missions to Europe and his work on the Navy Board, and his appointment as secretary to the admiralty in 1673.
While Pepys delights in remembering the past and planning the future, "he is always conscious that now must be the best time to enjoy life: He conveys pleasure so memorably." He gives an unblushing account of the satisfactions of becoming successful and important.
With an eye to the 17th century and its historical events, Tomalin finds similarities with the present. Pepys covers "with rare effectiveness one of the key periods in history when a whole population is changing its allegiance. It was a movement comparable to the political wave that swept communism out of Eastern Europe in 1989, and like that wave it came out of a surge of feeling that had built up over a long period until it became an irresistible force."
The diary was for some time a secret, Tomalin writes, "nobody knew and nobody could have imagined that a young man in his twenties and thirties, building his career and pursuing his pleasures with unbound appetite, should have found the energy and commitment to create a new literary form, and that it should become a work of genius."
Yet it is no show of pretension; "when you turn over the last page of the Diary, you know you have been in the company of both the most ordinary and the most extraordinary writer you will ever meet."
