TABLE
OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION (1993) TITLE/MAIN
PAGE
Between
August 1904 and March, 1905, seven poems by an author named
'Fanny Essler' appeared in the weekly literary magazine Die
Freistatt. In a letter to André Gide, Felix
Paul Greve claimed authorship of these poems by identifying
himself with the pseudonym which is identical with the
title of his first novel. The subject of the novel and
the narrating persona of the poems was Greve's companion
Else, then separated from his friend August Endell & Greve's
wife after August 1907. She would later acquire fame
& notoriety in New York as the avant-garde artist Baroness
von Freytag-Loringhoven. Greve is better known today in
his second, post-1912 identity as the Canadian author Frederick
Philip Grove.
Freytag-Loringhoven's
archives at the University of Maryland [1] contain
not only Else's autobiography which was written
in English from Berlin in the early 1920s, and provides
a mirror-image of Greve's two novels about Else, Fanny
Essler (1905)
and Maurermeister
Ihles Haus (1906). There are also a considerable
number of German poems.
Several of these are inspired
by the decade Else lived with Greve/Grove, and two are
directly related to the Fanny Essler complex to be explored
here: one echoes Fanny Essler's last poem, and another
combines elements of her central three sonnets with the
impetuous Fall theme of Greve's "Erster
Sturm" in Die Schaubühne, 1907. This
poem must have held particular importance for Grove,
since it also exists in his archives at the University
of Manitoba & since he translated it himself as "The
Dying Year."[2]
Furthermore,
Else describes in her autobiography how she felt an
imperative need for poetic expression precisely on the three occasions
which provide the setting for the seven 'Fanny Essler'
poems: when she dreamt about Greve on the Frisian island
Föhr
before they became lovers at Christmas 1902 (Ab
30), when she missed him in Palermo in May 1903, after
he was unexpectedly sentenced for fraud in
Bonn (Ab 92), and finally, when she was in Rome on
her way to meet him upon his release in June 1904 (Ab
195).
Obvious questions arise
from this evidence: to what extent were the 'Fanny
Essler' publications in poetry & prose really Greve's? What
was Else's role in their creation? And, since
a collaborative effort seems indicated, what was the nature
of their collaboration?
A
fair amount of digression is unavoidable in the effort
to unravel the multi-layered intertextual and biographical
ramifications of the astounding Fanny Essler story which
pertain to German, Canadian and American literature on
the one hand, and to interdisciplinary concerns regarding
authorship, the creative process, the use of pseudonyms,
genre issues, art history and feminism on the other.
A
panoramic overview of the scandalous pair's
respective lives and works precedes the textual analysis
of the 1904/5 'Fanny Essler' poems. Plausible
answers to the questions concerning their genesis will
emerge from this detailed investigation, and in conclusion, the
mutual reflections in Else's and
Grove's later writings will be explored.
NOTES:
[1] There
are five large archival boxes in the University
of Maryland, College Park, Collections. They
were originally part of the Djuna Barnes collection.
For a vast microfilming project in 2001, they
were completely reorganized, so that the following
information may not be entirely accurate anymore.
For
a browseable description of the entire contents,
see the EAD Finding at http://www.lib.umd.edu/ARCV/litmss/freytag.html
When I researched the collection in the 1990s, Box 4 contained Else's German
poetry, Box 1 her autobiography in typescript and manuscript. A copy of both
autobiographical
documents has been available at the University of Manitoba since April 1992,
several months before Spettigue's & Hjartarson's Baroness
Elsa was published. They were exchanged for a microfilm of the 1905 Fanny
Essler novel held in
the UMA Spettigue Collection. Professors Spettigue & Hjartarson
published FrL's autobiography from the manuscript version, along with a selection
of Else's correspondence, without addressing the complex source situation:
parts three and four are largely redundant in content, but have a quite different
structure.
All references in this paper, cited as "Ab," are to the typescript (205
p.) which is overall a reliable reproduction of the first three ms. parts.
[2] The
Grove
Collection (21 boxes) was donated by
the author's widow in the early sixties, and
contains much unpublished material. A Register was
published in 1979, &, though available online,
is in need of
major revisions. Most of Grove's poetry is
in Box 18. The Spettigue, Stobie and Divay research
collections (1986, 1976, 1990-) provide important
source documents related to both Greve and
Grove.
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