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

Implications for Greve/Grove's obscure years, August 1909 to December 1912

      Let us have a closer look at Grove's precise words about his passage in his 1927 "autobiography" in light of the new documentary evidence. Book I, ominously entitled The Descent, opens like this:

"I was twenty-four years old, when one day in the month of July I took passage from Liverpool to Montreal. I was not British-born..." (ASA, 1)

      Grove then, for the next eight pages, spins his yarn about his Anglo-Swedish family background, which, here implicitly and explicitly in 1946, he has directly appropriated from former friend-turned-foe, Herman (sic!) C. Kilian, whose Scottish mother Jane really was the daughter of Judge Andrew R. Rutherford.[26] Introduced with: "I must explain what induced me to go to America" (ASA, 1), Grove dwells epically on his cosmopolitan upbringing, complete with frequenting literary circles surrounding Gide and Stefan George, university studies (in "Paris, Bonn, Oxford, Rome"), and exotic voyages all over the globe. This is meant to cement the impression of an immense fortune, which his "father" managed to dissipate in rather nebulous ways, so that Phil Branden's social disgrace and sudden departure will appear convincing. The worldly upbringing also serves nicely to justify both his phenomenal ease with languages, and the strange absence of his alleged mother-tongue Swedish from his language arsenal. Then the narrator returns to the topic of the beginning, and the purpose of Chapter 1, I Emigrate:

"While dozing in my berth [of the "through train" from Malmø to Ostende, gd], I determined upon a gamble. Not for a moment did it occur to me to go anywhere except into an Anglo-Saxon country ... -- Canada, the United States, South Africa, or Australia -- on one of these four my choice had to fall. What I resolved to do, was this. I intended to step in at a Cook's tourist-office in London -- on the Strand, if I remember right -- and to ask for the next boat which I stood any chance of catching, either at Liverpool or at Southampton, no matter where she might be bound. As it happened, when, a day or two later, I carried this idea out, a White-Star liner was to weigh anchor next day, going from Liverpool to Montreal. The boat train was to leave Euston station the same night at ten o'clock. I bought my passage -- second cabin -- received a third-class railway ticket free of charge, and had burnt my bridges. Thus I became an immigrant into the western hemisphere.
As I have said, I was twenty-four years old at the time; it was late in July.
While we were sailing up the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, I naturally pondered a good deal on my venture..." (ASA, 9-10)

      Apart from harping here at his incorrect age, already introduced in the opening sentence of his narrative, and giving it added emphasis by placing it in a paragraph all by itself -- we have kept this visual prominence in the quotation, -- he compensates for the revealing lie with the true precision, that these events take place in "late" July.

      The second chapter, I Land on American Soil, describes the hero's first impressions on the new continent: the immigration hall in Montreal, the custom's officer who cannot help but being impressed by his elegance and man-of-the-world manners, etc. Here follows a vivid and, perhaps, fairly accurate description of Phil/Grove himself:

"I stood there, in front of my fourteen pieces of luggage, with half a dozen overcoats on my arm and a camera in my hand ... I was six feet three inches tall... My hair was...of this ancestral Scandinavian fairness which makes me to this day appear a much younger man than I am. My eyes were blue... and ... [I] had been trained from [my] earliest days never to betray an emotion, to keep [my] mask intact." (ASA, 14)

      This is one of the many "portraits" FPG excels in painting with words. The most striking was perhaps the centre piece of the Fanny Essler poetry triptych which he had published in Die Freistatt in close collaboration with Else in 1904/5. It was entitled "Ein Porträt: Drei Sonette," and addressed in turn his hands (capable of brutality), his eyes (blue and cold), and his mouth (prone to lying) in perfect adaptation of the Petrarchan tradition.[27] In our present example, Grove has cleverly planted a subtle justification for his young looks and his alleged Swedish background. And a few pages later, he proudly reports, like an echo of the middle sonnet of long ago, that he had been "famous among [his] former friends" for the annihilating power of an icy gaze from his eyes (ASA, 21).

      He declines an offer to take a cab to Montreal, since he plans to take the "Toronto Express" at midnight, and feels the need to explain his choice of destination: "I must, at the risk of seeming tedious, point out the significance of this answer" (ASA, 15). After a lengthy digression about the great cities of the world, and how he was not yet interested in Montreal, here is what he offers as the "explanation" he promised to the patient reader:

"Why I had chosen Toronto as the place to make my first stand in, I do not remember; no doubt I had some reason which seemed compelling at the time"(ASA, 17).

      This vagueness coupled with a typical instance of selectively failing memory arouses the suspicion that he did not take up residence in Toronto at all. The waiter episode there, with its transparent intertextual ties to Dante's Inferno in La Divina Commedia,[28] was without any doubt based on first-hand experience. But it could well have happened anywhere, including New York, which, for a variety of reasons, is the more likely location. It may also have been overlaid with yet unknown waitering jobs in Germany, very much in analogy to Thomas Mann's impostor hero Felix Krull who bears more than just a fleeting resemblance to Greve/Grove.[29] According to both autobiographies, it is only after he quit his job in Toronto that Grove became -- quite innocently, of course! -- entangled in gambling scams, and book dealing frauds in New York. I believe that Greve/Grove's itinerary led him from Montreal straight to New York City, via Toronto and perhaps Buffalo. The presence of a much worn 1909 Baedeker travel guide to the United States in Grove's library has contributed to this conviction. Grove admits that, "while crossing the Atlantic," he had studied just such a "guide-book for tourists on the American continent" (ASA, 17). The copy in his library has numerous markings in the New York pages, including underlining of several German book dealers.

      As to his luggage, it may have contained a fair number of those rare and well-kept books in "beautiful bindings" he reports peddling in New York to antiquarians on 16th Street (ASA 161). They may have proven a more lucrative investment than his elegant wardrobe "made by one of the most exclusive tailors in London" which he also sold at the time (ASA, 160). Grove's library at the University of Manitoba is lacking, for example, any of Gide's autographed books mentioned in his correspondence with Greve, while rows of expensive English Harris tweeds are reported in reminiscences of impressed Canadian contemporaries like Marcus Adeney.[30] Whether they were made in London is unknown. Since Greve visited H. G. Wells several times, it is possible that he replenished his wardrobe there. While still affecting his dandy airs in Munich, he employs a tailor in Dresden where there apparently was an English colony in which Kilian's parents resided (ASA, 11/12).

      I asked Bruce Thomson why Greve would have taken the C.P.R. train to Toronto at midnight, when he was free to step ashore at seven o'clock in the morning. He believes, that since Greve got a free third-class train ride from London to Liverpool thrown in with the purchase of his Megantic ticket, a corresponding deal from Montreal to Toronto may have been part and parcel of the bargain, much like present-day travel offers tend to come in compact packages. This may explain the forgotten, compelling reason, why Greve "chose" to go to or via Toronto out of the spur of the moment.[31]

      The passage documents held two big surprises. One was the "late July" crossing, since that particular detail in A Search for America was always dismissed as a "red herring," a piece of information deliberately planted to mislead the reader. Else's upset note to Kippenberg had helped pin Greve's "suicide" to mid-September 1909. A year ago, I had still given her the benefit of a doubt that she had composed and sent it in genuine emotional distress. Now, the likelihood of being upset two months after her lover's departure is next to nil. If she was not conniving with Greve from the beginning, she must have known by then that he was alive and well. Her proneness to send begging, extortion, or blackmail letters to all sorts of old and new acquaintances, including the Freytag-Loringhoven family, former lover Ernst Hardt, and ex-husband August Endell, before and after she returned to Berlin in 1923, is well attested.[32] Her accusatory note to Kippenberg in 1909 did have the desired effect: he offered her support, and like him, she may have taken other publishers to task to pave her way to Greve in Pittsburgh. She sailed in June 1910 from Rotterdam to New York.[33]

      The other surprise in the passage documents was the name "Grove." I believe that Greve adopted his new name along with his new identity when he crossed the Canadian border in December 1912. Mary Grove emphatically confirms that this is quite in line with venerable Grove-family assumptions. Two anecdotes have been in circulation for a long time. They can be found in the Pacey Papers at the Canadian National Archives, the Spettigue Collections, and the 1977 Simcoe Symposium audio-tapes at the University of Manitoba; in all three instances, they are told by Leonard Grove. One concerns "royal treatment" in Sweden where people believed that Grove was a nobleman. This mistake must have been based on the fact that the title "Count" in Swedish is identical to FPG's real name "Greve."[34] Greve traveled in Sweden at least once, as his travel essay "Reise in Schweden" attests.[35]

      The second anecdote has more immediate relevance in our context. Apparently, Grove's identity papers were questioned by U.S. officials when he crossed the  border. The bone of contention was the middle vowel in his family name, and what kind of letter it might represent: was it an "a", or an "e", or an "o"? Leonard Grove wrote to Professor Spettigue:"...father explained that [the officer] had simply misread the "o" for an "a." It seems that Grove's name on his passport, which he had not to relinquish before he became a Canadian citizen in 1921, held an inherent and not entirely inconvenient ambiguity. It might have been filled out in the arcane Sütterlin script, as many documents were at the time. It is not easy to decipher, and an "e" as in "Greve" would have looked very much like an "u," an "n," an "o," or even an "a." When Greve had his name recorded on the Megantic's second cabin passenger list, he had not necessarily tampered with his passport. His name could have been naturally misread, and all Greve had to do, was to keep silent about its faulty form. In fact, this encouraging experience with British officials may have inspired him to exploit the ambiguity of his papers along the same lines when he decided to settle permanently as Grove in Canada.

Pittsburgh, 1910:

      Spettigue reports that Else told New York immigration officers in June 1910, that she was joining her "Brother-in-law, T. R. Greve" at his domicile on 57, 4th Avenue in Pittsburgh. He shrewdly observes, that a bar from the "F" reappears in the "P" in this artful transformation of Greve's initials (1992, 24). What is perhaps more noteworthy is that the proper last name has remained untouched. This and the fact that a certain "F. P. Greve" is listed in Pittsburgh's 1910 directory confirms that he had not yet changed his name. The business address is 524, 5th Avenue, on the 4th floor, an abbreviated designation indicates that he is "manager" there, and his home address refers summarily to the hilly suburb "Carrick" in the southeast. The downtown office location has always been the city's financial district, making Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh's Wall Street. A contemporary map of the area suggests, however, that Greve's business address was fictitious: only odd numbers exist in the 500 block. Then as today, the corresponding even numbers are occupied, straight across, by the monumental Allegheny Court Building and its adjoining prison. Inquiries revealed that no part of this stately judicial complex had ever been rented out for commercial use. Greve may therefore have been briefly employed in an unknown office capacity on the fourth floor, possibly as an inmate. After all, in 1903/4 he boldly headed his prison correspondence with a plain "Bonn, Wilhelmstrasse 19," as if it were a private, and not an institutional address. The Pittsburgh "business" address may have been a facetious imitation of this daring habit. In Grove's Baedeker, the pages for Pittsburgh and Cincinnati (both cities are mentioned in ISM, 175), betray frequent consultation, though they are not annotated like the New York section. It is curious to see that Grove, whenever he speaks of the city, invariably uses "Pittsburg." This spelling is strictly applied to the year 1910 only,[36] which is indirect proof that his visits to this town were limited to that particular time, and not, as he would have us believe, twenty years earlier.

Sparta, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, 1910/11:

      From Else's memoirs, it seems that the couple assumed their life on a small Kentucky farm shortly after they were reunited in Pittsburgh. Family anecdotes about Grove driving a truck-load of over-ripe tomatoes to market have circulated for some time, but it is known solely from Else's German poem "Schalk" in her University of Maryland papers that the precise location was near "Sparta, am Eagle Creek." In this poem, Else expands Greve's not exactly flattering picture drawn in the 1904 sonnets into a more complete "portrait" by adding further attributes, including his "heart of stone."

      Sparta is today a rather insignificant little town with less than 200 inhabitants. Though hardly more populous in 1910/11, it was then a market-centre of some importance, boasting two hotels and a direct railroad connection to Louisville in the southwest and Cincinnati in the northeast.[37] The old red brick train depot is still standing, but the windows are boarded up, and no train has stopped there since the early sixties. Similar small towns follow the rails along the Eagle Creek at five-mile intervals. The next one towards Cincinnati is Glencoe, and curiously enough, there is a short-story with the title "Glencoe Oil" extant in Grove's archives. This is just one of many examples where Grove incorporates clever clues to his experiences in his writings.

      There can be no doubt that his first Canadian novel Settlers of the Marsh (1925) was also an attempt to come to terms with the difficult Kentucky year and the end of the couple's relationship. With the depraved Clara Vogel, he set Else an unflattering monument, and in disguise of the virtuous and virginal Niels, he achieved the therapeutic aim of justifying his brutal abandonment of her. The pioneer setting between Lake Manitoba and the Riding Mountain region resembles the Kentucky infra-structure in amazing detail: a railroad is linking small settlements on the way to Winnipeg, roughly 120 km to the southeast -- 80 miles lead from Sparta to Cincinnati in northeasterly direction. The "bluff" where Niels built his stately white range-line house near the meandering Grassy River bears an especially striking resemblance to Sparta, Kentucky, surroundings. Amidst miles an miles of otherwise bare and flat prairie fields, there is some elevation, and it is (relatively) lushly treed.

      When bad Clara goes for city amusement to Winnipeg, which purpose she thinly disguises with pressing dental appointments, we can envision Else escaping from the hated rural isolation near Sparta to Cincinnati. Since German was still widely used before World War I, she was not hampered by her poor command of English after Greve left her, and she was able to fall back on modeling at the flourishing art academy there. In 1993, I checked several German dailies in Cincinnati's Public Library, and was amazed at the extent of cultural activities reflected for the years 1910-1912: there were operas, operettas, variety shows, exhibitions, school competitions, etc., all on a grand scale, and above and beyond the numerous choir group activities of the local Sängervereine. Some anonymous short stories in the weekend magazines dealing with gambling are reminiscent of similar sketches in Grove's autobiographies. It is not improbable that Greve placed "a few articles" [as he planned in ISM, 175] with the German local press, while farming in nearby Kentucky. On his side, Grove mentions visiting his "last remaining sister ... a widow of forty, with two children" for a couple of weeks in Cincinnati (ISM 175).[38] Greve's only sister Henny would have been 33, not 40, had he gone to see her in 1909. This shows that he added the same seven years to her age he most often assigned to his own. If her children were boys, they may well stand for the two sons Grove allegedly had sired in the United States.[39]

A Bonanza Farm in the Dakotas, 1912:

      The Bonanza Farm addressed in both autobiographies has been identified as the Amenia & Sharon Land Company near Fargo in the North Dakota State University archives in March 1996. Grove describes his experiences as a hobo, farm-hand, bookkeeper and coachman on the so-called Mackenzie Farm with inconsistent chronology and in varying detail. In the 1927 account, the episode takes place in 1893/4, but provides a remarkably accurate snapshot of the situation in Amenia in 1912. The rich proprietor and financial genius H. F. Chaffee had perished in the sinking of the White Star Liner Titanic on April 15. The nameless "young owner" was twenty-year old H. L. Chaffee, who, as in Grove's books, was an enthusiastic hunter, and who later was president of the local rifle association. With his equally nameless widowed mother Carrie, who had survived the April catastrophe, he was indeed running the gigantic enterprise. They had competent help in the person of their relative Walter Reed, the "superintendent Nelson" in Grove's stories. Grove has elegantly forewarned his readers against any anachronisms with this blanket explanation in his "Author's Note:"

"This book, during the last thirty-two years, has been written and rewritten eight times, becoming a little shorter every time. That, at last, I picked up courage to release it for publication as it stands, with all the anachronisms of composition which are an unavoidable consequence of such a method of composition, is due entirely to the encouragement of two of my friends, namely A. L. P. [Phelps] and W. K. [Kirkconnell], both of Wesley College, Winnipeg. / Rapid City, Man,./ December, 1926. // F.P.G." (ASA, [vi])

      The unnecessarily detailed information that his book was written in 1894 allows dating its real conception to 1914, according to his own twenty year adding practice. The tramp and hobo episodes at the Bonanza farm are, by the way, a barely veiled homage to Knut Hamsun and his experience at the neighbouring Dalrymple's estate in the 1880s.[40] Apart from "the young owner" being twenty in 1912 rather than in 1893/4, such announced anachronisms include his Ford automobile which his father was one of the first to acquire in 1904; an elaborate telephone system which was only introduced in 1896; railroad lines negotiated by H. F. Chaffee shortly before his death, and a mighty "Twin City" steam tractor (ISM, 238) which was the marvel of the entire region when it arrived from Minneapolis in 1912.[41]

      In the 1946 story, Grove claims that the 1927 experience only "seems to fill a single season" (ISM, 195), but was in fact a symbolic condensation of twenty late summers spent at "what I had called the Mackenzie Farm" (ISM, 219; 196). He defensively insists that "for all essentials, the milieu was identical" with the one described two decades earlier (ISM, 214). Strangely then, that he precisely singles out and dwells on the 1912 season. It stands out in his mind because of unusually heavy rains. The other nineteen harvest times have fallen prey to his conveniently selective memory once again. The year 1912 is now correctly acknowledged as "a landmark in [his] life." Fargo (ISM, 220, 238) and Amenia's neighbour town Casselton (ISM, 243) are now explicitly and entirely accurately mentioned by name,  which, with a remnant from the mythological haziness deliberately applied to the Prairie geography in 1927, results in a stark text-internal contradiction: these cities are close to the state's  southern border, and not "just south of the centre of the state," as declared on ISM, page 219.

      What looks at first glance like "tall tales of the west" in Grove's reminiscences -- the 35-50 square miles of cultivated land, the camps of 100-800 seasonal harvest helpers, the 1000 horses and 5000 sheep, the very number, shape, and capacity of three huge grain elevators at headquarters, the store, the driving stable later used for automobiles, and Amenia's layout -- they all match the historical and factual givens in minute detail. Many of the buildings still stand today, though the Chaffees' stately residence was demolished in 1913.

      There is some suspicion that Greve did not just drift towards the prairies in quite the fashion he pretends. Grove never once mentions Amenia, but Sharon, Connecticut, is couched in a long list of places where he so innocently peddled over-priced encyclopedias and false deluxe editions from New York City. Amenia, N.Y., is just five miles away from Sharon, Conn., and the Chaffee and Reed families are still prominent residents there today. It unlikely that, like the biblical Joseph out of the pit, Grove was chosen from the hobo masses to assume the privileged bookkeeper's position in the office. He may have met the great H. F. Chaffee himself, or some of his relatives in upstate New York, and gone west with a recommendation for this particular post. In the 1946 account, Grove resigns amicably in spite of young Chaffee's urgent invitation to stay. But, like his crooked predecessor Bramley in his book (ISM, 220), he may have been dismissed for some improper transaction. Hiding out in Manitoba for ten years may have been a necessary consequence of whatever prompted his departure from a well-cushioned job, and it was definitely reinforced by constant [and well justified] fears that Else might come after him.

      Whatever the case, Grove's novels The Fruits of the Earth (1933) and The Master of the Mill (1944) owe much to the Bonanza Farm experience: Abe Spalding's grandiose land politics in the first, and the complex growth of an industrial empire in the second are rather transparently based on the Chaffee dynasty who owned and operated the Amenia & Sharon Land Company between 1875 and 1923.

      The recent discoveries presented here have helped mend a few holes in the still lacy fabric of Grove's pre-Canadian biography. They also invite a careful re-evaluation of his stories, which invariably blend fact and fiction more intricately than previously believed. Experience has shown that ironically the events presented in fictional disguise in A Search for America (1927) are far closer to the truth than in the supposedly straightforward autobiography In Search of Myself (1946). This has been demonstrated by comparing the circumstances of FPG's voluntary exile in 1909 with his descriptions, and by unraveling the similarly conflicting Bonanza farm episodes of 1912 in the two versions as well. Because the actual events have proven to match the 1927 narrative to such an amazing extent in both these cases, it may now be asserted that information given in A Search for America is perfectly reliable, as long as the intentionally false time and place coordinates are either ignored, or silently adjusted with the documentary evidence assembled over the last seventy years. While the earlier book has the great advantage of presenting FPG's most important experiences vaguely, but truthfully, In Search of Myself often adds accurate time and place precision, but blurs the focus of the actual events. This suggests that both must be read in conjunction in order to arrive at the truth behind the lies. Devices like condensation, displacement, and other "Verfremdungs"-techniques, which are also operational in dreams, selective lapses in an otherwise fine memory, and text-internal contradictions all serve as excellent guides to the grain of truth buried in a pile of misleading details. Grove may have rightly feared in 1947 that he had disclosed too much in 1927, or, reversely, that his camouflage provided insufficient coverage. However, a simply distorted time frame was enough to keep his true identity secret for twenty-five, and the secret of his passage for fifty years beyond his death.