Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections by His Students and Others in the 1940s and 1950s ed. by Robert D. Denham (review)

In 2001 Robert D. Denham edited Northrop Frye’s Diaries of 1942–55 for the edition, then in process, of Frye’s Collected Works. Frye’s Notebooks of the same period were also appearing in the CW, and those revealed the then-unknown inner world of the distinguished critic and teacher, one far more intoxicating than we might have guessed even from the dislocating effect of his easy use of a casual vernacular at a time when academic essays were class markers as well as means of communicating research. The Diaries yielded a different but parallel picture, one that hints at why that vernacular was Frye’s chosen medium. Naturally they were rich in the mundane details of a very busy young man’s professional life, the gossip he amusedly recorded, and the fledgling critic’s pondering of his own career. But they also yielded a detailed portrait of middle-class academic life in the Toronto – and Ontario – of the period: the narrow but in its own way flourishing culture, the social importance of the church, and the preoccupations of faculty at a time when the University of Toronto had 8,000 students, not 80,000.

Frye loved his students – ‘my kids,’ he called them – and he referred to them constantly in the diaries he kept until the workload caused by his increasing eminence made it impossible to continue. Denham set out to discover what his students thought about Frye. Between 1994 and 1999 he contacted almost all of the students Frye mentioned in the Diaries, asking for their responses to what their famous teacher had written about them, reminiscences of their time at Victoria College, and something about themselves. His original aim was annotation, but he realized that the responses provided ‘a rather remarkable body of reminiscence,’ and now, a decade after the Diaries appeared, he has published a broad selection of those letters. From them we learn not only how much Frye loved his students, but how much they loved him. In class he was remote, occasionally acerbic, constantly challenging, carrying even then an authority well beyond his years. In the hallways, in his office, crossing the campus, he appeared shy but proved endlessly helpful to students in their various quandaries. And in the intense social life then characterizing Victoria College, he and his wife Helen were constant hosts to these cheerful, inquiring young people. If the Diaries record this lost world, the letters Denham has brought together record one even more forgotten: what it was like to sit in Frye’s classes day by day and year by year, trying earnestly to follow where the great man was leading.

Many of Frye’s students went on to become writers, publishers, academics, and teachers. (Significantly for the changing times, only three became ministers.) The letters and headnotes Denham provides might well have been more heavily edited to remove irrelevancies and repetitions; nevertheless, there are important letters here from Margaret Avison, James Reaney, Margaret Gayfer, Holly Down, M.H. Abrams, Don Coles, George Johnston, Gene Lees, Ruth Alexander, Shirley Endicott, John B. Vickery, and many others. From them we gain not only a vivid portrait of Frye in the classroom, doing the work he preferred above all else, but also an enriched account of a vital and almost entirely overlooked period in regional Canadian culture: the forties and the fifties, just before the cultural ‘explosion,’ as Frye later called it, of the early 1960s. This unpretentious little book joins the small list of studies (Judith Grant on Robertson Davies, Ezra Schabas on Sir Ernest MacMillan) that demonstrate what a fertile base for those later developments that forgotten world really was, and it makes a memorable appendix to the Diaries and Notebooks themselves.