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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 64 | Spring 2015 Special Section: The Modernist Short Story, and Varia The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove Andrew James Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1569 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2015 ISBN: 978-2-7535-5056-8 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Andrew James, « The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 64 | Spring 2015, Online since 01 March 2017, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/1569 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove 1 The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove Andrew James 1 The twenty-three stories in the original version of Frederick Philip Grove’s Tales from the Margin comprise a cycle: characters recur and the locale is limited to Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta: the Canadian Prairies. This paper will examine how our perception of Grove’s cycle alters when the stories are viewed as tales. This is the label the author preferred. As he explained in his essay “The Novel,” while the short story deals with characters and incidents “excised” from the “social body” (It Needs to Be Said 120), the tale is concerned with the “border-provinces of human life” or life “on the margin.” Because tales belong to the oral tradition, the style of oration and identity of the teller are also important. Chaucer democratized tales by proving that anyone, irrespective of economic class or educational background, could tell a tale so long as it had sustaining interest to command an audience; Poe used the genre as an invitation to a fantastic, psychologically layered fictional world; and Washington Irving employed narrators who were dramatic figures in their own right, filtering his tales through them (Fallon xvii). These three elements–the levelling of class barriers, psychological penetration, and a subjective narrative style–are relevant to a discussion of Grove’s Tales from the Margin.1 Perhaps a fourth element is incredulity, for when someone says that he or she is telling a tale, we know that the truth is likely to be stretched. This applies to tall tales, many of which Grove told about his own life (Spettigue 21) in pseudo-memoirs, convincing generations of Canadian readers that he had emigrated from Sweden, rather than Germany, and inventing an alternate biography for himself. 2 Several early Canadian short story cycles helped to establish a literary identity for a particular group or geographic area by outlining certain basic characteristics of local inhabitants. Stephen Leacock, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant all wrote cycles on the people in circumscribed locales which may be compared in this respect with works such as Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If Grove’s tales had been published earlier they would have joined this group, but a cycle largely concerned with foreigners in the Canadian Midwest was deemed unappealing to Canadian readers in the 1940s (Sellwood 93). The story cycle was mothballed, rather than marginalized, for over forty years, and when it finally did appear its editor Desmond Pacey ignored Grove’s publication instructions. Although the author intended Tales from the Margin as Journal of the Short Story in English, 64 | Spring 2015 The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove 2 a cycle of twenty-three tales to be presented in a particular order, Pacey deleted six and added eight later selections, then shuffled the resulting twenty-five tales. In spite of Pacey’s meddling, the overall message of marginality remains relatively unchanged: Grove’s characters operate on the margins of society, a position with which the author was also familiar.2 As a highly literate, university-educated German immigrant to a rural Canadian Prairie community, he was marked by his accent, erudition, and bookish English. He straddled two worlds, standing neither inside nor outside, and this nebulous position is reflected in the authors listed in Grove’s essay “The Novel” as representative writers of tales, as we shall see. It is also reflected in the tales’ persistent concern for the poor and the forgotten–those who struggle and fail to improve their lot in a harsh environment–and the rogues and scam artists who take advantage of the weak. However Pacey’s editorial interference was not wholly negative. Some of his additions provide further evidence of Grove’s interest in the psychological penetration of his characters while others are revealing of a schism that exists within the author himself. 3 Unlike Tales from the Margin, Grove was not, for most of his writing career, neglected. His story “Snow,” about a poor Prairie farmer who freezes to death in a blizzard, was the first piece of short fiction by any author to be published in the Queen’s Quarterly in 1932, and this opened doors for young writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Margaret Lawrence, who would also publish stories in the journal (Bell); it also offered encouragement to western Canadian writers that their voices could be heard in eastern Canada.3 Grove was part of the Canadian literary canon in English up until the 1940s, thanks to seven novels, a collection of essays, and two fictionalized memoirs. As a purveyor of naturalist and socialist ideals, his explorations of pioneer life in the harsh but majestic Canadian west warned of the dangers of mechanization and unchecked capitalism. But there are other extenuating circumstances that affected the reception of Tales from the Margin in the early 1970s, shifting the focus away from the contents and Grove’s message. Around the time of publication, scholar Douglas O. Spettigue was announcing to the critical world that Frederick Philip Grove was not an Anglo-Swedish immigrant born in 1871, but a minor German modernist writer named Felix Paul Greve, born eight years later in 1879. Although many details still remain sketchy, Spettigue had discovered that Grove/Greve, or FPG as he came to be called, attended university in Bonn, settled in Berlin in 1906 or 1907, and authored numerous literary translations, two monographs on Oscar Wilde, a book of poetry, a play, and two novels in German. Living the life of a dandy, he borrowed wildly until, burdened by debt, he was imprisoned for a year for fraud (Spettigue 95-97). A few years after his release he faked his own death by drowning, surfaced in America in 1909, then arrived in Winnipeg in 1912, calling himself Frederick Philip Grove from Sweden. Two years later he married fellow-schoolteacher Catherine Wiens, claiming to be a widower, though he was still married to Frau Else Greve. In the know about the drowning plot, she had moved to New York and was living her own bohemian existence (Pacey and Mahanti 18, 21). 4 These revelations shocked scholars and titillated readers, who thought that they knew all about Grove’s life from his autobiographical novels and memoirs. Spettigue’s 1974 biography of Grove’s German years initiated a renewal and shift in Grove studies, with researchers focusing on the man, and using the fiction to explain his life. There had been little interest in the author sometimes referred to as the Canadian Dreiser (Knonagel 246) for the previous thirty years, since naturalism had fallen out of favour Journal of the Short Story in English, 64 | Spring 2015 The Tales of Frederick Philip Grove 3 and the critical focus had moved to younger, more sophisticated and socially diverse writers. It was also somewhat embarrassing that no one had solved the riddle of Grove’s past sooner since he had called himself “Fred Grove” as a Manitoba school-teacher, been known to his friends as “Phil,” a nickname for “Felix,” used the same three initials throughout his life, and kept the same birthday, February 14 (Pacey and Mahanti 21-22). It has been suggested that Grove had two very good reasons for hiding his identity. First, he arrived in Canada at the height of anti-German sentiment, in 1912 (Spettigue 15), and doubtless thought it would be easier to assimilate if he claimed Swedish heritage. The deception would not have been difficult to pull off since Swedish was one of five languages that Grove spoke fluently. Second, his criminal record in Germany, if it had become known, would have hurt his chances of acquiring Canadian citizenship, which he did in 1920 (Pacey and Mahanti 22). 5 Before discussing the cycle, the reasons for its persistent neglect require some explication. Although it was substantially complete by 1928, publication did not take place until 1971. Konrad Gross has suggested numerous factors that may have contributed to this delay: a preference in the 1920s for experimental American short fiction to Grove’s perceived naturalism; the limited number of Canadian magazines publishing short fiction; the fact that Grove’s stories often read better as short character sketches, which led to their critical dismissal; and the crippling effect of the Depression on the publishing industry (86-7). One of the attendant results of the long gap between composition and publication was that readers were not attuned to look for modernist influence. Because Grove’s German background was still unknown, no one knew that the Anglo-Swedish immigrant schoolteacher Frederick Philip Grove had once been the German dandy and minor modernist writer Felix Paul Greve. 6 In “The Novel” Grove says that the attraction of tales is that they deal with “the unusual” and therefore satisfy “our occasional appetite for the adventurous, the mysterious, or the horrible.” Representative writers of tales include: Hoffmann, De Quincey, Poe, Chesterton, Conrad, and (in some of his works) Hamsun (120).
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