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FrL & FPG's 1904/5 'Fanny Essler' Complex (Seven Poems & One Novel)
How to cite this 2005 e-Article
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Else
von Freytag-Loringhoven & Felix Paul Greve |
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Felix Paul Greve's & Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's
1904/5
'Fanny Essler' Poems: His or Hers?
Revised e-Edition in Ten Parts
by Gaby Divay, University of Manitoba Archives, ©25Mar2005
PART 9
TABLE
OF CONTENTS CONCLUSION TITLE/MAIN
PAGE
'Fanny Essler's' poems
breathe a kind of life and intensity which is more
characteristic of Else's expressive creations than
it is of Greve's or Grove's. Else's opinion of Greve's
poetry in Wanderungen (1902)
some twenty years after its publication is as revealing
as it is accurate: she aptly identifies its main
characteristic as "utter artificiality",
and links it to Stefan George's circle whom Greve
tried to impress: "His poems were as well cut
gems of language juggling without blood-call -- but
the call of an ambitious, industrious spirit... The
most impressive part about this kind of poetry is
paper, print and numbered privacy. It stood for the
top-notch of culture" (Ab 165 ff.). Already
in 1905, she had judged Greve's style à la
Flaubert in his novels about her life "abrupt...,
dry and artificial, having no carrying power or
convincing quality of its own," and she had
started to question his talent accordingly: "...that
was the first time, I think, when the seed of doubt
about his genius -- at least as artist (elsewhere,
she credits him with 'business genius' instead,
gd) -- was sewn in me" (Ab
35). Later, her global opinion is yet firmer and
harsher: "He
made, in spite of his intelligence, the mistake
of thinking himself an artist. How that is possible
I don't know! He was just the opposite of it...[It]
shows an amazing lack of observation, self-analysis
and intellect" (Ab 34; emphasis hers).
A
certain discrepancy between inspiration and technical
skill remains evident in all of Grove's works. His
strength lay in an immense, cultural knowledge, excellent
craftsmanship, and a knack for imitating whatever
model he came to admire in art or life: Nietzsche,
Oscar Wilde, Stefan George, Flaubert were providing
obvious and
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patterns, Goethe, Shakespeare,
Hardy, Shelley and others less acknowledged or visible
ones. His Canadian novels seem to confirm Else's
judgement: the lengthy romans-à-thèse
tend to be flesh- and bloodless abstractions cast
in two-dimensional characters. Grove's works are
far more convincing when they are based on autobiographical
material (A Search of America, In Search
of Myself),
when they are purely descriptive (the nature essays
in Over Prairie Trails & The Turn of the
Year), or when they are clearly imitative (of
Swift in Consider Her Ways, of Nietzsche,
Mach, Vaihinger in his published or unpublished critical
essays). Just as the symbolic realism
of his novels never strays from the traditional rules
established by Flaubert, the poetry, though it became
noticeably less precious in expression and more universal
in content over time to resemble Goethe's "Gedankenlyrik" in
many respects, remains
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of the "George-Mache" (Kluncker,
109 ff.): besides the occasional sonnet, quatrains
are the reigning form, humor and emotion are subdued
or absent. Even in the cycle devoted to the memory
of his daughter's tragic death, Poems: In Memoriam
Phyllis May Grove,
(PEd 63-153), Grove carefully avoided any direct
expression of grief. This cycle thereby deserves
the label of "pathetische
Distanz" (a distancing from pathos) which
Adorno (524) coined for George and his followers.Else's
preoccupation with men and love relationships
had prevented her artistic inclinations from coming
into full bloom until her physical attraction was
waning. When she pursued men half her age without
much success in New York, she finally started paying
attention to her creative potential. Even then she
often applied it to the sublimation of present and
past experiences, which were more and more often
wounds of unrequited love. In that, the motivation
and inspiration are not any different from the therapeutical
function of the 'Fanny Essler' poems: rejections
by William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, Jerome
Blum and George Biddle fuel many of her English poems.
On one she even wrote: "To
Marcel and Carlos, in post-sexual amusement."
Memories
of Ernst Hardt, Richard Schmitz, Behmer, Tse/Endell,
Greve and Baron Leo are the focus of her extant German
poetry. Some are bitter, many are hilarious, particularly, "Es
hat mal einen Ernst gegeben...", about Hardt,
and "Herr Puckellonder war...," about
Endell). She went with the flow of life and art
in a flexible and adaptive manner, whereas Greve/Grove,
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of all his superior education and knowledge,
remained mired in the old patterns he had absorbed
in his formative years. He shunned even traces
of expressionism or other modernist trends of his
time. Else had been muse and "Freundin bedeutender
Männer" (subtitle
of Musil's Vinzenz, 1924), like most
women of her generation and cultural background.[38] Unlike
many of them, she outshines the most important man
of her life today.
NOTES:
[38]Lou
Andreas-Salome for Nietzsche and Rilke, Frieda von
Richthoven for D. H. Lawrence, Franziska von Reventlow
for many, Helen Hessel for Henri-Yves Roché,
Emmy Hennings for Hugo Ball, and -- to a lesser extent
-- Alma Mahler-Werfel for Gropius and the two other
famous husbands reflected in her name.
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Originally
published:
Divay, Gaby. "Fanny Essler's Poems: Felix Paul Greve's or Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's?"
Arachne: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Literature, v.
1, no. 2 (1994), 165-197.
How to cite this e-Version:
Divay, Gaby. "Felix Paul Greve's & Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's 1904/5
'Fanny Essler' Poems: His or Hers?"
e-Edition, ©March 2005 at http://gaby-divay-webarchives.ca/FEArt/
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