Bob Denham has prepared a remarkable collection of Frye’s epiphanies from a number of sources, including his notebooks, diaries, and various interviews.  It is bracing reading.  We’ll be posting it in its entirety tomorrow.  My guess is that this will preoccupy the thoughts of many who read it.  We genuinely hope to receive your observations, in whatever form they come.  This is undoubtedly a motherlode.

A note from Margaret Burgess may resolve the issue of the adjectival form of “Frye”:

 I don’t know how much Frye would care about which variant is used, but it is perhaps worth noting for the record that the term appears in the Correspondence, where Helen, writing from London on 12 October 1934, quips: “I have quite a stock of Frygian witticisms up my sleeve to chuckle over at odd moments on the ‘bus and walking down streets, and even in lectures when they’re dull” (NFHK, 1:344). Although there is obviously no way of knowing, one might speculate as to whether she thought up the term on her own, or whether it might possibly have been coined at some earlier time by Frye himself.

Another note from Bob Denham:

From a letter by Deanne Bogdan to Bob Denham, 20 September 2002

Dear Bob,

. . . I saw the most amazing documents today, something I just have to share with you. The grandmother of one of my new students [Trevor Norris] dated Norrie at Vic. Her name was Florence Sparling. Her elder sister Ruth, is, I think, mentioned in the Frye-Kemp correspondence. My student, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were in the United Church ministry, today brought in two signed dance cards from his grandmother’s archives. One was from the Supper Dance of the Victoria College Music Club held at the Royal York Hotel on Feb 18th, 1930. Norrie’s signature ‘H. Northrop Frye’ appears for dance #4, a waltz entitled, “Poor wandering me.” There are 11 other names on the card. This dance took place two weeks after that of the first card, dated Jan. 29th––the Charles House, South House at-Home. Norrie’s name is written in the first space, but it doesn’t look like his writing. My student thinks his grandmother may have written it in. Anyhow––get
this––beside H. Northrop Frye is written (Buttercup). . . .

[“Buttercup” was Frye’s student nickname]

A note from Bob Denham:

For your edification, here’s the last paragraph in a letter from [class of ’33 member] Pete Colgrove, now 85, living in Santa Fe, NM:

I could mention an instance of Norrie’s sense of humor. With immense dry relish he would tell the story of the first dance he went to after trying to absorb all my anxiously persistent coaching, a tea-dance at one of the girls’ residences, called a ‘Paul Jones’: a circle of boys facing in around a circle of girls facing out; when the march music stops without warning, the couples facing pair off to dance; this happens several times and so becomes a ‘mixer.’ Norrie, who was of average height, had to dance in succession with the three tallest girls in our year—each well over six feet tall! Well, Norrie would wind up this story magnificently describing how he couldn’t see where he was leading, and worse, could see neither to the left nor right since his nose was buried between the bosoms of his partners.’ (Pete had learned ballroom dancing from his two female cousins.)

A note from Ed Lemond, Frye Festival, Moncton:

In August, 1936, one year before their marriage, Frye and his wife-to-be were going through a very rough patch, including the turmoil around Helen’s abortion and his preparations for departure to England. In a couple of his letters from Moncton (the first dated August 10, the last dated August 29) he mentions a neighbour by the name of Cormier, a good friend of his father’s. Cormier, “a mere trainman,” had what Frye believed to be the “best library in Moncton,” put together over 20 years of buying from a bookstore in England, with a heavy (in every sense of the word) emphasis on anthropology, comparative religion, and evolutionary theory. Haeckel, Frazer, that sort of thing, all “very dogmatic and violently anti-clerical.” This library eventually ended up in the hands (literally in the fraying boxes) of a descendant (a grand-daughter probably, with an unforgettable name, Beer), and in 1994, in my capacity as a used book store owner, I purchased what must have been almost the entire collection. It was the most spectacular purchase of my 21-year career as a book dealer, including the complete first edition Golden Bough, complete 1882 Arabian Nights, first American editions of Darwin’s masterpieces, etc. More than a thousand books, all hardcover, all in wonderful condition, despite the years. Frye was impressed by the books Cormier collected but not by the company he kept, most of whom Frye found to be “pig-headed.”

Google Books has online excerpts from the Collected Works Frye-Kemp correspondence.

Welcome to The Educated Imagination, a blog dedicated to Northrop Frye. 

What would have been Frye’s 97th birthday passed just this last month, it is the dog days of summer, many people (if not most academics) are doing as little as they can credibly get away with, and that perhaps makes it a particularly good time to launch this blog. A companion online journal, Myth and Metaphor, will be appearing shortly. More about that in a moment.

The purpose of this blog is to provide an online meeting place for the Frye community, which, we hope, will extend beyond the university to include those who maintain a lively interest in literature and the arts.

You’ll notice that we are more or less a blank slate at this point: an out-of-the-way site that Google still struggles to locate (so please remember to bookmark us), one post, two external links (one academic, the other appropriately festive), and a remarkably unsexy email address (fryeblog@gmail.com). We hope therefore that you’ll soon inundate us with advice, observations, queries, and requests. We wish the blog to take on the life of the community it is intended to serve, and to do so in the spirit of the man to whom it is dedicated. We are, that is, open to all comers. 

The Educated Imagination is fully accessible to anyone who visits the site. We enourage you to subscribe to our Entries RSS so that you’ll be notified via your RSS Reader when a new post goes up. While you’re at it, why not subscribe to the Comments RSS as well in order to be informed of the latest comments posted by members of the Frye community at large? (If you need to, you can link to our RSS FAQ to find out how RSS works.) Please also send us anything you think we ought to know about, whatever it is. We are on the lookout for audio, video, vintage photos, heartwarming anedcotes, you name it. Send us links you have but we don’t.

We are also calling for contributions to our online journal, Myth and Metaphor, which should be up and running very soon. Myth and Metaphor will include both peer reviewed scholarship and articles of general interest to reflect Frye’s broad readership. If you’re sitting on an article that hasn’t yet found the right home, consider this an open invitation, even if it isn’t about Frye. If it deals with literature, culture or the imagination in a way that is literate, cultured and imaginative, send it to us. Until the journal is operational, feel free to submit it to our email address here.

In the meantime, let’s get the conversation rolling. Drop us a line simply by hitting the “Comment” link below. Or send us an email. We will always be happy to post it. 

This blog, of course, shares its name with Frye’s celebrated little book. Chapter 4, ‘The Keys to Dreamland,” ends with this often cited observation:

Literature is a human apocalypse, man’s revelation to man, and literature is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

It’s almost 50 years since Frye wrote those words, whose terms of reference may now seem quaint at best. But those who continue to read him no doubt continue to feel their power. Frye begins The Educated Imagination by asking a series of simple questions about the study of literature. Perhaps we should begin by doing the same. Why, after a half century of undeniably radical changes in the study of literature and the arts, does Frye’s critical vision remain so compelling? Why does he regard criticism as a “revelation,” and what does he think is being revealed? Responding to these kinds of questions may serve as part of our purpose here.