The Life and Times of Chaucer Read online

  And so I have gathered the available scholarly materials in a heap, to make a stab at sorting them and finding out how much it is possible to say, or rather make up, about the character of Chaucer: how he lived and died, how he wrote poetry, how we might best read it. By available materials I mean of course a veritable Alp of writings, on fourteenthcentury history in general and on Chaucer in particular, to say nothing of the period’s philosophy, rhetorical theory, economics, and so forth. I’ve attempted no more here than to convey a more or less accurate impression. My idea has been to sketch the poet in the illumination of his time, place, and station—his history and the character of the courts he worked for—and to suggest some of the finer details, the tics, opinions, and customary worries, and, more important, Chaucer’s greatness and goodness, by brief and general comment on his work. The portrait which emerges will be recognized at once as partly personal, that is, biased, not strictly a composite made of other people’s notions of the man and his work, although I’ve read everything I could get hold of and have incorporated into my speculations on Chaucer’s life and art all that I’ve been able to make fit with a manlike, imaginatively fused image, a color portrait without noticeable extra ears or chopped-off fingers. I’ve tried to be judicious and relatively objective, accepting suggestions, struggling to suppress my own predispositions; but my work must inevitably have to some degree the failing I see in other people’s books, wherein the portrait of the poet comes out oddly like a picture of the biographer.

  I might acknowledge here one conscious bias. Although I’ve tried to accommodate others’ opinions, a few I’ve resisted, namely, those which begin by insisting on Chaucer’s medievalness and then so narrowly define medievalness as to rule out all that’s most visible in the poems, such as the humor. By a sort of scholarly sleight-of-hand, wherein the ideas of men like St. Augustine, nine centuries before Chaucer, become the ruling opinions of the fourteenth century, it has been made to appear in a few recent studies—now generally rejected—that Chaucer was not, as most people have imagined, a humane and genially comic poet. It has been shown, rightly, that he frequently makes use of Christian symbolism, biblical allusion, and patterns of detail which establish something like extended allegory. Such features, misunderstood, can suggest the puritanical arthritis of John Bunyan, or Jonathan Swift’s ironic Christian leer. In their historical context, the Middle Ages, they can be made to suggest doctrinal rigidity, contempt for the world: St. Augustine’s scorn of his libertine days, revealed in his Confessions, or the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin’s disapproval of the pagan Virgil he was forever quoting. Presented with this darker view of Chaucer, we are asked to abandon the complex poems for simple, rather righteous theories.

  Balanced literary criticism, balanced understanding of anything, is based, as we know when we stop to think, on juxtaposition and exclusion, the principle in the old story of the man who, when asked, “How’s your wife?” responded, “Compared to what?” Chaucer was Christian, but not as intensely so as, for example, St. Peter. He was interested in the theory of monarchy, but not as intensely so as Richard II. A certain kind of Christianity—a certain style in the manipulation of symbol and allusion—was a part of the general literary style of Chaucer’s age. Many things in Chaucer’s poetry reflect that style; some do not. To understand what Chaucer means—to understand his attitude toward his partly traditional, partly original subject matter—the critic must determine what elements of the poetry are part of the general medieval style: what Chaucer has in common with the man who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the man who wrote Piers Plowman, what things belong to Chaucer’s personal style, and what relationship obtains between the two. Most Chaucerians agree that once one has separated what T. S. Eliot would call “tradition” from “individual talent” in Chaucer’s work, Chaucer stands out among his poetic contemporaries as remarkably original.

  Though no defense is really needed for the standard view of Chaucer’s originality, it is worthwhile asking, here at the start of this assay at reconstruction, where exactly Chaucer stood in relation to his poetic contemporaries, that is, what Chaucer’s individuality consisted of. The answer, of course, is that he was an original poet in any number of ways—among others his characteristic choice of themes, his taste in subject matter, his preference for particular earlier writers (poets, philosophers, religious thinkers), and his attitudes toward, say, women and money. But when we compare Chaucer’s choices with those commonly made by his fellow English poets, certain features do, I think, stand out, and perhaps the most significant, though not the first we notice, is this: In nearly everything he wrote, Chaucer worried one basic philosophical question, the nature and spiritual effect of love. Chaucer wrote, of course, during one of the world’s great moments for love poetry; but his handling of love is nevertheless one of the essential ingredients in his uniqueness.

  Chaucer’s basic subject has sometimes been identified—too loosely, as we’ll see—with what has been described as the central theme of all medieval literature, “What is the proper use of ‘the World’?”, a theme as old, by one formulation, as Homer’s Iliad, but a theme especially urgent in the Christian Middle Ages, when “the World” was both profoundly appealing and suspect, standing out—as it did not for Homer—in dramatic contrast to the promised ultimate haven of the soul. The theme is one Chaucer cannot help having thought about, strolling beside the Thames, his hands behind his back, his round head thrown forward, large eyes staring groundward with the expression of a man “fully dazed”—a plump, conservatively dressed public official with slightly flushed cheeks, slowly heading home from his customshouse office to his handsome mansion above Aldgate in the London city wall. He was perhaps still musing on the problem of the World in his house late that night, frowning in his medieval spectacles (Roger Bacon’s invention, half a century before)—the children all in bed, Philippa across the dim, shuttered room from him, fashioning small neeedlepoint flowers of vermilion and gold.

  Stroking his beard, reading by fluttering candlelight his copy of Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, he must have turned over the problem’s complexities, its numerous, never quite satisfactory solutions, from carpe diem to Macrobius and St. Paul. It was the central issue in the Christian’s earthly trial, but more important, in a way, it was at the heart of most of the serious poetry Chaucer knew, the poetry against which he measured his artistic progress. (For all his humor, for all his faith, Chaucer was something of a worrier. Worry is one of the regular features of his comic self-portraits. He worries himself sleepless in the Book of the Duchess, worries frantically, in the House of Fame, that the eagle carrying him to visions may drop him; he wrings his hands in anguish, worrying about his characters in Troilus and Criseyde, and worries, as a pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales, that Our Host, Harry Bailey, may again interrupt him. Jokes, certainly, but like his jokes about his stoutness, they probably have some basis in fact. As this biography will show, Chaucer had, from time to time, more than a little to worry about.) The question must have vexed him, and like all vexing questions, it was personal, finally. He worked hard, lived by rule, as if heaven might be watching, while that great, thieving lout, his associate Nick Brembre…All very well to say, with eyes rolled skyward, as he’d written not long since in the Parliament of Birds, “ourë present worldës lyvës spacë/Nis but a maner deth, what wey we tracë.…” But ah, the seductive, sly-eyed World was not so easily dismissed in these days of Ricardian opulence—radiant entertainments, crimson-bannered spires. All the poets agreed.

  He’d no doubt recognized that standard theme, the siren-appeal of the things of this world, in provincial court performances of the anonymous alliterative Morte Arthure in the days of King Edward III.1 Chaucer had been younger then, just beginning as a poet, and the sharp-eyed old Westerner’s thudding native meter—his “rum, ram, ruf by lettre,” as Chaucer’s Parson would describe it in the Canterbury Tales—had had, for Chaucer, no particular appeal. All the same, it was a stirri
ng piece of poetry in its way, and a bold piece of criticism, even though in a dialect most of the audience had trouble understanding. The old Westerner was interested in nationalism, politics, war—particularly the great war of Edward III in France—and he was troubled about the queer intertanglement of good and evil in affairs of state, especially the insidious relationship of princely glory and overweening pride. He’d set to verse the legend of King Arthur’s war with the Roman Emperor Lucius, a transparent allegory of Edward’s war, and by imagistic and dramatic means he’d shown the degree to which Arthur was simultaneously majestic and monstrous. Wealth and power, the glories of this world, and overweening pride, were near of kin. So far so good. But there the old man of the West had reached his limit. To resolve the ambiguity in Arthur’s nature (or that of any great king), the poet had applied like hopeful phlebotomies the standard legal, philosophical, and religious opinions handed down to him: a warlike king without a clearly valid claim, whatever his seeming chivalry, is a criminal aggressor; trust in Fortune leads to the failure of one’s hopes; man should seek to do the will of God. Chaucer knew, listening in the audience—his hands folded, his eyes half-closed—that none of this had in fact much to do with King Edward’s situation, and what proved King Arthur a monster in the poem, his killing and ravaging, had already occurred, and been noted by his victims, long before he’d overreached his claim, turned to trust in Fortune, or forgotten his Christian vassalage. Though the poem had a fine swashbuckling swing and a moral that would be pleasing to King Edward’s successor, pacific King Richard—though the poem was, indeed, beside any English poem since AngloSaxon times a transcendent work of art—the real dramatic issue, the interpenetration of evil and good, was one the poet’s mind was too loyal to old doctrines to penetrate. He delighted in war, in such lordly feats as those of the king’s illustrious son in the magnificent black armor, le Prince d’Angleterre, although the poet also knew, and wouldn’t pretend he didn’t, that war wrecks convents and orphans little children. What could one do with such a paradox except copy it down and advise contemptus mundi?

  Chaucer had seen early that he could do better than that. Pride of position, delight in the world, was a dangerous business—as he would write later, in his punning poem “Truth,” “the wrastling for this world axeth [asketh] a fall”—but there was more to it than that.

  Other of Chaucer’s contemporaries, the authors of the Parliament of the Three Ages and Winner and Waster (the Morte Arthure-poet’s apparent disciples—although the dating of these poems has proved somewhat uncertain), worked related thematic material with more or less the same intense concern and something of the same inability to pierce the mystery. Life is splendid, life is ghastly; man should hoard, man should spend. In the introduction to the Parliament, a poaching expedition is offered as (apparently) an emblem of the usual concupiscent (as opposed to ascetic) human life: it’s hard and it’s thrilling and when they finally catch you doing it they hang you. To all this world’s blandishments, in each of these poems, the answer is doctrine, humility, faith, though at the end of the Parliament the poet has made his peace with the grove—the green world of nature. Like the alliterative Morte Arthure, the poems have undeniable charm and beauty, and the contempt of the world they advise is not harsh; yet their vision, Chaucer would know (if in fact he ever heard them), was limited. Their authors were able to love God and nature, including nature’s law of creation and destruction, gathering and spending (that is, “winning” and “wasting”); but the heart of man was an embarrassment.

  Though Long Will Langland might not look it, raw-boned and pockmarked, ranting at country and small-town humanity in a long black coat (Chaucer avoided him as he would the plague, but he kept track of his work, kept track of his readings in baronial courts and followed, with distaste, the cancerous proliferation of copies of his poem), Langland was a man able to penetrate doctrine’s inadequacy and also the world’s, and hunt for an adjustment. What seems true in theory, like what seems to be true when you’re having a dream, may prove crooked, ill-considered when you try to apply it to the real world where things wax and wane and, in many cases, bite. In Piers Plowman Langland had presented this conflict of ideal and real, now looking at the world and observing its desperately struggling virtues, its chaos and stupidity, now dozing and visioning solutions which, when he’d awaken again, would prove skewbald. His subject matter—like Chaucer’s own—was “Everything”: poverty in the villages, the church calendar, unjust taxation, disease, corruption in King Richard’s court, the seven deadly sins, the wickedness of friars, England’s changing weather.…But what matters here is this: Langland saw behind the question, saw that the world changes (in Langland’s poem, “Lady Meed,” Reward, can be harmful or valuable, depending), so that truth in man must be a quality of mind and heart, a quality only apprehensible in terms of some model character, for instance, a faithful English plowman like Piers, or for instance Christ (in Langland’s vision, the two turn out to be the same). It is true enough that, as Chaucer once mentioned in conversation with John of Gaunt (unfortunately no record of the conversation survives), Langland’s plodding, sometimes staggering verse treats the subject of “the proper use of ‘the World’”; but Langland was no mere repeater of old saws, centuries-old doctrine. Langland had boldly rejected the stance of helplessly thrown up hands, the stance of the saintly in thirteenth-century paintings; had impatiently dismissed the whole cringing business of Should-I-take-pleasure-in-the-world-or-not? (“Avoid luxury, avoid causing people needless pain, don’t be fooled by a Papal pardon, and finish your soup,” was Langland’s advice.) What Langland offered was a positive program, a way of adjusting the ideal and the real in the spirit of Truth. “Brothers, I have shown you Piers,” says Will Langland, banging his stick. “Now behave like Piers.” (Chaucer grinned, glancing up past his shoulder at his elongated shadow on the wall. Except for the tone, the banging stick, he and Langland were closer than it was pleasant for a gentleman to admit.)

  Somewhere up around York, where Edward III had gotten married, or perhaps in nearby Lancashire, lived Chaucer’s greatest English rival, the man known today as the Gawain-poet. Recent evidence suggests that he was a priest named John of Massey, brother to the muralist Hugo of Massey, who may have done the illustrations in the poet’s manuscript; “Hugo de” appears on one of the pictures, which are muralist in style, and other biographical details seem to fit.2 Chaucer and John Massey—if that was his name—may have known each other. One of the poems commonly attributed to Massey, St. Erkenwald, shows a knowledge of London, and Chaucer probably visited Yorkshire, where several of his friends had country estates, on numerous occasions. Chaucer may have had Massey’s most famous poem in mind when he alluded, in the Canterbury Tales, to “Gawayn, with his olde curteisyë,” and he may have been thinking of Massey’s Pearl at several points in the Book of the Duchess. If the two poets did in fact know each other, or know each other’s work, they surely felt some affinity. Massey was a consummate gentleman, had a wit to rival Chaucer’s own, and knew as well as Chaucer how to capture in English verse the spicy essence of an English seductress. More to the point, though not more important, he knew about “the World.”

  In his four linked poems, Pearl, Purity, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Massey presents a tour-de-force treatment of two common medieval themes: purity (God’s nature and the complementary state of a child or saint who goes to heaven directly, never having sinned) and patience (God’s tolerance and the complementary state of a repentant sinner loyally serving God and awaiting his pardon). No poet in the whole tradition of English literature has written more lush and lyrical descriptions of the natural world and the courtly world of tapestries, jewels, beautiful ladies and handsome knights, music, cuisine, and chivalric ritual. Here sits the sweet, seductive World at her fairest; here, if anywhere, we ought to face the great question, “What is the proper use of ‘the World’?” But we don’t. True, Massey now and then shows his heritage. He men
tions, in Purity, that a man and wife should not make love with the lights on; it might lead to defilement, more sex than love. But such moments in the poetry are notable because of their rarity. The real problems, the plot problems, are these: In Pearl a devout and decent Christian has a dream in which he meets the ghost of his daughter, and, though he knows better, he cannot help loving her more than he loves God. In Purity, a vivid and inventive retelling of Old Testament stories, some men revel in filth, sinning against purity, and others struggle with doubt, sinning against patience, while the best precariously and bravely behave as nobly as they can. In Patience, Jonah’s story, the hero fumes because God reconsiders his plan to wreck Nineveh, making Jonah look silly after all his dire prophesies, until Jonah comes to see that God, if ruled not by patience but by self-regard and embarrassment, would have wrecked the whole universe long ago. And in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a perfect courtier betrays his principles not for love of wealth or power or sex but in stark fear of losing his life. For John Massey as for William Langland (and Plato, for that matter), it is assumed that men want pleasure, not pain, that life’s great aches as a rule come not from wanting still more jewels, still more mistresses or lovers, another heaping plate of breast of swan, but from the loss of dear children, from humiliation in company, from doubt that God is watching, and fear of facing Death without a penknife. Trading his Christian and chivalric codes for a green piece of cloth with a spell on it (he hopes), Sir Gawain commits, technically, a sin of pride. But that is a harsh way of stating the morality of the poem. Gawain’s real sin is mere humanness, the ardent, sad wish to live, not die, which God and one’s fellow human beings can forgive. When Gawain returns to Arthur’s court, tells of his “shame” and shows the green cloth he now wears as a reminder, the court laughs merrily, glad that he survived, and insists on putting on green cloths exactly like Sir Gawain’s. A version of the motto of the Order of the Garter is appended to this supremely genteel, supremely tolerant poem. And fittingly so. In the same spirit King Edward, picking up from the floor a lady’s garter—his mistress, but a lady of inestimable worth—said in French, that being his primary language, “Evil to him who thinks evil of this,” and the high-minded Order was founded.