Recorded 22 March 1971
From a tape in the CBC Radio Archives, reference no. 710424-2, transcribed by Monika Lee. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1971. “Notes on a Maple Leaf” was a documentary on Canadian literature and publishing, prepared by freelance writer and broadcaster Val Cleary, and broadcast in the Anthology series on CBC Radio, 24 April 1971. In his introduction, Cleary refers to the crisis in Canadian publishing, and the question of whether we have a Canadian literature for it to publish. Obviously relevant was Frye’s recently published The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971).
FRYE: The fiction writer, though, has a rather different problem from the poet. A poet makes poems and each poem is a separate creative effort, whereas a full-length work of fiction takes a terrific amount of drive to get through. You’re sustained in that drive by the feeling of a fairly immediate response from your public, and if you don’t get that, of course, you’re simply hung up. Back in the early nineteenth century, poor old Major Richardson said he might as well have published his book in Kamchatka as Canada.1 I think that that feeling of no echo coming back from this stone that you drop into the well can do more damage to a writer than simply the lack of media.
[Other people interviewed speak. Author Marian Engel comments on the “flat, dreary, underpopulated,” nature of western Ontario, from which nevertheless a great number of writers have emerged.]
FRYE: I suppose that’s so, but actually I think the southern Ontario community is one of the more inarticulate ones in Canada. There have been an astonishing number of writers developed in the Maritimes and on the Pacific coast. To some extent, we parallel some of the developments in the United States. The United States went through this unity/identity business in a much tougher way than we did. They had to fight a Civil War over the issue of unity, and yet, although the South lost the Civil War, they certainly won the cultural war. The state of Mississippi, for example, has produced an astonishing amount of the best American writing. I think that that’s a feature of writing, that it tends to come from communities where there is more of pressure on the more imaginative people to seek an outlet in writing. * * *
It’s a curious law of literature that the greater variety there is, the more cohesion there is. If you’ve got twenty really good writers, you’ve got a much more coherent literature than if you had two, even though the twenty may be wildly different from one another. The place of publication matters very much less than the place of imaginative origin of the writer.
[Cleary reads a long quotation from The Bush Garden: excerpts from the passage in the conclusion to Literary History of Canada regarding the problematic relation of the Canadian writer to his literary tradition (BG, 232–4; C, 357–8).]
FRYE: It seems to me that technical experiment has to be founded on a pretty solid tradition, that Robbe-Grillet today, for example, wouldn’t know what he was doing if he didn’t have Proust and Balzac and Flaubert solidly behind him. There was no use telling our writers to experiment before they had something to experiment with. But I think it’s true that the whole tradition of writing has become more internationalized, that Canada has absorbed more and more of that tradition, and that the younger writers are reaping the benefits of being young.
I suppose that novelists, perhaps, are people who try to live by their writing, whereas poets, who know that they can’t do that, are more apt to be employed by universities, at any rate in English Canada, and so they migrate to the universities.
[Cleary discusses the publishing of more novels in Canada.]
FRYE: I’m more conscious of the general decline in the market for continuous fiction, which has been setting in for the last twenty-five years. It isn’t only the rise of the electronic media. It’s also just a change in public taste, that they prefer reading nonfiction to fiction. I think that this has discouraged a good many fiction writers, who tended to feel that form was just washed up, and it’s possible that that decline is nearing its end and we’re in for another cycle.
[Cleary asks whether our writers shouldn’t more naturally move, like Mailer, Capote, and Talese, towards the nonfiction novel.]
FRYE: That’s an interesting idea. Yes. I think that it’s quite possible that Truman Capote and Mailer together have, to some extent, popularized the form of a kind of work which is intermediate between fiction and fact, in the tradition of things like Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. There is a kind of writer who takes very well to that. I can’t get through Norman Mailer’s fiction, but I do find his journalistic work—the book on the march on Washington, for example—fascinating. I had a friend say that he perhaps wouldn’t have read In Cold Blood if he hadn’t known that it was fact rather than fiction.2 So it’s possible that fiction may be making a comeback by way of this kind of journalistic hybrid form.
CLEARY: There’s a certain irony in the fact that what impels French Canada’s cultural growth threatens the ideal of a bicultural literature.
FRYE: My feelings are reasonably hopeful. I think that really the answer to the future of Canadian culture lies in the future of Canadian politics. If Canada can preserve a certain sense of unity and a sense of shared tradition, then its culture will go ahead very rapidly, because that has certainly been evident in the last fifteen to twenty years: it’s been developing at an amazing speed. If the country falls apart, then its culture, of course, will be fragmented as well. So my prognosis would be an extremely hopeful one on the understanding that culture is dependent on other things, which it is rather powerless to affect.