FPG (Greve/Grove) Chronology

FPG (Frederick Philip Grove / Felix Paul Greve):
A Chronology in Three Parts

Solar Grove [PPt Cover Slide] ©gd June 2005 v

compiled, with notes, by Gaby Divay

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Greve (1879 - 1909)     FPG (1909 - 1912)     Grove (1912 - 1948)

• Felix Paul Greve is born on February 14, 1879 in Radomno, near Deutsch-Eylau.[1] Later, as Grove, FPG will maintain his place of birth in form of "a Russian German border-town" near the Vistula. It is instructive to view the area in an historical atlas: until World War I, Radomno was squarely within the boundaries of Wilhelmine Germany. After 1918, it became a Polish-German border town with the creation of East Prussia which was separated from the rest of Germany by a corridor. After World War II, it became part of the Soviet Union


• Greve's Family moves to Hamburg in 1871 Greve's family was from Mecklenburg near Schwerin. Greve's only sister was born on the stately, yellow brick premises of Thurow in the vicinity of this area on August 25, 1877. Grove would claim a white "castle Thurow" as his childhood residence which he relocated to southern Sweden


• In 1886 Greve starts school at the "Realschule" of St. Pauli, the famous harbour part of Hamburg


• In 1896 he enters the Real-Gymnasium branch of an illustrious Hamburg school, the Johanneum


• In 1897 he transfers to the Humanistic branch of the renowned Gymnasium


• In early 1898 he passes the graduation examinations (Abitur) with distinction, although he had to catch up on the classical languages largely on his own. Grove was always rightly proud of this achievement


• In May 1898 he enrolls at the University of Bonn in Classical Philology and Archaeology


• Almost immediately after Greve's arrival, his mother, Bertha (Reichentrog) Greve dies in Hamburg (15.10.1855-6.5.1898)


• 1898-1900 Greve studies diligently with distinguished professors at Bonn


• He leaves Bonn University in 1900, perhaps, to continue in Munich and to travel


• In October 1901 Greve registers as a "private scholar" (Privatgelehrter) in Munich. Soon, he publishes his first known reviews of Nietzsche's works and of Stendhal's Lucien Loewen in the local [Münchener] Allgemeine Zeitung


• Until October 1902 he courts the city's literary circles, particularly, those surrounding Karl Wolfskehl and the "Master" Stefan George. He is mentioned in Theodor Lessing's memoirs (1935) as having danced with the most glamorous of Munich's bohemian women, Franziska (Fanny) von Reventlow


• In early 1902 he produces the poetry collection Wanderungen and the lyrical play Helena & Damon as well as Oscar Wilde's Intentions as Fingerzeige. He also seems to be collaborating with renowned archaeologist, Adolf Furtwängler, on an authoritative catalogue of Greek vases


• He travels to Paris (in May 1902) and to Gardone on Lake Garda (in August 1902) with his friend from his Bonn student days, Herman [sic!] Kilian. On the way to Paris, the friends visit Stefan George in Bingen, and evaluate Daisy Broicher's translation of George's poetry into English


• In mid-October 1902, and apparently related to the staging of Oscar Wilde's comedies in Berlin with the genial director Max Reinhardt at the newly founded Kleine Theater, Greve settles in Berlin where he befriends August Endell, a Jugendstil architect of some growing renown


• During frequent afternoon teas he becomes attracted to Endell's wife Else, to whom he writes while she is at a sanatorium built by her husband in Boldixum on the Frisian island Föhr. He also sends her his translation of Oscar Wilde's comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (Bunbury)


• At Christmas 1902 Else and Greve become lovers


• In January 1903 the doubly betrayed Endell accompanies the adulterous pair to Hamburg and hence on a steamer to Palermo. He is left behind in Naples with a consolation bicycle


• In May 1903 Greve travels to Bonn on business -- he is arrested on arrival, tried, and sentenced to one year in prison for defrauding his friend Kilian for the enormous sum of M10,000


• Before and during his prison term in 1903, Greve writes two essays on Oscar Wilde.[2] Greve also pursues his career as a literary translator in earnest now: Gide, H. G. Wells, Meredith, and Swinburne are among the contemporary authors he introduces to the German public from now on. Initially, he translates for Bruns publishers, but soon he obtains assignments from other establishments as well


• Immediately after his release in June 1904 Greve visits André Gide in Paris who records his impressions at the time, and publishes them in 1919 as "Conversation avec un Allemand". An historical-critical edition of this intriguing text from Gide's 1904 notes & manuscripts has been published by the eminent Gide-scholar Claude Martin in the Bulletin des amis d'André Gide, October 1976, & exists in French & English at:
  gide_conv/conv04f.html
  
  Two confessional letters by Greve were found in Gide's "Conversation" file, & Claude Martin included them in his edition accordingly. The second is of particular interest, since it expounds a manic list of projects, including detailed plans concerning the "Fanny Essler" complex [see below]
• Shortly afterwards, Greve visits H. G. Wells for the first time, then Else and Greve move to Wollerau near Zürich in Switzerland. There they remain until mid-1905


• In 1905 Greve publishes his first novel about Else's experiences in Berlin and Munich with the title Fanny Essler. Under the joint pseudonym Fanny Essler, Greve and Else also publish an accomplished Petrarchan poetry cycle in Die Freistatt, 1904/5 ["Gedichte" (2) - "Drei Sonette: ein Porträt" - "Gedichte" (2)]. In a wing-altar structure, Else/Fanny describes how she misses her unnamed, absent lover Greve in "Tunis"/Palermo & "Husum"/Wyk auf Föhr, while setting him a time- & spaceless, abstract "Portrait"-monument in the three central sonnets.
  On occasion of the 100th anniversary of publication, these poems have been e-published in German & English at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~divay/FEPoems05/


• In June 1905 the couple move to Paris-Plage / Étaples in Northern France where they live until early 1906. The proximity to Boulogne allows for convenient day-trips to England in general, and to H. G. Wells in particular: the author lives across the Channel at Sandgate, a mere mile from the ferry harbour of Folkestone


• In February 1906 they move back to Berlin where Greve, over the next three-and-a-half years, produces an incredible amount of literary classics in German translation, now mostly for Insel Publishers. Else's "story of my childhood" appears as Greve's second novel, Maurermeister Ihles Haus


• In 1906/7 there is much talk about Greve's comedy Der heimliche Adel. It is uncertain if it was ever staged. In Berlin Greve and Else lead a fairly quiet life. Sparse letters to O.A.H. Schmitz prove that they socialized with him and the editor of Die Schaubühne, Siegfried Jacobsohn. Schmitz' chatty diaries and memoirs mention the couple several times during these years, and also Else's  past relationship with Richard Schmitz in the late 1890s. -- On August 22, 1907, after years of legal wrangling about Else's & August Endell's divorce resulting from her elopement with his friend Greve in January 1903, the "scandalous pair" DID tie the knot in Berlin, so that both Else & Greve became bigamists in America in November 1913 & August 1914 respectively! Gisi von Freytag-Loringhoven made this sensational discovery in late 2001, & Irene Gammel published this information in her biography of Else, Baroness Elsa, MIT Press, [April] 2002, p.144.


• In 1909 Greve's travel impressions "Reise in Schweden I" appear in the newly merged journal Neue Revue und Morgen. Friend Schmitz was involved in the merger, and partly financed it. The Roman numeral "I" indicates that more of the same or of a similar kind would follow, but it was to remain one of Greve's last known contributions


• In late July 1909 Greve leaves Germany with a staged suicide. Soon, he travels second-class on the White Star Liner Megantic from Liverpool to Montreal,[3] exactly as described by Grove in the opening pages of his 1927 autobiographical novel


• Else "Greve" sends a distraught note to Insel director A. Kippenberg on Friday, September 17, 1909 -- on Tuesday, September 19, he elegantly defends himself and his establishment against charges of having pushed Greve over the edge by overworking and underpaying her now presumably dead "husband" and also by unjustly criticizing his translations.[4] He furthermore points out as tactfully as possible that Greve had recently double-sold one of his latest translations [probably, Swift's Prosawerke, Berlin, v. 1, Oesterheld, 1909; v. 2-4, Reiss, 1910], and implies that this might have been a compelling raison for Greve's disappearance, Kippenberg excuses Else's impertinent tone with her "understandable agitation" and offers his financial support


• Else joins Greve in Pittsburgh in late June 1910, having crossed the Atlantic from Rotterdam New York on the Rijndam. When she clears immigration on June 29, she is a 35 year old author from Swinemünde who is on her way to meet her brother-in-law, a certain T. R. Greve. His address is on 4th Ave 57 in Pittsburgh.


• In the "Nekrolog" (obituary) section of Kürschner's 1910 Literatur-Kalender Felix Paul Greve is listed as deceased. His brief entry is marked by a symbol meaning that the information stems from the postal authorities.


FPG in Limbo, 1909-1912: United States

Note: For these obscure three years in between FPG's two lives, there are far more open questions than answers. The main sources for this period remain Grove's two autobiographical books of 1927 and 1946. Only four facts have been ascertained so far: (1) FPG took passage in July 1909; (2) in early 1910, before Else joined him, he was a New York publisher's agent in Pittsburgh, and therefore likely involved in the daring book-selling scam described in his 1927 book; (3) Greve was farming with Else near Sparta, Kentucky, for the year 1910/11; and (4) he worked for the Chaffee family at the huge Amenia & Sharon Bonanza Farm near Fargo, North Dakota, before coming to Canada in September 1912.


• Did Greve go to Toronto upon arrival in Montreal on July 30th, 1909?


• Did he really work in "a cheap eatery" on Toronto's Yonge Street for several weeks?


• When did he in fact go to New York? [our guess: in August/September 1909]


• Was he implicated in the "History of the World" book scam, by peddling the twenty-volume set to rich, but gullible industrialists like steel-Baron "Kirsty" in Pittsburgh?[5]


• An entry in the 1910 Pittsburgh Directory reads: "F. P. Greve, mgr [=manager], 524, 4th Ave., h [=home] Carrick." A contemporary city atlas shows that this address is located in the heart of the city's financial district, just around the corner of the Allegheny Court House with adjoining jail [6]


• A brief note in the New York Times attests to Else & Greve's presence in Pittsburgh in September 1910: Else Greve was arrested for wearing men's clothes & smoking a cigarette in public. Greve is mentioned as well  (see NYT Report)


• Did FPG really live as a hobo for nearly two years, tramping down from New York State, then following the Ohio River through Pennsylvania and Ohio?


• Why does Greve as Grove keep absolute silence about the entire year he spent with Else near Sparta, Kentucky, in 1910/11? Both in his first Canadian pioneer novel, Settlers of the Marsh in 1925, and in his first autobiography, A Search for America in 1927, any allusion to this experience is carefully avoided. Else wrote numerous poems dedicated to FPG, some make reference to Kentucky, but only one, entitled "Schalk", also specifies "Sparta, Kentucky, am Eagle Creek" [7]


• In his A Search for America (1927, web-edition ©2000) Grove describes his stay at a North Dakota Bonanza Farm during the early 1890s. This multi-million enterprise, where FPG did work temporarily in 1912, could be identified as the Amenia & Sharon Land Company near Casselton [5m] and Fargo, North Dakota [ca. 15m] in March 1996


Grove, 1912-1948: Canada
Manitoba, 1912-1929     Ontario, 1929-1948

• Greve shows up in the Prairie Province of Manitoba, Canada, as Frederick Philip Grove in September 1912[8]


• He obtains a teacher's certificate from the Province's Education Minister Fletcher and proceeds to teach in predominantly German-speaking areas like Kronsfeld, Haskett, Morden, and Winkler


• In 1913/14 he falls in love with fellow-teacher Catherine Wiens (1872-1972). They are married in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, on August 2, 1914. The Marriage Certificate states that Grove is 41 years old [= b. 1873, and six years older than he is, his real age being 35], that he was born in Moscow, Russia, that he is a widower, and that his parents are Edward Charles Grove and Bertha Rutherford-Grove [= Carl Eduard and Bertha Reichentrog-Greve were FPG's parents]


• Soon after the outbreak of World War I, in November and December 1914, Grove publishes his first Canadian article in four issues of the German-Canadian newspaper Der Nordwesten: "Rousseau als Erzieher" is a rambling essay reminiscent of Greve's Oscar Wilde criticism. It also harks back to Nietzsche's Third Untimely Consideration (1876), entitled "Schopenhauer als Erzieher"


• Both Groves teach in a variety of isolated places for the next fifteen years. In 1915, in Virden, their daughter Phyllis May is born (1915-1927). Gladstone, Ferguson, Leifur, and Eden are more or less lengthy stations before Grove becomes Principal of the Rapid City school in 1922


• In 1915 Grove enrolls as an extra-mural student at the University of Manitoba. After seven years he graduates in 1922 with a BA in French and German. He is awarded a $150 scholarship


• In 1917, while Principal in Gladstone, Mrs. Grove teaches in the isolated Falmouth School near Waldersee and Amaranth, Manitoba. Grove's weekly visits to his wife and daughter there involve a perilous drive with horse-and-wagon over thirty miles of rough and marshy country roads, and provide the material for his nature essays which are to become his first Canadian book five years later


• There is evidence in Grove's 1919 correspondence with his first Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart that Grove wanted to publish his upcoming nature essays under the pseudonym "Andrew R. Rutherford." The same name appears in relation to Grove's unpublished novel Jane Atkinson[9] in his archives. Note that this name refers to the maternal grand-father of Herman Kilian, the friend whom Greve defrauded and who had him sentenced to one year in prison in 1903/4!


• In October 1922, shortly after settling in Rapid City for the next seven years, Grove publishes his first book of nature essays, Over Prairie Trails. Within a year, a sequel appears in print under the title The Turn of the Year (1923)


• Related to these first English publications, Grove establishes friendships with several influential faculty members of Wesley College, University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, notably Arthur Leonard Phelps (1887-1970) and Watson Kirkconnell (1895-1977). Greve is invited to give readings or addresses in Winnipeg on several occasions after 1922/23. Particularly the ca. 155 letters Grove wrote to Phelps throw light on these events. The University of Manitoba Archives was able to acquire this invaluable correspondence when it surfaced quite surprisingly in 1997


• In June 1924 Grove retires from teaching to devote his time to his writing


• In October 1925 his first novel, Settlers of the Marsh, is published. This seemingly impersonal book is in fact an account of Greve's Kentucky year in 1910/11, and the final phases of his ten-year-old relationship with Else who is depicted in quite unflattering terms as the depraved Clara Vogel. In June 1925, Grove participates in the Canadian Authors' Association's convention in Winnipeg, where he meets A. Gordon, John Dafoe, and Charles Roberts[10]


• In April 1926 Grove is forced to lance a hasty disclaimer to the Canadian Bookman who had published in its April issue (on p. 110) a brief biographical note of the author [b. 1872, son "...of a wealthy Swede and a Scotchwoman" and "...actively cooperating with H. G. Wells, Wilde and their group in the ninety-nineties; and editing personally, at that time, the first complete edition of Swift's Gulliver's Travels..."]. This note was based on information Grove had told to Watson Kirkconnell. In his letter of April 30, 1926, Grove modestly defers the honour of editing Swift's novel to Temple Scott, and limits his own role to the "...re-collation of early editions and the South Kensington Ford MSS." He acknowledges that he may have been "instrumental" in the publication of certain "continental editions." To recall, one of Greve's last translations was a four-volume edition of Swift's Prose Works. It was based on Temple Scott's edition which is also extant in Grove's Library Collection


• Barely three months before his first autobiographical book, A Search for America, is launched in October 1927, and just days before her twelfth birthday, Phyllis May Grove dies during an appendicitis operation in Minnedosa on July 20, 1927


• In February 1928 Grove embarks on the first of three coast-to-coast lecture tours organized by the Canadian Club. It takes him through Ontario until April. Then, from September to November 1928, he is touring in western Canada. During this time, his second pioneer novel Our Daily Bread appears and benefits from the publicity


• The last lecture tour takes Grove to eastern Canada during January, February and March of 1929. All three voyages are very well documented by numerous letters the author wrote to his wife in Rapid City, Manitoba. For the first six months of this year, he is also Associate Editor of The Canadian Nation. And Grove's only Canadian translation, Gustav Amann's Legacy of Sun Yatsen, appears with Carrier's imprint


• In March 1929, a collection of critical essays is published as It Needs to be Said. They originated with an aborted lecture Grove had prepared for the 1926 convention of the Canadian Authors' Association in Vancouver. It contains six essays of criticism, including "A Neglected Function of a Certain Literary Association." Partial manuscripts of these essays exist in Grove's notebooks


• No doubt related to the enormous success on his three Canadian Club Lecture Tours, Grove entertains lofty expectations of success and employment. By the fall of 1929, the Groves consider leaving rural Manitoba and moving East. First, they think Grove might be employed by one of the big publishing houses in Toronto; then they hope for a lucrative government position in Ottawa, perhaps in the diplomatic service. When nothing seems to materialize, there are even hints that they may transfer to Europe -- France or Switzerland are mentioned in Grove's correspondence to Kirkconnell and Phelps at the time


Grove, 1929-1948: Ontario

• The Groves leave Rapid City in September 1929 and spend most of the fall in friends' cottages in Northern Ontario (Canton, in October, and Bobcaygeon). Grove is giving occasional lectures and is doing some writing. The couple also consider settling here by acquiring property in the area


• In December 1929 Grove accepts a position at Graphic Publishers in Ottawa. Graphic had published Grove's Search For America in October 1927. It was commissioned to the newly-founded Carillon Book Club in January 1928, and reprinted in June 1928


• In 1930 Grove is flying high with the anticipated success as figure-head editor of Graphic's new subsidiary Ariston. Scraps of stationary and a glossy advertising blurb have recently been found inserted in Grove's Library Collection, and his unpublished letters to Phelps are full of bragging about his salary, his importance, his publishing plans for large and expensive editions of world literature. Ariston would only publish two books, both in 1930[11]


• On October 14, 1930 Grove's son Leonard is born on the outskirts of Ottawa where the Groves have moved earlier in the year. The address given on personal letter-heads is a post office box in "Cummings Bridge". Phelps, after whom Grove's son was named and who christened the child, Kirkconnell and others are magnanimously invited to the spacious property during the spring and summer of this year. Also in October 1930, Grove's novel The Yoke of Life is published by Macmillan


• There are many financial and also political problems at Graphic Publishers by the spring of 1931. It has been noted that Grove cleared out just in time before the entire venture was faced with bankruptcy. However, by summer Grove is seriously concerned about his future. He even announces to Kirkconnell[12] that he has sold the family's belongings and bought "tickets for Europe." Once again, he threatens, not without melodramatic tones, to burn his books, as he frequently does when things are not going his way. This is the only time, though, that he darkly speaks of "a holocaust of my Mss". Equally pessimistic is his article "Apologia Pro Vita et Opere Sue" which appears in the August issue of Canadian Forum


• By October 1931, Grove has acquired an estate in Simcoe, Ontario, where he retires from the urban Ottawa region to realize his life-long dream of living and writing as a gentleman-farmer. Hard-hit by the severe economic depression and later by ill health, this is where Grove was to remain for the rest of his life. To a large extent, he owed the luxury of his writing to his wife Catherine, who operated a thriving Froebel school, which at times included the care of the emotionally and/or mentally challenged


• Grove is represented in the very first issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly with the article "Thomas Hardy: A Critical Examination of a Typical Novel and His Shorter Poems" in 1932


• By December 1932, Grove is the active leader of the English Club in Simcoe. The secretary/Treasurer, Mrs. Jackson, presents a paper about Hebbel's Gyges und sein Ring. Grove has proposed the topic, and he has lent a helping hand with her preparations. Mrs. Jackson's paper, many other documents about the Club, and her reminiscences on occasion of the 1977 Grove Symposium in Simcoe are extant in the Grove Collections


• In January 1933 Grove publishes Fruits of the Earth. Note that the title of his new novel mimics both Gide's Les nourritures terrestres (1897) which book Greve claimed to have translated in 1905, and Knut Hamsun's Markens Grøde / Growth of the Soil (1917), for which Hamsun received the Nobel Prize in 1920. Hamsun spent some time working in the Red River Valley in the 1880s: he mentions the Dalrymple Bonanza Farm which is adjacent to the neighbouring Amenia Bonanza Grove knew in 1912 (but claims to have known in ca. 1892/3)


• Later in the year 1933, and until February 1934, Grove gives a series of Carnegie Foundation Lectures on the appreciation of literature at McMaster's University in Hamilton[13]


• In June 1934 Grove is one of the first five recipients of the Lorne Pierce Medal. Ever since 1926 it was awarded every second year by the Royal Society of Canada for outstanding literary achievement. Dr. Pierce, with whom Grove corresponded much about those of his books produced by Ryerson in the 1930s, was quite hurt when he learnt of the fact that Grove had cashed in his 1934 award for a radio


• In January/February 1939 Grove publishes his latest novel, Two Generations, privately. Though complaining constantly in highly dramatic fashion about the desperate state of his financial affairs, he is able to produce a "de luxe edition" a copy of which he promptly sends to Thomas Mann in Princeton[14]


• Grove's 60th birthday in 1939 sets off a period of soul-searching and deep reflections. His enigmatic, oracle-like fragment "St. Nishivara, the Saint" can be dated to this time, and offers an encoded chronology of FPG's two lives in form of some sixty aphorisms. These are imitating Nietzsche's Zarathustra


• Grove also drafts a new and much longer preface for the 1939 Ryerson edition of his 1927 Search for America, in which he acknowledges, though still in veiled fashion, the model of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit. Goethe's famous autobiography is, however, openly mentioned in the corresponding manuscript draft extant among Grove's papers


• Piqued by the successful memoirs of André Gide, Grove embarks on writing his own "true" [versus fictional] autobiography, My Two Lives in late 1939. It was not published until 1946 as In Search of Myself


• From April to June 1940, Grove's "juvenile," The Adventures of Leonard Broadus, appears in The Canadian Boy. Also, the future "Prologue" to In Search of Myself is published separately in the October issue of University of Toronto Quarterly


• The Canadian Writers Foundation starts supporting Grove financially with regular monthly payments from 1940 onwards


• In April 1941 Grove is elected into the folds of the prestigious Royal Society of  Canada. His article "Peasant Poetry and Fiction from Hesiod to Hémon" appears in the Society's Proceedings of that year


• Grove's rather bitter "Postscript to A Search for America" appears in the third issue of Queen's Quarterly in 1942


• In the summer of 1943 Grove is running unsuccessfully for a seat of the "Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation" in the provincial elections of Ontario


• Half-a-year later, in April 1944, Grove suffers a first stroke which leaves him paralyzed on his right side. He is 65 years old, but still claims to be at least six, seven, or eight years older (he seems less consistent now than in the 1920s when he was fairly regular in applying the seven year age- and the 1872-birth year rules)


• In December 1944, The Master of the Mill is published by Macmillan. The panoramic novel, which, among other sources like Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) or Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, may well have drawn on the affluent Chaffee dynasty who owned and operated the North Dakota Bonanza Farm Grove describes in both his autobiographical books, suffers from serious faults of chronology and plot


• In July 1945 Desmond Pacey publishes the first full-length bio-bibliographical book about Grove


• In May 1946 Grove receives an Honorary Doctorate from his Alma Mater, the University of Manitoba, and in the fall, another one from Mount Allison University


• In June 1946 he is declared an Honorary Member of the Canadian Authors' Association. Ironically, by the time these academic and professional honours are bestowed on him, Grove has suffered another crippling stroke (in early May 1946) which has left him incapacitated


• Catherine Grove is conducting business with publishers from May 1946 onwards. She reports on her husband's decline in rather depressing letters to Carleton Stanley[15] who had reviewed The Master of the Mill for the Dalhousie Review in 1945, and to whom Grove dedicated his second autobiography In Search of Myself (1946).


• In February 1946, just weeks before the final devastating health blow, Grove is severely rattled:  Carleton Stanley is reading the manuscript version of Grove's presumably "straight" autobiography In Search of Myself at this time while it is being published by Macmillan. He has pointed out a discrepancy in the author's own latest chronology: the archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler did not lecture in Munich before 1892, a time when FPG claimed to have already travelled to North America. Grove is forced to amend the passage in the book immediately. He adds a few words signaling that the renowned professor [and father of the famous conductor] was "expected in Munich" when young FPG planned to go there


• In October 1946 Grove's second autobiographical book In Search of Myself is published by Macmillan. The disturbing paragraph has been neutralized just in time


• In January 1947 the fragment of Grove's satirical novel "Consider Her Ways" appears in print. This "Ant Book," as Grove liked to refer to it in better times, is doubtlessly inspired by Swift's writings which FPG knew intimately well


• Given just how much is invented, transformed, or, in Brecht's terminology,  "verfremdet" [distorted], it is rather ironic that Grove's autobiography In Search of Myself should be honoured with the Canadian Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction in July 1947


• By the summer of 1948, Grove is in a nursing home. His wife hopes for him to meet his death quickly, so he need not suffer a prolonged ordeal. On August 19, 1948 her wish is granted. The author is buried next to the grave of his daughter Phyllis May in Rapid City, Manitoba


• Catherine Grove survived her husband by a near-quarter of a century: she died on January 9, 1972. Only weeks before, she validated Spettigue's discovery of October 1971 that Grove had been Felix Paul Greve. Hardly a month later, and she would have celebrated her eightieth birthday.