the New Pantagruel

Chaucer in His World

by Daniel Sullivan

Chaucer, by Peter Ackroyd. DoubleDay, 188 pp., $19.95

e was not a poet who happened to be a diplomat and government official; he was a diplomat and government official who, in his spare time, happened to write poetry.” So declares historian Peter Ackroyd in Chaucer, his easily consumed, though only gradually digested, biography of the man called the father of English poetry. Though this quotation appears as more of a remark than a statement of his thesis, one ultimately realizes that this point is at the heart of what Ackroyd thinks of Chaucer. By a series of related themes that recur in his observations, Ackroyd presents Chaucer as a writer rather at one with his world. Medieval England was an age of dramatic representations overlaid with symbolic ceremony, and Chaucer was a constantly dissimulating performer on the stage of that world. Finding the man behind all that stage play is difficult, and may in fact, Ackroyd seems to suggest, miss the point.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) has, like many medieval figures, rather flummoxed modern scholars. Much is unclear about his life and activities. There is even a charge of rape (a more elastic term then than today) against him about which biographers can discover precious little. Commentators on his writing, especially The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, have had trouble gleaning a single interpretation of his work. Peter Ackroyd’s biography succeeds by avoiding these pitfalls — his book strives neither to account for the details of Chaucer’s life story nor to explain definitively his poetry. He discusses Chaucer’s work, of course, and he has researched his life thoroughly, but he replaces what cannot be known about the life and what ought not be ventured about the work with a deep, sympathetic knowledge of the period. Ackroyd’s brand of cultural history, which lacks the dry quantitative approach and presumptuous theorizing sometimes associated with that academic subgenre, furnishes the daily details and contemporary concerns that constituted Chaucer’s world. Ackroyd uses the context not to explain why Chaucer acted or wrote as he did, but rather to take the man on his own terms.

This is Ackroyd’s style. He has written biographies of Dickens, Blake, Eliot, Pound and More, as well as numerous works of fiction and poetry. Almost all of his writing revolves around the daily rhythm of London and the meaning of Englishness, obsessions that two recent titles spell out: London: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. Like all of his works, Chaucer reflects Ackroyd’s concern with the daily fabric of life (especially London life) — the circulating influence between how people live their lives and how they imagine those lives. Ackroyd understands the interdependence of a time and its geniuses: “to enter the consciousness and personality of a man or woman, of any period, is to see that period from within.” Since Chaucer is the first in a new series called “Ackroyd’s Brief Lives,” the author achieves this unique perspective in only 170 pages. So this is a sketch, but a very good one.

All Pages | 1 |  2  |  3  |  4