Curiosities
Jonathan Keates
John Evelyn and His World John Bowie (Routledge pp.277, £12.50) Of all periods in the history of the written word in English, the 17th century is surely the most immediate in its unbuttoned intimacy of communication. To those oldfashioned enough to enjoy reading an author more for the sake of hearing his individual voice than as a iv-tans of establishing some linguistic or so o‘togical point, the entire hundred years -rom James to William becomes an incurable passion. Now and then, after experiencing the closing lines of Paradise Lost, the bedroom scene in Cymbeline, Jonson's Celebration of Charis, or the final pages of time Burial!, the passion swells into an overwhelming madness. The simple sense of a tough, visceral expressiveness, a fullness of sound and meaning which uses of the same language by later ages can only cloud, is often found at its best in the century's diarists and memorialists. Writers like Fuller and Aubrey engage us by a paradoxical humility and lack of self-regard. The whole of Baroque and Restoration literature seems like a burning house whose inhabitants have rushed out in whatever clothes they can find, and sometimes in none at all.
It is impossible to imagine John Evelyn's diary being written at any other period. The initial disappointment of not finding a Pepys mis a nu in the pages of this enormously long `Kalendarium', a record stretching over almost 80 years, can be got over quickly enough (much of it in any case is autobiography rather than straight diary). The two men warmly admired each other: Pepys describes a dinner at Greenwich with Evelyn being 'inspired by such a spirit of mirth, that in all my life I never met with so merry a two hours as our company that night was. Among other humours, Mr Evelyn repeating of some verses made up of nothing but the various adaptations of ,nay and can, and doing it so aptly . . . and so fast, did make us all die almost with laughing'. Evelyn, noting his friend's death in 1703 and too ill to attend the funeral, calls him 'a very worthy, Industrious and curious person'.
That word 'curious' offers the key to the diarists and their age. If Evelyn lacks the unembarrassed gusto of Pepys, the self disclosed is very far from the smug amateur gardener of Deptford dismissed by Virginia Woolf in The Common Reader. Even at the end of the `Kalendarium', fizzling out in rather pathetic octogenarian apologies to ‘J.C.' for having fallen asleep in sermon time, we must feel that Pepys was right and that here was a clubbable, entertaining dinner guest who mixed a typically 17thcentury love of green-shaded retirement a la Marvell with a tireless curiosity to see and to know.
In a way which Pepys, through the irresistible obtrusiveness of his personality, can neve; quite manage, Evelyn reflects and encompasses the shifts and quirks of the epoch. For example he is, so far as I know, the first English writer to have described a visit to the opera, 'one of the most magnificent and expenseful diversions the wit of Men can invent', and to have recorded details of the famous practical anatomy demonstrations at Padua. He trailed a pike in Flanders, turned up late — 'I came in with my horse and Armes just at the retreate' — for a royalist effort to break into London in 1642, and watched the English and Dutch fleets in the Channel before the battle of Solebay. Peter the Great and his grimy entourage lodged at Evelyn's house, fouling the best sheets, smashing the windows and wrecking the garden. It was Evelyn who discovered the young Grinling Gibbons working in a thatched hovel at his miraculous carved cartoon of Tintoretto's 'Crucifixion'. He visited Hobbes and Wren, took spiritual council from Jeremy Taylor and dined with Judge Jeffreys. The sheer inclusiveness of his interests makes the diary a crammed capsule of 17th-century experience.
John Bowie's achievement has been merely to log all this from cradle in Surrey to deathbed in Dover Street. Despite his examination of published works such as Sylva, the great compendium of forestry, or Fumtfugium, the treatise, so admired by Charles II, on atmospheric pollution, and of those manuscript papers which escaped being cut up for dress patterns or used to line pie dishes, we come no nearer to this patient, gentle, rather reticent figure than the diary has already allowed us. The book's subtitle, after the fashion of a good many others, promises 'And his world', but there is little adequate investigation of the background which rolls into the distance beyond the events of the `Kalendarium' like a landscape by one of Evelyn's Dutch contemporaries.
In the extended and substantial work which this might have been, there was room for a perceptive account of the diary and other works as valuable documents in the history of English taste. The digest of Evelyn's travel narratives is only a paraphrase, and nothing intelligible is made of the nature of his responses to, for example, Venice or France, well-detailed though they are. One of the most pOignant outbursts in any diary is Evelyn's shattered access of despair at the death of his son Richard in a winter 'when the Crowes feete were frozen to their prey' ; Bowie passes it off as 'a long eulogy'. The intriguing ambiguities in his relationship with Margaret Godolphin (at her death she was 26, Evelyn 58) invite much deeper analysis and speculation than Bowie is prepared to give (nothing worthy of our attention is said of Evelyn's wife Mary).
Bowie is accurate and painstaking with facts and sources, and, even if a little patronising towards his subject, has a good superficial knowledge of the period. But this type of Annual Register biography was surely not the way to come at Evelyn, who demands a far more precise and penetrating study of his relationship to the people and ideas of an age whose subtleties we have barely started to probe.
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