Norrie

It’s a special kind of pleasure to read about someone’s life in the precise location where they spent most of their days.

I’ve been reading John Ayre’s Northrop Frye: A Biography (Random House, 1989), the only comprehensive biography of Frye that exists, in and around Victoria College at University of Toronto. From the Muskoka chairs and benches by the EJ Pratt library, the Burwash Hall is directly in sight, as well as the ‘Old Vic’ building and the Emmanuel College and its chapel where Frye and Helen Kemp married in a modest ceremony after he finally managed to get himself hired in the academe following many years of precarity. In the 1940s, middle class women would stop working after marriage, and Helen abandoned her art education/art history career (she worked at the Art Gallery of Toronto) and threw herself into gardening and fine-tuning a household and a marriage. There were to be no children. Ayre, in a tone that’s showing its age, tells us that she was ‘barren’, which remained a source of chagrin, but he doesn’t tell us how he knows it was her and not him who had er the issue. (Did he look at the medical records? Did he come to the conclusion based on what Frye told or didn’t tell him in their interviews?)

I didn’t mean to begin with the shortcomings, because there aren’t a great amount. The biography was published a couple of years before Frye died, just as he was coming out of the depression of losing his spouse (Helen passed away ahead of him), and well before any of his diaries were made public. Ayre, judging by the acknowledgements page, has spoken to or corresponded with hundreds of sources, including Frye who was generous with his time and recollections. Not only does Ayre write about all of his published books and papers, he also follows them through the many pre-pub twists and turns - possibly a little too diligently - on their way to their final shape. But even Frye’s discarded ideas matter, that we can agree. Oftentimes they resurrect in more chiseled form at a later point.

When it comes to Frye’s career path, a few things stand out.