The search strategy was closely based on Grove's autobiographical writings. Grove had volunteered conflicting information in A Search of America (1927, ed. 2000 & 2005)[10] and In Search of Myself (1946).[11] In order to conceal his identity, Grove had consistently added twenty years to his arrival in Manitoba in 1912, and anything between five and eleven, but usually seven, years to his age. Especially in later years, he liked conspicuously drawing attention to an age that would cement the alleged, rather than the correct year of his birth (1872 instead of 1879). According to Mrs. Mary Grove, the author's daughter-in-law, for several years after his marriage to Catherine Wiens in 1914, his birthday was celebrated before his wife's. She was born on February 11, 1892. His true birthday on February 14 seems to have been resuscitated when he started surfacing as a writer, and certainly was back in place once he became a Canadian citizen in 1921.[12]

      According to A Search of America, which vaguely unfolds against a background set in the early 1890s, his protagonist and alter ego Phil Branden learned, while in Stockholm, that his impoverished father had died in his retirement cottage near Étaples on the French coast.[13] He was twenty-four years old, in a melancholic, "Byronic" mood, and decided "in a flash" to leave Europe behind. He boarded "a through-train via Malmø, Copenhagen, Hamburg to Ostende, and thence a boat to England" (ASA, 9). In London, he found "a White-Star liner ... going from Liverpool to Montreal" (ASA, 10). Upon his arrival in Montreal, he took a train to Toronto for reasons he does not remember (ASA, 15), and soon worked there as a waiter in Johnson's café downtown (ASA, 41).

      In the 1947 book, all fictitious pretense of the first-person narrative is abandoned: the "I" now refers to Grove himself. At the beginning of Part II, Youth (ISM, 181), Grove claims that he wrote down "what [he] had lived through since August 1892" at the end of 1893[14] when he was twenty-one. He admits that his earlier story was fiction "to a certain extent," perhaps, to justify in one stroke the age discrepancy which the reader might have noticed in the preceding pages, and a host of other contradictions to follow. Presumably now according to strict biographical givens, he just had described how he crossed the Atlantic on a ship of the Hamburg-America Line from Hamburg to New York. Only in retrospect did it occur to him, that his father was on the verge of bankruptcy before he embarked. Having already traveled the American continent "for two or three months" as a tourist (ISM, 175), he learned in Toronto of his father's sudden death and financial ruin. Soon, he found himself "earning [his] living, not as a professor of archaeology or comparative philology, but as a waiter in a cheap eating house on Yonge Street, Toronto" (ISM, 177).

      Note the difference in our hero's two emigration stories, and consider that his "Byronic" state of mind[15] after finding himself poor and orphaned before his departure in the first befits Greve's actual situation at a crucial juncture in his life far better than the second, which leaves him suddenly bereaved and stranded in Toronto while touring in leisure and luxury.

      The curiously diverging accounts regarding the loss of his father and his wealth -- first in sequence, then all at once -- are an unmistakable indicator that these particular shocks were not suffered in real life. Whenever Grove strays from the truth, his narrative becomes noticeably thin and tentative, or both. In this example, his father Carl Eduard Greve was neither rich nor dead at the time of Greve's departure in 1909. Greve was more or less forced to burn his bridges in Europe for quite different reasons. He was, of course, neither twenty (ISM, 176), nor twenty-four (ASA, 1 & 10) when he set sail. This particular age he had reached when he was sent to prison in May 1903 for defrauding his friend Kilian in Bonn. Since that "catastrophe,"[16] Greve's livelihood had largely depended on translating literature. Without an outlet or market for his trade in the target language German, he was facing a very uncertain future in America. This situation explains Phil Branden's melancholic condition convincingly enough, and far better than the hero's feeble excuse that he turned his back to all of Europe in disgust for finding himself "snubbed" by former friends because his father was not wealthy any longer (ASA, 9).

      Four additional sources, two by and two about Greve/Grove, help pinpointing the year of Grove's departure to 1909. He had adopted the fabricated time-frame of the early 1890s when he emerged as an author after ten years of hiding out in the remotest corners of the remote province of Manitoba. Once established, he was not free to change the self-imposed rules later on. Since the intention was to conceal the less glorious sides of his past, it was unfortunate that glamorous achievements and contacts with renowned contemporaries like Gide in Paris, or Stefan George in Munich, were by definition obliterated as well. As Grove grew older, the tension between the need to conceal and the urge to reveal became more and more noticeable in his correspondence. It can also be traced in his second autobiography. Obviously fearing that he had said too much in 1927, he systematically recanted and obscured everything that might have led to an identification with Greve in 1946.

      Grove started composing In Search of Myself  at age sixty in 1939, when reading Gide's reminiscences had brought back fond memories of days gone by. Increased self-reflection and confessional urges surface regularly around his birthday in mid-February. Shortly before his sixtieth birthday, he had sent his latest novel Two Generations and A Search for America to Thomas Mann in Princeton who kindly acknowledged them, in German, in April and June. And Grove had also started writing sixty self-revealing aphorisms entitled "The Life of Saint Nishivara" around this time.[17] In form and in content, this revealing document is an obvious imitation of Nietzsche's Zarathustra who, like Greve, set out for the wilderness at age thirty: "Als Zarathustra dreißig Jahre alt war, verließ er seine Heimat und den See seiner Heimat, und ging ins Gebirge."[18] Grove confesses that he "was born in the east," but "always observed silence" on where precisely (no.2); that he had suffered a "great shock ... while still a very young man," because he "found himself entangled in sin and shame" (no.4-5); that he came to a great land (no.10), but that the success he gained there left "his life empty and his soul unsatisfied" (no.13), and that he again had felt trapped "in the snares of the world" (no.11). In number 12, he provides an oblique device for dating both his composition, and his departure from Europe: "In this way he spent once more as many years as he had spent before he crossed the seas." The latter part refers to 1909, the former to 1939.

      The most important of our two external sources is Insel publisher Anton Kippenberg's masterly reply to Else Greve after her "husband's" alleged suicide.[19] The date is Tuesday, September 21, 1909. Else's apparently hysterical note, received "last Friday," was written on Thursday, the 16th.[20] Point by point, Kippenberg refutes Else's accusations that his publishing house had driven her "husband" to this desperate measure by having overworked, underpaid and harshly criticized him. He refers to huge debts (M4,000 of advance payments from his establishment alone), and elegantly suggests that having double-sold a recent translation[21] might have prompted Greve's disappearance instead. Another fraud charge would indeed have had dire consequences for a man with a previous conviction for a similar offense. Kippenberg's latent doubts about Greve's demise were further strengthened, when his employee, Dr. Buchwald, retrieved several manuscripts from Greve's former residence, and reported that he had found the "grieving widow" in white summer dress, and none too distraught. Another Insel employee, Friedrich Michael, revealed in retrospect a) what Greve's suicide note to Else had contained: he was taking a boat to Sweden with the intention never to arrive; and b) an anecdote that Kippenberg was later asked for financial assistance from a New York Hospital.[22] Insel historian Heinz Sarkowski has recently confirmed the dates of Else's document which, however, is lacking in the Weimar Archives. He has also found in Kippenberg's correspondence with Stefan Zweig, pertaining to Greve's last translation assignment of Dickens' David Copperfield, that there were rumours about Greve's disappearance and his possible sojourn in Sweden as early as mid-August.

      One of Grove's earliest poems  entitled "At Sea" among his papers at the University of Manitoba has, much like many by his early idol Oscar Wilde, a time and place designation at the bottom:"Nova Scotia, 1909."[23] This poem exploits the wave metaphor so popular in philosophy, poetry, and art around 1900, and could well have been inspired as Greve's boat approached Halifax. The specification seems to confirm that Greve chose a Canadian escape route from Europe, which is in full accord with our fourth source, Greve's Else.

      In her frank and expressive recollections, written in Berlin during the early 1920s, she states explicitly that Greve had gone to "America via Canada" (AB 33). Though utterly devoid of time and place precision, her perspective on the decade she lived with Greve from 1902/3 to 1911/12 is a gold-mine of biographical information. When they were discovered by Professors Spettigue and Hjartarson in the mid-1980s, they provided the much needed proof that Greve had not perished in 1909, and also a refreshing, first-hand perspective on the events previously known only from meagre biographical facts: their elopement to Palermo with the doubly betrayed Endell in tow, Greve's arrest and Else's disillusionment about his reputed wealth, their post-prison exiles in Wollerau and Étaples, their return to Berlin, their Kentucky farming experience, and Greve's abandonment "after a year." According to Else, Greve decided to leave Europe because he was disgruntled with the lack of success of the two novels he had written about her life, Fanny Essler (1905) and Maurermeister Ihles Haus (1907). They were modeled after his new aesthetic mentor Flaubert, and he felt that they were at least as good as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) and Hermann Hesse's Peter Camenzind (1904). In Else's very astute opinion, however, Greve was lacking artistic "genius." She grants him excellent craftsmanship and a keen flair for marketing instead. His avowed aspirations for a new life were, therefore, "to become a business genius or potato king in America" (AB 34).

      Our search strategy for Greve/Grove's passage established a hierarchy according to pointers emanating from A Search for America, since this 1927 text seems paradoxically more reliable than his only apparently less fictionalized 1946 account. Canadian immigration records were to be searched first, and all passenger lists of White Star Line ships arriving in Montreal from Liverpool were to receive priority attention. Because of Kippenberg's September 1909 letter to Else, it was deemed unlikely that Greve had crossed the Atlantic before the end of this month. Convinced that a "late July" passage, as suggested in A Search for America (ASA, 10) was out of the question, the scrutiny was to start from mid-September onwards.

      Alternative searches were to concentrate on ships arriving in either Montreal or Halifax from Southampton (mentioned in ASA, 10) or London. This failing, searching immigration records for New York arrivals were to be the next step, with ships by White Star Line, other British lines (Dominion Line, Allen Line, Red Star Line, and others), and the Hamburg-America Line (Hapag) in priority order. Should systematic searching of these still not yield any results, more serious consideration would be given to Grove's Hamburg/New York story in In Search of Myself (ISM 174), and to continental ports of departure mentioned in 1927, such as Ostende, Copenhagen, or even Malmø (ASA 9). The possibility that Greve might have boarded an English ship en route, perhaps in Cherbourg (ISM 158), or Calais, or elsewhere on the Channel coast, since Greve had lived in nearby Étaples in 1905/6 and Grove had placed his fictitious father in a retirement cottage there (ASA, 8), was also kept in mind, and to be explored should all else have failed.

      In this case, the circumstances surrounding his sudden departure would have warranted a closer look. They might have required that Greve find without delay a boat for America or one of the other anglophone destinations he had considered -- namely, South Africa and Australia (ASA, 10) -- from the nearest continental port. Berlin's proximity to the Baltic Sea might have made a northern escape route via Sweden (as in F. Michael's report) and/or Denmark (as in ASA, 9) desirable or necessary. Wherever and however Greve went, his well-attested penchant for luxury would have dictated First Class accommodation as his first choice. But then, he may have had neither the means nor the leisure to indulge in his preferences at such an urgent time, and so all classes, including steerage, were to be considered valid possibilities.

      As it turned out, Bruce Thomson did not have to go beyond the first level of this elaborate hierarchy, although he had to search beyond the period deemed reasonable, and he did not find Greve among the First Class passengers. Here is what he reported:

"I checked the period [we] thought most likely, even went as far as November and came up empty, and I decided to backtrack from there. Most of the ships I viewed had a similar structure in the layout of the lists, with only a few not being alphabetical. At no point did I find any name even remotely like Greve/Grove until the final list consulted ... I also did not find anyone described as a touring author!"[24]

      Grove's boldly candid statements from the first ten pages of A Search of America had measured up to all the essential details in the discovered documents: Greve did sail on a White Star Line steamer; he did cross the Atlantic in "second cabin" from Liverpool to Montreal; and he even did sail in late July (all ASA, 10). Only the date was, as expected, off by some years (1909 rather than 1892). The emphatically alleged age of twenty-four was correctly listed as his true age, thirty years.