Northrop Frye Unbuttoned: Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This compilation is clearly a by-product of Frye’s Collected Works, an
admirable collection in the process of publication. The editor clearly
hopes to share with general readers some of Frye’s more personal
off-the-cuff observations from his notebooks and diaries, which they are
unlikely to encounter in the more specialized volumes of the collection.
Fair enough. “Wit and Wisdom” is, however, somewhat deceptive.
Readers expecting amusing one-liners or succinct gobbets of profundity
are likely to be disappointed. Frye, after all, is no Stephen Leacock.
Many of these extracts consist of agonized laments on the death of his
wife and bitter dissatisfactions concerning his religious beliefs.

Entries are arranged alphabetically according to subject, and some of
them are decidedly odd: “Buddha and Beer”; “Drunken Monkey”;
“Ice Stilts”; “Intellectual Mongrel” (a self-description);
“Strindberg’s Goofiness.” But many are highly intellectual:
“Demythologizing”; “Historical Interpenetration”;
“Redemption.” Forecastably, one of his quixotic protests against
“Value-Judgments” is included; yet the editor also prints no fewer
than 27 “Greatest” entries, among them “The Greatest Book in the
Bible,” “The Greatest Literary Genius After Blake” (Edgar Allan
Poe, for goodness’ sake!), “The Greatest Shakespearean Comedy,”
etc. These certainly sound like value-judgments to me.

The weakness of this book, I suspect, is that it offers individual
units of thought that, given the context, we inevitably read on the
lookout for “wit” or “wisdom” (there’s much more of the latter
than of the former, by the way). Yet the pleasure of reading Frye’s
notebooks in their entirety often comes from the sudden insights and
flashes of humour that accompany (and frequently leaven) the argument
and so impress with all the surprise of the unanticipated. Whatever the
blurb may claim, these extracts, though the product of a fascinating
mind, rarely “crackle.” They are learned, sometimes even pedantic,
and the general reader will all too often find them bewildering. I get
the impression that there was a good idea behind this compilation that
never quite worked out in practice.