Filmed 23 November 1987
From the videocassette in NFF, 1992, box 5. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1987. Frye was interviewed in Massey College by broadcaster Valerie Pringle for CBC’s Midday, 3 March 1988, to mark the imminent publication of his collection of essays, On Education. The book actually appeared in November 1988, according to a letter in NFF, 1991, box 20, file 5.
PRINGLE: You started your formal education in school at the age of eight, which is later than most kids. In all I read about you, you don’t have very kind things to say about teachers or the educational system, which you’ve called a form of penal servitude [WE, 143]. It seems sort of bizarre that you’d end up spending your life in its service.
FRYE: Well, I was taught at home, and those were fairly easy-going days, when our family was shuttling back and forth between Quebec and New Brunswick. So it was just a matter of accident that I did start when I was eight. They put me in grade 4 and I staggered through to grade 11—that was as far as you could go in Moncton at that time. So that’s really why I’m still interested in education—I had very little of it.
PRINGLE: But you were a great reader?
FRYE: Oh yes. I was brought up in a family that was full of books, and I did get a hand on reading.
PRINGLE: You talk of having a good grasp of nineteenth-century literature by the age of fifteen, reading volumes of Dickens and Scott …
FRYE: Yes, reasonably, I did have that, because our house had those books. It was partly a matter of being brought up in a Methodist blue Sunday home too—there was nothing else to do on Sunday except read.
PRINGLE: You had a very Evangelical and strict upbringing as a child. Were you really pumped with religion?
FRYE: In a way I was. My mother’s father had been a Methodist circuit rider. She taught me what her father had taught her and felt that she ought to believe in. But children are rather quick at seeing what’s behind the scenes and something else got through. Anyway, it never warped either her mind or mine, I don’t think.
PRINGLE: You talk about one time—it sounds like almost an epiphany-like experience—when you were walking along and all of a sudden the weight of your religious upbringing just lifted from your shoulders.
FRYE: Well, everything that was stupid about the religious background, everything that was anxiety and taboo—“And don’t do this,” and so forth—that just fell off. It was such an immense relief. There was no question of revolt or inner turmoil at all, it was just something I didn’t have to carry around any more.
PRINGLE: And yet you’re ordained as a minister. Did you really think you would spend your life doing that?
FRYE: When you’re brought up in a town like Moncton in the ‘20s, which at that time was not a university town, [the church] is the only cultural symbol there is, and it never occurred to me that I would be teaching in a university because I didn’t have any direct contact with university. I came to Victoria as a religious student and I finished that course. But again, I discovered … it wasn’t an intellectual revolt at all, it was simply the fact that clergymen in the modern world are primarily administrators, and I’m not.
PRINGLE: You had a brief time as a minister out in Saskatchewan in a place called Stone Pile. Do you have any memories of that time?
FRYE: I remember Katy, who had a trot that she was very proud of. But when she trotted the only thing you could do was stand up in the stirrups and the saddle would come up and smack your rear end and come down again. That’s what I remember most vividly. Katy was slightly older than I was; she was about twenty-five. She heard a fair amount about my parishioners. From the way her ears twitched I knew she understood me.
PRINGLE: You decided that wasn’t the life for you; you weren’t meant to be a minister.
FRYE: I had mixed feelings about it. It obviously wasn’t the life for me—I wasn’t brought up to it. At the same time the people I met were extraordinary people and I developed a respect for them that I would not want to be without. I think I would always find people wherever I was in the ministry that I would respect very deeply. But, again, I would feel that I was a fish out of water, that I was born to be a teacher.
PRINGLE: Do you feel that now, that you were born to be a teacher?
FRYE: Oh, I feel I was born to be a teacher. Perhaps at the age of seventyfive one can let up on a bit of it. During my active career I’ve always felt that my writing and my teaching played into each other a great deal, that the one benefited the other, and that I couldn’t believe anything I said in writing unless I’d tried it out on a class and got them to respond to it.
PRINGLE: There must have been times when people said, “Look, we’ll get rid of the troublesome part for you; you should just concentrate on writing books and that form of academia.”
FRYE: Yes, but there’s also the fact that one gets rather fond of students and one likes personal contact with people; and that a lecturer is a public performer, which means he’s about nine-tenths ham and he consequently likes a public response to what he does.
PRINGLE: Do you have a sense ever that there’s not enough time to read all the books that you want to read?
FRYE: I still have that feeling at times, and then at other times I feel great relief about the number of books that I’m never going to read. That’s partly a matter of perspective of course. I remember a student, a girl of about eighteen, telling me that she hoped she would live to be eighty so that she could read everything she wanted to read. What amused me about that remark was that eighty at that time to her sounded like a hundred to me. But you get there fast enough.
PRINGLE: Where do you think you’ve had your greatest influence, through your books—and obviously you’ve been read by millions of people and will be—or on the individuals who’ve passed through your classroom?
FRYE: It’s hard to say, because there are two very different rhythms there. I know that I have had a very considerable personal influence on students. The long-term influence is spotty, because it goes in the cycles of fashion. In one decade, everybody reads Frye; in the next decade, nobody reads Frye—he’s old hat and they read something else. But in another decade that may change again.
PRINGLE: It’s something to come in and out of fashion in your own lifetime.
FRYE: Whatever happens you don’t worry about it.
PRINGLE: You don’t care about posterity?
FRYE: I don’t care about posterity. I’m not writing for posterity, I’m writing for me.
PRINGLE: And you’re pleased with it?
FRYE: Yes.