New writing from me, old writing from Pepys
Adam's Notes for June 5, 2025
I have a piece out this month in EVENT Magazine, a review of recent fiction that looks at two new Canadian novels: Keefer Street by David Spaner and Johnny Delivers by Wayne Ng.
Keefer Street follows Jake Feldman, a sort of leftist Forrest Gump from a Jewish immigrant family in Vancouver who happens to show up at or adjacent to some big events in Canadian history, some of which I knew about—the Christie Pits riot, the Relief Camp Workers’ Union strikes—and some of which I learned about here for the first time, like the fact that a Nazi warship visited Vancouver in 1935 and was celebrated by the mayor and the cops, but protested by several left wing groups (link is a pdf). The defining event of Feldman’s life is his decision to join the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, the unit of Canadian volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that’s always been of great interest to me. There is some fiction out there on the Mac-Paps, but this is the first such novel that I’ve enjoyed. Even in the wider war, there’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and not much else, except disappointment. The Spanish do all that memory-and-forgetting stuff, which fair enough, I guess, but I’m not interested. I want action. Canadian and American writers, on the other hand, tend to be trying to commune with Hemingway’s ghost, and end up going romantic and sentimental, trying to picture the war within the limits of technicolor nostalgia instead of remembering it as one of the most important conflicts of the twentieth century, a moment on which everything else pivots. I thought Spaner handled it well, if nothing else he knows that there are lessons there for today’s left—but if you want to know more, you’ll have to check out my review or the novel itself (but if you have any recs for Spanish Civil War novels, let me know).
I liked Johnny Delivers, too. It’s a coming-of-age/crime novel set in 70s Toronto, about a kid from a Chinese immigrant family working at his family’s restaurant and getting into trouble during his last year of high school. It has a good way of introducing elements of Chinese immigrant life—the tong associations, the concept of paper sons—and incorporating them into the plot in a way that doesn’t come off as hokey. At one point Johnny is discussing identity and uses the word DNA, which set off my pedant’s alarm—would a kid in the 70s be aware of the concept of DNA well enough to use it as a metaphor the way we do now? I’m guessing the answer is no, but lately I’ve been trying not to ding novels for anachronisms. I haven’t fully articulated it to myself yet, but I think we always bring the present with us into the past, and I keep thinking about the longstanding notion that Homer got chariots wrong in the Iliad (I think the consensus on that one is a little more complicated than a simple yes/no).
Anyway, I hope you’ll check out EVENT Magazine. Special thanks to reviews editor Marisa Grizenko, and be sure to check out her newsletter Plain Pleasures.
Speaking of unnecessary pedantry, I was recently sent this article about the publishing of Pepys’ diary, and there’s one detail I’m just not sure about.
To summarize: Pepys wrote his diary using Thomas Shelton’s shorthand method, which let him write a good quantity in a short amount of time, but more importantly it kept his private thoughts from prying eyes. Think about it: in the last year of the diary his wife finds about his sexual escapades with their maid Deb and tries to pinch his balls off with red-hot fireplace tongs, and in 1679, ten years after the diary ends, Pepys was briefly jailed in the Tower of London by his political enemies as part of a navy scandal. Think of how much worse things would be for Pepys if people read his diary while he was still alive.
The article does a good job (as far as I know) of quickly summarizing how the journal was eventually decoded. In short, Pepys bequeathed his library, which included both the journal and Shelton’s manual on shorthand, to Magdalen College, Oxford, and eventually the diary was smuggled out of the college and a desperately poor student, John Smith, was paid a pittance to decipher/transcribe the diary, which took him three years. There was a whole big fight about whether he should be credited as deciphering it or merely transcribing it. The author of the article—Kate Loveman, a Pepys scholar—suggests Smith had the manual at hand:
At issue here was whether Smith had enjoyed the benefit of a ‘key’ to the shorthand made by Grenville during his initial work on the diary and so acted merely as a transcriber (something wrongly portrayed as a simple task). Smith wrote to defend himself: Grenville had provided no such key. The diary, Smith said, had been ‘brought into its legible state by my sole exertions’, although others had reaped the profits. The editor of the paper judged Smith to have been the ‘real revealer of Pepys’.
It has generally been assumed on this basis that Smith worked largely from scratch and that, throughout, the shorthand system remained unrecognised. What Smith did not say (but which scrutiny of his transcript reveals) is that he had identified Shelton’s system and was working with the benefit of one of Shelton’s manuals – probably from Pepys’s library. He kept the fact he had located a shorthand key private, thereby magnifying his achievements and keeping his expertise on Pepys’s manuscripts exclusive.
However, in her biography of Pepys, Claire Tomalin says that Smith did not have Shelton’s manual at hand, that “He carried out the entire task without knowing that the key to the shorthand was in the library.” Smith claimed to have written a history of the diary but died without publishing it. Tomalin says Smith “remained aggrieved for the rest of his life. He saw a rich aristocrat taking all the credit while his essential work was glossed over.” Whereas Loveman’s article paints him as basically having the cheatcodes and keeping them to himself.
I don’t know enough to say who is right. Both writers are experts on Pepys. I wonder what Loveman means by ‘scrutiny of his transcript reveals.’ Loveman has a new book out on Pepys, I’ll read it eventually and report back when I can. Hopefully she sheds more light on this.
Instagram | Goodreads | Letterboxd | Bluesky