Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on Fellow Diarist John Evelyn)

“The diary, for whose sake we are remembering the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of John Evelyn, is a case in point.  It is sometimes composed like a memoir, sometimes jotted down like a calendar; but he never used its pages to reveal the secrets of his heart, and all that he wrote might have been read aloud in the evening with a calm conscience to his children….

“Ignorant, yet justly confident that with his own hands he might advance not merely his private knowledge but the knowledge of mankind, Evelyn dabbled in all the arts and sciences, ran about the Continent for ten years, gazed with unflagging gusto upon hairy women and rational dogs, and drew inferences and framed speculations which are now only to be matched by listening to the talk of old women round the village pump.  The moon, they say, is so much larger than usual this autumn that no mushrooms will grow, and the carpenter's wife will be brought to bed of twins.  So Evelyn, Fellow of the Royal Society, a gentleman of the highest culture and intelligence, carefully noted all comets and portents, and thought it a sinister omen when a whale came up the Thames….Nature, it seems, was determined to stimulate the devotion of her seventeenth-century admirers by displays of violence and eccentricity from which she now refrains.  There were storms, floods, and droughts; the Thames frozen hard; comets flaring in the sky. If a cat so much as kittened in Evelyn's bed the kitten was inevitably gifted with eight legs, six ears, two bodies, and two tails.”—English novelist, essayist, and diarist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Rambling Round Evelyn” (1920), reprinted in The Common Reader: First Series, edited by Andrew McNeillie (1925)

John Evelyn was born 400 years ago today in Surrey, to a family made wealthy by gunpowder production. Virginia Woolf captures his unflagging activity in the passage above. But it may be even more shocking to contemporary society, revolving around intellectual specialists, to see all his activities listed: writer, gardener, urbanologist, architect, connoisseur, and bibliophile.

Though I had heard of Evelyn previously, Woolf’s incisive essay made me want to seek out more information on him, even as I pondered her unique vantage point in assessing his literary achievement.

In her fiction, Woolf was concerned with illuminating the interior consciousness of characters. At the time she wrote about Evelyn, she was five years into keeping her own diary—a record she would continue to maintain until weeks before her suicide in 1941. Into what she called her “dialogue of the soul with the soul,” she poured reflections on her work, thoughts of other writers, and her wrestling with the depression that dogged her life—all of which made her more appreciative of the diaries of Evelyn’s contemporary and friend Samuel Pepys.

As Woolf implied, Evelyn was the soul of discretion compared with Pepys. If you want to know what it felt like to be a top government bureaucrat wrestling with financing the Royal Navy by day before getting randy with the family maid by night, then Pepys is your man. If you want to know how an entire society experienced the sights and sounds of a certain day, then you’ll want to read Evelyn, as in this passage recording what happened the day that exiled King Charles II returned to power in 1660:

“This day came in his Majestie Charles the 2d to London after a sad, and long Exile, and Calamitous Suffering both of the King and Church: being 17 yeares: This was also his Birthday, and with a Triumph of above 20000 horse & foote, brandishing their swords and shouting with unexpressable joy: The wayes straw’d with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with Tapissry, fountaines running with wine: The Major, Aldermen, all the Companies in their liver[ie]s, Chaines of Gold, banners; Lords & nobles, Cloth of Silver, gold and vellvet every body clad in, the windos and balconies all set with Ladys, Trumpets, Musick, and [myriads] of people flocking the streetes and was as far as Rochester, so as they were 7 houres in passing the Citty, even from 2 in the afternoon 'til nine at night: I stood in the strand, and beheld it, & blessed God: And all this without one drop of bloud, and by that very army, which rebell'd against him: but it was the Lords doing, et mirabile in oculis nostris: for such a Restauration was never seene in the mention of any history, antient or modern, since the returne of the Babylonian Captivity, nor so joyfull a day, and so bright, ever seene in this nation: this hapning when to expect or effect it, was past all humane policy.”

Ultimately, though not as confessional, Evelyn may prove more suited to the needs of historians and biographies than Pepys.  The latter gave up penning his thoughts in 1669, but Evelyn maintained his habit of diary-keeping from his college days in 1641 to his retirement period in 1704. It’s a prime source for understanding life in 17^th-century England.

(For a fascinating discussion on Sayes Court, Evelyn's home in Deptford, and how the author's prized garden there fell victim to the visiting Peter the Great and the Russian Tsar's drunken friends, see Caroline Derry's guest post on the "London Historians' Blog.")

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Alcohol and ‘The Age of the Abyss’)

“I stuck to my diet and had a whisky and soda before lunch, followed by a half dozen belons, a steak au poivre, a salad with French dressing, and a hefty lump of cheese. I drank Lafite ‘60, about two glasses, and two or three brandies after the cheese with sugarless and creamless coffee. Later that night I had a couple more whiskies and soda. Apart from water that is all I took in that day…. E[lizabeth Taylor] was astonishingly drunk even as I got to lunch. I don't recollect her before ever being incoherent from drink. I expect it from the drugs she's forced to take, but not from the booze. Christ I hope she's alright. It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before, or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. Good I'm going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer. This is the age of the abyss and any minute now or dark day we could tumble over the edge into primal chaos. Some frigging foreigner will press a button and gone it will all be. Even the Miners Arms in Pontrhydyfen. Our little lives will be shattered with a cosmic bang. ‘These millions of white faces,’ as Archie MacLeish says, and then ‘nothing, nothing, nothing at all.‘ But don't let's be stoned all the time. Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical….”—Actor Richard Burton (1925-1984), diary entry for January 10, 1969, The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (2012)

I have always wanted to read the diaries of Richard Burton, and this past weekend I finally got my hands on a copy at a library near me. Since then, I’ve been consuming entries the way I once might have gone after a Crackerjack box, sampling one here, one there, finding myself unable to stop. 

The entry here hardly contains the most news—it doesn’t describe his purchases, for wife Elizabeth Taylor, diamonds and a plane, each costing at least $900,000, nor his high-profile friends and films of the time. 

But these lines may evoke something more revelatory and fascinating than any more seemingly momentous incident. Such was the consequence of a self-loathing genius—a talented writer who (perhaps correctly) believed he was miscast as a gifted, well-compensated actor—pursuing “the drinking man’s diet.”

There are several astonishing elements of this entry:

*That phrase, “that is all I took in that day.” The amount of alcohol involved is not inconsiderable.

*Burton largely passes over his own drinking, but not his wife’s.

*Shortly after conjuring up the very real consequences of alcohol abuse, the actor indulges in his thirst for another whisky and soda.

*Burton wishes for liquid oblivion to wipe out “the age of the abyss” he sees in the hands of nuclear powers around the world—but somehow also wishes for “days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical”—an outcome that feels ever more elusive by the end of this paragraph.

Clear-eyed enough to see the disappointing finish to his life and his wife’s (who, though successfully drying out in the Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s, lived out the rest of her days more by taking advantage of her celebrity than by strengthening her real muscles as an actor), Burton is also seemingly powerless to stop it. 

It is quite sad to behold the evolution—or, rather, the devolution—of these entries. Initial ones, from the early 1940s, are short, befitting a youth still struggling to find his place and his voice.  The decade or so from the 1960s to early 1970s featured the longest ruminations, when the actor would take out his typewriter and type right in front of Ms. Taylor. He was trying to harness his creativity by imposing self-discipline. But, from the mid-Seventies and continuing for several years, there were no entries. 

Burton had slipped into an extended lost weekend of substance abuse. The voice on stage had, despite heavy cigarette use, lost little of its mellifluous richness. But the “voice” on the printed page, in the last entries from early 1983, over a year before his death, is exhausted, confessing that his last wife, Sally, is “still depressed and fed up….Being with me is not as glamorous as people think.”

Perhaps it was no accident that some of his best, Oscar-nominated performances--in Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and his late-career triumph of stage and screen, Equus--center around disillusioned, burnt-out cases

Quote of the Day (Dawn Powell, on How ‘Gaiety Should Be Brave’)

“Gaiety should be brave, it should have stout legs of truth, not a gelatine base of dreams and wishes.”— American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Dawn Powell (1896-1965), The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page (1998)

Bonus Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on a Prior ‘Year of Publick Wonder and Mischief’)

“Thus ends this year of publick wonder and mischief to this nation, and, therefore, generally wished by all people to have an end....[P]ublick matters in a most sad condition; seamen discouraged for want of pay, and are become not to be governed: nor, as matters are now, can any fleete go out next year. Our enemies, French and Dutch, great, and grow more by our poverty. The Parliament backward in raising, because jealous of the spending of the money; the City less and less likely to be built again, every body settling elsewhere, and nobody encouraged to trade. A sad, vicious, negligent Court, and all sober men there fearful of the ruin of the whole kingdom this next year; from which, good God deliver us!”—English government official and master diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), diary entry of Dec. 31, 1666, in Pepys’ Diaries

It’s nice to know that 350 years ago, men worried about matters of state similar to now—foreign enemies, a dysfunctional legislative body, lack of public investment, a dormant economy, a malfunctioning judiciary, even ‘the ruin” of the country—and somehow still survived.

See you on the other side of the calendar in 2017…

Quote of the Day (Dawn Powell, on Friendship in Youth and Age)

“Friendship in youth represents sympathy without understanding; in age, understanding without sympathy.”— Novelist Dawn Powell, The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page (1998)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Pepys, on the Terrible Start to His 30th Birthday)

“Thence to my Lord Sandwich, who though he has been abroad again two or three days is falling ill again, and is let blood this morning, though I hope it is only a great cold that he has got. It was a great trouble to me (and I had great apprehensions of it) that my Lord desired me to go to Westminster Hall, to the Parliament- house door, about business; and to Sir Wm. Wheeler, which I told him I would do, but durst not go for fear of being taken by these rogues; but was forced to go to White Hall and take boat, and so land below the Tower at the Iron-gate; and so the back way over Little Tower Hill; and with my cloak over my face, took one of the watermen along with me, and staid behind a wall in the New-buildings behind our garden, while he went to see whether any body stood within the Merchants' Gate, under which we pass to go into our garden, and there standing but a little dirty boy before the gate, did make me quake and sweat to think he might be a Trepan. But there was nobody, and so I got safe into the garden, and coming to open my office door, something behind it fell in the opening, which made me start. So that God knows in what a sad condition I should be in if I were truly in the condition that many a poor man is for debt: and therefore ought to bless God that I have no such reall reason, and to endeavour to keep myself, by my good deportment and good husbandry, out of any such condition.”—Samuel Pepys, diary entry February 23, 1663

Samuel Pepys, a naval bureaucrat and perhaps the greatest diarist in English letters, was born on this date in 1633 in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, the fifth in a line of 11 children born to a London tailor and the sister of a Whitechapel butcher. The surname, by the way, is pronounced “peeps”—a rather apt description, come to think of it, of what he gives us of life in his country in the mid-17^th century, a period of regime change, turbulence, disaster and the fear these all bred.

Pepys’ accounts of the London fire and the plague that also devastated the city have become primary sources for historians of major cataclysms of that time, and his daily descriptions of playgoing and his marital misadventures have filled in the details of social life in his time. But I thought, with this post, to see how he would view events on a day with more personal meaning for him: his birthday.

The whole entry for this day is double in length, at least, what I’ve quoted here. But this portion does give a good sense of the juxtaposition of high and low in Pepys’ world. As the right-hand man of Lord Sandwich (cousin Edward Montagu), head of naval administration, he’s sent at the behest of his mentor (taken sick, and experiencing the treatment-worse-than-the-disease of bloodletting with leeches), on one of those inevitable political-bureaucratic errands that public servants inevitably handle.

As I read the passage, I called to mind my own trip to London late last month, and especially around the Tower of London and Parliament. Those areas are now thronged with tourists, but it was a different atmosphere in Pepys’ time. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (published only 13 years before Pepys’ 30^th birthday) famously described the life of man in a state of war as “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” Less than 15 years after a regicide ended England’s Civil War, Pepys encountered shadows of that state in the figures he encounters on his errand.

Already worried about “these rogues,” this high minister is afraid he’s bumped into a “Trepan.” The word might sound a bit unfamiliar to us, but its context is treacherous. The Oxford English Dictionary, it turns out, defines it as “A person who entraps or decoys others into actions or positions which may be to his advantage and to their ruin or loss.” The sinister aspect of this term might come from something sharp that a hoodlum might hold in the pocket, such as a surgical instrument in the form of a crown-saw, used for cutting out small pieces of bone.

Pepys quit making his diary entries only six years later, when he feared encroaching blindness. It turned out that his fears on this score were as overblown as the ones he felt concerning the “rogues” that he was sure were accosting him on his 30^th birthday. He ended up dying when he was 70. Posterity honors him not for the phantoms he thought he saw, but for the gritty, amusing vignettes he did witness. Biographer Claire Tomalin has called him “The Unequalled Self,” and many have found little reason to argue the point.

(Portrait of Samuel Pepys by Johann Closterman)