Bloody As Could Be

By John Skow

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHAUCER

by JOHN GARDNER

328 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

As a born teacher will do when he is peddling a beloved subject that is thought to be impenetrable, Novelist and Medievalist John Gardner clowns a bit in this amiable biography of Chaucer. He includes a faker's guide to the pronunciation of Middle English, to which, after a discourse on the swampy places to be avoided in negotiating the letter e, he adds, "If this is too confusing, try to follow, in general, the pronunciation of the Cisco Kid: 'Boot hombray, thees ees nut yoor peesstol.' "

Although his manner is easy, Gardner has not written a slight book. He succeeds in counteracting the popular supposition that the medieval period was excessively religious and dull. As he demonstrates, the age was worldly, tumultuous and as bloody as could be wished. And Chaucer, who was born in about 1340, spent his life at the center of the commotion.

Much is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's life, much lost. He was a vintner's son who rose (through cleverness and, no doubt, the ability to entertain highborn ladies with after-dinner recitals) to become a government official, courtier and diplomat under three successive monarchs -- Edward II, Edward III and Richard II. He was at least briefly a soldier, and while fighting in France under the Black Prince, he was captured, then ransomed for -L-16. The smallness of this sum is a favorite joke among Chaucerians, but it amounts to $3,840 in modern terms, by Gardner's computation, and probably was only part of the ransom paid. In a time of famine, plague, constant war, baronial feuding and serious peasant uprisings, the poet lived to be nearly 60 -- which was old in the 14th century -- and died peacefully.

For what is lost -- details of Chaucer's personal history, shadings of his personality -- Gardner relies on scholarly guesses and novelistic license. After all, he teaches medieval literature at Bennington and, as the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, is one of the most enterprising American novelists of the '70s.

He infers, largely from Chaucer's poetry, that the author of The Canterbury Tales was shrewd, playful, funny, a mocker, but even-tempered, a religious man capable of what Gardner slyly calls "willing suspension of belief." Though the poet, as a matter of convention, denied all personal knowledge of love, his love poetry was strongly sexual.

Underlying Chaucer's sturdy, balanced genius, Gardner sees a characteristically medieval conviction that the world made sense. Chaucer viewed man as a "responsible, moral agent in a baffling but orderly universe." Yet his finest work was full of ironical laughter; a "canterbury tale," in medieval slang, was a lie.

Readers of The Life and Times may find themselves hooked on Chaucer. For those who do, Gardner has thoughtfully and simultaneously provided a sterner volume of criticism: The Poetry of Chaucer (408 pages; Southern Illinois University Press; $15).

John Skow

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