Category Archives: Birthdays

Henry Miller

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkqMupPk7d8

From the 1969 film adaptation of Quiet Days in Clichy

Today is Henry Miller‘s birthday (1891-1980).

Frye in The Modern Century:

In two writers who have strongly influenced the Freudian proletariat movement, Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, pastoralism is a central theme. . . In Miller and Lawrence this pastoral theme is less sentimentalized and more closely connected with the more deeply traditional elements of the pastoral: spontaneity in human relations, especially sexual relations; the stimulus to creative power that is gained from a simpler society, less obsessed by satisfying imaginary wants; and, at least in Lawrence, a sense of identity with nature of great delicacy and precision.  (CW 11, 44-5)

Jean Genet

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDN_TwTrFj8&feature=related

An excerpt from Genet’s only film Un chant d’amour

Today is Jean Genet‘s birthday (1910-1986).

Frye in The Modern Century:

Jean Genet is the most remarkable example of the contemporary artist as criminal: his sentence of life imprisonment was appealed against by Sartre, Claudel, Cocteau, and Gide, and even before his best-known works had appeared, Sartre had written a seven-hundred page biography of him called Saint Genet.  Genet’s most famous play, in this country, is Le Balcon.  Here the main setting is a brothel in which the patrons dress up as bishops, generals, or judges and engage in sadistic ritual games with the whores, who are flogged and abused in the roles of penitents or thieves.  The point is that society as a whole is one vast sadistic ritual of this sort.  As the mock-bishop says, very rudely, he does not care about the function of the bishop: all he wants is the metaphor, the idea or sexual core of the office.  The madam of the brothel remarks, “They all want everything to be as true as possible . . . minus something indefinable, so that it won’t be true” — a most accurate description of what I have been calling stupid realism.  A revolution is going on outside: it is put down by the chief of police, and the patrons of the brothel are pulled out of it to enact the “real” social forms of the games they have been playing.  Nobody notices the difference, because generals and judges and bishops are traditional metaphors, and new patrons come to the brothel and continue the games.  The chief of police, the only one with any real social power, is worried because he is not a traditional metaphor, and nobody comes to the brothel to imitate him.  Finally, however, one such patron does turn up: the leader of the revolution.  There is a good deal more in the play, but this account will perhaps indicate how penetrating it is as a sadist vision of society.  (CW 11, 57-8)

Stalin

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From an obscure but powerful post-Soviet film, The Chekist.  Even though this clip is in Russian without subtitles, it is worth watching.  It captures the murderous claustrophobia of Stalinism where assembly-line executions were ordered up by bureaucrats with quotas to fill.

Today is Joseph Stalin‘s birthday (1878-1953).

Frye in the “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada“:

I remember the thirties, when so many “intellectuals” were trying to rationalize or ignore the Stalin massacres or whatever such horrors did not fit their categories, and thinking even then that part of their infantalism was in being men of print: they saw only lines of type on a page, not lines of prisoners shuffling off to death camps.  (CW 12, 460)

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

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Today is Thomas C. Haliburton‘s birthday (1796-1865).

Frye in “Haliburton: Mask and Ego”:

Haliburton would never have called himself a Canadian.  He was a Nova Scotian, a Bluenose, and died two years before Confederation.  He was born and brought up in Windsor, and represented Annapolis in the legislature.  There he did good work in fighting the Family Compact, and became the friend of an every more brilliant man than himself, Joseph Howe.  It was in Howe’s paper that he began the series of sketches later know as The Clockmaker: the sayings and doings of Sam Slick of Slickville, Onion County, Connecticut.  The Sam Slick books extend from 1835 to 1860, there are eight of them, and they take in nearly everything Haliburton wrote that we still read, except for some sketches of Nova Scotia called The Old Judge.

After his first skirmishes as a Liberal, Haliburton became a judge, a judge like the one in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches, who says he has no politics because he’s on the bench, but — and then we get a belligerent Tory speech.  To call Haliburton a Tory would be an understatement.  He fought responsible government; he fought the Durham Report, and until toward the end of his life he fought Confederation.  He didn’t want Great Britain either to give Nova Scotia self-government or run it from London; but to appoint Nova Scotians to the government.  In other words, he wanted patronage on a grand scale.  As for the kind of person who should be appointed — well, there are several hints, sometimes not very subtle hints, about one in particular who has deserved well of his country. (CW 12, 316-17)

Jane Austen

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKy_SJWTEIk

The happy ending of Mansfield Park

Today is  Jane Austen‘s birthday (1775-1817).

Here’s Frye reminding us that the prevailing concerns of literature are the surest source of our desire for a more equitable world.

The Fanny Price of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park also has a double social identity, being a poor relation brought up in a wealthy home.  She has, in typical heroine fashion, decided on her cousin, Edmund Bertram, but she has to cope with a most flattering proposal favoured by everybody except her.  Fanny appears to be a humble, acquiescent, even passive young woman, but while she blushes and weeps and agonizes and is overwhelmed with confusion, she is also directed by a steely inflexible will that is determined to have Edmund or nobody.  As her guardian Sir Thomas Bertram says, with the exasperation of a man who discovers that his society is less male-dominated than he had been assuming: “But you have now shewn me that you can be wilful and perverse, that you can and will decide for yourself.”

Fanny clearly has Jane Austen’s own sympathy, as is obvious from the way the story is worked out.  At the same time it is also clear that the kind of authority Sir Thomas represents seems to Jane Austen a right and natural authority.  It is not that Jane Austen is a woman novelist expressing a woman’s resistance to social conditions governing the place of women in her time.  She accepts whose conditions, on the whole: it is the romantic convention she is using that expresses the resistance.  This principle that an element of social protest is inherent in romance is one that we can only suggest now, and will return to later.  Meanwhile we may note that in Emma the hero has a moral ascendancy over the heroine which is fully justified by his greater maturity and common sense.  Yet what actually happens at the end of the book is that the heroine takes on a matriarchal role, and compels him to move from his house into hers, in order not to disturb her father’s dedication to inertia.  (CW 18, 51-2)

Emily Carr

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“Haida Totems”

Today is Emily Carr‘s birthday (1871-1945).

Frye was deeply interested in painting, and as a young reviewer seemed to have little patience for sniffy art criticism.  See, for example, his 1939 Canadian Forum review, “Canadian Art in London,” which begins with an observation so dry that any hint of condescension would be immediately desiccated: “The Canadian Exhibition at the Tate Gallery was opened by a somewhat puzzled Duke of Kent, who said, according to the Times, that Canadian painting was very interesting, and that the really interesting thing about this exhibition was that it gave the English a chance to see this painting” (CW 12, 7).

Frye clearly enjoyed reviewing Canadian artists — not necessarily because he had any sort of patriotic bias, but because (knowing that all of the arts have deep roots in their native environment) he shared with them a Canadian experience that allowed him to see past the imperial prejudices of self-congratulatory more advanced tastes.

Here he is in the Christmas 1948 issue of Canadian Art, “The Pursuit of Form”:

Most painters choose a certain genre of painting, which in Canada is generally landscape, and commit themselves to the genius of that genre.  Their growth as painters is thus a growth in sensitive receptivity.  In comparing early and late work of a typical landscape painter, such as Arthur Lismer, once can see a steady increase in the power of articulating what he sees.  The early work generalizes colour and abstract form; the late work brings out every possible detail of colour contrast and formal relationship with an almost primitive intensity.  Emily Carr seems to go in the opposite direction, from the conventional to the conventionalized, from faithful detail to an equally intense abstraction.  Yet there too the same growth in receptivity has taken place, the same power to express all the pictorial reality that she sees.  (CW 12, 85)

Frank Sinatra

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CiizL8Vfu8

“Moonlight in Vermont” live with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra

Today is Frank Sinatra‘s birthday (1915-1998).  No, Frye had nothing to say about Frank Sinatra.  But today is Frank Sinatra’s birthday.

(An early Merry Christmas to you, Joe.)

Emily Dickinson

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Dickinson at age 17.  There is no authenticated later photo of her.

Today is Emily Dickinson‘s birthday (1830-1886).

Frye in “Emily Dickinson”:

Many, perhaps most, of Emily Dickinson’s readers will simply take their favorite poems from her and leave the rest, with little curiosity about the larger structure of her imagination.  For many, too, the whole bent of her mind will seem irresponsible or morbid.  It is perhaps as well that this should be so.  “It is essential to the sanity of mankind,” the poet remarks, “that each one should think the other crazy.”  There are more serious reasons: a certain perversity, and instinct for looking in the opposite direction from the rest of society, is frequent among creative minds.  When the United States was beginning to develop an entrepreneur capitalism on a scale unprecedented in history, Thoreau retired to Walden to discover the meaning of the word “property,” and found that it meant only what was proper or essential to unfettered human life.  When the Civil War was beginning to force on America the troubled vision of the revolutionary destiny, Emily Dickinson retired to her garden to remain, like Wordsworth’s skylark, within the kindred points of heaven and home.  She will always have readers who will know what she means when she says, “Each of us gives or takes of heaven in corporeal person, for each of has the skill of life” [L388].  More restless minds will not relax from taking thought for the morrow to spend much time with her.  But even some of them may still admire the energy and humour with which she fought her angel until she had forced out of him the crippling blessing of genius. (CW 17, 270)

Osbert Sitwell

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Osbert with his sister Edith

Today is Osbert Sitwell‘s birthday (1892-1969).  Sitwell’s sister, Edith, provided a warm review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator (10 October 1947).

Here’s Frye’s diary entry for January 4, 1949:

Lunch with Osbert Sitwell at the University Club–Lionel Massey gave the party, & Doug LePan & Paul Arthur & a man I didn’t know were there.  Sitwell was a high-coloured solid-looking aristocrat with iron-grey hair, who until he opened his mouth could have been either a cultivated man or a barbarian.  Wonderful lunch–oysters & a fine dry red Portuguese wine.  The conversation was commonplaces, though highly cultivated commonplaces.  He is deeply impressed by my book–says he’s recommended it to a lot of people including the painter John Piper.  Edith [Sitwell] is at the St. Regis on East 50th St, New York.  He’s Jung’s sensation type, not a thinker primarily.  (CW 8, 62)