Northrop Frye: A Biography by John Ayre (review)

HUMANITIES 157 centuries,' Trehearne observes at the beginning of his study. 'We need the information before we rule upon its relevance. Without an archival and literary-historical interest, the aestheticism in these Canadian poets might well have gone, indeed was going, entirely unnoticed. Future critics might choose to ignore this information, but there is an enormous difference between willed ignoring and wilful ignorance.' This caution is also Trehearne's apologia pro opere suo. With his fine appreciation of the English Aesthetes and Decadents and his exhaustive knowledge and sensitive reading of the Canadian modernists, Trehearne rewrites the history of the 1920s generation in Canadian poetry. (DAVID STAINEs) John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography Random House. 472. us $28.95 Oral tradition tends to turn great people into heroes and their lives into stories and sayings. This is especially true of great teachers, as the anecdotes become part of their teachings-- for example, in the tales of the Zen masters and the Hasidim. What makes for a good story, however, usually obscures the historical personage and vexes the biographer. With Northrop Frye there is a host of 'Norrie stories.' John Ayre began to hear them as an undergraduate at Victoria College twenty-five years ago, and has probably heard more than any man alive during the eight years that he spent on his biography of Frye. As a biographer he had to record the facts behind the stories, dispelling some favourite 'myths' about Frye while letting the true myth of his life emerge and shape the narrative. The Norrie cycle that all Torontonians learn (and 'Fryedolators' elaborate) involves the lad of humble origins who types his way to Toronto and through the university as winner of an international competition and who can stillbe heard at all hours, composing new tomes at lightning speed. Ayre has to note that Frye did not win, and has always composed his books longhand. Yet he is aware that Frye fits the role of hero as dragon slayer in a way quite appropriate to the University of Toronto's 'StGeorge Campus.' His biography has five chapters, of which the central one describes the final triumph over the huge book manuscript on Blake. Other chapters follow Frye through other struggles, first with the constraints of an evangelical upbringing and the financial crises of college and graduate study, later with critical theory and the Bible. However, Ayre is especially sensitive to Frye's difficulties in writing on Blake, perhaps because he spent nearly as long wrestling with his own book, and he too is on the fringe of academe, a writer without a PH D. Fortunately, Ayre had Frye's full cooperation when he undertook the task in 1978. He had access even to letters that brought back the pain of Frye's early years. He also interviewed many of Frye's old friends. He no 158 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 doubt had to resist some tempting leads- for example, from a classmate who once told me that Frye determined to become head of the English department before he had finished his freshman year and went into the ministry because there had never been a head at Vic who was not an ordained minister. Ayre even caught Frye in the act of elaborating the painful experience of summer ministry in Saskatchewan into a series of witty stories, during a summer in Seattle. He wanted to record the prize story from this period, about the day when Frye was asked to pray for rain after a long drought and watched the sky cloud over as the service progressed, but Frye protested that the same story was told of every ministry student and should not be included. Ayre has a good ear for phrases, especially Frye's, and peppers his prose with lines from Frye's extensive correspondence. His eye is less acute than his ear, and while he lets us glimpse the places from Frye's early days, he does little to describe the city and University of Toronto. Granted that the inner life is the real life, for Frye as for Blake, but he is a product of Toronto and readers outside Canada, at least, could understand him...