Conducted 30 January 1978
From “Eminent Victorians: The Frye Interview,” The Strand [Victoria College, University of Toronto], 1 March 1978, 5–11. Partially reprinted in Acta Victoriana Centennial, 1878–1978, 102 (Fall 1978): 53–4, as “Interview: Northrop Frye.” Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1978. This was one of a series of interviews in the Strand with eminent professors at Victoria College. The questions were prepared by Douglas Janack, Rob Lapp, and Bruce Reynolds; the interviewer was student Bruce Reynolds, then associate editor of the Strand, later a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP specializing in construction law.
REYNOLDS: Do you have any favourite recollections from your days as a student at Victoria College?
FRYE: Well, I’d had rather a lonely time growing up and I found myself in a very congenial community, so I threw myself into quite a lot of activities: debating, dramatic society, year executives, residence executives, editor of Acta in my last year, and so on.1 So there are quite a number of pleasant memories, including the friends that I met. I think that students did know each other very well in those days, more than they do now perhaps. There are something like eighteen married couples within our year so obviously they got together somehow.
REYNOLDS: During the recent “E.J. Pratt Remembered” evening held at Wymilwood Music Room, David Knight recalled Pelham Edgar as “sweeping into a lecture hall one night with two of the prettiest girls in class on either arm and the glowering fiancé of one of the girls in tow.”2And last year in your talk on the “University as a Community” you described him as chairman of the English department reading a newspaper while the professors decided what courses they would be teaching. Still, many students are not aware of this great teacher in Victoria’s past. Could you say something further concerning the man behind these anecdotes?
FRYE: Well, he was just that. That is, he came from a sort of upper middle-class family and his home, which was a Victoria residence for many years, was on the southern part of Bloor Street. He was originally in the French department and he taught at Upper Canada College along with Stephen Leacock, and then came down to Victoria. In those days it was quite easy to go from high-school teaching to university teaching.
Just to look at him, if you didn’t know him, you would swear that he had nothing on his mind except himself and his own comfort. But he was writing articles on “Is there a Canadian Literature?” in Saturday Night as early as 1895, and he was extraordinarily shrewd at picking people. He hauled Ned Pratt into his department from the Department of Psychology. Ned Pratt was the latest-blooming poet in the history of literature—his first book didn’t come out until he was in his forties—but Pelham thought he might write some day. He got Kathleen Coburn and me on the staff, and he got a number of people together who eventually turned up at UBC (Roy Daniells, Al Purdy, and others). He had an extraordinarily sharp eye for people, but his lecturing was very erratic, spasmodic. He wasn’t a theorist at all, but he read, and he read extraordinarily well. As a result of taking lectures from him you got very spasmodic information from your notes but you realized that devoting your life to scholarship was somehow an honourable career—that was what he managed to put across.
REYNOLDS: The great kindness of John Robins was another recollection which you shared with those people who gathered to reminisce about E.J. Pratt.
FRYE: I think John Robins was a very great man, really. He came from a working-class family and he had to leave school at the age of twelve in order to earn money for the family. It was from there that he had not only to go on to university but to earn the qualifications for teaching in university. As a result, he was a person whose literary tastes were in popular literature. That is, ballads—he knew the ballad very well—and folk tales, and Paul Bunyan stories. That kind of thing. Of course, in those days, that was not as academically respectable as it is now. He was quite a pioneer in that kind of interest. So people, while they liked him very much, often didn’t take him as seriously as a scholar as he should have been taken, because he really was a very perceptive scholar. He was also, like Pelham, a reciter, and what he told were things like Uncle Remus stories. His accent was just perfect for those. So you got exposed to an oral tradition with those men, that was rather unusual I think.
REYNOLDS: Those who attended the “E.J. Pratt Remembered” evening heard of the poet’s legendarily poor memory and the intense research that went into his poetry as well as many humorous and affectionate stories concerning Dr. Pratt. Professor Love expressed disappointment that you were unable to be there to add your memories to those that were present. Do you have a favourite Pratt story?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know. You see, Pratt deliberately cultivated a reputation as an absent-minded duffer. I used to see him doing that. When he was still young enough for the question of the secretaryship of the department to come his way, he would immediately start telling the story of how he once was made secretary of a committee and he got so interested in the conversation he forgot to take any notes.
He realized that there is a great deal of make-work and busy-work around a university as there is around any institution and that he had just to keep away from it if he was going to be let alone to do his own writing. Professors and poets are supposed to be absent-minded so he just played up to that legend. But he was no fool. He would get things mixed up, but he kept a speaking, lecturing, and teaching schedule going for years that no business man would have attempted without a secretary. And it was generally other people’s dimwittedness that was responsible for the blow-ups rather than his.
REYNOLDS: Do you think that the many versions of some of the Pratt myths, which it seems were mostly begun in their different forms by the poet himself, will make it difficult to separate man from legend when someone comes to do a complete critical biography?
FRYE: Yes, except the critical biography is now being done by someone who has been fanatically clever at disentangling the two things. His name is David Pitt and he’s at Memorial University in Newfoundland. When that book of his finally sees the light of day I think it’ll probably have things pretty clear.3 But you’re right. He did cultivate the legend himself.
REYNOLDS: Professor Love told how Dr. Pratt pawned his philosophy medal and took five other Newfoundland students to dinner at the King Edward [Hotel].
FRYE: Well, that kind of gesture he loved and he loved parties and sitting at the head of the table, and so on. And he loved conversation, but he was quite serious about his conversation. He didn’t want gossip. And those evenings were really quite rewarding evenings; they weren’t just shooting the breeze.
REYNOLDS: Has the character of Victoria changed fundamentally during the time that you’ve been here?
FRYE: Not fundamentally, no. It’s changed in many respects. When I was an undergraduate there was still a majority of people coming from outside Toronto. It hadn’t become the metropolitan university that it is now. Now people just charge in from the Toronto high schools and that’s mostly it, but in those days there was no Guelph, no Waterloo, no McMaster, no Trent,4 and so people came in from all the small towns in the west of Ontario. That meant that coming to a bigger city was a part of their college education. And that meant also that the residence was much more the focus of university life perhaps than it is now. And, as I said at the beginning, students perhaps knew each other a little better than they do now. It was smaller.
REYNOLDS: As a result of expansion many students are no longer aware of Emmanuel College, Victoria’s Methodist cornerstone, and its place in Victoria’s identity. If Victoria loses its sense of being a United Church institution, from the student’s standpoint, will it lose its traditional identity, becoming merely a residence college?
FRYE: Well, you can’t go on ethos alone and the United Church connection is a part of the ethos. It’s always been an extremely flexible part because even at the turn of the century, around 1890 or 1900, there were perhaps more Methodists going to UC than going to Victoria, and there were always a great number of other people coming to Victoria. I think that it’s a much subtler ethos to put your finger on than simply the church connection. That’s something else again.
REYNOLDS: Each of the professors interviewed by the Strand this year has expressed regret over the loss of the Honour Course system. Many students do not even know what once constituted the Honour program.5 Do you feel that the discontinuation of the Honour program was a loss?
FRYE: Oh God, yes. The Honour Course gave the best undergraduate training that was available on the continent. If you went into the Honour Course you got relatively few choices through your undergraduate years, but you got your subject and you knew it when you got out. And I did have some quite intelligent students say to me in the science courses, more particularly, that they felt they got more of a technical training than an education. But in the humanities it was an extraordinarily good training. It perhaps required a bit more maturity from the student than the student was able to give to it coming from grade 13 because it was founded on the principle that wherever you are is the centre of all knowledge, and it takes a while to get that through one’s head. But I think that after the Macpherson Report, they should have experimented as much as they liked with the General Course, but it was a disaster to destroy the Honour Course.6
REYNOLDS: Were the students in favour of discontinuing the Honour Course?
FRYE: They didn’t know.
REYNOLDS: It’s been suggested that students in the ’60s were so embittered and frustrated from the high-school system that they came to university with the intent of doing what they could to demolish it, almost out of revenge. Do you think that that’s possible?
FRYE: Some of them perhaps did, yes. It was simply a kind of mass hysteria that was in the air and I don’t think that many of the student activists really knew what the hell they were about. They had vague notions of revolutionizing society but the movement accomplished extraordinarily little. I think that the reactions to it were panicky: they were panicky when they were repressive, and they were panicky when they were permissive. The result was that when we came out of it the two things that made Toronto unique among universities—the federal system, and the Honour Course—were both mortally injured. So now it’s just another big packing and processing plant like Michigan, and Ohio, and Indiana.
But these movements always achieve the very opposite of what they intend to achieve. That is, instead of liberating things they just created an atmosphere in which the individual teacher was much more the dictator in his classroom than he ever was before. It’s the same thing with representation: so many different groups of people are represented on decision-making bodies that they become too big and too unwieldy, and so you get an invisible committee deciding everything. That to some degree has settled down. That is, the people who demand representation are the people who want to get their fingers on the very centres of power, and then of course they find it a very dull job, and they get off. Then you get the decent students, the ones who are willing to work and serve on committees, and you get proper student representation.
REYNOLDS: Many people still come to university with very poor attitudes * * * and don’t really enjoy and experience the opportunities here to the full.
FRYE: Yes, I think that’s true. It’s extremely difficult to understand just what the university is for undergraduates. It gives you four years’ experience of a life in which the intelligence and the imagination have functional roles to play, and it’s rather difficult to get that. Most people, including the editorial writers in the Globe and Mail, are determined that the university should be a place to get you a better middle-class job in a middle-class community.
REYNOLDS: Is it possible to avoid the teaching of extremely large classes? Or is this not an undesirable teaching situation?
FRYE: Large classes are not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve had a great deal of the mystique of the seminar or the small class—what they call at Princeton the preceptorial and so on—but those turned out to be monologues from the instructor like everything else. There are certain things that the large lecture can do. In the humanities, for example, you can give a kind of historical perspective which a tutorial can’t give. I think there is a place for the large classroom and I don’t think it inhibits questions necessarily. I’ve had quite lively discussions with classes of three or four hundred.
REYNOLDS: Does the loss of autonomous departments at Victoria threaten Vic’s identity as a liberal arts institution?7
FRYE: Yes. As I say, you can’t keep a college going on ethos alone. You have to have some autonomy of departments. I think that they have to renegotiate the whole basis of federation and put the federated colleges back on their feet as autonomous institutions. Otherwise, it just gets to be another great big monolithic structure where all the individual parts are not really colleges but just residences and classroom space.
REYNOLDS: Does the loss of individual Vic departments in liberal arts reflect a trend towards the shrinking of liberal arts in the university as a whole?
FRYE: Oh, possibly. These things go in cycles to some degree. You get a great concentration of students in natural sciences or the social sciences, and the humanities always do better than people think they’re going to do. When the federation agreement was drawn up in 1884, the principle then was that the humanities are better when they’re decentralized and the sciences better when they’re centralized. Since then the social sciences have come into the picture, and a good many humanities departments, like Spanish and Italian and Fine Art and so forth, have also come in and automatically become university departments. That meant that the situation got very lopsided. Of course the University of Toronto wanted it to become lopsided so as to push the federated colleges into a corner. But I think it’s still true that the humanities are best taught in a more decentralized atmosphere. Even though Victoria and University College are bigger than they should be, students can still find an identity there.
REYNOLDS: How do you feel when you enter the reading room of E.J. Pratt Library and see the painting of Frye in the sky?8
FRYE: Well, I don’t know exactly how I feel. For one thing I’m glad that the wall is there. That’s mostly what I think of. The architects originally wanted to make that wall entirely glass, and I had visions of students fried to grease spots in the summer with the sun pouring in through the west windows. After discussing an inside screen and an outside screen, they finally decided on a blank wall that is so high that it doesn’t give you a sense of being closed in at all. I think they should go easy with the pictures: there shouldn’t be too many. I don’t particularly like that picture of me. There are jokes about Frye having no visible means of support. I don’t think it bothers me very much though.
REYNOLDS: What does the university faculty of liberal arts do for the working man, at Stelco, for instance, who supports universities with his tax money but never attends them?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know. The university doesn’t perhaps directly affect the individual tax payer as such. I don’t think very many of the things we pay our taxes for do, but the university creates a kind of free space in society. It has a great deal to do with the fact the working man is living in a democratic society and has the minimum of interference with his personal liberty. The university has a great role to play in keeping society open-ended. That’s the main benefit I see, but, of course, there are all sorts of subsidiary ones. Having a centre of scholarship and research—that’s part of keeping society open-ended too.
REYNOLDS: Your television program “Journey Without Arrival” pointed out the existence of a uniquely Canadian identity.9 To what extent do you think the Canadian people are aware of their country’s identity?
FRYE: I think they’re much less aware of it than they are when they leave the country. I always assumed that it was impossible to tell a Canadian from an American until I lived for a year or two in Great Britain, then I realized that was nonsense. There was quite an obvious difference between them. But that’s the kind of perspective you get only when you’re outside for a bit. The people who stay within the country aren’t particularly aware of it, and there’s not much reason why they should be, really.
REYNOLDS: Since the CRTC imposed Canadian content restrictions on the media, has it had any active role in bringing Canadian culture to the public?
FRYE: I think it’s helped, yes. At least it’s given employment to certain people who would otherwise have had to go to the States. As we’ve already sold the pass on things like the book business, the magazine business, the movie business, we’ve only got one thing to hold on to now, and I think it’s worth trying to hold on to that as long as we can.
REYNOLDS: Do you think that Canada’s “branch office” mentality is the reason for Canadian artistic endeavour assuming an alternate role in our society, which, for example, in the theatre world manifests itself in a solid London–New York fare at major theatres?
FRYE: I daresay that’s true. The fact that we in English Canada speak the same language as do much larger centres naturally does mean that we, as you say, alternate between a feeling of what we can produce locally, and of what we import. The main thing is to make sure the balance of trade isn’t too much upset in either direction, I suppose, because a very considerable amount of even New York theatre is imported from Europe. It’s the kind of balance that almost anyone in the entertainment business would look for.
REYNOLDS: A group of Canadian artists is becoming prominent now who were initially affected by your ideas. How do you think this changes the relationship between the poet and critic? Or does it?
FRYE: I don’t think criticism can affect poetry very directly. There is no such thing as a Frye school of poetry. What I’ve done as a critic may make people concerned with literature more aware of what they’re doing in one way or another, but I don’t think a critic directly influences poetry: that’s not his job. If it is his job, he’s a very dangerous influence. There is perhaps a tendency to regard critics as possible friends rather than as possible enemies.
REYNOLDS: Is a Canadian Walt Whitman possible, imaginatively unifying a nation of regionalists? Or do you think that the Group of Seven and E.J. Pratt have accomplished that imaginative unification?
FRYE: It’s a very large and complex process for people to become aware of a cultural identity. I think the Group of Seven and Pratt have done a great deal towards that, partly because they’re a generation removed from us. I certainly don’t think a Canadian Whitman is possible; he seems to be something absolutely peculiar to the United States. He couldn’t possibly have existed here. But he of course had to fight all his life against neglect and indifference. He very much wanted to be a national poet but nobody took him very seriously as that in his lifetime. These things take a while to settle and grow: cultural rhythms can’t be hurried. They don’t make an immediate impact; they’re not news.
REYNOLDS: If the separatist movement in Quebec were successful, how would that affect the Canadian imaginative identity?
FRYE: Well, it would break it up. At least it would damage it considerably. I would hate to see it happen. At the same time I don’t think it would fatally destroy the Canadian identity. I think that English Canada has got a new sense of identity, partly bounced off from the French Canadian sense. Culturally a sense of Quebec separatism only intensifies what is there anyway and ought to be there, because culturally it’s good for regions to develop in a country, especially a country as big as this. The disasters would be economic and political disasters, and they would be very considerable.
In an interview the Star had with me some months ago I said I didn’t think separatism was going to work politically and economically: if it did win the referendum it would be a matter of more or less symbolic separation.10 The people backing it are very largely people in the National Film Board, and the CBC, and teaching. I don’t think business people in Quebec want separatism, and I don’t think unions want it, but there is a tradition among intellectuals of being rather socially irresponsible. If you mention economic problems their eyes just glaze over. They don’t care about that, and I think that there’s a large body of these people. They’re well organized, they’re very articulate, and they’re perhaps strong enough to win a referendum in Quebec.
The presence of the United States will prevent it from becoming a real rupture. The Canadian temper seems to be pretty cool, and I’m very glad to see that it is cool. They seem to be trying to understand the aspirations of the Québécois, or at least some of them. I think that negotiations will always be open. There are some very unpleasant things, of course, under the surface of the Parti Québécois. It’s a very nasty neo-fascist movement, and if they got their head then that would be quite literally a case of hell breaking loose.
REYNOLDS: So many groups have come forward in the last ten years to demand more from our society, people who have been oppressed: the blacks, the Indians, women, and gays. Can society continue to make reparations in order to give everyone a decent chance?
FRYE: The sense of the rights of minorities is a very healthy sense in itself. I think it’s a good thing society is getting more and more sense of the kinds of things it does consciously or unconsciously to minorities who can’t fight back. I’m very glad to see more awareness of smaller minority groups, homosexuals for example, as human beings, with their own dignity, their own rights. It is of course possible to go overboard on that. When affirmative action in American universities gets to the point of hiring third-rate people because they’re blacks, that’s a kind of discrimination in reverse.
REYNOLDS: How do you think the Bible, since it is an integral part of our cultural modelling, could be re-introduced to education on the primary level as something other than the focal point of religious education?
FRYE: I think that the Bible should be taught very thoroughly and very early and that it should be taught very largely in relationship to its content but not didactically. It’s quite possible to teach it in terms of stories, in terms of what it actually does record, without going on to say, “This proves, dear children, that you ought to hold exactly the same views as I hold.” You don’t need to do that at all. I’ve taught a course in the Bible for thirty years to a variety of people ranging from Greek Orthodox to Communist. I don’t think anybody’s ever felt that his privacy was being invaded by the course.
REYNOLDS: Time has called the evangelical movement in the United States, which is also having a large effect in Canada, the “new empire of faith.” And this movement accepts the historical truth of the Bible. Do you think that this attitude could frustrate an attempt to teach the Bible as the imaginative focus for a secular educational process?
FRYE: Oh, it could. But that’s merely another example of the fact that anti-intellectualism is built into our whole way of life, especially on the North American continent. People’s instinctive attitude towards the Bible or religion is an uncritical attitude. It’s quite true that you get people horsing around in California trying to set up the book of Genesis as an alternative to evolution and so forth, but when you consider what was going on fifty years ago in the monkey trial in Tennessee, for example, things are not all that bad now. These people do not get as much play as they used to. That’s why you have to have a university to keep society open-ended and to indicate that there is a place for the intelligence and the critical intelligence.
REYNOLDS: The contemporary social imagination is full of apocalyptic images, as in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. How is this related to our socio-economic conditions?
FRYE: There’s a sort of manic-depressive feeling about society. The manic phase is the “Age of Aquarius” part of it, and the depressive phase is the “atomic holocaust” part of it.11 I think it’s very easy to jump to black-and-white extremes of emotion one way or the other. Actually what impressed me about Star Wars was its stock conservatism. That’s exactly the way the pictures were being made in the days when I used to go clutching a dime and a penny to the Empress Theatre in Moncton: the good guys win, the bad guys lose.
REYNOLDS: A space western?
FRYE: Yes. There’s a lot more hardware busted than there used to be, but that’s the main difference.
REYNOLDS: The black-and-white nature of these different images which are appearing seems to appeal to many people. Is this the same kind of attitude that makes people want to believe in the Bible literally?
FRYE: Yes, I think it’s the same oversimplified tendency to think you must be this way, otherwise you’re totally opposed. It’s the sense of melodrama really, and melodrama is for people who cheer the heroes and hiss the villains. As a kind of emotional release, there’s no great harm in that. It becomes harmful when it becomes a serious and consistent social attitude.
REYNOLDS: In your essay “The University and Personal Life” you speak about the loss of the teleological sense in our time: of the feeling, which is close to absurdity, that the continuity in our lives is really not there, that life is a discontinuous sequence of intense moments [WE, 365]. Could the confusion often resulting from this perception be related to people’s desire to see everything in terms of black and white?
FRYE: I would think so, yes. If you’re thinking in terms of going towards an end you become aware of certain complexities leading towards it, but if you’re in on the jokes-per-minute routine, if you’re just out for pure sensation, then the more black or the more white it is the better.