Northrop Frye had no desire to be a “media celebrity,” no itch for publicity in itself. Undoubtedly, he would rather have been at home in his study writing and thinking than sitting before a microphone fielding questions he had probably heard many times before. The enormous number of interviews he granted bears witness both to his heightened sense of the social responsibility of academics, and to his personal, Methodist-derived belief in his own vocation as a preacher (in an extended sense) of the Word (318–20). And as the preface points out, the present volume, large as it is, represents only what remains of an even greater number of appearances. In spite of needing to husband his resources, he could be persuaded to be interviewed by almost any individual or on behalf of any organization that revealed itself to be interested in the value of literature, reading, and culture. He talked with Roman Catholic priests, poets, teachers, students crying out for change, graduates deploring change, professors, Italian and East European critics steeped in literary theory, interviewers and journalists of many persuasions. Just two months before his death, ill with cancer, he still agreed to answer questions from the type of person he found it hardest to resist, a student writing for undergraduates. The range of printed sources is large in this volume, including newspapers of all stripes and from several countries, magazines and periodicals from the popular Chatelaine to the scholarly Studies in Canadian Literature, student organs, teachers’ journals, and books. His voice was heard on radio programs discussing the future of humanity, the bomb, evil, and a host of other topics besides his own books and ideas. In these discussions he was acting as he thought the intellectual should act in society, contributing to informed, civilized discussion.
By happy chance, the very first interview in this volume, a radio discussion on “What Has Become of Conversation?” (1948), establishes the importance for Frye of such verbal exchanges. Though he is delightfully cynical about the normal characteristics of conversation—the competing egos, the slander of absent friends—nevertheless he defends good conversation as an essential basis of civil life. And in the second interview he names discussions between people with different points of view as one of the central civilized values that must be defended (18). As he says later, “the kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication” (747); the man who can produce such sentences extemporaneously is a fine advertisement for his own belief in articulate speech. In no. 71, deploring jargon and gobbledygook, he links good scholarship in the humanities with “constant practice in conversational style, speaking to intelligent people in a kind of concrete language” (702). No. 84 is a sympathetic discussion with Vince Carlin, chief correspondent for CBC Radio news, about the problems the journalist faces in an age of mass media and their rain of clichés. Frye speaks feelingly of the importance of the individual voice and of how, if he were a journalist, he might wish for a platform “in which I would have the chance to express things the way I would express them. My idiom would come through, and the sense of the impact of a personality has everything to do with whether it’s memorable or not” (772).
It is that personality and that idiom which he stamped on Canadian culture, and which can be revisited in this volume. Fortunately, though some of the interviews were originally broadcast on radio or filmed for television, the essence of Frye can still be savoured here: perhaps he was like his favourite composer Bach, whose structure survives in any medium. At any rate, the sound of his voice and his visual image are not central to his presentation. Margaret Atwood has memorably described the far from expressive “Frye dance” during lectures:
He stood at the front of the room. He took one step forward, put his left hand on the table, took another forward, put his right hand on the table, took a step back, removed his left hand, another step back, removed his right hand, and repeated the pattern.1
As a “talking head” he has, of course, no feet to step with; and left and right hands seldom appear. His head movements and facial expressions are minimal. Occasionally, in his effort to craft a sentence, he closes his eyes for a moment or nods his head gently, at which times you can almost hear the mental wheels turning. Visually he is benign, cooperative, patient, and a little baggy around the cheeks by the time he reaches the TV age; often he is dressed in a tweed jacket of nondescript colour. Aurally, he is no nightingale. There is an amusing passage in his diary for 1950 when he hears himself on the radio:
At six [P.M.] I heard a most curious noise over the radio purporting to come from some Professor named Frye who was talking about books. It’s the first time I’ve heard my voice, except for a few remarks in that Infeld programme. I would never have recognized it as my own voice: that nasal honking grating buzz-saw of a Middle-Western corncrake. I need a few years in England. (D, 293)
Throughout his life he was troubled by his throat, and attempted little ineffectual clearings of it.
Frye’s willingness to appear so often in the media was the more praiseworthy in that the interview was not really his most congenial form. Although, as remarked, he was an excellent speaker—one feels that, unlike his students and the misinformed M. Jourdain in Molière,2 he had been speaking prose all his life—the informal address was his preferred medium. In a piece of self-analysis in his notebook he wrote that “what’s ‘creative’ in me is the professional rhetorician …. I’m one of Jung’s feeling types, a senser of occasions …. I’m usually first-rate at impromptu” (LN, 247). A one-on-one interview could be more troublesome because of his innate shyness. He admitted that he seldom took the initiative in conversations. Asked by John Plaskett whether this reticence might work against him, he replied quietly, “Yes, I think it would. It’s worked against me all my life” (435). Mathieu Lindon offers a graphic description of Frye’s nervously twisting hands (726). At the end of the tape of the interviews that make up Northrop Frye in Conversation is a final, unprinted interchange. David Cayley asks whether there are any more questions he should have asked, and Frye apologizes that he hasn’t answered a lot of the questions in a very satisfactory way, but that he felt like a worm on a hook only proving it was alive by wriggling. From time to time one seems to feel this squirm.
Not only was Frye himself nervous; he also reacted to the nervousness of others. Mild and accommodating though he was, some interviewers worked themselves into a frenzy of apprehension at the thought of questioning the great man. My collection of expressions of such dread includes Peter Yan’s confession that “interviewing Frye was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life, right up there with getting married and filling out my first income tax form”;3 Irma DeFord’s remark that “I felt I was going to talk to Moses on the mount”;4 the CBC’s Paul Kennedy’s “my knees were knocking”;5 and Deborah Shackleton’s introducing her two-part interview with Frye with the thought that, “being neither a scholar nor a writer and having read of his genius, I was terrified that the interviews would be a debacle.”6 Deanne Bogdan relates that she was so nervous she tripped over the tape recorder’s cord and pulled out the plug.7 Frye’s reaction to such an excess of nerves could be to become tongue-tied himself. Helen Heller (at one time Frye’s editor at Fitzhenry and Whiteside) asked him what went wrong in the interview on Morningside (no. 88), and he replied, “Oh my dear, the first thing Mr. Gzowski did was to tell me how afraid he is of me. And I couldn’t think of anything to say after that.”8 In fact, Frye is too modest here: the tape shows him coming out with fairly fluent answers, thanks in part to his complete mastery of the material in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, some of whose phrases he echoes. In an unfortunate closed circuit of fear echoing fear and nervousness proving contagious, it is Gzowski who is reduced to a jelly. Gzowski’s questions on pp. 813–20 have been edited considerably for ease of reading; an accurate transcription of one of his remarks would read something like:
[Shakespeare’s] all on the stage, as you say, I mean, I’d, there’s—this is a charming idea this offers—if he were a twentieth-century playwright we’d have him on—well, I don’t think the curr—he’d be on Morningside—we’d have him—he’d do a regular—or we’d—Morningside would at least phone him up, right, and say, “What do you think of what’s happening in Afghanistan now, Will?” [talking over Frye’s murmur of assent, bounding thankfully to the end].
The interview is an anomalous form for Frye by reason, too, of his characteristic habit of thought. He often remarked on the fact that for him thinking involved essentially finding the right verbal formulas. To interviewer Ann Craik he explained that “there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it. … [I]deas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words” (746). Or as he wrote in a notebook, “I keep revolving around the same place until I’ve brought off a verbal formulation that I like” (LN, 89). Once he had formulated the phrase, this was the idea, and this, in more or less the same words, was what he brought out when questioned. For instance, the notion that a writer’s meaning resides in both what he meant to his own time and what he means to us is a favourite one. Possibly its first use is in the talk “The University and Personal Life” of 9 December 1968, where the understanding of an alien culture is linked to the educational practice of humanism and the training of British civil servants for India, and called the “liberalizing element” in a liberal education (WE, 374). The same ideas and expressions fit handily into an interview shortly afterwards, on 30 December (167–8). Another interview of September 1969 may be the first to introduce the verb “kidnap” for the understanding of an author in only modern terms (194).9 The whole complex of ideas and phrases is still doing duty in the Presidential Address to the MLA in 1976 (WE, 485), in a 1982 interview (634), and elsewhere. Readers will undoubtedly come across many a familiar formulation, from the notion that you can’t take off in a jet plane and expect to find a different civilization when you land (299) to the foolishness of ascribing creativity to genres rather than to the people working in them (471).
This use of stock phrases (along, of course, with his being asked the same questions) leads, one must admit, to a good deal of repetition in this volume. The sequential reader needs to hold fast to Frye’s dictum on the Koran: “What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three hundred times is profoundly true” (RT, 198). The downside of Frye’s ability to write in lucid prose is that, unlike more impenetrably technical writers, he has no need of an interviewer who might induce him to translate his ideas into ordinary English. He has already hammered his idea out in the best English he can find, and if asked he will say it again. Besides which, shyness makes it handy to have a pre-thought reply.
These cavils aside, one must point out Frye’s efforts to put his interviewers at ease. Their fear of him was largely self-induced and unnecessary. He was not one to condescend to them. On the contrary, he was a perfect gentleman, calibrating his response and respecting the sensibilities of his interlocutor. What the Frye community knows affectionately as the “shitty garment episode” when the young Frye is relieved of fundamentalist religious doctrines is habitually described in those terms (see pp. 922–3), but to Deanne Bodgan Frye more politely speaks of “blinkers” falling away (796). He listened carefully to questions and did his best to answer them. As he remarked in one of his notebooks, “I’m also particularly good, or used to be, at answering questions; my ability to translate a dumb question into a searching one has often been commented on” (LN, 248). This volume gives ample testimony to his sporting willingness to find an answerable question in some rather opaque formulations. In no. 25, “Science Policy and the Quality of Life,” for instance, Cathleen Going and others give him some posers:
GOING: Your suggestion for wisdom and discrimination within the vitality of a vital tradition would be …?
FRYE: Within the …?
GOING: Within the reemergence of the more vital, or the recovery or the rediscovery of a more vital experience, where would one look for the criteria of discrimination, in other words where would one look for the wise man?
FRYE: The wise man? Yes. Well, I think that if one compares wisdom and knowledge …10
In which answer one sees both ingenuity and a relieved reliance on one of his ready-made formulations (first seen at p. 83 here, and used often in graduation addresses). Naïm Kattan’s experience (no. 8) is fairly typical: he found that at first Frye reflected long and silently before answering his questions, but that as the interview progressed he became engaged, and even waxed vehement over Marshall McLuhan.11
Of course, ancient lore has it that the interviewer’s nightmare occurs when the interviewee pays great attention to a long, carefully-crafted question, ponders, and then answers very accurately, “yes,” or it may be, “no.”12 There are a few instances in this volume where Frye interprets a question more literally than might have been desirable:
BOGDAN: You have thought a lot about the relationship of aesthetic experience to religious experience, haven’t you?
FRYE: Oh, a great deal, yes.
BOGDAN: Can you expand on that? (806)
RASKY: Is the Bible fact or fiction? Can one answer that?
FRYE: No. (864)
William Barker (no. 71) was probably not the only interviewer who disguised this problem in editing:
He answered in very short clips, in a tightly polished aphoristic style. It was tough to get a flow. I found if I could ask three linked questions, I could then later edit myself out of the exchange, and you could get a whole minute of Frye speaking seamlessly on a topic—a string of elegant aphorisms that almost sounded like a continuous series of thoughts.13
But some of Frye’s short answers are remarkably effective rhetorically. Given his detestation of some of the university reforms of the 1960s, one can well understand the following exchange with the Varsity:
FRASER: Do you think the students of the ’60s accomplished anything?
FRYE: No. (476)
I particularly like the following:
RRASKY: I wonder if I would be prying if I said, Does Northrop Frye talk to God?
FRYE: Yes. (871)
His thoughtful silence before replying, his slight smile, do not reveal which part of the question he is answering, but definitely discourage prying.
Nevertheless, questions are important to Frye: there is a sense in which the question is more important than the answer. He has often remarked upon the fact that to answer a question is to consolidate the mental level upon which it is asked, and thus to block further advance.14 As a teacher, though he did of course answer students’ questions, he thought his real role was to feign ignorance and to pose questions himself, “just as Socrates did” (987). An interview reversed the situation: the interviewer was the one asking the questions and in control of the flow. So Frye depended to some extent on the interviewer’s astuteness in finding questions, and perhaps on his or her willingness not to take Frye’s words as final, but to insist on “the right to keep on repeating the question” (273). The most effective interviewers here are those who follow up a response by probing its implications, joining Frye, in one of his favourite images, in a dialectic.
Thus Cayley is successful in his Northrop Frye in Conversation partly because he continues to question Frye with a “What do you mean by that?” approach. When Frye goes off on a tangent, he is capable of complaining that “I’m still not sure you’ve answered my question” (948). Hugh Oliver is another interviewer who won’t take any guff from Frye, but, when Frye for instance objects to the phrase “learning grammar” and maintains that “You don’t learn grammar. What you learn is a language that has a grammatical structure,” argues back with some cogency, “But you are taught grammatical terms, are you not? You learn what a gerundive is and that sort of thing” (333), and thus gets Frye to enlarge on what he thinks is the right approach to grammar in teaching a language. Amusingly in this interview with a member of OISE, Frye takes the opportunity, when asked about the effect of the ideas in Design for Learning, to complain that they might have had more influence if the government hadn’t obliterated the Curriculum Institute with this American-staffed mammoth institution (i.e., OISE itself). Oliver ventures to point out that less than a quarter of the staff are American, and adds tartly that in any case “such an argument would have little to do with literacy” (332).
Frye learned from his students’ questions and from working out his own ideas before them (321): “In a sense I don’t believe anything I say until I hear myself saying it” (674). As he points out here, whereas the videotaped Bible lectures appear to be quoting The Great Code, in fact The Great Code uses expressions hammered out in the classroom. Did he learn in the same way from his interviewers? One amusing such instance came to my attention because of the time I had spent, as editor of Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, fruitlessly searching for the source of Frye’s assertion that “Buckminster Fuller has remarked that unless a first principle can be grasped by a six-year-old, it is not really a first principle” (WE, 525). Only when I came to edit these interviews did I realize that Frye was actually quoting, almost verbatim, a remark made to him a month earlier by interviewer Bryant Fillion (465). The connections between the interviews and the writings will be fully apparent only when all the Collected Works have been published and indexed. But experience, and Frye’s prodigious memory, suggest that Frye was surely alerted to puzzlements and gaps by astute questioning.
What do we, as readers, learn from the efforts of these questioners?—people who, at the best, act as our surrogates in interrogating the author. When researching the identity of the interviewers for the headnotes, I was amazed at the later eminence of many of the people who questioned Frye at an early stage in their careers, not to mention those who were already established. They include youngsters who would grow up to be university presidents, distinguished professors and heads of departments, members of the Order of Canada, writers, a future general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, and many others, some of whom because of my own limitations I have failed to identify. Between them they give a panorama of Frye’s thought and concerns. Readers who do not plan to read the whole volume might consider concentrating, first, on David Cayley’s Northrop Frye in Conversation (no. 102), a splendid survey, both biographical and theoretical, by an interviewer who has studied Frye’s works in depth. (The presence in the background of Sara Wolch, with whom Frye felt comfortable, no doubt helped to grease the wheels of this interview.) Imre Salusinszky probes Frye’s literary theory in the context of other modern schools in no. 82. There is a sensitive exploration of his early life in “Moncton, Mentors, and Memories” by Deanne Bogdan (no. 86). Bruce Mickleburgh does an excellent job of eliciting Frye’s views on education (no. 14), as does Hugh Oliver specifically on reading and writing (no. 36). Interesting questions on science vs. art are broached in no. 59 by John Cargill and Angela Esterhammer: Frye reacted favourably to student interviewers such as these, even to disaffected ones. An interview with graduate student Andrew Kaufman, himself a writer (no. 67), sheds interesting light on Frye’s habits of composition. A number of interviewers have tackled Frye’s religious views; particularly interesting is his dialogue with Gregory Baum (no. 5). David Lawton is a knowledgable Biblical scholar who has pertinent questions about Frye’s Christian background and the reaction of Jewish readers to his work (no. 85). The state of Canadian literature is handled well by Robert Fulford (no. 53). For those interested in Frye’s education and involvement with Victoria College and the University of Toronto, there is a fascinating series of interviews that were made in connection with an oral history project, and that elaborate on many personal relationships (no. 64). Interviewer Valerie Schatzker obviously has a point of view of her own, but fortunately it is not dissimilar to Frye’s; and she provides a helpful, running historical background.
There are two areas of particular interest, showing Frye’s involvement in Canadian culture, which deserve somewhat extended consideration because of their unfamiliarity. The first did not, eventually, yield a publishable interview for this volume, but its existence should be noted here. As part of Canada’s exhibit at Expo ’67 in Montreal, “Man and his World,” the National Film Board had undertaken to produce an innovative, multi-screen work revolving around the labyrinth, on the theme of “man’s conquest of himself”: the title Labyrinthe was given its French form in deference to the Quebec setting. The production team already knew Frye: director Roman Kroitor and film editor Tom Daly, as well as associate Wolf Koening, had worked on the film University in which he appeared (no. 3). They persuaded Frye to act as chief consultant to the project, and he attended a brain-storming session at a ski lodge in St. Jovite, Quebec on 12 May 1964. Notes on this interview survive in a holograph notebook of Tom Daly entitled “Discussions on the Future of the Labyrinthe Project, St. Jovite, May 12, 1964” in the Archives of the NFB. Although written in dialogue form, these are too fragmentary or illegible to provide a readable text, but they do show Frye suggesting the way archetypal patterns and images of the quest and Minotaur myth—the descent to the underworld, struggle with the monster, and rebirth—could be used to shape what he said was the “only one story—the story of your life.”15 His knowledge awed Daly: “It was like he had an encyclopaedia of all his researches right there in his brain.”16 Frye’s contribution surely influenced what proved to be a very popular spectacle, for which there were long line-ups. It also influenced Frye himself: he came back from Montreal with the plan of “writing the book [his ‘Third Book’] in the fullest quest or labyrinth form” (TBN, 81).
Another type of involvement is represented by the substantial series of interviews (no. 13) with the Canadian Radio-Television Commission. Established by the Broadcasting Act of 1 April 1968, the CRTC replaced the Board of Broadcast Governors as the regulator of Canadian broadcasting, as a result of a white paper which had stressed that a national system was essential for fostering Canadian identity and unity. Frye was asked to join as one of nine part-time members shortly after its establishment, and served loyally until mid-1977—“nine bloody years,” as he recalled them later (984). Jane Widdicombe’s list of dates (which does not even include the 1968 and 1969 interviews published in this volume, and at least one which preceded them) shows an astonishing 137 days devoted to CRTC meetings in Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Kingston, and Quebec City between 1970 and September 1977.
The Commission’s mandate included reviewing the program logs of stations and issuing or renewing licences, as reflected in no. 31. Frye’s presence at public hearings into the past or future performance of stations has been commented on before; he is generally described as a quiet member of the Commission, somewhat intimidating the petitioners. (His most widely quoted intervention, in which he corrected a hapless broadcaster who had taken “Junius” for a Roman rather than an eighteenth-century Englishman, is not likely to alter this perception.)17 Less well known is his participation in the theoretical underpinnings of the Commission. He had been induced to join mainly as a “tame intellectual” who would discuss ideas with the CRTC’s Research Department, as he explains at p. 997, and in 1969 and 1970 he spent day-long sessions with André Martin and Rodrigue Chiasson of the Research Department, discussing the ways the CRTC might fulfil its mandate of furthering Canadian culture (no. 13).
In their original, unedited form especially, these conversations are a tribute to one characteristic of Canadian life, being a delightful, bilingual mélange. At times it is not always clear how much mutual understanding there was. For instance, it is charitable to suppose that Martin had not picked up Frye’s reference to his work on Labyrinthe (107); and we hope that Frye did not hear him when he used Labyrinthe later as an example of an unsuccessful, wasteful film, “un jeu dénué de sens” [a senseless game] (119). Frye’s own concrete vocabulary sorts oddly with Martin’s technological jargon, his talk of “severing static or heuristic dynamic diet to dynamic analogic diet”18 and the like. But in other ways these two CRTC theorists are men after Frye’s heart. They react with en-thusiasm to Frye’s “Logos” diagram—“It’s a fountain, it’s a well” exclaims Martin (140). In fact Martin is preparing a Frye-like chart, which he constantly revises, showing the intersection of the “open system” with the “current information system” (95).
The research department were facing an uphill battle in their desire to promote a fundamentally Canadian broadcasting system. They had no direct contact with the producers of programs, but could only judge the general management of the stations. The CRTC had become involved in requiring a certain amount of “Canadian content” which would foster native production instead of American imports; but Martin’s initial suggestion here is that perhaps their attention should be turned to the system rather than to content, technological innovation being a Canadian specialty. He is speaking at a time of technological change, with the development of cable, satellite communications, and even primitive computers about to complicate the CRTC’s purview. Frye is aware of this cultural upheaval; it is interesting to see how much he draws on his experience with students, who help him to understand the new ways of simultaneous perception and its strengths and weaknesses (120). But for all his belief that the new technologies can be on the side of creativity (108), Frye is not on Martin’s wavelength here: as he often made clear in his explanations of how he disagreed with Marshall McLuhan, for him the medium is not really the message,19 and the book, one of Martin’s “anciennes technologies” (89), is not about to be superseded. His remark on current astronomical feats, “You get to the moon without stopping to think whether the moon is worth landing on” (139),20 is typical, as is his gloomy prediction that “We’ll set up the hardware with great speed and efficiency and then there will be a long silence” (142): obviously he is not following in the footsteps of his father, a hardware salesman.
Normally Frye’s inclination is to stress form over content, and in this discussion he champions not Canadian content but a type of form, the Canadian attitude (96). There is much interesting discussion about the nature of this attitude, its cool observant quality and its relation to abstraction, the landscape, and the black and white of winter. As in his literary criticism, Frye champions regionalism—the local and specific which can become universal—and the use of imaginative images rather than argument. His ideal program is one which presents discontinuous images (in the manner of some of his favourite poetry), leaving the viewer to connect them and thus to be at once detached and involved. The problem addressed here is how the CRTC could foster a climate in which such creation could be encouraged: it is easier to say what should be avoided (censorship, coercive value judgments, and excessive regulation) than to suggest solutions (conferences on experimental projects are one suggestion, p. 107).
These discussions sufficiently impressed the full-time staff of the CRTC that they entered into a scheme to use Frye to help develop “foreground studies.” In NFF, 1988, box 75, file 5 is the correspondence describing these variously as “a study of operational and figurational activities and practices,” “a study of the symbolic form and content of TV programming,” and “an inductive method of comparative and positive evaluation.” Martin arranged for the rental of two colour television sets, at a time when colour was an expensive luxury—but one that influenced presentation—so that Frye could view television programs both in his office and at home. (One can only imagine the puzzlement of students who came to discuss their essays with Frye and found him hunched over the Miss Canada beauty contest.) His detailed reports on this and other programs, also in NFF, have been published in vol. 10 of the Collected Works;21 they include the judgment that “talking heads and interviews are the easiest and cheapest forms of filling up time on television” (LS, 290). Was this confirmed or regretted, one wonders, in the light of subsequent experience? Transcriptions of some of the discussions setting up Frye’s work are in the same box in the Frye Fonds; though in dialogue form, these were judged not to be “interviews” but rather notes on meetings, dominated by other commission members, and so are not reproduced here.
It would be interesting, though difficult, to trace specific ramifications of these CRTC discussions. For Frye himself they surely intensified his thinking about the new media and their influence; without the CRTC he would hardly have been exposed to Sesame Street or the Carol Burnett Show. They were an experience in embodying theory in specific social policies; and, like the Labyrinthe session, they brought him to envisage what a Canadian cultural artefact in a different medium might look like. Frye’s influence on broadcast policy would also be hard to pin down. It would be fascinating to find that the arcana of Frye’s Logos diagram and its Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus quadrants had left their mark in some media planning; easier, meanwhile, to see the time and effort Frye was willing to devote to defining the Canadian identity in quarters where this brought absolutely no scholarly or personal credit.
The CRTC item is more of a conversation than a normal interview. In most other cases, the interlocutor is trying to elicit facts or explanations that help to clarify the Frye oeuvre. Much in this volume provides an overview of what it is most important to know about Frye. Perhaps even more valuable, however, are the “sidelights” which, perhaps owing to the way a question is asked or to some particular felicity in the phraseology of Frye’s reply, suddenly illuminate an aspect of Frye’s thought. For me, one such moment occurs when Stan Corey asks Frye about Dante’s four levels and the theory of “polysemous meaning.” Perhaps there has never been a better explanation than Frye’s saying that one could take it “as a kind of expanding dialectic that grew in the reader’s mind as he continued to read and study the book in front of him; so that what you have is not different levels of meaning and different senses but a single sense that keeps growing and expanding in its range of significance” (665).22 There is a lovely explanation to Cayley of Frye’s avoidance of dialectical argument: “to me criticism is really the expression of the awareness of language” (954). He finely illuminates, also to Cayley, the distinctive nature of his criticism, at once scientific and poetic:
I think I am a critic who thinks as poets think—in terms of metaphors. If you like, that’s what makes me distinctive as a critic. I don’t say that there aren’t other critics who think metaphorically, but I do. And I think that whatever success I have as a critic I have because I can speak the language of metaphor with less of an accent than a good many other critics can. (986)
And what could be a more moving expression of Frye’s acceptance of his own background in an open society: “I am what I am: let others be what they are” (1031).
Or it may be that the course of conversation reveals the way Frye actually used certain concepts. We are all aware that he believed value judgments were tentative and should not enter into the task of criticism; yet he obviously made them, and we might well wonder on what they were based. In an early discussion of (yet unflowering) Canadian literature, Frye having said that he prefers Canadian poetry because Canadian novels are not well written, Naïm Kattan points out that Frye does not believe that one can say that a work is well or badly written. Frye agrees, and changes the basis of his value judgment to the presence of “power” or “conviction” (62). At p. 314, the criterion is “genuineness,” carefully distinguished from a judgment on “greatness.” Yet there is a sense in which he does distinguish “greatness” as having some kerygmatic power: great works, he explains, have a social function that smashes out of the category of literature (420)—a clue to the Frye labyrinth of secular and sacred scriptures. Interesting too is the value that Frye assigns to realistic content when he says that getting a sense of the different social assumptions in, say, Victorian England is an important part of the study of literature (703).
The true nature of education to Frye is nowhere better brought out than when he tells Stanley Jackson that though any reasonably bright student can pass exams, “There’s no way of testing—no examination that has ever been devised will ever find out—whether the educating process has actually got into his soul or not” (27). His notion of the teacher as a transparent medium comes into focus when he describes how, in teaching the nineteenth-century thought course, he unconsciously adopted in turn the persona of Mill or Ruskin or Carlyle (801–2). People have frequently wondered, as I did when editing the volume of educational writings, why Frye did not speak out more in public when the structure of English courses he loved at the University of Toronto was being dismantled by the Macpherson Report. We learn now that he did submit a brief, but he felt it was not listened to. His quotation of Amos 5:13 to Valerie Schatzker encapsulates his feeling of helplessness and disgust as the student revolution rolled on: “Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time” (637; cf. 993).
John Ayre, a questing student at a time of doctrinal upheaval, presses Frye on the question concerning man’s communicating with God that still puzzles Frye scholars: is there an entity outside of man to communicate with, since Frye rejects the traditional transcendent God (207)? Pointing out the fallacious notion of an “entity” that lurks in the question, Frye stresses both the suffering man, Jesus, and the notion of the religious group as a human community, without attempting to be precise on the “infinite” dimension. Later, in the course of his discussion with Kaufman, Frye explains that, “As far as man is concerned, it seems to me there is no reality in the conception of God outside human consciousness. But man is not the whole of creation.” Elaborating on ideas obviously related to Blake’s, he goes on to say that, like our senses, “the brain is a filter, too, and … there’s all kinds of experience surrounding us that the brain simply can’t absorb or assimilate. Consequently, I’m quite prepared to accept the feeling that there’s a life that’s infinitely larger and more inclusive than the simple cradle-to-grave progression of the individual” (677). Finally, in 1989, this faith in transcendence is revealed as an existential choice:
FRYE: I don’t know what else [than God] is transcendent. Otherwise, you’re left with human nature and physical nature. Physical nature doesn’t seem to have very much conversation. It’s a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable, cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else.
CAYLEY: Or else?
FRYE: Or else despair. The Bible is to me the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, as something with a right to survive. (1014–15)
One can see in this volume perhaps more easily than anywhere else the evolution of Frye’s views of nature from his early, totally negative ones, as mankind’s destruction of nature became more apparent and more appalling. Frye speaks feelingly of the ecological movement at p. 437, and in 1983 he tells his Australian interviewers that he would no longer use the word “conquest” in connection with nature: “I would put a much stronger emphasis now on the participation of man in nature” (686). Old habits die hard, however. At one of his most vulnerable periods emotionally, a few months after the death of his first wife, Helen, he agreed to an interview with Deanne Bogdan. Asked at the end whether there was any other question he would have welcomed, he responded, apparently with breaking voice, with an anecdote that amplified his answer to a previous question: “I suppose the best answer to your question about nature is the time when Helen died in Australia, Jane [Widdicombe] pulled the curtains aside so I could look at the sea and palm trees, and I said, ‘Nature doesn’t care how I feel. Close them’” (808).23 A “humanized,” responsive nature was still his ideal.
For many readers a moving personal revelation such as the above is the pearl in the oyster of an interview. It is, however, as rare as real pearls are: Frye guarded his privacy and had no inclination whatever to dramatize his life for public consumption. In fact he declared that he had “unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me” (SM, 16), that a biography need never be written, and that all the important things about him are in his works: “everything I write I consider autobiography” (316). He is a writer par excellence, only completely happy when he is composing: “I don’t seem to know what to do with vacations and holidays because this little internal typewriter just goes on tapping and won’t stop” (674; cf. 65). “I’m a bit short on hobbies,” he confessed when another interviewer asked about them. Those who imagine he does nothing but think all day “wouldn’t be far off the truth. One of the consequences of being the kind of scholar I am—that is, working on my own ideas—is that they never leave you.”24 Yet there is a genuine interest in the life events of such a major figure. Many of these have now been related in Ayre’s Northrop Frye: A Biography (itself based partly on interviews, including many of those here) and in Joseph Adamson’s Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life. Every once in a while an arresting new picture emerges, such as that of the young Frye piping up in his 1920s high school class with a question about syphilis (823), or his being spat at and taken to be a German in Ravenna just before the war (603). Frye agreed to a joint interview along with his new wife Elizabeth that opens a charming window onto his second marriage (no. 101).
Not content with these nuggets, some interviewers have persisted in searching for something in Frye’s early life that helps to explain his career, or in trying to uncover some emotional core. Many have probably wished to ask the question put forward with apologies by student Philip Chester: “How do you see yourself? What does Northrop Frye mean to Northrop Frye?” (320). Here the interviewers have to do much of the work, Frye regularly failing to seize the opportunity to enlarge on a suggestion:
BOGDAN: In your essay “Lacan and the Full Word,” you use his concept of the stade du miroir in the individuation process to emphasize the importance of coming to terms with “the gigantic face of personality imprisoned within an alienated self.” Is there a sense in which Moncton represents to you a kind of pre-mirror stage of your life?
FRYE: Yes, I think it does. (802)
He is surprisingly cagey when asked about specific myths, personal and otherwise (cf. 1059). In one strange personal interview, quite painful to listen to on tape and never published (no. 105), Ann Silversides presses Frye to reveal the family stories that shaped him, while he is quite sure that he hasn’t any. What emerges from this very lack of story is the joylessness of Frye’s early existence. When Silversides inquires how his parents met, Frye insists that he could never have asked them about such a thing. “Anything in the way of intimacy or tenderness wasn’t stressed at all. There was a kind of mutual tolerance” (1048). The whole Frye family seems emotionally isolated.
It is well known that the death of Frye’s older brother Howard in World War I cast a gloom over his parents from which they never recovered. In the Silversides interview Frye says that “my mother, I think, always regarded me as God’s rather bumbling and inefficient and stupid substitute for the son that she had lost. I discovered later that a lot of cute stories and bright sayings that were told about my babyhood were in fact about my brother and not about me” (1043). His poor elementary school marks and lack of athletic abilities seemed to validate the opinion. We learn further that when Cassie “was eaten up with cancer and dying she never called me anything but Howard. She never called me by any other name than his” (1053). When Bogdan, who has prepared for her interview by reading family letters in the Frye Fonds, confronts him with the evidence that his mother wrote to her sister in detail about Norrie’s college career and honours, he replies, “I never knew … I’m sorry …” (796). He is obviously surprised, and I would like to think deeply moved, though Bogdan recalls him as normal. Could this be a key to Frye’s career? Was he misreading the signs, imputing to his mother an indifference that he imagined or exaggerated, carrying on his shoulder a chip that proved to be a rocket fuelling his stellar career?
To Silversides Frye names the motif of the bear’s son, one of the stories of the good-for-nothing third son who succeeds where his elder brothers fail. But he also maintains that he was not shaped by any tales and expectations, negative or positive, and that one forges one’s own myth by living and only discovers the shape of it later (1049). He appears on the face of it to have a robust, unselfpitying attitude, only marginally disturbed by parental displeasure, confident that he had great things in him that would emerge when the time was ripe. With an alarming utilitarianism he declares elsewhere that fathers and mothers are unnecessary anyway (908); in a late notebook, speculating on whether his mother’s preference for Howard may have affected him in some way, he concludes that “Fortunately I was always too indolent & selfish to make silly efforts about it, trying to ‘prove’ myself and the like” (LN, 237).
Frye does not encourage his interviewers to wade further into these murky waters. Those who wish to psychoanalyse him would be well advised to turn instead to his notebooks, where thoughts and opinions are allowed to flow more uninhibitedly. The comment Frye gives to an interviewer about Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, for instance (784), is a good deal more circumspect than his private notebook’s “Art of Biblical Narrative my ass” (LN, 174). But I would emphasize that to Frye, personal identity resides far more in one’s public self and work than in some supposed inner essence. In a society of concern, he says, “a man’s real self would consist primarily of what he creates and of what he offers” (WE, 296). As he said in answer to Philip Chester’s question about the real Northrop Frye, “I suspect that other people’s notions of what you are come closer to being your real self than your view of yourself” (320). It is the public self that is on display here, the Canadian icon. In the interviews we probe what he thought, what he induced us to think about, and what he thought it important for us to discuss in the endless conversation that gives shape to civilized life.