TABLE
OF CONTENTS SEPARATE WAYS:
AFTER SPARTA, KY, 1911 TITLE/MAIN
PAGE
It does not appear
that Else and Greve/Grove
had any contact with each other after their dramatic
separation in 1911. Else's remark "he might
be very successful now in America, if he is not de
ad ... I do not know. I became separated from him
by his suddenly leaving me..." (Ab 36) suggests that she was
unaware of Grove's post-Sparta whereabouts, and he
is not among the many old lovers and friends she
approached from Berlin with often impertinent demands
for support.
Grove may have tried to
find her in December 1913. To Warkentin, he mentions
that for Christmas he had gone to Arkansas (which
might stand Cincinnati or even New York), where he
was hospitalized with "a raging
fever." He
then says: "As for my marriage, that
has gone to smash: something I have been working
on for the last five years. I don't blame the girl
-- I merely don't understand her. Difference of
age was considerable: she was my pupil before she
went to college." (10. 2. 1914, Letters,
13). Else, though older, in a way had been
his pupil. The five years Grove worked on his "marriage" leads
back to late 1908, when Greve announced to Gide
that he would be "divorced," hinting
darkly at plans to disappear in the near future:"...il
y aura une grande lacune dans quelques mois..."(Letters,
547-548). Insel manager Anton Kippenberg was reportedly
approached by Greve from a New York hospital, which
may have been on occasion of Grove's illness in
December, 1913 (Michael, A81). It would, however,
not have been beyond Else, who had just married
to Baron Leo in November, to include Kippenberg
in her soliciting campaigns then or at any other
time during her New York years from 1913 to 1923.
In
his first novel Settlers of the Marsh (1925),
Grove set a rather unflattering monument to Else
as Clara Vogel. The vague pioneer setting in Manitoba's
Riding Mountain region has a definite likeness to
Sparta, Kentucky surroundings, so that when Clara
takes the train from the nearby town of "Minor" (=Plumas)
to go to town (Winnipeg) for sporadic city amusements,
it stands for Else escaping to Cincinnati from the
hated rural isolation in nearby Kentucky. Sparta,
today an insignificant community of 130 inhabitants,
was a market-centre of some importance in 1910, boasting
two hotels and a direct railroad connection to the
Ohio border-town ca. 80 miles to the
northeast. Sprinkled along the way are similar
small towns with railroad depots at roughly five-mile
intervals. This infrastructure resembles the Manitoba
location in amazing detail. When Grove taught in
this area (1916-1922), a railway also linked small
settlements in similar fashion on the way to Winnipeg,
120 km to the southeast.
Particularly impressive
is the location[36] of
the virginal protagonist's stately range-line mansion:
no building exists today, but the "bluff" where
Niels reportedly built his house is located at
a bend of the meandering Grassy River. The entire
area around is bare, flat prairie land. This particular
spot is lusciously treed and relatively hilly,
and thus bears a striking resemblance to
the country-side near the Eagle Creek at Sparta
(seen in May, 1994).
It is strange that Grove
toiled in near-total seclusion for well over a decade
until Else returned to Europe. Settlers appeared
six months before she went to Paris in April,
1926, the first autobiographical novel was published
around the time of her death in 1927, and wide-spread
public exposure during the lecture tours was
safely delayed until afterwards (1928-1929).
He possibly kept well-informed about her moves.[37]
Unlike
Greve/Grove, Else was not in the
habit of masquerading in assumed identities, masks
or roles, though she did offer her first poems to
the Little
Revue under
the name Tara Osrik (Anderson, 178). Her reminiscences
and opinions of Greve are communicated without disguise,
and most have been addressed above. Only the following
points need to be added now.
From
New York, in 1921, she sent the young photographer
Berenice Abbot to Gide with a proposal to have her
come to Paris for the greatest benefit of the town.
Her extravagant letter, accompanied by samples of
her work in the Little Review, identified
her as Greve's "wife:
"...(Gide) examine
le curieux pli: il contient une lettre en anglais, écrite
en caractères d'impression, sur une sorte
de papier de garde à coulées jaunes
et rouges, avec de temps en temps des frottis d'or.
Le texte est plus imvraisemblable encore: en un langage
cru, exalté et suffisant, une femme lui
propose tout simplement de se faire entretenir par
lui. Elle croit qu'il y aurait grand profit pour
Paris à sa venue! La signature révèle
la femme de Paul Greve...Les trois revues americaines
sont remplies d'elle: vers, portraits, articles.
L'énormité de tout cela l'amuse" (Bruxelles,
June, 1921; emphasis mine).
The
amazing offer, noted by Maria van Rysselberghe (v.
1, 85) who, in the eminent Gide scholar Claude Martin's
opinion chronicled Gide's life as Eckermann recorded
Goethe's (introd., v. 1), was an outrage given that
Gide was rather the traditionalist antipode to surrealist
(André Breton)
and dadaist groups (Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray) at
the time.
In
January, 1923 Else's poem "Circle" with
an oblong, primitivist illustration appeared in Broom (128).
It is her only publication in this avant-garde journal
which was published in New York, Rome and Berlin
by Peggy Guggenheim's cousin Harold Loeb. The frontispiece
to the same volume (4, 1922/23, 2) is completely
out of character with the rest of the journal's modernist
content: an old-fashioned lithograph of the dancer
Fanny Elssler in a pas-de-deux, etched by G. Leybold
in 1840. The juxtaposition of old and new has a
comical effect, which is repeated in reverse when
Sheeler's photograph of Freytag-Loringhoven's "Portrait
of Marcel Duchamp," a dadaist sculpture of an
unplucked pheasant with protruding metal parts, follows
upon a traditional etching of Duchamp by Joseph Stella
with the same title (Little Review 9, no.
2, 1922). Else created at least two other "portraits" of
this sort (one of Duchamp, one of Berenice Abbott,
both in more two-dimensional reliefs), which shows
that she continued to apply in novel ways the Petrarchan
principle used in the 'Fanny Essler' sonnets and
in her poem "Schalk."
NOTES:
[36]Professor
Richard Ottenbreit, University of Winnipeg, personal
communication, 9.6.1994.
[37]This
astute and valid observation I also owe to Professor
Ottenbreit who furthermore reports that Grove's extensive
foreign correspondence did not go unnoticed by local
postmasters in rural Manitoba, particularly, during
the War years.
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