Careerist Pepys

SAMUELS PEPYS : THE YEARS of PERIL --Arthur Bryant--Macmillan ($3.50).

Because Samuel Pepys took snapshots of himself in various revealing postures and the negatives were discovered and developed by a delighted posterity, the present-day world can never take him with half the seriousness his fellow Englishmen did. Had it not been for the discovery and translation of his shorthand diaries, on the other hand, he might have been buried forever in a respectable obscurity. With a laudable desire to play down Pepys's human frailty, to play up his first-rate abilities. Author Bryant is trying to rehabilitate Pepys as a serious character. Samuel Pepys: The Years of Peril is the second volume of what is to.be a biographical trilogy, and the last word on Pepys.

Not "the amorous buffoon and gossip" of the Diaries, but a busy little executive, years ahead of his easy-going times, appears from Author Bryant's pages. At 36 Pepys may have felt that the death of his wife, "poor wretch," had closed the most important chapter in his life, but in fact his career was just beginning. Partly to forget his grief and partly because his enemies were trying to discredit his administration of the Navy Office. Pepys threw himself wholeheartedly into his job. He became a walking encyclopedia of Navy affairs, was able to confound almost single-handed the Parliamentary commission of investigation, went on to combat, with varying success, the inadequate funds, irresponsibility and chaos that marked the Navy of Charles II.

Luckily he had Charles on his side. When the Lord High Admiral resigned, no successor was appointed, and Pepys became Secretary. He made the fur fly. He put down "corruption, laissez-faire and boozy optimism" with a stern official hand. Says Biographer Bryant: "By his precept and example Pepys was to transform an inchoate and ill-directed service into the most enduring, exact and potent instrument of force seen on this disorderly planet since the days of Imperial Rome."

Pepys naturally made plenty of enemies, and they used the Popish Plot conspiracy of Titus Gates to get even with him. Accused of implication in a political murder, he was arrested, imprisoned in the Tower, faced with trial for his life. With characteristic energy he methodically tracked down every piece of false evidence, finally cleared himself. In building up his hero Biographer Bryant does not overplay his hand. He admits that Pepys. after the death of his wife, "formed a connection" with one Mary Skinner, that he delighted in the emoluments and furbelows of his high office, that he accepted presents occasionally--red sprats, a tun of Rhenish wine, even a tame lion cub.

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