The Confidence Man

Sir Arthur Bryant once described Samuel Pepys’ unique “Diary” as probably (after the Bible and Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson”) “the best bedside book in the English language.” Amen to that, and forget about Boswell. Pepys has everything. He lived at the storm-center of British political life, walking Whitehall’s perilous corridors of power from Cromwell’s last years as lord protector through the restoration of Charles II to the overthrow of his brother James II by William of Orange. Great men became outcasts overnight, while their adherents scurried to change sides and clever climbers competed to replace them. Pepys himself was twice confined to the Tower on trumped-up charges (once because of Titus Oates’ notorious “Popish plot” accusations). Yet through all this he rose to become secretary of the Admiralty, was personally responsible for the remaking of the British navy and accumulated a fortune. His “Diary” also recounts, in detail, his private life, the taverns he frequented, the plays he saw, the gossip he heard, the music he played and (most notoriously) his lowlife sexual encounters atthe expense of his beautiful (if buck-toothed) French Huguenot wife. He lived through the Great Plague and the Great Fire that followed it: His firsthand descriptions of both are the best we have.

This wonderful 17th century social tapestry is a natural for any historical novelist in search of a convincing background: lurid intrigues, affairs of state, the fashions, fads, entertainments, daily round, noises and smells (oh God, the smells: don’t even ask) of Restoration London are all here for the borrowing. In “Jem (and Sam)”--yes, the Sam is Pepys himself--Ferdinand Mount, a nicely offbeat novelist as well as editor of the Times Literary Supplement, has raided this cornucopia of plenty with uncommon skill and imagination. The result is one of the most continually enjoyable picaresque novels I’ve read in years. It is presented, with a wealth of historical backup, as the memoirs (written in destitute old age) of one Jeremiah (Jem) Mount: place-seeker, clerk, courtier and acquaintance and failed rival of Pepys, whose erotic peccadilloes he fervently condemns while performing with equal brio in a variety of beds himself.

We follow Jem on what is not so much a rake’s progress as a natural con man’s mad scramble up the greasy pole of patronage and preferment. Early poverty in Kent is mixed up in his mind with adolescent sex on the cliffs while watching “ships joggling at anchor in the bay. Or was it me joggling?” Disgraced because of a pregnancy for which he wasn’t responsible, he’s apprenticed to dismal Uncle John, a bookseller-cum-stationer. In no time, he’s on the road as a salesman, flogging naval charts and raunchy erotica (hard to come by under the Protectorate) to vinous sea captains, keeping double accounts and diddling his employer out of the profits. This is how he meets Gen. Monck, now admiral for the Dutch wars and in search of a chart of Sheerness and the Medway. Patronage begins: Jem becomes under-clerk to the great council. But one thing leads to another. Nan Radford, a draper’s wife tumbled by Jem in the storeroom, reappears married to Monck, and Jem abandons Whitehall to become her gentlemen-usher with, ahem, other services thrown in. His career with Monck (soon to become duke of Albemarle) and Monck’s odious son takes him to the West Indies, a ruinous fling at marine insurance and a pauper’s end back in Kent.

All through his life, Jem measures himself, with curdling resentment, against Pepys the perfect climber, described on first meeting as “a little man with eyes like children’s marbles knocking together and a nose like a quill which he dipped into mine host’s ink with a quick sucking motion as through he wished to empty the tavern before he was emptied out of it.” Yet when he’s approached at the time of Pepys’ trial to supply false evidence to help convict him, he can’t and won’t do it. Jem, despite himself, has an honest heart. It’s surprising, too, how much of “Jem (and Sam),” how many of its characters, are rooted in historical reality, not least the revivalist preacher Lodowick Muggleton (a wonderful portrait). Indeed, it’s hard often to tell where history ends and fiction begins. There is indeed a Mr. Mount in the “Diary,” and what he does there is duly geared to the novel. But the author--also, of course, a Mount--presents him, very convincingly, as his own ancestor, and we can’t tell whether he’s pulling our legs or not. This teasing intermixture of truth and myth is what, in the end, makes Jem so unexpectedly attractive a hero and his story such compulsive reading.