Criticism about FPG & FrL
Greve/Grove & Else von Freytag-Loringhoven



FPG (Felix Paul Greve/Frederick Philip Grove)'s
Passage to America in 1909

The October 1998 Discovery of the Author's Arrival in North America

by Gaby Divay
University of Manitoba, Archives & Special Collections

e-Edition © 2006

Originally published in Walter Pache's Festschrift:
New Worlds: discovering & constructing the unknown in Anglophone literature.
München: Verlag Ernst Vögel, 2000.
(Schriften der Philosophischen Fakultäten der Universität Augsburg), 111-132.


Introduction
Designing a Search Strategy for FPG's Passage
The Passage, Th, July 22 to Fr, July 30, 1909
Implications for FPG's obscure years, Aug.1909-Dec.1912
Notes

Notes
Introduction: fn. 1-9:

[1] B. Traven is believed to be identical with Ret Marut (pseud. for Richard Maurhut) who was sentenced to death after his involvement in the Munich November Revolution of 1918/19.

[2] Douglas O. Spettigue, FPG: The European Years, (Ottawa: Oberon, 1973).

[3] Douglas O. Spettigue, "Felix, Elsa, André Gide and Others: Some Unpublished Letters of F. P. Greve," Canadian Literature 134 (Autumn 1992): 9-39.
Douglas O. Spettigue, "Introduction," Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa, Eds., Paul I. Hjartarson and Douglas O. Spettigue, (Ottawa : Oberon Press, 1992a): 9-40, p.24. All references to Else's autobiography in our text, marked "(AB)," are to the 205 page typescript prepared by Djuna Barnes, University of Maryland, College Park.

[4] Douglas O. Spettigue, Frederick Philip Grove. ([Toronto]: Copp Clark Pub.Co., 1969). 175p.

[5] Arthur Leonard Grove, born in Ottawa on October 14, 1930, and named after A. L. Phelps of Wesley College, Winnipeg, was working in the Canadian National Archives on passenger lists in early June 1969 (University of Manitoba Archives (UMA), Spettigue Collection I, Correspondence,  5.6.1969).

[6] UMA, Spettigue Collection I, Correspondence.

[7] Walter Pache, "Der Fall Grove: Vorleben und Nachleben des Schriftstellers Felix Paul Greve," German-Canadian Yearbook/Deutschkanadisches Jahrbuch 5 (1979): 121-136.

Pache, Walter, "Dilettante in Exile: Grove at the Centenary of His Birth." Canadian Literature 90 (Autumn 1981): 187-191.

Walter Pache, "Frederick Philip Grove's Loneliness: Comparative Perspectives," Annals/Annalen 4: German-Canadian Studies in the 1980s: Symposium, CAUTG Publications 9, (Vancouver: CAUTG,  1983: 185-196).

[8] The FPG Endowment Fund was established in December 1996 to foster Greve/Grove & Else von Freytag-Loringhoven research and related editorial projects.

[9] Bruce Thomson's documentation has been deposited in FPG Research Collection Mss 12, University of Manitoba Archives (UMA). Sparta, Kentucky evidence, Pittsburgh information, and Bonanza Farm documents addressed below can be consulted in the same collection.

Search Strategy, fn. 10-24:

[10] Grove, Frederick Philip, A Search of America, (Ottawa: Graphic Publishers, 1928, c1927). 448p.; [vi]: Author's Note, Rapid City, Man., December1926, F.P.G.

[11] Grove, Frederick Philip, In Search of Myself, (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1947). 457p.; [458]: Postscript.

[12] Mary Grove, personal telephone communication, February 11, 1999.

[13] Greve and Else stayed for six months in such a "cottage" in Paris-Plage outside Étaples, from June to December 1905. Gide had been asked from Wollerau, Switzerland, to help find it for them (Greve/Gide Correspondence, UMA, Spettigue Collection I. There are fifty-five letters by Greve, written between 1903-1908).

[14] Applying the 20 year rule, this points to a composition date of late 1913. The period covered in ASA is 2 1/2 years, not 1 1/2 years as claimed here in IMS, 181. In ASA, Grove reflects on the time between 1909 and 1912 fairly truthfully, except for the missing year 1910/11 which he spent with Else in Sparta, Kentucky. In Manitoban disguise, this experience had already been addressed in Settlers of the Marsh, 1925.

[15] Greve had taken a course on Byron during his studies at Bonn university, 1898-1900 (UMA, Spettigue Collection I).

[16] Frederick Philip Grove, Letters, Ed., Desmond Pacey, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976): 526, 6.6.1903.

[17] Frederick Philip Grove, "The Life of Saint Nishivara," 60 Aphorisms, Mss. Notebook (UMA Grove Collection, Box. 18, Fd. 9. Also published as "Of Nishivara, the Saint," A Stranger To My Time, Ed., Paul Hjartarson, (Edmonton: NeWest Press, c1986): 83-87. Hjartarson points out (p. 83), that Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine, which Greve translated in 1905, provides an intertext. Given Greve's preoccupation with Oscar Wilde until 1903, the prose poem "The Doer of Good" can be added to the list, demonstrating once again Greve/Grove's artful and complex adaptation of multiple, literary models (The Works of Oscar Wilde, Leicester, Eng.: Galley Press, 1987, 843-4).

[18] Friedrich Nietzsche, "Vorrede zu Zarathustra," Werke in sechs Bänden, Hrsg., Karl Schlechta, (München: Hanser, 1980): III, 277.

[19] Grove, Letters, 548-552, German & English.

[20] Heinz Sarkowski, Submission for the Anniversary Symposium "In Memoriam FPG: Greve/Grove 1879-1946-1998," Winnipeg, Sept. 30-Oct. 3, 1998.

[21] Probably Jonathan Swift's Prose Works in four volumes, Berlin: Oesterheld ; E. Reiss, 1909-1910. The original edition by Temple Scott in twelve volumes is extant in the UMA Grove Library Collection.

[22] Friedrich Michael, "Verschollene der frühen Insel," Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel 28 (1972): A79-82, A81. -- Since Michael cannot specify the time of this plea for help, it could have come from Else who lived in New York from 1913 to 1923.

[23] Frederick Philip Grove, Poems/Gedichte, by F. P. Grove/F. P. Greve und Fanny Essler. Ed., Gaby Divay, Deutschkanadische Schriften, A: Belletristik;  Bd. 13, (Winnipeg: Wolf Verlag, 1993): 123-124.

[24] Bruce Thomson, Report on "Grove's Passage to America," (14.11.1998, p.2, UMA, Collection Mss 12).

The Passage on the White Star Liner "Magantic": fn. 25

[25] From photocopies showing and describing these ships in B. Thomson's documents. They stem from v. 1 of Arnold Kludas' twelve-volume set Great Passenger Ships of the World.

Implications, fn. 26-41:

[26] Gaby Divay, "Names, Pseudonyms, Monograms, and Titles in F. P. Grove/Greve's Work," German-Canadian Yearbook,  Bd. 14 (1995, c1996): 129-151.

[27] Published in Grove, Poems/Gedichte, 1993, 40-47, and facsim. 49b. For a discussion, see G. Divay, "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.

[28] For Greve's preoccupation with Dante, which dates back to 1898 when he translated sonnets from the Vita Nuova, see G. Divay, "F. P. Greve's First & Last Translations: Dante's 'Vita Nuova' & Swift's 'Modest Proposal'," German-Canadian Yearbook, Bd. 14, (1995, c1996): 107-128.

[29] Work is in progress about Greve/Grove's relations with Thomas Mann in 1901/2 & 1939. Parallels between Felix Krull's and Felix Greve's careers suggest that Mann's hero was partly based on Greve's conduct before 1903.

[30] Grove, Letters, 291, n. 1.

[31] Bruce Thomson, personal telephone communication, February 11, 1999.

[32] See G. Divay, "Abrechnung und Aufarbeitung im Gedicht: Else von Freytag-Loringhove über drei Männer (E. Hardt, A. Endell, F. P. Greve),"Trans-Lit VII/1 (1998): [24]-37. [Includes first publication of three German poems from the Freytag-Loringhoven Collection, University of Maryland, College Park].

[33] Spettigue, Introduction to Baroness Elsa, 1992a, 24.

[34] Langenscheidts Taschenwörterbuch der schwedischen und deutschen Sprache, (Berlin; München; Zürich: Langenscheidt, 1965, c1958): 182, "Graf,m, greve."

[35] Felix Paul Greve, "Reise in Schweden," Neue Revue und Morgen 3 (1909): 760-766.

[36] Documents from Pittsburgh Historical Society (directory entry; 1910 city map) and the Allegheny Court House Public Relations Dept.  were deposited in UMA Collection Mss 12, in April 1995.

[37] Information from the Historical Society, Louisville, in UMA Collection Mss 12.

[38] Grove allegedly has many sisters, none of whom he remembers clearly. To Gide, Greve already spoke of seven sisters in June 1904. He seems to have applied his mother's family background for himself: Bertha Reichentrog was one of nine children; after one brother and one sister died, there were six girls and one boy who was the youngest.
See UMA Spettigue Collection for documentation of the Greve and Reichentrog families in the Schwerin area, and Henny's birth on the yellow brick estate Thurow in 1876 (a colour photo, courtesy of Gisi Baronin Freytag-Loringhoven, 1994, in UMA Collection Mss 12).

[39] Grove, Letters, 38, n. 2, April 1926.

[40] Knut Hamsun, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 5, 959:"All summer of 1887, I worked on a section of Dalrumples' immense farm in the valley of the Red River..." [transl. mine]. Five sketches "On the Prairie" were originally published in Kratskog: Historier og Skitser    in 1903.

[41] Hiram M. Drache, The Days of the Bonanza, 1964, n.112, 184: "... in 1912, the Company bought a Twin City 40 gas tractor with a twelve bottom plow. It was a showpiece in that day." All details presented here and below about the Bonanza Farm are owed, with permission, to this fine book.


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