I
Chroniclers
Oh yes, I’ve enjoyed reading the past years diary, & shall keep it up. I’m amused to find how its grown a person, with almost a face of its own.
—Virginia Woolf, December 28, 1919
The first thing we should try to get straight is what to call them. “What’s the difference between a diary and a journal?” is one of the questions people interested in these books ask. The two terms are in fact hopelessly muddled. They’re both rooted in the idea of dailiness, but perhaps because of journal’s links to the newspaper trade and diary’s to dear, the latter seems more intimate than the former. (The French blur even this discrepancy by using no word recognizably like diary; they just say journal intime, which is sexy, but a bit of a mouthful.) One can go back as far as Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary and find him making the two more or less equal. To him a diary was “an account of the transactions, accidents and observations of every day; a journal.” Well, if synonymity was good enough for Johnson, we’ll let it be good enough for us.
The idea of the diary as carrier of the private, the everyday, the intriguing, the sordid, the sublime, the boring—in short, a chronicle of everything—seems to have occurred accidentally, and not much before Samuel Pepys began what may still be the best-known diary of all. If he cannot be said to have invented the form as we now think of it, he very nearly did, just as he more or less perfected it within months of starting his book on January 1, 1660. The start of a decade always seems ten times as auspicious as the beginning of a mere new year, and the dawning of January 1, 1660, may have been just what Pepys needed to push him over the top of an idea that had been kicking about in his juicy mind for some time.
He can’t be sure that this will be the year of the King’s restoration, much less the decade of the Great Fire and the Great Plague, but he hardly needs those extra historical inducements to record once he gets rolling. He is a natural: he may not always write up each day before it is over (it feels good to know he can get twelve days behind), but during the next 3,438 of them he will miss giving words to only eleven. He sets to work in Thomas Shelton’s tachygraphy, which looks a little like Pitman shorthand and a little like hieroglyphics, and he keeps going for more than a million words.
Pepys passes the 1660s in the Navy Office, and is just close enough to great events to make his diary a part of history. But he is never about to leave himself on the cutting room floor of the scenes he films just for the sake of the bigger picture. When Charles II is crowned in Westminster Abbey, Pepys sees it all—except those moments when he is relieving his great “list to pisse”; his next morning’s hangover, the result of the evening’s festivities, isn’t left out either. To Carlyle history amounted to the biography of great men; to Pepys it consists of the advancement of Pepys. He may deplore the court’s sycophancy toward the King during tennis matches, and he may not record examples of his own influence with the pomposity of his contemporary diarist John Evelyn, but you don’t exactly see him turning down any invitations, either. On April 17, 1665, he realizes the King knows his name, and he feels terrific.
Pepys feels terrific so often in this decade of increasing prosperity that he can’t help but make a reader feel terrific, too. He is forever taking stock of himself, not in the spiritual columns of debit and credit that the Puritan diarists of his time are totaling, but in ones of earthly prosperity. And he’s almost never in the red. Birthdays, New Year’s Eves, the anniversaries of his successful kidney stone operation: they all make him pause and cluck about his own good luck. In 1662 Pepys delights to find himself “a very rising man,” and three years later he can’t believe the extent to which he’s made it: “Lord, to see how I am treated, that come from so mean a beginning, is a matter of wonder to me.” He realizes in 1667 that none of his old classmates at Magdalene College, Cambridge, has done any better than he, and he unabashedly puts down his joy. The diary gurgles like a full stomach and jingles like a full pocket. Never was there a man more difficult to begrudge his own vulgarity. His success has made him happy; and it’s come, after all, from hard work and calculation: “Chance without merit brought me in, and . . . diligence only keeps me so, and will, living as I do among so many lazy people, that the diligent man becomes necessary . . . they cannot do anything without him.”
Along with a great job, he’s got a swell wife. She’s prettier than Princess Henriette, so pretty that he’s jealous of first her dancing master and then her painting instructor. The Pepyses argue over the accounts, and they bite and scratch and belt each other, but they always call a truce and end up “pretty good friends.” He knows how to let her bad temper burn itself out by paying it no mind, and when he’s been too free with the servant girls she makes sure the next one they hire has plenty of pock marks. Even their most serious row, in 1668 over the servant girl Deb, pays some connubial dividends: “I must here remember that I have laid with my moher as a husband more times since this falling-out then in I believe twelve months before—and with more pleasure to her then I think in all the time of our marriage before.” This last sentence is one illustration of Pepys’s knack for stumbling upon psychological truths long before psychology was invented.
Goodness knows Elizabeth Pepys has her hands full, mostly because her husband’s always are—of the pliant flesh of servant girls and married ladies about the town. Pepys believes in substituting appetite for logic in these matters. He can forgive a woman for accidentally hitting him with her spittle in the theater, once he discovers how “very pretty” she is; and after he’s made an assignation with Deb he can take “great hopes by her carriage that she continues modest and honest.” He goes for “the main thing” with Mrs. Lane, but she says no, “for which God be praised; and yet I came so near, that I was provoked to spend.” He suffers the same fate when he reads L’Escholle des Filles, “a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for information sake.” He’ll even risk groping a girl in Saint Dunstan’s Church—and when she threatens to stick pins in him, he goes off and gropes another one.
Being a man of some taste and standing he finds it fitting to cloak his amours in a code of broken French and Italian. Of course, one needn’t be bilingual to figure out what he does with Mrs. Martin on June 3, 1666: “Did what je voudrais avec her, both devante and backward, which is also muy bon plazer.” Or what happens between him and Deb on March 31, 1668: “Yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and did poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh.” If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, this lunatic “secrecy” is a little bonbon virtue throws to vice. Its purpose isn’t concealment; it’s to give a little extra thrill to Pepys as he writes. When you’re twelve and someone offers to show you a dirty postcard, you’re interested. But when you’re told it’s a French dirty postcard, then, boy, you’re really interested. In matters of the flesh, Pepys was permanently twelve.
He is blessed with a child’s avidity for any new piece of entertainment, science, invention, fashion. He wants to know everything. His mind, like that of his spiritual descendant Leopold Bloom, runs away from the abstract and toward the ingeniously practical in matters scientific. He’ll discuss optics just after he’s discussed teeth; go see an experiment in blood transfusion performed on a dog; marvel at a bearded lady; and wonder how this Italian sport of buggery he’s heard about is actually performed: “Blessed be god, I do not to this day know what is the meaning of this sin, nor which is the agent nor which the patient.” He’ll even listen to the antiquarian Elias Ashmole tell him how many insects and frogs “do often fall from the sky ready-formed.”
He is eager to get it all into both his days and his diary: a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life”), a cockfight, the story of how his wife burned her hand or Mr. Townsend ripped his breeches. But, however vast his capacity to gather and swallow, there comes a day—June 24, 1664—when even his senses suffer a temporary overload. The short circuit occurs in the evening, while he is being shown through the King’s closet in Whitehall, “where such variety of pictures and other things of value and rarity, that I was properly confounded and enjoyed no pleasure in the sight of them—which is the only time in my life that ever I was so at a loss for pleasure in the greatest plenty of objects to give it me.”
He is what the next century would call a great booby. And his willingness to be one so freely is his genius. He wakes up and gets scared by his own pillow; sets his wig on fire; bruises his finger while putting the make on Mrs. Bagwell; hurts his thumb while boxing a servant. He’s embarrassed when a footboy catches him kicking a cook-maid, but not too embarrassed to tell it to the diary. He consistently confesses the same responses the rest of us pretend to have outgrown: he’s less frightened to walk through a graveyard when the ground is covered with snow; the painted dew on a still life of flowers seems so real he keeps touching the canvas to make sure his eyes haven’t tricked him. There may be a sucker born every minute, but an unselfconscious sucker like this comes along—well, it’s difficult to think of his equal since.
The diary stops as suddenly as it begins. Fearing he is about to go blind, Pepys quits it on May 31, 1669. In fact, his eyes recover, and before his death thirty-four years later he manages to keep a few more diaries about travel and political business. But Pepys’s great private enterprise is never really resumed after the decade that opened it comes to a close. It eventually goes with the rest of his books, all of them magnificently bound and cased, to his alma mater, Magdalene College, where it remains undeciphered until an undergraduate named John Smith transcribes it early in the nineteenth century.
On a visit to Eton in 1666 Pepys was taken with the self-preserving custom the boys had of carving their names in the window shutters. An entire Pepys Library now exists as his own imprimatur upon Magdalene. The six original volumes, the first one opened to January 1, 1660, are there inside a glass case. The library is open for a few hours most days of the week. Very quiet and extremely well arranged, it is the most incongruously decorous room in the world.
If you have a taste for cruel fantasy, imagine Pepys, after getting a reprieve on his eyes, being shipped from the old England to the New one, and made to live his life and write his diaries in Puritan Massachusetts. How long would it have been before he found himself in the stocks? Only if you have a very modest set of appetites, as Samuel Sewall did, could the task of writing a diary in such a time and place be congenial. Sewall is sometimes labeled an American Pepys, but this idea should be dispelled at once. First, such a thing is impossible (one might as well imagine Casanova in Kansas), and second, Sewall is not nearly so entertaining a diarist. Absorbing, yes, but in a quiet, homely way. To walk out of Pepys’s diary and into Sewall’s is to leave the music hall for the church recital. It’s got its pleasures, but one fidgets if one stays too long.
One can do just that, because the recital runs for fifty-five years. Sewall starts his diaries in 1674, a few years after he gets out of Harvard, and keeps them going through what—as becomes appallingly apparent from the diaries themselves—was a jolly long lifetime for that continent in that century. Sewall is a pious businessman and jurist who fills his book with quiet records of one man’s daily colonial round. Its readers find accounts of rainbows, squabbles among the children, changes in the weather (“a very extraordinary Storm of Hail . . . ’twas as bigg as pistoll and Musquet Bullets.”), and the occasional sudden excitement, like a fire during the church service.
His career in the courts lets us glimpse the dark underbelly of our forefathers’ probity. Sewall attends a multiple hanging on June 30, 1704. Upon the lowering of the scaffold, he notes, there was “such a Screech of the Women that my wife heard it sitting in our Entry next the Orchard, and was much surprised at it; yet the wind was sou-west. Our house is a full mile from the place.” Sewall himself, the only judge at the Salem witch trials to admit his mistake publicly, shows as much compassion as a magistrate sitting on the hard wooden benches of Puritan New England can. In July 1701 he must try Esther Rogers for murdering her illegitimate daughter; after the sentence is pronounced he has some harsh words for her, but adds that he “did not do this to insult over her, but to make her sensible.”
Dead children form a grim garland around all the volumes of his diary. He fathers sons and daughters regularly, and as often as not they die in early childhood. The reader becomes accustomed to lyings-in and funerals coming within a few pages of each other. On Monday, December 7, 1685: “About One in the Night my Wife is brought to Bed of a Son, of which Mother Hull brings me the first News: Mrs. Weeden Midwife.” This was Henry, who would live for just fifteen days. Sewall describes his funeral on Christmas Eve, carefully listing the mourners and ceremonies. Then he becomes reflective: “The Lord humble me kindly in respect of all my Enmity against Him, and let his breaking my Image in my Son be a means of it.” But this is not the entry’s last sentence. Another one reads, “Considerable snow this night.” You can hypothesize that he wanted to get his mind off the subject, or chose to see some sort of symbolism—maybe of death, maybe of burial. But, as likely as not, all that is at work here is the chronicler’s habit of recording whatever dominates his recollection of the moment, regarding neither shape nor proportion, but only his own avidity for noticing and preserving.
The drama of Henry’s birth and death is repeated over and over. A year later the baby is named Stephen; he survives for six months. And after that funeral, too, it is easier to list who came rather than what he felt. If there is something a little unsettling in Pepys’s childlessness—all that seed without any sowing—Sewall’s continual fatherings and buryings are eventually benumbing. There are too many to take in. It is only after his wife has delivered her fourteenth child, in January 1702, that Sewall ends an entry of thanksgiving with the words: “And it may be my dear wife may now leave off bearing.”
The terrors of birth rival the terrors of the plague. Measles and smallpox also infect the diary. On January 12, 1690, Sewall tells his eleven-year-old son Samuel that he should be ready to die from the latter, as nine-year-old Richard Dumer just has. Sam eats an apple as he listens, seeming “not much to mind”—until he says the Lord’s Prayer his father prescribes and bursts into terrified cries.
With so much mortality about, and with such a baleful view of Providence in the body politic, it isn’t surprising that Sewall gives considerable attention to dreams and omens. Accidents are seen as symbols and portents. When a can of water spills it’s a bad sign; and a broken glass becomes “a lively Emblem of our Fragility and Mortality.” Some of Sewall’s dreams, alas, are wasted on his personal modesty and limited imagination. On February 13, 1705, he dreams he is sentenced to execution, but all he says about it is that it was “a very sad Dream that held me a great while.” Two years later he imagines he’s been made Lord Mayor of London, “a strange absurd Dream” that leaves him “much perplex’d.” One can only contemplate what Pepys would have done with these two! During the first we would have felt the sheets soaked with cold sweat, and in the course of the second we would have heard him ordering the new coach and silver plate.
Copyright © 1984 by Thomas Mallon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
