Author Archives: Bob Denham

More on Reagan

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Further to Joe’s post, more Frye on Reagan:

Of course it takes some effort to become more self-observant, to acquire historical sense and perspective, to understand the limitations that have been placed on human power by God, nature, fate, or whatever. It was part of President Reagan’s appeal that he was entirely unaware of any change in consciousness, and talked in the old reassuring terms of unlimited progress. But the new response to the patterns of history seems to have made itself felt, along with a growing sense that we can no longer afford leaders who think that acid rain is something one gets by eating grapefruit. I wish I could document this change from recent developments in American culture, but I am running out of both time and knowledge. It seems clear to me, however, that American and Canadian imaginations are much closer together than they have been in the past. (CW 12, 653)

Both Governor Reagan and the local SDS issued statements, and there is a curious similarity in their statements. They both say that the people’s park was a phoney issue, and that the real cause was a conspiracy—the Governor says of hard-core student agitators, the SDS says of right-wing interests operating “probably at the national level.” Both are undoubtedly right, up to a point. There is a hard core of student agitators: one of them was grumbling in the student paper, a day or two before the lid blew off, that “not a goddam thing was happening at Berkeley,” and that something would have to start soon because Chairman Mao himself had said, in one of his great thoughts, that revolution is no child’s play. On the other side, Governor Reagan is clearly staking a very ambitious career on the support of voters who want to have these noisy young pups put in their place once and for all. Both are very pleased with the result: the Governor is visibly admiring his own image as a firm and sane administrator, and the SDS are delighted that the police have “over-reacted” so predictably and helped to “radicalize the moderates.” But the more one thinks about these two attitudes, the clearer it becomes that the militant left and the militant right are not going in opposite directions, even when they fight each other, but in the same direction. For both the Governor and the SDS, the university is ultimately an obstacle, which will have to be destroyed or transformed into something unrecognizable if their ambitions are to be fulfilled. (CW 7, 386-7)

At Berkeley, one sees clearly how the supporters of Governor Reagan and the supporters of SDS are the same kind of people. The radical talks about the thoughts of Chairman Mao, not because he is really so impressed by those thoughts but because he cannot endure the notion of thought apart from dictatorial power. The John Bircher uses slightly different formulas to mean the same thing. In the past week I have seen, and heard about, the most incredible acts of police brutality and stupidity against the students. And yet even this is not one society repressing another, but a single society that cannot escape from its own bungling. Whatever we most condemn in our society is still a part of ourselves, and we cannot disclaim responsibility for it. (ibid., 392)

The Soviet Union is trying to outgrow the Leninist dialectical rigidity, and some elements in the U.S.A. are trying to outgrow its counterpart. But it’s hard: Reagan is the great symbol of clinging to the great-power syndrome, which is why he sounds charismatic even when he’s talking the most obvious nonsense. (CW 5, 398)

BILL MOYERS: I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he was able to make Americans feel as if we were still the mighty giant of the world, still an empire, even as around the world we were having to retreat from the old presumptions that governed us for the last fifty years. Did you see any of that in the Reagan appeal?
FRYE: Oh yes, very much so. It’s the only thing that explains the Reagan charisma. In fact, I think that what has been most important about Americans since the war is that they have been saying a lot of foolish things—the Evil Empire, for example—but doing all the right ones. I think nobody but Nixon could have organized a deal with China, for example. (CW 24, 893-4)

Frye on Machiavelli

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Frye taught Machiavelli’s The Prince in English 2i, English Poetry and Prose, 1500–1660.  In his 1949 Diary he writes about his lecture on The Prince: “I’m clarifying my view of a militant organization as pyramidal.  In Machiavelli all peacetime activities are geared to a war economy, of course: it’s a state militant as the Roman Catholic Church is a Church militant” (CW 8, 91).   About a later lecture on Castiglione, he writes, the “lecture said very little except to point out the Prince-Courtier link, & link Machiavelli’s doctrine that appearance (e.g. of virtue) is essential in government with Castiglione’s similar doctrine of the continuous epiphany of culture” (ibid., 98).  Three years later at a party for R.S. Crane, where Frye reports on snippets of the conversation, he says “I said Machiavelli’s Prince, if he had a courtier to advise him, wouldn’t draw Castiglione’s Courtier: he’d get something more like Ulysses, full of melancholy Luciferian knowledge of good & evil, of time & the chain of being” (ibid., 562).

In Elizabethan society Machiavelli became, as Frye says in Fools of Time, “a conventional bogey” in Renaissance drama (20).  The Machiavellian villain is, in Frye’s taxonomy of characterization in Anatomy of Criticism, the tragic counterpart of the vice or tricky slave of comedy.  Examples of this “self-starting principle of malevolence” are Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear, along with Bosola in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (CW 22, 202).  The Machiavellian villain “often acts without motivation, from pure love of evil” (“Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy”).  In his Notebooks on Renaissance Literature Frye has several references to this unmotivated, automomous principle of evil that makes the villain Machiavellian (CW 29, 130, 144, 275, 278).

The virtues of the prince are force, courage, and cunning.  Frye never tires of pointing out that these are not moral virtues but tactical virtues based on the art of illusion.  This means that for the prince his virtue is not actually virtue at all but only seems to be—a public relations enterprise.  What the prince has to do is pretend to exhibit these virtues.  Appearance becomes more important than reality, and so the prince is like a character in a play—one who puts on a mask.  Frye often contrasts Machiavelli’s view of the prince with Castiglione’s of the courtier (see, e.g., CW 23, 35; CW 7, 266–73, 528; CW 5, 178–9, 232; CW 27, 204; CW 13, 105; CW 20, 171; Myth and Metaphor, 292).  He gives the most extended account of the differences in his essay on Castiglione:

We have derived two words from the metaphor of the masked actor: hypocrite and person.  The former contains a moral value judgment, the latter does not.  If we compare Castiglione on the courtier with Machiavelli on the prince, we see a remarkable parallel: both are constantly on view: what they are seen to do is, socially speaking, what they are; their reputations are the most important part of their identity, and their functional reality is their appearance.  The difference is that Machiavelli’s prince, being the man who must make the decisions, must accept the large element of hypocrisy involved; must understand how and why the reputation for virtue is more important for him than the hidden reality of virtue.  It is essential for the prince to be reputed liberal, Machiavelli says, though he is probably better off if in reality he saves his money.  For the courtier, whose social function is ornamental rather than operative, the goal is an appearance which has entirely absorbed the reality, a persona or mask which is never removed even when asleep. In regard to women, we are told that men “. . . sempre temono essere dall’arte ingannati” (1.40) [bk. 1, sec. 40?], that is, of being manipulated. For the prince manipulation is essential; for the courtier it is not. (“Il Cortegiano”).

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Two Previously Unpublished Letters [Updated]

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[Update] These letters are now posted in the Denham Libary under “Previously Unpublished Material” here.

The two letters below from Frye to Helen Kemp regarding his mother Cassie have never been published.

The first letter is undated but it was written sometime during the summer of 1940, when Frye had left Toronto to visit his sick mother in Moncton, NB. Helen, who had accompanied him on a trip to Moncton in July, had returned to their home on Bathurst Street in Toronto.

My pet:

Thanks for your letter.  Nothing much has happened here.  I want to leave soon: I couldn’t leave as long as mother had her bad spell: she was at her worst the day after you left.  She’s getting much better but she won’t have a doctor, and that’s that.  She gives a hundred and fifty different reasons: the house is so dirty she’d be ashamed to have a doctor in, God’s told her to take cod‑liver oil (which we got her), Dad would never pay the bill and we shouldn’t––the whole thing is that she’s got the idea she has cancer, and is afraid to have a doctor tell her so.  Whether she has or not I of course don’t know, not being a doctor, but even if she has the worst thing we could do would be to bring in a doctor over her head.  Dad, however, says she’s had this cancer bug since Vera was a baby.  Her conversation is still a monologue of sickness and death and how many corpses that ghoul Aunt Dolly collected for her accursed boneyard.  Mentally and physically, she’s a hundred years old.

I find Blake difficult here.  Vera writes and says she’s coming to see us at Christmas, bless her heart.  After one look at where they put my Forum article I gave in and got a haircut.  I’ve been trying to locate my dentist, but he seems to have disappeared or joined the army or something.  I drive around with Dad and lift cans of paint around for him––how he manages alone I don’t know.  He hasn’t made any more trips, but talks of going to Toronto this week.  We’ve got to look around and find a girl to come and live here during the winter: if she got her room free it would be well worth it.  Sorry about the cut in the budget––not altogether unexpected, I suppose, and if Baldy is not too much of a born grafter to save on Ent. it perhaps won’t matter much.

There’s a bulky dress bag folded up on top of your suitcase: do you want it?

Dad saw Lichtenberg the other day and tried to tease him by telling him that another builder, a cheap shyster who undercuts his competition and swindles his clients, was tearing the town wide open and getting all sorts of orders.  “Yeh,” said Lichtenberg.  “I hear a rooster crowed like hell all vun morning.  By night his head vass off.”  I love you.

Norrie.

Vera = Frye’s sister

Aunt Dolly = Elthea Howard, eldest sister of Frye’s mother

Forum article = the reference is uncertain but the obvious candidates are “Poetry.” Canadian Forum 20 (July 1940): 125–6, and “War on the Cultural Front.” Canadian Forum 20 (August 1940): 144, 146.

Baldy =  Martin Baldwin = curator and director of the Art Gallery of Toronto

Lichtenberg = Described by Frye in the Diaries as a “good-natured German in Moncton . . .  who had been a peaceful, thrifty, industrious contractor there for thirty years.  For two wars the local Gestapo have cut their teeth on him: when the news is bad or they get tired of reading spy stories they’d go up and practise on him. . . . Dad’s friendship for Lichtenberg has come in for much unfavorable comment in that stinking little kraal Moncton.”

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Quotes of the Day

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First_Folio

“Persona or mask: nothing under it except another persona, but still important to know that we are playing roles.” Holograph note Frye scribbled at the end of a typescript of some notes for a talk.  1991 accession, box 36, file 1.

“As Hamlet proves in its soliloquies, we dramatize ourselves to ourselves even when alone.”  From Frye’s CRTC report.

Sylvia Maultash Warsh: “The Queen of Unforgetting”

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Sylvia Maultash Warsh has published a novel featuring Northrop Frye, The Queen of Unforgetting. An extended excerpt can be read here.

The synopsis provided by Cormorant Books reads:

Approaching a scholar and critic as legendary as Northrop Frye is a daunting task — but not for Mel Montrose. Armed with a prestigious academic award and a nothing-to-lose attitude, she convinces Frye to supervise her ambitious thesis exploring E.J. Pratt’s epic poem about Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf. To embark on her study, Mel takes a job at the newly reconstructed historical site at Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons, where de Brébeuf and seven other missionaries met their tragic ends. But Mel soon learns that delving into Ontario history is no escape from her own when an obsessed admirer threatens to destroy her academic career.


Frye and the Mona Lisa

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mona

Further to Michael’s post

“I must run across to the Louvre now, as it is getting late. The mob always goes straight to the Mona Lisa as the greatest drawing card. I’m a little annoyed with Leonardo just now. That miserable Bacchus and John the Baptist—which are of course open to doubt as to their authenticity—with their sickly smiles and their rather cloying chiaroscuro” (Frye to Helen Kemp. 25 September 1938)

Two years earlier Frye had reported to Helen on his visit to the Art Institute in Chicago: “The Art Institute has a special exhibit which I have visited twice, once with [my sister] Vera, once with Eleanor [Craig].  Renaissance painting–Tintoretto, Titian, two Leonardos‑‑one called the “Madonna of the Yarn Spinners,” a magnificent Italian Madonna, with the same inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, and the freshest and rosiest youngster I have ever seen.  Some of the representations of the Christ‑Child are almost blasphemous‑‑he looks sometimes like a manikin of forty, sometimes like a wizened old priest.  One Raphael‑‑very simple but breath‑taking‑‑a man dressed in black.  Two Botticellis‑‑one I could have sworn was modern French.  Our old friend Lippo Lippi, and one of his incubi, Fra Angelico.  (Try your hand at Fra Lippo Lippi sometime, contrasting the medieval type with Early Renaissance in initial letters or marginal designs.)  The Renaissance pictures were all very soft and quiet in color.  But the medieval ones were different.  Nearly all of them had gold backgrounds, and the figures were splashes of brilliant reds and greens.  The haloes were bewilderingly ornamented.  Poses stiff and architectural, often notably Byzantine.  But a sort of quaint childlike humor all through.  One picture of the Last Supper shows a little spaniel in the foreground gnawing a bone.  One Madonna and Child shows the latter with his fist stuck in a dish of candy.  A weird one of John the Baptist’s head brought to Sabine has a moving picture effect.  The head appears twice, and so do three attendants, at different stages in the procession.  I liked these medieval pictures best of all, I think.  Then the Dutch school.  Some rare humor here too.  One a young group of smokers trying to blow rings.  A beautiful Rembrandt‑‑“Girl at Half‑open Door” and a portrait of his father.  Several Franz Hals‑‑all the “Laughing Cavalier” type.  And an exquisite picture of a “Woman Weighing Gold.”  And so on.  The Dutch primitives disappointed me a bit.  There is an English room‑‑several graceful Gainsboroughs, a Romney, Reynolds, Raeburn, Zoffany, and Hogarth.  American colonial painting, including the two famous Gilbert Stuart portraits of Washington.  Whistler‑‑the great portrait of his mother‑‑one of the biggest attractions‑‑a superb picture in gray and black.  And the Thames “nocturne”‑‑the one that started the row with Ruskin.  Sargent‑‑a lovely study of an Egyptian nude girl‑‑surprisingly slim for the Orient.  Modern French too‑‑a room full of Matisse and Picasso.  That man Matisse knew how to handle color.  A picture of Picasso’s of a youngster eating out of a bowl called “Le Gourmet” is very popular‑‑Eleanor said it was her favourite” (Frye to Kemp, 1 July 1933).

From Northrop Frye’s Student Essays: “The relation of the artist to the scientist boils down to one very similar to his relation to the moralist or propagandist.  The scientist explains, and his words and images denote; the artist suggests, and his words and images connote.  No two people will look at a picture in the same way; and if I am looking at one, all the other possible reactions to it, which I may or may not share, form a sort of nimbus around my head, which I try to get away from.  If I am looking at Mona Lisa, for instance, I withdraw into myself in order to escape from both Walter Pater, except by responding to a meaning in the picture essentially “evocative” and “spell‑bearing” (CW 3, 377).

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Frye on Haydn

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Further to Michael’s post, Frye on Haydn in Notebook 5

If I had such a thing as a favorite composer, it would be Haydn.  I think it’s Haydn anyway.  I’m going to write something on him someday.  More and more I find myself turning to Bach & Haydn, which means more & more away from Mozart.  Mozart’s a skeptic & Haydn’s a Christian.  Haydn has everything.  He has all of Schubert’s ease of melody sags or goes soupy the way Schubert does.  He’s as witty as either Mozart or Scarlatti: I’ve just read through 37 minuets & 24 German dances, a grueling test for any composer & he says something pointed & epigrammatic practically every time.  But he has more than wit: he has an amazing eloquence & range in his melodic line: he can be marvellously “singable” & yet swoop over everything form a soprano to a bass range: D major sonata in Book I with the lovely long Adagio.  He may not be as profound a thinker generally as Mozart, but I think he’s a greater thinker in musical form than Mozart: he has a sense of organic unity about him & an originality of creative thought, still in musical form, Mozart hasn’t.  Haydn develops a plot; Mozart works out a situation.  But the plot really develops, that’s the point.  He had much more influence over Beethoven than Mozart, I think, particularly in things like the Pathétique: only Beethoven is analytic & disruptive where Haydn is synthetic.  He’s really almost more radiant than Beethoven for that reason.  His trios are more fun to read on a piano than Mozart’s because they’re all piano & Mozart’s are balanced: Mozart’s are more expertly written, but it’s plot & situation again, & Haydn’s more fun.  In things like the G major sonata, Book II, slow movement, his impersonality, gone serious, just drops you out of sight: he’s too wrapped up in pure music ever to be sad or cynical, like Mozart.  He hits cold depths of ice Mozart doesn’t get down to because he doesn’t believe enough.  Sometimes the coldness of pure Rococo, the winter-chill of our autumnal culture: slow movement of C major quartet, op. 59 No. 2 or something in the fifties: 55, I guess.  But that doesn’t mean he’s an abstract music writer.  Sometimes Bach is unplayable, either because, as in the Art of Fugue, he’s just writing absolute music, or because he’s gone beyond all reading or reproduction into pure thought, as in the C# minor of the WTC I [The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1].  Sometimes Beethoven’s unplayable when he’s appealing to a wrench in the guts too physical for a performance to reach, as in the Coriolan or the 106.  (That doesn’t necessarily mean greatness, any more than an unactable play is necessarily great because King Lear is unactable).  But Haydn always has a powerful ease of reproduction: his music exists only for performance.  His piano sonatas are in one idiom, his string quartets in another, etc.  That’s why he’s the easiest of all composers to play: he thinks so purely in terms of the genius of reproducing instruments.  Hence he’s an amateur-family musician, and could do what the Bible could almost have done (not quite: its achievement is overrated) for amateur-family English prose style.  He’s probably the only great composer who could have written a national anthem.  But he’s got something ultimate in his time & Mozart & Beethoven & Goethe haven’t: there’s too much Goethe in Mozart and too much Beethoven in Goethe.  Something of the rebirth of imagination: the thing Blake had.  Haydn was no Bach and couldn’t do the Mass or Passion job to save his soul, if it had ever been in any danger, but the Creation does give the perfect Paradise-existence of the imaginative mind: the super-pastoral note.  I daresay the Seasons is the same thing: I haven’t heard or read it, but winter is as pastoral an idea as summer.  He’s been so grossly underrated for the same reason that Mozart used to be: a supreme genius of comedy, patted on the back for being amusing, like Dan Chaucer and gentle Shakespeare—the Papa Haydn approach.  Chaucer, being ironical, is Mozartian; Haydn’s closer to the 13th c.  (Notebook 5, CW 25, 163–5)

Frye and Helen Kemp on A. Y. Jackson

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ayjackson

Further to Michael’s post, Frye and Helen on Jackson in the Correspondence.

Canadian landscape painting has to deal with a sharp hard light and solid blocks of clear colour: consequently a tendency to conventionalize outlines has been inherent in it from the first. Thomson, being interested in problems of linear distance and in the breaking up of light which they suggest, dodged this tendency, but it is strong in Jackson and Emily Carr, and of course far stronger in Lawren Harris, who saved himself from dropping into a facile formula (like Rockwell Kent) by turning to out-and-out abstract painting. (CW 12, 12)

The Group of Seven felt that they were among the first to look at Canada directly, and much of their painting was based on the principle of confronting the eye with the landscape. This made a good deal of their work approach the flat and posterish, but that was a risk they were ready to take. Jackson, Lismer, and Harris all found this formula exhaustible, and have all developed away from it. Thomson and Emily Carr represent a more conscious penetration of the landscape: they seem to try to find a centre of rhythm deep within their subject and expand from there. Milne combines these techniques in a way that is apt to confuse people who look at him for the first time. (CW 12, 73)

I am, of course, deeply appreciative of the honour that Carleton University has done me. It is particularly an honour to receive this degree in the company of Mr. A.Y. Jackson, as well as a great pleasure, because Mr. Jackson is an old friend. (CW 12, 272)

Writers don’t interpret national characters; they create them. But what they create is a series of individual things, characters in novels, images in poems, landscapes in pictures. Types and distinctive qualities are second-hand conventions. If you see what you think is a typical Englishman, it’s a hundred to one that you’ve got your notion of a typical Englishman from your second-hand reading. It is only in satire that types are properly used: a typical Englishman can exist only in such figures as Low’s Colonel Blimp. If you look at Mr. Jackson’s paintings, you will see a most impressive pictorial survey of Canada: pictures of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, pictures of the Quebec Laurentians, pictures of Great Bear Lake and the Mackenzie River. What you will not see is a typically Canadian landscape: no such place exists. In fiction too, there is nothing typically Canadian, and Canada would not be a very interesting place to live in if there were. Only the outsider to a country finds characters or patterns of behaviour that are seriously typical. Maria Chapdelaine has something of this typifying quality, but then Maria Chapdelaine is a tourist’s novel. (CW 12, 275)

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