by JENNA MEAD
*from EILEEN: Can you imagine sitting down and willfully deciding to write a book review just because you felt compelled to do so, even though no one had actually requested it? Yes, I know it happens, but it is RARE, people ... RARE. There's something compelling about a book that, in its own inimitable way, calls forth a commentary, or a writing-beside (minus the usual compulsory, or professional, obligation to do so, and we've featured many such reviews here at ITM over the years). So we were delighted when Jenna Mead contacted us and told us that she had unwittingly written an entire review of Paul Strohm's recent book and micro-history
Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (Viking, 2014), just because she felt like it, and what should she do with it? Publish it here, that's what. So, without further ado --
Strohm’s boy & translatio studii
Paul
Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale. 1386 and the Road to
Canterbury. New York: Viking, 2014. i-xv, 1-284; 1 map; 12
coloured plates.
by Jenna
Mead
About
halfway through his scintillating account of the wool trade, Paul Strohm’s expository
third person narrator serves up one of his coolest wisecracks. Describing—of
all things—the export commodity market, he says
Records indicate occasional shipments of lead, tin, leather,
cheese, butter, feathers and featherbeds, resin, frippery (whether rags or sewn
clothing ornament, linen, wheat, woad (a source of blue dye), wax, and
fat—exports, that is, of a miscellaneous character and decidedly modest profitability
. . .but wool was the ball game. Excepting the odd peasant in a remote village
or a hermit in a cell, nobody in fourteenth-century England was more than one
degree of separation from the wool trade. (107)
That’s
it right there. Strohm’s narrator is everything you want your guide through
Chaucer’s life to be: intimately knowledgeable about the material; generous but
perspicacious in his judgments; technically accomplished in managing the kind
of story he’s sifted out of putting the archive next to historical fiction next
to micro-history and downright funny. Above all, this narrator is confident about
the narrative he wants to tell and the reader whose attention he’s caught up
and wants to keep. A tried and true way to seduce readers and keep them is to
place those readers in the story and Strohm’s narrator does that here by
pulling off a wicked piece of translatio
studii. Literally “the transfer of knowledge from one geographical place
and time to another,” this wonk-puncturing wisecrack and its witty amplification
summoning up the stereotypes of comic medievalism—the yokel peasant and the
walled-in hermit—shift a snapshot of balance of payments to less than one
degree of separation from the reader at the ballpark. The effect is achieved
through drop-dead timing: just when you thought you didn’t understand medieval
economics, Strohm’s narrator brings it right into your twenty-first century ear
and you’re there on the fourteenth-century dock watching the bales going out and
the money rolling in. You’re connected to the narrative. As long as you know
how to play ball that is; but more on that later.
Chaucer’s
Tale. 1386 and the Road to Canterbury is, of course, not Chaucer’s tale at
all but Strohm’s tale and it sets the bar high in what’s emerging as a renewed
confidence in the genre of biography and Chaucer as its subject. This year’s
MLA Convention, for example, included a session titled “Chaucer and
Microhistory” at which Marion E Turner and Ardis Butterfield considered “After
Biography” and "Writing
Chaucer's Life: A Surrogate Narrative" while Daniel Birkholz considered "Micro-Literary
History in a Pre-Chaucerian Register.” The session anchored “microhistory” to
the canonical Chaucer either as subject or temporal marker. Strohm’s publisher,
Viking, refines the connection by calling the book “[a] lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the
story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury
Tales:” thereby shifting the genre
from academic discursive formation, with a history arcing back to E. P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class and Carlo Ginzburg, I
benandanti. Ricerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agria tra Cinquecento e
Seicento in 1963, to a commercial category that has the feel of something trending
up. It’s a smart move: “micro” is small enough to read easily (no footnotes) and
who doesn’t like “biography,” especially if it reads like fiction? The data on Goodreads.com are certainly pointing that way; Amazon reviews are generally in
agreement with one discerning reviewer identifying the book as a “crossover”
from “history” to “a wider audience.”
Chaucer’s Tale is more
ambitious than that, though, and under the rubric of “a little life story”
Strohm’s narrative is about a single year (1386) and the writing of a
masterwork (The Canterbury Tales). So it’s a story about history and
literature. It has a roll call of major characters—the dangerously skilful John
of Gaunt, the dangerously perverse Richard II and all the others—whose
histories dramatize a grand narrative of late fourteen-century London with deft
economy, supplemented by lesser-known figures who are given their moment in the
sun—egregious Nicholas Brembre and his cronies, clever, sexy Katherine Swynford
and her loyal sister Philippa, Sir Arnold Savage and the folks down in Kent,
taking the political temperature in London and often getting it right. But it
also has an argument and here is where the fault line, as Strohm perceives it,
lies between history and biography, regardless of dimensions. In an interview with Candace Robb, Strohm says, with disarming candour:
In Social Chaucer and in books like Hochon’s Arrow I let myself linger over the uncertainties of
my evidence, over its recesses, its obtuseness, its silences and evasions. But
when you’re writing a biography–even a “microbiography” as my publisher calls
it–you have to commit to narrative. You can’t endlessly wobble about, was it
this way or that way. You have to go ahead and make your best choice and get
the story told. And I don’t mind that. It’s a different way of knowing.
Narrative–the arrangement of details into a coherent account–is itself a
powerful tool of discovery. When you narrate incidents, configure them or
string them together, you learn things.
What’s
at stake here is negotiating between the archive—for the most part, the Chaucer
Life-Records—and the demands of
“commit[ting] to narrative” and this is where Strohm’s intelligence and skills
as a writer push his narrative toward historical fiction. “In the pivotal year
1386, at the mature age of forty-two or forty-three, Chaucer was a man of
literary accomplishment, standing on the brink of his decision to write the Canterbury Tales” (184). Really? Chaucer stood on the brink right then? Really? There is nothing in
the Chaucer Life-Records to support
this claim: Strohm knows this because he observes that “[o]ne can immerse
oneself in the extensive Life-Records
without learning that Chaucer was a writer at all” (184). But this is the critical
point in the argument. Chaucer’s annus
horribilis deprives him of all that he has known and relied upon as a writer and the move to Kent demands
and occasions one of the most daring innovations of his entire poetic: he invents
an audience “that will live within the borders of his own work, perennially
available as a resource for the telling and hearing of tales” (227). To
narrativize this moment, demands a trope from historical fiction that imagines
a conversation, a moment, a thought, that an historical personage might have had and uses that writerly
invention to “get the story told.”
This expository narrator—thinly
veiled as the impersonal “one”—has been managing the argumentative thread of
the narrative from the beginning and this is the Strohm of Theory and the Premodern Text (2000). The “Introduction” is called
“Chaucer’s Crisis” and after setting out historical ground his microbiography
will investigate, Strohm unpacks his own crisis.
This book proposes a connection between an author’s immersion in
ordinary, everyday activities and the separately imagined world of his literary
work. Every literary biographer faces the problem of bridging this practical
and conceptual divide. But the problem is stretched to breaking point in the
case of a premodern writer who kept no personal diaries and maintained no
regular written correspondence or other firsthand account of his motives and
thoughts. (7)
Dismissing
the “precarious ground when [literary biographers] go prospecting in an
artist’s body of written work seeking nuggets of buried life experience” (9),
Strohm writes “I have pursued a third option.” “Intermediary between a writer’s
public life on the one hand and fictional and literary creations on the other
are those activities comprising what might be called the ‘writing scene;’ all
those matters of situation and circumstance that permit writing in the first
place” (11). Not the “writing scene” of Jacques Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene
of Writing,” and here Strohm swerves away from his earlier engagement with
psychoanalysis, but a scene of writing revealed by “an evidence-based account
that respects the past as past, but that simultaneously seeks out linkages between
the past and our present” (13).
This scene is the rich and engaging
narrative that comprises the larger part of Strohm’s tale. There is the
delicate account of the web of social nuance in the first chapter, “A Married
Man,” that pulls Chaucer’s mercantile background and aspirational career
prospects into the glamorous orbit of “Hainault Chic” in which the de Roet
girls (Katherine and Philippa) moved with the poised ambition of insiders. The
net effects for Chaucer are what Strohm calls “collateral benefits” (38) and
“derivative favour” (40): patronage at one degree of separation; sometimes
being in the room with real power; observable frisson. Strohm is too tactful to draw a comparison that hovers
over this part of his narrative. He’s not going to diss his boy. Katherine de
Roet becomes Katherine Swynford. It was perhaps convenient: Sir Hugh Swynford is
one of Gaunt’s retainers thus locating Katherine in Gaunt’s court with appropriate
status. Katherine is also a married woman, with children of her own, while she
is governess to Gaunt’s daughters. When Sir Hugh dies (c. 1372) his wife
inherits property in Kettlethorp that will become a power base as she builds
and husbands her own court—with her sister perhaps to mind her back. Meanwhile,
Philippa de Roet becomes Philippa Chaucer and she will thrive in the dense
complexities of court life. Her husband, meanwhile, isn’t singled out but
neither is he forgotten as he patches together a career on the fringes of
public life, without either the spectacular financial success or deadly
political risks of others from the same mercantile class.
Another element in the writing scene
is the rent-free accommodation over Aldgate (Chapter 2): “cramped, cold,
rudimentary in its sanitary arrangements, and (perhaps most seriously in the
case of a writer) ill lit, even at midday” (52). There is much evidence of the
physical conditions of this scene in which it’s hard to imagine writing taking
place at all but Strohm makes two points, almost inter alia, that will resonate in coming events. He notes Aldgate’s
“rough-cut stone walls, its narrow arrow slits, its smelly ditch, and its
generally defensive and civic character” as “ill-suited to the tastes of a
classy and upwardly mobile lady, or, for that matter to the emerging tastes of
[Chaucer’s] socially ambitious son Thomas” (61). Yes, exactly. Chaucer’s day
job is entangled with the Ricardian faction; Philippa and Thomas operate deep
in Lancastrian territory. And while Philippa astutely garners her successes and
Thomas learns what he needs to know, Strohm rates Chaucer as a man of “private
learning” (65), living “in London for a dozen years without the guarantees and
emotional comforts of citizenship, in a city in which distinctions of
citizen/noncitizen, freeman/nonfreeman, denizen/alien were attentively observed”
(66). Whereas “[t]o be a citizen of London in the later fourteenth century was
a splendid thing” (65). Strohm sees the materiality of Chaucer’s life as shorn
off from all those forms of association—of ward or parish, for example—that
structured lives in the city to which he was born and through which he might
have risen to be somebody.
The day job as controller of customs
and later the wool custom—his big break after (very) modest success as an
esquire in the king’s household—is a complete nightmare. In an earlier, and
formal, biography, Derek Pearsall characterized the role at the customs quay in
1374 as “no sinecure: it was not the kind of position that would be granted to
a favoured poet to give him the leisure to write more poetry . . .[the job]
usually went to professional civil servants” (99).
Strohm’s corresponding third chapter, “The Wool Men,” is a triumph of drama and
suspense: detailing the shakers and movers in that dangerous set of plays
between the volatilities of the market interlocking with the machinations of
political power, historical forces that resist just being historical, ambition-driven
brinkmanship and sheer unadulterated greed. The key word in this chapter
shimmers into view in the first paragraph — “compromised” (90). The point of
the narrative here is “to form a judgment of Chaucer’s own culpability or, to
put it differently, just how many compromises this new post would require him
to make” (98). Given the culture of bribery Strohm describes, another way of
putting it might be, “did Chaucer ever have a chance?”—especially since “[c]ollectors
of customs were expected to be men of substance” (115). That would be a no,
then. But this isn’t just a story about ethics for it also shows Chaucer’s
surviving from 1374 to 1386. Twelve years is a long time to be “looking the
other way; working to rule; keeping his head down; knowing when to keep his
mouth shut; and allowing his superiors a free hand” (136).
Being the king’s man may have become
a career-limiting move down there at the Wool Quay but 1386 opened up new
possibilities for being compromised and, as Shire Knight representing Kent in
the Parliament, it’s not long before it all goes to hell in a handcart. The
narrative is especially good on counterpointing the macro-level—the headlong
rush toward political disaster as Richard II faced down a Parliament flexing
its reformist muscle in an alliance with Thomas, Duke of Gloucester—with the
micro-level of Chaucer as “the least qualified shire knight to be there” (141).
The smart move in the narrative here is to situate Chaucer within the culture of Parliament where he doesn’t
own land and neither has he inherited it and has virtually no capital
resources, having been a minor public servant with modest (finite) annuities.
He is an esquire but of meindre or
lower degree rather than being a sworn knight; he’s not a Kentish man, he’s a
Londoner, and his people are the King’s faction, which is in all kinds of
trouble. We’ve come to anticipate the next move: the expense account of four
London representatives to a slightly later Parliament “is an eye-opener” (147).
“A look inside Georgetown bars, and Pimlico equivalents, when the US Congress
or the British Parliament are in session still gives a hint of the goings-on
that might be expected when so many well-funded, short-term out-of-towners
arrive on such a basis” (147). Just how out of his depth was Chaucer? “As to
what an evening on the town would have looked like for Chaucer, we’ll never
know” (149) but nothing in the archive leads us to expect he could cut it. And
so Chaucer makes a “constrained choice:” he “resigned his positions and left
town . . .without any send-off or any kind of golden parachute” (183).
The last 70-odd pages of Strohm’s
narrative has Chaucer “on the skids in Kent in the winter of 1387-87” (254):
the 493 Life-Records and the archive
Strohm has assiduously mined for evidence evaporate as the writing scene and its
literary masterwork are focalized through a character called “The Other
Chaucer,” the one who is the writer (184). This character bears an uncanny
resemblance to the one summarily dismissed in the Introduction “before it opens
the door to the host of crackpot theories . . .from which Chaucer has been
blessedly spared” (8); the one produced by when the literary biographer goes
“prospecting in an artist’s body of written work seeking nuggets of buried life
experience” (9). This other Chaucer, though, is an essential strategy for the
narrative because he owns the writing scene: without him, there’s simply no
point. My problem — and I’m happy to own it — isn’t actually that Strohm finds
“Chaucer had a typically medieval attitude toward completion” (189) or that the
author of Troilus and Criseyde is
standing “behind” its narrator (189); that the House of Fame is Chaucer’s riposte to “his illustrious predecessor
Dante as a fame-seeking windbag” (206); that the Troilus is regarded as “evidence” (213) or even lines like Chaucer
is “too great an artist to rest complacently” (234). My problem is that “in
biography . . .you have to commit to narrative;” there’s no “linger[ing] over the
uncertainties of [one’s] evidence, over its recesses, its obtuseness, its
silences and evasions.” Microbiography, in other words, relies upon a theory of
textuality that literary criticism does not.
But back
to the ball park—because I’m a fan of this book—and its wise-cracking narrator.
Making the connection between Chaucer’s observations of parliamentary procedure
and both the cacophony of the Parliament
of Fowls and the shouting down of Ector that sees Criseyde exchanged for
Antenor (166), the narrator comments
[t]his kind of upsurge, especially in its
orally demonstrate character, appears to have been endemic to the English
Parliament. After all, even today, in what appears to be a continuing
tradition, the British Parliament surprises strangers who, expecting a high level
of decorum in debate, are taken aback with the verbally rowdy character the
prime minister’s questions and other unruly aspects of parliamentary demeanour.
(164)
Actually, only if those strangers are
Americans. This is the narrator who brings George W Bush into view with
Knighton’s Chronicle (171); whose
“loose analogy” for visiting parliamentarians on the tear down King Street is
the Las Vegas strip and a run of taverns and ale-houses down to the limits of
Westminster where “things got really rowdy” (148); who sees ideas that “would
have been a stretch at best” (254) and a whole raft of other sparkling, funny,
seductive idioms that will drive some readers crazy and delight others—if only
for the truly impressive skill that weaves this demotic rhetoric together with
acute archival analysis and unfailing erudition into compelling historical
narrative that really swings along.
But
to say this narrator’s speech is demotic isn't quite right: it’s colloquial,
it’s everyday language, it’s globalized but it’s also indelibly US—and that’s
not a put-down. This narrator delivers another chapter in the long-running
“negotiation” in the Anglo-American academy over who owns “Chaucer.” There is a
gripping, genre-trashing story to be told about the trans-Atlantic moves behind
the discursive structures of Chaucer culture in the US. Including, but by no
means limited to, MS EL 26 C 9 (the Ellesmere Manuscript)’s moving west; the
roll-call of American editors, John M Manly, Edith Rickert, Fred Robinson, Albert
Baugh, Larry Benson; the Variorum Chaucer
project, Houghton Mifflin and the Riverside
Chaucer; the associations like the New Chaucer Society, the forums of the
Modern Language Association; the breaking up of MS Bute 13; Professor Toshiyuki
Takamiya’s collection of ME
manuscripts, that includes three copies of The Canterbury Tales in its
treasures, now on long-term loan to the Beinecke Library at Yale. The
traffic isn’t only one-way, of course, and distinguished scholars—like Paul
Strohm himself—have moved in both directions. It’s a complicated story of
ambition, agonistics and exceptionalism; a story of translatio studii; a
story that shows, above all, how “Chaucer” thrives. Strohm’s achievements in Chaucer’s
Tale. 1386 and the Road to Canterbury are significant and will shape the (micro)biographies
of Chaucer currently underway: his book has changed the shape of the space and
I’m hanging out to read what happens next.
