Painting of Frye at E.J. Pratt library at Victoria College: a college in-joke, repeated by Frye, was that he appeared to be living “without visible means of support”.
The renowned U of T and world literary figure grew up a reader in a devout family rooted in the smaller cities of eastern Canada
At a busy Portland Boulevard intersection near the exit from autoroute 410 in Sherbrooke, Quebec, drivers can briefly glimpse a high-post street sign, while turning left or right on their way to the SAQ wine depot or other shopping-mall outlets: rue Northrop-Frye.
This undistinguished, four-block street is an important local reminder of one of the most eminent English Canadians to emerge from the Townships. As the street sign notes, Frye was an “Auteur et critique littéraire (1912-1991)”. And not just any literary critic, but arguably the most influential in the world.
Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke in 1912 and lived there only to age 7. But the Frye family’s roots there were deep and, as biographer John Ayre reports, even during his long years teaching English literature at the University of Toronto, Frye “always considered himself a Quebecer”.
Over his career, Frye was called “the most crucial literary critic in the English language” by top U.S. scholar Harold Bloom, and was often celebrated as Canada’s most important thinker. His key work, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), was seminal in dissecting the roots of Western literary imagery and core mythologies, tracing many of them to “archetypes” in the Bible. He established criticism as quite distinct from simply reading and commenting on books. He was also a seminal interpreter of Romantic poet William Blake.
This thinking was very influential on academics worldwide, and the unassuming Frye was showered with honours, from the Governor-General’s Award for literature and the Order of Canada to membership in the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Ayre’s otherwise exhaustive biography does not record if Frye was ever nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, which would not have been undeserved, but would have been an earthquake in the smallish emerging world of Canadian literature back in the 1950s or 1960s.
Family moved to Sherbrooke
While his literary feats are well documented, Frye’s childhood and family history in the Townships are not. Most bios start and end with Frye being “born in 1912 in Sherbrooke, Quebec”. Biographer Ayre, however, dug deep into his family history, both on the Frye side of his father and for his mother’s Howard roots.
The Howard family descended from a long line of Methodist and evangelical preachers, whose family centre was largely in New England, around Lowell, Massachusetts. However, travelling ministers were generally restricted to three-year terms at parishes, so Frye’s maternal grandfather Eratus Howard travelled widely between small towns in Ontario, New England and Quebec, including Wolfe Island (where daughter Cassie was born), Nepean, Windsor Mills, Farnham, Minton and Philipsburg.
On the Frye side, as early as the 1820s, Peter Frye occupied the heights overlooking the Saint Francis river near Sherbrooke, and his son Hermon Frye farmed near Windsor, Quebec. Another branch of the family lived at Lowell; Northrop’s father Herman was born there.
Herman Frye and Cassie Howard met at Windsor Mills, and married at Philipsburg in October 1897. They moved back to Lowell, but Cassie hated life there, and was reputed to be “venomously anti-American”, reports Ayre. She insisted that the young family return to Canada. With two young children in tow, they settled in Sherbrooke in 1904.
Northrop Frye’s father Herman worked in the hardware trade in Sherbrooke from 1904 to 1917. He was relentlessly unsuccessful in business, and this was the family’s downfall here.
The family first settled in a flat on Wolfe Street in Sherbrooke (no number is given), then in 1905 they moved into the house at 30 London St. They attended faithfully the nearby Methodist church. His father started to work for the J.S. Mitchell hardware concern. But he soon grew restless and launched his own hardware store, setting up shop in 1915 as Frye and Cross at 187 Wellington.
In 1916, he renamed the business H.E. Frye, and the Sherbrooke City Directory advertisement highlighted its selection of “builder’s hardware, cutlery, tools, sporting goods, mantels, tilings, gratings, paints and oils”. Regular ads in The Record emphasized its aggressive price-cutting, including lawn-mowers sold for $5, a dollar cheaper than at competitors.
Northrop a precocious reader
Northrop Frye was a late child, born when his mother was 41, on July 14, 1912. His older brother Howard and his sister Vera were each more than a dozen years older.
Northrop was even-tempered and precociously bookish, reading aloud from the Paul Bunyan classic Pilgrim’s Progress by age 4. The family’s church and Bible focus affected him profoundly. He was perhaps destined to be a stolid English professor: he was very poor at math, accounting and sports, and later in his school life launched a separate boys club for the more serious and less boisterous of his classmates.
In 1917, brother Howard was called up in the First World War; he was killed there when Northrop was still just 4. This affected him for life, although he could never clearly remember his older brother.
His father’s business in Sherbrooke steadily failed, which brought instability. The family lost control of their London St. house, became tenants there, and were eventually forced to move south to the Two Oaks farm in Lennoxville near Bishop’s, owned by Cassie’s sister Hatty. But father Herm’s business continued downhill, and by 1917 he was bankrupt. After paying off or avoiding some key debts, he became a travelling hardware salesman, and eventually decided his prospects were better in Moncton, New Brunswick.
The Sherbrooke chapter of Northrop Frye’s family history ended there. Little remains today but a four-block long street, and a great literary reputation. That is worth remembering.
Originally published May 7, 2021, in the Sherbrooke Record
Addendum
Two great thinkers worked in close proximity at the University of Toronto from the 1950s until the 1980s, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. An interesting look at how their intellectual and personal lives intersected there:
https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/marshall-mcluhan-met-northrop-frye/
