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An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Park, Clara Claiborne

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He comes down to earth, however, with a bump. The rhapsody concludes in the very same sentence with "a resolve to practice wind music and make my wife do the like."

Earthly folk, of course, can't live on air, and if we go by frequency of reference, food and drink are right up there with music. Over the years Pepys specifies the pleasurable consumption of twenty varieties of fish and thirty of meat and poultry. Anchovies, carp, caviar, crab, crayfish . . . , bacon, beef, brains, calf's head, capon, all the way to venison: "the best venison pasty that ever I eat of in my life," in "the best dinner 1 ever was at." Dining was a convivial pleasure, sometimes an intellectual one; this time he listened while his friends disputed whether "it was essentiall for a Tragedy to have the argument of it true," himself to be the judge of it next week "at the same place upon the eating of the remains of the pasty," ten shillings to be paid by the loser.

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To read such menus is to understand the prevalence of gout and kidney stones among those who could afford them. Rather than his birthday Pepys celebrated the anniversary of his successful operation for a stone "as big as a tennis ball." he had a leather case made for it and ten years later was still showing it around.

My wife had got ready a very fine dinner [soon she'd have a cook] viz. a dish of marrow bones. A leg of mutton. A loin of veal. A dish of fowl, three pullets, and two dozen of larks, all in a dish. A great tart. A neat's tongue. A dish of anchoves. A dish of prawns and cheese.

No vegetables are mentioned.

This is in the first month of the Diary; he is just beginning to feel prosperous, and he's out to impress his relatives-father, brother, uncle, cousins, and "all their wives." One cousin drinks and talks too much; Pepys is "as merry [another recurrent word] as I could frame myself to be in that company." Still, irritation is subsumed in satisfaction. There are poor Pepyses and rich Pepyses. He's going to be one of the rich ones, and he wants the family to know it.

The consumption is certainly conspicuous. Yet there is a winning quality in the openness of his satisfaction. The dinner is for show, but it's a good dinner, and we may be sure the host enjoyed it. His gilded parlor "doth please me well." "My new plate sets off my cupboard very nobly."

I fell into the Furnishing of my new closet . . . and so all the afternoon, till it was quite dark-hanging things; that is, my maps and pictures . . . and setting up my books . . . to my most extraordinary satisfaction; so that I think it will be as noble a closet as any man hath.

Reading unsympathetically, we may reflect that there's not much he does that isn't for show. The books are gilded too, and shelved according to height, to please the eye. Noble. As any man hath. The words imply, even crave recognition. But there's more here than a parvenu's display. He doesn't just collect-books, pictures, plate, even (see the Index) scientific instruments. He reads, admires, uses, genuinely enjoys them.

An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

Hudson Review, The, Summer 2004 by Park, Clara Claiborne

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