Facing It: How His Masquerades Write FPG's Autobiography*
by
Markus Müller, Trier

Is the truth of 'the man' in his face? Taking the phenomenon FPG and all the self-portraying information he issued during his life-time at face value does not necessarily reveal an authentic biography, as readers and critics alike have repeatedly had to discover. For in too many ways has this figure presented a multitude of faces, or a composite of personae, which have prevented us from establishing an accurate picture of Felix Paul Greve, alias Frederick Philip Grove. Rather, we are still drawing from labelling fragments that do not fit into a coherent image: "[...] a writer in Canada rather than a Canadian writer" (Pache 1986: 15); "a stranger [who] took us in" (Sutherland 1974: 8); "this country's most talked about but least understood author" (Hjartason 1986: ix); "something of a liar" (Pacey 1976: xiv); "our first novelist of unquestioned stature" (Keith 1982: xi); "a man of new beginnings" (Spettigue 1973: 219) with an "almost compulsive habit of veiled self-referencing" (Divay 1995: 109) ...

Working towards a cumulative biography and reassessing the totality of both Greve's and Grove's numerous writings is a crucial necessity for contemporary critics, but still remains overshadowed by FPG's enigmatic life. Along with a host of authorial personae (for instance, Woodrow Ormond in Our Daily Bread), his work reflects an incessant concern with the motif of disguise - and the author himself appears as the major subject of a palimpsestic play with identity-constructions. With FPG, the topos of the mask-as-face abounds; he engaged heavily in what Walter Jens would term the "staged masquerade in the library of his own works."[1] This performance has often kept us from properly interpreting his many deliberately scattered hints as to his 'true' identity. A Search for America (1927; ASA) and In Search of Myself (1946; ISM) - presented in the guises of either 'fictional' or 'authoritative' autobiography - are the most prominent examples for this; as the titles already suggest, and as has often been pointed out, he wanted to be searched for and found but paradoxically kept preventing this through his protean identity. In order better to understand this identity-as-process and the operating spirit behind it all, we should rethink our understanding of writing as an autobiographical act and then view this in relation to FPG's life-long project of masquerade.

As a "means to self-knowledge" (Gusdorf 1980: 38), autobiography seems to purport an accurate self-portrait of its author; as "the most elusive of literary documents" (Olney 1980: 3) or a "narrative [that] is beholden to certain imperatives of imaginative discourse" (Renza 1980: 269), it urges us "to ask of the text" - as H. Porter Abbott suggests - "How does this reveal the author?" (1988: 613). FPG's marked autobiographies (are they not one elaborate autobiography-as-masquerade?) appear to be invitations to search for and recreate the subject of the text - but often enough lead the reader into a cul-de-sac and frustration.

It is worth noting that etymologically, autobiography designates a translation, or transposition, of a self's life into text. How can - or how should - the reader approach an author who has thus transcribed him- or herself? In his seminal essay, "Autobiography as De-facement," Paul de Man proposes to think of this phenomenon not so much as "a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts" (1979: 921). Correlatively, Friedrich Nietzsche - exerting a major influence over Greve/Grove[2] - muses in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): "Little by little it has become clear to me that every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography" (quoted in Olney 1980: 4-5). Hence, reading a person's complete ouvre or private philosophy can produce biographical insights; depending on our own decoding activities, especially 'the other work' - that body of texts not marked as life-writings - may yield new information about its writer.

FPG's primary mode of existence - the unending impersonations or identity-adoptions that are reflected in his ouvre - seems to call for such a technique of tracing. Quite fittingly, de Man draws our particular attention to an author's inevitable masquerade: "Prosopopeia," he argues, "is the trope of autobiography, [which] deals with the giving and taking away of faces." The trope, he specifies, means "to confer a mask or a face (prosopon)" (Ibid: 926). De Man's notion of the autobiographical project as play of various representations of self can help us assessing FPG's biography. Using Grove's factually questionable but psychologically telling 'autobiographical' searches as a point of departure, we will examine Greve's first German novel in the mirror of his alleged first wife's memoir, before discussing three of Grove's unpublished short stories that present authorial personae in uncanny masquerades.

Grove's 'Autobiographies'

Both A Search for America and In Search of Myself display existential games in a multitude of roles, from promising intellectual and wanderer in Europe, to suddenly impoverished immigrant, and finally a man of letters who elevated himself to the height of literary production and significance in Canada. Both searches stress their author's obsession with appearance, with clothing and effect through role-play and self-stylization; behind all these surfaces, however, Grove is paradoxically absent, particularly in his "disappointingly empty book" (Stobie 1973: 179), In Search of Myself. How well aware Grove was of his own absence is expressed through a fascinating analogy: "like the face of Europe," he states, "my memory is a palimpsest on which writing has overlaid writing" (ISM 147). In a gesture that could be understood as central to Grove, he illuminates his technique of self-writing - or defacement - when he equates his experience with European physiognomy to an awareness of its historical as well as of his own transformation; for his memory is equated with a repeatedly manipulated series of faces through and as the act of writing. This layering act of self-construction is promoted by his constant masquerade: "As a process of personal palimpsest," Lloyd Davis notes in his examination of the English Renaissance, "disguise establishes ordinal and temporal hierarchies among primary, secondary, and possibly more personae" (Davis 1993: 10).[3]

"Persona," according to one etymological theory now disputed, was originally the Latin word for the mask in the classical theatre; as the mask also "acted as a mini-megaphone, amplifying the actor's voice through the carved mouth hole" (Scobie 1991: 183), the character was put before the audience primarily 'through sound', i.e. per-sona. In psychological terms, C.G. Jung defines a persona as "a mask that simulates individuality" and as a kind of screen for its employer's psyche to the world, thus serving to protect the 'true' nature of a human being (1972: 45ff; my translation). FPG's texts, as shall be outlined in some detail now, present personae both as protecting masks and as playful results of exchanging multiple disguises in a process of personal palimpsest.

The authorial persona Phil Branden is visibly subject of and to such disguises in FPG's complementary text of life-writing, A Search for America. "Disguise lies everywhere in this book," W.H. New reasons; "it shapes themes and [...] helps reveal truths about desire, ambition, and behaviour" (New 1991: 462). In fact, when Phil mentions his father's "lifetime in disguise" at the very beginning, remembers his own impersonation of an Englishman[4] or refers repeatedly to "the impenetrable mask of my face" and the need to keep it intact (ASA 11-27), disguise is inaugurated as a major motif of structural importance. Its "psychology of behaviour" establishes the most important "connection between author and character" (New 1991: 463). Although such a psychological connection may urge us to penetrate the character/author's disguise, it simultaneously makes us look beyond the mask's production in the text at our own reception of it (cf. Irmscher 1992: 37).

 Our reception of Phil Branden's disguise is characterized by an awareness of the theatricality of both his and Phil Grove's existence. Their disguises reflect what Davis (1993: 4) calls "a calculated effort by a character to resolve problems or realize goals through manipulating identity in certain situations." The repeated efforts of either 'Phil' thus indicate that Branden's - or Grove's - identity is an effect of the play of differences between, or among, one's various selves; correlatively, Davis would argue that "once a disguise has been donned, its wearer can never simply take it off, either to return to an original self or to attain an ultimate one" (Ibid: 6). Thus, Branden's employment of disguise as both camouflage and projection points at the author's self-representation and playful acting-out of roles; through his persona, Grove not only draws attention to the mechanics of disguise, but also fosters the unmasking gaze of his audience. Although author and persona are anything but identical, their relatedness through the psychology of behaviour makes the fictional autobiographer, Branden, reveal a lot about the autobiographical fictioneer, Grove.

Greve's Self-Portrait and Elsa's Analysis

The prototype of FPG's persona, however, is created much earlier - in the figure of Friedrich Karl Reelen in Felix Paul Greve's first novel, Fanny Essler (1905; FE I+II). Equipped with everything Greve, the German author, believed or wished himself to be, Reelen is introduced towards the end by the novel's unfortunate heroine as "a new phenomenon: a strikingly tall and slim, strikingly blond, strikingly elegant young man of about 30" (FE II: 134). Fanny, having failed on the platform of the theatre, becomes his lover and further characterizes her new prince as a "completely enigmatic person" (FE II: 147). While he poses as a man of supposed wealth and indisputable intellect, and directs her life, intent on transforming her into an image of his liking, she notices the cool and calculating performance of his character; her analytic gaze puts the stress on the surface of the author's persona: "His face had been a fixed mask; the eyes were like those of a fish" (FE II: 179).

"Classical theatre used the mask both to conceal identity and to express character," Stephen Scobie reminds us. "Actor and character coexisted as each other's doubles" (1991: 21). In Fanny Essler, Reelen is the character of the actor-writer Greve; as major mirror image, his persona helps transcend Greve's concept of artistic self-fashioning in turn-of-the-century Germany, illustrates the integration of aesthetic and decadent stances into the author's lifestyle. For Felix Greve had temporarily internalized, by translating and writing about Oscar Wilde, the central credo of 'art creates life'; he had become a dandy who, through the need to construct a social biography, was existing in endless poses only.[5]

Whereas this mimicry contributed to the model that E.D. Blodgett names "perpetual self-metamorphosis" (1982: 128), Nietzsche likewise affected Greve[6] through the promotion of a dispassionate but will-oriented superhuman being and of a quest for self-elevation that demanded further masks. His discussion of the need for masks in Beyond Good and Evil reads almost as if specifically designed for Greve/Grove's own justification: "Every profound spirit is in need of a mask: even more so, around every profound spirit a mask keeps growing, thanks to the incessantly mistaken, that is, shallow interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life that he produces" (1994: 52; my translation). In Nietzsche's understanding, then, personae are a must for every intellectually gifted individual; it is the constant play of masks that projects, parodoxically, something of an 'essence' on the many faces donned.

The result, the figure-in-the-making, is a Felix Paul Greve who experiments with himself on the stage of life as well as in his fiction, where he creates his prototypal persona Friedrich Karl Reelen. Embodying "the notion of character as theme and actant" (Blodgett 1982: 146), this figure also represents "a cold gaze [that] the author turns on himself" (Riley and Spettigue, Introduction, FE I: 8). Greve's self-portrait is in fact not only detached, but strikingly accurate, as has become evident through the "fascinating and sensational memoir" (DeVore 1983: 78) of the woman who was both model and material for Greve's Fanny Essler - Else Endell, later known as Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her autobiography - sent to her friend Djuna Barnes in the form of many disrupted letters[7] and titled Baroness Elsa (1992; BE) - devotes large sections to a figure called "Mr. Felix," Elsa's "first potent mate" (BE 61). Written with unusual transparency, there emerges from Baroness Elsa the blueprint of the versions and personae of Greve/Grove that are addressed here. With astute analytical powers, Elsa characterizes this complex figure of protean role-playing and strong narcissistic disposition: Mr. Felix - "a man who liked to love only himself" - "was strictly conventional - as he was also anxious to appear before the world - supposedly to hold a mask before his true face - for discretion's sake - to repulse public comment - but that mask was his face" (BE 109; Elsa's emphasis).              

Man and mask, figure and its double, have here become one; but behind the façade, as Elsa speculates, is maybe nothing more than vacancy, or absence. She diagnoses, in one of her letters, "F.P.G.'s [sic] secret subconscious envy of all truly creative artists" (BE 216) at the root of his incessant literary self-creations. This lack of originality necessitates compensatory acts and thus turns into both motivation and driving force behind FPG's masquerade as an autobiographical enterprise. Felix's pose - as described by Elsa - mirrors that of Reelen and foreshadows that of Branden. Thus, FPG's treatment of self in and as literature in the European Prelude proves formative for his Canadian way of being and writing. The model persona born in the Old World is simply transferred to and further cultivated, translated, in the New World - a model that places the role, the mere surface, in lieu of a 'real' (or more essential) self.

Unpublished Short Stories, or: Additional Autobiography

The autobiographically speaking personae that are prominent in Grove's published material can also be found in his unpublished pieces. In fact, some of the undated short stories that are extant in the University of Manitoba Special Archives and Collections[8] even add new facets to the typically Grovian motif of changing identity. The story titled "Camouflage," for instance, has an intricate plot which centers around three British special agents that transform into three high-ranking German soldiers during the Second World War. The metamorphoses of Marshal into Hauptmann Oberbauer, Arthur Hopkins into Leutnant Zabern, and Bill Forrest into the famous deaf-and-dumb "Luftzeug Fuehrer" [sic] pilot Meyer are meticulously acted out on the levels of clothing, language, and appropriated biographical background.

The story's guiding theme - that of variable appearance in the face of the Other - is introduced in a London headquarters where all young women employed wear the same dress. When the nameless chief dismisses his secretary - who had just quipped to Marshal, "We have no names here" - and invites the three agents into his office, the author comments: "A mask seemed to fall from the face of the man" ("Camouflage" 3). Now showing his real intentions, the chief can instruct his agents on their latest orders: they are to impersonate three German spies that have been captured recently. Rehearsing their dangerous camouflages, it is particularly the figure of Marshal who personifies the intricate play of surfaces, or the labyrinthine diffusion of identity. For Marshal is the only one of the three men who engages in a double disguise. First, he impersonates "the latest German prisoner" (Ibid: 7) named Kobus, speaks English imperfectly with the imprisoned Oberbauer and purports to be plotting an escape with him; this allows Marshal, alias Kobus, to study Oberbauer thoroughly. The cunning first disguise as Kobus is instrumental in perfecting the second one as Oberbauer, which in turn is instrumental in bringing the mission to a successful close.

Their mission is to spot out and subsequently destroy a disguised German underground air-dome in a French forest. When they arrive there, masqueraded as German soldiers, it is also Marshal, alias Oberbauer, who stands out. He senses the suspicion of their host, Colonel Ebers, and quickly ventures forward by saying, "with the greatest nonchalance": "'Oh yes [...] I had been in England before the war, you know; I've been in Canada, too. I've never been spotted. My English is perfect; [...] I've always been able to fool the English'" (Ibid: 16). The camouflaged men succeed, thanks to the clever performance of Marshal who transgresses the borders of nationality as well as of language and points towards his creator, FPG. His reference to Canada and to never having been spotted - that is, in his 'true' identity - could easily be taken as uttered directly by the author. For Grove, in an autobiographical essay titled "Rebels All: Of the Interpretation of Individual Life" and never intended for publication,[9] refers to having written "under names assumed for the purpose" and adds that "nobody will ever trace them to me" ("Rebels All" 69).

Grove's maybe most conspicuous description of his persona occurs immediately after the three agents have been catapulted into the air and thus escaped from the secret German base which they will successfully bomb the next day. "Meyer, now Forrest again, levelled off, with his marvellous sense of balance, [...] Zabern, becoming Hopkins again, took a deep breath; but Marshal sat with a sardonic smile on his face" (Ibid: 17). Why is the third figure not described in analogy to the other two - who both revert from their performed identity as German spies to their 'original' identity as British agents - but immediately referred to by his English name and shown with a 'sardonic smile'? If a step of re-transformation is missing and instead this figure is represented with a bitterly mocking or cynical look on his face, what can this tell us about his authenticity? Is all this maybe indicative that besides impersonating Kobus or Oberbauer, 'being' the British agent Marshal is yet another role performed, another alias or face put on? The story's opening would support this possibility as well as reading "Camouflage" as partly autobiographical confession. Marshal is stressed as a figure of protean adaptability whose origin is questioned from the very start: "nobody had even heard his first name [and he had,] before the war, spent two years in Germany" (Ibid: 1).

Marshal alias Oberbauer clearly carries traits that reflect the past and aspirations of the story's author. That may be one explanation why Grove could not resist granting Marshal a "reinstatement in his quarter," a medal "as well as a handshake with His Majesty, the King" ("Camouflage" 17) in Britain. Compensating for the author's unfulfilled wishes, his literary projection thus receives the public recognition and acceptance FPG kept yearning for.

"Blackmail," another Grove manuscript, also deals with the mysteries of a protagonist's past. It establishes an even more striking list of characteristics that connect the author and his literary creation, Dr. Ballinger. As a capacity in his field, he has just been promoted for having introduced the mirror as essential element of dealing with the mentally deranged. Ballinger is first presented to us in a meditative mood, facing his basic instrument. "But this very moment," Grove writes, "the mirror showed him, not a patient, but himself." Quite fittingly, he is characterized as a vain man who "could not help criticising his own appearance [and] was not entirely pleased with himself" ("Blackmail" 1). This twisted motif of Narcissus echoes Grove's own numerous references, e.g. in In Search of Myself or in the letters to his wife Catherine during the lecture tours, to feeling inadequately dressed or often underrepresented;[10] but the motif here also problematizes the transcending of identity. For Ballinger's act of looking into the mirror - to him, usually, an instrument for treating others - redirects his therapeutic activities by turning himself into the object of treatment, or of a speculative gaze.[11]

Vis-à-vis the mirror, the doctor ponders the grounding of his existence - and in doing so becomes Grove's mirror image; in "Rebels All," the author intones one of the refrains of his entire ouvre - "we are what we are and cannot help it" - and then concludes with an enigmatic remark: "the only thing which is merely fiction in our conception of ourselves is precisely this that we assume an independent and spontaneous 'we,' which is as little of our making as the image we see in the mirror is of the mirror's making or assembling" ("Rebels All" 81). Implicitly referring to himself in the singular form, Grove seems to be reasoning that the possibility of shaping our identity is but an illusion; rather, he seems to say, our identity is subject to external forces, or to fate. This argumentation, however, is probably one of Grove's many deliberate misleadings, for his lifetime in disguise clearly illustrated his belief in - and, to a limited extent, the possibility of - self-creation.

And the same tension between individual image-creation and external perspectives on this image is thematized by "Blackmail." The story's gradual illumination of a character's past and psyche reflects the author's internal set-up: Ballinger "had a phenomenal memory" and "his mind retained; but it did not discover. Yet all his instructors, whose echo he had been, were deceived."[12] Though only one person, a hunched surgeon with exceptionally skilled fingers, had recognized this and told him right out: "Ballinger, I believe, in spite of your apparent success, you're a fraud", correlatively, Grove comments on a private moment of his exhausted protagonist: "Again the mask fell from his face."[13] In public, though, the doctor managed to impress everybody else, partly because he could read "three or four modern languages perfectly"[14] and was always "the best-dressed young man";[15] he was, at age 45, thought of as "the 'coming man'" ("Blackmail" 2; 9; 2-4).[16]

          Grove has Ballinger realize the ambitions of a coming man as well as struggle with a lapse from the past. For "the whole forgotten business" suddenly comes back to the doctor: John Hackwriter, the illegitimate offspring of his short-lived and secret union with a village beauty, Julia Hackwriter, has been submitted to his hospital. Ballinger had broken his marriage vow and abandoned the pregnant girl, afterwards married the daughter of a senator, and now fears disclosure of his "guilt" when Julia's name appears on the visitors' list. Forced to realize "that his whole career ha[s] been built on pretensions," his sense of anticipation increases when Julia herself is hospitalized. Already expecting to be unveiled, he learns, with "a sigh of relief," that she suffers from complete amnesia, and that their son John is an epileptic (Ibid: 12; 21; 26).

Ballinger's feeling of triumph, however, ends abruptly when Julia's husband, the alcoholic Henry O'Brien, shows up unexpectedly. In full knowledge of the past, O'Brien explains how he had saved Julia by marrying her and saying the child was his: "'She believed what I said [...]. I never touched her. She was another's. She married me because she thought I was you...'". Not demanding money explicitly, O'Brien wants Ballinger to 'acknowledge responsibility' for the deceived woman's deranged state, wants to give him a chance "to atone." Understanding the purpose of the talk, the doctor promises regular payment on the grounds that Henry "will discontinue" his visits. Julia is taken home with O'Brien, and the doctor is "himself again as he had been before the menace had entered his life, deliberate, cool, courteous, urbane, but decided" (Ibid: 28f; 31).

With this temporary threat behind him, Ballinger can go on pursuing his career. He again forgets the past, becomes "a very successful administrator of the institution at the head of which he was placed," and finally retires to take his father-in-law's "place in the senate" - a step that conveniently coincides with Julia's passing away. In his position as senator in the capital, Ballinger pays O'Brien a final and generous sum of five thousand dollars, "because he had long since come to the conclusion that he was paying blackmail" (Ibid: 31; 32).

In "Blackmail," then, Grove and his persona have a strong psychological connection; frauds both, they appear as somebody they are not and hide their past through life-long masquerades. The parallels are striking indeed: both figures have abandoned a woman, both must be afraid of having their origins/deeds exposed, and both aspire to higher positions through their ability to deceive, equipped with very similar characteristics. In "Blackmail," Dr. Ballinger experiences the trauma that FPG might have been expecting throughout his life - or eventually did suffer: having his 'true' identity discovered and therefore having to pay somebody for not disclosing this information.

There are many more features in Grove's short story that render its use of character appearance and portrayal an explicit statement about the author's life. There is, for example, an echo from the first pages of A Search of America in Henry O'Brien's nostalgic words, "You should have seen me in my fine clothes... I am an M.A., of Dublin University, doctor";[17] there is a possible parallel in Grove's choice of rural Manitoba as new home (see, e.g., Over Prairie Trails, 1922) and Ballinger's "glimpses of a simpler life on the prairies"; there is an overt resemblance between the young doctor's "appear[ing] as the fairy prince to the young girl" and Greve's portrait of himself and his partner Else in the figures of Reelen and Fanny; and there is a possible hint to Grove's Canadian marriage with Catherine Wiens in his portrait of Ruth Ballinger as Juno - the goddess representative of women and protrectress of marriage - "in appearance and deportment" ("Blackmail" 28; 22; 13; 11).

          "Blackmail" may contain other parallels of which we are not yet aware. But Grove's technique of attributing his own disguise and very characteristical facets to his persona Ballinger is visible enough to convey biographical information. The author's projections may make us wonder whether he knew of his former partner Else Endell's writing career among New York Dadaists,[18] whether he was afraid of her suddenly showing up in Canada, and whether he invested Julia Hackwriter (note the odd conflation of charged names!) with a forgetfulness he would have wanted in Else. Whereas the later Baroness represented the biggest potential threat from his past - and her autobiography, had it been published during his lifetime, would have had a shattering effect - Grove not only silenced her literary alter ego through amnesia,[19] but granted his own persona exactly what he himself was pursuing: As his contemporary and friend, Wilfred Eggleston, remembers, Grove was really wondering "about a senatorship. Or a post in the diplomatic service" (Eggleston 1974: 109).

"Alien Enemy," the last of three unpublished short stories under discussion here, is best introducted by a longer quotation:

Appropriately, his name was Karl Schneider; appropriately, for by trade he was a man's tailor. When he had immigrated into the United States, coming from Hamburg, he had been a young man. It cannot be said that he had had an easy time of it in America, working first in New York, then in Chicago; but he was determined not to give in; and in 1910, having been in the country ten years, he took out his papers and became a citizen of the New World.

          In doing so, he deliberately changed his name into that of Charles Snyder, trying to disguise the fact that he was not native-born. He did not succeed, for, though his English was fluent and even racy, his accent betrayed him the moment he opened his mouth. He could not understand it.

          He was not happy, had never been happy since he had arrived on this continent. It was not in his nature to be happy. Nor could he ever reconcile himself to the fact that he lived on alien soil. At bottom, he never ceased despising America. It was not the race conceit so common today; for when he had left Germany, he had despised its whole atmosphere. It was his inborn disposition to belittle his surroundings. ("Alien Enemy" 1)

 With an overtness that eventually surpasses that of the more revealing passages of A Search for America, these first three paragraphs of "Alien Enemy" present a persona and its author in almost complete congruence with regards to crucial aspects: both spent their youth in Hamburg and emigrated to the United States first; both adopted another name with only minimal phonemic variation from the original (Schneider to Snyder, and Greve to Grove[20]) and thus assumed a new identity in the New World; both figures display linguistic abilities but still carry sufficient accent to betray their non-native heritage;[21] both become "a citizen of the New World" after about a decade of living in it;[22] and both share the characteristical trait of being overly critical and therefore of belittling their environments. In short, this opening passage renders - with just a few minor variations - an astonishingly accurate description of major details of Greve's transfer from Old to New World, of his mental and emotional state in North America. Here, the author's mask hides next to nothing and can be taken at face value.

          Of course, there appear also major discrepancies between persona and author - most notably Snyder's profession or the implied date of 1900 as year of arrival in America. If one looks at Grove's practise of usually adding roughly ten or twenty years to major events in his life, except for seven years to his age (cf. Divay 2000), though, one discrepancy is soon dissipated in light of his actual immigration in 1909. And if one further looks at the profession of Karl Schneider (with the telling German name for "tailor") - the man who fabricates dresses and costumes, who helps people fashion their appearance - and compares this to Grove's life-long practise of endlessly designing that kind of textual garment which would suit the contours of his self-projections, then another discrepancy vanishes. Now both figures appear as a "man's tailor" by trade - the one working with real cloth, the other with stories that patch an autobiographical text of multiple overlapping seams.

          The congruences between author and persona on the first two pages of "Alien Enemy" are striking; all the more so, since seeming differences turn out to be further parallels in the light of recent rereadings of FPG's autobiographies. For example, Snyder's "working first in New York, then in Chicago" is probably closer to Grove's real experience than his claim in A Search for America of having worked in Toronto as a waiter before going to Pittsburgh and travelling the U.S. extensively; his private library, extant in the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections, holds a "much worn 1909 Baedeker travel guide to the United States [that has] numerous markings in the New York pages" (Divay 2000: 13); no proof could be found yet that FPG ever did work in Toronto, and maybe he simply passed through on the way to New York City. But in America, Snyder, like Grove, suffers - the one from loneliness, the other rather for want of loneliness, as he had apparently grown tired of his companion Elsa;[23] his "discontent grew such that he began playing with the idea of once more changing his country" ("Alien Enemy" 2). Like the author, the persona moves to Canada, attracted by the "economic prospect" to be found in the "growing" city of Winnipeg.[24] If FPG also shared - though never explicity acknowledged - his protagonist's longing for a lost home, for "the country of his birth [and] the parks on the banks of the Alster" (Ibid: 2f) at Hamburg, can only be surmised.

          With Snyder's nostalgia becoming increasingly obsessive, the congruence of external aspects in the lives of persona and author fades away. At first sight, Snyder's taking a passage back home to Germany in 1932 - and the subsequent arranging of his life "around a social centre, the beer-cellar," his "visiting all the haunts of his boyhood, revelling in memories" in Hamburg, and his talking "of one thing only, boastfully, of America's greatness" (Ibid: 6f) - is a striking contradiction to the actual life led, or endured, by one FPG in North America.[25] But read as another uncanny projection of an alternative life-sketch, this plot of departure could well portray some of the motivations or emotions possibly occupying the German-Canadian author. In June 1929, for example, just briefly after his triumphant nationwide lecture tours but already disillusioned over poor booksales and related financial troubles, Grove wrote to his friend Watson Kirkconnell: "It seems that Canada has nothing to offer me.[...] We are canvassing possibilities in New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Switzerland - and the pointer of the balance seems to be attracted by the last-named country - though it is too soon to say" (quoted in Pacey 1976: 279). FPG, not just a little motivated by hurting pride, was pondering the idea of leaving Canada for a better suited place; his creation Snyder did seize the chance to undergo such "a last metamorphosis" ("Alien Enemy" 6).

          Even if Grove was tempted by a possible final transformation, the further plot of "Alien Enemy" provides a potential answer as to why he never did venture out again and leave Canada: Karl Schneider, expected by "the police [to] give up [his] United-States citizenship," refuses to do so and, in one of his megalomaniac attacks, threatens to "cable the Washington State Department" and to make them "send a warship to take [him] off." His boastful insistence on being an American citizen is reported by "one of [his] cronies who had joined the Nazy party" - apparently without a chance to pay blackmail. Shot by a firing squad for having "committed treason in talking as he had done," Karl is afterwards "buried in a nameless grave" (Ibid: 8). The grim ending of "Alien Enemy" thus makes the returnee pay with his life for his lack of modesty, his fabricating lies, and his being out of touch with reality - character traits that were also shared by the equally singular and isolated FPG. Whereas the persona is killed, the author Grove 'experienced' the emigrant's dangerous movement of going back home through the safe distance of writing. In this act of presumably cathartic compensation, he thus translated an odd sense of nostalgia combined with fear into Schneider's return and passing away unnoticed. 'At home' in Canada, the fate of being forgotten and of leaving no traces behind would certainly not be that of FPG.

          As with "Camouflage" and "Blackmail," one may wonder why "Alien Enemy" was never published. No doubt that the obvious flaws (a mostly odd style, stilted language, insufficient character dimension) of these pieces are one good reason for reluctance towards publication. Nor could any indication be found that Grove ever submitted any of these stories. Was he concerned that, beyond their wanting quality, these stories might be too dangerous because of possible self-exposure? They must have been written during the period of composing his official autobiography, In Search of Myself (stopped in 1939), but are significantly less cautious in terms of autobiographical revelations. All three pieces present figures of disguises that are undeniably unhiding facets of their author. Since the presumably most telling (and also older) manuscript of "Felix Powell's Career" was always held back during FPG's lifetime and afterwards, as one is made to believe, destroyed by his wife (cf. Divay 1995: 124ff), these short stories represent crucial material indeed: they read like a playground, a textual arena in which the author could test himself in the guises and in the mirrors of his personae, rehearse yet a few more alternative existences and come out with yet a few more faces.

Coda: Masquerading as Palimpsestic Self-Constitution

The figurative (and possibly literal) donning of a face or a mask, as de Man tells us, characterizes autobiography. This topos also characterizes FPG, the man who was always seeking an identity in his gloss of literary self-references. De Man further urges us to contemplate "that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture" (1979: 920). FPG's employment of personae - in the service of a portraiture that obsessively points back at its creator - can in fact be seen as an essential part of his masquerade-as-autobiography. Not only his official memoirs, poignantly titled as searches, but also many of his other writings revelled, in this sense, in a layering of faces and disguises as a process of personal palimpsest - a palimpsest through which FPG kept writing, reinventing, translating himself. It is worth comparing this technique to Ezra Pound's comments on the use of the mask or persona "as an image for what the poet does in the act of writing" (Scobie 1991: 21):

In the 'search for oneself,' in the search for 'sincere self-expression,' one gropes, one finds some seeming verity. One says 'I am' this, that, or the other, and with the words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.

I began this search for the real in a book called Personae, casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self in each poem. I continued in a long series of translations, which were but more elaborate masks.[26]

 Somewhat different from Grove, Pound, the poet, is primarily interested in a literary transposition - but not so much a personal construction - of self and a further development of linguistic potential by applying the mask of another person.[27] Similar to the process described by Pound, though, FPG's own act of writing his multi-volumed life-story is an endless variation of faces donned. Translating himself into text through more elaborate masks does not effect increasing distance from a self, but rather constitutes this - through an unending succession of equally important variants - in the process. In this discourse, all that matters is the writing out of and from behind the masks that assume the authentic face of autobiography. Truly, the case of Greve, Grove, and his many other personae stands out as a graphic one: FPG's masquerades were his signature.