It was ten years ago that I set myself the task of reading all of Frye’s writings, both published and unpublished, a feat made possible by the appearance over the last decade of the successive volumes of the Collected Works. I wish I could say I understood everything that I read — the Ogdoads are complicated! — but after a while I began to focus on the pattern behind the particulars. I came to the conclusion that Frye was no “absent-minded professor”; indeed, it is probably true that he had a memory that was eidetic. He could seemingly draw on recollections of everything that he had ever read and of everything that he had ever written. He was simply one of the great readers of our time. Harold Bloom called him “the foremost living student of Western literature,” but he was also widely read in non-Western literature and philosophy. He had the ability to discern structures, not Platonic (based on visions) but Aristotelian (based on observations). The sociologist Edmund Carpenter, a one-time colleague on campus and sometime debating partner, once told me that Frye was “a genius of some kind.” I have come to the conclusion that Carpenter was right.
The standard dictionary of quotations is a work of collective expression, a mosaic of the ideas, impressions, and opinions contributed by hundreds or thousands of thoughtful people over great periods of time. This is not such a book. The present work is a specialized dictionary of quotations, for it is based on the thoughts and writings of a single person; it is the handiwork of one contributor, albeit a remarkable one. It is evidence that there is a Canadian writer of whom it may be said that we as his readers can grow up inside his work “without ever being aware of a circumference.”
Biographical Appreciation
Jean O’Grady
Northrop Frye
What a guy
Read more books than
You or I
So begins a ditty about Frye popular at one time among undergraduates at Victoria College. It captures the local view of Frye — affectionate, proprietorial, somewhat in awe of the great man but by no means overwhelmed.
There is a curious dichotomy between this picture of Frye and that of the eminent man-of-letters celebrated by the world at large. Frye became an international phenomenon, the literary critic who opened up criticism as a discipline in its own right, and adumbrated a vast structure for the whole of literature. His books have been translated into twenty languages, including Serbo-Croatian, Korean, and Portuguese; his theories have been used to elucidate works from Old English to Russian. Scholars have held conferences on his work in Canada, the United States, Australia, Italy, China, Korea, and Inner Mongolia. The Northrop Frye papers in the Victoria University Library contain letters from twenty-six different colleges and universities offering Frye a job — and this is just in the eighteen years between 1959 and 1977. The offers range from a permanent appointment as Mackenzie King Professor at Harvard to a position in the English Department at Arizona State University.
In spite of this worldwide fame, and his thirty-eight honorary degrees, Frye spent most of his working life at the (with all due respect) comparatively obscure Victoria College in the University of Toronto. He enrolled there as an undergraduate in the college in 1929, studying philosophy and English; then, after his graduation, he studied theology at Emmanuel, the theological college of Victoria University, while doing some part-time lecturing in the college English department. As it became apparent that teaching was his vocation, the college authorities helped to send him to England for two years, to round out his English studies at Merton College, Oxford University. He persevered there, in spite of finding Oxford “dismally cold, wet, clammy, muggy, damp, and moist, like a morgue.” Upon finishing his studies at Oxford, he was relieved to be taken on permanently in the English Department at Victoria in 1939. There he remained, except for spells as a visiting professor, until his retirement. For years he rode the subway to work like any beginning lecturer, expounded his pass course in Biblical symbolism to undergraduates of every degree of sophistication, and often spent Saturday afternoons grading essays.
I first met him in this guise myself in 1960. I was going to study English Language and Literature and had been advised by my high-school guidance counsellor to enrol at Victoria so that I would, as they said, “get Frye.” I did get him, for several courses, and an amazing figure he was: dumpy and pasty-coloured, with an almost shifty air, as if he didn’t quite belong inside this mortal envelope. He would open his mouth and, in a quiet and unemphatic voice, give expression to the most searching analyses, the most suggestive generalizations, the most piercing insights, all in sentences and whole paragraphs perfectly controlled and modulated. Even his witty remarks were delivered deadpan, with just the occasional quick upturn at the side of his mouth if you seemed to get the joke.
Going back into the past, here’s a reminiscence of Frye as a lecturer by one of his students in 1946, political columnist Douglas Fisher, who had just arrived at college under the veterans’ preference with many other former soldiers:
Our class, perhaps forty [people], was stiff. The general tone was serious, almost apprehensive. It reeked of both earnestness and doubt.… At 9:05, a slight chap walked in, his suit too large, a dour Russian quality about its hang and texture. He was blond, his hair heavy, but haloed with wisps and snarls. (In his younger days, this blond mop had earned him the nickname “Buttercup.”) On first look, he seemed prissy, uncomfortable, yet curiously like a robot. Stiff — and we were stiffer.
He began while staring out the window.… “My subject today is George Bernard Shaw.…” and he was away. A tape recorder would have picked up little but the teacher’s voice. Except for an occasional titter, the class didn’t loosen up. When the bell rang, the man stopped talking, bobbed his head, and left.
He was no sooner gone from the room when an uproar of comments made the place noisy.
“This can’t be university, it’s too entertaining.”
“What’s this man’s name?”
A girl beside me looked at me for seconds but her mind wasn’t there. When her beatific smile finally broke, she said, “That was better than any movie I’ve ever seen.”
What I knew was — if this was university, I wanted a lot more of it, and the teacher.… What a break! Northrop Frye as first voice heard at university.
Frye was always the opposite of grandstanding or charismatic, the conduit of a force that came purely from the mind and owed nothing to physical stature. In 1950, when he spent a year as a visiting professor at Harvard, he went to a store where the proprietors took a friendly interest in the students. As Frye relates it, “The clerk asked me what I was studying, and I said, with only a touch of shrillness, that I was teaching. Just for the summer, of course. He wrapped my parcel, handed it to me, and said, ‘I hope your permanent appointment comes through all right.’”
Working on The Collected Writings of Northrop Frye, I encountered another form of this contrast between appearance and reality. The edition includes not only the published works, but also letters written to his future wife Helen, diaries, and seventy-six densely packed notebooks, in which Frye wrestled with trains of thought, worked and re-worked the shapes of his books, and reflected on his own strengths and weaknesses. At the end of his life, instead of burning these notebooks, he allowed them to pass to the Northrop Frye Fonds at Victoria’s E.J. Pratt Library, and thus implicitly gave us our liberty to publish them. It is not too much to say that they reveal an entirely new Frye, unsuspected by the general public and even by most of his associates: one given to waspish comments on his colleagues, or to politically incorrect remarks like “Probably one has to lie to men — certainly to women.”
The letters written during