Northrop Frye on Education by Northrop Frye, and: Some Reflections on Life and Habit by Northrop Frye, and: Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources by Robert D. Denham, and: Northrop Frye by Ian Balfour (review)

164 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 (We know, because it is concocted out of Glassco's own journal entries in 1960.) But even in the papers, we cannot trust the teller or the tale. 'Did Ezra Pound accept the second chapter of his memoirs for The Exile?' (There is no trace of evidence that he did.) 'Did Glassco have one-night homosexual affairs with Jean Cocteau and A.E. Housman?' Did he have homosexual relations with Lord Alfred Douglas? Probably -none of the above. And yet the revelations of this book do not discredit the Memoirs as a literary work. Despite the technique of prevarication throughout, Glassco is in a profound sense, taking the manuscripts and the published book together, far more honest than other writer of his generation - he reveals more of his inner conflicts and his sexual perversity than any Canadian writer before him. And he is a very deft and skilful manipulator of the word. He is an artist to his fingertips. Kokotailo's best critical insight, moreover, is that Glassco 'artfully constructed a sequence of events whose implicit moral he then denies.' The pattern of the Memoirs shows a life of youthful indulgence ending in suffering and near-death; yet the author claims throughout that this is truly how life should be lived. 'He is arguing for a youth ofwine and roses' but 'the pattern he designed for his memoirs argues against it.' This is a conflict that leaves future critics much to puzzle at, concerning the folly or the inner conflicts of this artist. Kokotailo's final chapter places Glassco among the dandies, decadents, and aesthetes of the last century, showing how all his sexual and artistic peculiarities are typical of that literary camp. This is all very fine, but one would have wanted a more searching account of the Canadian origins of this variant of decadence. Actually, the late-aesthetic branch of decadence in Canada -Smith, Gustafson, .Glassco - which I have sometimes called 'the flower of gentility' - is a rebellion from within against the puritan tradition of the ruling culture. And such Memoires d'artifice,.as they might be called - in part fraud, in part high artistry - are thus counterpointed against another branch of literary development where truth is paramount. This latter is a movement of social criticism and reconstruction from below, which is far more thoroughgoing than that of the aesthetes, and which has a larger future. But that is to place Glassco and Kokotailo's study in a much wider historical perspective. (LOUIS DUDEK) Northrop Frye. Northrop Frye on Education Fitzhenry and Whiteside. 211. $24.95 Northrop Frye. Some Reflections on Life and Habit University of Lethbridge Press. 47. $5.00 paper HUMANITIES 165 Robert D. Denham. Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources University of Toronto Press. xviii, 449. $50.00 Ian Balfour. Northrop Frye G.K. Hall. Twayne's World Authors Series 806. xiv, 132. $21.95 Northrop Frye's views on education are already well known, at least to teachers of literature. There are repeated references to 'liberal education' in Anatomy of Criticism (1975); eleven essays on teaching and the university in The Stubborn Structure (1970), Spiritus Mundi (1976), and Divisions on a Ground (1982); and further reflections in the preface to The Great Code (1982), which grew directly out of his undergraduate course in the mythological framework of Western culture. The prospect of another eighteen 'occasional' pieces, ranging from commencement speeches and keynote addresses to a teacher's manual and a committee report, would seem uninviting were it not Frye's work, and even as his work it requires some explanation. Northrop Frye on Education is less than a systematic treatment of literary education, but also much more. The collection ends with an interview from 1975, and with Frye's remark that people who ask him to write his autobiography should realize 'that everything I write I consider autobiography.' Since Frye has insisted that he is primarily a teacher, and that all his books are an outgrowth of his teaching, we might well suppose this book is about as close to an autobiography as he will come. On checking, we find that the selections are arranged...