Penguins on Parade: The Shorter Pepys!

Some Penguin Classics are necessary compromises, and Robert Latham's fantastic The Shorter Pepys is a perfect case-in-point. The diary that Samuel Pepys kept from 1660 to 1669 is a great unruly sprawl, a mix of purely utilitarian jottings, longer and more personal entries, and set-pieces describing great events, so despite the genial and engaging voice Pepys brings to the written page, the unedited Diary makes for some very uneven reading. Latham's reduced version - comprising about a third of the original - was first published 1985 and first brought out as a Penguin Classic in 1993. With all due respect to my beloved Everybody's Pepys, this is certainly the best one-volume edition of the Diaries - it's only serious competition is in-house: Latham's The Illustrated Pepys from 1978.

Latham loads the volume with Pepys scholarship, of course, so the Introduction and the Notes are both interesting and extremely helpful for newcomers to the period - but as with any edition of the Diaries, it's the man at center stage who'll keep those newcomers reading. Pepys was a rising man in government work when he started his diary - he continuously mentions his net worth, and he's clearly proud of his new connections with powerful men at the court of Charles II. But the Diary's personal sagas upstage its political content every time, as when Pepys discovers a cache of letters in which his brother John uses the most foul and hilarious language to describe him. Pepys broods over his discovery, and when he's next in the same room with John and their peacemaking father, the brooding erupts into a frightful row:

 21 March 1664

Up; and it snowing this morning a little, which from the mildness of the winter and the weather beginning to be hot and the summer to come on apace is a little strange to us - I did not go abroad, because of my tumour, for fear it shall rise again; but stayed within and by and by my father came, poor man, to me, and my brother John; after much talk and taking them up to my chamber, I did there after some discourse bring in my business of anger with John and did before my father read all his roguish letters; which troubled my father mightily, especially to hear me say what I did, against my allowing anything for the time to come to him out of my own purse, and other words very severe - while he, like a simple rogue, made very silly and churlish answers to me, not like a man of any goodness or wit - at which I was as much disturbed as the other.

The unconscious genius of Pepys is that it never occurs to him not to include such scenes - virtually any other diarist would succumb to the urge to censor themselves. Instead of doing that, Pepys always just writes himself, in the round, as the beguiling combination of high-minded motives and trivial daily realities that most brisk, engaged humans are (though they seldom want to admit it). And our author is never aware of the weird dichotomies he's forever preserving on the page, as when he and his colleagues face international threat:

8 June 1667

Up and to the office, where all the news this morning is that the Dutch are come with a fleet of 80 sail to Harwich, and that guns were heard plain by Sir W. Rider's people at Bednall Greene all yesterday noon. So to the office we all, and sat all the morning; and then home to dinner - where our dinner, a ham of French Bacon boiled with pigeons - an excellent dish. Here dined with us only W. Hewers and his mother. After dinner to the office again, where busy till night; and then home to read a little and then to bed.

The threat of invasion, and a delicious dish of French Bacon - and no hint from the entry itself as to which one loomed the larger in the author's recall when he sat down to make this entry. Little details like supper and dinner and road conditions and weather crop up constantly in the Diary - they're a very large part of its charm, even when some of those details foreshadow disappointment for the knowing reader:

24 December 1668

A cold day. Up and to the office, where all the morning alone at the office, nobody meeting, being the Eve of Christmas. At noon home to dinner and then to the office, busy all the afternoon, and at night home to supper; and it being now very cold, and in hopes of a frost, I begin this night to put on a Wastecoate, it being the first winter in my whole memory that I ever stayed till this day before I did so. So to bed, in mighty good humour with my wife, but sad in one thing, and that is for my poor eyes.

That 'my poor eyes would be gloomily prophetic, of course. After a decade of keeping his diary and quite obviously enjoying it, Pepys came to the conclusion that he was in danger of losing his eyesight from constant scribbling, scribbling, scribbling. He decided to dictate all his future writing (a decision immeasurably helped by being able to afford an amanuensis) - which meant, obviously, that his diary, with its brutally honest assessments of some of the most powerful men in the country, and with its sexual irresponsibility and openness, would have to come to an end. Pepys was sad about that - he refers to it almost as seeing his own self laid in the grave - and perhaps wrong as well: I'm thinking he could have kept generating his diary without hurting his eyes at all. If true, that's a bitter thing for any Pepysian to contemplate, since we'd all very much like another decade of entries.

Still, we can be grateful for what we have, and grateful that Penguin Classics corrected as long-standing oversight by introducing Pepys to the Classics line in this nifty abridgement. If you're already a Pepys fan, this will be the volume you end up carrying around with you - and if you're just discovering Pepys, this volume is pretty much the perfect vessel of that discovery - like Pepys himself, The Shorter Pepys is bright, accessible, and fat - but not too fat.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys!

Our book today is the Diary of Samuel Pepys, kept by him for almost a decade, from 1549 to 1559, and of course so infinitely interesting a work cannot be encompassed in any one entry, even here at Stevereads where we love his work abidingly. It isn’t just that the diary is vast, although it is encouragingly large; it’s that Pepys is such a remarkable narrator of himself, so acutely observant and yet so wholly confessional – he resists complete analysis in the same way that Shakespeare does, and he likewise draws out the same endless curiosity.

But we can chip away at his happy monument here and there, always glad to be in his company even when he’s truthfully reporting himself at his most blockheaded or hypocritical.

We could take as our theme, for instance, a character mentioned more frequently in the Diary than any other: our author’s wife. They married very young – he was twenty-two and she was just fifteen – and since neither one of them had any money, we can presume there was some genuine affection binding them. Certainly by the time they began to make friends in London society they were in a more sincere kind of love with each other than all but a handful of the time’s couples – those friends could see it not in the smiling serenity of, for instance, the future Queen Anne’s marriage to Prince George of Denmark, her amiable dolt of a husband, but in the fiery emotions of their numerous fights. Pepys and his wife shared a childless bed until her death at age 29 (after fourteen years of marriage), and despite his numerous infidelities, their imperfect passion remained strong until she was taken from him.

Much as we love the Diary, much as we might have loved Pepys himself had we known him, we must say it: he couldn’t have been a particularly endurable husband. Partly this can be attributed to the era in which he lived: women were seldom educated and often thought of as a topical variation of children – and, like children, not quite human. The real pity of such a situation, of course, is to be reserved for the victims of it – Pepys was free to go to his office, to sit up late debating and drinking at a tavern or coffee house, to take in a scandalous new play; his wife could scarcely do any of these things unless she was attended by a man. To a woman as high-spirited as the one Pepys married (he never once in the entire course of his writings bothers to tell us her name), these daily restrictions were virtually intolerable; time and again in the Diary, we read of her pleading with her husband to hire a waiting lady for her, somebody to talk to because she was so desperately lonely. And for all his evident love of her, Pepys himself can often be found either treating her like a piece of furniture:

1^st January 1662: Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again.

Or like a small child he can bully:

5^th April 1664: Coming home I find my wife dressed as if she had been abroad, but I think she was not; but she answering me some way that I did not like I pulled her by the nose, indeed to offend her; though afterwards to appease her I denied it, but only it was done in haste. The poor wretch took it mighty ill, and I believe besides wringing her nose she did feel pain, and so cried a great while; but by and by I made her friends, and so after supper to my office a while, and then home to bed.

Some other aspects of his behavior towards her will be instantly recognizable to contemporary women, alas. It seems that in all ages, men can be equal parts incompetent and huffily defensive about it, with the long-suffering ladies left to roll their eyes and endure it as best they can:

6^th January 1663: Thence my wife and I home, and found all well, only myself somewhat vexed at my wife’s neglect in leaving her scarf, waistcoat, and night-dressings in the coach to-day that brought us back from Westminster; though, I confess, she did give them to me to look after, yet it was her fault not to see that I did take them out of the coach.

The salutary difference in Pepys’ diary, however, is the quiet domesticity that shines through, the great and immediately human counterbalances to carelessly tweaked noses. Innumerable entries open with Pepys and his wife abed in the morning, quietly talking, and far more frequently than they fight, they can be found laughing together:

10^th May 1666: Going out towards Hackney by coach for the ayre, the silly coachman carries us to Shoreditch, which was so pleasant a piece of simplicity in him and us, that made us mighty merry.

Her illness was swift and unexpected, and her death came closer to destroying this maddening, indomitable man than anything else that had tried. All the things he had built from the nothing they’d shared – the nice house, the fine fixtures (so lovingly detailed in the Diary, the only book we know that is hugely materialistic but not at all venal), the costly drapings, the paintings, the art objects, the musical instruments, the finely bound books, the modest fortune in money – all these things he had built for her as much as for himself, though he didn’t always admit that even in the privacy of the Diary. He outlived her by thirty-four years but never remarried, which is singular tribute itself from such a lover of women as he was. And when he died in 1703 he was buried with her.

Her name was Elizabeth.

Open forum: re-reading!

The other night, in the midst of my ceaseless toil blogging on behalf of all you ungrateful little guttersnipes, I took a brief half-hour's respite by dipping into Pepys.

The half hour grew to two hours before I even thought to look up at the clock, so subsumed was I in the hustling world of Pepys, in the squirrel-rushings of his thoughts, in the marvelous portrait he paints of his whole world, shifting with his inimitable idiosyncrasy from the most mundane details of daily life to the most important goings-on of court and country ... and all of it told with that chatty, totally human voice. Two hours fled like a snatch of dream.

And it got me wondering, as I so often do, about the whole act of re-reading books. A sizeable portion of all the reading I do is re-reading, and yet I've never been able to quite define what it is we DO when we re-read a book.

Some books are so complex and crammed that re-reading is virtually a necessary componant of enjoying them at all. Who entirely grasps Tale of Genji the first time through, or Vanity Fair, or Gravity's Rainbow? And certainly five or ten years between readings brings a very different US to the books we read once before - allusions that went over our heads the first time are now caught and savored.

But what about those books we re-read not only once but repeatedly? Further understanding a book you read once before makes perfect sense ... but how to explain re-reading a book you not only understand completely but quite often know virtually by heart? What's going on, when we're doing that?

I have a regular stable of authors I revisit in this way. Pepys. Chaucer. Ariosto. Kipling. Arthur Conan Doyle. Wodehouse. Herodotus. And of course more than any of them Horace. Almost every serious reader I've ever met has a comparable list, often broken up into specific needs, like we were talking about medicines in a cabinet ('so and so when I'm depressed, so and so when I need to forget the world,' etc).

So I'm opening the question to the assembled hordes of stevereads fans, especially the die-hard readers out there! How do YOU explain this thing we all do, this thing that after enough times can't really be called 'reading' in the normal sense of the word? Is it the intersection of reading and religion, or is it just creepy and compulsive?

And, of course: give me YOUR perennial authors/books. I know some for some of you but not all for all, so feel free to list 'em all!