Conducted 29 September 1983
From the Canadian Forum, 69 (March 1991): 15–17. Frye contributed extensively to the Forum during the 1930s and 1940s, served as managing editor from May 1948 to June 1950, and then joined the editorial board, along with Helen Frye. They remained there until June 1956. Correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 39, file 5 reveals that the following interview was conducted at Victoria College on 29 September 1983 by Hilda Kirkwood (Mrs. J.L. Green), a longtime contributor to the Forum and former member of the editorial board, in connection with a planned article on the history of the Forum. The interview remained unpublished until shortly after Frye’s death in January 1991. The square brackets in this piece are the Forum’s.
KIRKWOOD: Do you think that writing on a variety of subjects in the Forum when you were a younger man helped you to form your style and your ideas in any way?
FRYE: Oh yes, very much so. I spoke once of the Forum’s good-natured hospitality that has helped so many Canadians to learn to write,1 and actually that was one of the things I had as a kind of ideal when I was literary editor. I wanted it to be a forum for bringing along younger writers.
KIRKWOOD: In October 1938, some years before you became editor, you wrote an article about an art show at the CNE. At that time big art shows were rare in Toronto, and this was an important one, our first public exposure to surrealist art in this country. In your review of this show you said, “In the coming fight between creators and destroyers, the artists must present a united front on the creative side.”2 It was a prophetic piece dealing with the impact of disintegrating forces on society.
FRYE: The point was that this art show appeared at the CNE [at that time few large shows were accessible to the public here] and the CNE never had anything but the most conservative kind of art shows. A number of people, Fred Haines and so on, had put together this surrealist show purely as a joke—expecting people would laugh.3 So when a perfectly serious article came out in the Forum, Fred Haines muttered to my wife that the trouble with Art was that there were too many damn intellectuals running it! Surrealism was right in the centre of fashion at the time, so their timing was perfect even though their intentions were perverse. What they wanted was hostility.
KIRKWOOD: We always like to think that the Forum is supportive of artists, but at times it seems to have put more emphasis on the analytical and synthesizing sorts of writers than on the creative ones. Do you think it was more daring in this respect when it was younger?
FRYE: The magazine had more fronts to fight on then. For example, if there was a picture [on display] with a nude in it, the Toronto Star would immediately scurry around to try to get people to express shock and horror and say, “This ought to be banned.” That kind of thing is a dead issue now, but in the 1920s and right into the 1940s the Forum had to fight an extremely narrow bigoted provincialism which is no longer the threat that it was.
KIRKWOOD: How much of your time did you devote to the various editorial and dogsbody duties entailed in getting the Forum out each month around 1950?
FRYE: I did a lot of proofreading and a lot of editing and writing. One of my friends thought I was wasting my time.4
KIRKWOOD: You didn’t think so?
FRYE: Well, a writer doesn’t waste his time by learning altogether. I met people many years later who complained that three or four of their articles had been rewritten as one article. I still think it was an improvement.
KIRKWOOD: Do you have an overall view of how the short story has developed over the years in the Forum, or was your interest more specifically in the poetry?
FRYE: I had more interest in the poetry because it was a little better written than the prose, and we didn’t have a great deal of room for the kind of short story the New Yorker runs, for instance. During the 1930s and 1940s there were a great many didactic stories with a political moral. I found a lot of them very dull so I was more interested in the poetry because on the whole it was a more interesting genre.
KIRKWOOD: The short story has flowered in Canada in the past two decades.
FRYE: Yes, and the novel made up of short stories such as Lives of Girls and Women [Alice Munro]. This is a very distinctive Canadian feature.
KIRKWOOD: Appearances have changed greatly in magazines, and in the Forum there are more visuals than there used to be during the ’40s and ’50s.
FRYE: I think it made a difference that during the war and after the Forum got to be more and more a resistance press. We had to concentrate on print. We used visuals as much as we could but economics affected that. Now photography has made its appearance in the Forum. I think it does reflect visual education to a considerable extent. We started in the shadow of the Victorian journal where there was never an illustration. There is a more general assumption [now] that people can’t read! The older type of magazine with a subscription list is a pretty hard thing to keep going. Especially in the shadow of the imported papers, etc. We tried to keep a window open on Canadian visual culture but the Forum was stronger in the abstract field.
KIRKWOOD: When I was talking with Barker Fairley he said that when the Forum began they had thought of it as becoming a weekly.
FRYE: We kept talking about turning it into a weekly whenever we could finance it. You see, the whole Canadian situation was closer to the British than it is now. George Grube was trained in England and he always thought of the CCF as the Canadian Labour party which would eventually force the Conservatives and Liberals to amalgamate, and similarly they were originally thinking of a model like the New Statesman.
KIRKWOOD: In the New Statesman and the New Republic, then, was not the literary aspect minor?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know, they had a fairly full literary section, they had the same format as the Forum had in those times [the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.] The first half was political and the second, literary.
KIRKWOOD: Over the years one notices that many people who were young and relatively unknown and who are now successful writers and thinkers in Canada contributed some of their first work to the Forum. I think of Frank Underhill, Earle Birney, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Ramsay Cook, Robert Fulford. A very early short story of Alice Munro’s appeared and poetry by Margaret Atwood before she was known. Were there others you feel added vitality to the Forum when you were the editor?
FRYE: Oh yes, Ivon Owen, Edith Fowke, Al Shea, Milton Wilson. They all did a lot of good work, and there were others.
KIRKWOOD: Was George Grube your immediate predecessor?
FRYE: Yes, he was, and I was literary editor, and although in many ways I didn’t agree with Grube’s attitude I had great respect for him. He didn’t get along too well with the Morrises, who of course were “the civil service,” and the issue involved was pulling away from the CCF.5
KIRKWOOD: Would you say the Forum’s politics were left of centre in Grube’s time?
FRYE: They followed the CCF’s party line pretty closely. Yes, I suppose by the standards of those days they were pretty left of centre.
KIRKWOOD: In looking over the issues of the time when you were editor (1948–50), there seems to be a division in the editorials, very much so. You have said it was in a CCF phase when you began to contribute to it. Would you say it was more radical in its beginnings than later when you were there, or did it change?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know, the political situation was a lot less polarized in the 1920s. Fascism hadn’t come on the scene for one thing, and the very strong Communist movement, which of course the Forum never supported but nevertheless was very aware of, came along in the 1930s. That changed the whole political orientation very radically.
KIRKWOOD: When I looked over the issues on which you spent a lot of time and effort I wondered if you wrote strictly literary articles or whether some of the anonymous editorials on public affairs were your work?
FRYE: When I was editor I wrote a fair number of editorials, yes.
KIRKWOOD: You wrote on public affairs?6
FRYE: Well, yes—I always established a distinction between politics and public affairs. That was a distinction which Grube never accepted. He just didn’t believe that there was such a thing as a discussion of public affairs aside from a political approach. But I think the distinction is there, and I felt that the Forum ought to be what it was called on its masthead after I came in, that is, an independent journal of public opinion, and it should be as free to criticize the CCF as any other group of writers.
KIRKWOOD: Every now and then someone says in print what a great contribution the Forum has made to the cultural life of this country, but it still has to struggle along day to day, hand to mouth.
FRYE: The amazing thing is that it has struggled for so long!
KIRKWOOD: Literacy has increased, readership has not increased in proportion. I wonder why?
FRYE: The whole relationship of people to magazines has changed so much. You get magazines thrown in your door; there is a flurry of little magazines being started for which you can hear the funeral march playing in the background. There are a lot of publishers of what I call the resistance press, and a lot of poetry books you can get out by mechanical printing methods. It is extraordinary that the Canadian Forum has kept going in the face of all this, and I say it is unique.