The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 ed. by R.D. Denham (review)

316 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 he said, ~is a teclmique to endow the idiot with dignity.' And I wonder if this was not a stem admonition tohimself. Commentators report,late inhis career, that he was alarmed.and unhappy about the events of his time. But I think the unhappiness and alarm were there from the first. It's just that he didn't see how that was going to help him, or anybody else, cope, and so he urged himself and others, as one of the corrunentators here puts it, 'to stop saying /Jis this a good thing or bad thing?1I and start saying, "What's going on?'" This book is a valuable and concise overview of an important thinker, one we find ourselves turning back tobecause the 'tools weshape shape us' and McLuhan is one of our more important tools for understanding the present as it is really happening, and not as we would like to imagjne it. (GARRY LEONARD) R.D. Denham, editor. The Correspondence ofNorthrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939. 2 vols University of Toronto Press. x, 1048. $70.00 each v91ume In the summer of 1992 Robert D. Denham, editor of the early letters between Northrop Frye and his wife Helen Kemp, undertook the monumental task of transcription, exegesis, and reconstruction of these extraordinary documents. Nowpublished as the flagship ofthe forthcoming twenty-five volumes of The Collected Works ofNorthrop Frye, edited by Alvin A. Lee, the thousand pages of these handsome volumes mark a historic contribution to .the burgeoning scholarship on Frye since his death in 1991. Set against the flowering of Canadian arts and letters, prairie life in the 1930s, Toronto the Good, Muskoka, Moncton, Oxford University, Victoria College, London, and European culture amid encroaching Nazism on the brink of the Second World War, this epistolary epic of two remarkable young people at a formative period in their lives takes its place beside those of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning , Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann. Denham's meticulous piecing together of the chronology, along with his contextualization of the narrative in the introductions to each year of the couple's separation (Frye's summer as a student minister in Saskatchewan,his two years at Oxford, and Kemp's year at the Courtauld Institute), guides the reader without prescribing interpretation. From cross-referencing other correspondence within the Kemp-Frye circle to detailing the origin of the Hart House String Quartet to documenting the Florentine frescoes Frye viewed on his Italian tour, Denham propels the reader from entry to entry in these altogether absorbing vignettes. The glosses are exhaustive: occasionally they seem precious; often they enhance the interplay between the protagonists' cultural sensibilities and the reader's; overall, they firmly establish the texts, freeing them to HUMANITIES 317 function as Cl: 'ground bass upon which readers can make their own progressions/ as Frye himself might say. The letters can be read as a period piece ('swell' is ubiquitous), archive ofCanadianculture, andintimationofFrye's corpus of thought. Certainly his scholarly bent, critical temper, and schematizing imagination are embryonic in Frye's relentless pursuit of both cuItural knowledge in general and his Blake thesis as 'an objective unity.' But for many readers the overriding interest of these intensely personal epistles will lie in the personalities themselves and dynamics oftheir relationship. Both personages are dazzlingly articulate, witty, passionate about music, concerned for their friends, and manifest an ironic self-understanding that belies their youth. Readers become privy to Frye's weak eyesight, poor diet, physical sluggishness, penchant for parody, irritation with radios, compulsion to 'hammer out [his] ideas,' encyclopaedic brilliance, views on gender complementarity, taste for the academic agon often approaching arrogance, and mood swings between 'morbid introspection' and feverish productivity. Kemp radiates highintelligence, artistic giftedness, leamingwithout pretension, ambivalence about her abilities, irrepressible energy, sagacity, feistiness, 'penetrating sweetness/ the capacity for happiness, independence in pursuing her London studies, and .fierce determination to combine marriage with a career. With these lovers mutual devotion becomes a symbiotic bond that reaches beyond the page with the immediacy of a continuing present. At the end of Frye's second year at Oxford, Kemp writes, '[S]ometimes I wonder if I did live with...