And So to Press

By Melvin Maddocks

PEPYS

by RICHARD OLLARD 368 pages, Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

$12.50.

Diaries are more merciless than TV cameras at exposing those who would manipulate them. The diarist, in fact, plays a doubly dangerous game. If he fakes or withholds the evidence that is his life, he will certainly give himself away. On the other hand, to strip oneself bare is not necessarily to make oneself lovable. Samuel Pepys, the diarist's diarist, ran this second risk. The self that Pepys portrayed for nine years, beginning Jan. 1, 1660, was laid startlingly bare, so much so that the diarist resorted to a shorthand code. The code has long since been cracked, and British Historian Richard Ollard is too conscientious a biographer to gloss over Pepys' failings. Instead, he does something almost as fatal--something Pepys never did. He apologizes.

Pepys kicked his cook and sold a black servant into slavery to finance his already ample stores of chocolate and sherry. Once, while in bed, he blacked an eye of the wife he married when she was 15. More regularly, he pulled her nose and terrorized her about kitchen expenses. Against his enemies, or his imagined enemies, he was capable, in Ollard's words, of "scurrility verging at times on the hysterical." Yet Ollard feels compelled to insist that here, dear reader, stands a "kindhearted" man.

It is as if, at this late stage in the Pepys-watching game, the diarist has become his own literary character whom biographers must attack or defend according to their tastes and their times. To 19th century moralists, for instance, Pepys was that most off-putting of hypocrites: a pious lecher -- a Uriah Heep who could preach sanctimoniously to a fellow tomcat while he himself was goatishly seducing pretty Mrs. Bagwell, the carpenter's wife.

Gold Buttons. "Simplicity" and "innocence" were Pepys' dominant qualities, counters Ollard, the arch defender, while allying himself to another camp of Pepys interpreters, the 20th century aesthetes. For them, the true Pepys was a sort of underground artist, living in the silence, exile and cunning of his diary. Certainly Pepys was an avid collector of fine-bound volumes, which he arranged according to their height rather than subject matter, and he had a portrait of himself painted with a scrap of musical score in one hand. There is something more than a little bogus about Pepys the aesthete, as if he collected his culture the way he built up his cellar (he was a wine snob who kept his Haut-Brion claret in a cask). His custom-de signed carriage may have meant as much to Pepys as his carefully acquired prints. And nothing seemed to have meant more to this tailor's son on the make than his sumptuous wardrobe -- at a time when 36 bushels of coal cost -L-3 he spent up to -L-55 a month on silk suits and cloaks with gold buttons.

Today Samuel Pepys looks less like an artist to a playboy-prig than the very first bureaucrat. Ollard ends up empha sizing the Pepys who was "one of the best officials England ever had," add ing with a sweep: "The Royal Navy owes more to him, is more his handiwork, than that of any other possible claim ant from King Alfred downward." He flung himself into administrative labors with what Ollard calls "an exultant hedonism." Precept upon precept, line upon line, he set up the Royal Navy's thorough compilation of rules and reg ulations. He found time to keep awe-in spiring files. On a busy day he might start work at 4 or 5 a.m. and stay at it until midnight. In addition to doing his duty over three decades for Their Maj esties Charles II and James II, Pepys was consistently and systematically feathering his nest, as Richard Ollard admits, by the very "corrupt practices he denounced in others." A superbu reaucrat, however, is not exactly the favorite hero of a '70s reader.

Is Pepys the bureaucrat worth Ol-lard's time or ours? While stubborn in his determination to make a fascinating man good, Ollard, fortunately, is not mo nolithic about his own version of Pepys.

In fact, the special value of his come-lately study is that he can and does lay out all the other interpretations of Pepys for the comparison-shopping reader.

Through these versions, Richard Ol-lard's book encourages the original por trait, the Pepys of the diaries, to shine with his incorrigible zest -- for a boat ride on the Thames, for a glass of sack, for a pretty phrase or a pretty woman. . Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.