The Last Hours of Northrop Frye • by Gary Michael Dault 2

Short Fiction: The Last Hours of Northrop Frye by Gary Michael Dault                  I urgently wished to see Professor Frye in what I suppose must have been his last office, but I could make little headway towards his door against this procession of unworthies coming the other way.             “I want to see Dr. Frye,” I tell an authoritative-looking creature who somehow resembles a nurse. “You will”, she says, in what seems like an unhelpfully threatening manner.             Just then the door is thrown wide, and two academically-gowned professors, who appear to be wearing false beards, burst gaily from the darkened room beyond, pulling Dr. Frye—who has grown unaccountably small, the size of a Koala bear, say, but still with his full-size leonine head, his sandy hair rippling back in waves, his eyes twinkling puckishly—in a red metal wagon. It is beginning to dawn on me that this is no way to treat the author of The Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry.              Just as his funeral wagon is passing before me—at the level of my knees—I call out to him. “Professor Frye, Professor Frye!”             The procession stops. His big head turns slowly on his little furred shoulders and looks at me carefully. Then he smiles, in what I hope is recognition. I am suddenly carrying a bright red metal fire engine, the colour of his wagon, and I thrust this battered and worrisomely rusty toy towards him, certain he will recognize it and that, furthermore, it will ignite in him a conflagration of nostalgia which will engulf the two of us. For somehow this fire engine, as I understand it, is beloved of both of us, and is the index to a period of tender companionship between us, some halcyon time in which we experienced together the sparkling pursuit of ideas and the hushed acquisition of beauty in ways so sweet and profound it apparently involved a lot of joyful weeping, and trading in transcendental promises to commit ourselves to whatever we could find in the world that was indisputably fine.  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]       Share [Distillate © HA&L + Gary Michael Dault {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]