Recorded 16 January 1990
From the tape provided by Ann Silversides, transcribed by Leslie Barnes. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Freelance writer and broadcaster Silversides interviewed Frye in preparation for her CBC program on Family Stories; in the finished program, perhaps because of the reticence of Frye’s family, only a few sentences were used. The book Silversides refers to several times is Elizabeth Stone’s Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (New York: Times Books, 1988). The following transcription gives the complete interview until the point where the CBC’s tape recorder broke down. It has been edited to remove a few false starts and misunderstandings.
FRYE: … broken in rather curious ways. I had a brother who was thirteen years older than I and a sister who was twelve years older. So I was in effect brought up as an only child. When I was six years old, my brother was killed in the First World War and my mother, I think, always regarded me as God’s rather bumbling and inefficient and stupid substitute for the son that she had lost. I discovered later that a lot of cute stories and bright sayings that were told about my babyhood were in fact about my brother and not about me.
SILVERSIDES: A foundling.
FRYE: Yes. Then my father’s business failed, so he completely retired from a rather active social life in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and went down to Moncton, New Brunswick. Because of their retirement, my mother’s growing deafness, and the fact that she felt like an exile, an outcast in the Maritimes where she had no friends, I was in effect brought up by grand-parents—psychologically, that is. There’s always been a large feeling of belonging to an earlier generation. Is this the kind of thing you want at all?
SILVERSIDES: That’s wonderful. I didn’t know if you wanted to speak about your family as well … So you found it was stories of ancestors, then, that formed …
FRYE: No, it wasn’t much about ancestors. Neither my father nor mother had much interest in that beyond preserving a number of myths about them which were all entirely false. My father believed that the Fryes were Loyalists. Actually, the Fryes fought on the other side in the revolutionary war and came across later, mainly because the land was cheaper and they were farmers. There was always a sort of myth that my mother’s family, which were Howards, were connected with the Norfolk Howards. But that was one of those [inaudiable syllable] myths that are so frequent in family.
SILVERSIDES: Glorifying ancestors, you mean?
FRYE: That is, linking yourself with more distinguished ancestors than you probably had.
SILVERSIDES: Do you think that’s quite a common thing? I was wondering about that because the book that I read is by an American. She talked a lot about the inflation of ancestors and I wondered if that might be more peculiarly American than Canadian.
FRYE: On the whole it is more peculiarly American but it did touch our family to some degree.
SILVERSIDES: What about stories from your grandparents if they were the ones that psychologically1 … did they tell stories about further back as well, or were most of the stories you heard from your mother?
FRYE: As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear many stories about the family. My father had a rather droll sense of humour and I remember a lot of quite funny anecdotes about people whom he knew when he was young in Windsor Mills [now Windsor], Quebec, outside Sherbrooke. That was the sort of folklore I grew up with.
SILVERSIDES: Of a larger society, not immediate family?
FRYE: Yes, of a sort of small village farming group. Some of them were stories about very familiar patterns. Such as, my family were Englishspeaking and had a very uncertain hold on French, and when a little boy of five was staying with them overnight he started howling because my grandmother said, “Come now, Pete, time to cochon now.”2 But I didn’t hear many stories about the family itself. I knew that mother’s father was a Methodist circuit rider and there were various stories about him. He was quite a character. My father’s father and mother both died before I was born and there was very little reference to them, except that I was named after his mother Sarah Ann Northrop. She was a factory girl at Lowell at the time when Lowell was a model flourishing town. Then of course they moved all the mills to the south and Lowell went dead.
SILVERSIDES: When you mentioned at the beginning that you felt that you were the poor substitute for the older brother who had died, how was that made clear to you? Was that articulated in stories as well?
FRYE: It was made clear in my school reports. My brother was always first or second in the class. I was usually something like twenty-eighth out of a class of thirty-two.
SILVERSIDES: So it was your brother who was glorified for his achievements and you were …
FRYE: I was contrasted with him. If you want the motif it’s the bear’s son motif, the younger son who was always the stupid one and is never going to amount to anything.3
SILVERSIDES: One of the theses in the book is that children often subscribe to the stories that are provided for them or the roles that they’re coached into.
FRYE: Yes, but I didn’t. [They laugh.]
SILVERSIDES: No, I was going to say, why is it that you didn’t? Were there counter-stories from grandparents? What came into the equation?
FRYE: It was an inner knowledge of myself that these conditioning people don’t take into account. I knew that I wasn’t dumb. In fact, my mother and father knew it too; they just felt, quite correctly, that I was being a lazy bastard. But what they didn’t quite realize was that I was bored to death with school, which I regarded as penal servitude.
SILVERSIDES: The inner knowledge of yourself. Were there any stories or examples that helped you believe that that was possible, within the family? Were there other renegades or black sheep? Was there something else that you could hold on to?
FRYE: I don’t know that there were. If I read a novel of Scott or Dickens I would perhaps feel that I could write something like that sometime. I don’t know that I grew up inside an archetypal myth myself. I don’t have that feeling particularly.
SILVERSIDES: I’m not sure what you mean, that you grew up inside …
FRYE: Well, what you just said.
SILVERSIDES: Oh, that there was support from outside from this idea of unrecognized talent early on. [pause] You just made a reference to these conditioning people and what they neglect. Could you speak to that a little bit more? When I outlined the series I talked about a point in perhaps middle age or early middle age when people redefine themselves using their family stories. Certainly the model I was going on here was that people either accept or react against these stories, but that they are very, very powerful to them. You’re suggesting that there’s something else that can be more powerful.
FRYE: I think you really re-enact myths in your own experience rather than settling into a prefabricated myth. The myth you eventually live will belong to a familiar pattern, a catalogued and ticketed set of patterns. But you discover that yourself almost entirely, I think. At least I did.
SILVERSIDES: It’s only after the fact that you can …
FRYE: It’s only after the fact that you can perhaps relate it to other things.
SILVERSIDES: Do you think there is power in family stories, though?
FRYE: I daresay there is and must be. I feel such a dearth of stories in my own background, coming along as a late and unexpected arrival in the family.
SILVERSIDES: Yes, I’ve been wondering about that, the difference in families. Because there are some families where the stories are told and retold, and some stories [sic] where you have to go out at a certain point and try to find out. It sounds perhaps that you did that at some point, from what you said about Sarah Ann Northrop and where she came from. Was there a point where you found that the absence of stories made you want to go out and find out facts and details, historical circumstances?
FRYE: No. [chuckles] As I say, the mythology of my childhood was almost entirely this anecdotal mythology that I’ve mentioned concerning other people, none of whom I’d ever met, most of whom were dead before I was born. I did begin to realize something of the isolation and the sectarian divisiveness within a community when I made a friend of a woman in Toronto who’d been brought up in the same small village of Windsor beside Sherbrooke that my father had been. So I took my father to meet her. But she was a Roman Catholic and he was Methodist, and the only person they knew in common was the town drunk.
SILVERSIDES: You suggested at the beginning that this kind of upbringing and identification with an earlier generation might have had some bearings on your personal myth.
FRYE: No, I was just trying to explain the comparative dearth of a traditional body of stories. I mean there were stories that my father repeated and repeated. But there were stories of that kind that didn’t involve me.
SILVERSIDES: Right. But earlier when you said that you were psychologically brought up by your grandparents, you mentioned identification with an earlier generation as something that you felt strongly in your childhood.
FRYE: So, I suppose I was really acting out the myth of the exile, because that was what my mother always felt she was. I think my father did too, except that he wasn’t a reflective person and also had to earn his living. He made business acquaintances, but it was significant, I thought, that he never had any social life of any kind. So that being in the middle of a social community has always been a tremendous strain for me. I suppose the exile myth was the one that I was unconsciously living through myself.
SILVERSIDES: Much of your life’s work has been concerned with understanding earlier writers, earlier times, and how they’ve affected the present. Do you see that as having had any connection with this early identification with previous generations?
FRYE: That I’m not sure of. I’d have to think about that.
SILVERSIDES: Because it’s an imaginative knowledge and association that other people might not have had early on in their lives.
FRYE: Yes. I think that being an utterly nonathletic and badly coordinated person very much out of the sort of team spirit of my contemporaries— although I always had a very strong affection for other people and wanted friends—I always felt it difficult to find my place in a society in my school days. Coming up here to Victoria College had a great deal of the exile’s return about it. This is where my grandfather had gone to college in the old Coburg days. I felt almost immediately that I had come home, that I had come into a society where I did have a function. I don’t quite know where I acquired or why I acquired this tendency to system building, except that Peggy Atwood maintains that it’s a Canadian characteristic.4
SILVERSIDES: Perhaps the most central family story is the courtship story: sort of, “Tell me how you and dad met, what was that about?” I wondered if you could speak to what you were told when you asked that question as a child. I assume that it’s a creation-myth parallel.
FRYE: There was relatively little of that in my family. They were reasonably good friends, but my mother found my father’s inability to earn any money so off-putting that they really weren’t close enough for me to ask that.
SILVERSIDES: Even to ask how they met, you mean?
FRYE: No. The John Ayre biography of me quotes my cousin, Willie Solomon, as saying that my mother was a “stiff, formidable woman.”5 I saw a much more vulnerable side of her than that. But even so I felt that the relations between my mother and my father were relations that I wouldn’t be encouraged to ask about.
SILVERSIDES: So just the distance there put a prohibition on asking how they came to be together?
FRYE: Yes. I mean anything in the way of intimacy or tenderness wasn’t stressed at all. There was a kind of mutual tolerance.
SILVERSIDES: It seems to me, when you look at courtship stories in many families, they convey instructions or warnings. The courtship story articulates the model of marriage the children have and then you carry that with you. For instance, if it was very romantic then you may feel that’s what you have to relive as well; or if it was long periods of friendship and then a marriage, then that conveys some buried instructions to the child about how they’re supposed to proceed.
FRYE: Yes, perhaps so. I don’t know. My own courtship with my wife was a sort of intellectualized one because by accident we were separated over a period of two or three years. It was at least five years between the time I first met her and the time we married.6 I suppose that was to some degree a product of family conditioning. I was somewhat incurious about women and thought almost entirely in terms of marrying one woman rather than of sexual experience as such.
SILVERSIDES: Interestingly, your remarriage was to someone you’d known for a long period of time as well.
FRYE: Yes, exactly. It’s a matter where friendship and companionship have an extremely central place.
SILVERSIDES: Although they didn’t in your parents’ marriage.
FRYE: They did in a sort of vestigial way. That is, they got along well enough, but there wasn’t much intimacy or tenderness between them. They just weren’t that way temperamentally.
SILVERSIDES: Coming in, I had a list of typical family stories, and I thought we could examine how they might correspond to particular myths. But I think you suggested that what was more interesting than finding those correspondences was looking at the individual as they were making their own myth.
FRYE: If you have a reflective temperament you may discover fairly well on in your life, usually not until your sixties or seventies, that you have actually been living through and forging a myth of your own.
SILVERSIDES: In what sense is there a correspondence between that and the myths that were the bedrock of our culture?
FRYE: Myths are like human beings: every one is unique. And yet there’s a very small number of conventions which apply to all of them.
SILVERSIDES: What would be some of the central conventions which, when people look back on their life, they might recognize?
FRYE: I mean that a myth is a story. A story has a beginning and a development and a projected end and there are only so many ways to begin a story and so many ways to develop it.
SILVERSIDES: But could you, in the most general sense, say what some of those might be for people who might not have thought in mythological terms before? You mentioned earlier the exile and the return home.
FRYE: I’d begun to think in these terms largely because of having a biography written about me by a person who interviewed me a great deal for it, and by having people like you coming along and asking me about my earlier life. I hadn’t really thought about it much before then.
SILVERSIDES: There must have also been a process by which you told, say, your wife, stories about your family. You would in your selection of those stories be discarding some of the stories you were told and selecting some to tell. That itself is a process of beginning to identify your story …
FRYE: Yes, possibly it would be. I don’t remember talking to Helen very much about my parents. She made up her own mind about them. Of course she only met my mother once. That was the summer two months before she died.7 She knew my father a little better because he came to live with us. But there wasn’t a great deal of shared mythology either with my parents or with hers, it seems to me. She was very fond of her parents and so was I. I think that she had some of the eldest-daughter syndromes. That is, she felt responsibility and she had a sense of social function right from the beginning. Elizabeth, my present wife, was also an eldest daughter and I think has some of the same characteristics. That’s the opposite of what I had.
SILVERSIDES: The opposite, in what sense?
FRYE: The eldest daughter, as I say, has a sense of responsibility.
SILVERSIDES: And you were irresponsible?
FRYE: I wasn’t exactly irresponsible, but I grew up with a strong tendency to accept things as more or less a natural right. You might say I was overprotected in that sense, except that that has overtones I’m not clear about.
SILVERSIDES: When you were beginning to say, accept things as a natural right, I was thinking you were going to say, to challenge things …
FRYE: Yes, but what I challenged was in another context. The actual getting a job, getting a routine established around me in which I could do certain things: I tended to take a somewhat passive and accepting attitude to that rather than an active one. I’m not putting this very well, but I have a feeling that a person who was so very much the youngest in the family gets taken care of in a way that the first-born don’t.
SILVERSIDES: Catered to by all the other children, who would show him and bring him along. Although in your case, as you said, you grew up very much as an only child.
FRYE: I did later. In the first five years I didn’t so much.
SILVERSIDES: I haven’t formally interviewed that many people yet for what I’m doing, though obviously I’ve spoken to a lot of people about family stories. I did interview Michael Ignatieff and he said that his first memory was sitting on his father’s knee with his father telling him family stories.
FRYE: Ah yes, in the first place that’s Russian. The sense of family mythology is much more highly developed there.
SILVERSIDES: [Comments on Ignatieff’s book The Russian Album (1987), in which Ignatieff traces five generations of his family roots back to 1815.] I was wondering if you had any thoughts in general about the role that ancestors play, because it seemed to me it has something to do with identification and eradicating time.
FRYE: It does have something to do with it. My own relative lack of curiosity about ancestors I suppose is …. I suspect that Michael Ignatieff is rather exceptional in this way. I’ve met so many students who are firmly convinced that the world was created the day they were born and that nothing could matter less than a perspective of time behind them. One of the main difficulties I’ve had as a teacher is to try to get some sense of historical imagination into kids, to think that there were other people who had other ways of doing things back in, say, Shakespeare’s day.
TECHNICIAN: Excuse me, we have a problem. The machine has gone into … a happy rumble has come into it.
FRYE: You mean it’s not coming from me? [tape turns off]
SILVERSIDES: Professor Frye, you astutely remembered where we were. And we were going to speak about how your lack of ancestral stories or models might have had something to do with finding a sense of ancestors in your literary studies.
FRYE: In my career as a teacher and as a writer I’ve been concerned with literature and have always had a very strong sense of tradition and, if you like, imaginative ancestry in literature. I feel that the plays of Shakespeare, for example, were designed for an audience of 1600, but they also appeal to us. That to me is the great mystery of literature: how can something cross over all these barriers of time and space and culture and still convey meanings, many of which would have been unintelligible to the people of 1600? That’s my main concern as a teacher and writer, and I suppose it really is an ancestral concern. Except that the ancestors are the ancestors of my own craft, my field of literature.
SILVERSIDES: You mentioned earlier that you were dismayed by a general feeling among students that the world began with their birth. Is that something that has held constant through your years of teaching, or might it be more so now? I ask because one suspects family stories are told less now because of pace [sic], time, distance, all kinds of considerations.
FRYE: The absence of a sense of historical imagination in my students has always been a problem in my teaching, I think. I’ve always insisted that the really liberal part of a liberal education is in getting to know Shakespeare as he was in his day and Milton as he was in his setting, because being so different from ours, and the assumptions being so different, you get to know a variety of ways in which the human race has experienced life. That is the really enlarging part of the mind when it comes to studying literature. The relating of literature to one’s own life is, I think, a process that can very largely take care of itself if you understand that the difference is at the other end. That was why I never had any patience with these relevance slogans in the ’60s, where you had students saying they wanted the whole of the past to look as much as possible like them.
SILVERSIDES: But that sense among students hasn’t changed?
FRYE: I’ve always found that among students, let’s put it that way. They have greater or less degrees of it, depending on the class, but it’s always there to some degree.
SILVERSIDES: I was looking down the categories that I’ve written out of common family stories, and right there at the top was “dead children,” which is fairly central in your family as well. Is there anything lasting from the sense of having a dead older brother in the working out of your life?
FRYE: I daresay there is, but it’s very difficult for me to identify it. He was such a shadowy memory to me because he left home for Europe when I was about five, I think. I do remember him around the house, but hardly as a personality. He was just a figure in an infantile landscape.
SILVERSIDES: I guess I was speaking to the importance someone like that assumes after they’re dead in the lives of their family.
FRYE: My mother, of course, centred her whole emotional life around him after he was dead. In the last years when she was eaten up with cancer and dying she never called me anything but Howard. She never called me by any other name than his. In other words the two of us had simply merged our identities as far as she was concerned.
SILVERSIDES: You weren’t a child at that point?
FRYE: No, I wasn’t.
SILVERSIDES: But if some of that happened earlier, it would certainly be very confusing to a child.
FRYE: Oh yes, it would have been. But there was a break in the whole family fortunes after or around about the time my brother was killed: my father’s business failing, having to move to the Maritimes, my mother’s deafness, and so forth. All that was part of a break in the family which I think broke any sense of mythological continuity.
SILVERSIDES: You mentioned your personal story of exile. One of the things talked about in the book is the immigrants’ family stories. The author felt that she could delineate whole different world views in the United States. New immigrants saw a much more difficult world and their stories reflected that—difficulty of travel and so on—whereas third- and fourth-generation stories are much more optimistic. Would you think that the same might be true in a Canadian setting?
FRYE: It would be. I think immigrants have a very strong sense of the continuity of mythology as one thing to hold on to when they’re facing a new life. My own parents were not really facing a new life in the sense of there being an agenda of new things to do, they were thinking more in terms of survival. [break in tape] There are perhaps two stages in which ancestral mythology is operative. One is in the immigrant stage where they are very keen on preserving a continuity of identity in a new land. Then they tend to drop it for a generation or two. They get rather ashamed of their European background and want to become as fully as possible integrated into the community around them. Then a generation after that they begin to become more mature and to think more in terms of reconstructing their cultural ancestral roots. I think that that perhaps happens to a nation as well. When Canada was very largely a land of immigrants it had the various mythologies which have been chronicled in a lot of Canadian fiction. Now that it’s become more mature culturally it’s beginning to recapture that. But the time when I was growing up was rather a bad time for ancestral mythologies, really. [tape cuts out]