1 Margaret Atwood, “Northrop Frye Observed,” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 399.
2 See, e.g., p. 332, below, for NF’s oft-repeated view that M. Jourdain’s, and everybody’s, ordinary speech is not prose at all, though they may think it is.
3 Email communication to the author, 19 May 2004, re. no. 111.
4 Oral communication to the author, April 2004. De Ford’s interview did not result in a published work.
5 Oral communication to the author, February 2005. Kennedy’s interviews with NF—on Robert Zend, and on Utopias—are no longer extant.
6 Descant, 12, no. 32–3 (1981): 216. This is an introduction to no. 52.
7 Oral communication to the author, 30 June 2005.
8 Email from Helen Heller quoted in a column by Gzowski, Globe and Mail, 7 April 2001, F3.
9 William Blissett has pointed out that NF probably drew the term from Merritt Y. Hughes’s 1934 article “Kidnapping Donne,” rpt. in Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry, ed. John R. Roberts (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 37–57. Hughes criticizes the then-current fashion for modernizing the scepticism of Donne and making him a touchstone for contemporary poetry: “We kidnap him from the past” (38).
10 Question condensed on p. 271.
11 Naïm Kattan, “La Réception de l’oeuvre de Northrop Frye dans la francophonie,” in Verticals of Frye / Les Verticales de Frye, The Northrop Frye Lectures and Related Talks Given at the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival (Moncton, N.B.: printed for the Festival, 2005), 35.
12 See Peter Gzowski, The Private Voice (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988), 49, for Gzowski’s dismay at the way NF’s short and unelaborated answers gave him no leeway to steer the interview. Interviewer Christopher Lowry (no. 95) reported the same phenomenon in a phone conversation of 20 March 2006.
13 Email of 22 March 2006.
14 See, e.g., WE, 497; RT, 489, 562; GC, xv/9.
15 On p. 51 of the Daly notebook.
16 Quoted in D.B. Jones, The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 133. See also John Ayre, “Into the Labyrinth: Northrop Frye’s Personal Mythology,” in Verticals of Frye / Les Verticales de Frye, esp. 38–41.
17 See the reminiscence of Harry J. Boyle (a fellow commissioner), CEA Critic, 42 (January 1980): 19.
18 P. 1 of the transcript of the interview of 19 December, 2nd section. Here Martin proposes that they might investigate “‘content and values of technological systems’ au lieu de s’occuper de technological systems of content and values” (not used in final version).
19 E.g. LN, 234–5: “I have never understood why that blithering nonsense ‘the medium is the message’ caught on so. Apparently the terms ‘medium’ and ‘message’ are being aligned with ‘form’ and ‘content’ respectively. And while it would make sense to say that form and content are inseparable, a medium is just that, a medium.”
20 This is not to deny that NF appreciated the grandeur of the moon landings; he told Ramsay Cook that “The kind of feeling one had in the summer of 1969 when that first team landed on the moon was surely a much deeper kind of feeling than anything that nationalism could churn up” (298).
21 See LS, 266–301, for the reports on programs and for two more general reports, and LS, xxvi, for a summary of NF’s involvement with the CRTC. NF’s summation of a CRTC symposium on television violence is in NFMC, 156–66. To this should be added the fact that NF helped to draft the report of the CRTC’s Committee of Inquiry into the CBC of 1977, which had its origins in allegations of separatist bias at Radio Canada, and which was enlarged to investigate the general question of whether the CBC was fulfilling its mandate.
22 The idea is expressed at GC, 221/242, but the interview’s wording is more impressive.
23 Describing this interview later, Bogdan writes that “At [this] point of the telling, he broke down in my presence.” Deanne Bogdan, “Musical/Literary Boundaries in Northrop Frye,” Changing English, 6, no. 1 (March 1999): 74.
24 “Frye does his research in mind, not the library,” Winnipeg Free Press, 8 August 1986, 30. This was an interview with Pattie Tasko that was written up as an article.
1 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. Herbert Askwith (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 1035. The poets in question were actually Smart and Derrick.
2 In recalling this panel discussion, James Reaney remembered particularly NF’s rather startling statement that a poet friend—identified later in the article as Margaret Avison—took part most brilliantly in conversation by being silent. See “The Identifier Effect,” CEA Critic, 42, no. 2 (January 1980): 27, 30. This statement was either not aired or not taped.
1 Earlier that year, on 22 February, NF had debated Carpenter on the meaning of symbolism; see D, 470, and its n. 128 in which NF complains of Carpenter’s aggressive and belligerent character.
2 In chap. 27, “We Travel by Glacier,” of his A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain described his scheme for arriving at Zermatt from the Riffelberg Hotel by jumping off a precipice, buoyed up by an umbrella, on to the Gorner Glacier.
3 John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, l. 263.
1 NF used this expression for the liberal arts in his installation address as principal of Victoria College, By Liberal Things, WE, 99.
2 Ibid., 94.
3 Quoted from memory with slight inaccuracies from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, act 2.
1 At this time Mailer had written several novels, as well as one or two books using his characteristic mixture of journalism, autobiography, and fiction. His Armies of the Night (1968), the most notable example of this genre, was still to come.
2 Presumably NF has in mind the story “Teddy,” in Salinger’s Nine Stories (Boston: Little Brown, 1948), 253–302.
3 In his TSE (written 1961, published 1963), NF developed this view in the chapter “Antique Drum.”
1 Cyprian, in his Letters, no. 72, is the source for this doctrine. See Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1844), 3:1123, col. a.
2 Colin McDougall, Execution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), 90–1.
3 The term “lonely crowd” comes from the title of a book by American sociologist David Reisman (1950).
4 September 1, 1939, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 246. The stanza containing this line was edited out of later editions of the poem.
1 Montaigne said of his cat, “When I play with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her?” Apology for Raymond Sebond, bk. 2, chap. 12. The reference is from a section in which Montaigne is sceptical of man’s ability to penetrate and make sense of God’s Book of Nature. NF has bracketed the section and underlined the word “Cat” in his NFL copy of The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 399.
1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall, ll. 127–8.
2 William Blake, Jerusalem (preface to Milton), l. 13, E96. In this and subsequent references to Blake’s works, the reference E indicates the page number in David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (1982).
3 See 1 Corinthians 13:13 (“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three”); Matthew 6:34 (“Take therefore no thought for the morrow”).
1 Naïm Kattan, “La Réception de l’oeuvre de Northrop Frye dans la francophonie” (see Introduction, n. 11), 35.
2 New Criticism in France should not be confused with the much earlier New Criticism in North America and England. The French school became well known in 1964–65 with Raymond Picard’s attack on Roland Barthes, its chief practitioner. Whereas the anglophone New Critics believed in close reading of the work without recourse to extra-textual considerations such as biography and history, Barthes denied the existence of a stable text and maintained that all critical readings were subjective.
3 NF had written a preface to Gaston Bachelard’s The Psycholanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), v–viii, in which he linked Bachelard’s study of the mythology of the elements to literary criticism. Both Barthes and the American New Critics opposed the “intentional fallacy.” NF argues that the author’s “intention” is to produce a verbal form rather than a paraphrasable meaning or message (see AC, 86–7/80).
4 In the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy Arnold says that culture “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” See Culture and Anarchy, in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 426.
5 Norman O. Brown studied the psychological dimensions of myth; in NFL are annotated copies of his Hermes the Thief (1947) and Life against Death (1959). Regarding Chomsky, NF is presumably alluding to Chomsky’s explorations of the “deep structures” that underlie all individual languages; see, e.g., Cartesian Linguistics (1966).
6 This was the “Third Book” that NF never brought to fruition. For his notes towards it, see TBN.
7 Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau (1912–43) is generally considered to be the founder of modern “liberated” poetry in Quebec. His cousin Anne Hébert (1916–2000) took some of his symbols into her own poetry of revolt. In 1970 NF was to provide a foreword to a dialogue on translation between Hébert and Frank Scott; see C, 406–7.
1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901; orig. pub. 1859), 25.
2 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 246.
1 See Poetics, chap. 1, 1447a29–b9, in which Aristotle talks of an art that imitates by means of language alone, either in prose or verse, and that has hitherto been without a name.
2 Such essays might have included, among others, “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1952), “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” (1953), “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (1962), NP (on Shakespearean comedy and romance), and FT (on Shakespearean tragedy).
1 See, e.g., WE, 329, 111. See also p. 147.
2 Written early in 1967, published in the Los Angeles Free Press, and frequently republished.
3 The remark does not occur in Caesar and Cleopatra; but cf. Shaw’s Candida, act 3, in which Candida says that “He has learnt to live without happiness.”
4 NF, “The Social Importance of Literature” (17 September 1968), WE, 331. The speech was given to the Canadian Association of School Superintendents and Inspectors, reprinted in abridged form in the Toronto Star, and published in full in the Educational Courier, November–December 1968.
5 The U of T offered two types of course in the Faculty of Arts and Science: four-year, specialized Honour Courses in particular subjects, and a three-year General Course with its own individual courses and a lower pass-mark. Bossin is perhaps thinking of the remark in By Liberal Things that the Honour Courses “seem to me to do everything for the student that a carefully planned and balanced programme of studies can do” (WE, 93). Cf. also pp. 276 and 359, below.
6 Student radicals attacked the Honour Courses both as elitist and for their rigid prescribed curricula. The Macpherson Committee (Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science) had issued its Report in 1967, recommending that the Honour Courses be abolished. All students should be able to choose from the same array of courses, though they could arrange to graduate in three years, or in four as a specialist. These proposals were being vigorously debated at the time of this interview; in one hearing NF had called the suggestion to lower entry standards “lunatic and suicidal” (Ayre, 313). The proposals were nevertheless instituted later in 1969 with the “new program.”
7 The Hall-Dennis report was Living and Learning (1968)—the report of a commission appointed by the Ontario government to study the aims and methods of education in the province, co-chaired by Mr. Justice Emmett M. Hall and Lloyd Dennis, a former school principal. This report, which recommended a “child-friendly” form of education, with decreased emphasis on discipline, structure, fixed curricula, and examinations, ushered in a more permissive type of education in Ontario.
8 In “The Community of the University,” in The University Game, ed. Howard Adelman and Dennis Lee (Toronto: Anansi, 1968), McCulloch argued that dependent members of unilateral relationships “become persuaded of their own worthlessness and of the worthlessness of their ideas and their acts,” and hence “apathetic in relation to almost everything” (31).
9 Rochdale was an 18–storey alternative college at 341 Bloor St. W. on the northern edge of the U of T campus. The college, which had no formal connection with the university but was owned and operated by the residents, was founded in 1968 to provide innovative noncredit education, but rapidly became a “hippie” and drug haven. After its demise in 1975 it was turned into a home for senior citizens.
10 Cf. MC, 34 (NFMC, 17), where NF writes that “we do not know the future well enough to know whether those ends [envisaged by a theory of progress] will be achieved or not. All we actually know is that we are damaging the present.”
11 Dennis Lee, “Getting to Rochdale,” in The University Game, 93. Lee was speaking of the need to explore and develop new types of learning at Rochdale.
12 See NF’s youthful “Case against Examinations,” WE, 10–13, and NFHK, 1:423–4.
1 One hundred and forty pp. of single- and double-spaced typescript, representing all the interviews when scanned, have been reduced to 68 pp. double-spaced. These conversations were informal and at times diffuse. NF spoke in English; Martin usually spoke in French; Chiasson mediated between the two. In accordance with the bilingual policy of the Collected Works, Martin’s French has not been translated. However, assuming the readership of this volume will be largely English-speaking, whenever Chiasson explains that “André says that …” I have used his explanation in preference to the original: it is after all what NF heard. And although Chiasson functions remarkably well in English, I have sometimes changed his Francophone expressions to a more idiomatic English. NF’s own words are only lightly edited, but the longer remarks of the others have been shortened. Some exchanges, often about mutual acquaintances, have been omitted altogether, while other remarks have been transposed to aid continuity. As minor omissions are so frequent, they have not been signalled with the three asterisks used elsewhere in this volume.
2 Fernand Cadieux, film critic and media thinker, was closely allied with the development of French Canadian films from the 1950s on.
3 The reference is to MC, 17 (NFMC, 8).
4 Radio Canada is the French name for the CBC, both radio and television divisions.
5 In “Reflections in a Mirror,” his response to the critiques of his system at the 1965 session of the English Institute, NF attributes the distinction between archetype and stereotype to Ionesco. See Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 143.
6 Seaway, the most costly TV series produced in Canada to that date, was seen over the CBC from September 1965 to September 1966. It featured a fearless Canadian duo who worked to keep the St. Lawrence Seaway functioning, but it was designed to appeal to a wider community and followed U.S. trends in broadcasting; it was eventually syndicated to American TV stations.
7 The CRTC had inherited the power to set requirements for a specific amount of Canadian content from the BBG. The BBG would review and certify programs as Canadian if necessary, taking into consideration the ownership of the production company, the nationality of the producer and creative personnel, costs paid to Canadians or incurred in Canada, and Canadian themes and subject matter. In 1968 the CRTC required that fifty-five per cent of the broadcasting day be filled with Canadian content, including forty per cent during the prime time from 6 P.M. to midnight.
8 Candid Eye was a groundbreaking series of documentaries by the NFB, under executive producer Tom Daly, seen on the CBC in 1958–59. It introduced a new dimension of realism. Martin mentions particularly the work of Michel Brault, producer of several of the Candid Eye documentaries, who pioneered the use of the shoulder-held camera and the wide-angle lens. He later collaborated with the Frenchman Jean Rouch, the father of cinéma vérité.
9 The Federal Communications Commission was the U.S. equivalent to the CRTC, given the responsibility in 1934 to oversee interstate and international communications by radio, television, and related technologies.
10 Pierre Trudeau, the current prime minister, had been elected leader of the Liberal party on 6 April 1968 to replace Prime Minister Lester Pearson; he led the Liberals to victory in the election of 25 June. “Participatory democracy” as a term can be found in political science articles of the early 1960s. Trudeau seems to have used the phrase for the first time during his leadership campaign; although he did not coin the phrase, he gave it new currency.
11 The region of Biafra was attempting to break away from Nigeria. The Organization for African Unity had asked outside countries not to interfere in this civil war, and Trudeau complied. However, there was a good deal of public sympathy for the starving Biafrans, as evidenced by an outpouring of private donations. By January 1969 Canairelief had been organized by Oxfam, aided by various church groups, to fly in aid to the breakaway state.
12 It has not been possible to date a visit to Scandinavia before that of April–May 1972; daybooks and itineraries are not available for the pre-1967 period.
13 In his Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, 1st ed., ed. Carl Klinck et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), NF had described how the narrator in Frederick Philip Grove’s A Search for America suggested that the North American pastoral myth could still be found in Canada (C, 364).
14 Probably this is the “application by a company to be incorporated represented by John Watt for a licence to establish and operate a new television station at Whitehorse, Y.T.,” referred to in the Annual Report of the Board of Broadcast Governors, March 31, 1968 (Canada, 1968), app. A, 22, and marked DENIAL. The Yukon and Northwest Territories had only one TV station at the time, the CBC, which broadcast in English (app. b, 3).
15 The reference is to Diefenbaker’s campaign to become Conservative leader in December 1956, and the federal election campaign of 1957, in both of which he emphasized the need to make the North a full partner in Confederation.
16 The Air of Death was a program on pollution broadcast over the CBC on 22 October 1967. Its most controversial conclusion was that fluorine emissions from a factory in the Dunville area in southern Ontario were poisoning crops, animals, and people. The program greatly stimulated concern over the environment and led, among other things, to the foundation of Pollution Probe. For more discussion, see pp. 110–11.
17 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amerique (1835).
18 This was the report of a royal commission headed by Dr. George E. Hall, former president of the University of Western Ontario, into the accuracy and balance of the CBC’s program The Air of Death on pollution in Dunville. Just released (10 December), the report criticized the CBC for some inaccurate and alarmist statements which caused financial hardship to the residents of Dunville.
19 The Democratic National Convention to choose a presidential candidate opened in Chicago on 26 August 1968. It was the scene of a series of enormous protest marches against the Vietnam war and President Johnson, and of violent confrontations with the police. At midnight on 29 August it was adjourned.
20 This may be a reference to Orwell’s 1984, a novel that NF admired greatly. The meaning is not clear; possibly it is that people continue to hate in spite of the nightmare that Orwell shows is produced by hatred and brutality.
21 Unfortunately the name was not deciphered; it could perhaps have been Stéphane Mallarmé, although he would not normally be considered not very widely read. In one of his late notebooks NF refers to “the pan-literary universe which only three people understand: Blake, Mallarmé, and myself” (LN, 247).
22 The Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, the professional organization for those who work in the English language in Canadian film, television, radio, and commercial productions.
23 In 1954, radio and television personality Max Ferguson had interviewed Bill Thompson, the fireman who had driven to Halifax harbour to extinguish the fire on the munitions ship Mont Blanc in 1917; the explosion that erupted as he arrived killed the other five firemen and blew him, unconscious, several blocks away. The riveting interview is discussed in And Now Here’s Max: A Funny Kind of Autobiography (Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1967), 134–6. Ferguson broadcast from Halifax on television, 1954–58.
24 Political science professor Frank MacKinnon led the group that created the Fathers of Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, P.E.I.: a cultural centre with library, theatre, museum, art gallery, restaurant, and Memorial Hall whose design was selected by international competition. It was opened in 1964 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference that led to Confederation, and was conceived as a national monument owned and partly financed by all of the Canadian provinces.
25 The reference is to the multi-screen film shown in Canada’s pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Roman Kroitor was the director and Tom Daly the editor. For more information, see pp. xxxvii–xxxviii].
26 The Annual Report of the CRTC, 1968–69 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969) dealt with the broadcasting year which ended 31 March 1969. Though not directly discussing decentralization, it does stress “community interest” against concentration of ownership (18).
27 The Air of Death had been broadcast in 1967, before the creation of the CRTC. The resultant controversy led the government to commission the Hall Report (see n. 18, above). Shortly after its inception in 1968 the CRTC was also asked to hold hearings on the show and on information programming standards in general; these took place 18–20 March 1969. The CRTC’s report, delivered 9 July 1970, was instrumental in forming the policy that “a balance of views” must be shown in the context of total programming. A summary is provided in the Annual Report of the CRTC, 1970–71 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1971), 42–3.
28 The original transcript reads “Paracletes,” but I am grateful to the Press reader for pointing out that there is no such person. NF often paired Heraclitus with McLuhan as aphoristic, e.g., at p. 176.
29 In an aside in the first conversation (not reproduced here), Martin had remarked that Godard was anti-cinema personified, and that “il fait des mauvais films, mais dans le bon sens.” The reference is to the French film director who became a leader of the “New Wave” of filmmaking by films such as Breathless (1959) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), which used jump-cuts, freeze-frames, and similar devices.
30 NF often commented on poet Arthur Rimbaud’s doctrine of a deliberate “dérèglement de tous les sens,” as expressed in his letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871; see Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 102. In 1873 Rimbaud published his Un Saison en enfer, describing his struggle to break with his “hellish” past, and then at the age of nineteen abandoned literature and began a wandering life as a soldier, trader, and gun-runner.
31 See Psalms 74:12–17 and 89:9–10. NF refers elsewhere to the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, which was recited every New Year, and which was closely related to the Priestly account of creation in Genesis (see NFR, 151; RT, 439, 477–8, 517–18; GC, 188–90/209–11).
32 Moon shots had begun in 1959. On 21 December 1968 the first manned mission, Apollo 8, was launched to orbit the moon. The crew headed by Commander Frank Borman transmitted a live TV broadcast on Christmas Eve, giving pictures of the earth from space and ending with the Creation reading from Genesis.
33 For Cadieux, see n. 2, above. John Grierson was first commissioner of the newly created NFB, 1939–45, where he developed pioneering documentary film techniques. At the time of the interview he was teaching film-making at McGill and Carleton Universities.
34 The move to recognize the People’s Republic of China had long been hindered by the opposition of the United States, and by Canada’s own desire not to abandon the Chinese nationalist government in Taiwan. In February 1969 External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp had announced the government’s decision to contact the government of China for talks; on 29 May a review of foreign policy was announced including this planned initiative. The Cultural Revolution hindered the plan, but diplomatic relations were established in October 1970.
35 American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was born in Pittsburgh but settled in Carmel on the California coast. He was much influenced by the cyclical theories of Spengler and Nietzsche, and by the time of the post-war collection The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948) he was proclaiming the collapse of the present civilization. The theme was reinforced in his posthumous The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (1963).
36 See no. 14, n. 5, below (an interview predating this third CRTC one), in which this controversy is first discussed.
37 NF had recently been a visiting lecturer at Berkeley, during the student disruptions in the spring of 1969.
38 Apollo 11 was to be launched on 16 July 1969, and on 20 July Neil Armstrong took the first human step on the moon.
39 Henry J. (Harry) Boyle, vice chairman of the CRTC, chaired the CRTC’s hearings on The Air of Death in 1969. He asked the majority of hard-line questions to CBC representatives regarding the quality of their research.
40 Larry Gosnell was the producer and director, and Stanley Burke the narrator, of The Air of Death.
41 The Annual Report of the CRTC, 1968–69 was much concerned with broadcasting coverage and its extension (3, 13–16), CATV and cable (21–2), and satellite broadcasting (23).
42 The diagram reproduced is from the CRTC folder. For further discussion of it by Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani, see LN, xxvi–xxxi, and TBN, xviii–xxxi.
43 In bk. 5, chap. 48 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the priestess of the underworld, Baqbuc, boasts of the superiority of the underground kingdom. Pantagruel and his companions have descended to receive the wisdom of the Oracle of the Bottle.
44 This favourite anecdote had recently appeared in NF’s Conclusion to Literary History of Canada, C, 352. The source is Leacock’s “The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph,” in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914), 208.
45 Tropism is defined in the botanical sense as the turning of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus.
46 Mack Sennett (1880–1960), born in Quebec, went to the United States, where he acted in films. In 1912 he founded the Keystone production company and engaged in the production of silent comedies such as the Keystone Kops, which involved classic slapstick techniques such as chases and pie-mishaps. Larry Semon (1889–1928), actually born in Mississippi, was a cartoonist who eventually directed and acted in film pantomimes from 1915 until his early death in 1928.
47 Mariposa is the fictional name given to Orillia, a small Ontario town which Stephen Leacock depicted nostalgically and humorously in his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1922).
48 “Henri Carnot” is in the transcript, but he does not appear in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Canada, the New Grove Dictionary, or the standard reference works on Canadian and Quebec literature. Possibly NF said “Saint-Denys Garneau,” who might well be considered anxious. At p. 1037 he mentions admiring Yves Thériault, who rhymes with Carnot but did not write lyrics.
49 Born in France of German-Jewish descent, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (b. 1945) acted as leader of the student protesters in the famous Paris general strikes against Charles de Gaulle in May 1968. After the protests collapsed he was expelled for sedition. He and his brother Gabriel wrote Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Crawley, Sussex: Andre Deutsch, 1968).
50 This was the manuscript of Harold Innis’s massive, unfinished History of Communications. In the 1980s the CRTC Research Department was given permission to edit and publish it in two or three volumes. NF wrote introductions to the work as a whole (later published in EAC, 154–67; C, 582–95), and to the second volume (LS, 302–6), but the publishing scheme fell through.
51 Jacob Christopher Burckhardt (1818–97) was a conservative historian sceptical of the modern faith in reason and progress, which he felt had led to alienation from land and state. The remedy was personal regeneration through culture, scholarship, and a kind of secular asceticism.
52 In the battle on the Plains of Abraham which led to the conquest of Quebec (1759), the victorious British army was led by General James Wolfe, while the French was led by the Marquis de Montcalm.
1 NF made this point in his introduction to Design for Learning, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), the report of a joint committee of the Toronto Board of Education and the U of T, formed to evaluate and suggest changes to the school curriculum; see WE, 139.
2 “A Liberal Education” appeared in the Canadian Forum in two parts, September and October 1945. In it NF said that “offhand, I should say that the purpose of liberal education today is to achieve a neurotic maladjustment in the student” (WE, 48–9).
3 Cf. WE, 114. Mickleburgh had perhaps heard NF’s speech to the Quail Roost seminar, 9 December 1968, not yet published (see no. 16, n. 4), where the phrase “entering into a structure of knowledge” is used (WE, 375).
4 NF used this figure a little later in a public speech at OISE, 4 November 1970; see WE, 410.
5 John Kelsey, “Should U.S. professors dominate Canadian universities?” Globe and Mail, 30 December 1968. The article was followed by another on 31 December, and an editorial on 2 January. Kesley described the increasing numbers and influence of American professors, and the use of American text-books, as a response to the rapid expansion of Canadian universities. The dilemma extended to the training of Canadian graduate students at American universities.
6 See no. 12, n. 6.
7 George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), esp. viii.
8 “[E]ven the most blatant advocacy of violence and terror may be, like Satan in the Bible, transformed into an angel of light by being regarded as a contribution to modern thought” (MC, 105; NFMC, 59). See SeSCT, 280–1, for NF’s citation of Céline in support of the notion that “great art can arise in any kind of mind.”
9 In The Oxford Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), editor Douglas Gray points out that the Middle English words “auctour” and “auctorite” had two senses, applying both to an author and to the time-honoured truth in his writings.
10 Seeley’s view is implicit in his article “Mental Health and the Secondary School” (1963), rpt. in The Americanization of the Unconscious (New York: International Science Press, 1967); see esp. pp. 351–2.
11 See no. 8, n. 4.
12 At MC, 24–5 (NFMC, 12), NF argued that the “central symbol of this [alienation] is of course the overkill bomb, as presented in such works as Dr. Strangelove.”
13 Plato’s Republic, 377b ff. proscribes certain stories and poems; 521c–541b discusses ideal education. His Laws, 809b ff. directs teachers.
14 See, e.g., the introduction to Design for Learning (WE, 135), and the speech “The Developing Imagination” (WE, 151).
15 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, chap. 6.
16 NF, “The Social Importance of Literature,” WE, 334.
17 This explains NF’s ability to drop the Mothers of Invention into his conversation with Martin and Chiasson, p. 110. NF’s graduate course was called “Principles of Literary Symbolism.”
18 See, e.g., EI, 65–6 (EICT, 492–3); WE, 94, 104–5, 264–5 (where social vision is the result of education as a whole). Mickleburgh had reviewed EI in the Educational Courier, 34 (1964): 57–9.
19 Ted Kemp, “Education—Mental Castration in Our Schools,” Edge (Edmonton), 1:64, 74.
20 Franz Boas’s idea of one-sided rationalism is not specifically mentioned by Kemp. In an early article Boas warns against the appropriation of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories for the study of human society. Such an approach, while valuable in some respects, can only be “one-sided” when misapplied. “The Methods of Ethnology,” American Anthropologist, 22 (1920): 311–22; rpt. in Race, Language and Culture (1940), 281–9.
21 The first essay in Grove’s It Needs to Be Said (Toronto: Macmillan, 1929), “A Neglected Function of a Certain Literary Association,” is an address prepared for, but never delivered to, the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Authors’ Association. It contrasts the serious literature the CAA should be upholding with the U.S. mania for mere pot-boilers.
1 See “Silence and the Poet,” in Language and Silence, 36–54. The poets that are said in the book move towards silence are Hölderlin and Rimbaud.
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 189: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7th proposition; last line of the book).
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1956), esp. pp. 101–5 of the section “Patterns of Bad Faith.”
4 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 237 (bk. 4, chap. 3).
5 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.16–17.
6 NF’s contention is odd. The Greek word mēnis is normally translated as “wrath” or “anger”; nowhere in Greek literature is it translated as “madness.”
7 See MC, 79–80 for the Freudian proletariat, 86 for society; NFMC, 44, 48.
8 While not using these actual words, NF does say in connection with the study of antisocial works and the transformation of Satan next alluded to by Mandel that “study, as distinct from direct response, is a cool medium” (MC, 105; NFMC, 59).
9 Steiner, Language and Silence, 61. Steiner argues that “it is at least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text, which is the substance of our training and pursuit, diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response.”
10 Claude Bissell was at that time president of the U of T.
11 The allusion is to R(ichard) B(edford) Bennett, prime minister of Canada, 1930–35, and Robert Falconer, president of the U of T, 1907–32.
12 In 1969 Iraq was a republic liable to military takeovers and factional revolts. In January 1969 the government of General Ahmed al-Bakr executed fourteen alleged Israeli spies by public hanging. Sixty-five other people were held for trial on similar charges, including the former prime minister Abdul Rahman El-Bazzaz.
13 See no. 13, n. 30.
14 Yeats, Blood and the Moon, l. 49.
15 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel: The Novel as History (New York: New American Library, 1968), 54. This is an autobiographical nonfiction novel about the march on the Pentagon to protest against the war in Vietnam.
16 Ibid., 280.
17 In Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), the young activist Anne Wiazemsky plots an assassination, kills the wrong man, and then calmly returns to the scene and kills the intended target.
1 “The Social Importance of Literature,” WE, 331.
2 NF’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie (1951) appeared in The Canadian Forum, 31 (February 1952): 258–60; rpt. in EICT, 146–9.
3 “The Social Importance of Literature,” WE, 330.
4 WE, 376. The quotation is from NF’s speech “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract,” given to the Quail Roost seminar at Duke University, 9 December 1968. Part of it was published in the University of Toronto Graduate, 2 (Summer 1969); it also appeared in New Society in November 1969.
5 WE, 376–7.
6 WE, 332.
7 Irving Thalberg’s 1936 production of Romeo and Juliet starred Norma Shearer as Juliet, Leslie Howard as Romeo, John Barrymore as Mercutio, and Basil Rathbone as Tybalt. Both lovers were past their youth, as Howard was born in 1893 and Shearer in 1902. The more recent film that Aitken refers to is Franco Zeffirelli’s version of 1968.
1 Archbishop James Ussher, working on the then current assumption that the Bible was history, established 4004 B.C. as the date of creation in his Annals of the World Deduced from the Origin of Time (London, 1658), l.
2 The text reads “something not in relation to the sense of a greater community,” which seems not to make sense; Ayre’s notes are not available for checking.
3 Brother Antoninus was the name assumed by California “beat” poet William Everson (1912–94) (raised in a Christian Science home) when he joined the Dominican order in 1951. He left in 1969 to embark on a third marriage.
4 See, for instance, NF’s assertion that “contemporary radicalism is deeply, even desperately, religious” in “The University and Personal Life,” WE, 367.
5 The Oxford Group was started in 1920–21 by the American Lutheran Frank Buchman, but did not become really popular until it moved to Oxford, England in the later 1920s. It was a revivalist movement that stressed “life-changing” experience, contemplation, confession, and personal guidance from God over doctrine and formal structure, and was active while NF and Helen Kemp were students. In 1938 it became known as the Moral Rearmament Movement.
1 Sendak is an award-winning writer and illustrator of children’s books, the creator of mysterious, oddly grotesque pictures, best known for Where the Wild Things Are (1963).
2 “The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.” G.M. Hopkins, letter of 25 September 1888, in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbot (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 291 (Letter 166).
1 The famous phrase is from his essay “Hawthorne and his Mosses” (1850), a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses for an Old Manse. It reads in full, “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole world round.” Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrish Hayford et al. (Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern Press & Newberry Library, 1987), 9:249.
2 Psalm 115:8 and 135:18; Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 66, l. 36, E218.
3 Milton, Tetrachordon, in The Complete Prose Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 2:636–7.
4 Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, 2:555. In NF’s copy of Milton’s Prose, ed. Malcolm Wallace (annotated no. 370 in NFL), this passage has the marginal notation “analysis perfect image” and [Blake’s] “Palace of Golgonooza.”
1 In his introduction to the 1851 edition of Wacousta; or The Prophecy (first published in Edinburgh in 1832), Richardson remarked that “some few years ago I published in Canada—I might as well have done so in Kamschatka—the continuation.” His reference is to The Canadian Brothers (Montreal, 1840). See abridged ed. of Wacousta, ed. Malcolm Ross (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967), xix.
2 The references are to Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, for which see no. 15, n. 15, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), an account of an actual multiple murder for which Capote interviewed the killers extensively.
1 His reviews, published from April 1951 to July 1960 in the University of Toronto Quarterly, were headed “Letters in Canada: Poetry,” and partially reproduced in BG. For the complete text, see C, 91–229.
2 Sir John A. Macdonald (1815–91), leader of the Conservative party in Canada and prime minister, 1867–73, 1878–91, was a chief promoter of the trans-Canada railway; Edward Blake (1833–1912), leader of the Liberals, 1880–87, was a sceptic. NF reviewed Pratt’s poem dealing with the building of the railway in “Letters in Canada: Poetry: 1952,” rpt. in BG, 11–14; C, 103–6.
1 NF was a member of the Forum’s editorial committee, and served as managing editor, 1948–50.
2 Historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) first outlined his theory in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). He argued that the frontier, which gave rise to national characteristics such as individualism, freedom, and materialism, was the decisive factor in shaping American history. See F.J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996).
1 Blake, The Divine Image and The Human Abstract in Songs of Innocence and Experience.
2 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, ll. 258–9.
3 Aristotle, Poetics, 6.2.
4 The Nuremburg trials (1945–49) were conducted under the charter of the International Military Tribunal that treated the Nazi regime as a criminal conspiracy. In the first and most famous of the trials, 18 of 21 major Nazis were convicted and 11 sentenced to execution.
5 The Calley case arose from an incident in the Vietnam War in which Charlie Company, commanded by Lt. William Calley, massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai, 16 March 1968. Calley was the only one charged and convicted of murder by a court martial in 1971. (Sentenced to a life of hard labour, he served three and a half years before being paroled, pardoned, and returned to civilian life.) Presumably NF is wondering about the moral responsibility of the other soldiers.
1 The reference is to the fifth picture, The Ancient Britons, in Blake’s 1809 Exhibition. See p. 1 of the Advertisement of the Exhibition, and pp. 39–51 of the Descriptive Catalogue, E526, 542–5.
2 Blake, There Is No Natural Religion [b], pl. 3, E2.
3 Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, p. 27, E538: “Their art [Venetian and Flemish artists’] is to lose form, his art [“Mr. B’s”] is to find form, and to keep it.”
4 Blake, The French Revolution, l. 189, E294.
5 Blake, Laocoön annotations, E274: “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.”
6 Blake, Annotations to Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical and Political, 69–70, E625. Subsequently Blake says that “Bacon has no notion of any thing but Mammon.”
7 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 24, E44.
8 Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ll. 1–4, E490.
9 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 7, E35.
10 See Blake’s Annotations to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, p. 14, E617.
11 NF, Introduction to Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Random House, 1953), xix.
1 NF was due to attend the meetings of the Learned Societies in Montreal, 31 May to 2 June (see also the next item). On 1 June he would address the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion on the topic of the shift to the mythical and imaginative. The notes from which he spoke are in NFR, 3–9, headed “Pistis and Mythos”; a partly inaudible tape recording of his words, labelled “the shift from the doctrinal and conceptual to the mythical and imaginative,” is available in NFF, 1991, box 63.
2 Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 132. In his copy (annotated no. 82 in NFL), NF had noted “very shrewd” beside Ellman’s remark that “The discovery of coincidence is the middle-aged counterpart of the youthful discovery of singularity.”
1 See no. 12, nn. 5 & 6, for the background.
2 The U of T grew out of a single college, King’s College, and in 1853 hived off UC as its teaching body. During the nineteenth century there were repeated efforts to form a wider University of Ontario. Three liberal arts colleges, of which VC was the first in 1892, eventually entered into federation with the U of T. The terms of union stipulated that seven humanities subjects would continue to be taught by the colleges to their own pupils, while other subjects, mainly sciences, would be taught by university departments to all students together. The actual division of subjects did not prove to be entirely logical: humanities subjects such as Portuguese, omitted from the orginal agreement, fell to the lot of the university, while history and some other humanities subjects were assigned to the university as a result of special interests.
1 Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 55, ll. 60–1, E205.
2 Blake, preface to Jerusalem, pl. 3, E146.
3 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, E34.
4 Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ll. 1–4, E490.
1 In some versions of the Gospel of Nicodemus is a second part, “Christ’s Descent into Hell.” See The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. M.R. James (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924). An annotated copy is in NFL.
2 Ephesians 4:9–10.
3 Fortunatus was a priest in Gaul, d. ca. 600. The hymn referred to, sung on Good Friday, is “Vexilla Regis Prodeunt.”
4 Wallace Stevens, address on receiving an honorary degree from Baird College, 1951; see “Poetic Acts,” in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1977), 238–41.
1 For details of the Saskatchewan experience in the summer of 1934, see pp. 935–6, and NFHK, 1:222–322 passim.
2 This was Rev. Eratus Seth Howard (1883–1923), who served at eighteen different postings in Ontario and Quebec during his long years as a Methodist minister.
3 Preface to BG, v (C, 416).
4 NF spent two academic years at Merton College, Oxford, 1936–37, and 1938–39. His B.A. was automatically converted to an M.A. in 1940 according to Oxford practice.
5 “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943) is the source of NF’s celebrated characterization of colonialism as “a frostbite at the roots of the Canadian imagination” (C, 30). Even in the preface to BG (1971), however, NF called Canada “practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony” (iii; C, 414).
6 Preface to BG, i–iii (C, 412–14). This theme became more pronounced in later years; see, e.g., “Canadian Culture Today” (1977), in which NF argues that “nationalism suggests something aggressive …. But culture in itself seeks only its own identity,” and that “contemporary Canadian culture, being a culture, is not a national development but a series of regional ones” (C, 514).
7 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972).
8 See, e.g., George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965), 76.
1 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. “A socialist amalgam primarily of farmers and intellectuals which flourished in the ’30s and ’40s; it is now called the New Democratic Party” (note in Canada Today). The note might well have mentioned a strong orientation to labour also.
1 R.B.W. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
2 Johnson argued against Wilkes that quotation was not pedantry: “No, Sir, it is a good thing: there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.” Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 974 (C.E. 1781).
3 Julien Benda, Le Trahison des clercs (1927).
4 In AC, NF argues that the term “prose fiction” might be applied to all works of literature written in continuous prose, rather than merely novels: “Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern” (307/287).
1 See no. 36, n. 2.
2 The reference is to NF’s service on the CRTC, 1968–77, and to his presidency of the Modern Language Association during 1976.
3 Newton’s remark, in slightly different words, is quoted by Sir David Brewster in his Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1860), 2:331 (chap. 27).
4 Walter Jackson Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts, enlarged ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 600.
5 NF had been ordained in the Maritime Conference, Moncton Presbytery, though the ceremony took place in Toronto. Presumably Moncton was still his official “home address.”
6 The proposed amalgamation, which had been discussed since the mid-1940s and especially after 1960, was accepted by the General Council of the United Church but rejected by the Anglican House of Bishops and the General Synod in 1975.
1 The astrological sign Aquarius, associated with life-giving water, was supposed to end some two thousand years of domination by the sign Pisces and usher in a new world order. The song “The Age of Aquarius” in the musical Hair made the phrase a popular expression of millennial optimism.
1 In 1962 NF had participated in the founding of the Ontario Curriculum Institute (OCI), which grew out of the work of the joint committee of the University of Toronto and the Toronto Board of Education that had produced Design for Learning. He was a member of its Board of Governors and its program committee. By April 1965, however, the Institute had agreed to join OISE, the high-powered research and teaching centre recently established by the Ontario government, and began to wind down its affairs. For NF’s address to the first annual meeting of the OCI, see WE, 187–91.
2 Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, act 2, sc. 4. NF added this comment, beginning with “A lot of university students,” in response to Oliver’s query sent with the transcript, “In what way is prose not the language of ordinary speech?”
3 Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) was a Montreal neurosurgeon who, in pursuit of a treatment for epilepsy, developed the physical basis for memory and mapped the brain.
4 As reported in his obituary in the New York Times, 3 February 1970.
5 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 2nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 287.
6 Oliver had perhaps read this favourite point of NF’s in his interview with Bruce Mickleburgh in Monday Morning (see pp. 167–8, above).
7 John Bassett (1915–98) was founder of television station CFTO and a key figure in the formation of the CTV network.
8 Blake, Annotations to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, E 613.
1 For NF’s speech “Violence and Television,” delivered 26 August 1975, see NFMC, 156–66. Here he discusses the civilizing role of television in terms of catharsis; for his remarks on the breaking down of stereotypes, see his Conclusion to the second edition of Literary History of Canada (1976), C, 460.
2 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 246.
3 NF, “The Renaissance of Books,” published in Visible Language in 1974, NFMC, 154.
4 For a discussion of this series, Literature: Uses of the Imagination, see no. 40.
5 For instance, in “America: True or False?” (1969), C, 403.
6 The Parti Québécois (PQ) under René Lévesque had won the Quebec election of November 1976. They were committed to a referendum on political sovereignty for Quebec along with economic association with the rest of Canada. The date of the referendum had not yet been set. NF’s assertion of irresponsibility and betrayal has not been found. In his preface to BG, he did remark on the reactionary nature of separatism (iv; C, 415). Subsequently, in no. 38 (pub. March 1978), he said that separatism is linked to a tradition among intellectuals of being socially irresponsible (p. 364).
7 “The University and Personal Life,” WE, 367.
1 When NF served on Acta Victoriana as joint review editor, 1931–32, and editor, 1932–33, it was the only student magazine at VC. The Strand, in which the present interview appeared, was a more recently established paper: it reported on current student affairs, leaving to Acta the publication of student literary and artistic efforts.
2 David Knight was a former student of VC, hired by the English department in 1952.
3 The biography appeared in two volumes: E.J. Pratt: The Truant Years, 1882–1927; and E.J. Pratt: The Master Years, 1927–1964 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984–87).
4 The Ontario Agricultural College became the University of Guelph in 1964; the University of Waterloo was founded in 1957; and Trent University opened in 1964. McMaster University had actually existed since 1890 as a small Baptist university; it moved from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930.
5 See no. 12, n. 5.
6 See no. 12, n. 6.
7 For the original arrangements for teaching departments within the federated colleges, see no. 26, n. 2. The colleges had been experiencing financial difficulties, and finding too that many of their pupils took few or no courses in the college. In the 1974 Memorandum of Understanding between the university and the federated universities and colleges, the distinction between university and college subjects was dropped, the teaching staff of former college departments became members of combined university departments, and the federated universities in effect lost the power to make appointments.
8 The reference is to Douglas Martin’s 1971 painting of NF sitting on an invisible chair against a barren landscape of stormy sky, river, and mountains. At the time of the interview the painting hung on the west wall of the reading room; after renovations to the library it was moved to the south wall.
9 This was a program in the CBC’s Images of Canada series. NF’s segment, devised by Barbara Moon, Vincent Tovell, and NF, was entitled Journey without Arrival: A Personal Point of View from Northrop Frye. Featuring NF viewing various monuments and parts of the country, it was broadcast 6 April 1976. For a transcription of the soundtrack, see C, 466–71.
10 See Harvey Schachter, “Let Quebec Go: Professor,” Toronto Star, 3 March 1977, B5. Here NF was quoted as saying that separatism seemed inevitable and that the rest of Canada should let it happen, “sit quietly on the sidelines as the experiment proves disastrous,” and then welcome Quebec back to a renewed federation. In the event, the referendum of 20 May 1980 was lost, with 59.56 per cent voting no.
11 The Strand actually reads “age of inquiry,” but NF is more likely to have referred to the Age of Aquarius. Cf. pp. 329, 391.
1 Moon groups, or “Moonies,” are named after the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in 1954. Teaching what he calls the Divine Principle, Moon claims to have had a vision of Jesus telling him to continue Jesus’ work. Best known at the time of publication as purveyors of mass marriages and for Moon’s great wealth, and preferring to be called Unificationists, Moonies are the model for satirical images of modern religious cults.
2 Brought to the west from India by Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1965, “Krishna consciousness” seeks to access the supreme reality directly through chanting, transcendence, and simple living.
3 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 223 (1:v).
4 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1911–13), 2:138 (pt. 5, chap. 12).
5 The Return of the Native, in The Works of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse, Wessex ed. (London: Macmillan, 1928), 4:143–4 (bk. 2, chap. 4).
6 William Blissett points out that NF is mistaken here. All Souls’ Day is not on Halloween, but on 2 November. It was established in the eleventh century as a day of prayer for all the faithful departed. All Saints’ Day, which does indeed occur on 1 November, was instituted in the fourth century to commemorate the great number who had been martyred or had suffered during the preceding period of persecution.
7 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 35.
8 Chief among these was NF’s favourite, Joachim of Fiore or Floris, who envisaged three ages, those of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. See, e.g., LN, 47, 202; GC 85/104.
9 Cf. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, ed. D.C. Somervell, abridg. (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 12–13, though the external proletariat is not given the role NF indicates. This vol. is in NFL.
10 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Knopf, 1932), 2:310–11.
11 Cf. Preface to Major Barbara, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw (London: Bodley Head, 1971), 3:21, 44.
12 Four months after the successful Woodstock festival, a free concert of rock music was held at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco (6 December 1969). The rock group The Rolling Stones hired the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security. Drunk and drugged, they beat to death a black man, Meredith Hunter, who was armed with a knife and gun. Three other people died during the festival.
13 The National Front was a “Britain first” party founded in 1967 to oppose immigration, multiculturalism, and loss of sovereignty to international bodies. Attacked by its opponents as neo-fascist, it became quite prominent in the 1970s; its decline began shortly after this interview.
14 The references are to Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1939).
15 The Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Cosmos 954 had crashed to earth near Yellowknife on 24 January 1978, shortly before this interview was recorded.
16 An allusion to Marc Connelly’s play The Green Pastures, based on the American black conception of Old Testament history.
17 Plato, Sophist, 266c.
1 For a fuller description of the series, see WE, xli–xlii. NF’s On Teaching Literature (1972), WE, 432–61, explains the theory behind the anthologies.
2 William Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply, l. 24.
3 William T. Jewkes, professor of English at Penn State University, was the general editor. Alvin A. Lee, professor of English and at that time vice-president at McMaster University, and Hope Lee, former teacher of grades 7 to 12, edited the first six volumes.
4 Elizabeth Cowan had quoted from Kenneth Rothwell’s review of the first eleven anthologies in Exercise Exchange, 18 (Fall 1973): 22–7.
5 Perhaps NF had drawn a mandala or other diagram on the blackboard which, we learn later, he was using in his explanations.
6 T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 151.
7 The Neoplatonic use of “archetype” can be seen in Plotinus, Enneads, 5.1.4. In “Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility” NF said he derived the word from a footnote in James Beattie’s Minstrel (EAC, 94; ENC, 24–5). For a fuller discussion of his sources, see Thomas Willard, “Archetypes of the Imagination,” in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 16–18.
8 For Whitman’s desire to be more democratic, see his Song of the Exposition, esp. stanzas 2 and 7. His poem on the death of Lincoln is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (1866).
9 NF, “The Archetypes of Literature,” Kenyon Review, 13 (Winter 1951): 91–110; rpt. in EICT, 120–35.
10 This review has not been found. The Canadian Opera Company performed The Magic Flute in Sept–Oct. 1977. Reviews appeared in the Star, Globe, and Sun, but none of these mentions NF. Toronto Life, Macleans, and Saturday Night did not review the production. An Ottawa production in July 1975 was also reviewed in the Globe without mentioning NF.
11 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 18. Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818), in The Letters of John Keats, 4th ed., ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 227.
1 NF actually said he worked on FS for twenty years, but this is an exaggeration. At p. 671 he notes that he became seriously committed to doing the book after the insight he had while writing a graduate paper on Milton and Blake in 1935, and that his serious writing began around 1941. In 1945 the book was accepted by Princeton.
2 William K. Wimsatt, “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth,” in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 75–107.
3 E.D. Hirsh, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
4 For a representative attack on NF’s notion that poetry is made from other poetry, complete with ranting and name-calling, see Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, ed. Seymour Mayne (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972), 58.
5 Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (London: Methuen, 1963), 260; Yeats, A Vision, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1937), 73 ff. For Eliot and Keats, see no. 40, n. 11.
6 Wimsatt, “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth,” esp. 97.
7 This course has now been published in RT, 413–607, and in Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Foundations of Western Culture, by Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). See also no. 63, n. 2.
8 George Woodcock, “One of the Great Canadian Gurus, Frye Still Provokes,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 19 January 1977, 13. In this review of SM, Woodcock appreciates the fact that many of the essays are those of a mediating public figure rather than a purely academic critic.
9 Woodcock had found a remnant of snobbery, for instance, in NF’s “extraordinary remark that ‘Literary criticism in its present form grew up in the nineteenth century, under the shadow of philosophy.’ What he means, of course, is academic criticism, as it is practiced [sic] in the universities and expressed in learned journals.”
10 In “The Search for Acceptable Words,” SM, 25, NF comments on the “continuous cataract of unsolicited material” sent to a professor. In “Expanding Eyes,” SM, 100, he reflects on adverse criticisms of AC.
11 Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1976, 2, 98–9.
12 For instance, at SM, 190, NF talks of “Eliot the poet and Eliot the snob; Pound the poet and Pound the crank; Yeats the poet and Yeats the poseur,” and so on (NFMC, 307).
13 NF, “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (1968; WE, 360–78) is one of several condemnations of the student protest movement.
14 The remark on the age of the great work of art perhaps being over actually occurs in SM, 35 (WE, 367).
15 SeS, 29 (SeSCT, 23), speaks of conventions wearing out.
16 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), bk. 1, ll. 398–400.
1 In 1905, the U of T had abolished the office of vice-chancellor and was headed by a president, with a largely ceremonial chancellor. After its union with Albert College in 1884, the newly named Victoria University was headed by a chancellor who was also president. An act of 1944 sponsored by Walter T. Brown (president, 1941–49) provided for a separate chancellor, while the president became “president and vice-chancellor.”
2 Pearson was chancellor, 1952–58; Breithaupt, 1959–60. [P]
3 NF’s reference is to the royal charter for Upper Canada Academy, the predecessor of VC, issued on 12 October 1836. VC gained the power to grant degrees when it was elevated to the status of a university, as Victoria College, 27 August 1841.
4 NF spent a Guggenheim year as a researcher at Harvard, 1950–51. He taught there in the spring term of 1957, and was Charles Eliot Norton professor, 1974–75. He taught at the summer school of Columbia University in 1958. He held the Class of 1932 lectureship in the Special Program in the Humanities at Princeton, spring term 1954. He did not actually teach at Yale.
5 For the Honour Courses and their abolition, see no. 12, nn. 5 and 6. For the federation system, see no. 26, n. 2; for the drift against it, see p. 360–1.
6 “Report of the Committee to Review the Undergraduate Programme” (1979). Chaired by Professor John Kelly of St. Michael’s College, the committee recommended that arts and science students, whether in three- or four-year courses, have a greater degree of concentration along with breadth in other fields.
7 Even in my undergraduate years—1969–73—students had begun to consult the registrar and the old calendars to construct some semblance of order in their 20–course college careers. [P]
8 Pauline McGibbon (1910–2001), a woman active in the arts community, became the first female Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario in 1974; Bora Laskin (1912–84), law professor and labour arbitrator, was made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973.
9 NF, Installation Address as Chancellor (11 October 1978), WE, 522.
10 See A History of Victoria University, by C.B. Sissons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952). [P, referring to the tradition.] In the spring of 1977 there was a series of four lectures at Victoria to mark the sesquicentennial of the U of T. Margaret Prang, historian and former don of Annesley Hall, spoke on “Victoria and Canadian politics.”
11 Lovat Dickson’s two-part dramatized history of the Massey family’s climb to worldwide industrial and philanthropic prominence was telecast in October 1978. [P]
12 Frank Jones, “To Frye Fame Is no Fortune,” Toronto Star, 28 May 1978, D1.
13 This was a yearly series of six open evening lectures on a common theme delivered by Victoria professors to any interested students, faculty, and alumni. It lasted for many years but was eventually discontinued.
1 The seven books were: AC (Einaudi, 1969); MC (Rizzoli, 1969); FI (Einaudi, 1973); EI (Longanesi, 1974); WTC (Longanesi, 1974); FS (Longanesi, 1976); and SeS (Il Mulino, 1978).
1 “Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality” (AC, 193/180).
2 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). The authors argue that Freud’s Oedipus myth—particularly his concept of desire—depends on a capitalist ideology which distorts and limits our understanding of the term in fundamental ways.
1 In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 19.
1 NF, “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (1964), StS, 82. Other quotations from StS in the text are also from this essay.
2 See I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929), a book generally credited with reforming the teaching of poetry and encouraging the “close reading” favoured by the New Critics.
3 This reference has not been found. Interestingly, NF repeated Fillion’s remark about Fuller a month later, in “Criticism as Education,” a speech to the School of Library Service at Columbia University, 26 October 1979 (WE, 525).
1 Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) contains the partial drafts of, and jottings for, several novels, as well as youthful short stories published in Acta Victoriana.
2 The reference is to Harley Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927–54), and A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904).
3 T.S. Eliot, conclusion to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 152.
1 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934).
2 Wellek had charged NF with failing in the critic’s task of evaluation when he reviewed FS in Modern Language Notes, 64 (January 1949): 62–3. When NF reviewed Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, 32 (Spring 1956): 310–15, he slyly ended by emphasizing the book’s usefulness in showing how premature value judgments have bedevilled criticism. Herman-Sekulić may rather, however, have in mind the well-known criticism by Wellek’s colleague Wimsatt (see pp. 414–15, above).
3 For Lacan, see, for instance, the argument in The Language of the Self, trans. Anthony Wilden (1968). An annotated copy of the 1975 reprint is in NFL. Also in NFL is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). NF has marked the passage in the “Translator’s Preface” in which Spivak claims that “Derrida uses the word “metaphysics” very simply as shorthand for any science of presence” (xxi). NF has also marked the passage in his copy of Derrida’s Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), in which Johnson discusses how, for Derrida, the communicative act is a moment of différence defined by absence: a place where metaphysics as a concept does not hold true (x–xii).
4 NF is perhaps thinking of Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, who proposed hegemony as an extension of ideology that could be appropriated to counter dominant values.
1 NF had recently corresponded with Maja Herman-Sekuliñ about this; see no. 50.
1 President Garfield of the United States is said to have remarked that his ideal of a college would be met by a log in the woods with a student at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other. The allusion is to Mark Hopkins (1802–87), president of Williams College, 1836–72.
2 The SX-70 is the Polaroid camera, marketed in 1972 as the first instant camera to make its own self-developing print.
3 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), 1:488, describing the confused sense-impressions of a baby.
1 Amos ’n’ Andy was first broadcast in March of 1928 as a radio sketch; it became a half-hour radio comedy and then a television program, running until 1966. The Keystone Kops silent films (for which see no. 13, n. 46) began in 1912 and were superseded by 1917.
2 The War Measures Act gives the federal cabinet the power to override provincial authority and civil liberties during an emergency. It has been invoked in peace time only once, during the 1970 “October crisis” when Pierre Trudeau’s government feared a separatist uprising. Walter Cronkite was the anchor for the CBS evening news, 1962–81.
3 The Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing was established in December 1970. Its report, Canadian Publishers and Canadian Publishing, presented in December 1972, recommended the establishment of an Ontario Book Publishing Board that would counter the trend to foreign domination of the industry. Among programs suggested were grants to Ontario-based, Canadian-owned publishers to assist the publication of works by Canadian authors, grants for the re-issue of out-of-print Canadian works, and annual literary awards.
1 Gillian Cosgove, “Plain Mr. Frye Condemned to Be Lonely,” Toronto Star, 7 August 1980, F1. Perhaps NF was “exercised” by this generally appreciative portrait because one section, exploring the loneliness of the genius, is headed “Few close friends” and has him finding most people boring.
1 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 252–3.
1 In his Laocoön annotations, Blake said that “The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” E273.
2 The original reads “a kind of form of apprehensiveness”: it seems more likely that NF is referring to the altered ratio of the senses that McLuhan ascribed to viewing electronic media, though he did also refer elsewhere to McLuhan’s theory of the “terror” characteristic of oral cultures and, by extension, global villages.
3 NF, “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada,” C, 346.
4 This assertion was not made directly in MC (the Whidden lectures), but is a frequent theme in NF’s writings on Canada (see, e.g., C, 106, 258, 446–7). NF speaks of the Toryism he mentions in his next answer in his Conclusion to Literary History of Canada, C, 370.
1 Cf. The Tempest, 3.2.91–3, 95.
1 From Blake’s poem on double vision, ll. 87–8, in his letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802, E722.
2 See, e.g., Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1862) or his introduction to A Crown of Wild Olive (1866).
3 An interview with Dr. John Moffat (conducted by Cargill and Esterhammer) appears in the same issue of Acta Victoriana that contains the interview with NF. He is described as a professor of physics at U of T, a painter, and a poet. The interview deals with “the relationship between the activity of the scientist and the activity of the artist.”
4 Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, new ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 31.
5 Margaret Avison, Perspective, ll. 20–2: “Your law of optics is a quarrel / Of chickenfeet on paper. / Does a train / Run pigeon-toed?” Originally published in Poetry (Chicago), 70 (1947): 320–1. Also anthologized in Poetry of Mid-Century, 1940–1960, ed. Milton Wilson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964), 87–8.
1 This is perhaps an allusion to the report NF did for the CRTC on Sesame Street in 1971, in which he remarked on the technique of using masks, a face that does not change (see LS, 280). These reports were not published, but Ful-ford may have seen them at the CRTC.
2 From 1925 to 1933 Arthur Waley brought out in sections his translation of The Tale of Genji, the classic Japanese tale by the Baroness Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978–ca. 1031).
3 Nova Scotia’s Amusements Regulation Board, seeing it was a film about a prostitute, labelled it Restricted (to those over 18). See the amusing article by Jay Scott, “Puppets ‘restricted’ in Nova Scotia, ‘certainly an error,’ Censor Agrees,” Globe and Mail, 21 October 1981, 15.
4 Japanese woodcut artists Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), best known for his Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1835), and Ando Hiroshige (1797– 1858), whose Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido was very influential in the West.
5 This is the reason for a dramatist’s preferring the verse form in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle” (Spanish, 1943). See Borges, A Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 187.
6 Eliot, Burnt Norton, pt. 1, ll. 42–3.
7 See no. 39, n. 5.
1 See The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 193.
2 Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (1950); in NFL is a copy of the Dell 1967 ed. In Notebook 24 NF writes that he found the book “much more convincing than I thought it was going to be” (TBN, 291).
3 This quotation is not in GC, but NF does say there that “there is no real evidence for the life of Jesus outside the New Testament” (78/96; cf. 77/95).
4 In a note to GC, NF cites Josephus, Contra Apion, bk. 2, [par.] 15. The passage he probably has in mind is in par. 14 of the Loeb edition, 1:351.
5 Quæstionum S. Augustini in Heptateuchum, Quæstionum 2: 73, in Patrologiæ cursus completus, 34:625.
6 In his City of God, bk. 15, chap. 26, Augustine calls the ark a figure of the city of God, or the church, sojourning in this world as in a deluge. In chap. 27 he continues to allegorize details such as the three stories of the ark.
7 This is l. 26 of Sabine Baring-Gould’s well-known hymn Onward Christian Soldiers.
8 Although GC does ascribe the line to Sunday Morning (168n/327n. 104), it is actually from Stevens’s The Poems of Our Climate.
1 “The Great Charlie” (1941) and “The Eternal Tramp” (1947), NFMC, 89–102, 116–22.
1 See, e.g., WE, 158, 318, 329.
2 This was a series of thirty half-hour videotapes entitled The Bible and Literature: A Personal View from Northrop Frye issued by the Media Centre at the University of Toronto (1982). These lectures on the Bible, which at the time formed half of a course on “The Mythological Framework of Western Culture,” were drawn on extensively in GC. The videos consisted of classroom lectures followed by question-and-answer sessions around a seminar table with selected students. A transcript of the lectures is in RT, 415–607; they also appear in Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson, Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
3 For an example of NF’s use of this figure, see an editorial in the Canadian Forum, 1970, in which he argues that “Marshall McLuhan has a phrase about reactionaries who don’t get with it as people driving by a rear-view mirror. This assumes the monumental fallacy that we move forward in time as well as in space, whereas actually, of course, we face the past, and the rear-view mirror of that direction is the shape of things to come” (C, 408).
4 The Constitution was to be patriated on 17 April 1982. Prior to patriation, the Canadian Constitution could be modified only by the British Parliament. Subsequently, the powers to modify the Constitution rested solely within the hands of Canadian Parliament, with Queen Elizabeth’s signature.
1 This was a four-year Pass Course designed to allow for completion of high-school matriculation requirements within the university. Starting with the 1931–32 school year, senior matriculation was demanded for entrance, after which students could take a three-year Pass Course (replaced in 1951 by the three-year General Course), a new four-year General Course, or an Honour Course.
2 The Scottish-born George Ross (1875–1967), organist and choirmaster at St. John’s United Church (as it was later called), N.B., 1910–50. His FRCO meant that he held the Fellowship Diploma of the (British) Royal College of Organists.
3 The minister was Harold Tomkinson, pastor at Wesley Memorial Church, 1926–31. His daughter Constance Tomkinson wrote of her experiences as a chorus girl, would-be actress, and arts administrator in a number of autobiographies, including Les Girls (1956).
4 NF had a job at Toronto’s Central Reference Library, then near the U of T at College and St. George Sts., pasting labels into new books—a process which allowed him to become acquainted with Denis Saurat’s Blake and Modern Thought.
5 See Ayre, 68–9, for a description of the essay “Eccentricity,” which arranged eccentrics under categories such as “clown,” “connoisseur,” and “crank.” Ayre reports that it is almost certain NF won the prize (email of 7 November 2005).
6 This was the John Trick and Susan Treble Trick scholarship, which NF continued to receive until he graduated in 1933.
7 This was a social event in which couples strolled about together to the accompaniment of music.
8 This was the Protestant movement to work towards creating the Kingdom of God on earth by improving social justice and following Christian ethics in the political and economic sphere.
9 This remark shows both NF’s sense of justice and his amazing memory. When I was writing my biography of Margaret Addison I had in my possession a copy of an interchange of letters, now unfortunately misplaced, in which a woman graduate complained of a joke NF had made in an after-dinner speech implying Addison was stuffy and a bit absurd. The woman described, in very close to these words, how Addison had toiled during the flu epidemic.
10 Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse joined the UC English department in 1929, and was its chair from 1944 to 1964. He was also chair of the graduate English department for nearly twenty years. For this and other details about the English department, see Robin S. Harris, English Studies at Toronto: A History, with foreword by NF (Toronto: printed by the U of T Press for the Governing Council, 1988), to which I am indebted.
11 This was a one-hour-a-week course offered to senior students in certain Honour Courses, though not to those in English, starting in 1954.
12 Geoffrey E. Holt was professor of German at UC until 1948, and also organist and choirmaster of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto.
13 George Sidney Brett, A History of Psychology, 3 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1912–21).
14 Norman Endicott was a member of the English department at UC, 1929–70. He had a B.Litt. from Oxford.
15 Pelham Edgar, Henry James: Man and Author (Toronto: Macmillan, 1927).
16 Barker Fairley, Charles M. Doughty: A Critical Study (London: J. Cape, 1927); Wilhelm Raabe: An Introduction to His Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947).
17 Fairley’s A Study of Goethe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), is annotated no. 516 in NFL. Fairley had previously published Goethe as Revealed in His Poetry (1932).
18 Robert Falconer was president of the U of T, 1907–32; Canon Henry John Cody served 1932–45. The latter was not an academic but an Anglican clergyman who was chair of the Board of Governors.
19 Richard Pinch Bowles was chancellor and president of Victoria University, 1913–30. He died in 1960.
20 Edward W. Wallace was chancellor and president, 1930–41.
21 Walter T. Brown was principal of VC, 1932–44. He served as president and chancellor (vice-chancellor after 1944) of Victoria University, 1941–49.
22 No person with a name sounding like this occurs in lists of students or recipients of honorary degrees at the U of T or Emmanuel.
23 Daniells did graduate work at U of T and in England. In 1934–35 he taught in the English department at VC and was a don in residence; NF, a second-year Emmanuel student and reader in the department, was a frequent companion. In the 1935–36 school year, NF was a virtual teaching assistant in Daniells’s fourth-year drama course. For NF’s remarks on their friendship, see, e.g., NFHK, 1:353–4, 478.
24 Margaret or Peggy Stobie was the former Margaret Roseborough; NFHK has many remarks on her, Mary Winspear, and the Blake group.
25 No reminiscences of Foster Damon have been discovered; perhaps they were in MS.
26 As a reader in the English department at VC, 1934–35, NF taught two courses while also taking two graduate English courses and doing his work at Emmanuel; in 1935–36, his last year at Emmanuel, he taught three courses. See also n. 23, above.
27 In the fall of 1937, after sending NF to Merton College, 1936–37, VC hired him as a one-year “special lecturer” to replace the departing Roy Daniells. He had to return to Merton College to complete his English studies before becoming a permanent employee in fall 1939.
28 Edward Warriner Hazen (1860–1929), American farmer and teacher who had become an advertising executive, had established the Edward W. Hazen Foundation in 1925; in its early years it was particularly concerned with the lack of value-based and religious instruction in higher education.
29 Kenneth Woodsworth was the co-secretary of the Canadian Youth Congress, an organization which in the 1930s brought together young people of all persuasions to fight for peace and jobs, and author of Canadian Youth Comes of Age (1939). He later had a distinguished career as union organizer, lawyer, teacher, and social activist. His father Harold Frederick Woodsworth (1883– 1939) was a missionary to Japan where he served as a dean at Kwansei Gakuin University. Harold was brother to labour leader J.S. Woodsworth and son of James Woodsworth, “The Apostle of Systematic Giving,” in charge of the Western Canadian missions of the Methodist Church.
30 This was a fellowship of $1500 from the Royal Society, specifically for research into the “Development of symbolism in the prophetic books of William Blake” (Ayre, 119).
31 The Susan Treble Trick and the Mary Treble Currelly Travelling Fellowship, controlled by C.T. Currelly. It was designed to help eligible instructors to travel abroad to enrich their teaching (Ayre, 143). Charles Trick Currelly (1876–1957), the founder of the Royal Ontario Museum, was a member of the Senior Common Room at Victoria for many years.
32 In addition to the political uncongeniality, NF’s general misery in Oxford can be seen in the letters in NFHK, vol. 2. See particularly 2:652, where he complains that “I’m simply going mad in this place. Dismally cold, wet, clammy, muggy, damp and moist, like a morgue.” See also his remarks on his tutor Edmund Blunden in this volume.
33 Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), a member of the Labour government of 1929, later resigned and became leader of the British Union of Fascists.
34 NFHK has many references to NF’s adventures with Mike Joseph and Rodney Baine. Bernard Mellor was appointed registrar of the University of Hong Kong in 1948 and served for several decades. He cooperated with the Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden in producing three anthologies of English poetry.
35 Sir Anthony Blunt (1907–93), art historian and director of the Courtauld Institute, where Helen studied, 1934–35. He was later found to be a Soviet agent and stripped of his title.
36 In NFL is an annotated copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
37 Edward Sheffield of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics predicted, in a 1955 speech to the National Conference of Canadian Universities, that enrolment in universities would double in the next ten years. President Sidney Smith set up a committee to determine the response of the U of T; it was called the Plateau Committee on the grounds that this increase was not a temporary bulge but a permanent step upwards. The committee, reporting in 1956, recommended the founding of several new colleges to handle a doubled enrolment. For this and other institutional details, see Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), to which several notes are indebted.
38 These distinguished members of the Class of 1949 at Victoria were: Douglas Mason Fisher, NDP member of Parliament, 1957–65, and later a political columnist; Keith Douglas Davey, former National Campaign Director of the Liberal Party, Senator, 1966–96; and Julia Verlyn LaMarsh, known as Judy, Liberal Minister of National Health and Welfare and Minister of Amateur Sport, 1963–65, and Secretary of State, 1965–68.
39 Ayre notes that as a junior professor NF was “nearly as much in demand as honorary president of graduating classes as John Robins” (186).
40 Hardolph Wasteneys, head of the biochemistry department, 1929–51.
41 Hazard Adams, The Academic Tribes (New York: Liveright, 1976), 8.
42 This was the Combined Departments of English, consisting of the full-time staff in English in each constituent college. It had begun to meet formally in spring 1919 under William Alexander of UC. Eventually the chairmanship was rotated among the different colleges.
43 Arthur Barker had joined the department at Trinity College in 1937; he left for Illinois in 1961 and stayed there until 1970. He ended his career at the University of Western Ontario.
44 The first year of the new English Language and Literature course was offered in the fall of 1936, and no new students were admitted to English and History. That course was gradually phased out as each year graduated, the last doing so in June 1939. Woodhouse was particularly involved in restructuring the initial outline of the English course to provide Honour options for “students naturally adapted for History and Philosophy” (Harris, English Studies, 84). Edward Killoran Brown (1905–51), his seconder, had joined the department at UC in 1929 but had been at Manitoba, 1935–37. He left UC again in 1941 to teach in the States.
45 Millar MacLure (1917–91), who joined the department in 1953, was a Renaissance specialist who wrote the well-regarded George Chapman: A Critical Study (1966). John M. Robson (1927–95), a nineteenth-century scholar hired in 1958 after two years in the West, was chiefly known for his editorship of the 33-volume Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. He was the founding general editor of the present Collected Works before his early death. Both had been graduate students at Toronto.
46 F.E.L. Priestley (1905–88), nineteenth-century specialist and founding general editor of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, was at the UC English department, 1944–70.
47 Hugo McPherson and Jess Bessinger joined UC in 1956.
48 Kenneth MacLean joined the English department at VC in 1938, and became head in 1959.
49 NF definitely said “pack” on tape, though one wonders whether MacLure might have said “hack.” However, this idiom is not very characteristic of his speaking style.
50 William Blissett is mentioned several times in D. He was a graduate student who finished his thesis on Spenser and Milton under NF’s supervision in 1950, and went on to a distinguished career which included editing the University of Toronto Quarterly.
51 John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945), perhaps best known for his book on Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927).
52 Canon Cody had been followed by Sidney Smith, president, 1945–57.
53 William Davis (who as Minister of Education for Ontario from 1962 had presided over the immense expansion of the system) was Conservative premier, 1971–85. During his term of office the Report of the Commission on Post-Secondary Education in Ontario (1972) said that the guiding principle should be the universal access to appropriate educational services for all who wished and were able to benefit from them.
54 Ernest Sirluck was associate dean of the graduate school, 1962–64, and dean, 1965–70, during the time of Bissell’s presidency (1958–71).
55 See no. 42, n. 6.
56 The provincial government at Queen’s Park had had direct oversight and financial control of the university until the University of Toronto Act of 1906, which established a Board of Governors for that purpose. The Senate continued to supervise academic affairs. In 1972, as a result of student unrest, these two bodies were replaced by a single Governing Council with student, faculty, and community representation.
57 John Leyerle, professor of English at UC, became the founding director of the Centre for Medieval Studies in 1966.
58 Readers have suggested that NF must have said “grouped around medieval research,” since that was Leyerle’s field. But on tape he clearly says “medical.” This could be a Freudian slip, but since it is unlikely NF would argue that it’s easy to raise money for medieval studies, I think he is telescoping ideas and means that “it” (i.e., public generosity) is more easily tapped by medical research.
59 “Across the River and Out of the Trees” (1980), C, 555. The books particularly mentioned here are Charles Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture, Barker Fairley’s Study of Goethe, Kathleen Coburn’s edition of Coleridge’s Philosophical Lectures, Priestley’s edition of Godwin’s Political Justice, NF’s own book on Blake, Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty, and Arthur Barker’s Milton and the Puritan Dilemma.
60 It has since been republished in the Collected Works, in WE, 517–22. The address does not directly make the accusation NF quotes; the general point is made in previous interviews, e.g. pp. 359, 432, 475.
61 Cf. the section on “The Circuit of Money Capital,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992), 2:128.
62 CAUT is the Canadian Association of University Teachers. The U of T Faculty Association had been particularly active; after they had persuaded the administration to agree to binding arbitration, arbitrator Kenneth Burkett had awarded an eighteen per cent increase in June 1982 (not long before this interview). As a result, the university needed to find an additional $14 million a year, faculty hirings were frozen, and budgets were cut (Friedland, University of Toronto, 585–6).
63 Physiologist Reginald Haist had chaired a committee that developed new rules for the appointment of deans and divisional chairs in 1966. Whereas previously the president had chosen his own candidates, committees of professors were now struck to make recommendations; and appointments were for a limited term, generally five years.
64 Political scientist John Edwin Hodgetts succeeded NF as principal of VC in 1967 and served until 1970, when he became president of Victoria University.
65 See n. 41, above.
66 Paxton Young (1819–89), a broad-minded Presbyterian minister, philosopher, and mathematician. Friedland in his University of Toronto quotes a eulogy of him as “an enthusiastic and soul-inspiring lecturer” (75).
67 John Evans, dean of the medical school at McMaster University, succeeded Claude Bissell as president in 1972, after a hiatus under acting president Jack Sword. For the Memorandum of Understanding limiting college departments’ powers, see no. 38, n. 7.
68 This incident has not been traced. The most famous student disruption at UC was that at which political scientist Edward Banfield was prevented from speaking in West Hall in 1974. There was also a major sit-in at the U of T over the issue of access to the stacks at the newly-built Robarts Library.
69 Ned’s was the student cafeteria, called after the affectionate name for E.J. Pratt, and in the early 2000s unaccountably re-christened the Wymilwood Cafeteria.
70 The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the grant-giving agency of the federal government.
1 Herbert Norman (1909–57) was a career diplomat who was Canadian ambassador to Egypt. He committed suicide on 4 April 1957 after being accused of being a Communist sympathizer and a security risk.
2 Cf. the last line of Birney’s Can. Lit.
3 Byron, The Vision of Judgment, ll. 688–9.
1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), 67–9.
2 The theological tradition established by the twelfth-century followers of St. Hugh of the Abbey of St. Victor, who stressed the importance of the grammatical, historical, and geographical senses of the Scriptures as a foundation for the allegorical and tropological. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).
3 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 1.
4 Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), and Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981). The latter is in NFL.
5 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979).
6 See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 281 ff.
7 Dante Alighieri, “Letter to Can Grande” (Epistola X) and “The Four Levels of Interpretation” (from the Convivio, 2.1), in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, trans. and ed. Robert S. Hallen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 95–114.
8 The remark actually comes from the first page of NF’s NP: “We are told, by Coleridge, that all philosophers are either Platonists or Aristotelians …. I shall begin with a similar dichotomy about literary criticism. I may express it, in the manner of Coleridge, by saying that all literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics.”
9 Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value,” in The Necessary Angel (New York: Knopf, 1951), 142.
1 Following the fall of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris. An Islamic republic was established by referendum on 31 March. Under the new constitution introduced on 15 November, Khomeini gained supreme religious and secular control of the country, and Islamic law was imposed.
2 This favourite notion of NF’s is perhaps a distillation of Hegel’s notion of concepts and the way they contain or evoke their opposites, rather than a direct quotation regarding propositions (cf. p. 562). Hegel says, for instance, that “Positive is not an immediate identity, but is partly a term opposite to the Negative, having significance only in this relation and therefore containing the negative in its concept …. Similarly, the Negative, which is opposed to Positive, has meaning only with reference to this its Other: it therefore contains it in its concept.” The Science of Logic, trans. W.H. Johnston and L.G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), 2:63. In GC, NF says that “the hero of Hegel’s philosophical quest is the concept (Begriff),” but that this concept “can hardly exist apart from its own verbal fomulation … so that the Phenomenology is, among other things, a general theory of how verbal meaning takes shape” (222/243).
3 1 Corinthians 13:13.
4 In Milton’s Paradise Lost, after Adam has inquired about the rotation of the spheres, Raphael counsels him not to dream “of other worlds, what creatures there / Live, in what state, condition or degree” (bk. 8, ll. 175–6).
5 Eric Berne, What Do You Say after You Say Hallo? (New York: Bantam, 1973; orig. pub. 1972), 98, 1004. In his copy in NFL, beside the phrase “from each directive, however indirectly it is put[,] he [the child] tries to extract the imperative essence,” NF has written “will and Word of God.”
1 In GC, NF comments that the Biblical religions are strongly moral and voluntaristic, and that many today find them in some respects primitive compared with Oriental religions (105/125).
1 These themes are frequent in NF; the interviewer may be thinking particularly of the discussion of similarities and differences in “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts” (1977), C, 472–4.
2 See, e.g., pp. 80–1 in Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981).
3 See pp. 320 and 488, above, and esp. p. 408, which the interviewers are more likely to have read. Similar sentiments are expressed, e.g., in SM, 18.
4 This assertion has not been found. At p. 160, above, NF says that criticism should not be taught much before the undergraduate level, an assertion more consonant with his general views.
5 This remark is doubly ridiculous in that both I.A. Richards and William Empson (author of Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), were Englishmen, Richards teaching at Cambridge and Empson studying there. Richards did move to Harvard in 1939, but Empson became a professor at Sheffield. Empson’s family could be traced back to the fifteenth-century tax farmer Empson who was executed by Henry VIII.
6 NF, “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–73. The occasion of its delivery is described by Jan Gorak in “From Escape to Irony: Frye’s ‘The Argument of Comedy,’” in Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. Jean O’Grady and Wang Ning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 69–70.
1 See his Preface to BG, C, 417.
2 The CNE is the Canadian National Exhibition, a Toronto fall fair which combines agricultural and “modern living” exhibitions with entertainment and midway rides. The art show in question included works by Dali, Chirico, Miró, Klee, Paul Nash, and Picasso. See NF, “Men as Trees Walking,” NFMC, 94.
3 Fred Haines (1879–1960) was a Canadian painter and printmaker; he had served as director of the Art Gallery of Toronto (1928–32) and was thereafter principal of the Ontario College of Art.
4 For many references to NF’s work on the Forum, see the index to D.
5 The Morrises, Louis A. and his wife Kay, worked on the Forum for many years, the former as business manager. For comments on their connection with the CCF, see D, esp. 537.
6 Among the anonymous editorials now established to be by NF are “Law and Disorder” (July 1949), on the extralegal persecution of Communists, and “Caution or Dither?” (July 1950), on the British Labour party’s reluctance to enter the postwar Schuman Plan. See NFMC, 224–5, 246–7. Another editorial on the death of H.G. Wells, “Idols of the Market-Place” (September 1946), was established as NF’s too late to be included in the Collected Works.
1 NF, “The Definition of a University,” a speech of November 1970 published in 1971 and rpt. in DG, 139–55; WE, 414.
2 See no. 36, n. 2.
3 See, for instance, NF’s talk on the inauguration of Claude Bissell as president of the U of T, WE, 84.
1 NF refers to the completion of AC (actually in June 1955 according to Ayre, 249), rather than to its publication in 1957.
2 The leading exponents of the “Yale School” of deconstructionists were Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. These four, together with Derrida, published Deconstruction and Criticism, frequently referred to as the “Yale Manifesto” (New York: Seabury, 1979).
1 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973). The book argues that the current pursuit of profit and progress has resulted in economic inefficiency and a backward-looking society.
1 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in “Leaves of Grass” and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Reinhart, 1949), 76 (stanza 51).
2 After consultation, I have ventured to retranslate the original’s “l’anthethèse entre le religieux et le laïc” for NF’s favourite phrase, “distinction between the sacred and the secular.”
3 The Frenchman Roger Garaudy (b. 1913) wrote a number of books on Christianity and Marxism between 1966 and 1974, such as The Alternative Future: A Vision of Christian Marxism, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), or, with Quentin Lauer, A Christian-Communist Dialogue (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1968). Much later, in 1998, he was brought before a French court as a Holocaust-denier.
1 Cf. p. 494, above.
2 This was the Canadian National Railways radio station, which began broadcasting in 1924. It was transferred to the CBC in April 1933, but went off the air shortly after.
3 Canadian choreographer and director Brian MacDonald produced The Gondoliers at Stratford in 1983.
4 Yeats, The Choice, ll. 1–2. In SM, NF had quoted these lines and said that they “express a profound insight” (120).
5 George Herbert, The Church Porch, stanza 40.
1 See p. 668, above.
2 See Wallace Stevens, Asides on the Oboe, in Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 250. [S]
3 Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier, ibid., 91. [S]
4 Samuel Johnson, “Yalden,” in Lives of the English Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:303.
5 See Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).
6 Salusinszky here refers to the forthcoming WP.
1 “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” These lines from Desiderata, a prose poem composed in 1927 by the American writer Max Ehrmann (1872–1945), found a sympathetic response during the 1960s, when they were mistakenly believed to be an anonymous inscription on an old church wall. Pierre Elliott Trudeau quoted them on a number of public occasions, notably on 22 May 1979 when he conceded electoral defeat. I am indebted to John Robert Colombo for this information.
2 Stanley Knowles represented Winnipeg North Centre almost continuously between 1943 and 1984, first for the CCF and then for the NDP. An ordained United Church minister, he became a social activist perhaps best known for his advocacy of workers’ pensions.
3 See “CRTC Hearings,” no. 31, above.
1 For Derrida on “supplementarity,” see “Structure, Sign and Play,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2001), 278–93. An annotated copy of the 1978 ed. is in NFL. Language is a decentred “field of infinite substitutions,” or “play.” Because there is no centre, “the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre’s place in its absence—this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement” (289). See also NF’s remarks at pp. 828, 933, 952, 1011, below.
2 Cf. Matthew 13:11; Luke 8:10.
3 Kathleen Coburn of Victoria University was editor of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 5 vols. in 10 (Bolligen series, Princeton University Press). She edited the first three volumes and was co-editor of vol. 4 and the posthumously published vol. 5.
4 In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), the heroine’s first husband, the pedantic Edward Casaubon, labours to find and publish a key to all mythologies, including Biblical. His project is presented as an outdated and futile endeavour. In 1846 Eliot had translated into English David Friedrich Strauss’s controversial Leben Jesu (1835), which attempted to disentangle a core of historical truth from the myths of the Gospels.
5 See no. 66, n. 2.
6 William Blissett points out that this is an allusion to Rev. T.T. Shields, pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, 1910–55, the Ian Paisley of Toronto.
1 There were two primary schools because of the growth in Moncton’s population. Victoria School was built in 1890 on Park St. to serve kindergarten to grade 8, and Edith Cavell School was erected on its grounds in 1920 as a parallel school to take the overflow of students, in which grades it is not apparent. NF started at Victoria School in grade 3 in 1920 (soon skipping to grade 4), but graduated from Edith Cavell in 1925. Victoria School is no longer in existence, but Edith Cavell School, burned down in 1988, has been rebuilt and may still be seen at 125 Park St.
2 This was a large and imposing wooden building at the foot of Archibald St., which had been, at various points in its history, a railway hotel and the residence of P.S. Archibald, chief engineer of the Intercolonial Railway. It was donated (at a nominal rent of one dollar per year) to the city by the CNR in 1926 for a public library, which opened in 1927.
3 The doctor was Dr. Clarence Webster (1863–1950), a native of Shediac, N.B., who became a distingished doctor in Edinburgh and then Montreal before being called to the Rush Medical School in Chicago in 1899. In 1920 he retired and returned to Shediac, where he pursued his lifelong interest in researching and publishing on local history. The Moncton Public Library has no record of any donation from him—perhaps just as well, since the library burned down in 1948. Much of his collection went to the New Brunswick Museum.
4 See pp. 734, above.
5 See no. 30, n. 2.
6 Cassie Frye, letter to Donald Howard, 12 December 1933 (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 8). NF had been planning to stay in Moncton at least until Christmas, but the members of the class of 1933 who were continuing to Emmanuel were instrumental in arranging for a small job and sending some money for travel so that he could attend Emmanuel College (Ayre, 89).
7 See, for instance, p. 315 above.
8 Ivan Rand (1884–1969) was a member of the Supreme Court of Canada for sixteen years, and is known chiefly for his development of the “Rand formula” for levying union dues. He served briefly in the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick in 1925. Mathematical astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) was actually born in Nova Scotia but spent some time as a youth apprenticed to a herbalist in Moncton. In later years, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he looked upon his childhood as “an unhappy time spent in a backwater.”
9 Letter of Mary Howard to Donald Howard, 29 September 1929 (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 1).
10 In 1898 Shaw published Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant in two volumes; vol. 2, the pleasant ones, included Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell.
11 Alma Howard was the maiden and professional name of Alma Howard Rolleston Ebert (1913–84), daughter of NF’s uncle Eratus. The holder of a Ph.D. from McGill, she had a distinguished career in radiobiology and cell kinetics in laboratories in England. During her retirement she and NF exchanged letters, and a month before her sudden death were planning to meet (NFF, 1990, box 4, file 3).
12 Wilbert Howard (1890–1967), son of Daniel Hershey Howard, NF’s maternal uncle. He was a lawyer who held numerous corporate appointments.
13 E.g., in “The Developing Imagination” (1963), WE, 143.
14 E.g., in “The Teacher’s Source of Authority” (1978), WE, 499.
15 Letter from Mary Howard to her sisters [1929] (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 6). [B]
16 American composer Edward Macdowell (1860–1906) was greatly influenced by German Romanticism. Étude Magazine, published monthly, 1883–1957, in Philadelphia, was strongly supportive of German and Romantic music during the 1920s under editor James Francis Cook. One issue offers a reappraisal of German music in the wake of the First World War, concluding that Germany is still musically pre-eminent and dismissing suggestions about the “decadence” of German music.
17 The 1903 edition of the Golden Treasury was in 4 vols.; vol. 2 included three poems by Marvell and eleven of the shorter works of Milton.
18 Rev. Charles Arthur Krug (1906–85) was don at Gate House during NF’s student years. After his studies and ordination he was Hart Massey Professor of Philosophy, 1931–43, and of Philosophy and Psychology (1943–47) at Mount Allison, with time out for war service. NF attended his wedding in September 1932 (NFHK, 1:83).
19 Letter from Cassie Howard Frye to Donald Howard, 3 September 1931 (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 8). [B]
20 NF’s sister, Vera Victoria Frye, received a B.A. from Mount Allison University in 1924. [B]
21 John Edward Belliveau, “Newcomb, Frye and Rand: Three Scholars of Whom Moncton Should Be Proud,” Atlantic Advocate, 69, no. 2 (1978): 46. [B]
22 [This essay appeared, translated into French by] Jacqueline Carnaud, in Ornicar? Revue du champs freudien, 33 (1985): 11–14. [B] After the time of this interview, the original English version appeared in Criticism and Lacan, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (1990).
23 Cf. Acts 22:3–16.
24 Cf. EI, 12–13 (EICT, 447), where the developing imaginative life of a “genuine primitive” is suggested. See also SeS, 29 (SeSCT, 23), which links the periodic rise of primitivism with the wearing out of conventions.
25 This was Jerome McGann, whose published Alexander Lectures had the title Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). His fourth lecture invoked Walter Benjamin and others in calling for an even more politicized reading of texts. At the start of his book, McGann criticizes AC for its lack of historicity.
26 In his Either/Or (1843), Søren Kierkegaard had contrasted the aesthetic and the ethical.
27 This may be a somewhat fanciful allusion to escapes to his parents’ cottage on Lake Simcoe (the earliest-settled and most southerly area of “cottage country” north of Toronto), where the urbanized Gould liked to play his parents’ old Chickering piano. Or it may perhaps refer to the documentary Gould made on “The Idea of North,” one of the really desolate areas that appealed to him.
1 The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), 96–7 (sec. 331).
1 Gzowski is presumably thinking of NF’s assertion, at NFS, 99–100, that without Hamlet we might not have had the Romantic movement or the works of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard.
2 This is definitely what NF said on tape. It is puzzling in that the plays could not have been performed in the time indicated, yet an hour and forty minutes is too long for a single act of Lear also.
1 See the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
1 See no. 85, n. 1.
2 In StS, NF had written, “I do not believe, ultimately, in a plurality of critical methods, though I can see a division of labour in critical operations” (81). In elaboration he said that he did not believe that there are different “schools” with irreconcilable metaphysical assumptions.
1 In her introductory remarks, Aphel had noted this suggestion by Monseigneur Clemente Riva. The paper published several replies, including that of correspondent Fausto Gianfranceschi, who had focused particularly on NF’s The Great Code.
2 In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, bk. 5, chap. 5, the Grand Inquisitor of Ivan’s poem renounces human freedom in favour of security, gained by following church teachings.
3 The Medium is the Message is the title of one of McLuhan’s books (1967) and the message of much of his work.
1 Emily Dickinson, Because that you are going, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1958), 3:875–6.
1 Criticism in Society, ed. Imre Salusinszky, 73. The same collection, recently published, included an interview with NF, no. 82 above.
2 Ibid., 32. [G introduces the Salusinszky volume here]
3 “Lacan et la parole dans sa plenitude,” trans. Jacqueline Carnaud, Ornicar? Revue du champ freudien, 33 (April–June 1985): 11–14. [NF] [The editor of the interview did not use this note supplied by NF on his disk, giving instead a general footnote, “For a detailed and complete list of Frye’s works, including his writings on psychology (Freud, Jung, Bachelard, Lacan), see the voluminous updated bibliography compiled by Robert Denham.”]
4 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 10, l. 68, E38; letter to Thomas Butts, 2 October 1800, E712.
5 CR, 55 [G]; NFR, 69.
6 Guardiani is actually recalling a remark by Frank Kermode in Criticism in Society, 104.
7 Criticism in Society, 169 [G].
8 CR, 19–20 [G]; NFR, 47.
9 See no. 85, n. 1.
10 Criticism in Society, 33; see also p. 755, above.
1 Asa Briggs, Introduction to William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 13. [L]
2 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 11, E38.
3 This is the poet’s opening address to the reader in The Earthly Paradise.
4 William Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” in News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1993), 381. [L]
5 See Sartor Resartus, bk. 3, chap. 10, where Carlyle speaks of these two sects who strive to divide the English nation into two, one attracting the money and one the hunger of the nation.
6 “Chapters on Socialism” (1879), left incomplete at Mill’s death, was actually revised and published by his step-daughter Helen Taylor. Under the influence of his wife Harriet (who died in 1858), Mill had revised the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1852) to show a far greater sympathy with socialism than had the first edition of 1848.
7 “Arthur Pendenys” is the name used by Arthur Lee Humphreys (1865–1946) in an undated letter to Morris which was reprinted as a small booklet (in a limited edition of 100 copies) by the Aliquando Press (Toronto) in 1979. Humphreys was a highly regarded bookseller at Hatchards in Piccadilly, and the publisher of small but beautifully printed books. In his amusing letter, which makes fun of Morris’s hefty books with their unreadable Gothic type, Pendenys says that “Your books are bric-à-brac, and they appeal only to a class which I am told you are constantly condemning.”
8 See Morris’s criticism of Oxford, in particular, in News from Nowhere (London: Longmans, 1891), 77.
9 William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, 158. [L]
10 William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” in Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, 1914), 12:76. [L]
1 This was a frequent inaccuracy of NF’s. In fact St. Augustine mentions someone else’s irritation on this subject, as NF himself explains in CR (NFR, 55–6). See Augustine, Confessions, trans. E.B. Pusey (London: Dent, 1932), 260–1 (bk. 11, chap. 12).
2 This quotation has not been located; perhaps Rasky heard NF say it in the Bible lectures, some of which he attended before filming. NF stresses the fact that the creation of woman comes at the end of the Jahwist account “as the climax of the whole procedure” in “The Mythical Approach to Creation,” which however was not published until 1990 in MM (NFR, 122).
3 Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), no. 152.
4 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra had proclaimed “God is dead” in The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 167, 181–2. In The Twilight of the Idols (1888), trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 22, Nietzsche remarks, “I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.”
5 Joyce, Ulysses, 35; Byron, Vision of Judgment, ll. 688–9.
6 D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (London: Martin Secker, 1932), 76.
7 GC, 167/189: “my interest is not in doctrines of faith as such but in the expanding of vision through language.”
8 “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps” is the name given to the preface of Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending (1958), a revised version of the Battle of Angels (1945). It first appeared in separate form in the New York Times, 17 March 1957.
9 CP, 16, 97–8. Sir Walter Raleigh made the assertion about Paradise Lost in his Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1922), 88.
10 Sartre’s “Hell is other people” comes from his famous one-act play No Exit (1944). Kierkegaard (1813–55) lived long before Sartre (1905–80), and so could not literally respond to his remark, though he shared his interest in the relation between the individual and society. Coincidentally, NF had written “Hell is other people” in the margin of his copy of Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work As an Author, p. 116, beside a paragraph which seems to support Sartre; see ann. no. 883 in NFL. T.S. Eliot had advanced the idea that “hell is oneself” in his The Cocktail Party.
11 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff et al. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 3:215 (chap. 3).
12 Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, l. 21.
13 The quip (not attributed at GC, 137/157) has been attributed variously to Calvin, Luther, and others, and has been cited as a reason for Calvin’s not having written a commentary on the Book of Revelation.
1 In this regard it is amusing to recall Gzowski’s anecdote that, when he was interviewing NF, he was so tense that he burst out into a fit of uncontrollable coughing, at which NF said, “Oh dear, I’m sorry” (The Private Voice, 50).
2 This remark has not been located, but for examples of Richler’s attitude to the United States, see his childhood memoir, The Street (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969), 59; or St. Urbain’s Horseman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971), 107.
3 “To Come to Light,” NF’s address on the 150th anniversary of the founding of Victoria College, published in No Uncertain Sounds (1988); NFR, 361.
4 Edward Koch, the bold and outspoken mayor of New York, had appeared regularly on news radio and television besides writing thirteen books. He served three terms (1973–89) before losing a fourth.
5 See Artabanus’s (unheeded) advice to his nephew Xerxes, about a contemplated invasion of Greece, in Herodotus, The History, bk. 7, sec. 10.
6 Ronald Reagan used this phrase in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, 8 March 1982, defending the decision to build more nuclear weapons. It was widely reported and became a popular term to describe the Soviet Union (or to make fun of Reagan).
7 In Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps Whitman describes “How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on” (l. 30); in Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood he compares democracy to a ship advancing with the freight of the ages (ll. 47–57). Both poems are in Leaves of Grass.
8 “To Come to Light,” NFR, 362–3.
9 “By Liberal Things” (1959), WE, 98.
10 “To Come to Light,” NFR, 363.
11 This is the ending of CR (NFR, 81–2), where the supremacy of charity over faith is called the Everlasting Gospel.
12 See no. 34, n. 3.
1 “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada,” C, 351.
2 Preface to BG, iii (C, 414).
3 Ibid.
1 In the pre-interview, Ashton tried out this question:
ASHTON: You and Elizabeth, along with your first wife Helen, were classmates at Victoria College in 1933. How, more than fifty years later, did the talk of marriage come up?
FRYE: Well, Elizabeth and her husband, and I and my wife, were very congenial friends. After Jim died, the three of us continued to see one another and we were still congenial. After Helen went it just left the two of us—and we were still congenial—
ELIZABETH FRYE: Well, thank you! (laughter)
2 This was Robert P. (Bob) Bates, a classmate both at Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges.
3 In the pre-interview, Ashton asked more about the subject of aging:
ASHTON: In your travels around the world do you notice different attitudes to aging?
ELIZABETH FRYE: We’ve just been travelling in the Soviet Union and one of the things that knocked me out was having to wait at every door while six or seven huge Soviet men would go through first and practically knock me down. (To Frye) Didn’t you notice that?
FRYE: Yes, and it’s very different in Oriental countries. In Japan they seem to have a considerable respect for age—more of a sense of age and wisdom [going hand in hand]. In North America there’s perhaps more of a feeling of the lifespan being more or less over at sixty. I mean, when I read reviews—which I do as seldom as possible—of my own books and my own place as a critic, I can very frequently see in the subtext: “You know, it’s time this old bugger was dead.”
At the end of the pre-interview, Ashton asked if there was anything they would like to add regarding aging.
FRYE: Well, there’s one completely stupid story regarding young people’s attitudes to older people. I met a lad on the subway who asked for my autograph, but he hadn’t given me anything to write on or with so I hesitated. And then he said, “You’re Harold Ballard, aren’t you?” And I said, “Well, I’m not,” and he said, “You know, the old guy who owns the Leafs?” Now there’s a young man to whom all old men must look the same.
1 NF’s older brother Howard had been killed when NF had just turned six. His sister Vera (1900–66) left home to attend Mt. Allison University when he was eight. After graduation she went to work in Chicago.
2 In chap. 8 of George Orwell’s 1984, Julia and Winston visit the luxury flat of party member O’Brien, who has this privilege. The man who walks into the room is O’Brien’s servant Martin.
3 This refers to the hymn “Lead Kindly Light” with words by John Henry Newman (no. 270 in The Hymn Book of the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada, 1971). [C]
4 NF, Letter to Roy Daniells, 1 April 1975, quoted in Ayre, 45.
5 The colleague was Joseph Fisher, who had joined the department in 1937 and was to become chair in 1945. Besides his eighteenth-century course, NF taught Milton and Spenser, seventeenth-century prose, and nineteenth-century thought.
6 “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 249. [C]
7 Thomas J.J. Altizer, The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967). [C]
8 Blake, There Is No Natural Religion (b), last line, E3. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, par. 54, in Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. and trans. Robert W. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 269.
9 Unpublished interview. Kathleen Raine is a British poet and scholar and the author of a number of books on Blake, including Blake and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1968), The Human Face of God (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), and Blake and the New Age (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979). [C]
10 Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, pp. [37–8; E]541–2. [C]
11 “William Blake: Prophet of a New Age,”Ideas, CBC Radio, 26 March 1987, 20. [C] This was a program NF also contributed to, no. 87, above. George Goyder was a co-founder and trustee of the William Blake Trust (1949–82), concerned with bringing Blake’s illuminated books to a wider audience by publishing facsimiles.
12 Blake, Milton, pl. 41, l. 4, E142.
13 In “The Road of Excess” NF had discussed the way in which an aphorism of Blake’s will often sound, “as Blake intended it to sound, like someone in the last stages of paranoia. Blake has an unusual faculty for putting his central beliefs in this mock-paranoid form” in order to destabilize normal language (StS, 161; M&B, 317).
14 André Malraux, The Voices of Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 619. An annotated copy of the first ed. (1953) is in NFL.
15 In “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), NF had associated spring with romance and summer with comedy; in AC spring was associated with comedy and summer with romance.
16 Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966). Imre Salusinszky in “Frye and the Art of Memory,” in Rereading Frye, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 39–54, discusses this topic and the influence of Yates.
17 NF, “Literary and Mechanical Models,” presented at the Conference on Computing in the Humanities, Toronto, 6 June 1989; rpt. in SeSCT, 451–62. For the remark on software, see EAC, 12–13; SeSCT, 455.
18 See no. 85, n. 1.
19 Elizabeth Waterston, “Travel Books, 1880–1920,” Literary History of Canada, 360.
20 À propos of this work, NF remarks that “One may wonder whether satire was not his real medium, whether in the long run he was not of the race of Rabelais and Apuleius, a metaphysical satirist inclined to fantasy rather than symbolism” (FS, 193/195).
21 Bacon declared that he had taken upon himself “to ring a Bell, to call other wits together,” and therefore wished it to be widely heard. See his “Letter of Request to Dr. Playfer to Translate the Book of Advancement of Learning into Latine,” Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into publick light severall pieces of the works, civil, historical, philosophical, & theological, hitherto sleeping, of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon … together with His Lordships life by William Rawley (London: Printed by Sarah Griffin for William Lee, 1657), 33.
22 Blake, Jerusalem, [pl. 10, l. 20, E]153. [C]
23 Plato attacks poets in bk. 10 of the Republic. See his Laws, 660a, on the allowing of subservient poets to stay in the republic.
24 NF’s favourite example is Heidegger, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 198.
25 Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1692). [C]
26 Samuel Johnson, Prologue to the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre (1747) [ll. 53–4]. [C]
27 In “Maps and Territories,” his talk at the Rome conference of 1987, NF remarked that “Every writer today is surrounded by ideologues who not only urge him to write according to their formulas but have suborned a large proportion of critics to explain his work in their own terms.” Ritratto di Northrop Frye, ed. Agostino Lombardo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 14; SeSCT, 439.
28 AC, 5/7. For Mill’s remark, see his “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J.M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 345.
29 NF, “The Instruments of Mental Production” (1966), StS, 5; WE, 263.
30 Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), 1–24. [C]
31 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 68–75. [C]
32 “Ghostlier Demarcations,” in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 68–75. [C]
33 An annotated copy of Jean Piaget’s Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), is in NFL.
34 Cf. p. 933, above, and no. 85, n. 1.
35 This is an allusion to the chapter “That Dangerous Supplement” in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, a reading of Rousseau’s Confessions which points out that Rousseau uses the word “supplément” to describe both writing and masturbation.
36 Yeats, Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham (4 January 1939), quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Dutton, 1948), 285.
37 WP had not been published at the time of this interview, but at p. 925 NF mentions having finished it (cf. also p. 1036). Presumably Cayley read it in typescript, as the quotation from it is on the original tape. Margaret Burgess testifies that Jane Widdicombe did give printouts of the typescript to several people to read. For Russell’s remark, see WP, 150, and NF’s note to A History of Western Philosophy (1945), chap. 23.
38 Paul Valéry, “On Poe’s Eureka,” in Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James Lawler (London: Routledge, 1972), 170.
39 Most people would probably say that there were not four revolutions in English history, let alone in Milton’s lifetime. But NF made this claim also in his introduction to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951), xv. Presumably he was thinking of the various stages of the English Civil War, Commonwealth, and Protectorate.
40 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [pl. 5, last line, E]35. [C]
41 Sir Thomas Browne, “All Things are artificial, for nature is the art of God,” in Religio Medici (1643), pt. 1, sec. 15. [C]
42 “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism” (StS, 200–17 [ENC, 75–91]). [C]
43 Ibid., 216; ENC, 90–1.
44 “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read” (TSE, 5).
45 Interview by Stan Correy and Don Anderson (WGS, 221–35). [C] See p. 668, above.
46 The first two quotations are from Stevens’s The Motive for Metaphor, the third from So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch.
47 See p. 1071, below, for further comments on this conversion.
48 Cayley’s second quotation is from Stevens’s Sunday Morning, while the third alludes to his volume Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1947).
49 Stevens, Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, l. 2.
50 Adagia does not specifically mention Easter, though it is concerned with God as imagination. NF is probably thinking of Stevens’s address on receiving an honorary degree which he quotes at p. 289, above.
51 The goldiardic poets were anonymous twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors of satirical and profane poems in Latin, the most famous of which is the Apocalypse of Golias.
52 Matthew Arnold, 1869 preface to Culture and Anarchy, in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190.
53 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. Lin Piao (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), 61.
54 NF, “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943), C, 28.
55 Brian Moore (1921–99), born and raised in Ireland, came to Canada in 1948. His early novels, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), The Feast of Lupercal (1957), and The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), were written and published in Canada, the latter winning a Governor General’s Literary Award. Shortly before this (1959) Moore had left Canada for the United States, though he retained his Canadian citizenship.
56 Atwood, Second Words, 94, 405.
57 Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan were both colleagues of NF’s at the University of Toronto. See Innis, The Bias of Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); and McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). [C]
58 NF is presumably including Newfoundland here, although it did not become a Canadian province until 1949.
59 Historian Donald D. Creighton was another of NF’s University of Toronto colleagues. See Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937). [C]
60 Socrates stated that he believed that the earth is vast, “and that we who dwell between the river Phasis and the Pillars of Hercules inhabit only a minute portion of it—we live around the sea like ants or frogs around a pond—and there are many other people inhabiting similar regions” (Phaedo, 109a–b).
61 Raymond Knister’s White Narcissus was published in 1929 (around the time of Callaghan’s early fiction), and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist in 1904, so NF is not actually outlining a chronological sequence here, as he appears to be doing. In his essay “Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784–1984,” he discusses White Narcissus as an example of provincial style (C, 623–4).
62 These annual reviews are collected in [C, and in slightly shortened form in] BG. [C]
63 David Jackel, “Northrop Frye and the Continentalist Tradition,” Dalhousie Review, 56, no. 2 (1976): 221–39. On p. 226 Jackel says that some of NF’s students (such as Macpherson, Reaney, and Avison) went on to write poetry which was in turn praised by him. See also George Bowering, “Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) Than Any Northrop Frye Poet (2) Than He Used to Be,” Canadian Literature, 36 (Spring 1968): 40–9.
64 The free-trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. was signed 2 January 1988 under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. After the House of Commons had passed implementing legislation in August, the threat that the Liberal-dominated Senate would reject it led to the “free trade election” of November 1988, in which the Mulroney Conservatives won a majority. The activities of the cultural industries (film, video, audio, broadcasting, and publishing) were exempt from the provisions of the agreement.
65 See no. 76, n. 1.
66 Eric Havelock was a colleague of NF’s at the University of Toronto in the 1940s. In 1977, the year before he died, he returned to U of T to address a symposium on orality and literacy held at Emmanuel College. His views are summarized in his final book, The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). [C]
67 See the first essay in WTC, “The Moral of Manner,” which contrasts ordinary speech with prose and laments the lack of articulateness and rhythm in much habitual speech.
68 See no. 19, n. 4.
69 See no. 98, n. 9.
70 Jan Kott (1914–2001), Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Norton, 1974).
71 The Macpherson Commission was named for its chairman, the distinguished political philosopher C.B. Macpherson. It was established in response to student criticism of the U of T’s undergraduate curriculum, with its scholarly and specialized honour courses. The Commission reported in 1967 and recommended that the university virtually eliminate these courses, offer the students more choice, but still maintain high academic standards. (See C.B. Macpherson: A Retrospective, “Ideas,” 24 May 1988, 12). [C]
72 Claude Bissell was the president of the University of Toronto at the time of the Macpherson Commission. [C]
73 Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.81–2.
74 For NF’s report on these “Adventures” readers, see WE, 227–41. For his alternative series, see no. 40, above.
75 See chap. 10 of The Muse Learns to Write, esp. pp. 101–3. See also The Greek Concept of Justice from its Shadow in Homer to its Substance in Plato (1978).
76 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 246.
77 See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), a defence of liberal democracy against totalitarian trends in Plato and later theorists.
78 William Irwin Thompson, Gaia: A Way of Knowing (New York: Lindisfarne, 1987), 209–10.
79 According to Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy throws each man back upon himself, “et menace de le renfermer enfin tout entier dans le solitude de son propre coeur.” De la Démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla (Paris: Libraire Philosophique, 1990), 2:98 (pt. 2, chap. 2).
80 See no. 39, n. 3.
81 Blake, The Laocoön, [E] 274. [C]
82 NF probably had in mind the films Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Later this theme reached a mass audience with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, made into a movie in 2006.
83 See no. 98, n. 4.
84 In CR, chap. 3, NF remarks of Exodus 3:14, “I am that I am,” that scholars say it would be better rendered as “I will be what I will be” (NFR, 79; see also GC, 17/35).
85 See p. 810, above.
86 William O. Fennell, “Theology and Frye: Some Implications of The Great Code,” Toronto Journal of Theology, 1, no.1 (1985): 113–21. [C]
87 Eliot, Burnt Norton, sec. 2, l. 19.
88 Bernard Shaw, “The Bible,” in A Treatise on Parents and Children (1914), par. 1.
89 See, for example, Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985). [C]
90 See no. 98, n. 6.
91 The reference is to Genesis 3:22 with its unfinished sentence, “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.”
92 NF started to use this distinction in about 1983, for instance in a speech on Eros in poetry given on 16 February 1983 and published in 1986 (see SeSCT, 266). Cayley may have come across it in his reading of the typescript of WP; the discussion is on pp. 42–6 of the printed book.
93 Pascal is mocking moral judgments that are influenced by political considerations: “Plaisante justice qu’une rivière borne! Vérité au deçá des Pyrénées, erreur au delà.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1948), 151 (art. 5, par. 294).
94 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, E34.
95 In Some Reflections on Life and Habit (published as a short monograph in 1988) NF refers to his having recently read “a book that has been on the best-seller list for a long time, and which propounds the thesis that students have been cheated out of their education, socially and morally as well as intellectually” (23). He does not exactly satirize Bloom—with whose views of the ’60s he has some sympathy—but he does say that Bloom’s readers are reacting to a pastoral myth of an idealized past.
96 See Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations from the Library of Congress, ed. Suzy Platt (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1992), 392, for remarks on this epigram, often attributed to Shaw but perhaps originating with Oscar Wilde.
97 On the original tape NF says, “Barthes yesterday was saying,” so the reference is to a speech or conversation. For the general idea, see the claim that everything is already read and “there is no first reading,” in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1974), 16.
1 E.g., Odyssey, trans. Lattimore, bk. 16, l. 129; bk. 1, ll. 267, 401.
1 This appears to be a misunderstanding on Silversides’s part. NF had not meant that his grandparents brought him up, but that his parents had somewhat the age and mental attitude of grandparents. Cf. p. 791, above.
2 That is, she had used the word for “pig” (cochon) in place of “to go to bed” (se coucher, perhaps in the form couchons).
3 The bear’s son tale (thought to have influenced Beowulf) is a widespread folk tale with over two hundred variants telling of a fight with a demon who terrorizes a king’s hall. The important point here is that it is the youngest son, thought to be sluggish and good-for-nothing in his boyhood, who triumphs where his older brothers failed—a motif found in many folk tales.
4 Margaret Atwood, Second Words, 95, 405.
5 Ayre, 32. Willie Solomon was the son of Mrs. Frye’s sister Tessie.
6 NF had met Helen Kemp during their second year at Victoria College, 1930–31. During 1934–35, Helen studied at the Courtauld Institute in London, while NF was at Emmanuel College. In 1936–37, NF went to Oxford to study at Merton College, while Helen worked at the Art Gallery of Toronto. They were married 24 August 1937.
7 NF and Helen visited Moncton in July of 1940, when his mother Cassie was very sick, but undiagnosed. She died in November. For discussion of a possible earlier meeting while NF was visiting his parents in August 1936, see NFHK, 522–9 passim.
1 Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 10, l. 20, E153.
2 T.S. Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1960), 37.
3 Blake, Letter to Butts, 6 July 1803, E730. Blake draws attention to the similarity to Plato, apparently having in mind the Phaedrus.
4 Blake, Letter to Rev. Dr. Trusler, 23 August 1799, E702–3.
5 T.S. Eliot, “William Blake,” Selected Essays, 321.
6 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 12, E38.
7 See p. 885, above.
8 T.S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” Selected Essays, 23.
9 Edmund Wilson, “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” in The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963; orig. pub. 1938), 15–30.
10 “Bill 101” is The Charter of the French Language (S.Q. 1977, c. 5), a statute passed by the Quebec National Assembly in 1977 as part of Quebec’s determination to maintain French as a viable language in a continent that speaks mainly English. The most controversial sections were those restricting access to English schools and prohibiting the use of English on commercial signs. The Supreme Court of Canada later ruled that these provisions were in conflict with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982).
11 See no. 38, n. 10.
1 Plato, Sophist, 266c.
2 Immanuel Kart, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 54–5 (sec. 10).
3 See p. 668, above.
4 In Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1977), Peter Brazeau collects interviews with people who had known Stevens. Rev. Arthur Hanley was the chaplain at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where Stevens died on 2 August 1955; he said that he had succeeded in overcoming Stevens’s objections to the doctrine of hell and receiving him into the church some time in July, although it was kept quiet (294–6). Holly Stevens, the poet’s daughter, “vigorously denies that her father was converted to Catholicism during his last illness. While at St. Francis Hospital, she recalls, Stevens complained of visits by the clergy, but said he was too weak to protest” (310n).
1 Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: Die typologische Deutung des Alten Testaments im Neuen (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1939), 244. This book has been translated into English by D.H. Madvig as Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (1982).
2 In bk. 12 of Paradise Lost, while showing Adam the panorama of the future as portrayed in the Bible, Michael speaks of the movement “From shadowie Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit” (l. 303).
3 See, e.g., “The Double Mirror,” where NF writes, “As for ‘inspiration,’ if there is one thing that Biblical scholarship has established beyond reasonable doubt, it is that authorship, inspired or not, counts for very little in the Bible” (NFR, 86).
4 The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern European states, partly facilitated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power in the U.S.S.R. in 1985, reached its symbolic height with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
1 R.S. Crane of the University of Chicago came to Toronto to give the Alexander Lectures for 1951–52, later published as The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953). For NF’s comments on the lectures, see D, 544–8 passim.
2 Hayden White discusses his debt to NF for “the story–plot relationship” in “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” Clio, 1, no. 3 (1972): 5–20. In his 1973 book-length study he speaks in detail of four different modes, outlined in AC, as central to his study of narrative designs in historical writing. See Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 7–11.
3 Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini’s I Puritani (based on Scott’s Old Mortality), both of 1835, were the most popular, and lasting, of numerous transformations of Scott’s novels into Italian operas in the nineteenth century. In fact, The Bride of Lammermoor had already furnished three librettos of operas, 1829–34.
4 Cf. NF, “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 46, ser. 3, sec. 2 (June 1952): 57.
5 Probably this is “The Road of Excess,” StS, 160–74, originally published in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Beatrice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 3–20; rpt. in M&B, 316–29.
6 In Dissemination, 130–4, Jacques Derrida links this word, which Plato does not use, with cognates such as pharmakeus, which he does.
7 Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, l. 21.
8 Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), linguist and critic, author of numerous books and articles on literature, style, and syntax.
9 Michail Bakhtin discusses Menippean satire in his 1963 study, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 112–16. Here he discusses the genre “as one of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature” (113).
1 “Speech at the new Canadian Embassy, Washington” (14 September 1989), C, 642. This speech expands on the idea of levels of cultural identity mentioned in the interview.
2 On 1 November 1990, in the wake of Meech Lake (for which see n. 3), the federal government announced the creation of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future. Chaired by Keith Spicer (b. 1934), journalist, broadcaster, and head of the CRTC, the Forum travelled across the country soliciting Canadians’ ideas about their country.
3 The Meech Lake constitutional accord was a proposed agreement between the federal government and the ten provinces to recognize Quebec as a “distinct society.” The accord was not ratified by all the provinces and so lapsed.
4 The Idea File of Harold Adam Innis, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).
1 Aristotle’s theory of causation: 1) formal cause is that into which something is made, 2) efficient cause is that by which something is made, 3) material cause is that out of which something is made, 4) final cause is that for the sake of which something is made (from Aristotle for Everybody, by Mortimer J. Adler). Bertrand Russell provides a clear example of what Aristotle means:
Let us take again the man who is making a statue. The material cause of the statue is the marble, the formal cause is the essence of the statue to be produced, the efficient cause is the contact of the chisel with the marble, and the final cause is the end that the sculptor has in view (A History of Western Philosophy).
[Yan’s note]
2 Reviewers of FS who so complained include Lloyd Frankenberg in the Saturday Review of Literature, 30 (19 July 1947): 19; and Marshall McLuhan in the Sewanee Review, 55 (October–December 1947): 710–13. NF’s expression about the complaint/compliment is found in his Notebook 7, par. 19, (NAC, 13–14) and doubtless elsewhere. For his general views on the teacher as a transparent medium, see, e.g., pp. 987–9, above.
3 With Sheridan Baker and George Perkins, NF edited The Practical Imagination: An Introduction to Poetry (New York: Harper & Row, 1983; rev. compact ed., 1987); rpt. in SeSCT, 182–212. For Literature: Uses of the Imagination, see no. 40, above.