This collection aims to assemble all those interviews or discussions with Northrop Frye that were published in question-and-answer or dialogue form, or broadcast on radio or television as interviews. It cannot claim to be equally inclusive regarding unpublished interviews, but efforts have been made to discover, and include here, those additional interviews Frye granted for which the interviewer kept the tape or transcript and which have some intrinsic interest. Also included are a few brief oral pronouncements that are not really interviews (e.g., nos. 9, 28): these obviously derive from Frye’s response to a question, but only the answer remains. In fact it has been difficult to define exactly an interview (so that the volume might more pedantically be titled Northrop Frye’s Interviews, Dialogues, and Other Oral Pronouncements); but these semi-interviews do seem to belong in this, the only volume of the Collected Works to capture Frye’s off-the-cuff, spontaneous utterances.
Not included, however, are films of Frye in which he appears as a “talking head” without audible questions; these are listed in Appendix A. Appendix B lists other interviews given by Frye that were written up and published in discursive form, usually incorporating some direct quotations; these include the interviews with John Ayre that were used for background and factual information for his biography. Finally, Appendix C assembles chronologically the other interviews known to have taken place but no longer available.
Several sources have been used to search for interviews with Frye. The largest number have been recorded in Robert D. Denham’s Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography. A collection of “Correspondence relating to media projects” in The Northrop Frye Fonds, 1991, box 41, files 1 and 2 at Victoria University Library indicated several more usable interviews. For each year from 1970 on, Frye’s secretary Jane Widdicombe has provided a list of his major engagements which includes appointments for interviews, while the daybooks for 1970–90 on which these lists are based, available in the Frye Fonds, have other jottings indicating interviews. There are incidental references to interviews in the autobiographical volumes of the Collected Works, in Ayre’s biography, and in miscellaneous print sources. All clues have been followed up by library research, letter and personal appeal, internet searches, and a combing of the CBC Archives undertaken by Mary Ellen Kappler.
In spite of these efforts, the present collection could not be described as exhibiting the sum of Frye’s efforts to contribute to intellectual fare in the media. For instance, his diaries as a young professor in the 1950s mention his taking part in a number of radio programs which have not survived on tape: these include a discussion of the H-bomb on the student radio station with philosopher Marcus Long and theoretical physicist Melwyn Preston (D, 266, 269); a planned CBC discussion of religion in 1950 which may not have taken place (D, 290, 301); and several contributions to the CBC’s “Citizens Forum.” In 1982 (a good year from this point of view), there are clues to interviews with sixteen people: seven are included here, four resulted in known articles, and only five have not been tracked down. But in 1985, distressingly, nine of the thirteen interviews listed seem to have left no trace, including a tantalizing “Steve Minuk interview for MENSA” (25 March). Some missing interviews of this type were potential contributions to larger projects that had to be abandoned. Fiona McHugh, for instance, interviewed Frye on “world mythology” for a survey that did not eventually work out. In a scenario that will be all too familiar to researchers, she replied to a query in 2004 about her interview that she had kept the tape since 1981, but three weeks ago had finally thrown it out. People working on a topic for broadcast sometimes taped Frye’s views but did not use them in the final program, as happened with Kay Armatage’s video Storytelling (interview of 27 June 1983) or Dennis Duffy’s program on historical fiction (9 October 1986); again the original tapes are no longer available. In the late 1970s the Thomas More Institute in Montreal and its offshoot Discovery Theatre in Toronto offered a course on “Story” based on The Secular Scripture and an interview concerning it conducted with Frye in Montreal; but the tape of this, though still in existence, apparently crumbles at a touch.
Given the length of the present collection and the inevitable repetitions, some readers may be grateful that these research efforts were not more successful. However, in spite of overlaps it was thought useful to publish each interview in full for researchers to make what use of them they wish. The introduction, p. xxxvii, makes some suggestions as to the most rewarding for the general reader interested in Frye’s ideas.
The interviews have been arranged in chronological order according to the date on which Frye gave them, if this is available; if not, by date of their publication or broadcast. Thus where possible we follow the evolving sequence of ideas in Frye’s life, rather than the somewhat arbitrary dates of appearance. The dates could frequently be ascertained by the Widdicombe list already mentioned, referred to in the headnotes as “Jane Widdicombe’s list,” supplemented by Frye’s daybooks. Sometimes it has been possible to deduce the date of the interview from correspondence with the interviewer in files in the Frye Fonds. Finally, there is sometimes internal evidence, either in the interview itself or in the discursive introduction to it, that dates the encounter or provides historical clues.
Many of the pieces’ titles have been retained from the original published version or broadcast program. But so many were headed with some variation of “An Interview with Northrop Frye” that in these cases other, more descriptive titles have been supplied. When Robert Denham devised titles for the interviews published in his collection A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye, these have been used in order not to multiply sources of confusion.
Oral discourses demand editorial principles somewhat different from those used in the rest of Frye’s Collected Works. No one would wish to read an exact reproduction of conversation, with all its hesitations, false starts, grammatical slips, and incomplete sentences. These have, in the most conservative manner, been edited out, as have some of Frye’s frequent uses of the phrase “Well, I think that” as he begins an answer, though perhaps he appears slightly more dogmatic without this modest filler. As he is such an articulate speaker, known for his magic ability to pull whole paragraphs from the air, the only other frequent adjustment was to remove the ruminative “and” by which he often moved from one sentence to the next.
Even when the source is a published document—almost inevitably deriving from someone else’s transcription of a tape, soundtrack, or written notes—some silent corrections of this sort have been introduced. I have listened to the original tape or watched the video whenever these were available, and this has helped in the correction of apparent mis-hearings, as has comparison with what Frye normally said or thought. Among the most amusing mishearings I might mention Vic Report’s having Frye refer to “what was going on fifty years ago in Kamucketrak in Tennessee.” Only after some time spent trying to trace down this city and its shenanigans did I realize that what Frye must have said was “in the monkey trial in Tennessee.” In a recent telephone conversation, interviewer Bruce Reynolds spontaneously recalled listening to the tape many times to catch the name of that city; Frye’s rapid, low-pitched tone, at times scarcely more than a mumble, could be a challenge to his transcribers. Nevertheless, it is hard to excuse some of the College English Association’s wild approximations, including calling Frye’s circle of mythoi the “circle of Ithaly,” Jung’s mandala his “man–thou arc,” and integral calculus “integral competence.” Our general editor Alvin Lee, at that time vice-president, academic of McMaster University, is charmingly metamorphosed into “vice-president and master at Hamilton.” A phrase in Cayley’s Northrop Frye in Conversation, “according to one notable critic, named Ayme” (104), generated a good deal of fruitless research until a rehearing of the tape revealed that what Frye had really said, tongue in cheek, was “one notable critic, namely me.” Undoubtedly, more of these mishearings remain, undetected by me.
In the case of discussions involving several people, it has been necessary in the interests of space to compress or eliminate some of the non-Frye matter. This has been replaced by editorial summaries, in square brackets and italics, where necessary to maintain continuity. Otherwise, omissions are signalled by three asterisks, to distinguish them from the three spaced dots that are used to indicate a voice trailing off or an incomplete sentence in the original. Words which have been added editorially to clarify someone’s statement, but which are conjectural, are placed in square brackets. Short paragraphs in newspaper-type columns have been run together. Frequent introductory paragraphs in the originals, explaining who Frye is, have been omitted.
In other respects the general guidelines of the Collected Works have been followed. Printed sources have been regularized to use Canadian spellings in “-our” and to include two commas in sequences of three. Titles of poems and books are italicized. Interviews published in French have been left in French in accord with the bilingual policy of the Collected Works, while those in other languages have been translated or, if this has survived, replaced by the English original. Headnotes to each item specify the source of the text, the means for dating if this is not the date of publication, reprintings in English and French, and whatever contextual information is judged necessary. Generally this includes some indication of the nature of the publication and the identity of the interviewer, when this could be ascertained. Other background information is provided in the notes. Notes that were present in the original printed source are so identified. References to page numbers in Anatomy of Criticism, Fearful Symmetry, and The Great Code, often given in square brackets in the text, are followed after a slash by the page number in the Collected Works edition (e.g., GC, xv/9). When a person or book title is mentioned in passing, a note is not provided, but the person’s full name and life dates, and the book’s date of publication, are given in the index (which I compiled myself).
I am indebted to a number of individuals who provided or searched for lost interviews, including Kay Armatage, Dominique Aubry of the NFB, Debra Bennett of TVO, Barbara Brown of the CBC, Dennis Duffy, Ellen Esrock, Nicholas Graham, Marty Gross, Fiona McHugh, Gilbert Reid, Robert Sandler, Ann Silversides, Glenna Davis Sloan, Alison Sutherland of Berkeley Studios, United Church of Canada, Jeff Walden of the BBC Archives, Garron Wells of the University of Toronto Archives, Ken Wilson in the Archives of the United Church and Victoria University, and Sara Wolch. Most of the printed items were scanned or typed by Elisabeth Oliver. Ten of the taped items had already been transcribed by Robert Denham for A World in a Grain of Sand. Subsequent interviews were transcribed from tape or videocassette by Leslie Barnes, Margaret Burgess, Mary Ellen Kappler, Monika Lee, Elizabeth O’Grady, and Carrie O’Grady, and translated by Nella Cotrupi, Igor Djordjevic, and János Kenyeres, for all of whose careful work I am most grateful. (Those not attributed I transcribed myself.) Janet Ritch cast an expert eye over the French interviews. I should also like to thank Margaret Burgess for her proof-reading, exemplary copy-editing, and many helpful suggestions for notes.
I received most welcome help with the notes from my research assistants, particularly Mary Ellen Kappler and Christopher Jennings, with later contributions by Scott Schofield, Leslie Barnes, and Erin Reynolds. Other information was kindly provided by John Ayre, Kathleen Cabral, Derek Chan, John Robert Colombo, William Conklin, Robert D. Denham, Tibor Fabiny, Branko Gorjup, John Webster Grant, Robin Jackson, Alexandra Johnston, János Kenyeres, Rosemary Knox, Martin Levin, Ann Lewis, Wallace McLeod, Margaret Prang, Ian Singer, Alex Thomson, Kenneth Thompson, Lynn Welsh, Jane Widdicombe, and Peter Yan. Robert Denham has been generous in sharing both his unrivalled knowledge of Frye and his powerful computer. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues at the Northrop Frye Centre: to Alvin Lee, the general editor, who entrusted this volume to me; and to Margaret Burgess and Ward McBurney, and latterly Erin Reynolds, daily companions whose presence and encouragement have often brightened the day.