Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World ed. by Robert D. Denham (review)

HUMANITIES 339 carried out. One of the marvellous revelations of Olson=s correspondence with Bolderoff (edited several years ago by Maud and the poet Sharon Thesen) was that the Maximus poems were born in the letters exchanged between the two. As Olson put it to Creeley, >I believe a man talks best straight and going out to another.= To say that Olson was a prolific letter writer is an immense understatement . He sometimes penned eight or ten letters a day, many of them, as he put it, >of consequence.= The correspondence with Robert Creeley, for instance, is now legendary. Over a thousand pieces were produced, the bulk of them written between about 1950 and 1955. Now in its tenth volume, the collected correspondence of Olson and Creeley has still covered only two years. His correspondence with others, while not quite so immense, was still voluminous. Given this prodigious output, Ralph Maud=s task in putting together a meaningful selection was Herculean, and he has done a terrific job. He has chosen to let Olson tell the story of his life in these letters (supplemented by a very thorough chronology of the poet=s life in the preliminary material), providing an important alternative to the skewed Tom Clark biography. The earliest is from a young Olson to his father, the last in response to an Indian graduate student=s query written shortly before Olson=s death from cancer in 1971. In between, there are 170 other items (some items include multiple letters) to politicians, granting agencies, critics, friends, enemies, teachers, students, and companions. At the head of each letter Maud usefully and judiciously encapsulates the context of the letter, providing the reader with the information necessary to understand the relationship between Olson and the recipient. Among many other things, it is fascinating to watch Olson=s mode of discourse shift towards the energetic telegraphy of his later writing from the straightforward letters of his youth. While the book is fascinating as an autobiography in letters and as a revelation of an exciting mind at work over many years, it is equally revealing as a cultural history of an intellectually and politically tumultuous period. From his pioneering work on Melville in the 1930s, to his work at the Office of War Information in the Roosevelt administration, to his rectorship of Black Mountain College, Olson was deeply involved with many of the most important cultural and political figures of his time. The myriad letters to other writers are particularly rich in their discussion of the burning issues of the day, but there are also fascinating letters to scholars, critics, artists, family, and friends, all of which add up to a portrait of an important period of our cultural history, one with many lessons still to offer. (MICHAEL BOUGHN) Robert D. Denham, editor. Northrop Frye=s Late Notebooks, 1982B1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. 340 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Volumes 5 and 6 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye University of Toronto Press. Volume 5: xlx, 418. $75.00; Volume 6: xii, 431. $75.00 Among the Northrop Frye papers at Victoria College in the University of Toronto are seventy-six holograph notebooks, the earliest one dating from the late 1930s. >I think in cores or aphorisms, as these notebooks indicate,= Frye writes, >and all the labor in my writing comes from trying to find verbal formulas to connect them. I have to wait for the cores to emerge: they seem to be born and not made.= Mostly written in the last five or six years of his life, these late notebooks record the process whereby many of Frye=s >cores= B hunches, moments of vision, insights B grew into his last two books, Words with Power (1990) and The Double Vision (1991). Other >cores= await the notice of critics. I cannot locate the word ego in the index, through Eco and ecology are there. One hunch that might be followed up is the implicit connection Frye makes between >the present critical scene= and the ego B the day=s vanity. >The present critical scene is typical of what the scrambling of egos produced: a sense of infinite complications where you=d have to...