Creators (4 page)

That Chaucer, a man of robust practicality, with his eye to the main chance, was influenced by such considerations of worldly glory and reward cannot be doubted. One of his perks was a daily measure of wine, and his connections ensured that it was of high quality. He must often, as he sipped it at his writing desk (“to refosculate his spirits,” as Hobbes put it), have reflected that the craft, hard though it was, brought its rewards in this world. Yet this is plainly not the whole story, or even half of it. No one who reads
Troilus and Criseyde
or
The Canterbury Tales
, his two great masterworks, can mistake the pervading note of relish: Chaucer loved to write. Writing was life to him—breakfast, dinner, and supper; meat and drink; the purpose, solace, comfort, and reward of existence.
His early essays in verse gradually built up a great reservoir of self-confidence, so that the thin trickle of ideas, similes, metaphors, devices, and word ecstacies gradually turned into an irresistible torrent, a raging, foaming river of felicity that brought him great happiness to pour upon the page. Such self-confidence is of the essence of creation. In a writer of genius like Chaucer—or Shakespeare, Dickens, and Kipling, the English writers he most resembles—confidence with words, ideas, images, and sheer verbal acrobatics takes over the personality, so that exercise of the skill becomes a daily necessity, and expression of what lies within the mind is as unavoidable as emptying the bladder and bowels (a comparison which would have appealed to Chaucer’s earthy tastes). Chaucer wrote because he had to write, out of compulsive delight.

He was intoxicated with words, as we shall see. But he was also entranced by men and women, their endless variety, their individual foibles and peculiar habits, their weird tastes and curious manners, their innocence and their cunning, their purity and lewdness, their humanity. What went on in his mind, as he observed his fellows—and no writer’s work ever gave better opportunity to see a wider spectrum of activities—was the astounding, almost miraculous, indeed divine comedy of people; and the phrase had a much closer application to his work than to Dante’s. Chaucer could be, when it was right, censorious and condemnatory, scornful and satirical; he could laugh and even sneer, inveigh against and rage at the wicked and petty. But it is clear he loved the human race, and the English in particular—they were his literary meat. Such love of humanity had to come out, just as did the hot, foaming words in which he expressed it.

So in the late 1380s or early 1390s, Chaucer, having written in
Troilus
a great poem of dignified beauty, began
The Canterbury Tales
. It was as though the whole of his life had been a preparation for this astonishing summation of the fourteenth-century English. There is nothing like it in the whole of western literature. Balzac’s
Comédie Humaine
and Zola’s
Rougon-Maquart
novels are, by comparison, sketchy and incomplete, as well as gruesomely long-winded compared with Chaucer’s matchless brevity. The England of his day is all there in the Prologue and the connecting links and in the tales themselves—church and state; rich and
poor; town and village; saint and sinner; honor; greed, deception, and guile; innocence and virtue both heroic and quotidian: all the pride, pathos, grandeur, pettiness, and sheer appetite of life as he had watched it in his time. In creating this vast, wide-ranging work of art he pinched ideas from others, and some of his plots are lifted whole, but all is transformed and made into something new, rich, and strange by his genius. Moreover the essential structure of a pilgrimage to Canterbury, with each of a mix of pilgrims forming a cross section of life, each telling a tale, is essentially Chaucer’s own. Nothing could have been more apposite for his experience and peculiar skills. It is an outstanding example of a creative idea producing a volcanic explosion of consequential ideas, which pour forth from the source in an irresistible flow.

Chaucer was probably the first man, and certainly the first writer, to see the English nation as a unity. This was his great appeal to his contemporaries, for the long war with France produced a sustained wave of patriotism, people no longer seeing each other as Norman or Saxon but as English, who no longer read French much and who wanted to read about themselves in English.
¹⁵
What Chaucer gave them was this, and something more: his was the English they spoke. It was one of his great creative gifts, which no one else was to possess to the same degree until Shakespeare came along, that he could write in a variety of vernaculars. There was the basic distinction, well understood by his time, between hieratic and demotic, or what people called “lered” or “lewed” (learned or lewd). The word “lewed” or “lewd” already meant vulgar but had not yet acquired its connotation of obscenity. Lered was full of Latinizing and French words;
lewd
was made up of much shorter words largely of remote Germanic origin, including vulgarisms the knightly class was not supposed to use (the men did; not the ladies, as a rule). Chaucer could not only write in both vernaculars (others could do that); he could also mingle them. In his dream poem
The House of Fame,
he as author has a dialogue with the Eagle, an upper-class bird which is so lered that it can rhyme “dissymulacious” with “reparacions” and “renovelauches” with “aqueyntaunces,” but can also, when it feels inclined, descends to demotic speech:

As has been observed, the Eagle (like Chaucer), has achieved and is proud of a bidialectical ability. For phrases like “lat be,” “ryght naught,” “no fors”—which meant “no matter”—and “pardee” (
par dieu
or “by God!”) were vulgar speech.
¹⁶

It is the strength of Chaucer that he was conversant with the technical terms in which, for example, lawyers, intellectuals, military men, engineers, etc., talked about their trades; but he also mocked such jargon. Thus the yeoman in
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale
says, “We seem wonderfully wise” because “Oure terms been so clergial and so queynte.” The Shipman, speaking in the Epilogue to
The Man of Law’s Tale
, says he will not use scholarly jargon:

Sometimes, however, Chaucer gets a character to use technical waffling (as Shakespeare was to do, often) to get a laugh. Thus the alchemist’s vocabulary of the canon is repeated by his yeoman:

Chaucer’s characters in
The Canterbury Tales
range from his knight, “a verray, parfit gentil knight,” as he is described—a
gentleman remote from vulgarity of any kind—and the extremely genteel prioress, Madame Eglentynes:

down to common artisans like the Miller and the Host, the innkeeper Harry Bailly. The fact that the key role of commentator is given to Bailly indicates Chaucer’s leaning toward the plebians for purposes of dramatic impact—they had never before appeared, except symbolically, in English letters. Bailly is a man of “rude speech and boold” but is nonetheless allowed to be bossy, even dominant. Chaucer had already made it clear, in the person of the Eagle, that “I can lewdly to a lewed man speke,” and he insists in the
Tales
that “The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.” His text abounds in rough phrases: “I rekke not a bene,” “I counte hym nat a flye,” “A straw for your gentilnesse!” There is a good deal of actual swearing, and not just of Madame Eglentyne’s variety—“Hir gretteste ooth was but by Seint Loy”—but lower stuff, “by my fay,” “a Goddes name,” “by Saint Ronyon,” down to what even today would be recognized as actual swearing and obscenity. The Host himself interrupts what he considers a tiresome passage, denouncing it as “drast,” adding, “Thy drasty rymyng is nat woorth a toord!” But although Chaucer has the Parson rebuke the Host for swearing, he also has the Parson use the word “piss” (as does the well-worn Wyf of Bath, who has used up five husbands and is looking forward to a sixth; and, less surprisingly, the Canon’s Yeoman and the Miller).

What is more, Chaucer not only has the Miller tell his shocking tale but affects surprise that the majority enjoyed it: “for the moore part they longhe and pleyde.” In my day
The Miller’s Tale
was virtually banned for schoolchildren because it was so “rude,” but that did not prevent me from relishing it. It is one of the most accomplished of his stories and, moreover, includes a brilliant little portrait of the Miller himself. “Full big he was of
brawn and eek of bones,” says Chaucer, calling him a skilled wrestler who could heave a door off its hinges, “Orbreke it at a renning with his heed.” Broad as a spade, he had a wart on the “top right” of his nose, and, sticking out of it, a tuft of hairs, “Reed as the brustles of a sowis eris.” His nostrils were black and wide and his mouth like “a great forneys,” with which he blew his bagpipe, leading the pilgrims “out of towne.”

Chaucer says the Miller was “a janglere and a goliardes”—a gossip and a comedian—whose stories were “moost of sinne and harlotries,” so it is not surprising that his tale is about a pretty young wife of an elderly and doom-ridden carpenter—a wife who not only commits adultery with a smooth young student but fends off a tiresome parish clerk, who is besotted with her, by tricking him, in the dark, into kissing her exposed bottom, believing it to be her mouth. When the student himself tries the trick, the clerk, prepared, brands him with a hot poker, and this brings the tale to an amazing climax.
¹⁸
For all its vulgarity, the story is related with great sophistication, and here it is worth noting that Chaucer, having experimented with all the meters then current among poets, is always adept at fitting his verse to his matter. He was a great experimenter but with a purpose, and in all his major works the type of verse he uses is eminently right. His favorite line was decasyllabic, and he uses it almost invariably in his mature work. But whereas in
Troilus
he favors the seven-line stanza or “rhyme royal,” as befits an epic of moving solemnity, for the fast-moving narrative of
The Canterbury Tales
he usually prefers the couplet. Chaucer, like all great tale-tellers, aims at deliberate speed; and as with other brilliant comedians who came later—one thinks of Shakespeare himself, Swift, and Waugh—uses enviable economy of means in his funny bits, the couplet of short sharp words being perfect for his purpose. He never uses two words where one will do, and
The Miller’s Tale
, a virtuoso exercise in brevity and keeping to the point, shows him at his best.

To set the scene for low life, immediately following the Knight’s elegant tale of chivalry and romance, Chaucer has a comic passage, in which the Host calls on the Monk to tell his story, but the Miller rudely interrupts to tell his. The Host objects that the Miller, or Robin as he calls him, is “dronke of ale.” The Miller replies: “That I
am dronke, I know it by my speech.” But he insists nevertheless on going ahead with his “legende” of “a carpenter and his wyf” in which a clerk (scholar) “hath set the wright’s cap.” This provokes an explosion from the Reeve: “Stint thy clappe! Let be thy lewed drunken harlotrie!” He says it is outrageous to bring a wife into disrepute. The Miller pooh-poohs the objection: there are a thousand good wives for one bad, and personally he trusts his own wife. So off he starts, and Chaucer apologizes for the nature of the story, adding that if the reader objects to it all he has to do is turn the page (it is one of Chaucer’s many innovations that he speaks directly to the reader in this confidential way). The tale is indeed lewd, although redeemed by the enchanting heroine (or perhaps antiheroine) Alison, the eighteen-year-old wife, “wilde and yong,” her body as lithe and slim as a weasel’s; she was a sight even more “blissful” than a young pear tree. Chaucer dwells lasciviously on how she plucks her eyebrows and dresses in the height of fashion, concluding that it is impossible to imagine “So gay a popelotte or swich a wenche,” skipping and jumping like a lamb, with a sweet mouth, a “joly colt,” “Long as a mast and upright as a bolt,” in short “a primerole, a piggesine, For any Lord to leggen in his bed.”

It is clear that this enchantress is to be allowed to get away with anything, and she does: not only does she cuckold her husband with the student; she also makes a fool of the amorous parish clerk by tricking him into kissing her bottom—which done, “‘Teehee,’ quod she, and clapte the window to.” This is the first teehee in history, a peculiarly feminine expression of malicious laughter. Chaucer’s language in this tale is uncompromising. Alison exposes “hir naked ers” to be kissed, and her lover, in turn, has a hot poker thrust up “amydd the ers.” It is true that Chaucer does not actually use the word “cunt,” though in describing the student making a pass at Alison he writes, “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte,” which comes to much the same thing. However, Chaucer, feigning surprise, says at the end of his tale that nobody objects to the language—“Ne at this tale I saugh no man hym greve”—though Oswald the Reeve is furious simply because he is a carpenter by trade and objects to someone of his calling getting the worst of it.