1942: Frye complains about the practice of expurgation in the Everyman editions (especially of Samuel Pepys, pictured above), and goes on to note the “wave of prudery” that seems to rise during wartime.

[81] I don’t know why I keep reading this idiotic Braybrooke Pepys, for which Everyman’s Library obtains money under false pretenses. It’s not only heavily expurgated but some of the most important musical references are left out. For the expurgation there is only the faint excuse of 19th c. publication and the facts (a) that milord B. [Braybrooke] was in the Pepys family (b) that he was presenting a historical rather than a literary document. That Everyman should ask $1.50 for this croquette is nonsense. I’d like to write an article on Everyman’s prudery sometime. Geoffrey of Monmouth; the translator’s smug smear on p. 248. Malory, according to Blunden. The Gulliver’s Travels “For Young People” has been modified. The Pepys is the worst of course, for B. [Braybrooke] has even been allowed to tamper with the family text to the extent of printing “prostitute” for “whore,” on the three-point landing principle: I remember the New Yorker’s account of a play, I think Sean O’Casey’s, where Lillian Russell was billed as a “Young Whore.” [Ed. Frye must be mistaken: Lillian Russell was 20 years older than O’Casey and died in 1922 — three years before The New Yorker began publication.] Several papers printed it as a “Young Harlot” (more cushion for sensitive moral fundaments in two syllables). One “blushed prettily and whispered ‘A Young Girl Who Has Gone Astray.'” One said “with Miss Russell and the following cast.”

[Update: According to Bob Denham, Frye means to say Lillian Gish rather than Lillian Russell.  Gish did indeed play the prostitute in O’Casey’s Within the Gates in 1934.]

[82] This combined with the banning of Freud makes me wonder if we are in for a wave of prudery as a defence against the licentiousness of war. That is, it puts me in a gloomy state of mind in which I wonder. I hope we’ll continue the tendency to greater frankness and less bother about it which the popularity of, say, The Grapes of Wrath, would seem to indicate. But as people instinctively do the sillier things, there’s the danger of the huge wave of sullen prurience pouring over us again, welling up from the deep and bitter hatred of culture in our middle-class.

1950: Out with Oxford chum Rodney Baine to see a production of The Alchemist:

[574] Rodney [Baine] celebrated finishing his thesis tonight by taking us over to Tufts College to see the Oxford Players put on the The Alchemist. A group of very young people — the ages were all carefully given in the programme and the oldest was twenty-eight — were attractive (Dol Common made even Elizabethan prostitution seem attractive) and full of life and bounce.

Tomorrow: Dieppe; the rhythm of Beowulf

A very interesting note from Craig Walker regarding Frye’s enigmatic diary entry on this date (see the post below).

Today I was discussing with a group of students the Shaw Festival production of Bernard Shaw’s “In Good King Charles’ Golden Days” (1939), the title of which comes from the satirical ballad, “The Vicar of Bray,” in which the Vicar’s opportunistic flexibility in the matters of politics and religion allows him to retain his position throughout all the vicissitudes of that era (of Civil War and Restoration). I suppose Frye means here that readiness to compromise clearly will only take a person so far and no further; but it is interesting that Shaw (an early hero of Frye’s) takes a somewhat different view, not only seeing King Charles II as a Vicar of Bray type, whose adaptability ensured his survival, but seems to present this as an essential quality of mind for us to embrace in the modern era (where, as Shaw implicitly offers by way of example, Newtonian physics have had to make way for the quantum revolution). In that context, I’m sure that Frye would agree with Shaw: see his essay “Science and Religion”

1942: Merely this enigmatic entry:

[80] The Vicar of Bray never got to be a bishop.

[Pictured above as a Royal Doulton figurine.]

1950: Frye wonders if his hay fever is a psychosomatic illness.

[573]… My disease encourages me to sleep in even later in the morning. Today I gave up entirely & read a book on psychosomatic medicine by Helen Flanders Dunbar. I don’t see how she can be the same person as the author of that book on Dante’s symbolism, but the coincidence of names is curious. [Ed. She is in fact the same woman.] She doesn’t say much about hay fever, but she says the emotional pattern behind asthma is often one of repression due to a sense of neglect: if people can manage to break down and weep their asthma gets better. I’ve been told that mother was very sick at my birth & that I was consigned to a nurse who kept me doped with soothing syrup. The strong and irradicable resentment I feel against mother, and especially my feeling that most of her illnesses were due to a morbid mental conditon in which self indulgence predominated, is doubtless fed from some such infantile springs. I can even remember resenting her sleeping half the afternoon. But I doubt very much than any knowledge of my infantile feelings will stop my blood from curdling when the ragweed busts loose, nor does the Dunbar woman suggest that it will. There’s also a strong introverted resistence to duty behind all my illnesses of course.

Tomorrow: expurgated texts; wartime “prudery”

Today is the Fryes’ wedding anniversary: their fifth in 1942 and their thirteenth in 1950.

1942:

A bad double feature at the movies (Through Different Eyes and Rings on Her Fingers) — complete with annoying gender stereotypes — leaves Frye in a mood to address “the war of the sexes”:

 [77] People are human beings first and men and women afterwards. Their bodily functions are different; their environments are different, though the difference in this century has been greatly decreased. So there may be generalizations of the ‘men are like this whereas women are like that’ kind which may have some hazy and approximate truth. I don’t know. Men’s conversation is more abstract & less personal than women’s, but whether that’s an accident of training or an essential sexual trait I don’t know. I do know that the kind of mind that thinks along these lines of facile anitheses is a dull & tiresome mind. It betrays a fixation on sex-differences which is mere adolescence, & in an adult unhealthy.

1950: A very hot day of shopping in Boston. Then an anniversary dinner:

[570] We went to the Bella Vista for dinner, which Dick Ellmann had recommended as the best place in town, but it wasn’t any hell — not nearly as good as the Viennese place. However, it was all right, though we were outdoors on a roof under an umbrella, and I’d have done better in an air-conditioned interior [because of hay fever]. Beside us was a young man who’d just got his Ph.D and was celebrating. His conversation got louder with his drinks & was a mixture of of cultural & personal remarks that, considered as a pattern, gave me quite an insight into the Harvard level of student sophistication, though it’s difficult to say just what it was.

Tomorrow: an enigmatic reference to the Vicar of Bray; hay fever as psychosomatic illness?