A modest, quiet, and almost monastic luminosity shines from The Clerk's Tale by Spencer Reece, creating a rich but unsettling tension with the poems' often theatrically lit settings: the frigid whites-and-grays of a Minnesota winter, the Talbot's pastels of a Cape Cod summer, the lurid tropical hues of southern Florida, the no-color hallways of a mental hospital, the gradual fluorescent darkening of a mall closing for the night.
It's the last for which Reece is already best known, since he has long worked as a salesman for Brooks Brothers and is now the assistant manager of one of its ritzier shops, in Boca Raton, as much of the country learned when The New Yorker devoted an entire page to the title poem of The Clerk's Tale and interviews began to follow. Reece's job as a sales clerk does not make him a monk apart but a member of a confraternity isolated from the customers served by, among other things, language: "Thank you very much please come back." Of course, there are gaps of isolation between any two people as wide and blank as the snow-covered fields of Reece's native Minnesota; his nonce ghazals portray this isolation magnificently. Selected for the Bakeless Prize by Louise Gluck, The Clerk's Tale bears her elucidative introduction.
Indeed, Chaucer seems to have been a kind of underground theme for poets in 2004. While last year's biopic Sylvia wasn't exactly a giggle-fest, one of its early segments is both hilarious and touching: Plath, as a graduate student at Cambridge, stands in a punt with arms outflung as she addresses a field of cows. "Ladies," she declaims, "I give you the Wife of Bath." And she does, in the plummy Middle English accent, heavily influenced at this point in its history by the importation of the French and Italian pentameter.
Who helped the light-running, continental-meter book passage to the land of the Anglo-Saxon "duh-duh / duh-duh"? Chaucer himself, of course, as Peter Ackroyd, biographer extraordinaire, makes clear in his latest venture. Ackroyd's remains the best study of T. S. Eliot, and he has also written full-length studies of London and Thomas Chatterton, "the marvelous boy," as Keats called him. His biography Chaucer, first in a series that will bear Ackroyd's name, is especially good on Chaucer's career as a diplomat and the various scrapes in which he found himself. Though the volume weighs in at a mere 188 pages, it scants on nothing of real importance; a welcome sign, along with the Penguin Brief Lives series, that the era of the door-stopper biography is over.
Was it ever truly necessary? To cite one small example, in all the multi-volumed pages of Peter Guralnick's Elvis Presley biography, the author fails to render a Memphis whose downtown smells of barbeque, car exhaust, and the Mississippi. Ackroyd, by contrast, describes very clearly what it was like to live near the Thames. He tells us what Chaucer would have seen from each window in his lodging, from the streets on which he walked, and—who knows?—the church door at which he may have seen a progressively older woman take five husbands, giving her full right "to speke of woe that is in mariage." The next volume in the Ackroyd series will be a biography of Shakespeare, to whom such topics were not, of course, foreign, having his bequeathed his wife of several decades his "second-best bed."
Two door-stoppers about Shakespeare raise some of the same questions that Ackroyd's do, chief among them: After Harold Bloom's massively ambitious Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human emerged in 1998—achieving a popularity that shocked everyone except, probably, Bloom himself—do we need any more bardological monuments in the next 10 years or so? Dip into Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World and Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare, After All, and you'll probably say yes. Their purposes are quite different: not only from Bloom's, but from each other's.
Greenblatt seeks to discover how Shakespeare became Shakespeare, how this seemingly nondescript student from a nondescript town—later married to a nondescript woman he doesn't seem to have liked very much—became the architect of modern personality (pace Freud) and the wizard of the English language, only to retire abruptly for no apparent reason and return to Avon for the last years of his life. Greenblatt's biographical approach is by no means less multilayered, complex, or interesting, however, than Garber's equally excellent and lauded work. Unknown outside academia until the publication of her books on cross-dressing and dogs, respectively, Garber is a whiz-bang literary theorist who might have been expected to approach Shakespeare with agendas drawn from the post-feminist, post-structuralist, post-colonialist, and post-historicist schools.
Instead, she performs a genuine tour de force: an old-fashioned, jargon-free close reading enlarged by her career immersion in the aforementioned forms of literary theory, among others, and also Elizabethan stage history. Garber eschews discussion of the sonnets and the poems, which isn't really surprising. Indeed, when you consider that Garber's longtime office mate Helen Vendler, who, along with Bloom, is considered the premier poetry critic of our time and whose exhaustively definitive work on Shakespeare's sonnets was published in 1997, Garber's tact seems almost of another era. Almost Elizabethan in its courtliness of manners, one might say.
Shakespeare was one of the first to show, through character, just how much the well-mannered can get away with: there's Hamlet and his antic disposition, of course; and, in one of the funniest sound-bites in the canon, Lady Macbeth's initial response to the news that the King has been murdered. "What," she says, not a little outraged, "in our house?" The only person Lady Macbeth cannot escape from, in the end, like many of Shakespeare's greatest characters, is herself. Which provokes some of his greatest poetry.
