The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary

While I am writing without knowing that I will keep these nine cahiers and take them with me to Stockholm, where they will be found among my papers after my death and sent to Clerselier in France. . . . [A]nd though I do not know the story of these events, it is no less true that I write to be read after my death, and that is why I do not publish. . . . While I am writing I think I see myself being seen by many others, who are reading over my shoulder the words traced by a dead man’s hand immobilised for eternity, the eternity of truth, in the instance of inscribing it: dum scribo. ¹

“Your food stamps will be stopped effective March, 1992, because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.”

From a letter to a dead person from the Greenville County (S. C.) Department of Social Services ²

The subject of Samuel Pepys’s Diary was no inner-worldly ascetic, no Calvinist. He doesn’t fit the Weberian pattern. He was a fiscal conservative in the sense that he kept most of his wealth in gold and his gold under his bed. But although reluctant to invest in land, and slow to speculate in securities, his financial health came increasingly to depend on his ability to navigate in the precarious waters of paper instruments and promises. The Diary’s monthly statements of his accounts were among these instruments—the few signatures of rough notes bound into the first volume of the diary show that it began as a combination journal and account record, with memoranda that listed many items in order to document expenses. The memoranda were transferred to separate account books, but it remains tempting to construe the diary figuratively as a record of experiential expenditures and acquisitions—a record in which Pepys “tells” the day’s happenings in a form that makes them as discrete and precious as his gold coins and shorthand symbols.

Pepys writes that during a time of danger in 1667 he removed his gold from his house and buried most of it for safekeeping in the yard of his father’s house in the village of Brompton. The entry for 10–11 October of that year contains a comic account of his furious search to recover the poorly hidden coins, wash the dirt off them, and carry them apprehensively back home. Equating the gold coins with diary entries produces a parable of Pepys’s ambivalent relation to the diary: like his money it is removed from his person for safekeeping, buried in foul papers, refurbished in fair copy, and returned to its hiding place at home; there it remains like a time capsule, containing his self-portrait safely disembodied and reincorporated in another medium, a paper investment in the future, but an uncertain investment owing to the coyness that solicits discovery only by conspicuously resisting it.

Since the nine-year growth of Pepys’s Diary to its six substantial volumes paralleled the growth of his fortunes, he may well have been justified in the diligence with which he gave not simply a daily picture of his life and times but an account of them, in the sense of an accounting. And whether or not the parallelism was superstitiously or fetishistically interpreted by the writer as a causal relation, the weight of a diaristic enterprise animated (if only in part) by expressly moral, social, and economic motives falls on the accounting activity as a form of self-protection and validation. From this standpoint, the mimetic motive may itself be conceived as instrumental or secondary to another, variously expressed in the following passages:

Custom and memory now played second fiddle to the written word: reality meant “established on paper.” ³

“Graphic” means “like writing”; it also means “like truth.” ⁴

The self-conscious emergence of the page in its own right implies a radical, perhaps irrevocable, alienation of language from its supposedly primordial character as speech. . . . The moment in which the...