Conducted 13 April 1982
From Chatelaine, 55, no. 11 (November 1982): 43. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Chatelaine’s Allan M. Gould was one of many people to draw attention to Frye on the occasion of the publication of The Great Code, though that work does not feature in his interview. What were evidently questions from Gould have been rendered in Chatelaine as subject headings. Gould was a former student of Frye’s then working as a freelance writer; he later became a prolific author.
Height: 5' 8 or 9”.
Weight: About 155.
Shoe size: I don’t know. I get my shoes measured.
Eyesight: I’m nearsighted; but gradually I’m becoming less so, as everybody does, after the age of sixty-five.
When I write: My writing becomes an oddly furtive business, like squirrels burying nuts against a hard winter. I’ve learned to adapt myself so I can write at odd moments and in odd corners
Average day: I find that my schedule tends to be very much nine to five or six. I like to be home for dinner. I am usually in bed by ten; I do a good deal of reading in bed.
Hobbies: The first time I was asked that, I said my only hobby was writing books, which didn’t satisfy the person who asked me. I use the piano for relaxation, but there isn’t much else I do
Personal heroes: The three people who were my seniors here in the department at Victoria College—Pelham Edgar, John Robins, Ned Pratt—have always loomed up in my life as rather important influences.
Recollected favourite movies: There was a time when I got interested in the Charlie Chaplin films; I wrote articles about both The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux.1
Television: My wife seldom gets away from Channel 17 [the Public Broadcasting Service station in Buffalo, picked up in Toronto]. I saw some of the Jacques Cousteau undersea things.
Favourite composer: Bach.
On productions of plays: Although I lecture on Shakespeare, I am so frequently dissatisfied with performances of his works and producers’ ideas of what they ought to be, that I think it’s a kind of occupational hazard. I should be disbarred from going.
Popular songs: Snatches of tunes—sometimes very silly tunes—suddenly appear in one’s head, and it takes a while to get rid of them: popular songs I heard as a child, evangelical hymns, all kinds of musical hogwash is slurping around that part of the brain that’s sometimes regarded as “the seat of thought.”
Shakespeare favourites: The late romances—The Winter’ s Tale and The Tempest. I find them incredibly rich and suggestive. And the tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear particularly.
General attitude toward life: That of a liberal bourgeois intellectual, which I consider the flower of humanity.
Religion in my life: It has a great deal of importance. Words like “infinite” and “eternal” are not fuzzy to me; they are words that prevent the human spirit from getting claustrophobia.
On Canadian leaders: I rather approve of the tendency of this country to put intellectuals into political power, and I think that Canada has people with interesting and unusual minds in politics, even when one totally disagrees with their philosophy—René Lévesque would be an example.
On political leaders in history: Most of the people who rank as great leaders—say, Lenin—seem to me to be utter creeps.
On Canadian nationalism: Nationalism, as the term is generally understood, is simply a psychotic state of mind. But there is such a thing as cultural consciousness, which I’m glad to see Canada developing.
Canadian characteristic I could do without: The unwillingness to admit that anything Canadian can be first-rate.
Greatest outrage: Well, the whole course of human history is pretty well an outrage. Acts of territorial aggression, like those tinhorn fascists in Argentina grabbing the Falkland Islands.
Capital punishment: I’ve never quite made up my mind about capital punishment; I don’t trust the law to get hold of the right people. It catches the drug addict who murders in quest of a fix, but it doesn’t catch the man who controls the heroin.
Abortion: I think that having an abortion might be a traumatic shock to a woman, and she ought to consider carefully all the factors before going into it. But I’m not prepared to say whether it is right or wrong.
Attitude toward the feminist movement: There’s a kind of nagging pedantry about it that seems to me concentrating on rather peripheral issues, like “chairperson.” I think the central issue is the economic discrimination against women, which is a serious and important issue.
Sentimental over: I have a good deal of emotional feeling, not all of which I suppose is genuine. And when it’s phony, it’s sentimental.
Most painful childhood experience: My brother was killed in the First World War when I was six years old, and my father’s business failed at almost the same time.
Most difficult time of my life: I came up from New Brunswick without any financial resources and lived by my wits. I did well under the capitalist system; scholarships kept me going.
Special moments: I have very pleasant memories. But I don’t know that I would put them in the same category as the sense of the sudden expansion of the mind, which I have had occasionally.
Favourite drink: I knew an old man once who settled for drinking straight Scotch, and he said, “I find it agrees with me.” I find the same thing.
Greatest beef against others: Other people are not to blame for anything that’s frustrating me. I distrust the instinct to throw the blame on others.
On fear: Fear is a state of mind in itself, irrespective of what one is afraid of.
Hopes for the next decade: The second volume of The Great Code (on theinfluence of the Bible on Western culture); a small book on Shakespeare.
Best time of day: I’m a morning worker.
Bad habits: I’ve never been a well-coordinated person; I suppose that’s developed a certain laziness or indolence.
Favourite cities: When I was a student in Italy, the first places I saw were Pisa and Siena. Siena has remained in my mind with great vividness as a place full of colour and warmth and life.
If I could live my life over: I would think with the utmost horror of being reborn as Northrop Frye; I would want to be someone else. I’d rather be somebody else with different talents and, consequently, a different set of experiences.