Dr. Frye and Mr. Hyde
Northrop Frye's notebooks and diaries provide a surprising view of his inner life, showing the deep thinker took note of 'female flesh' and his own genius
Jeet Heer
National Post
CREDIT: University of Toronto
Although he was an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada, the late literary critic Northrop Frye privately bristled at the widespread public notion that he was a holy man. With his gentle demeanour and wavy blond hair (sometimes compared by his admirers to an angel's halo), Frye had a reputation as a sort of scholarly saint, a dedicated teacher whose wide-ranging erudition was used in the service of higher things. In 1949, an undergraduate at the University of Toronto described Frye as "the best Christian she knew." Other students went even further and nicknamed Frye "God." Recording incidents of this type of misplaced worship in his diaries, Frye expressed astonishment that a "facile pseudo-sanctity" was starting to surround his name.
Perhaps the strongest challenge to this "facile" image of public piety can be found in the voluminous notebooks and diaries that Frye kept from his student days in the 1930s until his death in 1991. Currently in the process of being made public by the University of Toronto as part of a massive 33-volume Collected Works, Frye's notebooks and diaries provide a surprising view of his complex inner life, showing him as an unbuttoned and free-wheeling thinker.
In one diary entry, Frye describes the United Church as being little more than "a committee of temperance cranks." Elsewhere, he offers frank assessments of his friends and colleagues, describing the musicologist Arnold Walter as "a heavy Teutonic bastard" and complaining that Philip Child wrote "a long poem that's complete bullshit from beginning to end." On a more physical note, Frye often makes note of the "cute" appearances of his female students and the "female flesh" on display at a public restaurant.
Perhaps the most far-reaching revelation in the diaries and notebooks is the extent of Frye's intellectual ambitions. Throughout these works, he shows great faith in his own abilities, referring on several occasions to his own "genius." Although Frye's published books dealt with weighty topics such as the nature of literary criticism and the relationship between the Bible and literature, these tomes turn out to be mere cobblestones of Frye's much larger design: Nothing less than a systematic survey of all human knowledge.
For some of Frye's admirers, the publication of his previously private papers offer a fresh occasion to revisit this major thinker. "The unpublished stuff shows us a side of Frye that no one much talks about," observes Robert Denham, a professor of English at Roanoke College who has edited several volumes in the series. "I think the notebooks and diaries show Frye to be all too human. He has this image perhaps as the gentle presiding spirit over Victoria College, but these books show, like the rest of us, he had his anxieties." Noting that Frye's reputation in recent years has been eclipsed by more fashionable literary theorists like Jacques Derrida, Denham hopes that the Collected Works will demonstrate to a new generation that Frye was a uniquely imaginative and capacious thinker.
Not everyone is convinced of the merits of the Collected Works. "I'm not at all sure that a ... complete Frye is what his reputation needs," argues Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, author of such best-selling works as The Western Canon.
For Bloom, who remembers as an undergraduate obsessively reading and re-reading Frye's first book, Fearful Symmetry, the Collected Works presents "the Canadian master" in an unflattering light. "His notebooks can be very petty and troublesome," Bloom complains.
Usually, the posthumous collected works of renowned authors serves to consolidate and memorialize a reputation. Other collected works published by the University of Toronto Press, focusing on canonical writers such as Erasmus or John Stuart Mill, have had this effect. Yet, with its inclusion of new and controversial material, the Collected Works of Northrop Frye is not aimed at the simple task of nailing down Frye's place in history; ambitiously, it offers a fresh new version of a thinker whose plaster saint image is belied by a complicated mental life. More than anything else, the Collected Works call upon us to re-examine Northrop Frye's life and legacy.
- - -
Born in Sherbrooke, Que., in 1912, Herman Northrop Frye had his strongest formative influence from his devout Methodist mother, who wanted her younger son to become a minister. Reared in a pious household, Frye's imagination was shaped by his early reading of the Bible as well as allegorical religious texts such as The Pilgrim's Progress.
As a teenager, however, Frye had a sort of reverse religious epiphany, realizing during a walk to high school that the literalist reading of the Bible promoted by fundamentalist Christians was a "shitty and smelly garment" that had nothing to do with true faith.
As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the early 1930s, Frye discovered that the writings of the poet William Blake offered him a new and more vital approach to religion. Under the tutelage of Blake's words, Frye realized that the Bible could be read imaginatively, as the mythological substructure of Western culture, rather than simple factual record.
In describing the Bible as a myth, Frye did not mean that it was untrue, but rather that it was a primary guiding category of our mental life. Believing that all human thought was shaped by mythological systems, Frye believed the power of the Bible was that it undergirds so much of our culture. For example, when tabloid newspapers report that Elvis or Tupac Shakur are still alive and in hiding, this is merely an echo of Christ's resurrection.
"I propose spending the rest of my life, apart from living with you, on various problems connected with religion and art," Frye wrote to his girlfriend, Helen Kemp, in 1935.
"Now religion and art are the two most important phenomena in the world; or rather the most important phenomenon, for they are basically the same thing."
After an unsuccessful year as a student minister doing pastoral work in rural Saskatchewan in 1934, Frye returned to his literary studies, going to England to learn more about Blake.
He and Helen Kemp married in 1937.
One of the major achievements of the Collected Works is to flesh out the nature of Frye's relationship with his wife.
In earlier accounts of Frye's life, notably John Ayre's 1989 biography, Helen appears as a wraith-like figure. Reading the witty and spirited love letters that Frye and Helen wrote to each during their courtship, published as the first two volumes of the Collected Works, there can be little doubt about their passionate commitment.
When Helen died in 1986, Frye was devastated, falling into a personal purgatory recorded in moving detail in his late notebooks.
In terms of Frye's intellectual development, the unpublished works demonstrate both Frye's persistence in pursuing his major ideas, as well as certain significant dead-ends he encountered in his always ambitious intellectual agenda. If we just go by Frye's major published work, his intellectual career shows an unusually strong sense of purpose: Fearful Symmetry (1947) demonstrated the logic of Blake's seemingly private mythology; Anatomy of Criticism (1957) showed how Frye's archetypical and mythological reading of Blake could illuminate the literary universe as a whole; The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990) established the Bible as the mythological cornerstone of the Western literature. Conceptually rich and elegantly written, these books earned Frye an enormous global audience. By the time he died in 1991, he was one of the most widely cited thinkers in human history, quoted nearly as often as thinkers like Plato or Hegel.
No matter how large Frye bulked as a scholar, his published works represent merely a fraction of what he hoped to achieve. After completing Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Frye planned to do a "Third Book" that would lead towards a "symbolic guide" to human knowledge. "He really hoped to be the Einstein of criticism, bringing about a paradigm shift in the field," explains Jean O'Grady, associate editor of the Collected Works project. O'Grady notes that Frye had "vast plans for a survey of the whole of human knowledge," which were never formalized but exist as notebook entries (although raw material from the "Third Book" was recycled in some of the published works).
If Frye's "Third Book" project was a rare failure in a life crowned with many academic laurels, they also serve to humanize the great critic. In books like Anatomy of Criticism, Frye can sound like an Olympian know-it-all, whose gaze takes in all of literature with a sweeping glance. In the notebooks, by contrast, we see a much more down-to-earth and tentative Frye, who has to struggle to absorb each new book into his system and often finds himself wavering over which direction to go.
Of course, Frye never would have undertaken the "Third Book" unless he had supreme confidence in his own powers. In a passage that has excited some unfriendly comments, Frye noted that "the twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that."
"He certainly didn't lack for confidence," quips Harold Bloom. Although Bloom is a proponent of the idea of genius, having just published a book on the topic, he is troubled by Frye's claim to exclusive status. Without denying Frye's genius, Bloom lists off other critics (including Kenneth Burke and William Empson) who were equally "original and creative."
In his new book, Figures of Dissent, which reprints an earlier essay on Frye, the British critic Terry Eagleton is much harsher, criticizing Frye's "breathtaking arrogance." As Eagleton notes, "It is rather as if Christ had asked for a notice to be pinned to his cross proclaiming: 'I may not be a hotshot scholar but at least I'm the Son of God.' " (In his notebooks, Frye got in a pre-emptive strike against Eagleton, describing him as a "Marxist goof.")
However unseemly Frye's proclamation of his own "genius" may sound, honest readers should confront the fact that perhaps he was right in his assessment. Any ordinary scholar would have been content to write a book like Fearful Symmetry and achieved Frye's level of professional success. To his great credit, Frye was never satisfied with such worldly achievements. As his unpublished works document, he was always a spiritual seeker, looking into texts of all sorts, ranging from astrology handbooks to the Bible, for insight into the fundamental mythological categories of human thought. Frye's genius resided not just in his great intellect but also in his restless soul, which pushed him constantly onward in search of enlightenment.
Northrop Frye's notebooks and diaries provide a surprising view of his inner life, showing the deep thinker took note of 'female flesh' and his own genius
Jeet Heer
National Post
CREDIT: University of Toronto
Although he was an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada, the late literary critic Northrop Frye privately bristled at the widespread public notion that he was a holy man. With his gentle demeanour and wavy blond hair (sometimes compared by his admirers to an angel's halo), Frye had a reputation as a sort of scholarly saint, a dedicated teacher whose wide-ranging erudition was used in the service of higher things. In 1949, an undergraduate at the University of Toronto described Frye as "the best Christian she knew." Other students went even further and nicknamed Frye "God." Recording incidents of this type of misplaced worship in his diaries, Frye expressed astonishment that a "facile pseudo-sanctity" was starting to surround his name.
Perhaps the strongest challenge to this "facile" image of public piety can be found in the voluminous notebooks and diaries that Frye kept from his student days in the 1930s until his death in 1991. Currently in the process of being made public by the University of Toronto as part of a massive 33-volume Collected Works, Frye's notebooks and diaries provide a surprising view of his complex inner life, showing him as an unbuttoned and free-wheeling thinker.
In one diary entry, Frye describes the United Church as being little more than "a committee of temperance cranks." Elsewhere, he offers frank assessments of his friends and colleagues, describing the musicologist Arnold Walter as "a heavy Teutonic bastard" and complaining that Philip Child wrote "a long poem that's complete bullshit from beginning to end." On a more physical note, Frye often makes note of the "cute" appearances of his female students and the "female flesh" on display at a public restaurant.
Perhaps the most far-reaching revelation in the diaries and notebooks is the extent of Frye's intellectual ambitions. Throughout these works, he shows great faith in his own abilities, referring on several occasions to his own "genius." Although Frye's published books dealt with weighty topics such as the nature of literary criticism and the relationship between the Bible and literature, these tomes turn out to be mere cobblestones of Frye's much larger design: Nothing less than a systematic survey of all human knowledge.
For some of Frye's admirers, the publication of his previously private papers offer a fresh occasion to revisit this major thinker. "The unpublished stuff shows us a side of Frye that no one much talks about," observes Robert Denham, a professor of English at Roanoke College who has edited several volumes in the series. "I think the notebooks and diaries show Frye to be all too human. He has this image perhaps as the gentle presiding spirit over Victoria College, but these books show, like the rest of us, he had his anxieties." Noting that Frye's reputation in recent years has been eclipsed by more fashionable literary theorists like Jacques Derrida, Denham hopes that the Collected Works will demonstrate to a new generation that Frye was a uniquely imaginative and capacious thinker.
Not everyone is convinced of the merits of the Collected Works. "I'm not at all sure that a ... complete Frye is what his reputation needs," argues Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, author of such best-selling works as The Western Canon.
For Bloom, who remembers as an undergraduate obsessively reading and re-reading Frye's first book, Fearful Symmetry, the Collected Works presents "the Canadian master" in an unflattering light. "His notebooks can be very petty and troublesome," Bloom complains.
Usually, the posthumous collected works of renowned authors serves to consolidate and memorialize a reputation. Other collected works published by the University of Toronto Press, focusing on canonical writers such as Erasmus or John Stuart Mill, have had this effect. Yet, with its inclusion of new and controversial material, the Collected Works of Northrop Frye is not aimed at the simple task of nailing down Frye's place in history; ambitiously, it offers a fresh new version of a thinker whose plaster saint image is belied by a complicated mental life. More than anything else, the Collected Works call upon us to re-examine Northrop Frye's life and legacy.
- - -
Born in Sherbrooke, Que., in 1912, Herman Northrop Frye had his strongest formative influence from his devout Methodist mother, who wanted her younger son to become a minister. Reared in a pious household, Frye's imagination was shaped by his early reading of the Bible as well as allegorical religious texts such as The Pilgrim's Progress.
As a teenager, however, Frye had a sort of reverse religious epiphany, realizing during a walk to high school that the literalist reading of the Bible promoted by fundamentalist Christians was a "shitty and smelly garment" that had nothing to do with true faith.
As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the early 1930s, Frye discovered that the writings of the poet William Blake offered him a new and more vital approach to religion. Under the tutelage of Blake's words, Frye realized that the Bible could be read imaginatively, as the mythological substructure of Western culture, rather than simple factual record.
In describing the Bible as a myth, Frye did not mean that it was untrue, but rather that it was a primary guiding category of our mental life. Believing that all human thought was shaped by mythological systems, Frye believed the power of the Bible was that it undergirds so much of our culture. For example, when tabloid newspapers report that Elvis or Tupac Shakur are still alive and in hiding, this is merely an echo of Christ's resurrection.
"I propose spending the rest of my life, apart from living with you, on various problems connected with religion and art," Frye wrote to his girlfriend, Helen Kemp, in 1935.
"Now religion and art are the two most important phenomena in the world; or rather the most important phenomenon, for they are basically the same thing."
After an unsuccessful year as a student minister doing pastoral work in rural Saskatchewan in 1934, Frye returned to his literary studies, going to England to learn more about Blake.
He and Helen Kemp married in 1937.
One of the major achievements of the Collected Works is to flesh out the nature of Frye's relationship with his wife.
In earlier accounts of Frye's life, notably John Ayre's 1989 biography, Helen appears as a wraith-like figure. Reading the witty and spirited love letters that Frye and Helen wrote to each during their courtship, published as the first two volumes of the Collected Works, there can be little doubt about their passionate commitment.
When Helen died in 1986, Frye was devastated, falling into a personal purgatory recorded in moving detail in his late notebooks.
In terms of Frye's intellectual development, the unpublished works demonstrate both Frye's persistence in pursuing his major ideas, as well as certain significant dead-ends he encountered in his always ambitious intellectual agenda. If we just go by Frye's major published work, his intellectual career shows an unusually strong sense of purpose: Fearful Symmetry (1947) demonstrated the logic of Blake's seemingly private mythology; Anatomy of Criticism (1957) showed how Frye's archetypical and mythological reading of Blake could illuminate the literary universe as a whole; The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990) established the Bible as the mythological cornerstone of the Western literature. Conceptually rich and elegantly written, these books earned Frye an enormous global audience. By the time he died in 1991, he was one of the most widely cited thinkers in human history, quoted nearly as often as thinkers like Plato or Hegel.
No matter how large Frye bulked as a scholar, his published works represent merely a fraction of what he hoped to achieve. After completing Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Frye planned to do a "Third Book" that would lead towards a "symbolic guide" to human knowledge. "He really hoped to be the Einstein of criticism, bringing about a paradigm shift in the field," explains Jean O'Grady, associate editor of the Collected Works project. O'Grady notes that Frye had "vast plans for a survey of the whole of human knowledge," which were never formalized but exist as notebook entries (although raw material from the "Third Book" was recycled in some of the published works).
If Frye's "Third Book" project was a rare failure in a life crowned with many academic laurels, they also serve to humanize the great critic. In books like Anatomy of Criticism, Frye can sound like an Olympian know-it-all, whose gaze takes in all of literature with a sweeping glance. In the notebooks, by contrast, we see a much more down-to-earth and tentative Frye, who has to struggle to absorb each new book into his system and often finds himself wavering over which direction to go.
Of course, Frye never would have undertaken the "Third Book" unless he had supreme confidence in his own powers. In a passage that has excited some unfriendly comments, Frye noted that "the twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that."
"He certainly didn't lack for confidence," quips Harold Bloom. Although Bloom is a proponent of the idea of genius, having just published a book on the topic, he is troubled by Frye's claim to exclusive status. Without denying Frye's genius, Bloom lists off other critics (including Kenneth Burke and William Empson) who were equally "original and creative."
In his new book, Figures of Dissent, which reprints an earlier essay on Frye, the British critic Terry Eagleton is much harsher, criticizing Frye's "breathtaking arrogance." As Eagleton notes, "It is rather as if Christ had asked for a notice to be pinned to his cross proclaiming: 'I may not be a hotshot scholar but at least I'm the Son of God.' " (In his notebooks, Frye got in a pre-emptive strike against Eagleton, describing him as a "Marxist goof.")
However unseemly Frye's proclamation of his own "genius" may sound, honest readers should confront the fact that perhaps he was right in his assessment. Any ordinary scholar would have been content to write a book like Fearful Symmetry and achieved Frye's level of professional success. To his great credit, Frye was never satisfied with such worldly achievements. As his unpublished works document, he was always a spiritual seeker, looking into texts of all sorts, ranging from astrology handbooks to the Bible, for insight into the fundamental mythological categories of human thought. Frye's genius resided not just in his great intellect but also in his restless soul, which pushed him constantly onward in search of enlightenment.
