Creators (3 page)

An even more distressing case was that of Toulouse-Lautrec, but it was also an inspiring one, in some ways, for his inherited disabilities, of a most painful and shaming kind, brought out prodigies of courage and willpower. A life of horror and self-degradation was redeemed by a mass of creative work of superlative quality. Though he did not reach his thirty-seventh birthday, and was often too ill to paint, the quantity of his oeuvre is impressive and the quality high. He was born to wealth and came from one of France’s grandest families, which had once possessed the rich city of Toulouse and still owned thousands of acres of fertile land. But the family had a fatal propensity to inbreed. Henri and four of his cousins were victims of the doubling of a recessive gene carried by both his parents and his uncle and aunt. One female cousin merely suffered from pain and weakness in her legs. But three others were genuine dwarfs and badly deformed as well, one of them spending her entire life in a large wicker baby carriage.

Henri was a little more fortunate. Fragility at the growth end of his bones hindered normal development and caused pain, deformation, and weakness in his skeletal structure. This condition became obvious in adolescence. It baffled the doctors and proved impossible to treat. As an adult, he had a normal torso but “his knock-kneed legs were comically short and his stocky arms had massive hands with club-like fingers.” His bones were fragile and would break without apparent cause. He limped, and he had very large nostrils, bulbous lips, a thickened tongue, and a speech impediment. He sniffed continuously and drooled at the mouth.
⁹
Most men with his afflictions would have done nothing with their lives but hide and brood. In fact Lautrec compounded his troubles by becoming an alcoholic and contracting syphilis, though he had been warned against the woman who infected him.

But he had courage, and his courage not only enabled him to
fight against his ill health and debilities by hard work but also to do amazingly daring things with his pencil, pen, and brush. Along with his bravery, his dwarfism may actually have helped his art. He had to stand right up to the canvas and thus avoided impressionist fuzz. Though he is normally grouped with Monet and the rest, he was no more an impressionist than Degas and Cassatt. He became a linear artist of great skill, the best draftsman of his time in Paris, Degas alone excepted, and he developed a strikingly original sense of color. The kind of courage that allowed him to show himself at all, and to work, made it possible for him to penetrate the behind-the-scenes worlds of the circus, the music hall, the theater, and the brothel. Isolated himself, and weird, he nurtured a strange gift for capturing the bizarre character and vigor of a star performer. His subjects leap out at us from the canvas or print, grotesquely vibrant like himself, as vivid as their greasepaint—once seen, never forgotten. His images had a perceptible influence on the whole course of twentieth-century art, and it is impossible to imagine modern design without his colors, shapes, ideas, and frissons. A creative martyr in his way, a hero of creativity.

Equally striking, in this category of courage, are the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson, which can now be studied day by day in the eight rich volumes of his collected correspondence.
¹⁰
Like Toulouse-Lautrec, Stevenson was a sick man from childhood—not a dwarf or a cripple, but a man with weak and unreliable lungs, which finally killed him when he was in his early forties. As his letters show, there were few days, and fewer still weeks or months, when he could work normal hours without a conscious effort of will. He found writing (as he admitted) hard, especially to begin with. The kind of originality he demanded of himself added a huge extra dimension of difficulty, and his health added yet another. Few writers have shown such constant courage over the whole course of a career. Few have hit the original note so often as he did, with
Kidnapped
,
Treasure Island
,
The Master of Ballantrae
, the marvelous verses for children, and strange tales like
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. Given the effort everything took and the brevity of his career—less than two decades—his output was impressive. I can never pass a set of his
Collected Works
in a library or a bookshop without, as it were, taking off my hat to this brave man.

This creative courage is of many different kinds. What are we to think of the quiet, withdrawn, silent, uncomplaining courage of Emily Dickinson? She continued to write her poetry, and eventually amassed a significant oeuvre, with little or no encouragement, no guidance, and no public response, for only six short poems were published in her lifetime and these against her will. She worked essentially in isolation and solitude, a brave woman confronting the fears and agonies of creation without help (or hindrance either, as perhaps she would have said). Then there is the courage of persistence, in the face of failure or total lack of recognition, as shown by David Hume, whose brilliant
Essay on Human Understanding
“fell dead-born from the press,” as he put it; or Anthony Trollope, whose first novel,
The Macdermots of Ballycloran
, was (so far as he knew) never reviewed at all, and sold not a single copy. There is the courage of age, too. My old friend V. S. Pritchett, the best critic of his day and a short-story writer of genius, told me in his eighties how he had to drag himself “moaning and protesting” up long flights of stairs to his study at the top of his house in Primrose Hill, without fail every morning after breakfast, to begin his invariable stint of work—and this continued into his nineties. Another old friend, the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley, described to me how (in his late eighties) he sat at his desk at nine each morning and practiced little strategies—cleaning his pipe, sharpening pencils, rearranging papers and implements—to delay the dreaded but inevitable moment when he had to begin putting words on paper again. All the same, creation is a marvelous business, and people who create at the highest level lead a privileged life, however arduous and difficult it may be. An interesting life, too, full of peculiar aspects and strange satisfactions. That is the message of this book.

G
EOFFREY
C
HAUCER
(
C
.
1342–1400
)
was perhaps the most creative spirit ever to write in English. Indeed it could be argued that he created English as a medium of art. Before him, we had a tongue, spoken and to some degree written. After him, we had a literature. He came, to be sure, at a good time. In his grandfather’s day, England still had a hieratic-demotic language structure. Only the plebeians habitually spoke English, in a variety of bewildering regional forms. The ruling class spoke French and wrote in Latin. Edward I and his son Edward II spoke French. They understood some English, though they certainly did not, and probably could not, write it. Edward III, born in 1312—he was a generation older than Chaucer—spoke English fluently. The Hundred Years’ War, which he launched five years before Chaucer was born, opened a deep chasm between England and France that made the close interaction and simultaneous development of their culture no longer possible. The use of French in official transactions went into precipitous decline. The rise of English as the language of law and government was formally recognized by the Statute of Pleading (1362), when Chaucer was a young man. It ordered that in all the courts, all cases “shall be pleaded, showed, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue.”
¹
The following year the lord chancellor, for the first time, opened Parliament with a speech in English.

At the same time, the number of people literate in English was increasing rapidly. In Chaucer’s lifetime, scores of first-class schools, led by William of Wykham’s great foundation, Winchester College (still in existence), were founded, together with twenty distinct colleges of higher education at Oxford and Cambridge. Four times as many English manuscripts survive from the fourteenth century as from the thirteenth. There are, for instance, twenty medical manuscripts in English from the thirteenth century, 140 in the fourteenth, and 872 in the fifteenth.
²
By the time Chaucer died, there were about 200 stationers and book craftsmen operating in London. The number of “clerks”—a new term to describe men whose business it was to write and copy documents—was already formidable—120 in the Chancery alone.
³
Men (and some women) were acquiring libraries for their private pleasure, to supplement the growing number of institutional libraries in monasteries, colleges, and cathedrals. When Chaucer died, over 500 private book collections existed, and the price of paper had fallen so fast that a sheet of eight-octavo pages cost only one penny.
⁴

Chaucer’s entry into history thus came at an auspicious moment for writers. Yet it was not so much an entry as a transformation. He found a language; he left a literature. No man ever had so great an impact on a written tongue, not even Dante, who transformed Florentine into the language of Italy. For Chaucer had the creative gift of appealing strongly to a great number of people, then and now. Before him there was very little.
Beowulf
is in Old English, almost incomprehensible today to English-speaking readers, and dull, too. No one ever reads
Beowulf
unless forced to do so (in schools or universities) or paid to do so (as on the BBC).
Gawayn and the Green Knight
is little more attractive. Of Middle English works, Langland’s
Piers Ploughman
is taught or read as a duty, never for pleasure. Chaucer is in a class by himself, and a class joined by no one until Shakespeare’s day. He was, and is, read for delight, and in joy. Over eighty complete manuscripts by Chaucer have survived, out of many hundreds—perhaps over 1,000—published in the fifteenth century. Many of them bear the marks of continuous circulation and perusal. When printing came to England, Caxton pounced on
The Canterbury Tales
and published it, not once but twice. It has been in print for 520
years, and even today it is one of the texts that teenagers begin in compulsion but finish in delight. And Chaucer has attracted a body of commentary and elucidation over the centuries which is rivaled only by Shakespeare.
⁵

How did this happen? What was so special about Geoffrey Chaucer that gives him this unique status as the founder of English literature? We here enter one of the personal mysteries that always seems to surround acts of creation. For, on the surface, there was nothing particularly outstanding about Chaucer. He might be described as
un homme moyen sensuel
of the fourteenth century. The three contemporary portraits we have of him, the basis of an extensive iconography in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (and thereafter), show him as a jolly, prosperous, happy member of the late medieval upper middle class.
⁶
He was the son of a successful London vintner, John Chaucer (c. 1312–1368), and was educated at home. His family provided an excellent upbringing. Vintners have tended to be well-traveled, sophisticated men, with many links abroad, especially in Italy, France, the Rhineland, and the Iberian countries, often in high circles. John Ruskin, one of the best-educated Englishmen of the nineteenth century, was likewise the son of a vintner and was taught at home. When Chaucer was a teenager, his father secured him a post as page in the household of Lionel, afterward duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III. Lionel, who was two years older than Chaucer, married first the greatest Anglo-Irish heiress of the day and then the leading Italian heiress, Violante Visconti.
⁷
It would be difficult to think of a more sophisticated “finishing” for the young Chaucer. He was thereafter at ease in any society, including the highest, at home and abroad. Lionel had a taste for magnificence, which Chaucer admired. When he set off to claim his Visconti bride in 1368, he had a train of 457 men and 1,280 horses, and at the wedding the aged poet Petrarch was a guest at the high table. By this time, of course, Chaucer had moved on. In 1359 he was in France with Edward III’s invading army and was taken prisoner and ransomed. He married (probably in 1366) Philippa, and had three children by her: Thomas, Louis (or Lewis), and Elizabeth. Philippa was the daughter of Sir Paon Roet of Hainault; more important, she was the sister of Kather
ine Swynford, third wife of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s richest and best-connected son. This connection ensured that Chaucer had Gaunt’s powerful patronage throughout his career. He thus held many positions at court and in the royal service, including membership in several important diplomatic missions—to Genoa and Florence (1372–1373), to Spain, and to France and Lombardy (1378). From 1374 on, he held a lucrative post as head of the London customs, with an official house. In 1386, he was knight of the shire for Kent, where he had a house and lands. He also served (in 1391–1400) as deputy forester for Petherton in Somerset, where he likewise had an estate. His official duties mean that he crops up in the records at least 493 times, and is, or ought to be, better known to us than any other English medieval writer. But these records are disappointingly impersonal, and efforts to bring Chaucer’s official activities to vigorous life have been only partly successful.
⁸

What does seem clear, however, is that Chaucer’s career at the courts of Edward III and Richard II had its ups and downs. Though his connection with Gaunt brought him jobs, perks, and money, it also involved him in party politics, which could bring trouble as well as rewards. In 1389 he was appointed to the great office of clerk of the King’s Works, which put him in charge of Westminster Palace, the Tower, and eight of the royal residences; the next year St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the Knights of the Garter were installed, was added to his duties. This clerkship was a position of considerable power and a means of acquiring wealth. But a year later, he resigned it and moved himself to Somerset. Politics? It seems likely. Chaucer certainly suffered in 1386, during the rule of Thomas, duke of Gloucester, who ousted the “John of Gaunt Gang” from power. This was the year of the only political reference in Chaucer’s poetry, the line “That all is lost for lack of steadfastness.” Chaucer deplored cowardice in any context, politics included.
⁹
But he seems to have flourished under Henry IV, as his gratuity of £20 a year was promptly renewed by the new monarch. Much of his life was spent at the very heart of medieval government at Westminster, since he had a home in the garden of the Lady Chapel of the Abbey, on the spot where later was built Henry VII’s magnificent late-Gothic
chapel; and Chaucer’s body was the first to be placed in the section of the Abbey that we now call the Poets’ Corner.

The richness and variety of Chaucer’s career gave him opportunities few English men of letters have enjoyed. He traveled at the highest level all over western Europe, and he saw at close quarters the workings of half a dozen courts. He was involved professionally with the army and navy, international commerce, the export and import trade, central and local government finance, parliament and the law courts, the Exchequer and Chancery, the agricultural and forestry activities of the crown estates—and of private estates too—and the workings of internal commerce and industry, especially the building trade. Diplomacy and the church, politics and the law, the nation’s well-being in war and peace—all these spheres were familiar to him. He must have met and conversed with almost everyone of consequence in England over many decades, and with plenty of notables from the Continent too. Among those with whom we know he had dealings were great merchants like Sir Nicholas Brembre, Sir William Walworth, and Sir John Philpot; the Lollard Knights, followers of William Wycliffe (Sir Lewis Clifford, Sir John Clan-vowe, Sir Richard Sturry, and Sir William Neville); diplomats and officials such as Sir Guichard d’Angle, Sir Peter Comtenay, the Bishop of Durham Walter Skirlawe, Sir William de Beauchamp, and Sir John Burley; and grandees like Gaunt himself.
¹⁰
Chaucer worked at the heart of the establishment of Plantagenet England and was familiar with its corridors of power. He knew how to get a tally paid by the Exchequer and, the most valuable trick of all, how to get a writ through Chancery, with its Great Seal attached. He knew, too, how to get entrée to the King’s Privy Chamber, and how to get a room allotted to him in a royal palace or tent city. At the same time, he never lost contact with his middle-class and trading origins. He carried with him the prudent habits of the City of London and the country lore of a modest mansion in the Kentish Weald—he knew inns and staging posts, shops and workplaces, smithies and ferryboats, cross-Channel packets, and inshore fisheries. He certainly spoke and read French and Italian, and probably some German, Flemish, and Spanish. Like many another English autodidact, including at least two monarchs,
King Alfred and Queen Elizabeth I, he knew enough Latin to translate Boethius’s
De Consolatione Philosophiae
, and he was familiar with the works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch (he may, indeed, have met the last two).
¹¹

That Chaucer was influenced in his writing by French and Italian literature, then much more advanced than England’s, was inevitable and, indeed, can be demonstrated by internal evidence in his work. He often followed continental forms. Thus his first masterpiece,
The Book of the Duchess
, a poem of 1,334 lines written in 1369, when he was in his late twenties, followed the French device of the dream, as does the 2,158-line
House of Fame
(unfinished), written in 1374–1385 at intervals during his busy official career. His longest poem,
Troilus and Criseyde
, of 8,239 lines, from the second half of the 1380s, is taken direct, so far as the story goes, from Boccaccio’s
Il Filostrato
. But that is only the final stage in a long genealogy of borrowings going back through Guido delle Cotoune via Benoit de Sante-Maure to Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. Apart from the story, Chaucer’s poem has little in common with Boccaccio’s, striking a note of high seriousness and sadness quite lacking in the Italian.
¹²
Chaucer looked to others for structure and metrical tricks, but never for content. This is particularly noticeable in his relationship with Dante, whom he admired—who hasn’t?—but essentially ignored. Their minds and worlds of thought were quite different. Indeed, Chaucer, with a clear reference to Dante, admits in
Troilus
, “Of heaven and hell I have no power to sing.”
¹³
We have here the first indication of a great divide already opening between English and Continental literature—an English concentration on the concrete and practical, as opposed to the abstract.

A more pertinent question is what made Chaucer a poet in the first place. With a successful official career already launched, why turn to verse with what can only be called professional determination and ardor? Though Chaucer never tells us what drove him to literature, he more than once complains how hard it is to become a master of words. As he writes in yet another dream poem,
The Parliament of Fowls,
a delightful fantasy of birds choosing their mates on St. Valentine’s Day (1382):

No poet, grumbling as he trudges upstairs to his study to begin the day’s quota of lines, has ever put it better. Why, then, did Chaucer embrace the craft with such tenacity? Here, I think, the Continental evidence is highly relevant. Poets, so far as we can tell, had no status in England in 1360. It was a different matter across the Channel, as Chaucer discovered. At the courts of France and Burgundy poets were held in high regard and were able to advance their own careers, and help their families, by pleasing verse-loving, sentimental princes. Chaucer found that in Italy Dante was the one truly national figure; Dante’s fame, beginning shortly after his death in 1321, had spread everywhere by the time Chaucer came to Italy. Boccaccio and Petrarch, both still living, were also celebrated and revered, the toasts of courts, the favorites of princes. Such favor was not, as yet, to be had in England, but it could be earned. Chaucer also noted that celebrity and favors were most commonly secured by such poets when they turned their skills to
vers d’occasion,
jubilee poems to mark princely feasts and red-letter days. He wrote accordingly. Thus his
Book of the Duchess
was almost certainly an allegorical lament on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, first wife of his patron, John of Gaunt; and
The Parliament of Fowls
celebrated the marriage of his king and benefactor to Anne of Bohemia.
¹⁴