Book Review: Chaucer's Tale

Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterburyby Paul StrohmViking, 2014The alleged pivot-point in Paul Strohm's fast-paced, engaging new book Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, is 1386, when the poet was evicted from his grace-and-favor public lodgings over Aldgate, deprived of his very lucrative job as controller of the city's wool custom, and relegated to a lonely exile in the beautiful countryside of Kent. "This was his crisis," Strohm writes, "his time of troubles," and tracing its exact contours is a tricky thing to do, considering the almost completely bifurcated nature of the historical record. That record is fairly acceptable when it comes to the busy public life Chaucer led as a royal servant for virtually his entire life. But the story is very different when it comes to the other side of his life. "As far as the existing records go, Chaucer the poet remains all but hidden from history," Strohm rightly reminds his readers. "Based on the 493 documents of his official life published in the Life-Records, nobody would have known he was a poet at all."It's a dichotomy that's destined to dog Strohm's story to its end, so he devotes some attention to its nuances:

One could go so far as to imagine, speculatively, the existence of "two Chaucers," the one busy in court and city and the other scribbling in obscure digs somewhere. The first with a public career conducted at a level of moderate visibility and the other as a private writer perfecting his art on his own terms. The records display a public man seeking advancement, forming political and factional ties, representing his king at home and abroad, and supervising the export of the most valuable commodity in the land. The writer and private man is, by comparison, hardly to be seen.

Strohm's aim is twofold, first to narrate the upheavals that gripped the public Chaucer's life in the late 14th Century, and second to draw a picture of how those upheavals changed what was being scratched out by the private Chaucer's goose-quill pen. His larger theory is that Chaucer's "time of troubles" deeply altered his conception of his own artistic enterprise and gave rise to, among other things, The Canterbury Tales. And since one of the inevitable outcomes of "the two Chaucer" problem is of course that there can't possibly be a clear demonstration of such a connection, much of Chaucer's Tale is Strohm engaging in lots of highly-detailed speculation. And since he's very, very good at highly-detailed speculation, the book is a treat.He reads the era's great and small personalities with a fine dramatic sensitivity (his portrait of disreputably shabby-charismatic London mayor Nicholas Brembe is particularly entertaining, and it's providentially impossible for Brembe to sue him), and he's equally good at bringing the day-to-day life of Chaucer's city:

Accommodations in London were small, if not downright cramped, and much of life there was conducted publicly, in the street, for all to share and see. Even a resident in a tower surrounded by five-foot walls still steps out into the street to draw some water from the communal pump, of to enjoy a cup of wine or a measure of ale, or to pick up some bread from a streetside oven, or to visit a public latrine. Even the resident who skips a ward meeting will be governed by its ordinances, and the parishioner who skips mass will still divide the day by the sound of liturgical bells. The most solitary walker will jostle with fellow Londoners on narrow streets and hold a plethora of city sights in common.

Chaucer's Tale isn't the full-dress new biography of the poet and his times that we've needed for two or decades now, but in a performance much like that of James Shapiro in his equally-good 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Strohm does an enormous amount of broad-scale work even through his smaller focus, on one crisis year and its aftermath in the life of "England's first widely-acclaimed literary celebrity."