NORTHROP FRYE

Herman Northrop Frye (July 14,1912-January 22,1991) was Canada's most famous literary critic. He was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, lived much of his boyhood in Moncton, New Brunswick, and spent most of his academic career at the University of Toronto. I was never an official student of his, but in 1973-1974 I audited two of his courses at Victoria College in the University. One course I audited that year was Literary Symbolism; the other may have been Modern Poetry.

That year Frye was also teaching Tudor Poetry and Prose. I would have audited that class as well, had it been possible. But there was no room.

In the more memorable class, Literary Symbolism, about 150 of us sat in the little auditorium in the New Academic Building (now Northrop Frye Hall). Frye spoke vigorously in an excellent brown suit analyzing poems of Dylan Thomas and others. He ripped through Thomas' poem so swiftly that I don't understand it to this day. It was all so obvious to Frye.

I attended Frye's lectures with an eccentric friend. Alas, I have since realized that my friend was probably schizophrenic, perhaps with a touch of autism. He had beady little eyes, a mad smile, an aura of self-preoccupation and a way of either focusing on you with blowtorch intensity or ignoring your existence. He was easily offended, and eventually our friendship ended because of this.

My friend attempted to challenge Frye. Frye had been expatiating about The Waste Land and Four Quartets.

"Who cares about T.S. Eliot anymore?" my friend said. "Who reads him?"

"More people every year," Frye replied, steadily and defiantly. He frowned over his glasses.

# # #

That year Frye mentioned in passing the "secret language of poets." This concept practically gave me goosebumps. I had come to it on my own from reading Joseph Campbell. Did we poets truly have a secret wisdom that we expressed in symbolic language? I was . . . unsure . . . Still, it was a relief to hear its existence confirmed from one of the world's greatest scholars. I felt a little validated. Frye had indirectly confirmed my vast, hidden wisdom . . . especially when, as so often, I felt a public idiot.

# # #

Frye's hair was such a soft brown I suspected he had made a visit to Lady Clairol. (As a young person, I have since learned, Frye's hair was blond.) In later years his sideburns were white.

# # #

I think I had heard of Frye before I went to university in 1967. One Christmas about then an aunt or cousin gave me a copy of The Modern Century (1967). So perhaps I had encountered Frye's work before I actually arrived at University College.

Frye was a predominant spirit over the humanities section of the University. By the fall of 1967 I was interested in getting all his books. I soon bought a copy of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye's major work up to that time, and read it. I saw Frye on the subway one day early in my years at university, and told him how much I had enjoyed and learned from his work. I think he looked genial but uneasy.

I liked Frye's work because I was almost totally ignorant, and his books seemed to explain, or promise to explain, not only literature but the world. They seemed to hint that Frye understood not only literature but the forces that secretly were shaping the world. No magician could have devised a more potent magic to excite me.

Those who have not read Frye's work should. Anatomy of Criticism -- perhaps his major opus -- attempts to attack literature from several directions, setting up several ways of looking at its structure. According to Frye, literature not only consists of thousands of individual works, but has common themes and forms. Frye uses the seasonal metaphor, by which books are thought of by the way in which they seem to correspond to seasons of the year: romance, I seem to remember, is summer; tragedy, winter. Or is comedy summer?

Whatever. Frye sets up several different schemes for analyzing the kinds of fiction. In his rather abstract and Ciceronian prose Frye seemed tantalizingly to give the literary student the keys to the treasure house of literature.

# # #

Only gradually did I realize what a panjandrum Frye was at the University of Toronto. He was a University Professor; there was nothing higher, and only a few of them. He seemed to preside at or attend many University functions. He was a person of immensely high prestige, one of the few teachers at the University known all around the world.

I was officially studying philosophy at the time, but actually reading plays. So I didn't wangle my way into Frye's undergraduate classes which, by God, I should have done. No, I continued in philosophy suffering under droning professors like Dr. David Gauthier, the author of Practical Reasoning; I must get around to reading his book Real Soon Now.

Oh, and I had Dr. David Savan for Spinoza and Leibniz. He was a cheerful, gentle, rotund Jewish man, a noted liberal who wrote letters to the newspapers. And I had Dr. Donald Macrae for Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He was a tall Canadian-looking Anglo; rumor said he'd had his balls shot off in the war. He was very helpful. For 19th century Germans I had Emil Fackenheim, the author of The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought. Dr. Fackenheim had been offered Marcuse's post at a California university; he declined it. Dr. Fackenheim later made aliyah, migrating to Israel to keep world Judaism alive. I believe in 2002 he still thrives there.

I was a terribly mediocre B student. Philosophy was just so involved, so complex. It was not at all what I had thought it would be. At the time the University of Toronto philosophy department was in the death grip of analytic philosophy (it probably still is); to learn that one wasn't supposed to have giant airy conceptions but was supposed to learn a whole lot of technical terms and then attack little bitty problems in epistemology and philosophy of science was hard to fathom. Where was the love of wisdom?

Back to Frye.

Over the next few years I read Frye's earlier books. I was so ignorant that Frye taught me an enormous amount. He oriented me in literature. Like a good guru he had a plausible, if somewhat obscure, opinion about everything. And his take on things was always a bit different than what I had expected it would be.

Frye deeply loved the poetry, thought, and character of English poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). He had written his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), on that artist; Frye seemed to think his was nearly the first important and accurate book on the poet. I found Blake, however, easier to admire than to like. He was an marvellous lyric poet -- one of the best -- but a boring epic and symbolic poet. His early work was mostly crap. His unfinished epics were, well, crap. (Try reading Europe or The French Revolution.) He was a so-so painter of questionable anatomy (who conceived a few marvellous visions) and a total crank. And Christ!, was he Biblical. The Bible (and Milton and Swedenborg) dominated his mind. That mind was bent. The father figures in his epics were like cranky Old Testament Gods; it seemed that one was supposed to respect them, but they always seemed to me bad parents. They were like Nobodaddy, Blake's bad father god that Frye explained was "nobody's daddy." Orc and Urizen and Albion and Urthona and Thel and the rest of Blake's symbolic crew didn't do much for me. (I think that they are, usually, badly written, shallow characters; that's the trouble with symbolic characters.) I didn't care for the metric in Blake's epics; it seemed loose -- slack and dysfunctional. I also have a problem with thinking that Jerusalem (or the Byzantium of Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), for that matter) could in any sense be an ideal city.

So, except for Blake's marvelous short poems, the rest did not take on me. My mind remains open, but I can't force myself to try to read them again. Too stiff, too constricted, too "spiritual" and Christian for the like of me. (But I did steal from The Four Valas for the end of my poem Eyes of Lapis Lazuli.)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821) were more my speed as poets, and George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) for a while. I was deeply impressed by the American-English poet Thomas Sterns Eliot (1888-1965). I read all Eliot's available literary criticism, and Frye's short book T. S. Eliot. Eliot's essays on Dante, on Milton, on Swinburne, and on Byron as a bad poet were fascinating.

Through my undergraduate years Frye and Eliot were my chief literary guides. Frye oriented me to literature, Eliot to poetry. Only after I graduated did the American poet Ezra Loomis Pound (1888-1972) and Yeats begin to influence me. I have already explained that during the academic year that I returned to U of T, 1973-74, I was again under the spell of Frye; that year I wrote the first drafts of my longish poem "Eyes of Lapis Lazuli".

About this time Frye's work began to evolve. He wrote his important Romantic book, The Secular Scripture, and then Spiritus Mundi (1976), which struck me as one of his most important and clear works. His style began to seem more simple, his ideas more clear.

About 1974 I decided to see Frye, to ask him to support my application for a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. I appeared at his office several flights up in the New Academic Building (now Northrop Frye Hall) at Victoria College with a copy of my Eyes of Lapis Lazuli. It was a photocopy from an A. B. Dick photocopier; it was on a kind of greasy-feeling onionskin photocopy paper, all interlined with changes and re-copied several times. It must have looked completely unprofessional, an unreadable mass of scribblings.

Frye looked at it and frowned. Probably he couldn't make head nor tail of it.

I waited expectantly. Confidently.

Frye glanced up at me, and said grumpily, "You know . . . they want you to have published numerous times." He suggested that if I hoped to get a grant I would have to have published many poems (about 50, as it turned out). I said I understood that. But Frye agreed to write a letter of support. Recognition at last! Recognition!

Much later I found out that Frye always wrote this kind of letter for young poets and scholars (I think, whether they were any good or not). He was reputed a soft touch, and a nice man.

# # #

I also submitted my interlined greasy A.B. Dick photocopy version to Coach House Press, who rejected it swiftly and efficiently. I admit I was surprised. Okay . . . so the world wasn't lining up to salute my genius. At least I had made a start.

I soon realized that getting a grant would take longer than I had thought. Gradually I gave up the idea. I decided to finance my own poetic career rather than do things their way.

Meanwhile Frye rolled successfully along in his career, producing two big and important books about the Bible, The Great Code (1981) and Words With Power (1990). These were not quite as clear as Spiritus Mundi, but they were filled with interesting, stimulating material and ideas. One problem I felt they had was that they were too Eurocentric; the Bible is only near the centre of Western literature, not literature as a whole. Literature is about more than the Bible. Its center seems to me nearer to The Masks of God by American mythologian Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), or to that author's The Hero of a Thousand Faces.

In the late 1970s I was very much into science fiction. Frye seemed aware that science fiction was not to be dismissed. He was aware that it was another "displacement," to use his term, of myth, like detective stories, romances and Westerns. I hoped that he had read Philip K(indred) Dick (1926-1982), the bizarre American science-fiction writer; Dick's theme of multiple realities struck me as being like the work of Pirandello. Science fiction struck me as reminiscent of Homer's Odyssey; but, alas, Frye scarcely ever mentioned science fiction.

Though I never saw him in a personal way again, I did attend an occasional lecture of his. He gave three lectures at the U of T Faculty of Education, and later, as was his way, adapted them into one of his books. And I saw him lecture at the Harbour Castle Hilton, as it was then called, before the American Association for the Advancement of Science when it met in Toronto in the early 1980s.

Frye did disgracefully well without my help. The two Bible books, in particular, elevated his reputation beyond even its previous height. But he published four or five other good books before he died. In essence, he was constantly returning to the same themes, clarifying and expanding his earlier thoughts.

# # #

About 1975 I was trying to decide whether to go to graduate school in comparative languages. So I looked up F. E. L. Priestley (known as Felp to his friends), and asked to see him. Priestley had been the mentor to a teacher of mine, Dr. Niermeier at University College (Dr. Niermeier was eventually forced out of University of Toronto for budgetary or scholarly reasons, I never understood which, and later taught at a community college.) Anyway, Dr. Priestley had written a very good book on Tennyson; Tennyson was his thing.

Felp Priestley's house was on a North Toronto street in a neighbourhood known to be frequented by Anglos (Northrop Frye lived on Heath Street in a similar area not far away). Priestley's wife had just died. (He was later to marry a respected University of Toronto astronomer, the author of The Stars Belong to Everyone, and to die before she did.) The house was full of laden bookshelves, and of hardcover books, often big coffee-table picture books, on every subject, lying in piles everywhere around the living room. On the couch. On chairs. In corners. I especially remember the books on locomotives.

Priestley turned out to be a slim, polite and friendly (may I use a word I hate?) mustached WASP. When I mentioned Frye, he spoke affectionately of "Norrie." When I addressed the question to him of my questionable future, he advised me not to enter a graduate program in comparative literature unless that was really what I wanted to pursue.

It wasn't. I knew it was just a stopgap, something I was contemplating doing to get some knowledge while I Made Up My Mind.

I was going about my future in a very rational way, so I had also made an appointment with the head of U of T's comparative language department. All I remember was that he was dark, and had a hyphenated Latin-American name. He too did not seem eager to embrace a neophyte contemplating slumming for a year in his department.

And thus I had no choice but to become a poet. There was nothing left where anyone wanted me.

# # #

I have one final story to tell about Northrop Frye.

One afternoon in the early 1970s I attended a lecture in the Great Hall of University College. This was a not very big lecture space criss-crossing above the main entrance to the College. I am not certain who the speaker was. Was he H.D.F. Kitto, the English classical scholar, author of The Greeks and Form and Meaning in Greek Drama? Well, let us imagine that it was, for I certainly heard a lecture by Kitto in that space at some time or other.

Frye came in to hear the lecture. He sat down quietly about eight rows from the front with a fellow professor. The University's other scholar with prestigious mojo, the communications theorist and former English professor Herbert Marshall McLuhan, came in as well, and draped himself (he was a fairly tall man) in the very first row with two of his academic friends. I had never seen McLuhan in the flesh before. He turned out to be amusing to watch.

McLuhan projected an awkward air of half self-consciousness. As he sat he crossed his legs and sat with them at a casual angle, taking up a lot of space. I couldn't take my eyes off him. As the lecture went on, it was fascinating to watch McLuhan's face work, reacting with the lift of an eyebrow to the speaker's points.

Frye's face, by contrast, was an enigma. As he listened he gave away little of what he thought. A frown occasionally wrinkled his forehead.

The speaker gave his talk. If it was indeed Kitto, I remember the talk well. Kitto, a big imposing bald man (I think), intoned the introductory lines of Homer's Iliad, and led us to what Kitto postulated with gravitas as the theme: "And the will of Zeus was accomplished." He ran through the epic, impressively pointing out how the enunciated theme was everywhere.

Afterwards, for some reason, both Frye and McLuhan were invited to ask questions and comment. Each awkwardly rose to his feet, Frye first, I think, asked a question and made some sort of summarizing remarks.

Now you should know -- though I did not know it at the time -- that Frye and McLuhan each somewhat disliked the other, and felt that the other was damaging or destroying English.

But, for myself, I enjoyed comparing their different styles. Frye was grudgingly respectful of everyone, even people he disliked. McLuhan, by contrast (I could see), was largely oblivious of the impression he made; namely, of being humorously fatuous.

Yet I think I was blessed to be at a university where two such different and interesting people could co-exist, and each get tenure, respect and reasonable attention.

For this reason I am very grateful to the University of Toronto, its scholars and its staff, for existing and allowing me to encounter such, well, giants.

# # # # #

Books by and about Northrop Frye

Ayre, John. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1989.

Balfour, Ian. Northrop Frye. Boston: Twayne Publishers (a division of G.K. Hall & Co, 1988.

Denham, Robert D., editor. Northrop Frye on Culture and Education: A Collection of Review Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

-------, editor. Northrop Frye: Myth and Metaphor. Selected Essays 1974-1988. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

-------, editor. Northrop Frye: The Eternal Act of Creation. Essays, 1979-1990. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.

-------. Anatomy of Criticism. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1957.

-------. Fables of Identity. New York and Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.

-------. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Publications, 1963.

-------. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1963.

-------. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1965.

-------. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967.

-------. The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967.

-------. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1970.

-------. The Secular Scripture.

-------. The Critical Path. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1971.

-------. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1976.

-------. Creation and Recreation. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1980.

-------. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press Canada (i.e., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1981, 1982.

-------. The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1983.

-------. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986.

-------. On Education. Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1988, 1990.

-------. Words With Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. New York, London, Toronto: Viking (a division of Penguin Books), 1990.

-------. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Hamilton, A. C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1990

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