Recorded 25 January 1985
From WGS, 269–79. Transcribed by Robert D. Denham from the Arts National audiotapes in the CBC Archives. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. First published in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, 1 (Spring 1989): 10–16. The interview with Ian Alexander, the host of the CBC’s Arts National and a former student of Frye’s, was broadcast on the CBC’s Music in My Life series on 1 February 1985.
ALEXANDER: Northrop Frye, you’ve said, “I’m really building everything around a highly personal vision I think I’ve had since I was a child.”1 Can you talk about your childhood and what that vision might have been?
FRYE: I suppose I’m really saying what is true of almost all members of the human race, that they get what I call their archetypes in their childhood and then spend the rest of their lives elaborating them in various ways. I was brought up in a middle-class, nonconformist environment. I have been more or less writing footnotes to the assumptions I acquired at the age of three or so ever since.
ALEXANDER: Do most of those assumptions and archetypes tend to come from your mother?
FRYE: I suppose they came through my mother, yes. The kind of teaching one gets in very early childhood, I suppose, comes to one at any rate in the form of pictures and images. I used to say I always knew where heaven was because it was the other side of the St. Francis River in Sherbrooke that first dawned on my vision.
ALEXANDER: You moved when you were relatively young from Sherbrooke to the Maritimes, I believe.
FRYE: Yes.
ALEXANDER: Was there a sense of being, at that time, relatively isolated? Was there a sense that you were not near a major metropolitan centre?
FRYE: That was very strong as I grew older—into my adolescence. In the Maritimes in the 1920s we were rather culturally isolated. There was no radio—or it was just beginning to come in. It was mostly scratching and screaming for a very long time. There was no bookstore that I remember in Moncton. Everybody in Moncton who was adult simply regarded Moncton as a kind of remote suburb of Boston.
ALEXANDER: It’s interesting that you say Boston rather than a Canadian city. The Maritime ties are to the south rather than to the west?
FRYE: The Maritimers tend to refer to New England as the Boston states. When I graduated from high school, practically all my female classmates went off nursing in either Boston or Providence. A lot of them returned, but that certainly was their headquarters.
ALEXANDER: By this point, I gather, you had become deeply involved with music through the influence of a very important teacher. Can you tell me a bit about George Ross and your first encounter with him?
FRYE: George Ross was the organist at the Saint John’s Presbyterian, later United, Church in Moncton. He had been a student of Sir Hubert Parry, and he was a properly trained musician. He was a music teacher who had a tremendous influence on me, not so much from what he said or did but simply from the authority which he carried from knowing his subject.
ALEXANDER: I want to speak more about George Ross and Northrop Frye as teachers. But first, some music. Was it about 1928 that you were working on the Schubert Impromptus?
FRYE: Nineteen twenty-eight was the centenary of the death of Schubert, and I played a couple of movements from Schubert’s sonatas over the Moncton radio, which was called CNRA in those days.2 Fortunately, that was long before the age of tapes.
ALEXANDER: So we haven’t preserved it. But we do have a Schubert recording here—Murray Perahia playing the Opus 90 Impromptu. Was that a work you studied?
FRYE: Oh, yes, I worked on the first Impromptu. It was one of the things I came across.
ALEXANDER: Let’s listen to it now. [Murray Perahia plays Schubert’s Impromptu, Opus 90, No. 1 in C Minor. Columbia Masterworks IM 37291.] Professor Frye, I know that the piano music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a special interest of yours. What does that particular Schubert Impromptu say to you? Why is it the sort of music that grabs hold of you?
FRYE: I suppose because of the rather simplified, rather square-cut tunes. The music expresses to me the kind of sanity which is the front entrance, so to speak, of a very profound serenity. I have cultivated composers who are not as well known or famous as Schubert, like Clementi and Hummel and Dussek, because they seem to me to be eminently composers of sanity, which I find is very important in my general emotional stability.
ALEXANDER: When you became deeply interested in music as a young man, it was in large part because of your teacher George Ross. I think of you as a teacher above all else—above being a writer or a critic. Do you think of yourself as a teacher?
FRYE: Oh, yes.
ALEXANDER: You’ve spoken of the impersonality of the teacher and connected this with what you saw of how George Ross taught. Can you explain that a bit?
FRYE: Well, I suppose what impressed me about him, or at least gave me complete confidence in him, was that he was never pushing his students to do dramatic things which would redound to his credit. All that he cared about was the music and transmitting that to people.
ALEXANDER: Can you carry that over to your own approach to teaching English literature?
FRYE: I’ve always said that the teacher is subject to the temptation to make himself a substitute for what he’s teaching, whereas his real efforts have to be directed toward making himself a totally transparent medium. If he disappears in the student’s mind as a medium between what he’s teaching and what the student learns, then he’s accomplished what ought to be his ambition.
ALEXANDER: In Moncton in the late 1920s there were, in fact, two keyboards that figured prominently in your life. We’ve talked about the piano, but some people may not know that you were a champion typist at that time.
FRYE: Well, yes. I came up to Toronto to operate an Underwood typewriter for a contest that the company was running. I got my way paid to Toronto, and that was how I managed to get to the University of Toronto. The two forms of touch don’t seem to have clashed a great deal, although many people have said that I played the piano as though it were a typewriter.
ALEXANDER: I understand—and this surprises me a bit in terms of what I know of your personality—that when you came to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, you threw yourself into all kinds of extracurricular activities.
FRYE: I was rather apart. I suppose a teenager, an adolescent, is a rather ingrown person anyway, and I was unusually so because I was not athletic and not well coordinated. So I lived my own life at high school. Then when I came to university, I suddenly found myself in a community where I felt I had a function. And, of course, I just swung over to the opposite extreme and threw myself into everything going.
ALEXANDER: Tell me about the Gilbert and Sullivan musical and its role in the future Frye marriage—your meeting your wife.
FRYE: The Music Club at that time was organized largely around a Gilbert and Sullivan performance, and I got in on that. I didn’t actually take a part in the performance. I never did. I was running the arc light, or helping to do so, in The Pirates of Penzance, which was put on in my first year. The second year was The Gondoliers, and I remember operating the arc light on the left side, while keeping an eye out on the rather cute girl on the right side, who was the prompter and who had previously played the piano for the rehearsals. And she is the present Mrs. Frye.
ALEXANDER: You asked that we play a particular excerpt from The Gondoliers. Could you set the excerpt up for us here?
FRYE: I was very impressed by Brian MacDonald’s commedia dell’arte show of The Gondoliers.3 I thought it was amazing. But being the kind of show it was, he was compelled to cut out some of the numbers. My impression of The Gondoliers was so intense that anything left out was like a missing tooth. I noticed particularly that the rather delightful gavotte late in the second act had been cut.
ALEXANDER: I think we can reinsert it for you right now. [Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts the Pro Arte Orchestra in Sullivan’s “I am a courtier grave and serious” from The Gondoliers. Angel 3570 B/L.] Does that fill in the gap from the Stratford production?
FRYE: Yes, indeed.
ALEXANDER: You spoke of your coming to the University of Toronto and realizing, in a sense, that you were coming home—coming to your natural environment. Was that the feeling?
FRYE: I suppose I’m an urban type and with my tastes I can live only in a city.
ALEXANDER: What about the fact that you have spent such a long time in one place, professionally as well as geographically? Victoria College has been home to you since you went there as an undergraduate. You have taught there for many years and are now chancellor. Has it been a good and important thing for you to be rooted there?
FRYE: I suppose that it has. I’ve never seen any occasion to move. That is, I’ve had suggestions that I should move, which I have had to consider very carefully, and sometimes it’s been quite an agonizing decision. Toronto and Victoria have always been very good to me, and I’ve never regretted having stayed here. I found, as I grew older, that my roots were going deeper and deeper into the Canadian society and that I couldn’t really pull out of that.
ALEXANDER: Is it possible to generalize about how university life, life at the University of Toronto at least, was different, say, about fifty years ago? You got your B.A. in 1933. What was different in the university environment then?
FRYE: There was surprisingly little, really. The university is an enormously continuous institution. While Victoria fifty years ago was, I suppose, a small Methodist college and now it’s a big cosmopolitan university, nevertheless people who have been around it for half a century, like myself, don’t feel any violent discontinuity in what has taken place in that time.
ALEXANDER: Your sense of the university then and now might lead some people listening to think of it as closed or cloistered, or, to use a word of yours, in garrison terms. But your own scholarly activities, it seems to me, have always tended to modulate out into social commentary and to speak of things beyond what we consider traditionally to be the realm of academic study.
FRYE: Oh, yes. I think that that stupid phrase “ivory tower,” which has all the wrong contexts and echoes, is particularly misleading when applied to the university. The university is the engine-room of society. That’s where the source of society’s energy is.
ALEXANDER: After you got your B.A. you spent some time at Oxford and took a degree there. Was it not at Oxford that you got deeply involved with The Magic Flute?
FRYE: When I was at Oxford a classmate of mine there had bought a recording of The Magic Flute—a 78 recording. While I had known about The Magic Flute, this was the first opportunity I’d had to study it in detail. It’s my favourite opera, not because the libretto by itself is anything wonderful, but because when it’s presented through Mozart’s music it gives the impression of revealing all the mysteries that ever were. [James Levine conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera Chorus in “O Isis and Osiris, grant the spirit of wisdom to the new pair!” from act 2 of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. RCA CTCA-4124.]
ALEXANDER: You’ve been interested in romance—I use the term in its cultural sense—for a very long time. Why would a critic be drawn to what is in some sense a kind of trashy, popular literature? It’s not necessarily high art.
FRYE: I’ve never felt that starting civil wars between highbrow and lowbrow literature was very helpful. I notice that popular literature in the first place is often better than it’s said to be, and in the second place it contains the formulas that the greatest literature does and sometimes in a form that’s a little easier to explain if you’re a critic. So I’ve often found myself using popular literature as a guide to what literature as a whole is all about.
ALEXANDER: Would it be fair to say, then, that your academic preoccupations over a very long time have been variations on a theme, or as a recent title of a book of your essays puts it, divisions on a ground?
FRYE: I think so. My life has been a kind of spiral, expanding from and always revolving around the same issues. I picked up a remark in a review of a book of mine which said that I was always rewriting my central myth in every book I wrote, and it occurred to me that every writer I would ever read or trust has done the same thing.
ALEXANDER: Certainly, as a lot of people know, books of yours like Anatomy of Criticism, and the more recent Great Code, are rooted in your early interest in the poetry of William Blake.
FRYE: Yes, I suppose I learned everything I know from Blake in one way or another.
ALEXANDER: You’ve spoken of your coming to an awareness of Blake as a kind of epiphany. Can you describe that experience?
FRYE: Perhaps you mean the time when I was taking a graduate course in Blake with Herbert Davis, who later went to Oxford. I was assigned a paper to write on Blake’s Milton for which there was, of course, no secondary material whatever. My very bad habit in those days was to start a paper the night before I was to read it. About half-past three in the morning some very funny things started happening in my mind, and I began to see dimensions of critical experience that I’d never dreamed existed before—a sudden expansion of the horizon. When I went out for breakfast—I remember it was a bitterly cold morning—I knew that I was to write a book on Blake. And fifteen years later I did.
ALEXANDER: That was Fearful Symmetry in 1947.
FRYE: Yes.
ALEXANDER: Probably the piece of William Blake’s poetry that most people know best is the piece from Milton [the hymn Jerusalem] that Hubert Parry set. There is a connection between yourself and Parry, I think.
FRYE: He was my musical grandfather—the teacher of my teacher. George Ross always had a great respect for Parry and spoke of the intelligence of the exercises that he set his students to do. As for the Blake, Jerusalem is the greatest hymn in the English language. While I’m not sure that any musical setting of it is definitive, that’s as good a one as I know. [Alan Wicks directs the Choir of Canterbury Cathedral, the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, and organist David Flood in Jerusalem, words by William Blake and music by Sir Hubert Parry.]
ALEXANDER: Do you ever feel at all uncomfortable with the kind of image, the kind of position you now hold, not just in the academic community, but in the minds of people in Canada and around the world? Does that position disturb you? Do you wish you didn’t hold it?
FRYE: I really don’t know that it does disturb me all that much. I wouldn’t care to be idolized, but then I don’t think I am idolized. If I get, say, a crank letter from somebody, I think, well, he must believe that I’m accessible or he wouldn’t write to me.
ALEXANDER: You do remain quite accessible. That must cut into the time available for your own ongoing original work.
FRYE: It certainly does, yes, but there’s no way out of it that I can see. I have an unlisted telephone number and I have a wonderfully efficient secretary, but there are still limits, and I don’t want to shut myself away. That would turn me into a different person.
ALEXANDER: We’ve spoken about early nineteenth-century piano music by composers less well known than Franz Schubert, and you mentioned in particular Muzio Clementi. I’d like to find out a little more about your interest in Clementi. You play the piano a good deal yourself and have done so throughout your life.
FRYE: Yes. At first, of course, I took in the standard keyboard repertoire, starting with the Beethoven sonatas. But the thing is that you get so completely absorbed in the standard composers that eventually, if you’re still playing, you look around for more variety. Because I’m an amateur pianist and I don’t play in public, I have looked for keyboard music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which an amateur can play and enjoy.
ALEXANDER: I think you have quite a collection of Clementi.
FRYE: Yes, I have a fairly large collection of that.
ALEXANDER: You asked us to play a particular sonata by Clementi. Does it have not only musical resonances for you but mythological, programmatic resonances, too?
FRYE: Yes, it’s Clementi’s sonata on the abandoning of Dido. It always amused me, because Clementi was such a level-headed composer, and he starts off in a minor ninth, which for him, of course, was a frightful dissonance. Before long he marks the movement con disperazione. But in a very few minutes you’re in the regular finale rondo of early nineteenth-century piano music. It’s a triumph of musical conventions over literature, a kind that rather amuses me.
ALEXANDER: We’ll listen now to the last movement of the sonata. [Pianist Lamar Crowson plays Clementi’s sonata Didone Abbandonata, Opus 50, No. 3 in G Minor. L’Oiseau-Lyre Sol 306.] Before and after Clementi, many composers dealt with the story of Dido and Aeneas, and many writers made use of it in prose and poetry. Why do stories like that get set into human consciousness and keep floating to the surface?
FRYE: Well, it’s one of the central stories about how a woman dies for love, so she became a saint and martyr in the courtly love tradition that’s celebrated all through the Christian centuries down to the seventeenth and eighteenth. What I like about that movement is that if Dido had only had the sense of proportion that Clementi had, she would never have thrown herself away on a jerk like Aeneas.
ALEXANDER: But what I wanted to get at was the idea that no matter how original a work of genius may be, the best are always rooted in things that are furthest from originality. Aren’t they often?
FRYE: The original writer is the person who returns to origins. The man who produces the imperishable classic is not a man with a new story but a man who tells one of the world’s great stories again and tells it better.
ALEXANDER: I think Yeats said something about choosing between the unity of the life and the unity of the work.4 You seem to have been able to organize both life and work pretty well. Has that been good luck or good management?
FRYE: It’s been a mixture of both, but I think mostly good luck. That is, the things that look as though I had planned them from infancy I just blundered into. I think that I have always kept my life as quiet and uneventful as I possibly could in order to keep my work more or less in balance.
ALEXANDER: What remains to be done? What is at the top of your list of priorities right now?
FRYE: Oh, another big book on how all literature comes out of certain metaphorical and mythological patterns, most of which are in the Bible.
ALEXANDER: I’ve been most interested in some of the things you’ve had to say about music this evening. This last operatic excerpt, though, is of a very different sort. It’s the Finale to act 3 of Verdi’s Falstaff. Tell me why this is an appropriate way for us to end.
FRYE: Well, if I were asked who my favourite composer was, the answer would have to be Johann Sebastian Bach. So I suppose I have a particular affection for somebody who can display the acrobatic skill that Bach does in things like The Art of the Fugue. It’s partly for that reason that the greatest single moment in opera for me outside of Mozart is that Finale of Verdi’s Falstaff, the great fugue at the end.
ALEXANDER: Are they sentiments with which you can agree—everything in the world is a jest?
FRYE: Well, I think of a very profound devotional, religious poet, George Herbert, who said
All things are big with jest; nothing that’s plain
But may be witty, if thou hast the vein.5
I’ve always had a strong interest in the nature of comedy and the way in which even tragedy seems to fit inside as a kind of episode in a total story which is comic. While I’m not sure that everything in the world is simply a jest, there is a point at which the oracular and the witty do come together.
ALEXANDER: Northrop Frye, I’ve enjoyed chatting with you once again. Thank you very much. [The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays the Finale to act 3 of Verdi’s Falstaff.]