The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, Vol. 2: 1932-1939

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

In the 1960s, Northrop Frye’s influence hit the Canadian literary
scene like a bomb. His Anatom y of Criticism (1957), with its startling
thesis, was becoming known. In the words of biographer John Ayre, the
Anatomy showed that literary criticism was “a symbolically
co-ordinated discipline that outlines the shape of the human imagination
itself.” And by extension, the shape of literature—all literature.
Even Frye’s penetrating studies of Blake, Milton, Shakespeare, and the
Bible were shadowed by the Anatomy.

These two hefty volumes of correspondence between Frye and the woman
who became his wife reveal their imaginations and very human
personalities. Did we suspect that The Great Man could be tender, funny,
or lazy? The two were very young, just 20 and 22, when the
correspondence began. The letters are often very personal.

According to editor Robert Denham, “[t]he letters collected here open
a window on the formative years of a young man who became one of the
outstanding critical and creative minds of the twentieth century, and
they reveal an articulate young woman whose self-awareness, idealism,
and pragmatic good sense enabled her to establish her own place in the
often turbulent 1930s.”

Denham’s editing, with comprehensive footnotes and an appendix (a
directory of people mentioned in the correspondence) is thorough and
meticulous. His lengthy introductions to each volume, along with shorter
introductions to the sections, provide a welcome background as to what
is going on in the lives of “Norrie” and Helen during the years in
question.

These two people were highly intelligent, vulnerable, and very much in
love. Their correspondence affords a privileged look into two
exceptional private lives—and, for literary scholars, a wealth of
insights into the developing imagination of a great Canadian thinker.