More on me and Slothrop
purple
Don Theall wrote:
[Dan Merkuk's observations are "dead-on" when he concludes that the
Marchand
article "Academia and the Occult: Frye's Diaries Confirm Mcluhan's
Suspicion"
(_Toronto Star_ Nov. 30, 2002) is a "tempest in a teapot'". But I
thought in a
supplementary way I might add a few facts and observations from having
lived through
those days with Norrie and Marshall in the 1950s and 1960s. Norrie was
a "gentle
man" in every sense of the word, although he and McLuhan were naturally
in
competition. And in addition to being ambitious as Marchand notes,
since at that time
Norrie was the "big name" in the department, naturally that did not go
over well with
Marshall for two reasons: first, McLuhan wanted the top grad students in
English which
with a few exceptions Norrie was attracting; second, quite legitimately
and I still agree
with him, McLuhan did not accept the "Frygian" (as it was called
internally) system for
encompassing all of literary history and experience. [I'll address the
so-called Masonic
issue in a moment.] To my knowledge Norrie (and I worked closely with
him
administratively in the early 1960s, as well as having been a neighbour
of his briefly in
the 1950s) did not particularly care for Marshall; but he certainly did
not detest him as
Marshall did Frye. Frye never ever showed any animosity towards me even
though
while I was a grad student in the early 1950s I attacked him in the
_Varsity_ the U of
T newspaper, advancing McLuhan as being more "on the track" in literary
theories; and
later in the mid-1960s arranged to have William Wimsatt of Yale invited
to Toronto to
give a public lecture attacking Frye. I thought him a sensitive
commentator on Blake
and on literary texts, even though I could not agree with his
theoretical and historical
orientations. In spite of this he highly recommended me for all the
positions for which I
later applied.
That out of the way, let's examine the masonry issue. Marshall was
always a
manager, so that while he was suseptible of being paranoid, he was not
influenced by
paranoid catholics, anymore than he should be described as an
unequivocal critic of the
occult. I think I can comment on this in a special way in that I
believe I was the guilty
party in escalating McLuhan's interest in Masonry and the occult in the
early 1950s
when I began unearthing the importance of the eighteenth century
arguments about
Masonry which were reflected in the shifts within Alexander Pope's
mock-epic The
Dunciad Variorum between its early version in 1728 and its final version
in 1743. We
spoke incessantly about the role of the mysteries in Pope' poem, its
background in the
Eleusinian mysteries, Pythagoreans and Gnosticism and the politics of
Masonry in Britain and Europe in the late 1600s and the 1700s. I'm not
suggesting I influenced him, but that by bringing it and the relevance
of
the Catholic Church's condemnation to his attention I caused him to
launch
himself into an investigation of the esoteric, the occult and secret
societies which were a very dominant aspect of his interests in the
mid-1950s and remained a permanent factor. He became convinced, as his
correspondence shows, that the "secret tradition" was the ground for the
achievements
of literature and the arts and that the symbolists and modernists from
Baudelaire
onward were all interested in this.
This was not a difficult fact to understand in that the occult had
been recognized
for a long time as involved in aspects of the literary and artistic
traditions, which was
why it was natural for Frye also to be interested in them. Even
Marchand has to point
out the significance of these subjects to some significant bodies of
literature. It would
be way beyond the interests of this group to go into all the
complexities of this, but it
could be abundantly illustrated as one can find out by reading Yeats's
prose, the very
highly regarded artistic and literary history of Frances Yates in the
1960s and later or
the novels of Charles Williams, who was a literary rage (now dated) in
the period of high
modernism. It might also be pointed out that Frances Yates also
discussed the "occult
philosophy" of Shakespeare, including Prospero and _The Tempest_ in _The
Occult
Philosphy in the Elizabethan Age_ published in 1979 in chapters
entitled: "Shakespeare
and Christian Cabala: Francseco Giorgio and _The Merchant of Venice_",
"Shakespearean Fairies, Witches, Melancholy: King Lear and the Demons_,
and
"Prospero:the Shakespearean Magus."
Marshall nevertheless for some reason in the 1950s felt he had been
robbed of a
knowledge of where the moderns from Yeats and Pound to Lewis and Joyce
had been
coming from, since he was not as he came to think others were an
initiate in this "secret
knowledge". But, of course, this knowledge as even Marshall really knew
was part of
the history of the classical world, the patristic period, the middle
ages, the Renaissance
and so on through history. In spite of this he thought Frye and many
others even
including his good friend, Claude Bissel, were initiates, because he
knew that Yeats
was an initiate (a member of the "Golden Dawn" whose connection with
A.E.Waite is
mentioned at the end of Marchand's article) and Marshall also knew from
my work that
Pope and Swift had been Masons prior to their condemnation by Rome. In
fact in the
early to mid-1950s Marshall and I read the works of A.E. Waite, Aleister
Crowley,
Madame Blavatsky, histories of masonry and the occult and discussions of
the
Eleusinian mysteries, their European roots and their relations to
gnosticism and other
heresies.
The problem, I suspect, was having been a Protestant a
Methodist/Baptist
who had become a Catholic to embrace the rich inheritance of the
Church's thought,
Marshal believed that he had to reject that which the Church, (at
least, legalistically)
had condemned, while still needing to have access to the esoteric and
occult
knowledge to carry out his intellectual work. So in a sense he became a
"witch-hunter'
of Masons and other secret cultists as a way of justifying his pursuing
that esoteric and
occult knowledge (which ironically always had been available to him)
while still
preserving a certain purity of doctrine. It is part of what I have
referred to as his
"schizoid" problem.
These are just some brief thoughts. It is not an issue that can be
over-simplified
and Marchand was most irresponsible for stirring "this tempest" up in
the press, out of
context. Particularly since the involvement of the artistic and
literary tradition
throughout history and particularly in the last century and a half has
been deeply and
openly involved in the occult, the esoteric and the mystical.
Norrie Frye was most likely not a mason, since he was not the type
addicted to
what masonry had become by the second half of the twentieth century nor
was he a
member of any secret society. But Frye was a student deeply engrossed in
mysticism,
in Jungian theory, in the Gnostic tradition, all of which also
fascinated McLuhan, though
they may have valued them differently.
In closing it might be noted that Frye stumbled onto Colin Still's
work when he
was 17 or 18. Like most impressionable youthful intellectuals it
fascinated him and set
him on a quest. It was a fruitful and productive quest that inspired
many Canadian
writers and academics and led him to produce interesting scholarship on
Blake Also,
while Still probably was a "kook", strong arguments were made later by
other scholars
such as Frances Yates for the role of the occult in Elizabethan and
Jacobean writing,
especially in her 1975 study based on her delivering the Lord
Northcliffe lectures at
University College, London in 1974 _Shakespeare's Last Plays_.
I felt that I had to write at length to establish a clearer view of
where both Frye
and McLuhan's interests in the mystical tradition came from. Neither
could have
studied Joyce without an awareness of the rich, complex history of
mysticism,
esotericism, occultism and "secret" knowledge. And each in his own way
was on a
spiritual quest, which has preoccupied thought throughout the ages.]
Bob Dobbs
Blackout
"purple" wrote
> Don Theall wrote:
nobody cares who you buttfuck, dean, and reading your sordid blow by blow
descriptions of you and your sodomite friends isn't the kind of thing anyone
here really cares to do.
keep that kind of thing at your dinner table if you would be so kind.
nenslo
>
> I equate pompousness with knowledge and namedropping with scholarship.
Exactly.