Letter from Holly Down, Toronto, Ontario, 25 September 1994.\u00a0 In response to questions about Frye\u2019s diary entry of 15 May.<\/p>\n
Dairy entry:<\/em><\/p>\n 15 May 1949.\u00a0 Isabel\u2019s <\/em>[Isabelle\u2019s<\/em>] baby was christened today, & her father, the bishop, did a much smoother job than Woodcock did on <\/em>Nancy<\/em>.\u00a0 No howls from Hilary, only a pleasant succession of burps.\u00a0 The bishop has revised the service, cutting out the \u201cconceived in sin\u201d passage.\u00a0 Then a tea party, at which I met archdeacon Marsh & wife, a pleasant example of muscular Christianity, also a girl named [Jessie] Day, who was Vic 37 & teaching English at Danforth Tech, engaged to a man\u2014a friend of Harold\u2019s [Harold Whitley\u2019s], who was godfather. The Bretts were there, & asked us to dinner.\u00a0 Hilary is a lovely baby.\u00a0 In the evening we asked Marjorie [King] in\u2014she looks dreadfully tired.\u00a0 Margaret [<\/em>Newton<\/em>] also came in with Mary & Wilf <\/em>Hamilton<\/em>\u2014they\u2019re very pleasant people.\u00a0 The day wasn\u2019t quite as inane as it sounds.<\/em><\/p>\n [Isabel\u2019s baby = Holly Down (n\u00e9e Hilary Hallam Whitley).\u00a0 Nancy = Frye\u2019s godchild, the daughter of a woman named Edna who rented the attic of the Fryes\u2019 Clifton Road home in the early 1940s.\u00a0 The bishop = Bishop William Thomas Hallam, father of Isabel Whitley and a friend of Archdeacon Marsh from their Wycliffe College days.\u00a0 The \u201cgirl named Day\u201d = Jessie Adams (n\u00e9e Day); her husband Douglas, a long-time friend of the Whitleys, was the god-father of baby Hilary, and Helen Frye was the god-mother. The Bretts = Katherine Beatrice (Betty) Brett was a friend of Isabelle Whitley from their school days.\u00a0 Isabelle and Harold Whitley were the Fryes\u2019 neighbors.]<\/p>\n Dear Robert Denham,<\/p>\n I am writing in reply to your enquiries about Northrop Frye\u2019s diary entry for May 15, 1949.<\/p>\n [. . .] My Mother\u2019s friendship with Aunt Helen originated in their study of and interest in the History of Art and involvement in the Adult Education Department of the then Art Gallery of Toronto.\u00a0 As you know Helen graduated from Victoria College in 1933.\u00a0 Mother was in the first graduating class of the new Department o1 Art and Archaeology at the University of Toronto in 1938.\u00a0 My parents [Isabelle and Harold Whitley] lived around the corner from the Fryes at 226 Heath St. East for over forty years.\u00a0 The Haddows were next door to the Fryes with the shared the driveway, but I don\u2019t remember the people at the corner house.\u00a0 When my Father became ill in the Spring of 1980, my husband Barrie and I and our two children aged ten and seven moved in with Mother to care for him until his death in December of that year.\u00a0 We stayed on with Mother and cared for her until her death in 1988.<\/p>\n My chief remembrances of Helen and Norrie are scattered.\u00a0 I remember them coming over for Sunday afternoon tea at our house and Helen talking animatedly about all sorts of things, always with her marvellous ready laugh.\u00a0 Norrie was quiet and every so often added something to the proceedings.\u00a0 He was more at ease when we visited their house, punctuating the conversation with humorous remarks.\u00a0 Norrie and his living room chair created a safe zone where I sat on the carpet as a child, looking at books and listening to the adult conversation.\u00a0 I was a bookish child and ended up taking Fine Art at U of T and am presently completing my Masters in Fine Art there.<\/p>\n Helen was a thoughtful and generous person.\u00a0 She was careful to bring back some little treasure for me from their various trips: a little scented Indian grass box; a cloth doll dressed in bright red peasant gypsy skirt edged with gold sequins and black fringed shawl; a jewel-coloured, folding silk wastepaper basket with embroidered Japanese designs; a box of watercolours from England and an ivory necklace of little hearts which I still have. \u00a0These gifts carried a sense of romance with them. \u00a0Helen was a masterful story teller. \u00a0She created picturesque worlds replete with colourful characters and details of travel. \u00a0She demonstrated a sailor\u2019s gait much to my Mother\u2019s delight and related stories of various sleeping arrangements and menus on trains and of course of the collections of museums and galleries. It seemed to me that teaching adults was a huge and wonderful adventure.<\/p>\n I remember sitting at the top of the landing at home listening to the evening conversation of my parents and their friends. \u00a0People like Norrie and Helen who were passionately interested in education and the quality of life for the individual in Canadian society. \u00a0I\u2019d sit very quietly, breathing carefully so I could hear as much as possible. \u00a0Then I would go back to my room to sort out what it meant, piecing it together with my surreptitious reading of my Father\u2019s books on education and psychology. \u00a0He was the first Mental Health Consultant for the Toronto Board of Education as a result of his innovative studies in the forties and fifties. \u00a0It was at my Father\u2019s insistence that I was nicknamed \u201cHolly\u201d because he was concerned that I would be teased with \u201cHilly\u201d in the schoolyard.<\/p>\n I know that some people found Norrie a bit daunting, but I always found him to be quite accessible. \u00a0I guess because silences in the conversation were comfortable places.<\/p>\n When we lived with Mother after Father\u2019s death, my children attended the same local schools as I had. \u00a0My son Jeremy (now an artist-musician) had a grade seven project to interview someone who had made a significant contribution to Canadian life. \u00a0He interviewed another neighbour, a doctor who had made advances in burn therapy in North America and Norrie. \u00a0Jeremy and I went over one afternoon armed with his questions and tape recorder. \u00a0He remembers that Norrie\u2019s responses were broad (perhaps the presence of the tape recorder, although it is more likely that Norrie geared the answers more to Jeremy\u2019s age level), but his predominant impression was of Norrie\u2019s great kindness. \u00a0Unfortunately the tape has been lost over the years.<\/p>\n We saw less of the Fryes as Norrie\u2019s travelling increased and Helen\u2019s illness progressed. \u00a0His concern for her was evident when I met him at the bus stop on Mt. Pleasant Road. \u00a0He aged dramatically over the next six years, walking slowly and deliberately but brightening at having a visit on the sidewalk. \u00a0I was caught up at this point with Mother\u2019s illness and care which began just shortly after Helen\u2019s death. \u00a0The last time I saw Norrie was the Fall before he died. \u00a0He asked about Barrie and the kids and chatted, but his demeanor was even more professorial and other\u2011wordly than usual and his pallor was not good. \u00a0It was a dreadful shock when I heard on the CBC in the car that he had just died. \u00a0It felt like it was the end of a <\/em>whole generation of people with an old-fashioned Methodist commitment to society. \u00a0People who really didn\u2019t fit the multiplicity and self-conscious irony of Post-Modernism. \u00a0(Although Norrie\u2019s analyses of recent changes and their significance in Canadian society in some of his last addresses are characteristically astoundingly cogent). \u00a0One after another of their generation and orbit died in the late eighties and early nineties. We had seven die in our family circle in eight months.<\/p>\n I attended Norrie\u2019s memorial service at Convocation Hall at U of T with my daughter Adrienne who is now in her final year of Honours English at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. \u00a0Adrienne said that her memory of the service is summed in Timothy Findley\u2019s comment as he left the Hall: \u201cThe world is emptying.\u201d \u00a0She subsequently wrote a school paper in which she talked about the impact of Norrie in her life and her fear of going on in the academic world without having people of his calibre who had the magical quality of doing what they were doing because it was intrinsic to their nature and character and who consequently gave a sense of permanence and inspiration to young people in academic life. \u00a0She cited the instability of working under professors whose primary interest was research and career advancement, leaving the teaching and mentoring of students a dismal third.<\/p>\n Norrie typified the best of the mentor, an academic whose national and international achievements were based in the reality of his own personality. \u00a0When I was entering university, my marks weren\u2019t high enough to get into Honours Fine Art at U of T and I took first year at Glendon College, York University. \u00a0But my great passion was Art History and I transferred to Victoria College in second year, where Norrie played a benign avuncular role of encouragement.<\/p>\n Helen and Norrie affected the lives of my family and me in delightfully prosaic and yet remarkable ways. \u00a0What an oxymoron. \u00a0Real and yet eminently remarkable.<\/p>\n [. . .] I hope some of this information will be useful to you. This has been an interesting exercise for me to put down some of my thoughts about these two dear people whom it was a delight and privilege to know. . . .<\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n Holly Down<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Letter from Holly Down, Toronto, Ontario, 25 September 1994.\u00a0 In response to questions about Frye\u2019s diary entry of 15 May. Dairy entry: 15 May 1949.\u00a0 Isabel\u2019s [Isabelle\u2019s] baby was christened today, & her father, the bishop, did a much smoother job than Woodcock did on Nancy.\u00a0 No howls from Hilary, only a pleasant succession of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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-6406","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n