{"id":20243,"date":"2011-01-22T14:43:38","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T19:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/"},"modified":"2011-01-22T14:43:38","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T19:43:38","slug":"editing-frye","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/editing-frye\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing Frye"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert D. Denham<\/em><\/p>\n

The odyssey of my editing Frye\u2019s previously unpublished writing began in the summer of 1992 when I arrived at the Victoria College Library to examine the Frye papers that had been deposited there following Frye\u2019s death in January 1991.\u00a0 I had the good fortune of working with Dolores A. Signori, who had been enlisted to compile a guide to the Frye papers.\u00a0 Eva Kushner, president of Victoria College, had set me up in one of her offices on the second floor of the E.J. Pratt Library.\u00a0 Every day, Dolores, who was working down the hall, would bring me a cartful of documents to examine, and my more of less self\u2011defined job was to see if I could identify the various items.\u00a0 The Frye papers comprised a substantial body of material\u2013\u2013occupying more than twenty\u2011three meters of shelf space.\u00a0 What I combed through initially were the \u201cliterary files,\u201d as they came to be designated in Dolores\u2019s Guide to the Northrop Frye Papers (Toronto: Victoria University Library, 1993), and among the \u201cpersonal files,\u201d Frye diaries.\u00a0 I was also keenly interested in Frye\u2019s correspondence with his Helen Kemp, his girlfriend and later wife, in the 1930s and in the typescripts of his student essays.\u00a0 These were the four main categories of documents that I focused on.\u00a0 Among the literary files were Frye\u2019s notebooks, as well as published addresses, lectures, and essays.\u00a0 I fairly quickly determined that the Frye papers contained a large amount of extraordinary material, and I was convinced that a good portion of it should be published.\u00a0 Thus began my sixteen\u2011year odyssey.<\/p>\n

The initial challenge was to see, for the holograph material, whether or not I could successfully decipher Frye\u2019s handwriting.\u00a0 I remember carrying a photocopy of one of the notebooks\u2013\u2013it was on Matthew Arnold\u2013\u2013back to my room in Burwash Hall to see if I could transcribe it.\u00a0 I managed to decipher only about half of the text, and so initially I rather despaired of ever being able to reproduce with any degree of certainty what Frye had written.\u00a0 But the idiosyncrasies of Frye\u2019s script gradually became more and more distinguishable, and eventually I was able to read his handwriting with a fair amount of confidence.\u00a0 Frye\u2019s orthography remained very consistent over the years, so once I learned the features of his graphemes, it was only occasionally that I would be stumped by a word or phrase.<\/p>\n

I convinced myself early on that the notebooks, diaries, student essays, and Frye\u2013Kemp correspondence should be published.\u00a0 But there was a problem with half of the correspondence\u2013\u2013Kemp\u2019s letters to Frye could not be located.\u00a0 John Ayre had used some of Frye\u2019s letters to Kemp in writing his biography of Frye and he knew of the existence of Kemp\u2019s letters to Frye, but I could not find these letters, nor could Jane Widdicombe, Frye\u2019s secretary and the executrix of the Frye Estate, locate them at the Fryes\u2019 Clifton Road home.\u00a0 So during that first summer I called Frye\u2019s second wife, Elizabeth, to see if she would permit me to search for the papers in the attic.\u00a0 She graciously consented.\u00a0 But shortly after that I learned that she was not well.\u00a0 Although I knew Elizabeth and had spent some time with her and Frye in Toronto and Washington DC, I decided it would not be proper for me to be rummaging around in the home of one who was showing signs of dementia.\u00a0 At that point I contacted Ian Morrison, Elizabeth\u2019s son-in-law, who agreed to look through the papers in the attic.\u00a0 Within several days he drove to the Vic campus, and, as in a scene from a James Bond movie, opened the trunk of his sleek sedan and delivered to me an attach\u00e9 case and several dusty shopping bags filled with files, photographs, sketch books, postcards, newspaper clippings, and other miscellaneous documents.\u00a0 Rummaging through this material, I was almost ready to conclude that Kemp\u2019s letters to Frye had not been preserved, but at the bottom of the last shopping bag I finally uncovered them.\u00a0 Helen Kemp has very carefully clipped the envelopes to the letters and had made notes on some of them, presumably for John Ayre\u2019s benefit.\u00a0 In any event, I now had 266 letters, cards, and telegrams that passed between Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp from the winter of 1931\u201332 until 17 June 1939, and I decided that the first project I would tackle would be the transcription of the Frye\u2013Kemp correspondence.<\/p>\n

The size of the entire project was almost overwhelming, but I set out to photocopy whatever I thought was worthy of eventual publication.\u00a0 This was, in addition to the correspondence, chiefly the seventy-seven notebooks that turned up, the seven diaries, and a number of typescripts of Frye\u2019s talks, student papers, and essays.\u00a0 The Victoria library staff had been gracious in accommodating my needs, but the photocopying proved to be something of a frustration as the machines in the library produced such poor copies.\u00a0 Robert Brandeis, the chief librarian, has provided me with a key to the library so that I could get in and out of my temporary office at night (the library was not open in the evening during the summer).\u00a0 So for several weeks I would fill my book bag with notebooks and diaries, haul them across campus to one of the photocopiers in the Robarts Library, and stand there for hours feeding dimes in to the machine.\u00a0 This was doubtless against library policy (I was afraid to ask for fear I would not be permitted to take the manuscripts from the library), but I was eager to take back to Virginia copies I could read, and the chance that I would be hit by a truck, scattering the Frye manuscripts along St. George Street, seemed fairly remote.\u00a0 I have no idea how many pages I copied altogether, but the thirteen volumes of previously unpublished material that eventually made their way into the Collected Works amount to almost 7,000 pages.<\/p>\n

Word of this treasure trove of began to seep out, and some of those attending the conference on the Legacy of Northrop Frye, held at Victoria during the fall of 1992, began to examine the material in the Frye \u201cfonds,\u201d a word, new to me, that archivists use to refer to a body of material in special collections.\u00a0 I began to get the sense from some quarters that as a foreigner I was usurping an editing project that properly belonged to Canadians.\u00a0 The Frye material, it was suggested, was of sufficient scope to keep an army of Toronto graduate students busy for years.\u00a0 So what business did I have hauling copies of these treasures back to Virginia?\u00a0 It was at this point that I asked for permission from Jane Widdicombe and Roger Ball, executors of the Frye estate, to edit and publish all of Frye\u2019s previously unpublished manuscripts and documents.\u00a0 The permission was granted with the proviso that the executors would have final approval of the publisher.\u00a0 I had been Frye\u2019s unofficial bibliographer for a number of years, and in the late 1980s he had permitted me to edit three volumes of his essays and a collection of interviews.\u00a0 The executors had earlier granted permission for me and Michael Dolzani to edit Frye\u2019s professional correspondence, which had been coming to the Victoria University library in instalments over a period of years.\u00a0 But with the excitement generated by the notebooks, diaries, and other papers, I decided to put the professional correspondence on the back burner.\u00a0 I asked Michael Dolzani, who had been Frye\u2019s research assistant for twelve years and was more knowledgeable about Frye\u2019s work than anyone else, to help me edit the unpublished material.\u00a0 He agreed, and we set about the painstaking process of transcribing and annotating the photocopied documents.\u00a0 In 1995\u201396 I received a year\u2011long NEH fellowship, which meant that for an entire year I could devote full time to the project.\u00a0 Five years later Michael and I had a large portion of the manuscripts in electronic form.\u00a0 Once we had most of the transcription completed we began assigning the material to particular volumes.\u00a0 I elected to begin with Frye\u2019s late notebooks, written mostly during the 1980s, and Michael initially tackled what came to be known as The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks, Frye\u2019s free\u2011wheeling speculations about the book he intended to write after Anatomy of Criticism but never did.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, a proposal had emanated from Victoria College, spurred by the leadership of President Eva Kushner, to produce a collected edition of Frye\u2019s works.\u00a0 The issue now was whether or not the previously unpublished documents would become a part of this project.\u00a0 By 1994, I had completed the transcription of the Frye\u2013Kemp correspondence, a document of more than 400,000 words.\u00a0 At a meeting at Victoria College of President Kushner, the executors, Ron Schoeffel of the University of Toronto Press, and myself, I agreed that the best course was to join my efforts with the Collected Works project.\u00a0 I had not had a very happy experience with the publication of my Frye bibliography with the U of T Press, and so I sought some assurance that there wouldn\u2019t be the kind of foot\u2011dragging with this project that there had been with the bibliography.\u00a0 I was promised that the manuscript would be published within a year.\u00a0 It took two years.\u00a0 I was naturally eager to have the unpublished material in the hands of readers as soon as possible, but I came to realize there was little I could do to advance the process at the Press, which tended to move slower than a wounded turtle.\u00a0 In any case, the two\u2011volume Frye\u2013Kemp correspondence was published in 1996 under the general editorship of John M. Robson.\u00a0 And then, sixteen years after I began making a census of the material in the Frye fonds, I completed my commitment to make available to the reading public the previously unpublished manuscripts of Northrop Frye.\u00a0 I ended up editing nine of the thirteen volumes, Michael Dolzani edited three, and we shared the editorial duties for the final volume.\u00a0 Whatever insights we felt were worth reporting appear in our introductions to the several volumes.\u00a0 Each of us took on an additional volume in the series: Michael edited Words with Power and I, Anatomy of Criticism.<\/p>\n

There were eureka moments on practically every page of Frye\u2019s manuscripts, and there were larger epiphanies, such as the discovery, when we were well along in the process, of a set to typed notes called \u201cWork in Progress,\u201d which suddenly clarified the history and organizing pattern of Frye\u2019s ogdoad project and its symbolic shorthand\u2013\u2013the eight\u2011book project that motivated so much of his writing career.\u00a0 Then there was the discovery when I was almost finished with the late notebooks of still another notebook, which turned up on the bedside table of in Elizabeth Frye\u2019s nursing home.\u00a0 These notes were the workshop for Frye\u2019s 1990 \u201cdouble vision\u201d lectures at Emmanuel College.\u00a0 Transcribing and annotating can often become rather mindless operations, but what justified the tedium was watching Frye\u2019s fertile, nimble, and well\u2011stocked mind at work.\u00a0 It is trite to say that every day uncovered new insights, but it is nevertheless true.<\/p>\n

The success of the Collected Works project is due to the devoted labors of many people, including Jean O\u2019Grady and Margaret Burgess at the Northrop Frye Centre, but no one has been so important in insuring success as Alvin A. Lee, who assumed the role of general editor after the untimely death of Jack Robson.\u00a0 Anyone interested in the history of the project should consult Lee\u2019s \u201cThe Collected Works of Northrop Frye: The Project and the Edition,\u201d in Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old, ed. David Rampton (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2009), 1\u201314.\u00a0 All of us owe an enormous debt to Lee.<\/p>\n

The volumes of previously unpublished material:<\/p>\n

The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932\u20131939. 2 vols. (Denham)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Student Essays, 1932\u20131938 (Denham)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks, 1982\u20131990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. 2 vols. (Denham)<\/p>\n

The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942\u20131955 (Denham)<\/p>\n

The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964\u20131972: The Critical Comedy (Dolzani)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936\u20131989 (Denham)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (Denham)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Romance (Dolzani)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (Dolzani)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism\u201d (Denham)<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (Denham and Dolzani)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert D. Denham The odyssey of my editing Frye\u2019s previously unpublished writing began in the summer of 1992 when I arrived at the Victoria College Library to examine the Frye papers that had been deposited there following Frye\u2019s death in January 1991.\u00a0 I had the good fortune of working with Dolores A. Signori, who had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-20243","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nEditing Frye - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/editing-frye\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Editing Frye - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robert D. 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