The racket of genius

The Poet’s Tale: Chaucer and the Year that Made the Canterbury Tales. By Paul Strohm. Profile Books; 284 pages; £15.99.

THIS is an extremely good book. Oddly so, it might seem. It contains no new facts about Geoffrey Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales”, whose barely documented 14th-century life has long frustrated scholars: no more evidence about his strangely distant marriage to Philippa or his dealings with “lytel Lowys my sone”, or what books he read, or the cabal of venal, overweening London merchants he did business with. The works are cited sparingly. Paul Strohm does not even much indulge that useful biographer’s trick, trawling through the oeuvre for little gleams of Chaucer’s personality: a love, perhaps, of walking through dew-damp dawn meadows (“The Legend of Good Women”), or his delight in the sunshine through his new stained-glass window as he snuggled down in bed (“Troilus and Criseide”).

What he does instead is create a soundscape. Earlier books have described what Chaucer’s London looked like; Mr Strohm makes it a place where people are shouting, hustling, grabbing you by the coat, asking “What’s new?”, while almost continually behind them carts thunder, horses clatter, and bells ring, peal, carillon, clang and toll. You can hardly hear yourself think; but given the ceaseless round of church offices, tavern-bawling, new mechanical timekeeping and life lived out in the street, that was what it was like. This was what Chaucer had to contend with when, after a hard day of “reckonings” as controller of the wool custom, he came home to his room of books above Aldgate and attempted to write. It is a wonder that he produced anything.

Somehow he managed, and he presented his offerings at small literary gatherings that were fairly rowdy in themselves: the author reading aloud, with digs and asides, while listeners applauded, interrupted (“Namoore of this!”) or objected (“Thy drasty riming is nat worth a toord!”, as host Harry Bailly exclaims in the “Tales”). Nothing could pass without comment.

Similarly, the Parliament of 1386—in which Chaucer, as a supporter of Richard II, found himself on the wrong side, and after which, at 42 or 43, he lost both his job and his Aldgate rooms—is presented in this book as a welter of noise. The whole Commons rises in a tumult over the king’s demands for tax, the king sulkily stalks out, the nobles shout their defiance (as shocking as throwing their gauntlets to the floor), and it is all much as Chaucer depicts it in the “Parliament of Fowls” (“Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek”), or in the “House of Fame”, when the volume of disputing contenders for honour becomes as deafening as a rookery. What a contrast after that to retreat into the wilds of Kent, where “In th’end of [the] strem I am dul as ded.”

Yet out of that very quietness, Mr Strohm argues, came the flowering of Chaucer’s genius. Forced into unemployed rural solitude, longing for bustle and an audience, he created one himself in the glorious procession of pilgrims towards Thomas à Becket’s shrine. He rubbed elbows again with Franklin, Miller, Monk, Cook, Prioress, Shipman, all noisily interacting, and made himself a storyteller, too.

Typically for one who was a vintner’s son, and who had never quite hauled himself up socially from his first appointment as a meindre, or lesser, esquire, he made no great impression on his fictional company. In his heart, the real man knew better. He was not only ready to follow, if reverently, in the footsteps of Ovid, Petrarch and Dante; he was also ready to lead the way into the new world, just opening, of books being published for potential rather than actual readers, and of readers who were as likely to consume his wonderful writings in, of all things, silence.