Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, Wit and Wisdom Fro the Notebooks and Diaries

Northrop Frye once wrote in one of his notebooks: I’ve always wanted to write "my own" book of pensées, not like Pascal’s but more like Anatole France’s Jardin d’Epicure or (I’ve just discovered) Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave.… The disadvantage of this project is that it can’t be planned. Elsewhere in these pages he has more thoughts along these lines: It would be wonderful to write a whole book in the discontinuous aphoristic form in which things actually come to me.… Fulfilling Frye’s own idea, editor Robert D. Denham has made apt selections from the notebooks and diaries of this revered critic. Frye’s wit and brilliance are revealed in notes on literary matters, musings on religious ideas, and aphoristic speculations on a broad range of topics. Passages that are personal and autobiographical, such as the moving entries on the death of his wife Helen, provide a special human dimension. The notes, written over the course of fifty years, are cranky, idiosyncratic, irreverent, and cerebral, yet often down-to-earth. The Frye of the formal essays unbuttons his suit jacket and reveals his vulnerable self, all the while making insightful and sometimes acerbic comments on a wide range of subjects, illuminating his own character and thought in ways that reveal a diVerent man and writer than most have previously envisioned.