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A Brief
History
of the Electronic Sources, Resources & Projects
related to
Frederic Philip Grove/Felix
Paul Greve (FPG)&
Else
Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven (FrL)
in the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections
The FPG & FrL
Website started out in 1995 with a digitized
version of a budding informational Brochure* about the
University of Manitoba archival collections related to
Felix Paul Greve/Frederick Philip Grove & his first
wife Else Ploetz/divorced Endell, later known
in NY Dada circles as the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven.
The e-Image used above next to Else's portrait was named "Solar
Grove" due
to its eery luminous quality reminiscent of Man Ray's solarized,
rayogravure-like photographs.
It was
commissioned at the time of the brochure's making, & has
been used as a kind of logo in various size- and
colour adaptations ever since (see, for instance,
the e-Collage "Six
Times Solar Grove", or a full-sized version).
*The
TEXT of an
updated & shortened version of the 1995 document,
which was printed horizontally on a grey, folded sheet
of paper, and widely distributed at various scholarly
conferences, is appended below.
Apart from the Description of the Collections & a brief FPG
Biography, the
two earliest additions to the UMA's FPG & FrL Website were the monumental e-Text
Editions of Grove's first autobiographical novel A Search for America (1927)
and his unpublished typescript novel
Jane Atkinson (ca. 1921). This pioneering
digitizing venture was carried out, with the help of a successful UM Research
Grant application, by Gaby Divay, Jan Horner and Barry Pomeroy between
1998 & 2000.
With a special FrL-focus occasioned by the New York launch of Irene Gammel's
Freytag-Loringhoven biography at Francis Naumann's Gallery in April
2002, the website took on a new look and a more pan-Canadian scope. More recently,
the digitized Conference Video Proceedings of 1998 "In Memoriam FPG:
1879-1948-1998" Anniversary Symposium have been added to this corner
of the UMA website.
Numerous
other e-Text clusters - some big, some small - as well
as a host of illustrative or descriptive webpages accompanying
these documents, have been made available online since
then. They include:
BIOGRAPHICAL
- Gide's "Conversation avec un allemand" (1904) in the French original version & English
translation
- Greve's 1907 autobiographical account which he submitted
for publication in a German literary dictionary
[it eventually appeared, much shortened,
in Brümmer's Literarisches
Lexikon,
1913; Germ.+ Eng.]
- Greve's 1909 essay "Reise in Schweden" in Neue Revue & Morgen [facsim.
e-Edition]
- Grove's fictional autobiography A Search for America (ASA, 1927)
- Grove's "true" autobiography In Search of Myself (IMS, 1946)
- 2005 Anniversary e-Edition of the couple's 1904/5 'Fanny Essler' poetry cycle [about Greve, Germ.+Eng.]
- FrL's poems about FPG, incl. one stating "Sparta, am Eagle Creek" [facsim., German]
- FrL's long, satirical poems about Ernst Hardt & Endell [German & English]
COLLECTIONS
- the UMA's Greve German Translations Collection [ca. 60 titles, 2006]
- an annotated Bibliography of the UMA's Grove Library Collection [ca. 500 titles, 2007]
- the Video Proceedings of the 1998 "In Memoriam FPG: 1879-1948-1998" Anniversary Symposium [2008]
- the 2007 e-Edition of POEMS/GEDICHTE, incl. Greve's, Grove's, & Fanny
Essler's poetry [Ger. & Eng.]
- the 2008/9 facsim. ed. of Das Jahr der Wende [bound vol. of mss. poems,
Nov. 1901, UMA]
CORRESPONDENCE:
- Greve's Correspondence with contemporaries like Stefan George, Gundolf, Schmitz,
Wolfskehl,
Gide and H. G. Wells [UMA Spettigue & Divay Collections, 1986ff]
- Grove's Correspondence with contemporaries like K. Crouch, H. Miller/Graphic
Pub., A. L. Phelps, etc.,
& his wife Catherine
Wiens Grove
Several other Editorial Projects related
to the FPG & FrL Collections are underway:
- an updated Register to the Grove Collection
- enhanced Finding Aids to the Spettigue-, Stobie-, and Divay Research Collections
- Greve's correspondence with Karl Wolfskehl, Insel Publishers, André Gide,
H. G. Wells, et al.
- facsimile editions of Greve's early German mss. poetry "Aus Helga" [from
DLA, Marbach]
- facsimile edition of Grove's first Canadian publication "Rousseau als Erzieher" [from
Stobie Coll.]
- facsimile edition of Grove's confessional aphorisms "Of St. Nishivara, the Saint" [from
Grove Coll.]
- SOURCE materials, like the Chaffee Family photographs related to Grove's 1912
Bonanza Farm experience
[near Fargo, N.D.; from: Carie Good, Divay Collection,
2007ff]
- FrL's poems or letters dedicated to Marcus Behmer, Ernst Hardt, Richard Schmitz, & "Tse"/August
Endell
and of course FPG [facsims., German, from UMd
Collection]
- FrL's reminiscences about Greve, his friend Kilian, her first husband Endell,
Behmer, Hardt, Lechter,
Oscar & Richard Schmitz, Wolfskehl, Dachau
art teachers [incl. Hölzel], [Eng. & Germ., from UMd]
- THIRD PARTY reminiscences about Greve & Else, Grove & the Baroness FrL from Germany, Canada,
New York, Paris & Berlin [Divay Collection
of publ. & mss. sources, 1986ff]
All are in various stages of completion.
History
and Description of the Collections
[updated & shortened version]
F. P. Greve
lived from 1879 to 1909 in Germany, and as F. P.
Grove in Canada from 1912 until his death in 1948.
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
VIII below for some important recent discoveries
emanating from this key text e-published on this
website in 2000].
Grove's Canadian
works are predominantly in English, but contain
many veiled references to his German past.
His alleged Anglo-Swedish origins and Rutherford
family connections include the pseudonym "Andrew
R. Rutherford" which
Grove proposed both for his first Canadian
book, the nature essays Over Prairie Trails (1922)
and his unpublished novel Jane Atkinson.
There
are several major components
to the FPG & FrL collections at the University
of Manitoba. They include important texts
and documents pertaining to the author Greve/Grove
and his first wife who later was known in
New York Dada circles as Else Baroness von
Freytag-Loringhoven: I.
The Frederick Philip Grove Collection
II. The FPG Library Collection
III. The FPG Translations Collection
IV. The FPG Symposia Collections (Simcoe, 1977;
Ottawa, 1973; Winnipeg, UM 1998)
V.
Freytag-Loringhoven materials exchanged with the
University of Maryland
VI.-VIII.
Sources in the Spettigue, Stobie, and Divay Research
Collections
Many minor
research manuscripts or collections about FPG & Else
were deposited in recent years by H. Makow, I. Gammel,
W. Ruttkowski, M. Rubio, and others. G. Wade,
St.John-Stubbs, Karl Werner Maurer and others
provide insights by Grove's contemporaries,
early admirers, and critics.
Professor
A. W. Riley's 1995 donation is especially noteworthy, including
his doctoral dissertation, Tübingen University,
on Thomas Mann's Felix
Krull, valuable copies of Greve's Flaubert & Meredith
translations, and an astounding 2nd 1909 ed.
of Greve's Maurermeister
Ihles Haus.
Approximately
60 boxes of manuscripts, primary
and secondary research
documents, photographs,
tapes, and videos/DVDs
overall provide a unique
array of original source materials
which is of extraordinary scholarly value
to researchers and graduate students investigating
the dual lives and works of Greve/Grove & his
colourful companion from 1902 to 1911 alike.
An FPG Endowment Fund for fostering Greve/Grove
and Freytag-Loringhoven research in all its multi-layered
aspects, and for propagating the unique archival
resources through symposia, e-text editions and
research publications was established in 1996.
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 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 not 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 German personalities
mentioned above, famous artists like Man Ray, Marcel
Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Brancusi, Schwitters, Berenice
Abbott, Marsden Hartley, and writers like Djuna
Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and
a host of other French, American, or German authors
can be added.
Subjects like 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. The FPG sources are well supported by comprehensive
collections of Grove's Canadian and Greve's
German publications, including his many literary
translations, and his rare, privately published
editions of his Wanderungen (poems, 1902)
and Helena und Damon (neo-romantic,
lyrical play, 1902).
Virtually all theses and critical works
about both FPGs & FrL 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.
I.-V. The
central 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. It
is the most important
and comprehensive archival resource available anywhere.
Of
crucial importance for FPG's identity are six German
poems by Grove, one of which matches Greve's "Erster
Sturm", published
in Die
Schaubühne, 1907. -- The same poem also
plays a role in Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's
lyrical tribute to her former lover & husband,
and the couple's brief farming experience near
Sparta, Kentucky in 1910/11.
A detailed Register to the 23 archival boxes
containing the Frederick Philip Grove Collection
was published by UM Archives & Special Collections
in 1979. Unfortunately, it failed to reflect most
of the major research developments since the early
1970s, and a thorough revision is still required.
Grove's
son, Leonard Grove (1930-2006), donated his father's
invaluable 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' online catalogue BISON.
They allow to make many connections with FPG's carefully
concealed European past, and also reveal the author's
literary tastes and preferences.
Highlights include:
a much used Baedeker travel guide to the United
States published in 1909, 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 which
Greve had used 1909/10 German translation.
Greve's
many translations into German have been described
a long time ago, but in 2006, they were made available
online with a grant from the FPG & FrL Endowment.
While the
1973 Ottawa Symposium is only documented in a single
Inscape issue, and the Simcoe one in 1977 with a
complicated array of sound tapes, the 1998 "IN
MEMORIAM FPG" Anniversary Symposium has
been fully video-taped and exists also in DVD
format today. The PROGRAM, four full-text presentations,
and the Tour through FPG Country already exist
as webpages since ca. 2003.
Foremost among scholarly posthumous editions of
FPG's writings are:
- Desmond
Pacey's authoritative collection, The Letters
of Frederick Philip Grove (1976), which represents
an excellent reference source for Grove's Canadian
activities, and includes the correct identification
of Greve's Else as née Ploetz, divorced
Endell, as well as a selection of Greve's German
correspondence with English translations.
- Pacey's substantial collection of Grove's short
stories Tales
from the Margin (1971).
- W. J. Keith' edition of Grove's It needs to
be said, a collection of eight critical articles
(r1982, ©1929)
- Eleven critical essays, entitled An edition
of selected unpublished essays and lectures by
Frederick Philip Grove, bearing on his theory of
art was edited by Henry Makow (Doctoral
Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1982).
- Paul Hjartarson's 1987 book A
stranger to my time : essays by and about Frederick
Philip Grove includes several texts from the
UMA's Collections, including "Flaubert's theories
of artistic existence" [Eng. of "Flauberts
Theorien uber das Kunstlertum", 1904], "Of St.
Nishivara, the Saint", 5 Letters Grove sent to
his wife Catherine from Eden, Manitoba, Sep.-Nov.
1919, & "Thoughts
and reflections: an intermittent diary, 1933-1940".
- FPG's English and German
poetry from the archival FPG Collections was edited
by Gaby Divay in 1990 (M.A. Thesis, University of
Manitoba, 1992. -- Revised and enlarged version published
as v.13 of Deutschkanadische Schriften in
1993, Winnipeg, Wolf Verlag, lxxxix, 296 p. & facsims.
-- e-Ed., UMA Website, 2007).
E-Text Editions have been prepared since 1998. See in particular:
etexts/index.html
VI.
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, after
seven years of extra-mural studies, he
obtained a B.A. in French & German
in 1922,
plus 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).
Professor Spettigue published his truly sensational
findings in a 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 von Freytag-Loringhoven
whose revealing Autobiography was published
by Spettigue & Hjartarson in 1992.
Also reflected is the editorial work undertaken
with A. W. Riley for Greve's
two substantial novels about Else's life: The
Master Mason's House (1976, orig. 1907) and Fanny
Essler (1984, orig. 1905).
A Finding Aid to both Parts of the Spettigue
Collection exists since 1990/6.
VII.
In 1976, Professor Margaret Stobie, UM, 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's Mennonite & German-speaking areas,
and his very first Canadian publication: "Rousseau
als Erzieher", in Der Nordwesten, Nov.-Dec.,
1914. -- This highly 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, documenting the seventeen years
Grove spent in Manitoba from 1912 to 1929.
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.
VIII.
FPG source material collected in North American
and European archives and libraries has been deposited
in the Divay Research Collection since the late
1980s.
Included are findings like:
-
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).
It 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;
-
his initial
attempt from Bonn prison to secure the translation
rights for H. G. Wells' works, as well as his 1904-1906
correspondence with this author from the Urbana-Champaign
collections;
- numerous documents pertaining to FrL & other
FPG contemporaries, such as Endell's & Else's
police registrations in Munich, & FrL's stay
at Dachau's "Künstlerkolonie" in
1900;
- discoveries based on Grove's autobiographies ASA & ISM,
such as FPG's elusive Passage on the on the White
Star liner "Megantic" from
Liverpool to Montreal in 1909
[in 1998], the "Bonanza Farm in the Dakotas" [in
1996],
and the New York crooked book-selling scam [in
2000]; the likelihood that "young Ray" is in
fact Man Ray [which builds a foundation for FrL's
later affiliation with the American artist]
- Else's
German poems
at the University of Maryland refer back to her & Greve's 1904/5 "Fanny
Essler" poetry cycle,
and one makes an explicit reference to the couple's
farming location near Sparta, Kentucky,
in 1910/11.
- the sensational NYT note about Else's arrest
in Pittsburgh for cross-dressing & smoking
in public (her husband Greve is also mentioned]
- two FrL photos in exotic costume & pose, one
with Liberator editor Claude MacKay
No Finding
Aid exists to date, but detailed BISON entries
have been provided for most documents, many
of which are also accessible online as
e-Texts or e-Graphics. |
For further information about the FPG & FrL
Collections
and/or related Greve/Grove and Freytag-Loringhoven Research
contact
Dr. Gaby Divay
204 474-6483 (Tel.) ; 474-7913 (Fax) ; gaby_divay@umanitoba.ca
rev. 18.8.2008©gd
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