An Entrancing Ego: Samuel Pepys

Man and husband, he's all there, harsh but sorry, troubled but obdurate, yet glad at the end of the day to be friends, "mighty friends," with his wife. The biographer has chosen well; the incident goes far to explain how she herself can put up with him, and her willingness, not to excuse the inexcusable, but to understand it.

That imaginative understanding carries her beyond Sam and Elizabeth to the people they lived among and a vivid re-creation of the world they lived in. What it must have been like to be Pepys's mother, for instance, and many another like her-bearing eleven children in fourteen years, always expecting, nursing, washing, burying, since only four survived to grow up. Tomalin devotes pages to the servant girls whom Sam felt up, who cleaned up the dirt and carried the chamber pots and laughed with Elizabeth when they spilled. On the wide screen, she makes the interactions between king and Parliament and the underfunded navy almost as absorbing as they were to Pepys, explaining in the process his dangerous loyalty to the king's brother James, Duke of York (who was a strong navy man). She redresses the Diary's animus against distinguished colleagues like Sir William Penn, whom he tried hard to impress but badmouthed out of envy. Throughout she has a Pepysian eye for the revealing detail, as in the anti-Catholic agitation that later entangled him: witness the procession featuring "an effigy of the Pope stuffed with live cats, to be burned at Smithfield."

For there was life after the Diary. Pepys was only thirty-six when he had to give it up, the close work for the navy and the night entries by candlelight having so "undone" his eyes that he thought he was going blind. It was his most intimate friend; to close it was "almost as much as to see myself go into my grave." Six months later, another loss: Elizabeth died, swept away by one of the sudden fevers of the time, and not yet thirty. Pepys himself had half his life to live, not without drama, in what Tomalin calls "the most disturbed years in England's history." Yet the end of the Diary leaves us "stranded," and the biographer as well, its "brilliant and troubling intimacies replaced [as sources] . . . by official papers, parliamentary records, letters and scatterings of notes." Tomalin's imagination, however, rises to the task.

In 1669 the euphoria of Charles's return had worn away. The reverses of the Second Dutch War could even evoke nostalgia for Cromwell's naval victories, as the Merry Monarch spent in riotous living the money appropriated for the navy. Worse, the queen Charles had imported from Portugal produced neither son nor daughter, leaving the Duke the only legitimate heir to the throne. James was Catholic; he had a Catholic wife; his children would be Catholic. Catholics as far as the eye could see. It wasn't surprising that when Pepys stood for Parliament with James's patronage his opponents called him "a Bluddy Papist." The imputations grew specific; five years later he was denying before Parliament "that he had any Altar or Crucifix, or the Image of a Picture of any Saint whatever in his House, from the Top to the Bottom of it."