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.

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.

1942: Reflections on the war, which again, is not going well for the allies: the disaster of the Dieppe Raid on August 19th is becoming increasingly apparent.

[95] Anniversary of the war, so we’re told: see Aug. 19. It occurred to me a short while ago that I never really considered the possibility of our losing the war. I mean by that that I had never sat down and figured out how I could conscientiously go on living if we did. I’m beginning to understand how paralyzed, hopeless, hag-ridden and stupefied the average intellectual anti-Nazi on the European continent must be — have been.

1950: No entry.

1942:

[92] The radio is going: why is so much dance music thin, wailing, dismally melancholy and wistful, like a train going through a forest at night? [Ed. represented by a classic at the above link.] Is it intended to reproduce the complaining of the libido? Certainly it’s aimed at below the waist, & suited to a dimly lit dance hall with adolescents shuffling up & down the floor rhythmically rubbing their genitals together.

[93] I’m acquiring too many vulgar expressions, like bum’s rush for W.C. & cowflop for female wallflower.

1950: No entries for September 2, 3, 4.

1942: Frye loses access to the medication that offers relief for his chronic hay fever.  He therefore unleashes against the medical profession.

[91]… My druggest tells me that a new drug act has passed preventing several drugs, including codeine and phenobarbol [phenobarbitol], to be sold over the counter without a doctor’s prescription, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of such potent medicines as the one that’s helping me. Sounds like a medical stranglehold on their apothecary enemies of 3000 yrs. There may be a lot to be said on both sides, but doctors today are such ignorant barbarians, & their sense of heresy is priestly rather than scientific.

1950: The Frye’s move into the Brattle Inn on Story Street, just off of Harvard Square. John Ayre in his biography describes it “a glorified boarding house where they ate on a card table and washed their dishes in the bathtub” (226).  (A house in the Brattle/Story Street neighborhood is pictured above.)

[586] Today we completed our move to Story Street… [T]he place is much better set up for working than the house was: it has an excellent desk and a place to put books. It was hot & we got tired quickly: I did actually most of the unpacking in the evening… Mrs. Baillio…continues to be a dear; they’ve put up a new double bed in the place of the twin beds they had before; they’ve moved in new furniture (two enormous easy chairs, one a rocker), & in general I think we’ll live comfortably, if not luxuriously.