1. The Canadian Author Emerges:
Grove's First Publications from Rapid City

Grove's first autobiography A Search for America (ASA) was published by Henry Miller's all-Canadian publishing house, Graphic Publishers of Ottawa, in October 1927. The brief "Preface" was signed, like a good many of Felix Paul Greve's German translations, "F.P.G.," and it was dated "December 1926." This was Grove's fourth publication, and compared to the other three, it was his most self-revealing account. During the first ten years in Canada, Grove had kept a low profile, teaching at the remote outposts of the vast and isolated province of Manitoba. Rapid City, where he settled in the fall of 1922 and where he remained for seven years, is about ten miles north of Brandon, and 130 miles west of Winnipeg.

Grove's remarkable preference for minor localities within easy reach of more important cities or towns was already in effect in his pre-Canadian days. In 1904 and 1905, he chose to settle for several months each in Wollerau, near Zürich, and in Étaples, not too far from Paris. In 1910, he moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Sparta, Kentucky, where he tried farming for a year. The largest urban centre in the region is Cincinnati, Ohio, in north-easterly direction. 

To all these places, Greve took his "wife" Else, almost as if he had wanted to keep her in secluded surroundings. Else and the entire year he spent with her on a small farm near Sparta are conspicuously absent from Grove's autobiographical narratives. However, Grove had already dealt exclusively with this complex in his first novel, Settlers of the Marsh, two years before A Search for America was published in 1927. Not only Sparta, but also the entire state of Kentucky are carefully avoided: Cincinnati, in Ohio, is bypassed without valid explanation by Grove's mouthpiece Phil Branden on his tramp towards the southwest. Indiana on the west bank of the Ohio River is systematically substituted for its Kentucky counterpart to the east. On one occasion, the tiny town of Vevay on the Indiana side is mentioned (ASA, 307). Across the river, in Kentucky, one finds Warsaw on the riverbank, and Sparta roughly five miles inland. This is just one of many examples where Grove's silencing tactics have reverse effects: what he omits from his narrative speaks more eloquently than a thousand words to present-day readers.

After leaving Else behind in Kentucky in 1911, Grove's desire for isolated places increased noticeably. In the summer of 1912, on his way to Canada, he spent about three months in the doubly remote hamlet of Amenia, North Dakota: it is five miles north of Casselton, which in turn is located fifteen miles due west of Fargo. And his teaching assignments in Manitoba could not have been in less isolated places. All this suggests that FPG may have been in hiding from Else and her formidable temper for a generous ten-year period. He also seems to have kept an eye on her whereabouts, since he only started publishing after she had returned to Berlin in 1923, and his more personal records appeared after she had died in Paris, in mid-December 1927.

Most of the locations where Greve/Grove had dwelled, with or without Else, are included in the lists the narrator provides of his many travels in A Search for America. References to Étaples are particularly noteworthy, because places like Zürich, Paris, Cincinnati, and even Fargo are large enough to appear on almost anyone's travel list. After Wollerau on Lake Zürich, Greve had very carefully chosen Étaples as his second voluntary exile in 1905. Its advantages were twofold and strategic: due to its proximity to the ferry harbour of Boulogne, Greve could, as contemporary Baedeker travel guides reveal, easily make day-excursions across the Channel to Folkestone where H. G. Wells resided in nearby Sandgate. He also could pay André Gide a visit in Paris or at his country retreat at Cuverville near Le Havre. Greve was translating at the time works by both these authors. While Amenia in North Dakota is never mentioned in A Search for America, Grove inserts a slyly concealed pointer to it, by means of a reference to the small town of Sharon in Connecticut (ASA, 199). The wealthy owners of the huge Bonanza farm in Grove's story, the Amenia & Sharon Land Company, were originally from Amenia, N.Y., and Sharon, Connecticut, these two locations being some five miles apart across the common border of either state. Palermo, on the other hand, the place Greve had chosen when he eloped with Else in January 1903, is mentioned openly, if somewhat cryptically, on several occasions in both of Grove's autobiographies (ASA, 10; ISM, 80, 164). 

Grove had barely arrived in Rapid City, when he emerged as a writer with two volumes of nature essays. Both were published by McClelland & Stewart in 1922 and 1923. These texts were entirely impersonal, although they were drawn from personal experiences: in 1917/1918, Mrs. Grove taught at the isolated Falmouth School, which was located in the pioneer district near Waldersee and Amaranth in northwestern Manitoba. Grove remained in Gladstone as high-school principal, a position he had accepted in August 1916, and kept on and off until his resignation in December 1917. To rejoin his family -- their daughter, Phyllis May Grove, had been born in Virden on August 5, 1915 -- Grove would set out for Falmouth every weekend during the fall and winter of 1917. These perilous rides with horse-and-buggy or sleigh from and to Gladstone, led over some thirty miles of primitive country roads, and skirted the often impassable Grassy River Marsh. They provided the raw material for Grove's first book, Over Prairie Trails (1922), which John McClelland had accepted for publication in December 1919 as "Seven Drives Over Manitoba Trails." Grove's narrative of his weekly commuting trips adheres to perfectly detached observations, which have earned him, deservedly, the reputation of a master in landscape realism. Encouraged by the success of his first book, Grove speedily crafted a sequel from the same experiences. It was accepted by the same publisher, and came out within a year as The Turn of the Year (1923).

2. Continuity in FPG's Oeuvre

The Bildungsroman, as a faithful record of a "simple soul's" formation, often incorporates elements of older traditions. The spatial experiences of travel are an ingredient essential to picaresque narratives. Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715), the story of a jovial rogue who views the world from his lowly social positions as a valet and secretary, often serves as prime example. Greve had translated it in two volumes in 1908, under the pseudonym Konrad Thorer, a name he used for classics of this sort. Another prominent representative of the picaresque approach is Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605 & 1615). There, the hero is so good-hearted, dreamy and impractical, that he would not survive for long in this world without the deft and crafty realist Sancho Panza as his side-kick. Again, Greve had intimate knowledge of this text, which he had published in three volumes under the same pseudonym and in the same year as Gil Blas. A more obscure source for travelling adventures may have been those recorded by a certain Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1758-1822). Several editions of his Magister Laukhard, sein Leben und seine Schicksale von ihm selbst beschrieben were published shortly after 1900. Greve had acquired a vast, if informal, knowledge of German literature by then, as his edition of the far-travelled baroque poet Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau (1617-1679) may attest.

c. Satire

Of clearly satirical intention are the adventures of Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669). This naïve protagonist grows with experiences set against the background of the Thirty-Year-War. A highly successful satirical journal called Simplicissimus, had flourished in Munich since 1894, and its irreverent contributors were more than once in trouble with the stuffy imperial authorities. When Grove, in his second autobiography, refers to the literary circles he frequented in Munich, and mentions that some had "served terms of imprisonment for lèse-majesté" (ISM, 174), he is referring to them.

Perhaps the most influential satire in guise of a young, inexperienced hero's tribulations is Voltaire's Candide (1759), who cannot be dissuaded from his optimism, no matter how much adversity he encounters. Targeted in this roman-à-thèse are "the best of all possible worlds" implied in Leibniz' benign, teleological philosophy. In his "Author's Note to the Fourth Edition" of A Search for America (ASA, 1939, vii-viii), Grove adopts a condescending tone when he addresses the mixture of fact and fiction in his book, and says: "... it is teleological; what was the present when it was written had already become its telos." While Grove's understanding of this term stems more likely from his thorough classical studies than from Leibniz, the context of his statement seems to stress an element of destiny in the unfolding of Phil's character.

d. Confessions

A confessional note creeps into Grove's narrative fairly regularly, for instance, when he reveals that in his youth he "had affected English ways in dress and manner" (ASA, 1); or when he draws attention to his reputation of having both perfect self-control and chilling effects with the icy-blue gaze of his eyes (ASA, 21); or when he admits to a penchant for luxury items and "cherished trifles" like ivory nail-files (ASA, 253), or hints at prior gambling experience (ASA, 129). These instances clash with the predominant current of Phil's repeated declarations of innocence and honesty. Saint Augustine's autobiography (ca. 390 A.D.) is the most venerable and influential example of the confessional category of autobiographical literature, which invariably adopts a pronounced didactic tone for its purpose. Grove was certainly familiar with this text, but closer to his own experiences are famous variants by romantic representatives, like Rousseau (Les Confessions, 1770) and De Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822). Most of all, he was intimately familiar with Oscar Wilde's essay, De Profundis (1905) and the narrative poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), both of which were written in prison. Greve had translated the ballad as well as the anonymous Apologia pro Oscar Wilde during the years of his intense preoccupation with this author up to 1903. Note that the German decadence and aesthetist movements around 1900 are considered "neo-romantic," and that Greve/Grove would have classed Oscar Wilde in this tradition as well.[8]

7. Situating the genre of Grove's A Search for America

At this time, Grove was preoccupied with the private publication of Two Generations, he had embarked on rewriting his past in undisguised autobiographical fashion, and he had turned sixty on the fourteenth of February. Retrospective musings often accompany Grove's birthdays or anniversaries. In that particular year, he wrote at least twice to Thomas Mann, who had just arrived at Princeton. Nearly four decades earlier, in 1902, while in-between two more permanent residences, Mann had shared Greve's address at the Pension Gisela in Munich for a few weeks. While Grove's letters are no longer extant, we know from Mann's first reply that Grove had offered to send him a "de luxe" copy of his brand-new novel. Grove also sent A Search for America, but Mann unfortunately would only read the far less biographical book, Two Generations, of which he spoke quite kindly his second letter. He also detected a "truly anglo-saxon" sense of humour in Grove's novel, amd this rather points to Mann's ignorance of Grove's true identity as Greve. The Search of America, which might have enlightened him about his correspondent's true identity, Mann wanted to read during an upcoming summer vacation in Europe. But since World War II erupted in late August 1939, it is unlikely that Mann ever found the time to read this highly revealing book.

Here we have a cryptic hint at the "catastrophes" in Greve/Grove's life: his mother's death, when he had just started his classical and archaeological studies in Bonn (May, 1898); his elopement to Palermo with Else, then wife of his friend, the Jugendstil-architect August Endell (January 1903); his arrest, instigated by his former friend, Herman Kilian (May 1903); the mountain of debts, which remained overwhelming in spite of Greve's "titanic" (ISM, 4) efforts and the excellent fees paid for his translations; a new, and desperate attempt at fraud by double-selling one of his translations most (likely, a 4 v. edition of Swift's Prose Works); his hasty retreat to America in late July 1909; and, last in chronological order, but not in importance, the end of his relationship with Else after one year "in the wilderness" near Sparta, Kentucky -- "in der Einöde…", as she says in a note on her poem "Wolkzug".[10] She also refers to the end as "terrible, disgraceful" in her autobiography (Ab, 63), and specifies that Greve had her follow him to America. She met him in Pittsburgh, where he was employed as a publisher's agent, as we know from a Pittsburgh directory of 1910. "Within a year" he left her in Kentucky (Ab, 72). In the same commentary on her "Wolkzug" poem, which like many others are explicitly dedicated to her former lover, Else states that Greve sent her some money "hidden, from there", meaning Kentucky, but that it was hardly enough, since she had no work and couldn't speak much English. She got by with modelling at the Cincinnati School of Arts where the majority of faculty members were either of German-American stock, or had studied in Germany. Her tone when crafting poems dedicated to the memory of FPG, her "lover of gore", is predominently resentful and bitter, even many years after the traumatic experience of their separation.

9. How Successful Was Grove in Rewriting His Life

At the time Grove re-invented the first thirty years of his life, he was not bound by any documentary evidence about his vital statistics. Therefore, he was free to let his imagination roam. There is an obvious playfulness [10a] in placing Grove's Phil in an affluent, cosmopolitan setting, and in adopting the role of a spoiled and privileged dilettante who is untethered by such base concerns as as having to make a living. Even the literary circles Grove describes, notably those in Munich and Paris, were not too difficult to fit into their earlier invented time frame. More or less openly, Grove identifies with Stefan George by adopting the "Master's" well-attested stays in Munich for himself. George had also been to Paris, where he met a young Gide at one of the famous Tuesday receptions at Mallarmé's house. As time went on, Grove's fictitious parameters proved too inflexible, and actually turned into a prison of his own making, from which there was no easy escape. Adhering to it meant by definition sacrificing true claims to his acquaintance with a number of illustrious contemporaries, like Stefan George, Thomas Mann, André Gide, and H. G. Wells. The tension between the wish to reveal the more glorious aspects of his past, and the need to conceal the less desirable ones turned into an ever increasing burden for Grove. When he was about to publish his second autobiography in 1946, he was trying hard to overcome these frustrating limitations he had imposed on himself with his "official" biographical press releases twenty years earlier. Therefore, more than half of the 457 pages of In Search of Myself cover the same ground in 1946 that was already addressed in A Search for America in 1927. So Grove learned that what might have been indeed possible within the lofty constraints of a semi-fictional universe earlier did not square too well within the far less forgiving framework of a supposedly fact-based autobiographical narrative.

It has been a well-established habit in Grove and FPG criticism to comb the 1946 text for ever so elusive biographical givens, and to dismiss the 1927 book as pure fiction. This is the main reason why FPG's passage to North America on the Megantic, for instance, has escaped discovery until October 1998 (see the UM Libraries' online catalogue BISON for an exhaustive entry created on February 17, 1999 for this exciting find). The Bonanza Farm was not identified until March 1996 (this discovery was the timely topic of G. Divay's Presidential Dinner Address of the Linguistic Circle of Manitoba & North Dakota's annual meeting in October 1996), and Greve/Grove's involvement in the book-fraud of an exclusive American publishing house went undocumented until November 1999.

Each of these successive discoveries has made it abundantly clear that, strange as it may seem, the Search for America is actually the more reliable text for the biographical detective work Grove's history requires. Though deliberately vague about time and space, and complicating matters by pre-dating the setting by two decades, the events themselves are just as factual as their author has always maintained. In fact, they are so close to the truth, that Grove himself felt compelled to recant just about all of them in the Search of Myself.[11] For his passage to North America, for example, he had planted all the necessary clues within the first ten pages of A Search for America: he did in fact leave Europe in July (of 1909, and not 20 years earlier in the 1890s); he did board a a ship of the White Star Line, namely the brand new Megantic; he had a second class ticket; and he did in fact travel from Liverpool to Montreal. Grove obviously believed that the twenty-year margin he had introduced as a buffer from the real date 1909 would provide sufficient camouflage. Since he was just emerging from obscurity at the time A Search of America was published, the risk of inviting probing questions was minimal. By 1946, however, Grove was far better known, and he had attracted the critical attention of enthusiastic biographers like Desmond Pacey. And now he was not so sure anymore that a simple time-blurring ploy would still offer enough protection. Therefore, he rewrote the previous scenes surrounding his immigration in a frantic effort to divert attention from the earlier, truthful version (ISM, 170ff). For a detailed analysis of the narrative techniques of distortion applied to this important example, see "Felix Paul Greve/Frederick Philip Grove's Passage to America: The Discovery of the Author's Arrival in North America and Its Implications" (Divay, 2000).[12] 

For the Bonanza Farm episode, which is described in perfect analogy with the realities of the Amenia & Sharon Land Company near "Walloh" in A Search for America, Grove pretends that his 1927 description was intended as a symbolic condensation of no less than twenty such summers of seasonal work (ISM, 195). He then specifies the real place name, Fargo, for what was "Walloh" both in A Search for America, and on the mythological, hazy map first used as lining paper in Louis Carrier's 1928 edition (it was later copied for Ryerson's "fourth edition" of 1939). To justify that of these regular yearly visits it was precisely the one in 1912 that stood out in his mind, Grove offers as sole excuse "the famous heavy rains" of that season (ISM, 214), and concentrates in the remainder of his account on this one and only episode he actually knew from personal experience.

While Grove never refers to Amenia in any other way than "Headquarters" or "Camps", he does mention nearby Casselton as the place where he deposits his earnings (ISM, 243). Given Casselton's proximity to Amenia, a mere five miles to the south, this was a daring revelation: in 1912, very few of the great Bonanza Farms were still in operation. It is true that the Dalrymples, where Knut Hamsun had stayed at roughly the time of A Search for America's alleged setting, were also still going strong. However, the family situation Grove or Phil Branden depict matches conditions found only in Amenia, and only in 1912: the rich young owner would have been Herbert Lawrence Chaffee, (1892-?) whom Phil lectures much like the famous philosophers Aristotle and Seneca lectured their respective royal charges Alexander the Great and Roman Emperor Nero. When Phil accompanies the young man on bird hunting excursions -- here, one of the anachronistic lapses occurs, concerning the young owner's "car": his father had indeed owned one of the first Ford "tin Lizzies" in 1904, but there were surely no Fords in 1892! Local history books depict H. L. Chaffee in his fifties as president of the local rifle association. He had inherited his managerial duties after his father, the financial genius Herbert Fuller Chaffee (1866-1912), had perished earlier in the year in the Titanic disaster in April 1912.[13] The young owner's widowed mother in the narrative was in reality Carrie Chaffee (1864-1931) who had survived the ordeal. Authoritative websites devoted to the ship's fate report that she was rescued in lifeboat 4. The couple had inhabited cabin E41 in the Titanic's First Class section. Grove depicts Mrs Chaffee rather unkindly, and as if she were the young millionaire's grandmother. The charity work reported in the book does correspond to her actual Church interests in Casselton, as attested in several contemporary newspaper reports of the Casselton Reporter. It is significant that Grove dwells on the year 1912: quite apart from the "famous rains", this particular year was especially memorable for very personal reasons: he calls it "a landmark" in his life (ISM, 216), and given that shortly afterwards Greve crossed the Canadian border to become Grove, this is certainly an apt description.

About the elaborate book-peddling experiences, Grove keeps silent in the Search of Myself. Most of his efforts there go into a lavish make-over of his alleged childhood, school education, and university studies up to the time of his new life on a distant continent. In particular, the entire Rutherford family background Grove had appropriated for himself from his friend-turned-foe, Herman Kilian, is further embellished, though the stories about his father's fortunes and the conditions of his own state of mind when coming to America differ widely. As far as Grove's two conflicting versions in his two approaches towards self-representation are concerned, the advice to present and future FPG scholars goes like this: do always start with A Search for America, and see if any events make sense when transposed into the real 1909-1912 time parameters. Next, consult In Search of Myself for additional clues, and for extracting, if possible, details about real places and events. Do study primary sources like FPG's published and unpublished correspondence files available at the University of Manitoba archival collections. And, whatever form or direction the pursuit of your research may take over time, never forget to use both autobiographical books in conjunction: the first for an accurate account of what really happened, the second for clues of where and when it may have occurred.

[1] Greve's review appeared as "Nachgelassene Werke von Friedrich Nietzsche (Bd. 11 & 12)" in Beilage zur Münchner Allgemeinen Zeitung, no. 235 (1901), 6-7. In UM Archives, Spettigue Collection, Mss 57.

[2] For prudish reactions to Settlers in 1925, see Pacey, in: F. P. Grove, Letters, 29, n.1.

[3] Stefan George, in Edith Landmann's recollections, 86: “Ich hatte einen Artikel von Fehr bekommen über ästhetische Literaturbetrachtung. Wir lachten über diese verklungene Welt. Er meinte, es wäre ganz gut, wenn einer ein Buch über seine eigne geistige Entwicklung schreiben würde. Felix Greve habe so etwas schreiben wollen: die Novelle des jungen Mannes. Das müsse geschickt gemacht sein. Es könne auf diejenigen, für die die Dichtung viel zu schwer sei, gut wirken.” This reported conversation is in the following section of the Landmann's book: "10. Juli bis Mitte August [1919], Matten" (Switzerland), on pages 74-89. The English translation in the Introduction to ASA ©2000 above is mine.