Monthly Archives: September 2009

Ward McBurney: “Browsing Genius”

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 undertones

Ward McBurney sends us this poem inspired by Frye and his Merton College tutor and Great War Poet, Edmund Blunden.

 

Browsing Genius

 

She stops beside a book stall and she finds

  a copy of her lover’s tutor’s book:

Undertones of War. It costs a dime,

  and all around her, all she need is look

 

to see Toronto choked with veterans,

  wheezing past her whizz-bang attitude

that after all it’s twenty years since then,

  and youth will have its sway and certitude

 

that past is past is passed is passed away.

  O Helen, in your hand you held a friend

    ravished by particulars, whose fate

 

was to smile and quietly unsay

  that the war to end all never ends

    until we hold in hand the hands of mates

 

    long since buried under soil. So Frye

  took decades to search out his brother’s grave –

Eraytus Howard – where his mother paused

 

    her life on permanent no-need-reply:

  to whom it may concern please Jesus save

this brother who you never are and was.

 

  Blunden was a genius; so were you,

but he saw you and you blindsided him

  with academic fireworks and true

to form he smiled and let you win

 

  the laurels that a soldier poet knows.

Bound with brows of time and in the din

  of battle blasted memory he goes,

that shepherd who had gathered Howard in.

 

Another poem after the break.

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Today in the Frye Diaries, 6 September

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teenagers

1942: The difficulties with cultivating the young.

[98] A cousin of Helen’s living in Forest dropped in. Interested in music, & apparently planning to teach it. Asked her what she was working on & she said “Grade Ten.” Probed further & she said “Beethoven.” “One of the sonatas?” I suggested. “Guess so,” she said. She has a voice like a kitchen stove falling downstairs. I can’t understand the superstitious & barbaric notion in this country that it’s sissified to to cultivate an accent. The idea that correct & well-modulated speech is a fundamental cornerstone of culture doesn’t occur to my students, many of whom make noises like the cry of the great bronze grackle in the mating season. As it isn’t part of one’s education, I can’t teach it: I’m just the best friend who won’t tell them. The Yankee method of talking through the nowse and hawnking like a fahghowrrn is very widespread; some whine like flying shells, some mutter like priests, some chew & gurgle like cement mixers. Ten minutes of frank talking to this girl and I could raise her several notches in the scale of culture: she’s a bright kid and can take things on.

Aspects of this complete diary entry were included and expanded in “Reflections at a Movie,” Canadian Forum 22 (October 1942). The entire article can be found at the above link, reproduced in the Collected Works, volume 11, edited by Jan Gorak.

1950: No entry.

Query: Alphabet of Forms?

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 7days

A number of Frye’s books now housed in the Frye Collection at Victoria University have laid in a small sheet or card on which Frye constructed a table of twenty-six lines, beginning with the seven-letter sequences “y o u a u o y,” “y o u b u o y,” “y o u c u o y” and continuing through the alphabet to “y o u z u o y.”  Occasionally he made one of these grids with the “y” omitted, making a five-letter sequence (“o u a u o,” o u b u o,” etc.), and in at least one case there is a chart with only three letters in the twenty-six line column: “u a u,” “u b u,” and so on.  The grids are almost always incomplete: one or more of the slots will be blank, the initial letter having been omitted.  Some of the grids have the letter “a” added to the right and left sides.  There are dozens of these mysterious palindromic sequences, and they can be found as well scattered throughout Frye’s notebooks and other manuscripts in the Frye papers.  Might a blogger out there know what this “alphabet of forms” is all about?  Might it have some connection to the secret name of the seven-day week that Robert Graves deciphers in The White Goddess or to one of Graves’s other alphabet riddles? (Pictured above, a rendering of Robert Graves’ symbolism representing the essential nature of the White Goddess.)

Today in the Frye Diaries, 5 September

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 radio

1942: The shape of things to come…

[97] Listened to Information Please programme last night.  I wonder what the popular appeal of that programme is based on: I think partly on the enormous prestige enjoyed by a man who is well-informed on non-controversial subjects. The amount of actual erudition [John] Kieran gets a chance to display is not impressive, as such things go, but shuch things go a long way, like the polysyllables of Goldsmith‘s schoolmaster [The Deserted Village, l. 213: Ed. “While words of learned length and thundering sound”]. By means of it I succeeded in scaring the shit out of [Bobby] Morrison and Beattie, who make three times the money I do. One doesn’t realilze the immense social prestige of the university until one gets a little outside of it. Speaking of them, I wonder if the dry rot at the basis of their lives is significant of an economic change in which the bustling, successful, money-making, super-selling young man is no longer a pure clear-eyed Alger hero but an embittered souse.

1950: Some inconsequential gossip as the new school year begins.

Today in the Frye Diaries, 4 September

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runaway-bride

1942: Frye is perhaps giving some hint of the woe that is in marriage: he and Helen certainly seem to be feeling the conflict between marriage and career, Helen  especially.

[96] Mary Louise & Peter [Cameron] got married today, by Betty [MacCree’s] father, who did an awful job but let me out. I hate wedding receptions, & the only thing the service reminds me of is that “for fairer, for loather” was the original form of “for better, for worse.” Helen probing to see how much Jerry’s house would cost us to live in: too much. Helen’s been restless lately: the war gives her claustrophobia & she has the feeling that everyone else is doing something more interesting. Jerry [Riddell] going to Ottawa to take a government job, Eleanor [Godfrey] being mysterious about a career in advertising or publicity or something & taking a trip, Mary [Winspear] going out to Edmonton to be Dean of women, Beattie collecting a salary of $6100 a year: with my hopeless non-essential background she feels that everyone’s playing a game she’s left out of.

1950: No entry.

Frye Poems

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donaldson_palilalia

Jeffery Donaldson’s wonderful poem, “Museum,” encourages me to list some of the poems about, featuring, or otherwise related to Frye:

•  Irving Layton, “The Excessively Quiet Groves” in Cerberus: Poems by Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, and Raymond Souster (Toronto: Contact Press, 1952), 55. 
•  R.G. Everson, “Report for Northrop Frye” in Delta [Montreal] (January 1959): 28.
•  J.K. Halligan, “Northrop Frye” in The Belfast of the North and Other Poems (Belfast, Ireland: Lapwing, 2005), 43.
•  Jay Macpherson, “The Anagogic Man” in Poems Twice Told: The Boatman & Welcoming Disaster (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), 42.
•  Jay Macpherson, “Notes and Acknowledgements” in Poems Twice Told: The Boatman & Welcoming Disaster (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), 96.  This poem appeared in a slightly different form in the original edition (Toronto: Saanes Publications, 1974).
•  Caroline Knox, “Angels” in Massachusetts Review 26, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 579.
•  Anonymous, “Reflections on Spending Three Straight Hours Reading ‘Anatomy of Criticism.’”  A bit of doggerel that circulated among Victoria College students.  Published in Toronto (October 1986): 8. 
•  John Updike, “Big Bard” in American Scholar 70, no. 4 (2001): 40.
•  Florentin Smarandache, “The Philosophy of Psychology”
•  Roy Daniells, Untitled, Enclosed with Daniells’s letter to Frye of 27 April 1976, which is partially in response to the letters Frye wrote to him during the summer and fall of 1976 when Daniells was in Rome [“I dreamed the final Judgment came”].  In the Roy Daniells Fonds, University of British Columbia.
•  Roy Daniells, “On Reading ‘The Varsity’ for October 22nd, 1976 [“How doth our Norrie sit and smile”].  Enclosed with Daniells’ letter to Frye of 16 October 1976.  In the Roy Daniells Fonds, University of British Columbia.
•  Roy Daniells, Untitled, 2 November 1976 [“This envelope has come to hand”].  In the Roy Daniells Fonds, University of British Columbia.
•  Roy Daniells, Untitled, 9 September 1976 [“Dear Norrie, Do not softly swear!”].  In the Roy Daniells Fonds, University of British Columbia.
•  Roger Angell, “Greetings, Friends” in New Yorker (29 December 1980): 35.
•  Richard Outram, “In Memory of Northrop Frye,” in Globe and Mail 16 February 1991, and Northrop Frye Newsletter 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 36.
•  Margaret Atwood, “Norrie Banquet Ode.”  Composed on the occasion of the banquet held on the final day of the conference “The Legacy of Northrop Frye,” 31 October 1992, Victoria College, Toronto.  Published in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 171–73; rpt. in Northrop Frye Newsletter 6, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 38–9.
•  Jeffery Donaldson, “Museum” in Palilalia (Montreal & Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008), 17–26.
•  Kildare Dobbs, “On Seeing a Snake at Villa Epidaurus” in The Eleventh Hour: Poems for the New Millennium Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1997), 68–9.
•  Kildare Dobbs, “Dracula Verses: 1. The governess” in The Eleventh Hour: Poems for the New Millennium Oakville, ON: Mosaic Press, 1997), 88.
•  Finkelstein, Norman.  “A Tomb for Northrop Frye” in Passing Over.  New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2007): 11–12.

Jeffery Donaldson: “Museum”

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Fuseli.ghost

Jeffery Donaldson has graced us with this poem about an encounter with a ghostly familiar,  if not a “familiar compound ghost.” Jeffery is currently working on an article about the significance of Frye to a poet, to be published in New Quarterly.  A video of Jeffery reading the title poem from his latest collection, Palilalia, can be found at the end of this post.

Museum

But one writes only after one has willed to renounce the will,
and the wisest of poets have always insisted that in the long
run all poetry that is worth listening to has been written
by the gods.

—Northrop Frye

Subway, in the middle of my commute,
   I found myself in a dark corner.
The line vanished into the underground
   in two directions, the clack and crow-screech

of steel wheels echoed in recession
   of the just missed five-o-nine
from the tunnel’s depths. Museum Station.
   A chilled solitude widened around me

and water-drops pooled in mimicked snips
   between the rails below. The ceiling lamps’
subdued fluorescence seemed to cast no shadows
   and were like peering through green water.

Exhibits from the ROM in glass cases
   with aboriginal wooden masks descended
like messengers from the real world above,
   whose outsize faces gestured witness and alarm

in the apocalyptic style of indigenous myth.
   Farther up, the February dusk
was tawny, the air tasteless and dull
   as pewter plate. Fog had moved in on

Old Vic’s scrubbed-stone but now vague
   turrets uncobbling upwards to the last
vanished spire, as though parting illusion
   from the epigraph above the stairway arch,

still insisting, after these twenty years,
   that the truth would set me free.
All gone up in a mist now, as far
   as I could see. I pictured them above,

the Burwash quad, Pratt, and residence,
   whose faux-gothic walls hold the city at Bay
like the brim of an empty cup, and where
   the mind-set of college years, memories

of what unwritten words, burn perpetually
   as in a crucible. I wonder now had I known,
those years hiding my fidgets, of the tics
   Touretters spend their days trying to release,

or heard of how the obsessive’s repetitions
   grind every last impulse to its death,
would I have finished more, managed
   the regimental habitus
and got things done?
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Comment: Frye and Hawken

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earth

Clayton Chrusch’s comment on Ian Sloan’s post about Frye and Hawken deserves to be brought forward:

I really appreciate this post because it questions how Frye can be personally and socially relevant, which is what I am concerned about.

Here is my take, based on my limited understanding of Frye.

I think one of Frye’s contributions is as an historian of the imaginaton (that’s not quite the right term, since Frye does not try to make a rigourous historical case for anything). He gives a historical-imaginative context for the kind of changes he and Paul Hawken are describing. In particular, he sees people’s imaginations as being shaped by imaginative cosmologies. By cosmology, he meant simple mental pictures, almost diagrams, that structure almost everything about how we imagine the world. There have been two cosmologies historically (Blake was the prophet of the second one but he also saw beyond it) and Frye suggested that third was on the way. All three can be traced to the Bible.

My understanding is that the first two are vertical cosmologies. The first is the authoritarian cosmology with god/father/king figure and all legitimate authority at the top and the devil/child/slave, and everything legitimately subject to authority at the bottom.

The second is the revolutionary cosmology and it is formally a parody of the first, where the figure at the top is seen as as a tyrant or a fool and the bottom is reservoir of creative (and destructive) energy. The second cosmology informed Freud’s view of the subconscious, and Marx’s view of the proletariat. Frye also mentions Nietzche here. So all the dominant worldviews of the 20th century come out of ideas developed in the 19th-early 20th century, having their origin in this major cosmological shift heralded by Blake at the end of the 18th.

Frye saw the third cosmology as interpenetrative, an Indra’s net where connectedness, identity, and equality within the context of incredible diversity replace the dominance, alienation, inequality, and uniformity of the first two cosmologies. It is a non-ideological cosmology because it is not hierarchical. Because it is non-ideological, it can make primary concerns truly primary.

If I had to make a judgement on the interpenetrative cosmology, I would say that we haven’t discovered its full potential yet, but it is hard for me to believe it is a new mold in which all of our imaginative structures from now on can be formed. I think we still need the first two cosmologies as well as the third. But because the third is new, it will be the source of real and good imaginative innovations that we have not yet seen.

I haven’t read the book by Paul Hawken, but perhaps he is one of these innovators.