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Telling it like it wasIn the dear dead days almost beyond recall when I was living in California, a series of (as they now seem) woefully underfunded political campaigns were mounted on behalf of such men as Nixon, Goldwater, Humphrey, Pat Brown Sr., Lyndon Johnson and one or two others. The expression ‘spin doctor’ had yet to be coined but the type existed and there came the day when one such furnished his man with a sure vote grabber: “Be assured,” it ran, “you’re looking at a man who tells it like it is.” Overnight the telling phrase had blossomed into cliché. We watched their lips and every time the phrase escaped we were assured of just one thing — whatever we were about to hear would be a bill of goods. I don’t suppose, in fact, that anyone has ever told — or written — it exactly ‘like it is’. The criminal dictating a confession doesn’t know the whole truth (be it psychological, sociological, political-economical). The confessional memoirist — Cellini, Casanova, William Burroughs — is, of course, cranking up the bad guy factor all the better to gain the ultimately masochistic brownie point of shocking them moral majority folks. As for the conventional memoirs of politicians, astronauts, showbiz and sports stars. Ghosted or not they are all by Greed out of Whitewash. As Winston Churchill said: “Being a general is a safe enough occupation in time of war but when peace comes they all sell their Lives dearly.” If we except Harry Truman (who either told it like it seemed to him at the time or kept his mouth shut) just one man may claim truly to have told it like it was. Who was he? The English diarist Samuel Pepys. The entries which beginning in 1660 he made in the journal he maintained for nine consecutive years are arguably unique in their candor and objectivity — virtues for which Pepys, in one sense, can claim no credit whatsoever. Written in the highly efficient shorthand system then prevailing, the Diaries were never But why then bother? Why record the great events and the everyday minutiae of your life and times if the effort was to end up in an iron box? Well, perhaps Pepys had visions of recollecting his salad days (in 1660 he was 26) in tranquil old age. Perhaps he intended one day to produce a revisited, sanitized public version matching his friend John Evelyn’s. Maybe, given his perilous times, he wanted chapter and verse on where the bodies were buried. But far more probably, it seems to me, the answer lies in his all but schizophrenic character. On the one hand Pepys was a sensualist. He loved wine, women (and how!) and song. In the last of these regards he was a good enough singer (bass-baritone) and instrumentalist (violin, lute, recorder) to sit in with professionals. The painting of him as a young man shows him holding his own composition and he is on his own record as claiming that music was the ‘thing of the world that I love most’. Maybe. His own country often held pole position in his affections. And, even more frequently, women. The Diaries consistently note his succession of short-term encounters and long-running affairs. (How it was for him, in these cases!). They trouble him, these amours — he knows he shouldn’t, he loves his wife, but…ah, the fair sex! Meanwhile and besides there are the (re-opened and with actresses!) theaters and paintings and books and the latest fashions and the brave new world of scientific study the just founded Royal Society was making known. Ever curious, he could be actively ingenious. Pepys, the amateur composer, designed a specialized slide-rule dedicated to determining the overall volume and hence price of timber balks. He was on conversational terms with Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Robert Boyle and, sooner rather than later, his sovereign. But the other side of Pepys was that of workaholic and control freak. Taken on by the Navy Department (as it were), he in time came to run it. To that end he made himself an expert on everything that had to do with the financing, building, manning, provisioning, and sailing of a ship, man of war or merchantman. It was Pepys more than anyone who kept a waterlogged English navy afloat during a series of stand-offs with the Dutch. During his stewardship New Amsterdam had its name changed to honor Pepys’ top naval boss and the succession of vessels that, despite chronic budgetary short-falls, he caused to be built were the foundation of England’s sea-power — and hence Empire! — in the next century. All of this he achieved through sheer work-rate. Literally burning the mid-night oil, Pepys flooded Whitehall with budgets, memoranda, requisitions, schedules, lists and estimates. For him to have something down on paper was to be on the way to being in control. I believe that his Diaries represent his attempt to convince himself that he had some control over his own life: he was particularly good in years of terrible catastrophe. The disasters and chaos he encountered are almost irrelevant to his narrative. It is the life itself that grips us — and, as we wind deeper into it, overwhelmingly because, yes, it is identical to our own. How it was is how it is.Pepys lived in a world of inner city pollution and epidemic. Of traffic jams and vehicular breakdown. Where decorators were late to show up and missed deadlines. Where senior politicians, contractors and ward-heeling opportunists all around him took bribes as a matter of course. (He himself was not entirely squeaky-clean on this one). The latest sexual scandal — often involving the First Officer — was on everybody’s lips and in the broadsheets. Just across a narrow strip of sea was a foreign power dedicated to the nation’s overthrow…. One glory of the Diaries is that writing, most often when exhausted, Pepys set all this down on the fly. Off the top of his head and without a hint of ‘spin’ he puts the trivially everyday cheek-by-jowl with the universally profound. Trivial and profound often cross-dress and coalesce. Which is, indeed, gentle reader how it is. Here is a gallimaufry of an entry from July of 1665, the Great Plague year.
In the midst of life is…. Pepys. Chiding himself for his impulses to cowardice, greed, lust, sloth; fearful of what the top brass and the neighbors are thinking; privately proud of his moments of bravery, generosity and problem-solving intelligence; usually not quite knowing exactly what to think of himself, Pepys has involuntarily descended down to us as the absolute Everyman. He is you, me, the most three-dimensionally delineated John Doe in recorded History. Nine years of diary entries make for a lot of pages. Pepys’ off-the wall observations weigh in heavier than Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”. Pepys will likely appeal to readers of Patrick O'Brian's chronicles of the naval adventures of Messrs Aubrey and Maturin. But the second great joy is that, by their nature, they come in bite-size chunks. You can take them a day (or two) at a time. Available in a paperback format that is as scholarly as convenient they make for perfect bedtime, travel-time reading. You can jump in anywhere. 1664 is no bad place to start. Yuppie Pepys is on the rise and full of good feelings. And the Brits have just snaffled the real estate between the Hudson and the East and have no intention whatsoever of giving it back to any resident populations. Two particularly juicy years are 1665 (Plague) and 1666 (Great Fire), equally good places to start for an introduction to Pepys. There are several editions, but the best is probably Bell’s. A paperback edition is also being released in the US in May, 2000. Whatever edition you encounter, you will soon find yourself fascinated by the vivid contradictions of the familiar and the alien side by side in such lively pages. Buy and enjoy. Don’t put it off. Make a note in your diary. |
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intended for publication or even circulation among friends. And when, fearing he might well go blind, Pepys called a halt to the candle-lit summaries of his every day, he locked the journals away. They did not see the light of day or candle again until stumbled upon in the 1820’s. Another century and a half were to pass before a published edition was to do them justice.
