Samuel Pepys by Claire Tomalin

...In an epilogue, Tomalin gives a full account of the fortunes of the diary, encoded in shorthand and polyglot...

...For her the most perceptive writing about Pepys is to be found in an 1881 essay by Robert Louis Stevenson ("the unequalled self" of her title is Stevenson's label for Pepys), the occasion being a recently published new transcription of most of the six volumes of the diary Pepys kept from 1660 to the middle of 1669 and bequeathed to Magdalene College, Cambridge...

...It's not clear that the meal ever came off, but one likes to imagine it, the two old men looking back on their great ancestor...

...Improbable as it sounds, Pepys calls this music "so sweet that it ravished me...

...Pepys admired Chaucer, and Toma-lin mentions the earlier writer as a "near literary relation," but their differences are as interesting as their similarities...

...Temperament, boundless curiosity about people and events, an eye to the main chance-these are only stabs at explaining the mystery of how any gifted human being works...

...Memorable stuff, but Pepys's response to it is rather cautious: "I perceive my Lord is grown a man very indifferent to all manners of Religion and so makes nothing of these things...

...Enough said, presumably, but with none of the sly and tonic wisdom Chaucer showed in dealing with comparable matters...

...An experienced worker in the mode (her most recent one was of Jane Austen), Tomalin combines exhaustive research with admiration, even love of Pepys, while never forgetting she's addressing a reader whose engagement with the man is less certain than her own...

...All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination," wrote William Blake, whom Pepys wouldn't have known what to make of...

...The admiration comes out when, for example, she deals with a detailed account Pepys wrote of his health, years after he had ceased to keep a diary...

...Sandwich ridicules the idea that he should marry her, by quoting a saying of his father's "that he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head...

...On the basis of his diary, Tomalin urges the strongest ones, placing Pepys alongside Milton, Bunyan, Chaucer, Dickens, and Proust...

...then after a final bath, "a specially prescribed drink made of liquorice, marshmallow, cinnamon, milk, rosewater, and the whites of fifteen eggs...

...She compares the early years of the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, presented by Pepys in rich day-to-day perspective, to the sweeping out of communism from Eastern Europe in 1989...

...One of the most notable concerns a young woman named Deb Willett, employed by Pepys and his wife Elizabeth, though the latter didn't foresee some of Deb's services: "Going to bed, she undressed me, and there I did give her good advice and beso la, ella weeping still...

...For a modern instance of such adventuring, one thinks of Henry Miller, although Pepys makes less fuss about his conquests and satisfactions-for him it's all in a day's work, and he did a lot of work every day...

...Although Tomalin is thoroughly even-handed in her measurement of Pepys, there is also the sense that he's a little beyond such measurement...

...How indeed did he get out of bed and do all the rest of it in seventy years of unceasing activity...

...Tomalin prefaces her listing of his complaints (a few of which were allergic swellings, bowel and bladder pains, severe pain in the eyes each morning) by remarking, "It makes you wonder how he ever got out of bed at all, let alone ran and reformed a government department, addressed parliament, and attended the king wherever he happened to be...

...As for Dryden, just a year before his death and four years before Pepys's own, Pepys invited him, in Toma-lin's words, "to discuss Chaucer over a meal of cold chicken and salad...

...on the day of the surgery, a lightly boiled egg and talk with a religious adviser...

...Early in the diary he is having dinner with his patron, Lord Sandwich (they both turned from Cromwellian loyalties to welcome Charles II to the throne) who notes that Charles's brother, the Duke of York, has been accused of getting the Lord Chancellor's daughter with child...

...Still, piquant recommendations for nutrition in the preparatory weeks before surgery show what we've lost: no wine, but "sweet drinks made from almond, cucumber and melon...

...During the great London fire, he buried not only his wine in a pit in his garden, but also a stash of Parmesan cheese...

...Pepys himself wasn't immune from shocks and changes, especially when accused by Shaftesbury (Dryden's Achi-tophel in "Absalom and Achitophel") of conspiring in the Popish Plot to murder the king...

...Tomalin's familiarity with contemporary diaries, with London history and topography (a couple of maps are included), with naval and medical history is impressive, and her painfully vivid description of the operation Pepys underwent to remove from his bladder a stone the size of a small tennis ball will make any reader salute the marvels of modern medicine...

...The biographer never allows us to forget the historical moment in which Pepys lived, when "a whole population is changing its allegiance...

...Tomalin has had predecessors in her attempt, notably Arthur Bryant's three-volume biography in the 1930s, and more recently a shorter account by Stephen Coote...

...As Tomalin points out, writing about it in these lively "secret" words gave Pepys a pleasure comparable to the thing itself...

...And he memorably describes being overcome by music when he, with his wife and Deb Willett, attends a play by Dekker and Massinger in which the famous actress (and Charles's mistress) Nell Gywnn descends as an angel, accompanied by music played by recorders...

...Alas, after Elizabeth discovers him and Deb infla-grante a bitter and extended quarrel ensues about which Tomalin says, with some justice, "I know of no other account of marital rage and jealousy to match this one...

...How strong should claims be for Pepy's literary immortality...

...and indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife...

...and 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, which did hazer me great pleasure...

...He resolves to practice "wind-music and to make my wife do the like...

...Perhaps a sentence from Stevenson's essay is the best way to think of the man and writer Tomalin has so expertly revisited for us: "Thefe was never a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one...

...Here we may dissent mildly without seeming ungrateful-Bunyan seems a more likely companion, for all his differences from Pepys, than do the others in their "professional" literary brilliance...

...Discriminations animate both the diary and Tomalin's biography, as when Pepys and his wife spend a wonderful night in an Hertfordshire inn sleeping on separate beds and Pepys notes that "of all the nights that ever I slept in my life, I never did pass a night with more epicurism of sleep" (the "epicurism" is wonderful here...

...Indeed Pepys had a special case made and displayed the stone to people contemplating the operation (and perhaps a few others who just happened to be there at the anniversary dinners in memory of the event...

...The encoding is of special use when, as often, the entry is of an encounter with a female, and doubtless the first thing that attracts a modern, reasonably prurient reader like myself are the sexual bits...

...William Pritchard a modern, except for double Sunday prayers, / Samuel Pepys knew what made the Navy float," begins Robert Lowell's sonnet about the subject of Claire Tomalin's incisive, Booker Prize-winning biography...

...After all that, how could the operation not go well...

...Pepys spent a short time as a prisoner in the Tower before clearing himself...

...In his own day he was best known for his efficient organization of the nation's Navy as secretary to the admiralty...