Northrop Frye’s Uncollected Prose contains twenty-one pieces that for one reason or another were not included in the now completed thirty-volume Collected Works. The present volume includes talks Frye gave that were tape-recorded but for which there is no extant manuscript; taped interviews and responses to questions not included in the volume of interviews of the Collected Works; a previously undiscovered notebook and portions of others, including an extensive series of notes on romance (93,000 words); a brief in opposition to the Macpherson Report on undergraduate education at the University of Toronto; an address about the contribution of Victoria College to Canadian culture; reviews that were until recently unknown to me and the other editors of the Collected Works; a reply to a questionnaire from the American Scholar; and an early essay on poetic diction. One justification for such a miscellany is that it adds to the expansive Frye canon already in print. Very few things Frye wrote are without merit, and so the second justification is that these twenty-one pieces come from the pen or, in a few cases, the voice of Northrop Frye, one of the seminal humanistic thinkers of the last century. In seeking to understand his remarkable achievement it is good to have before us as complete a record as possible of what he wrote and said, no matter how fragmentary the collection as a whole is and how discontinuous the reading experience it provides. Like the published notebooks (Collected Works 5, 6, 9, 15, 20, 23), Uncollected Prose will no doubt often be used as a reference work, which, with the aid of the index, can be consulted by Frye specialists and all other readers.
The twenty-one items are arranged chronologically as best this can be determined, and the headnote for each piece has information on its provenance, location in the Frye Fonds, publication data for previously published items, and the like. Two items that are not possible to date have been placed at the end. The aim of what now follows is to provide a brief context for each of the pieces.
The 1932 Notebook came to the Victoria University Library in 2013 as part of the papers of Frye’s colleague the late Jay Macpherson. The head librarian at Victoria University, Robert Brandeis, informed me of the existence of the notebook in October 2012, and on 1 April 2013, he sent it to me as a scanned pdf file. Why the notebook was in Macpherson’s possession is uncertain.
Many of the pages in the “diary” have been left blank (there are entries for only 117 days), suggesting that Frye’s attention to the notebook entries was somewhat random: whatever day he determined to write he turned to that day in the notebook. Although it is written in a blank “diary,” the material is consistent not with Frye’s other diaries but with his other notebooks, as these were defined by the Collected Works project. “1932” is printed on the cover and title page, but whereas some of the entries may date from that year, there is internal evidence that some of the entries are from 1934 and following.
Frye used most of his notebooks as preparation for his writing projects. That does not seem to be the case with the 1932 Notebook, even though several of the entries anticipate later essays. Still, readers will discover a number of connections between the notebook entries and Frye’s later work. For example, an early reference to the anatomy as a form of prose fiction appears in the entry for 13 July. And in the entry for 16 January, we have an embryonic form of the Platonic triad—justice, beauty, and truth—which Frye would use in his Emmanuel College essay “The Relation of Religion to the Arts” and which would develop into the larger schematic triad at the beginning of his theory of genres in Anatomy of Criticism. The entry for 17 July contains Frye’s earliest use of the word “interpenetration,” denoting a concept that would develop into a key idea in his visionary poetics. A number of the entries have to do with familiar topics—with Shakespeare and with music, for example. And then we have an early notebook version of the literary stock-market metaphor that begins like this:
There is really no such thing as a wrong critical attitude. Take any of the big names at random, say, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley. Critic A, for instance, is an individualist and hero-worshipper who admires the strength and independence of Milton and Shelley, and resents the lack of a strong personality in Shakespeare. Critic B is a tricky sprite who soars off into the blue with Shakespeare and Shelley and talks about the leaden feet and crabbed Puritanism of Milton. Critic C is a classicist and a bit of a pedant with a strong sense of form who feels safe with Shakespeare and Milton and regards Shelley as a precariously balanced epiphyle. Critic D says the English have no feeling for poetry and have never produced any poet, except, by some miracle, Shakespeare.… (entry of 13 September)
Compare that to a passage, some twenty years later, from the “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism, where Frye outlines the kinds of judgments that are used to promote or demote Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley on the basis of justifiable but nevertheless arbitrary criteria:
A selective approach to tradition, then, invariably has some ultracritical joker concealed in it. There is no question of accepting the whole of literature as the basis of study, but a tradition (or, of course, “the” tradition) is abstracted from it and attached to contemporary social values, being then used to document those values. The hesitant reader is invited to try the following exercise. Pick three big names at random, work out the eight possible combinations of promotion and demotion (on a simplified, or two-class, basis) and defend each in turn. Thus if the three names picked were Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, the agenda would run:
1. Demoting Shelley, on the ground that he is immature in technique and profundity of thought compared to the others.
2. Demoting Milton, on the ground that his religious obscurantism and heavy doctrinal content impair the spontaneity of his utterance.
3. Demoting Shakespeare, on the ground that his detachment from ideas makes his dramas a reflection of life rather than a creative attempt to improve it.
4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by didacticism.
5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare’s unvarying worldliness and Shelley’s callowness.
6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets who accepted outworn social or religious values.
7. Promoting all three (for this a special style, which we may call the peroration style, should be used).
8. Demoting all three, on the ground of the untidiness of English genius when examined by French or Classical or Chinese standards. (CW 22: 24–5)
As one would expect, the 1932 notebook reveals a number of familiar topics. Frye was always interested in colour symbolism, and one can find rather extravagant instances of such interest in the entries for 31 January and 11–12 March. Surprisingly, Blake makes relatively few appearances in the notebook (passing mention in eight entries), whereas Shakespeare is very much on Frye’s mind (twenty entries, almost all of which references are more than passing). Fourteen of the entries have to do with music. But the topics are wide-ranging: parody, detective stories, the Scotch influence in Canada, analogies, connotations, the sceptic, Marxism, Thomas Hardy, John Keats, excessive introspection, women’s faces in advertising, Edward Lear and the limerick, Twain’s A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, D’Annunzio, Händel, music in poetry, wars immortalized by women, Fowler and Fowler’s The King’s English, critics and criticism, superstitions, the word “and,” Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor, teaching Latin in the public schools, Pilgrim’s Progress, Joyce’s Ulysses, the Canadian National Railways, and the Nordic influence in America, among scores of other topics.
Frye tosses off epigrams, sometimes witty and sometimes strained, gives us a limerick, and even tries his hand at such poetic forms as the cinquain (24 June) and triolet (10 July). Then there are the jokes (Emerson speaks in Plato-tudes) and overheard remarks (“Give me the history of drums and trumpets, not the history of bums and strumpets”). There are occasional vignettes that appear to be scenes from a contemplated short story or novel, although none of them appears later in Frye’s published or unpublished fiction writing.
As a student, Frye always appeared more mature and advanced in his thinking than his years would suggest. Much later in his life, after the triumph of feminism, Frye was occasionally brought to task for using sexist language. But in the notebook we find Frye, about age twenty-four or twenty-five, revealing that he is quite aware of the sexism of English pronouns: “One thing a universal language ought to do is give us a separate personal pronoun of common gender to use for words like ‘student,’ ‘author,’ ‘member,’ ‘person,’ etc. where we now have to say ‘he or she,’ or, insultingly ‘he’ ” (entry of 27 June).
The final entry in the notebook contains several puzzles. First, Frye refers to the several parts of what has become, since the publication of his notebooks, his well-known ogdoad, the eight parts that he decided early on would provide a structural outline of his life’s work. The references to early, middle, and late apparently have to do with the periods of his own life; that is, Liberal would be written early, Twilight late, and so forth. But why do the eight parts fall under the heading “NOVEL”? At an early age Frye had conceived of a grand project that would result in eight concerti. After several years this scheme modulated into eight novels, and by the time he had finished his undergraduate education the ogdoad had become eight critical works. However, Frye’s marginal note in the present notebook indicates that although he had “outgrown” the schema set down here, his eight-part vision of the novels “still holds.” A crucial word in the marginal annotation is indecipherable, but we do know that by the time of his college years the ogdoad had begun to shape itself in Frye’s mind as eight critical works. The marginal note, therefore, seems to indicate that although Frye had abandoned his eight-novel project, he would not be scrapping the names he attached to his eightfold project: Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight would be transferred from a fictional context to a critical one. In any event, it is perhaps worth remarking that in Frye’s earliest notebook he refers to the names of the eight projects that were still providing an outline for his writing up through the Late Notebooks of the 1980s.
The word “SUMMA” in the final entry represents something that will also be a “late” work. Frye did use the word “Summa” as the title of a transcript he wrote during his Emmanuel College years, where he outlines what might become his comprehensive summing up of the Protestant vision. In the notebook entry, the “Summa” is an “ESSAY,” so that it perhaps points to what would become the comprehensive critical principles set down in the four essays of Anatomy of Criticism. But as the Summa is to come late in Frye’s life, he may be in effect announcing a definitive and comprehensive work that synthesizes his imaginative vision of the Bible.
“I suppose,” Frye says, “a diary should be a self-confession. It is good, of course, to know oneself, and to realize the expression of your personality in one’s views of others. But I can’t bring myself entirely to confess in ink” (entry of 18 July). Very little confession appears in this notebook. Nonetheless, it projects the persona of a thoughtful and highly intelligent young man recording his wide-ranging speculations. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, he has withdrawn momentarily from the bustle of life around him to let us see what is going on in his hyperactive mind.
The essay on poetic diction, “Intoxicated with Words,” is a fragment of a project in literary history that Frye contemplated but never completed. He wrote a number of essays, many of them on individual writers and some on historical periods, that could well take their place as chapters in a literary history of English or American literature. But even though the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism contains his well-known theory of literary history, the actual writing of a continuous literary history was not something to which he devoted substantial attention. None of his books, except perhaps A Study of English Romanticism, is a literary history in any conventional sense. But writing such a history was a long-standing desire, going back to his university days in the 1930s, and the urge became formalized throughout his notebooks as one of the parts of what Frye called his ogdoad. Notebook 14 contains an outline and a series of notes for a history of English literature, as well as a draft of the text for this, which seems to be organized on the basis of imagery. But Frye’s dream of publishing such a literary history was never realized, though he did write an essay of some 50,000 words that was intended to serve as the introduction of a textbook anthology of English literature, a project that was eventually aborted. This is the closest thing we have from Frye’s pen of a genuine literary history. It was published as “Rencontre” in Northrop Frye on Literature and Society (CW 10). The essay on the history of poetic diction (no. 2), probably written when Frye was in his early thirties, is another chapter of the history of English literature that for him was never realized. It is perhaps worth observing that the essay does reveal the substantial knowledge of Old and Middle English Frye picked up at Oxford, where his Anglo-Saxon teacher was J.R.R. Tolkien and where he wrote about Chaucer for his tutor, Edmund Blunden. The essay appeared originally in the issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly devoted to Frye on the occasion of his centenary.
Although Frye reviewed only two books after 1960—books by Joseph Campbell and Paul de Man—earlier in his career he was a prolific book reviewer. Reviews of more than 125 books are scattered throughout the pages of the Collected Works. I served as Frye’s unofficial bibliographer, but I overlooked two reviews, one on books by Douglas Bush and Rosemond Tuve (no. 3) and the other on Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (no. 5). Bush and Tuve were distinguished scholars, both of whom Frye knew. Bush, a Canadian who received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and who was a distinguished professor at Harvard, became a reader for a manuscript called Structural Poetics, which Frye had submitted to Princeton University Press in 1955 and which turned out to become Anatomy of Criticism. A graduate of Victoria College and a student of Frye’s own mentor there, Pelham Edgar, Bush makes a number of appearances throughout Frye’s writings, and Frye refers at one point to his “genial and urbane scholarship.” Tuve had once stayed with the Fryes in Toronto, and in a 1985 letter Frye recalls for her biographer some anecdotes from that visit. In any event, Frye had a personal as well as a professional connection with the authors of both books he reviewed for Renaissance News—Tuve’s A Reading of George Herbert and Bush’s Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature. The reviews of both Bush and Tuve reveal a generous measure of appreciation and goodwill towards two fellow scholars.
Pasternak is not a writer to whom Frye devoted much attention—he is mentioned in passing in The Modern Century and again in the Late Notebooks—but in the review of Doctor Zhivago (no. 5) it is clear that Frye has a high opinion of Pasternak’s gifts as a writer, and the tentativeness with which he expresses his judgments about the novel come only from his not being able to read it in Russian.
Frye was a regular book reviewer for the Hudson Review in the 1950s, contributing fourteen review-essays to the journal over the course of nine years. These are now scattered throughout four volumes of the Collected Works (11, 17, 21, and 29). One that was inexplicably overlooked—on Wyndham Lewis—is reproduced here as number 4. Like the other Hudson Review pieces, which begin as reviews but are transformed into essays, this one finds Frye reaching out beyond the book under review, Geoffrey Wagner’s Wyndham Lewis, to engage the substance and form of a number of Lewis’s books. Twenty-one years earlier, when Frye was in his second year at Emmanuel College, he had written a long essay (14,600 words) on the diatribes of Lewis (CW 3: 345–80), and part of that paper made its way into “Wyndham Lewis: Anti-Spenglerian,” one of Frye’s early contributions to the Canadian Forum (CW 11: 178–83). The imprint on Frye of both Spengler and Lewis can be found in the present review. Lewis called himself one of the four “men of 1914,” the other three being Joyce, Pound, and Eliot. Why would the twenty-four-year-old Frye have initially become interested in a writer demonstrating such self-importance? I think it must have been because of Spengler, a writer whom he completely assimilated as an undergraduate and whom he saw as a cultural historian of formative influence, in spite of Spengler’s being so antipathetic to Frye’s general disposition (Frye once called him “a kraut clunkhead as dumb as the beer barrels in Munich”). Lewis had attacked Spengler in Time and Western Man, and it seems likely that this was what drew Frye to read Lewis. In addition to Time and Western Man, Frye owned four of Lewis’s other books: The Apes of God, The Childermass, The Wild Body, and The Human Age. And in preparation for his 1936 essay Frye read these additional volumes: Tarr, The Enemy of the Stars, The Art of Being Ruled, Hitler, The Lion and the Fox, Men without Art, Paleface, The Dithyrambic Spectator, and The Diabolical Principle. Frye had done his homework, and thus he can say in his review with some authority that, except for an occasional satiric hit, neither the matter nor the manner of Lewis’s prose measures up.
Frye’s Notebook 13 (no. 6), one of the seventy-seven holograph notebooks in the Frye Fonds at the Victoria University Library, contains his reflections on a number of writers, including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, T.S. Eliot, Poe, and Milton. From this notebook Michael Dolzani included Frye’s comments on Shakespeare’s sonnets and on Ben Jonson in his edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW 20). But when the two of us were collecting material for Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW 25), we neglected to extract for that volume several sets of entries from Notebook 13—notes for his book on T.S. Eliot, as well as a miscellaneous set of reflections on the imagination, false gods, Romanticism, Poe, and other topics. These notes now take their place alongside the eight volumes of holograph and typed notebook material.
The editors of the American Scholar, for its thirtieth-anniversary issue, asked a number of distinguished scholars, writers, and critics to select what were for them the outstanding books of the past thirty years (1931–61)—books notable for originality or enduring significance or for changes in thoughts and attitudes. Frye’s reply (no. 7), a brief comment on why he has selected Finnegans Wake, has now expanded the Frye canon by seventy-two words. It is, of course, no secret that Frye was a great admirer of Finnegans Wake. The book figures importantly in Anatomy of Criticism, where at the conclusion of the taxonomy of the four forms of prose fiction Frye remarks: “The forms we have been isolating in fiction, and which depend for their existence on the common-sense dichotomies of the daylight consciousness, vanish in Finnegans Wake into a fifth and quintessential form. This form is the one traditionally associated with scriptures and sacred books, and treats life in terms of the fall and awakening of the human soul and the creation and apocalypse of nature. The Bible is the definitive example of it; the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Icelandic Prose Edda, both of which have left deep imprints on Finnegans Wake, also belong to it” (CW 22: 294–5). Frye wrote two essays, separated by thirty years, on this “quintessential form”: “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake” (1957) and “Cycle and Apocalypse in Finnegans Wake” (1987) (CW 29: 105–13, 332–49). In his reply to the questionnaire he concludes by saying that Finnegans Wake “always has on every page something to astonish and delight”—which is perhaps one reason that he kept his copiously annotated copy of the book on the shelves directly behind his desk chair in his Victoria College office.
Most of the material in Notebook 9 relates to Shakespeare—Frye’s notes for the Bampton Lectures and the Alexander Lectures, which became A Natural Perspective and Fools of Time (CW 28: 127–225, 250–327). This material was included in Michael Dolzani’s edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. The first part of the notebook contains on the flyleaf a diagram of the cycle of verbal structures, followed by Frye’s notes for the Massey Lectures, an outline of the various projects he had under way in 1962, cancelled pages of his drafts for the Massey Lectures, and notes in preparation for writing an essay on Yeats’s A Vision. None of this material was selected for inclusion in the Collected Works. But given the fact that the notes for the Massey Lectures, which became The Educated Imagination, and for the Yeats article are similar in form and content to many of the notes for Frye’s books and essays that were included in the Collected Works, this material no doubt should have been published. In the interest, then, of having a more complete account of Frye’s writing, these two sets of notes are reproduced as number 8.
The individual items in Frye’s three collections of essays are naturally scattered throughout the volumes of the Collected Works. Given the principles that governed the materials to be included in each of the CW volumes, the prefaces to each of Frye’s three collections—Fables of Identity (1963), The Stubborn Structure (1969), and Spiritus Mundi (1976)—did not have an obvious CW home, except perhaps in the miscellany volume (CW 25). Whatever the reason for their omission, they are much more than pro forma exercises and deserve to be restored or, perhaps better, re-stored. The prefaces (one is called an introduction)—numbers 9, 12, and 15—reveal Frye’s commenting on his own work and disclose quite a few things not found elsewhere in his writing.
How do the post-Anatomy essays relate to that book? How does Frye define the three features of the central mythopoeic tradition that consciously set him apart from Eliot’s dispositions (Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics)? How does Frye adapt his talks to the different audiences before him? How does the conception of Romanticism serve to give the separate essays a unity and coherence? How do Joyce, Yeats, Stevens, and Dickinson represent the different Romantic values found in Blake, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other? What are the sources of Frye’s book titles? Which two essays show how Frye’s ideas have “taken shape genetically”? What does Frye’s interest in structuralism have to do with interpenetration? How does Frye relate himself to Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and George Steiner? How do Yeats’s schematisms relate to the second half of Spiritus Mundi? Where does Frye say “as some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the sub-title calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else”? Answers to these and numerous other questions can be found in the introduction to Fables of Identity and the prefaces to The Stubborn Structure and Spiritus Mundi.
Number 10 is Frye’s personal response to the so-called Macpherson Report—Undergraduate Instruction in Arts and Science, University of Toronto, Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science (1967). The report, which resulted in part from the student unrest of the 1960s, recommended a less elitist form of undergraduate instruction and more student involvement in university governance. One of its central proposals was that “the present distinction between Honour and General degree courses should be removed.” Frye, a tireless defender of the Honour Course, was very much opposed to the recommendations of the Presidential Advisory Committee, chaired by C.B. Macpherson, recommendations that were shortly accepted for implementation, beginning in 1969–70. In 1970 Frye wrote,
At the University of Toronto there used to be a distinction between a three-year General Course and a four-year Honour Course, but this has been swept away in a great wave of exuberant hysteria. The theories of these two courses were complementary. The theory of the General Course assumed a certain coordinating of disciplines, so that the student could see a broad area of knowledge from different points of view. The principle of the Honour Course was that every area of knowledge is the centre of all knowledge. Both these theories may have required too much sophistication from both students and teachers, but I would hope that after the dust settles and the university becomes restructured, it will become restructured along the older patterns. (“The Definition of a University,” Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, CW 7: 419)
Earlier Frye had written that his brief “could hardly have been more completely ignored than it was by the Macpherson Commission.”1
Frye was of course often called on to present public lectures, both inside and outside the academy. Sometimes he would speak from a manuscript, but often his remarks came from only a few notes or from none at all. He once said in a letter to me that for him “the difference between writing and speaking from notes is a chalk-and-cheese difference,” adding that “when I’m asked to speak I often make it a condition that I am not to produce a manuscript. But of course when I turn up either a tape recorder is revolving somewhere or the CBC has gone into action, and they produce what purports to be a manuscript” (letter of 14 February 1972, Selected Letters, 138). Whether a manuscript existed for “Communication and the Arts” (no. 11) is impossible to say, but my guess is that there wasn’t one. After Jane Widdicombe became Frye’s secretary in 1968, she began to keep a list of his engagements along with a list of the manuscripts she typed for him. “Communication and the Arts” is on neither list. I understand the difference between writing and speaking from notes, but I am not convinced, in Frye’s case, that speaking from notes and speaking from a prepared manuscript is really a chalk-and-cheese difference. In any case, Frye taught himself to speak in paragraphs, and I cannot think of a transcription of a recorded talk where Frye is any less articulate than if he had been speaking from a manuscript. “Communication and the Arts” ranges widely over a number of educational issues, including the role of the media, about which Frye’s intuitions are developed in large part in opposition to those of his colleague Marshall McLuhan. But the punchline of the essay is another variation on Frye’s long-held conviction that communication depends on community, a theme he was still advancing more than thirty years later in Words with Power.
The other recorded talk (no. 18) is about the Soviet Union and Russia. It illustrates how prescient Frye was about political movements, a perceptiveness that went back to his student days. From 30 September to 27 October 1989 he had lectured in Moscow, Kiev, and Leningrad, where he also met with Russian teachers and intellectuals. This was at a time when radical changes were happening in the Eastern Bloc and, less than two weeks after Frye returned to Canada, the fall of the Berlin Wall had begun, as the East German government announced that all East German citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Frye doesn’t predict the breakup of the Soviet Union, but he does take note of the absence of Marxist assumptions in the questions the Russians put to him, of the crowded bookshops, and of the glasnost that had begun to permeate the Soviet government. This talk also contains an account of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita Frye refers to as “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.” He had read Bulgakov some fifteen years earlier, and this talk is the only place in his published work where he refers to Bulgakov, outside of a 1973 letter to his friend Roy Daniells.2 It is the only place as well where Frye refers to the life and work of the fiction writer and journalist Andriy Babiuk, who had come to Canada from Ukraine in the 1920s.
Because the entry entitled “Notes on Romance” (no. 13) constitutes about half of the present collection, its sheer length deserves a word of explanation. The “Notes on Romance” were written in preparation for the six Norton Lectures that Frye gave at Harvard University in April 1975. The revised and expanded lectures were published as The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (CW 18: 3–124). The typescript is a series of forty-seven separate sections of notes on Frye’s reading in the “romance” tradition—from ancient Greece to the nineteenth century, including two secondary sources by Moses Hadas. The texts are examples of what Frye called “sentimental romance,” which were developments from the formulas of naive romance that we find in folk and fairy tales. The bulk of the notes consists of Frye’s summaries and commentaries on thirty-nine texts. Seven of the sections (8–11, 19, 22, and 25) correspond fairly closely to the substance and shape of Frye’s other, expansive note taking, most of which has now been published in the Collected Works. These seven sections were extracted by Michael Dolzani for inclusion in his edition of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance, where they are identified as “Notes 56a” (CW 15: 182–210). At the time, Dolzani and I decided not to include the remaining notes in the Notebooks on Romance, primarily because we were constrained by the length of the volume: we drew back from extending its 500 pages by another 200 (90,000 words). In an appendix to the Notebooks on Romance Dolzani lists the omitted material, which we designated as “Notes 56b.” These notes are devoted to the works of the following writers:
1. Longus, Daphnis and Chloe
2. Xenophon of Ephesus, Ephesiaca
3. Moses Hadas’s “Introduction” to Three Greek Romances
4. Thomas Lodge, Rosalind
5. Robert Greene, Pandosto
6. Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale
7. Heliodorus of Emesa, An Aethiopian History
8. Apollonius of Tyre
9. Parthenius of Nicaea, Love Romances
10. Clementine Recognitions
11. Chariton of Aphrodisias, Chaereas and Callirhoe
12. Barlaam and Ioasaph
13. Moses Hadas, Hellenistic Culture
14. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
15. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
16. The Harlequin, Goldoni, and Gozzi
17. Indian Drama
18. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley
19. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering
20. Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary
21. Sir Walter Scott, Redgauntlet
22. Sidney, Arcadia
23. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
24. Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate
25. Sir Walter Scott, Anne of Geierstein
26. The Volsunga Saga
27. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha
28. William Morris, The Wood beyond the World
29. William Morris, The Well at the World’s End
30. William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain
31. William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains
32. William Morris, The Sundering Flood
33. George MacDonald, Phantastes
34. George MacDonald, Essay on the Imagination
35. George MacDonald, Lilith
36. George MacDonald, The Portent
37. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
38. Thomas De Quincey, The English Mail-Coach
39. Achilles Tatius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon
A case can be made that the “Notes on Romance” are as significant as many of the entries in the seven volumes of notebooks now published in the Collected Works. In any event, the material in “Notes 56b” is now available for all, and the several Frye researchers who have asked me how they might get access to the romance notes no longer have to dig the typescripts out of the Frye Fonds in the Victoria University Library.
The romance notes do contain a good measure of plot summary, but they disclose a great deal more. They reveal, first of all, the extraordinarily detailed attention Frye devoted to preparing for his lectures. In The Secular Scripture Frye makes two incidental references to Achilles Tatius, and in his only substantive reference to this Greek writer of the Roman era, about whom we know next to nothing, he says this in chapter 3:
In another Greek romance by Achilles Tatius, Clitophon and Leucippe, which is, by and large, a rather silly story, the heroine is separated from her lover, is kidnapped and reduced to slavery, is threatened with torture and lashes; yet she still defies her tormentors and talks about the freedom of her soul. We can distinguish between the preposterous and contrived melodrama of this particular romance, and the convention expressed by it, where some kind of genuine human dignity does come through. Deep within the stock convention of virgin-baiting is a vision of human integrity imprisoned in a world it is in but not of, often forced by weakness into all kinds of ruses and stratagems, yet always managing to avoid the one fate which really is worse than death, the annihilation of one’s identity. In Achilles Tatius we are a very long way, in power and splendour, from anything like “I am Duchess of Malfi still.” But we are in the same imaginative area for all that. (CW 18: 58–9)
This brief commentary (167 words) is distilled from some 3,700 words in Frye’s notes about Clitophon and Leucippe. But what might be seen as excessive preparation is typical of his approach. His notebooks for Words with Power and The Double Vision, for example, are more than twice as extensive as the published volumes.
Some of these notes—for example, those on Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White—are close to completed essays, lacking only a bit of connective tissue. Other notes anticipate themes that we find developed in Words with Power. Frye’s late work often focuses on ecstatic states and the revolutionizing and expanding of consciousness that results from the kerygmatic experience of ecstasis. Kerygma moves beyond the poetic, embracing the reader’s existential experience. The highest states of this experience are a function of what Frye calls existential or, following Heidegger, ecstatic metaphor. At the conclusion of his notes on the Indian play The Later Story of Rama in the present volume, Frye writes about the ways in which that play, along with The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, heightens the role of the arts, and he concludes his note taking by saying, “All this appears to mean that the arts, brought together by drama, have a crucial role in uniting a dream with an awakened life, and by that union bringing about a form of higher consciousness which is what the cognitio at the end symbolizes. Drama, which partakes of both dream and wakened life, points to a form of consciousness transcending the schizophrenic alternation of dreams and waking ‘reality.’ ”
Sometimes it’s as if Frye has laboured and brought forth a mouse. After devoting some 16,000 words to the various versions of Sidney’s Arcadia, Frye says tersely, “Silly story, except for the archetypes.” Frye, nevertheless, takes a great deal of delight in summarizing the unlikely plots of these romances and seldom passes up a chance to describe the erotic themes, sublimated and otherwise, in impishly indecorous terms and with many witty asides, including linguistic jokes. He refers to Minna in Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate as “inscrewtable.” He mentions the “touch of self-mockery as Scott recognizes the affinity of his own scene to mellerdrammer.” Another Scott character is said to have thought that the heroine had “been supplied with a sin twister—I mean a twin sister—but the displacement is pretty dismal.”
Then there are the kinds of judgments about the style of the romances that one won’t find in Frye’s manual of style in The Well-Tempered Critic:
I noticed in reading Richardson’s Wacousta how the very badness of the style seemed in a way appropriate to the romance form. I haven’t got this clear, but it seems to me that writing of Jane Austen’s quality goes with a strong degree of realistic displacement, and that Scott’s creaky hay-waggon style really does seem the right medium for a romance where there’s a removal from reality: the characters aren’t speaking to you but are just being swept down the narrative current. I noticed that particularly in Anne of Geierstein, which is a late story, written after the financial collapse. In a sense the book isn’t written at all: it’s a draft written out, and the dialogue is too stilted to be believed. And yet it has an extraordinary pulling power, and I think it’s partly that goddam style.
William Morris doesn’t fare much better: “Curious that I remember so little of the early part when it’s repeated because of that synthetic glup Morris writes in: if he’d written his story in anything resembling the English language it’d be a lot easier to follow.” And Frye finds that after taking detailed notes on some thirty-seven romances, his own style seems to suffer: “The prose style [of Sidney’s Arcadia] is getting opaque: in the previous chapter the summary of Pyrocles’ adventures includes one sentence about thirty lines of closely packed type long. My prose style ain’t anything to write epic poems about nuther.”
Frye is always on the lookout for connections among the romances and links to other literary works, and, as in all of his note taking, to give only one example, he keeps an eye out for archetypes (he identifies more than eighty in the 56b material). In the notes on Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, for example, Frye spots the Gadarene swine archetype, the red-and-white archetype of Eros, the cherrytree-carol archetype, the Alcinous archetype, the archetype of the master turning into the father, and the Sarah archetype. In Sidney’s Arcadia he discovers a whole string of archetypes: amnesia, death and rebirth, loathly lady, twin, disdainful mistress, Omphale, Demeter-Proserpine or Venus-Psyche, Eunuchus, Damon and Pythias, Bosworth field, Gonzalo, Ligeia, Philomela, and the left-behind-for-sacrifice archetype. Frye is also interested in exploring themes, images, Shakespearean parallels, and the like, and he keeps an eye out for the “recognition scenes”—the phrase appears several dozen times, along with its shorthand version, “cognitio.” Throughout his often painstaking recreation of the intricate plots of these romances, Frye is ever alert not just to archetypes but to parallels and allusions to earlier works, to echoes from the literary tradition, to correspondences with what has come before—all in keeping with his principle that literature is made out of other literature.
Producing The Secular Scripture was often a three-part process. Frye began with all the detail he accumulated in “Notes on Romance.” These notes then became the source of further musings in his notebooks. An entire volume of the Collected Works (vol. 15) is devoted to romance. This notebook material was then transmuted into The Secular Scripture. But sometimes the spadework Frye did in preparation for his study of sentimental romance made its way into places other than The Secular Scripture. The reflections on De Quincey in “Notes on Romance” (nos. 37 and 38), for example, do not appear in that book, which is completely silent about The English Mail-Coach and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. But the attraction those two essays held for Frye can be seen in other places: “Vision and Cosmos,” “The Survival of Eros in Poetry,” and the section on fictional meaning in The Practical Imagination (CW 18: 190, 228, 265).
Frye’s “Notes on Romance” reveal an astonishing attention to detail, and though the reader may sometimes weary, as Frye himself did, of the mazelike plots and the hundreds of characters that move the stories along, these notes are a substantial body of work, and there is nothing quite like them in the rest of the Frye corpus. After having written some 3,500 words on Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate, Frye enjoins himself, “don’t ever again take so long to summarize one of these damn stories.” Nevertheless, patience is a virtue in preparing for another task, like giving the Norton lectures at Harvard, and most, no doubt, will agree, that Frye’s views on the romance tradition would have been incomplete without the notes that are being published here.
A significant genre in the Frye oeuvre is the interview. Jean O’Grady’s exemplary volume of interviews in the Collected Works contains 111 interviews and lists more than 50 others that remain lost, unavailable, or untraced. One of the missing ones that O’Grady lists is published here (no. 14). This interview, which takes the form of answers to questions by a dozen or so people at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal, was intended to focus on The Secular Scripture, but it is a long and wide-ranging interview (some 14,000 words, transcribed by Nicholas W. Graham), which explores dozens of topics. The second interview (no. 17), which I’ve entitled “Seeing, Hearing, Praying, Loving,” is more focused. It comes from a tape made by Nicholas W. Graham of a question-and-answer session following Frye’s lecture “The Dialectic of Belief and Vision.”
Victoria College, where Frye spent his entire academic life (from 1929 to 1991), is the focus of two of the items in the present collection, “Victoria College’s Contribution to the Development of Canadian Culture” (no. 16) and “The Victoria Chapel Windows” (no. 21). The former ends quite abruptly, and if it weren’t for the fact that the last page of the typescript fills only two-thirds of the page, one would be tempted to say that some pages appear to be missing. Frye’s argument, in any case, is that Victoria’s contribution to culture is one that gets beyond the faith-versus-reason debate so as to centre on the educated imagination.
The entry titled “The Victoria Chapel Windows” is a set of sketchy notes that appear to have been typed by Frye for a talk or, perhaps more likely, a chapel service held in the Victoria College chapel on the second floor of the Old Vic building (built in 1892). The chapel is decorated with five stained-glass windows. The central window displays the Victoria College crest and motto (Abeunt studia in mores [Studies develop into habit]). The other windows contain images of John Milton, John Wesley, Martin Luther, and Sir Isaac Newton. Germaine Warkentin, one of Frye’s colleagues, kindly provided me with this description of the windows, which is helpful in deciphering Frye’s concise and sometimes cryptic notes:
Each of the portraits is a circular medallion, with the appropriate text (very brief) on a ribbon around the face. I don’t quote exactly, just the gist. They are, from left to right:
1) Milton—to justify the ways of God to man
2) Wesley—the best of all is, God is with us
3) Luther—here I stand … God help me (in German)
4) Newton—the great ocean of truth lay before me undiscovered
About the Newton window, Frye writes, “End of life—get quote / —last phrase on window the key.” The last phrase is the “great ocean of truth,” which comes from this passage: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me” (Brewster 2: 331 [ch. 27]). The passage became a touchstone for Frye, who returned to the passage in three sermons. In the first, “To Come to Light,” he said,
We may remember the chapel windows in the college building, with the portrait of Isaac Newton accompanied by his famous remark that he felt like a child playing with pebbles on a beach with an undiscovered ocean still in front of him. But the ocean has no wish to remain undiscovered. The longing to know and create is deeply entrenched in the human mind, but when we pursue knowledge or creation we begin to feel something else moving beyond the control of our wills. Some of us at that point will become frightened at the prospect of doing without the sedating drugs of habit. Others may realize that this is the movement of a Spirit who, we are told, does not shrink from searching all things, even the deep things of God. (CW 4: 365–6)
In the second, “Wisdom and Knowledge,” he wrote,
Sir Isaac Newton is said to have remarked near the end of his life that however he may have appeared to the world, he seemed to himself like a child playing with pebbles on a beach, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him. I do not think this remark expressed either false modesty or world weariness. I think what it expressed was a sense of exhilaration in coming to the end of a great effort, and so back to a beginning again, a point where everything has yet to be known. One finds that the ultimate aim in some long and complex effort of knowledge, such as writing a book, is not really to accomplish something by writing it. The ultimate aim rather is to get rid of it, for the sake of that instant of breathless innocence before one starts the next book, the instant when all the possibilities of knowledge are still before one. The bankruptcy of knowledge is one of the most genuine and tangible rewards of knowledge. (CW 4: 307–8)
And in still another sermon he said:
I often think of the remark of Isaac Newton, made toward the end of his life, which is commemorated on one of these chapel windows: “I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been a child playing with stones on a beach, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” That is the kind of detachment that a wise and good man can attain from his own life. Without some measure of such a detachment, we shall make ourselves very miserable, if we try to judge our own lives as a body of things achieved, accomplished, or done. Society is a better judge of what we have done, partly because it knows less. If there is a final or last judgment to be made on our lives, it cannot be made by ourselves, or by our friends, or even by those who love us, who come much closer to it than anyone else. It could only be made by an omniscient but infinitely compassionate being. (CW 4: 284–5)
There are, then, three different emphases that the Newton window triggers in Frye’s gloss on the passage—the desire for knowledge, the exhilaration that that brings, and the ability to detach oneself from one’s own life—three things that are also a part of the great ocean of truth.
Seven volumes of the Collected Works and a portion of another volume contain material from Frye’s notebooks. Upon his death, seventy-seven holograph notebooks were discovered among the effects of his estate, along with close to 4,000 pages of typed material that is referred to in the Collected Works project as “notes.” This material came to the Victoria University Library. For five years during the mid-1990s Michael Dolzani and I transcribed the holograph notebooks into computer files, and I had the typed notes scanned into digital format. In 1997 after the death of Frye’s second wife, Elizabeth Eedy Frye, two notebooks, one large and the other small, were discovered at her bedside table. The large notebook—Notebook 50—was included in the Late Notebooks (vols. 5 and 6 of the Collected Works), but for reasons that are now murky I did not include the small one—Notebook 51. Like Notebook 50, 51 is a Double Vision notebook. It is now published (no. 19) as a supplement to the published notebook material from the last decade of Frye’s life.
Interestingly, Notebook 51 opens with several entries about Frye’s long-standing desire to write a work of fiction, which had begun at age eight when he proposed to write a series of eight historical novels. Here he calls it the cena, the banquet colloquy or dialogue that he had tried his hand at in the 1930s, producing eight “fables,” six of which were published. These were brief forms of the type of longer fiction that Frye called the anatomy. In the 1940s he also worked on a novel, a more or less realistic piece of fiction, called The Locust-Eaters. It appears to be the beginning of a novel in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism, with a heavy dose of satire. We know from Frye’s notebooks that he fantasized about writing other kinds of fiction: the thriller, the detective story, the intellectual comedy of understatement, the “theme with variations” novel, the academic novel in a university setting, a symposium, a novel about the discovery of a fifth gospel, and a fictional form in which the central character journeys through various states of being. It is this last form that remained in Frye’s consciousness until the end. Sometimes he refers to it as a bardo novel, and he points to various models: in Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools, Charles Williams’s All Hallow’s Eve, Henry James’s A Sense of the Past and The Next Time, and Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie. To this list we can now add Sweet Rocket by the Virginia novelist Mary Johnston, mentioned in the second entry of Notebook 51 and nowhere else in Frye’s work. The novel was reprinted in Six Novels of the Supernatural, an annotated copy of which is in Northrop Frye’s own library.3 Johnston, we are told, was
widely read in Blake and Swedenborg and sympathetic to Theosophy, and in her later novels the mysticism perceptible in her earlier books became more pronounced. This development was doubtless linked to the shock of the World War and the widespread conviction that only through far-ranging changes in human nature could world cataclysm be avoided. Although she contended that her mystical emphasis had begun as early as 1908 with Lewis Rand, it was in Foes (1918), Michael Forth (1919), and Sweet Rocket (1920) that this became the dominant theme of her work. The heroes of these novels possess a larger awareness in which “time, space and causation” are perceived “with a greater completeness” and the barriers of individuality transcended. (James 2: 283)4
One can understand why Frye would be interested in Sweet Rocket: it provided another model for his fiction-writing dreams, and it conformed to the theme of expanded consciousness or heightened awareness that appears everywhere in his late work.
The notebooks contain occasional personal reflections—remembering what it was like to see movies in Moncton as a child or recalling, when his mother read Sir Walter Scott to him, “how the descriptions made sense when the presentation was oral: had nothing to do but listen, and they could build up in my mind, point by point.” Sometimes he smiles at himself, as if issuing a caveat not to take himself too seriously: “Naturally this idea is as full of bugs as a slum tenement, but if I crack it the Bampton lectures will be a piece of cake. I’m not sure what holds these metaphors together. ‘Dialogue’ with oneself is a risky business.”
Frye confesses throughout the notebooks his doubts and uncertainties: “I’m not quite sure what this means”; “If I could figure out the interconnection of amnesia and identical twin themes I’d have this tied up”; “I haven’t got all the details clear”; “I forget what happens in this complication”; “I don’t get any of this.” Then there is a more extended misgiving about being able to solve a problem:
Something I haven’t quite got about the relation between elements of thought, or the imaginative identity, & elements of existence, individual human beings. In Blake the birth, development, death & reincarnation of imaginative units is described in such a way as to suggest that Blake is talking about actual human life, both during & after its earthly existence. Perhaps he intends this overtone, as the role of Milton in Milton suggests. But Yeats, it seems to me, completely confuses the two, & projects the immortality of imagery (Byzantium) into actual existence. If I could solve this problem, of course, I could do anything. Certainly I could write my third book easily enough.
Frye was of course not able to complete the third book—that is, the major work that was intended to follow on Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. Given the amount of energy he devoted to writing the third book, there is a certain poignancy in his remark that “maybe I’m getting into my tertiary period without having really had a secondary one.” This is, from my point of view, an accurate self-assessment. Frye really didn’t have a secondary phase that was comparable to the Aristotelian phase of the Anatomy at one end and the Longinian phase of The Great Code and Words with Power at the other.
Finally, there is an eleven-unit miscellany (no. 20), which is drawn from Notebooks 42, 30m, 16, 25, and from scattered typescripts. It includes brief entries on Jung, Blake, Morris, Milton, The Great Code, and other topics, and so it is, like the collection itself, a salmagundi.