Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (review)

Northrop Frye's literary career proved the exception to most rules. After a few early articles in Canadian journals, he achieved international fame overnight with the publication of his first book, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947). He then wrote a series of high profile articles for literary journals, mostly in the U.S., that he gathered and transformed into the immensely influential Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957). His posthumous publications have also been unusual. In 1996, only five years after his death, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye began to appear, and they began where the collected works of other writers tend to end, with volumes of letters, diaries, and notebooks. Scholarly editions of the Anatomy and Fearful Symmetry are now in active preparation, but even before they are printed Frye's readers have access to his personal reflections about these and other books. Such readers, whose interests include religion and culture as well as literature, are fortunate indeed.

Nietzsche's readers had to wait almost seventy years after his death for a scholarly edition of the Nachgelassene Fragmente, to which Frye makes reference, having had first to deal with his sister's selective arrangement in Der Wille zur Macht. Jung's readers have still to see most of his Rotbuch or any of his Schwarzbuch, access to which has been blocked by heirs and given only recently to the Philemon Foundation. Readers of Samuel Butler and James George Frazer, who edited their own notebooks, will never know what materials were discarded in the process. However, Frye's readers have an embarrassment of riches. Those who prefer a bedside book have Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries, selected by the immensely energetic Robert D. Denham, who knows the unpublished materials better than anyone else. Those who want the original context but without the complications of Frye's crabbed handwriting have the "late notebooks" and Bible notebooks edited by Denham, as well as the letters and diaries. Now they have two volumes edited by Denham's associate Michael Dolzani, who once served as Frye's research assistant. The notebooks connected with Frye's projected but unwritten "third book" after Fearful Symmetry and the Anatomy appeared in 2003, and those connected with his work on literary romance appeared at the end of 2004.

Unlike Nietzsche, who kept one notebook at a time, Frye used different notebooks for different subjects, often returning to one after a space of many months or years. Except in diaries, he seldom dated the entries. The result is a challenge for editors, who must guess the approximate dates from occasional references to events in Frye's world or the world at large. It poses a challenge for readers as well when entries in one volume of the edited notebooks are related to items in another. Dolzani acknowledges that some of the notes on romance touch on speculations in the "third book" notebooks, others on material in "late notebooks," and still others on the Anatomy notebooks, which Denham is currently editing. He puts the best face on the chaos, in the opening page of his fine introduction, when he compares the notes to the buried treasure in romances like Poe's. The reader must be prepared for a quest, with some long dry stretches but not without surprises and rewards for the persistent.

As he entered his sixties, Frye became prone to writer's cramp and began taking notes on his beloved Selectric typewriters. More than half of the material in the present volume is taken from typescripts, presumably first drafts. (The volume includes no illustrations of the original pages, so it is difficult to know how rough they are, but Frye was a proficient touch typist with business school training.) In all, there are nine handwritten notebooks, seven of them from the 1940s through 1960s, and sixteen sets of typewritten notes.

Most of the entries in the book's first half...