Books: Unexpurgated

Published letters and diaries, even if scandalous, create scandal for only a few years. Burned (like Byron's letters to his sister, Richard Burton's diaries), they scandalize a writer's name for good. Expurgated (like Pepys's diaries, Horace Walpole's letters), they start gossip which endures as long as the suppressed letters and diaries remain locked in bank vaults. After 50, 100, 150 years their outmoded revelations seem singularly innocent.

A good case in point is the recently published, unexpurgated, eight-volume edition of The Greville Memoirs: 1814-1860, edited by Lytton Strachey & Roger Fulford (Macmillan, $80). First published in an expurgated edition in 1874, nine years after hooknosed, cynical-lipped, elegant Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville's death, they seemed to Queen Victoria in "DISGRACEFULLY bad taste." Lord Winchilsea compared them to a life of the Apostles written by Judas Iscariot. Historians and biographers have long since ranked them among the greatest English political diaries. But, because some 80,000 words of the 91 red-covered notebooks were suppressed and because they were written in simple code the general impression remained that Greville's Memoirs were filled with indecent gossip.

Far from confirming this impression, the unexpurgated diary shows Greville as extremely scrupulous—too scrupulous—in omitting just this kind of Pepysian gossip. His diary deals almost entirely with serious political events—Cabinet crises, diplomatic juggling, Queen Victoria's shrewish squabbles with her ministers. Its value: that Greville, a shrewd and accurate reporter, wrote from the inside, that most of the leading political and literary figures of the day—the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, Peel, the Princess de Lieven, Macaulay—were his friends. His scandals —such as the lustful Duke of Cumberland's attack on Lady Lyndhurst—are those with direct political repercussions.

On the personal side, Greville's diary is interesting chiefly for the light it throws on his curious motive for writing it. Despite His aristocratic connections,his wealth, his membership in the Privy Council, his welcome to the most exclusive social, political and intellectual circles, Greville believed himself shallow-minded, frivolous, dissipated. His sober diary was a means to improve his mind, a penance for his sins.

His bitterest self-reproaches, occurring every few months, centre on his love of horse-racing. After winning £4,000 at Newmarket he broods: "I herd with the vilest and stupidest and most degraded of beings. ..." After an evening with encyclopedic Thomas Babington Macaulay, Greville ranks himself with the worms, compares his mind to "a hurdy-gurdy in the Street" and Macaulay's to "the great Organ at Haarlem."