History and Description
There are many major components to the FPG collections at the University of Manitoba. They include important texts pertaining to the author Greve/Grove and his first wife Else who later was known in New York Dada circles as Else Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven.
Approximately 60 boxes of manuscripts, primary and secondary research documents, photographs, tapes, and videos provide a unique array of original source material which is of extraordinary scholarly value to researchers and graduate students investigating the dual lives and works of Grove or Greve alike.
These sources are well supported by complete book collections of Grove's Canadian and Greve's German publications, including his many literary translations, and rare, privately published editions of Wanderungen (poems, 1902) and Helena und Damon (a neo-romantic, lyrical play, 1902), & Grove's personal library of some 500 titles.
Virtually all theses and critical works about both FPGs are either held in the Rare Book Room or elsewhere in the Libraries' collections. Excellent supporting book and periodical collections in Canadian, German, and French literature are available in the Elizabeth Dafoe, St. John's and St. Paul's College Libraries. The Art/Architecture Library contains many important titles pertaining to Else's first husband, the "art nouveau/Jugendstil" artist August Endell, as well as relevant rends like expressionism and New York dada or modernist artists.
FPG's contacts with many notable authors and publishers on both continents link him to renowned names like Thomas Mann, André Gide, H. G. Wells, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde, A. Swinburne, Knut Hamsun, Stefan George, Hermann Hesse, and, perhaps, the French author Louis Hémon, best known for his French-Canadian novel Maria Chapdelaine (1916). Many of these authors received the Nobel Prize in the 1920s, 1930s, or 1940s. Lesser known, but no less important, are German contemporaries like Karl Wolfskehl, Stefan George, Ernst Gundolf, O.A.H. Schmitz, Karl Vollmoeller, August Endell, Lou Andreas-Salome, Franziska (Fanny) von Reventlow, Ernst Hardt, Melchior Lechter and Marcus Behmer. On Else's side, besides many of the above, famous artists like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Brancusi, Schwitters, Berenice Abbott, writers like Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and a host of other French, American, or German authors can be added.
I. The Frederick Philip Grove Collection was acquired from his widow in the early 1960s. FPG's papers contain numerous unpublished manuscripts or typescripts of novels, short stories, poems, essays, lectures, autobiographical notes, and correspondence, and represent the most important and comprehensive archival resource available. Of crucial importance for FPG's identity are six German poems by Grove, one of which matches Greve's "Erster Sturm" (in Die Schaubühne, 1907). The same poem also plays a role in Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's lyrical tribute to her former lover and the couple's brief farming experience near Sparta, Kentucky (1910/11).
F. P. Greve lived from 1879 to 1909 in Germany, and as F. P. Grove in Canada from 1912 until his death in 1948 (see FPG Chronology). The three transitional years from 1909 to 1912, FPG spent in the United States, probably under his real name Greve, as indicated by an entry in the 1910 Pittsburgh directory found in 1994.
Documentation for this period remains rather sparse, the most reliable source being Grove's 1927 ASA [see IV below for some important recent discoveries emanating from this key text].
A detailed Register to the 23 archival boxes of the Frederick Philip Grove Collection was published by Archives & Special Collections in 1979, and made availableonline in ca. 2002. Unfortunately, it fails to reflect most of the major research developments since the early 1970s, and a thorough revision is still required.
II. The research papers documenting Professor D. O. Spettigue's spectacular 1971 discovery of Grove's former life as Greve were acquired in 1986. Many fundamental documents concerning Greve's origins in Thurow near Schwerin, his education at the Hamburg Gymnasium Johanneum and the universities of Bonn, Munich, and at the University of Manitoba from where he obtained a B.A. in French & German in 1922 after seven years of extra-mural studies, and an Honorary Doctorate in 1946, Grove's marriage (1915) and naturalization (1921) certificates, and his nomination to the Royal Society of Canada are extant in this remarkable collection. Especially noteworthy are two letters by Thomas Mann from Princeton in 1939 revealing that Grove had sent him his first autobiography (ASA, 1927) and his latest novel Two Generations (1939) [they were sent to Spettigue by L. Grove in January 1968, nearly four years before the FPG discovery in October 1971. Copies were deposited with Hans Wysling in the Zürich Thomas-Mann-Archiv by A. W. Riley in January 1971].
Professor Spettigue published his truly sensational findings in a large variety of articles, and in a substantial book, FPG: The European Years (Ottawa, Oberon, 1973). In 1995, his research collection was supplemented by an addition which contains important letters by Greve to André Gide (1903-1908), Karl Wolfskehl (1901/02), and O. A. H. Schmitz (1906), as well as correspondence by Else. About these materials, a long article was published as introduction to Baroness Elsa and another in Canadian Literature (both, 1992). The second instalment of the Spettigue Research Collection also reflects the editorial work undertaken with A. W. Riley for the translations of Greve's two novels about Else's life, The Master Mason's House (1976) and Fanny Essler (1984).
A Finding Aid to Parts 1 & 2 of the Spettigue Collections exists since 1990, and was updated with the help of Lewis Stubbs in 1996 [a SSHRCC grant by the UM made this possible, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged]. III. In 1976, UM Professor Margaret Stobie donated research documents related to her 1973 book about Grove in the Twayne World Authors series. Her papers contain detailed records of Grove's early Canadian years as a teacher in Manitoba, and his very first Canadian publication, "Rousseau als Erzieher" in Der Nordwesten, Nov.-Dec., 1914. This significant text transparently imitates the title of Nietzsche's essay "Schopenhauer as Educator." Note that Greve had reviewed two volumes of the philosopher's posthumous works in 1901. There are also numerous tape recordings of interviews with former pupils, colleagues, friends or neighbours from Grove's years in Manitoba.
A Finding Aid to the Stobie Research Collection is available. It has received a certain measure of upgrading and detailed component descriptions in recent times. IV. FPG source material collected in North American and European archives has been deposited in the Divay Research Collection since 1990. Included are early manuscript poems Greve submitted for Stefan George's exclusive journal Blätter für die Kunst in 1902; six sonnets from Dante's Vita Nuova in German translation; the 1904/5 poetry cycle by a certain "Fanny Essler" (Else and Greve's joint pseudonym) which was published in Die Freistatt even before the novel entitled Fanny Essler appeared in print in 1905; his entire correspondence with Insel Publishers obtained from the Weimar Archives in early May 1990; his Munich police registration (1901/2) showing that he briefly shared an address with Thomas Mann at the Pension Gisela in 1902; and his initial attempt from Bonn prison to secure the translation rights for H. G. Wells' works. Greve's letters to Wells were obtained from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000.
As a crucial juncture between the two lives of FPG, his passage on the White Star liner "Megantic" from Liverpool to Montreal in late July 1909 could be documented in October 1998 [Bruce Thomson for G. Divay, with funding from the FPG Endowment; see BisonEntry, 17.2.99]. Greve/Grove's crossing of the Atlantic had eluded FPG researchers for decades, even though all the details are openly presented in the first few pages of A Searchof America (1927).
For the three obscure years FPG spent in America before assuming his Canadian identity in late 1912, this research collection contains evidence that Grove's Bonanza Farm was in Amenia, near Fargo, N.D., and many documents about this massive operation, their owners, and nearby Casselton; an enigmatic entry in a 1910 Pittsburgh directory lists Greve as "manager" of an unnamed business with an address near the Allegheny County Court House & Jail [in 1999, the same directory yielded further information about the nature of Greve's professional dealings in that city]; and proof that he operated a small farm near Sparta, Kentucky, a small town ca. 80 miles southwest of Cincinnati, Ohio, stems from a single poem, shown in facsimile in Greve/Grove's 1993 poetry edition, in Else's archival collection in Maryland.
IV.a. Both the manuscript of Else's revealing autobiography and Djuna Barnes' typescript were exchanged with the University of Maryland in 1990 for a microfilmed copy of Fanny Essler (1905), Greve's first novel about her life. Her own reminiscences, written 20 years later in Berlin, provide a faithful mirror-image to this novel. The discovery of Else's connection with Felix Paul Greve was made in the mid-1980s by Professors Spettigue and Hjartarson who published the manuscript version along with a selection of letters as Baroness Elsa in 1992. These documents finally confirmed that Greve had not perished in 1909, as intimated in Else's correspondence with Insel chief Anton Kippenberg [Pacey, 548]; that he had started a new life abroad; and that Else had followed him to his new destination.
Many of FrL's poems and letters held at the University of Maryland have been obtained over the years. They contain references to "FPG" and former lovers & friends. Some of her German poetry incorporates elements of the 1904/5 "Fanny Essler" cycle, and one makes explicit references to both 1903 Palermo when Greve served his prison-term in Bonn, their 1910 reunion in Pittsburgh, & and his abandonment of her in Kentucky within a year.
Further FrL copies have been acquired from The Little Review Collection at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Two NYT newspaper articles were found in 2003/4, one reporting her arrest for cross-dressing in Greve's clothes & smoking in public on 5th Ave. in downtown Pittsburgh in September 1910, not even three months after her arrival. Then, in 2006, two photos depicting FrL & Claude MacKay in exotic costume were discovered in the LC Bain Collection.
No Finding Aid to the Divay Research Collection exists to date, but a good many documents have been made available online, & descriptive entries about virtually all can be found in the UM Libraries' on-line catalogue BISON. V. A small, but important research collection was donated in 1995 by Professor A. W. Riley. The noted Germanist, Thomas Mann- and Döblin scholar, is also a pioneer in FPG research. He was the first to review Greve's two novels about Else's life in view of Grove's fictitious biography, and he co-edited, with Professor Spettigue, the English translations of these two revealing books, Maurermeister Ihles Haus and Fanny Essler (both, Ottawa, Oberon, 1976 &1984). A. W. Riley's doctoral dissertation at Tübingen University was about Thomas Mann's Felix Krull. There is evidence today that Greve was the real-life model for the hero in this hilarious impostor novel. This Ph.D. thesis, two valuable copies of Greve's Flaubert and Meredith translations, and an astonishing second, 1909, edition of Greve's novel about Else's childhood (Maurermeister Ihles Haus, orig. ed., 1906) were among his gracious donations to the archival collections. VI. Both Greve's & Grove's respective books are available either in the Rare Book Room (RBR) or in the open stacks of Dafoe-, St. John's- and St. Paul's- Library. The same applies to a near-comprehensive collection of FPG criticism. Freytag-Loringhoven materials have only been systematically collected since the late 1980s. Relevant related holdings are found particularly in the Arts & Architecture Library. VII. Grove's son, Leonard Grove, made the invaluable donation of his father's Library in 1992. Many of the nearly 500 books are annotated in the author's hand, and all are fully described in the University of Manitoba Libraries' on-line catalogue BISON. These books allow to unveil many connections with FPG's carefully concealed European past, and also reveal the author's literary tastes and preferences. A commentated bibliography of this important collection will be published on the UM Archives website in the near future. Highlights include: a much used Baedeker travel guide to the United States published in 1909, the very year Greve faked his suicide and disappeared from Germany. In it, many German bookdealers listed for New York City are underlined; American editions of Goethe and Heine some of whose poems Grove imitated; and a complete set of Swift's Prose Works edited by Temple Scott whose edition Greve had used for one of his last major translation assignments (for Oesterheld and E. Reiss publishers, 1909-1910). Double- or triple-selling this particular German four-volume selection seems to have hastened his departure for North America [as so gently suggested by Kippenberg in his letter to Else, Sept. 21, 1909].
Leonard Grove died shortly before his 76th birthday in October 2006.
VIII. Minor collections about FPG & Else were deposited in recent years by H. Makow, I. Gammel, W. Ruttkowski, M. Rubio, Angela Kopp, Therese Caiter-Meyer, and many others. Documents or collections by G. Wade, St.John-Stubbs, Karl Werner Maurer, A. L. Phelps and others provide insights by Grove's contemporaries, early admirers, and critics.
Editions
Foremost among scholarly editions of FPG's writings in traditional format are Desmond Pacey's authoritative collection, The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove (1976), which represents an excellent reference source for Grove, and already includes the correct identification of "Greve's" Else as née Ploetz, divorced Endell. Pacey also published a collection of Grove's short stories as Tales from the Margin in 1971. A selection of Grove's critical essays about aesthetics was edited by Henry Makow (Doctoral Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1981), & several critical or creative texts appeared in Paul Hjartarson's 1986 collection A Stranger to My Time: Essays by and about Frederick Philip Grove. FPG's English and German poetry from the UM's archival collections was edited by Gaby Divay (M.A. Thesis, University of Manitoba, Sept. 1992; rev. & enl. ed. published as v.13 of Deutschkanadische Schriften in Dec. 1993 (Winnipeg, Wolf Verlag, lxxxix, 296 p. & facsims), and e-Edition in 2007).
Editorial Projects
Several e-ventures stemming from the Grove Collections are underway, and will gradually become available on the archival website. They include: an updated Register to the Grove Collection; an annotated bibliography of Grove's Library; online Finding Aids to the Spettigue-, Stobie-, and Divay Research Collections; Grove's recently discovered Correspondence with his early mentor A. L. Phelps from the 1920s; Greve's correspondence with Karl Wolfskehl, Insel Publishers, Stefan George & Gundolf, O.A.H. Schmitz, H. G. Wells and André Gide [with English translations from German or French where necessary] are all in various stages of preparation and completion.
e-Editions of Grove's unpublished novel Jane Atkinson (ca. 1925), commentated editions of his confessional fiction A Search for America (ASA, 2nd printing, 1928) and his autobiography In Search of Myself (IMS, 1946), as well as Gide's revealing "Conversation avec un Allemand" (1904, 1976, French & Eng.) have already been completed, the first two with the aid of a pioneering UM SHHRC Grant obtained in 1998.
Key-Documents like Greve's autobiographical sketch submitted in 1907 for Brümmer's Lexikon, Thomas Mann's letters to Grove in 1939, or Insel publisher Kippenberg's elegant reply to "widow" Else Greve's 1909 accusations that Greve's alleged suicide was caused by overworking, underpaying, and unfairly criticizing her husband, have received special attention.
Bilingual e-Editions of FrL's satirical poems about Ernst Hardt & August Endell, as well as the 100th Anniversary Edition of FPG & Frl's collaborative 1904/5 "Fanny Essler" poems, are also available online. Her contacting Gide via Berenice Abbott in 1921 with the outrageous proposal to have her come to Paris for the benefit of the metropolis, as recorded in Maria van Rysselberghe's chronicle, is another Key Document worthy of critical comment.
Subjects
Autobiography, Translating, Tutoring, Teaching in rural Manitoba, Froebel Kindergardens, German & Canadian Publishing from 1900 to 1948, Bonanza Farms in North Dakota, Decadence Literature, Classical Philology & Archaeology, Comparative Literature, Art History, Symbolism, Realism, Expressionism and Dadaism are all relevant for FPG and Freytag-Loringhoven studies. Languages
Grove's Canadian works are predominantly in English, but contain some important material in German, and many veiled references to his German past. His widely alleged Anglo-Swedish origins and Rutherford family connections include the pseudonym "Andrew R. Rutherford" which Grove proposed in 1919 both for his first Canadian book, the nature essays Over Prairie Trails (1922) and his unpublished novel Jane Atkinson. This suggested pen-name is borrowed directly from Herman Kilian, Greve's friend at Bonn University, who had him arrested for fraud in May 1903. French texts are limited so far to some fifty-five unpublished letters by Greve to Gide, 1903-1908, and sources related to FrL's last years in Paris.
Note that Grove loved to display his substantial knowledge of languages, including classical Greek & Latin. Lectures
The UM Archives & Special Collections' "Discovery Hour" Lecture Series about the FPG resources include presentations by D. O. Spettigue, Queen's University, on his 1971 discovery of Grove's German life in 1986 [on occasion of The Learned Societies' Congress in Winnipeg]; W. Ruttkowski, Ph.D. Cand. with Professor Konrad Gross, Kiel University, in 1983/4 [during a research year at the UM]; and G. Divay, UM, on "The Spettigue Connection to the Grove Collection" upon completion of curating the Spettigue research papers in 1990.
FPG & FrL Endowment
This fund was established in 1996 with the explicit mandate to foster Greve/Grove and Freytag-Loringhoven Research in all its multi-layered aspects, and to propagate the UM's unique archival resources through symposia, e-text editions and research publications.
The 1998 "IN MEMORIAM FPG" Anniversary Symposium was partly supported by this fund. Partial Proceedings of this memorable event have recently been made available as web-publications. The entire collection of conference videos has received detailed BISON entries in 1999, and been available for viewing in RBR & Reserve. These videos are presently posted in DVD format, including the late Carol Shields' Opening Address & the regretted Walter Pache's presentation on Grove's Over Prairie Trails.
Many of the electronic editions mentioned above, including this dedicated website, have been partially supported by this Endowment.
Several graduate students have received remuneration for transcribing various document clusters such as the Gide-, Insel-, and Phelps correspondence, or for helping in the preparation of online presentations such as the Greve Translation Collection.
Before the advent of the FPG Endowment, many scholars have been granted support from the T. Glendinning Hamilton Fund for researching the archival Grove Collections. Copies of resulting publications or theses partly supported by this opportunity have been deposited in the archives. |
