Bard Thou Never Wert

The following review ran, a little shortened for space, in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

CONTESTED WILL: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

By James Shapiro

Simon & Schuster, 324 pp., $26

Let's say you're at a party and you're introduced to a Shakespeare scholar. Please don't ask her or him if Shakespeare really wrote those plays. If you do, you'll get an icy glare, a weary frown, or some other expression that clearly says: Oh, God, not that again.

They've heard it all before, the scholars, and they're sick of it. For them, the matter's settled: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote “Hamlet” and “The Tempest,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Love's Labour's Lost,” “Macbeth” and “All's Well Than Ends Well,” the two parts of “Henry IV,” the three parts of “Henry VI,” and at least 27 other plays, plus narrative poems, lyrics and sonnets.

But the question just won't go away. It doesn't just get asked of Shakespeare scholars at cocktail parties: In 1987, three United States Supreme Court justices participated in a mock trial to adjudicate the evidence for the authorship of either Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare won that one, but in 1989 a TV program on the Public Broadcasting System again treated the question as if it were a serious one. The anti-Stratfordians have succeeded in making people think that there is real reason to doubt the authorship.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, firmly believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but his entertainingly combative “Contested Will” is not just a rebuttal to the doubters. It's a cultural history, an examination of why there were doubts in the first place, and why authorship candidates such as Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford attracted such otherwise sensible people as Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James and Sigmund Freud.

Blame it partly on the Germans, who developed the science of textual study. And particularly on Friedrich August Wolf, whose examination of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” challenged the idea that they were written by a single person named Homer. Today it's generally recognized that “Homer” is a legend – a figure who was attached to the oral tradition that handed down the Greek epics. And after Homer's existence was called into question there came the Higher Criticism, the textual analysis of the Bible which determined that the Pentateuch was probably not written by Moses himself, and then called into question the accuracy of the life of Jesus presented in the Gospels. The German scholar David Friedrich Strauss's The Life of Jesus was translated into English by George Eliot in 1846, and, as Shapiro puts it, skepticism about authorship “soon threatened that lesser deity Shakespeare, for his biography too rested precariously on the unstable foundation of posthumous reports and more than a fair share of myths.” 

One problem is that the documentary record of Shakespeare's life is that of a man who was all business: We have lots of documents of his existence: legal papers, real estate records, and the will in which he leaves his estate to his daughter and the “second-best bed” to his wife. But the Shakespeare of the records is bourgeois, provincial and dull. Surely a man who wrote in magnificent language about kings and princes couldn't have come from such a commonplace background. Wouldn't it be more likely that the works were those of a philosopher-statesman like Bacon or a playwright, poet and courtier like the Earl of Oxford? The question has sent people on all sides of the authorship question to scour the plays and poems for evidence about their author's life.

Shapiro is eminently fair in his portrayals of both Baconians and Oxfordians. He even comments that although one of the first Oxfordians was a man unfortunately named John Thomas Looney, the name has been “the subject of much unwarranted abuse” and that it “rhymes with bony.”  And he blames some of his colleagues, who agree that Shakespeare really was “the man from Stratford,” for encouraging the anti-Stratfordians by using the poems and plays as biographical material. Shapiro insists, “The more that Shakespeare scholars encourage autobiographical readings of the poems and plays, the more they legitimate assumptions that underlie the claims of all those who dismiss the idea that Shakespeare wrote the plays.”

Shapiro demonstrates that if you want to believe that that Bacon, Oxford, or anyone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays you have to ignore copious evidence to the contrary and indulge in intellectual contortions. Moreover, you have to credit the entire Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural establishment with a conspiracy so elaborate and a cover-up so successful it makes Watergate look like hide-and-seek. But in a world in which even the fact of a birth announcement published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1961 won't convince some people that the president of the United States wasn't really born in Kenya, it's not surprising that the “Shakespeare conspiracy” won't disappear.

Adam and Evil

This review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS

By William Boyd

Harper, 416 pp., $26.99

We are all Adam's kindred, and in Adam's fall we sinned all. The protagonist of this novel is named Adam Kindred, which is a pretty good indication that William Boyd wants us to think of him as an Everyman.

That's a shrewd move for a thriller writer, which is what Boyd, a versatile novelist to say the least, has become for this book. We all want characters who resemble us in some way, especially when they're put in situations as discomfiting as the one Adam Kindred finds himself in: without a job or a place to live, without the accouterments of everyday life such as credit cards and cell phone, without a family or even an identity, and on the run from both the police and the man who wants to kill him. He becomes a contemporary version of Shakespeare's “unaccommodated man,” not naked on a heath but holed up in the shrubbery on the banks of the Thames in London, drinking river water and eating a snared seagull.

Like the original Adam, Boyd's Adam is a sinner, a man whose moral fittings are not as snug and tight as they might be. And as he meditates on what he did to deserve his suffering, he makes explicit his connection to his ancestral namesake: “One stupid mistake – one lapse, one near-unconscious answering of an atavistic sexual instinct – that was all it took to put a perfectly secure life, a fairly happy and prosperous life, in free fall. Tell Adam and Eve about it, he thought, with some bitterness, some self-reproach.”

How he got this way is, as much as how he gets out of it, is something for the reader of this well-plotted novel to discover, and not for the reviewer to disclose. But plot isn't the only attraction of the novel. It's also rich in setting and characterization. We explore the circumstances of Adam's fall not only from his point of view but also from a variety of others, including an assassin, a policewoman, a drug company CEO, and a prostitute. They all bring with themselves back-stories as intriguing and complex as Adam's, and each presents the reader with a mystery to solve. Why, for example, is the prostitute named “Mhouse”?

And the novel teems with secondary characters, even with what you might call walk-on characters, each of whom is strikingly individualized; they pop into the imagination the way Dickens's minor characters do. Which is as it should be: One of the inspirations for the novel that Boyd has cited is Dickens's “Our Mutual Friend,” which begins with a body being dragged from the Thames. And Boyd makes a Dickens-like use of the city itself, the modern, polyglot, multiracial city that fringes the Thames, its neighborhoods strung out in a panorama ranging from the most affluent to the most sordid.

Also like Dickens, Boyd uses the novel for commentary on the times in which he lives, including the role of the military-industrial complex. The assassin, a veteran of every war since the Falklands, works for a Blackwater-like “security consultancy” firm called the Risk Averse Group. The CEO heads Calenture-Deutz, a pharmaceuticals company that is about to announce a breakthrough cure for asthma and is therefore the object of a takeover by another Big Pharma company. But since truth is not only stranger but also more mutable than fiction, Boyd takes pains not to make his fiction too topical, too bound to a particular year. To add a just-a-bit-in-the-future color to the novel, he invents his own street slang -- “monkey” for crack cocaine, for example, or “green, green peas” as a small boy's expression of delight – which he leaves to the reader to decipher.

As noted, Boyd is a versatile writer. “Ordinary Thunderstorms” is a very different kind of novel from his previous one, the spy thriller “Restless,” or from “Any Human Heart,” his exploration of 20th century history, or from his 1981 debut novel, “A Good Man in Africa,” which earned him comparisons to Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. It may be that this versatility, this bit of the literary chameleon, has deprived Boyd of the kind of fame that comes to the more easily pigeonholed. But all of his books have a very smart author in common. The only problem with “Ordinary Thunderstorms” is that some readers may be so swept along by the thrill of the chase that they may not stop long enough to admire how smart it is.

Poem of the Day: William Butler Yeats

Lapis lazuli carving given to Yeats by Henry Talbot De Vere ("Harry") Clifton

Lapis Lazuli

(For Harry Clifton)

I have heard that hysterical women say

They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,

Of poets that are always gay,

For everybody knows or else should know

That if nothing drastic is done

Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,

Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in

Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,

And all the drop-scenes drop at once

Upon a hundred thousand stages,

It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,

Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,

Old civilisations put to the sword.

Then they and their wisdom went to rack:

No handiwork of Callimachus,

Who handled marble as if it were bronze,

Made draperies that seemed to rise

When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;

His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem

Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

All things fall and are built again,

And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,

Are carved in lapis lazuli,

Over them flies a long-legged bird,

A symbol of longevity;

The third, doubtless a serving-man,

Carries a musical instrument.

Every discoloration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent,

Seems a water-course or an avalanche,

Or lofty slope where it still snows

Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch

Sweetens the little half-way house

Those Chinamen climb towards, and I

Delight to imagine them seated there;

There, on the mountain and the sky,

On all the tragic scene they stare.

One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

--William Butler Yeats

Oh, how glad I am that I don't have to teach this great poem today and deal with the elephant in the room: Gay. We know that Yeats didn't mean it in the currently dominant sense of the word. Well, not entirely. Even in his day, the word "gay" could be used in a sexual sense, meaning "licentious." In the Punch cartoon above, from 1857, the joke hinges on a recognition that the women are prostitutes, and obviously not very joyful ones. And there is perhaps a buried sense lurking even in Yeats's poem that artists are sexually loose, perhaps effeminate. But it's also likely that Yeats, who knew a lot of odds and ends of stuff, had in mind the Provençal gai saber, the "joyous wisdom" alluded to by Nietzsche in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, a title that was first translated into English as The Joyous Wisdom but is now known by Walter Kaufmann's title, The Gay Science.

Yeats's late poems, of which this is one, are among the great artistic treasures given us by people in their later years, like Beethoven's late quartets, or Verdi's Otello, Falstaff and Requiem. We like to celebrate people who died young -- Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mozart -- but we should also be thankful for the ones who matured into wisdom and poured that wisdom into their art. It was a point I stressed in a review for the Mercury News of the second volume of R.F. Foster's magnificent biography of Yeats:

Was William Butler Yeats the last great poet to write in English? The last, that is, who could stand comfortably with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth and Keats?

Of the poets from the generations that followed Yeats (who was born in 1865), only a few -- perhaps T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens -- would even be considered for that pantheon, but they seem somehow frail and spidery in the company of Milton and Wordsworth. And as for contemporary poets, how many English or American poets under the age of 50 can you name?

It may be that the great age of poetry in English is over, and that 1939, the year in which Yeats died, can serve as the terminal date on its tombstone. So it seems appropriate to ask, when faced with the second volume of a 1,500-page biography of Yeats that has taken its author, R.F. Foster, 17 years to write: Is Yeats -- is any poet -- worth such an effort?

The first volume of Foster's biography was published in 1997. His second volume begins when Yeats was 50. Offhand, I can't think of any other writer whose greatest work was ahead of him at that age, but these were the years when Yeats produced such poems as ''The Second Coming,'' ''A Prayer for My Daughter,'' ''Leda and the Swan,'' ''The Tower,'' ''Sailing to Byzantium,'' ''Among School Children,'' ''Lapis Lazuli,'' ''Long-Legged Fly'' and -- in the last year of his life -- ''The Circus Animals' Desertion.''

He also married, fathered two children, served as a senator (a non-elective position) for the Irish Free State, continued his involvement with the Abbey Theatre, founded an Irish Academy of Letters, fought against censorship and for the separation of church and state, toured the United States, won the Nobel Prize and even took a leading role in designing the new Irish coinage.

And he indulged in several extramarital flings, had a vasectomy as part of a ''rejuvenation'' treatment, used a blue rinse on his whitening hair, flirted with fascism and grew more deeply involved with the occult, which resulted in his near-unreadable mystico-mythical theory of history, ''A Vision.'' There were times while reading Foster's fascinatingly detailed account of Yeats' life when I marveled that so much nonsense could coexist with so much wisdom. How did a man who could have been an obscure crank, devoted to astrology and communicating with spirit guides, become a great poet?

But it's to Foster's credit that he never stops to wrestle with such possibly unanswerable questions. Foster -- who is a professor of history at Oxford, not a literary biographer -- simply has a wonderful story to tell, and he tells it with a novelistic mastery, careful to put Yeats in his time and place and to delineate that time and place skillfully. As Foster told an interviewer for the Guardian, Yeats was ''not a loony misplaced southern Californian, but a quintessential Irish Protestant looking for his own kind of magic. As a Protestant, your relationship with the Irish land was extremely complicated and compromised.''

And it's Yeats' struggle to make sense of the complications and compromises that constitutes both the drama of his life and the essence of his poetry. Yeats once famously wrote, ''We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.'' But in fact he blurred that distinction more often than not, and the strength and sinew of much of his greatest verse comes from the tension between Yeats and his country, a readiness to quarrel with those whose vision of Ireland differed from his. And some of his best earlier verse had come out of the lovers' quarrels with the beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne.

By the time this second volume opens, Gonne was separated from her husband, John MacBride, and was living in France. For his participation in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, MacBride was executed, earning his place in Yeats' ambivalent tribute to the rebels, ''Easter 1916,'' as the ''man I had dreamed/A drunken, vain-glorious lout'' who ''had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart'' but had been ''Transformed utterly'' by his participation in the rebellion.

MacBride's death opened the way for Yeats to make yet another play for Gonne. Thwarted once again, he turned his attentions to her 22-year-old daughter, Iseult. Rebuffed by her, he married 24-year-old Georgie Hyde Lees, whose fascination with the occult matched his own. The marriage didn't begin well -- the groom had a psychosomatic breakdown, perhaps not unexpected from a 52-year-old man getting married for the first time, and to a woman less than half his age.

But George -- as she came to be known after Ezra Pound started calling her that -- had a special talent that cemented the marriage: She was adept at ''automatic writing,'' serving as a conduit to the spirit world with which her husband was so eager to communicate. Foster gives us a droll, sly account of the way George manipulated Yeats with the messages she related from the spirits -- she even managed their sex life, and carefully steered him away from his obsession with Maud and Iseult.

Given that Yeats was capable -- as his poetry often demonstrates -- of good sense, I sometimes wonder if his apparent credulity was not in part a pose. A game, after all, is more fun if you pretend that it's real. But Foster also helps us keep in mind that Yeats' pursuit of the esoteric was a way of looking for certainties in a world that seemed more terrible with each year -- the World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the outbreak of another World War whose inevitability was apparent in the last months of his life. And always in the foreground there was the violent struggle of his own country for independence.

Yeats may have dabbled in fog-brained mysticism and been tempted by narrow-minded politics, but he neither charged into the one nor retreated into the other. A distaste for democracy betrayed him into an early admiration of Mussolini, and of the Blueshirts in his own country, but while Foster finds Yeats ''elitist and oligarchic,'' he's inclined to downplay Yeats' enthusiasm for fascism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Gonne, he never expressed anti-Semitic views, and his friendship with Pound was strained by Pound's increasing fanaticism.

Which is not to say that Yeats would pass even one of our more lenient tests for political correctness, but rather that he lived in uncertain times and reacted to them without the benefit of our hindsight. And more to the point, he managed in his poetry to find a central humanity unfettered by ideology. This is what makes it possible for generation after generation to return to a poem like ''The Second Coming'' and find truth in lines so often quoted that they come to us unbidden: ''The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.''

''The Second Coming'' is larded with esoteric references to ''Spiritus Mundi'' and underpinned by his cyclical theory of history, and it was written in the aftermath of World War I, when the ''blood-dimmed tide'' of revolution had been loosed into his own country. But these are just the specifics that underlie the universal in the poem, as the specifics of Yeats' literary career underlie the universality of aging in ''The Circus Animals' Desertion.''

The brilliant achievement of Foster's biography is that it acquaints us intimately with the specifics, and thereby brings home more clearly how invaluable Yeats' poetry is. No one, I submit, except possibly Shakespeare in ''King Lear,'' has written more powerfully and persuasively on aging than Yeats did in ''The Circus Animals' Desertion.'' To read it, and the other poems that Foster cites in his biography, is to be reminded that poetry does some things that can't be done by the dominant literary genre of our day, the novel, or the dominant media -- film, television, popular music.

In ''Coole Park and Ballylee,'' memorializing his patron, collaborator and friend Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats wrote:

We were the last romantics, chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness,

All that is written in what poets name

The book of the people, whatever most can bless

The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;

But fashion's changed. . . .

When they're read today, these lines could be an epitaph for poetry itself.

W.B. YEATS: A Life, Vol. II -- The Arch-Poet

By R.F. Foster

Oxford University Press

O Calcutta!

The following review appeared today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A DEAD HAND: A Crime in Calcutta

By Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 279 pp., $26

There's a house-of-mirrors moment in Paul Theroux's new novel when his narrator-protagonist, a travel writer named Jerry Delfont, meets up in Calcutta with a travel writer named Paul Theroux.

“What I knew about Theroux,” Delfont writes, “is what everyone knew about him. He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting – strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments. I suspected that much of what he wrote was fiction, since he'd started his writing life as a novelist.” Delfont concludes from their conversation that Theroux is insincere, a phony, driven and competitive and envious. “I also knew that he was going to write about me, about meeting me, and that he'd get everything wrong.” 

So what we have here is Paul Theroux writing about Jerry Delfont writing about Paul Theroux. It's an oddly self-conscious moment, though whether it's self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing on Theroux's part is a little hard to say. It also plays only a tangential role in the plot: Theroux is there to find out what Delfont knows about a mysterious American woman named Merrill Unger, and Delfont isn't willing to let Theroux know that he knows a lot about her. 

There’s a lot Delfont doesn’t know, too, and that forms the plot of the novel. He meets Mrs. Unger (as he continues to think of her even after they’ve become intimate) when she sends a letter to him at his hotel in Calcutta. She explains that her son is an admirer of his writing and that a friend of her son’s  may be in trouble: The friend woke up in a fleabag hotel to find the body of a dead boy on the floor. She wonders if Delfont could help her son’s friend.

Delfont is afflicted with writer’s block, which he refers to as “dead hand.” (That’s not the only explanation of the title the novel provides.) So he goes to see Mrs. Unger and gets involved in more than he expected. He learns that she’s very wealthy, that she runs a kind of home for children she picks up on the Calcutta streets, that she’s a devotee of the goddess Kali, and that she gives a terrific tantric massage. He learns that she despises Mother Teresa, with whom she once worked, as a fame-seeker and celebrity hound who “believed that poverty made people better.”  He learns other things, too, which we won’t go into here, except to cite the warning of his friend Howard, who works at the American consulate: “a lot of foreign women get goddess complexes.”

As a novelist, Theroux has made a kind of specialty of stories about people who go to places where they don’t really belong and consequently get into major messes, the way Allie Fox does in The Mosquito Coast, for example. And Jerry Delfont’s problem is that he – one of the “big pink foreigners”  -- doesn’t belong in “populous Calcutta, city of deformities,” no matter how infatuated he becomes with Mrs. Unger.

In fact, Mrs. Unger herself gives him the bitterest insight: “India [is] a culture of evasions. This country is very dirty. It’s impossible to tell the truth here. The truth is forbidden, especially in writing. Anyway, a truthful book about India would be unbearable – about spite, venom, cruelty, sexual repression, incest, and meaningless crimes.” Later, Delfont would reflect, “Of all the foreigners I met in India, she was the one who was most at home.” 

Is “A Dead Hand” a truthful book about India? It certainly has all those “unbearable” things that Mrs. Unger enumerates. It also has an abundance of richly drawn characters, Mrs. Unger the most enigmatic and scariest of them. Theroux has used his travel writer’s eye and ear and his novelist’s imagination to craft a tense, disturbing, funny and horrifying book around all of them.

Poem of the Day: T.S. Eliot

Five-Finger Exercises 

I. Lines to a Persian Cat 

The songsters of the air repair 

To the green fields of Russell Square. 

Beneath the trees there is no ease 

For the dull brain, the sharp desires 

And the quick eyes of Woolly Bear. 

There is no relief but in grief. 

O when will the creaking heart cease? 

When will the broken chair give ease? 

When will Time flow away?

II. Lines to a Yorkshire Terrier 

In a brown field stood a tree 

And the tree was crookt and dry. 

In a black sky, from a green cloud 

Natural forces shriek'd aloud, 

Screamed, rattled, muttered endlessly.

Little dog was safe and warm 

Under a cretonne eiderdown, 

Yet the field was cracked and brown 

And the tree was cramped and dry. 

Pollicle dogs and cats all must 

Jellicle cats and dogs all must 

Like undertakers, come to dust. 

Here a little dog I pause 

Heaving up my prior paws, 

Pause, and sleep endlessly.

III. Lines to a Duck in the Park

The long light shakes across the lake, 

The forces of the morning quake, 

The dawn is slant across the lawn, 

Here is no eft or mortal snake 

But only sluggish duck and drake. 

I have seen the morning shine, 

I have had the Bread and Wine, 

Let the feathered mortals take 

That which is their mortal due, 

Pinching bread and finger too, 

Easier had than squirming worm; 

For I know, and so should you 

That soon the enquiring worm shall try 

Our well-preserved complacency. 

IV. Lines to Ralph Hodgson Esqre. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! 

                          (Everyone wants to know him) -- 

With his musical sound 

And his Baskerville Hound

Which, just at a word from his master 

Will follow you faster and faster 

And tear you limb from limb. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! 

Who is worshipped by all waitresses 

(They regard him as something apart) 

While on his palate fine he presses 

The juice of the gooseberry tart. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson!
                          (Everyone wants to know him), 

He has 999 canaries 

And round his head finches and fairies 

In jubilant rapture skim. 

How delightful to meet Mr. Hodgson! 

                          (Everyone wants to meet him).

V. Lines for Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! 

With his features of clerical cut, 

And his brow so grim 

And his mouth so prim 

And his conversation, so nicely 

Restricted to What Precisely 

And If and Perhaps and But. 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! 

With a bobtail cur 

In a coat of fur 

And a porpentine cat 

And a wopsical hat: 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! 

                            (Whether his mouth be open or shut).

-- T.S. Eliot

Some people will never forgive T.S. Eliot for Cats. But I rather liked it when I saw it, so my grievance with Eliot is the line "April is the cruelest month," which has become a cliché that lands with an annual leaden thud in the ledes of newspaper articles across the land. (Anyway, he got it wrong. He had lived in Massachusetts, so he must have known that March, in which the calendar promises spring but the streets are packed with gray slush, is the cruelest month up there. Here in California, not so much. Maybe November, especially when they start playing Christmas carols too early.)  

No, I really don't like T.S. Eliot. I don't like his Tory politics or his anti-Semitism or his Anglo-Catholicism. (He would have loved Benedict XVI.) And I don't much care for his verse, except for some of the lyrical parts of the "Four Quartets." I don't like the obscure allusions and the early 20th-century ennui. I wish Ezra Pound had cut even more from "The Waste Land." 

But he still demands attention, so I've paid it. In my volume of the Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950, these five little poems are listed as "Minor Works," which seems about right. The best-known is the last one, Eliot's deprecatory self-portrait. (I was told, but can't confirm, that Cuscuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg were Eliot's cats. The latter seems also to have been the pseudonym of one Godolphin Mitford, a theosophical writer, so far as my Googling can tell. Ah, the Mitfords! Now that's another story.) There's a certain creepy charm about these verses. 

As for reallly creepy, there's Eliot's first marriage, which I wrote about in a review for the Mercury News: 

Was Old Possum really a rat?

That's pretty much the conclusion Carole Seymour-Jones comes to in her biography of Vivienne Eliot, the first wife of T.S. Eliot. Like Nancy Milford, in her biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, and Brenda Maddox, who wrote ''Nora'' about James Joyce's wife, Seymour-Jones examines the effects of marriage on the work of a major 20th-century writer. ''Painted Shadow'' gives us an unsettling point of view on Eliot and his work.

Thomas Stearns Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood were both 27 when they met in 1915 at Oxford, where he was doing postgraduate work. Three months after their meeting, they were married. Marry in haste, repent at leisure: This time the repentance took 32 years, until her death in a mental institution in 1947.

Only a few weeks after they married, Eliot sailed for the United States to attend a family reunion. Vivien (as she had begun spelling her name) stayed behind, and while Eliot was away she began seeing quite a lot of their new friend, Bertrand Russell. After Eliot's return, the two future Nobel Prize laureates and the lively but not particularly well-educated young woman formed a sort of ménage à trois -- Russell even paid the Eliots' household bills -- that lasted almost three years.

Seymour-Jones is convinced that T.S. Eliot was gay, and that Eliot married in hopes that a heterosexual union would ''cure'' him of his desire for his own sex. She finds ''an element of homosexuality by proxy'' in Eliot's apparent acquiescence in his wife's affair with Russell. (Though Russell once denied that the relationship with Vivien was sexual, Seymour-Jones is having none of it.)

In any case, Eliot and Vivien were temperamentally mismatched: She was nervous and impulsive (Virginia Woolf once referred to her as a ''bag of ferrets'' that ''Tom wears around his neck'') while he, again in Woolf's irresistibly quotable words, was ''sinister, insidious, eel-like, also monolithic, masked, intensely reserved.'' And neither was in the best of health: Both repeatedly suffered physical and emotional breakdowns.

But Seymour-Jones sees Vivien as Eliot's ''Muse'' and their marriage as a ''crucible of dysfunction which, rather than hindering the poet's creativity, provoked it.'' The troubles in their marriage may be reflected in the tension between men and women evident in ''The Waste Land'' and other poems. But as Seymour-Jones documents, Vivien also contributed lines to ''The Waste Land'' and suggested changes to the ones Eliot had written. And she was fiercely proud and supportive of his work as a writer.

For a time he reciprocated her loyalty and encouraged her own writing: When he became editor of the quarterly Criterion in 1922, he published many of her reviews and stories. ''It is possible that Eliot first encouraged Vivien's writing to assuage his own guilt,'' Seymour-Jones comments. ''Together they could make a quarterly, even if they could not make a child. And for Vivien her writing could become a substitute for the flesh and blood infant for which she longed. What began in part as therapy became a new career.''

But in the end it succeeded as neither therapy nor career. In 1925 Eliot published Vivien's devastating caricature of the Bloomsbury set and was forced by the scandal that ensued to promise that he wouldn't publish her again. Seymour-Jones thinks he set her up for the fall: ''It seems inconceivable that Eliot as editor would allow a piece of hers to go through of whose contents he was ignorant. To the innocent eye the assumption must be that Eliot encouraged Vivien to risk her reputation by satirizing their closest friends.'' But ''he may have had a darker motive: . . . he was negotiating a new contract . . . for a quarterly in which there would be no place for Vivien.''

And increasingly there was no place in his life for Vivienne -- she returned to the original spelling of her name in 1928. Eliot had begun drinking heavily, and she had grown dependent on various chemicals -- bromides, chloral hydrate, ether. Her use of the strong-smelling ether, which had been prescribed as a numbing agent for neuralgia, particularly drew comment -- Aldous Huxley observed that the Eliots' ''house smelled like a hospital.''

In 1932, Eliot was invited to lecture at Harvard, and he spent eight months in the United States. In 1933, he returned to England -- but not to Vivienne, who was surprised to learn that he had come back without making contact with her. Eliot dodged all encounters with the frenetic Vivienne as she turned into a kind of stalker, trying to arrange meetings with him.

Abandoned by husband, family and friends, she became increasingly erratic: In 1934 she joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, and thereafter often showed up at concerts and the theater, in a cloud of ether fumes, wearing the fascist uniform. Finally, in 1938, she was committed to the mental institution where she remained until she died in 1947 -- reportedly from a heart attack but possibly, Seymour-Jones believes, a suicide. Eliot never visited her.

Seymour-Jones surmises that Vivienne was manic-depressive, but that her institutionalization was unnecessary -- her husband and her family simply didn't want to be bothered with her. Her brother Maurice, who had been instrumental in getting her committed, expressed remorse toward the end of his life: ''It was only when I saw Vivie in the asylum for the last time I realized I had done something very wrong. She was as sane as I was.''

Though she has a harrowing story to tell, Seymour-Jones' book can be a bit of a slog -- she's a colorless writer. But ''Painted Shadow'' -- the title for which comes from a line about the protagonist's dead wife in Eliot's play ''The Family Reunion'' -- gives us some intriguing ways of looking at Eliot and his work. Finding the reflection of his tormented marriage in his poems takes them beyond the historical context in which they are often read -- as an expression of the spiritual and intellectual crisis provoked by the First World War -- and into the more universal context of human frailty.

The Eliot of this book is, to say the least, emotionally complex. His stiff-collared, buttoned-down public manner and his cultural ultra-conservatism -- which he once summed up as ''classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion'' -- may have been an attempt to erect a bulwark against psychosexual chaos: Privately, he composed comic verse full of buggery and scatology, and once shocked his friend Conrad Aiken by sending him a page torn from a publication about gynecological disorders.

Seymour-Jones believes that Eliot's misogyny stems from his relationship with his formidable mother and from his intensely repressed homosexuality -- the evidence for which is circumstantial but strong, though Seymour-Jones sometimes works over the evidence a little too bluntly. Nevertheless, women found him attractive: He led at least two women to believe that he was going to marry them before he finally married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957, when he was 68 and she was 30.

It was Eliot's moral cowardice, his unwillingness to face up to distasteful realities, Seymour-Jones concludes, that destroyed Vivienne: ''Had Eliot confronted her just once, and spoken to her honestly,'' she comments on his avoidance of Vivienne after his return to England in 1933, ''he might have given her the sense of closure she needed. Instead, his cowardice prolonged her agony -- and his.''

''How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!'' he wrote in one of his poems. No kidding.

PAINTED SHADOW: The Life of Vivienne Eliot
By Carole Seymour-Jones
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 701 pp., $35

Poem of the Day: Emily Dickinson

The Soul has Bandaged moments -- 
When too appalled to stir -- 
She feels some ghastly Fright come up 
And step to look at her -- 

Salute her -- with long fingers -- 
Caress her freezing hair -- 
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips 
The Lover -- hovered -- o'er -- 
Unworthy, that a thought so mean 
Accost a Theme -- so -- fair -- 

The soul has moments of Escape -- 
When bursting all the doors -- 
She dances like a Bomb, abroad, 
And swings upon the Hours, 

As do the Bee -- delirious borne -- 
Long Dungeoned from his Rose -- 
Touch Liberty -- then know no more, 
But Noon, and Paradise -- 

The Soul's retaken moments -- 
When, Felon led along, 
With shackles on the plumed feet, 
And staples, in the Song, 

The Horror welcomes her, again, 
These, are not brayed of Tongue -- 

--Emily Dickinson

What is there to say about Emily Dickinson, other than that no poet I know of dared so greatly and succeeded so often with what she dared. "She dances like a Bomb, abroad" -- who comes up so frequently with images like that? If you Google it, you get 83,900 hits, lots of them from people trying to figure it out. Of course, we who have lived in the horrors of the 20th century and seen the pilotless drones of the 21st have seen bombs dancing terribly in the air. But we have also known the exhilaration of dancing bombs in Fourth of July fireworks shows. Did Emily see them in Amherst? 

Once again, to provide coherent thoughts on a poet, I have recourse to a review I wrote, for the Mercury News. I remember struggling with this review because I was writing it on a deadline that happened to be September 11, 2001. At the time I felt absurd, focusing on a biography of a 19th century poet when everyone in the newsroom around me was preoccupied with the grim story of the day. But now, thinking of Emily's poem, I realize that that was one of those "Bandaged moments." 

There is a pain -- so utter –

It swallows substance up --

Then covers the Abyss with Trance --

So Memory can step

Around -- across -- upon it --

As one within a Swoon --

Goes safely -- where an open eye --

Would drop Him -- Bone by Bone.

Where, you have to wonder, did something like that come from? What forces of heredity, environment and culture combined to produce Emily Dickinson?

Bristling with facts, daunting in its poundage, a new biography lumbers in to help us solve the mystery of the woman who may be the greatest American poet. The biographer, Alfred Habegger, is a former professor of English at the University of Kansas, and he has done his work as a scholar -- to a fault.

She was born in 1830 in Amherst, Mass. Her grandfather, who helped found Amherst College, came close to financial ruin through a series of unwise investments. Her father, Edward, reacted against his father's carelessness: ''He had observed from close up a father's disaster, and after being repeatedly bruised by it, gained an unshakable belief in the priority of family security and the importance of buckling on all the armor of fortitude and determination.''

Edward Dickinson believed that women's education should prepare them to be homemakers and nothing more. Emily later told a correspondent that her father ''buys me many Books -- but begs me not to read them -- because he fears they joggle the Mind.'' Her mother, also named Emily, seems to have been in need of joggling: ''a melancholy, inexpressive, and relatively inelastic spirit,'' Habegger calls her. The poet's later literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, recalled that she once told him, ''I never had a mother.''

The Amherst of her childhood and youth was a place where an intense religiosity swept through in waves of revivalistic enthusiasm. At the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which she attended for a year, students were divided into three classes: those who were had been saved, those who believed they were on the way to salvation, and the ''impenitent.'' The last was Emily's group, but she would remain unregenerate, even when her father and her sister, Lavinia, experienced a conversion at a revival in 1850. About this time, she wrote her first known poem.

In 1855, the family moved into the Homestead, which had been lost by Emily's grandfather during his financial troubles, and plans were made for her brother, Austin, to move into an adjacent house after his own marriage. Her fate was sealed when, about the time of the move, her mother had a physical/emotional breakdown. Emily, the elder sister, would have to be the woman of the house: ''Her work in life would be to attempt and achieve an unprecedented imaginative freedom while dwelling in what looks like privileged captivity,'' Habegger observes.

By 1858 she was collecting her poems into handmade booklets -- carefully copying the poems on notepaper and sewing the leaves together. But she resisted publication, even though she received encouragement as a poet from men such as Higginson, whose essays in the Atlantic Monthly inspired Dickinson to begin a correspondence with him in 1862. After her death, Higginson would be involved in the first edition of her poems.

When Higginson visited her in 1870, he found ''a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair,'' and referred to her twice as ''childlike.'' But in later years he also recalled his discomfort at her eccentricity: ''The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and of something abnormal.''

The glimpses of her emotional life found in Dickinson's letters and poems are catnip to a biographer such as Habegger. For instance, ''Of the twenty-one instances of the word 'hurt' in her poems (noun or verb),'' Habegger enumerates, ''every single one occurs between 1860 and 1863.'' This was a period when many of her poems seem to be addressed to a man. ''That the love poems were a response to an actual and painful relationship with a man seems the only plausible way to take them,'' Habegger comments. His candidate is the Rev. Charles Wadsworth, whom she had met in Philadelphia and who moved to San Francisco in 1862. But whether this was more than a heavy crush seems doubtful.

But there's evidence that she and Otis Phillips Lord, a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, may have had something more substantial going on -- though it's circumstantial evidence, for most of their letters were destroyed. Judge Lord was in his 60s and she her 40s when they apparently fell in love. Her attraction to him seems to have developed around the time of her father's death, in 1873. Lord, whose wife died in 1877, apparently proposed marriage to her sometime after her mother's death in 1882. But she declined, and he died in 1884, two years before she did.

Throughout the book, Habegger steers a steady course around sensationalism and speculation. But the cumulative effect of his book is oppressive, smothering the spirit of its subject under a tedious account of her daily life. Lost in the mundane are what we really want to know about Dickinson: What sparked this utterly original writer to wrangle with God and nature and life and death? What emboldened her to break away from the conventions of poetic diction?

Her verse is that of a woman who knew the life of a small western Massachusetts town, the intensity of its religion and both the frivolity and the earnestness of its citizens; who dwelt in a countryside barely tamed out of wilderness, saw the arrival of the railroad and the expansion of a country; who lived in a time when war divided that country; who transmuted daily experience and a slim knowledge of the world into poems that can be nothing short of hair-raising.

Inebriate of Air -- am I --

And Debauchee of Dew --

Reeling -- thro endless summer days –

From inns of Molten Blue --

That ecstatic Emily Dickinson is nowhere to be found in this book. The Dickinson of Habegger's biography gazes at the world from behind doors and out of upstairs windows, and we don't learn much by standing there with her.

MY WARS ARE LAID AWAY IN BOOKS: The Life of Emily Dickinson
By Alfred Habegger
Random House, 766 pp., $35

   

Poem of the Day: Geoffrey Chaucer

From The Wife of Bath's Prologue

If you're not up to tackling the Middle English unaided, there's a parallel-text version (Middle English and modern English) here. 

"Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, is right ynogh for me

To speke of wo that is in mariage;

For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,

Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,

Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve, --

If I so ofte myghte have ywedded bee, --

And alle were worthy men in hir degree.

But me was toold, certayne, nat longe agoon is,

That sith that Crist ne wente nevere but onis

To weddyng, in the Cane of Galilee,

That by the same ensample taughte he me

That I ne sholde wedded be but ones,

Herkne eek, lo, which a sharp word for the nones,

Biside a welle, Jhesus, God and man,

Spake in repreeve of the Samaritan,

'Thou hast yhad fyve housbondes,' quod he,

'And that ilke man that now hath thee

Is noght thyn housbonde,' thus seyde he certeyne.

What that he mente therby, I kan nat seyn;

But that I axe, why that the fifthe man

Was noon housbonde to the Samaritan?

How manye myghte she have in mariage?

Yet herde I nevere tellen in myn age

Upon this nombre diffinicioun.

Men may devyne and glosen, up and doun,

But wel I woot, expres, withoute lye,

God bad us for to wexe and multiplye;

That gentil texte kan I wel understonde.

Eek wel I woot, he seyde myn housbonde

Sholde lete fader and mooder, and take to me.

But of no nombre mencion made he,

Of bigamye, or of octogamye;

Why sholde men thanne speke of it vileynye?

   Lo, heere the wise kyng, daun Salomon;

I trowe he hadde wyves more than oon.

As wolde God it were leveful unto me

To be refresshed half so ofte as he!

Which yifte of God hadde he for alle his wyvys!

No man hath swich that in this world alyve is.

God woot, this noble kyng, as to my wit,

The firste nyght had many a myrie fit

With ech of hem, so wel was hym on lyve,

Yblessed be God that I have wedded fyve!

Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal,

For sothe, I wol nat kepe me chaast in al.

Whan myn housbonde is fro the world ygon,

Som Cristen man shal wedde me anon,

For thanne, th'apostle seith that I am free

To wedde, a Goddes half, where it liketh me.

He seith that to be wedded is no synne;

Bet is to be wedded than to brynne

What rekketh me, thogh folk seye vileynye

Of shrewed Lameth and his bigamye?

I woot wel Abraham was an hooly man,

And Jacob eek, as ferforth as I kan;

And ech of hem hadde wyves mo than two,

And many another holy man also.

Where can ye seye, in any manere age,

That hye God defended mariage

By expres word? I pray yow, telleth me.

Or where comanded he virginitee?

I woot as wel as ye, it is no drede,

Th'apostle, when he speketh of maydenhede,

He seyde that precept thereof hadde he noon.

Men may conseille a womman to been oon,

But conseillyng is no comandement.

He putte it in our owene juggement;

For hadde God comanded maydenhede,

Thanne hadde he dampned weddyng with the dede.

And certes, if ther were no seed ysowe,

Virginitee, thanne whereof sholde it growe?

Poul dorste nat comanden, atte leeste,

A thyng of which his maister yaf noon heeste,

The dart is set up for virginitee:

Cacche whoso may, who renneth best lat see.

.....

My fourthe housbonde was a revelour;

This is to seyn, he hadde a paramour;

And I was yong and ful of ragerye,

Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye.

How koude I daunce to an harpe smale,

And synge, ywis, as any nyghtyngale,

Whan I had dronke a draughte of sweete wyn!

Metellus, the foule cherl, the swyn,

That with a staf birafte his wyf her lyf,

For she drank wyn, thogh I hadde been his wyf,

He sholde nat han daunted me fro drynke!

And after wyn on Venus most I thynke,

For al so siker as cold engendreth hayl,

A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayle.

In wommen vinolent is no defence, --

This knowen lecchours by experience.

   But, Lord Crist! what that it remembreth me

Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,

It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.

Upon this day it dooth myn herte boote

That I have had my world as in my tyme.

But age, allas! that al wol evenyme,

Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith,

Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith!

The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle;

The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle.

(lines 1-76, 462-478)

--Geoffrey Chaucer 

Watch an episode of "Jeopardy!" that has a literature category, especially one dealing with literature before 1900, and you'll see that even highly educated, highly literate people are unfamiliar with literary references that our grandparents used to assume were essential mental furniture. It's a consequence in part of our efforts at universal literacy: The more people there are who can read, the more diverse their backgrounds, the more books there are available to them, the less likely it is that they'll have the same books in common. It used to be that every literate person was familiar with figures like The Wife of Bath, Falstaff, Pickwick -- touchstones of the human comedy. Today, calling someone Falstaffian or Pickwickian, or saying "she's as raunchy as the Wife of Bath" will probably get you a blank stare. 


But this lack of a common literary background doesn't just include the moldy oldies of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens. Make an allusion to more recent literature, to Yossarian or Holden Caulfield or Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, and somebody in the room isn't going to get it. This is not meant as a rant against contemporary education. I'm no admirer of E.D. Hirsch's campaign for "cultural literacy" or even of Harold Bloom's canon-building. It's just to explain why I bothered to post a chunk of Chaucer here: because I think it's worth the effort, because it shines a light on a too often neglected corner of the literary experience. 


I think Chaucer is worth knowing because he was taught to me by a master, the late B.J. Whiting, whose Chaucer course used to fill the largest lecture room in Sever Hall at Harvard. Today, I bet you can't get enough students to fill a seminar room for a Chaucer course at most universities.


I've written about Chaucer before, in a review of the late Donald R. Howard's Chaucer biography. It appeared in the Mercury News in 1987. It says pretty much everything I have to say about the writer I think of as the second-greatest poet in the English language. 


CHAUCER: His Life, His Works, His World
By Donald R. Howard
E.P. Dutton, 704 pp., $29.95 

IT doesn't surprise me that, according to one of those recent gloom-and-doom studies of American education, half of American high school seniors don't know who wrote "The Canterbury Tales." I'm just glad half of them do. 

But I wonder how many of the people who did the survey and the editorial writers who agonized over its findings have actually read Chaucer. Or have read him since their English 101 survey courses. 

I'm talking about Chaucer in his own language, Middle English. So-called translations don't work because maybe two-thirds of his language doesn't need translating. It's not grammar and syntax so much as vocabulary that makes reading Middle English laborious. Take the opening couplet of the "Canterbury Tales" prologue, for example: 

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . . 

A word-for-word translation would go: 

When that April with his showers sweet
The drought of March hath pierced to the root . . . 

But that messes up the meter and wrecks the rhyme. The syntax now sounds quaintly "poetic." But the translator who tries to render these lines in something resembling the original's metrical and rhyme schemes inevitably drives away some of their ease and spontaneity. And all this effort goes just to make sure a reader doesn't think those showers are sooty instead of sweet. 

The reader of Chaucer has to put up with footnotes, not only to translate Middle English words, but also to explain the political, social and religious beliefs Chaucer took for granted. And the trouble with that is, as Samuel Johnson observed,"The mind is refrigerated by interruption." 

So no wonder people are ignorant of Chaucer. Which is unfortunate, because he's probably the second-greatest English poet. The only other serious contender for best-after-Shakespeare is Milton. And for me, Chaucer is to Milton as Mozart is to Beethoven. Both are great, but the tie-breaker is which artist can both strike terror in your soul and make you laugh. Chaucer and Mozart can do that; Milton and Beethoven are long on terror, short on laughter. 

A quarter-century after my own course in Chaucer, I still smile when I recall Alisoun's giggle in "The Miller's Tale," the eagle's bluster in "The House of Fame" or the barnyard fowls' banter in "The Nun's Priest's Tale." And thinking of Criseyde's despair and the fate of the rascals in "The Pardoner's Tale" gives me a frisson. 

Much of the delight Chaucer has given me came rushing back as I read Donald R. Howard's biography of him. Actually, "biography" is too narrow a genre to stuff Howard's book into, for it's a work of history as well as of biography, and one built on imagination as well as scholarship. What we know for sure about Chaucer is mostly dry-as-dust stuff from official records of the 14th century English court, about the doings of a Geoffrey Chaucer who was first a page, then a soldier, then a diplomat and a civil servant. These records don't even tell us what year Chaucer was born or what day he died. We know he married one of the queen's attendants, but not how many children they had. We even know he was once accused of rape; we don't know whether that means abduction or sexual assault or whether he was guilty of the charge. We have only circumstantial evidence, in fact, that the Chaucer of these records is also Chaucer the poet. 

Faced with not only such scanty evidence but also the webs of conjecture that scholars have woven about Chaucer over the centuries, Howard nevertheless puts together a coherent and convincing picture of Chaucer the man. And he also uses what we know of Chaucer's life and his poetry to shed light on his world. 

That's quite an accomplishment, for the 14th century is almost as alien to ours as an imaginary civilization created by a sci-fi writer. Think, for example, of a world not only without television, movies or radio, but without print. 

Newspapers and magazines didn't exist; books were few and precious. It was a world not only without the internal combustion engine, but without road maps -- and there were precious few roads. As Howard points out, our word "travel" comes from the French travail, meaning "toil." To travel the distance from San Jose to San Francisco would take more than a day. A trip from England to Italy, such as the one Chaucer took in which he encountered Italian culture at the dawn of the Renaissance, took months, and was a trek through an uncharted wilderness in which one relied on strangers to point the way. 

Before you get too swept away by the idea of a world without commuting and traffic jams, without talk shows and commercials, remember that it was also a world ignorant of microbiology, without antiseptics, with no clear sense of how disease was transmitted, let alone how it should be treated. Small wonder that the Black Death killed a third to a half of the population of England during Chaucer's lifetime. 

It's tempting to compare Howard's book with Barbara Tuchman's best-selling A Distant Mirror, another portrait of what Tuchman calls "The Calamitous 14th Century." Each book explores the age through the life of a representative man. Chaucer and Tuchman's central figure, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, lived at about the same time -- the last 60 years of the century. But I think, for us moderns, Chaucer is a better guide to the age than Tuchman's French nobleman. For Chaucer was not only a poet, he was also a professional man, a sort of medieval middle manager, born to the merchant class and educated into the service of the courts of Edward III and Richard II. He had the opportunity to explore not only England, France and Italy, but also several levels of society, and with Howard's help, we explore them with him. 

Howard also crafts a full portrait of Chaucer himself, making us abundantly aware of Chaucer's achievements. He helped transform English culture by introducing to it what he had encountered in France and Italy. When the literature of pre- Norman Conquest Britain -- such as "Beowulf" and the Anglo-Saxon lyrics -- had been swept away, not to be recovered for centuries, Chaucer created works that are the fountainhead of English literature. Even the language of Chaucer's England was unsettled, as the Germanic stream of Anglo-Saxon crossed with the Romance stream of Norman French. The court stuck to French, and the language of learning was Latin, but Chaucer forged the vernacular, what we now call Middle English, into a powerful poetic instrument. 

Howard's book will probably be heavy going for the general reader only in its analysis of Chaucer's less-familiar works. Nobody but scholars spends much time with "The Book of the Duchess" or "The Parliament of Fowls" these days. Even "The House of Fame," which has wonderful sections, is too allegorical for the modern temperament. But Howard's commentary will be invaluable for anyone who wants to dust off the old anthology and read a few "Canterbury Tales," or to venture into Chaucer's greatest work, "Troilus and Criseyde." 

Howard, a professor of English at Stanford, died of complications from AIDS, which it's too facile to call the Black Death of our age. This book is as fine a memorial as any writer could want, but there is an almost unbearable poignancy to its final sentence, in which Howard reflects on Chaucer's attitude toward death: "One must think of the world while one is in the world; facing eternity, our thoughts become closed within the self, our words become silence, and all our works upon this little spot of earth seem like the waves of the sea."