Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove ed. by Desmond Pacey

1977; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1977.0022

1913-4835

Claude Bissell,

Short Stories in Global Literature

244 The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove, edited with an introduction and notes by Desmond Pacey. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976). xxix, 584. $25.00 In the first paragraph of his chapter entitled "The Course of Canadian Criti­ cism" in the third volume of the second edition of The Literary History of Canada, Desmond Pacey called for new directions in the criticism of Canadian Literature. The last twenty years or so have yielded a good many historical and thematic surveys - Pacey's Creative Writing in Canada was an early and substantial contribution - and now almost every visible author has at least one critical monograph devoted to his work. But, says Pacey, much of this criticism "has proceeded from a very narrow or shallow scholarly base." What we must have now, in preparation for a second and more mature level of critical writing, are "more authoritative biographies, more editions of our writers' letters, more comprehensive and sophisticated editions of these collected works." By editing The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove, Pacey has begun, in a most exemplary way, to build the new base for critical work in Canadian Literature. This last of many scholarly contributions made by Pacey is certainly one of the most important. With the letters, and the two recent biographies, Margaret Stobie's Frederick Philip Grove, and Douglas Spettigue's FPG The European Years, we are now in a position to take a balanced and comprehensive look at Frederick Philip Grove. Pacey accepts Spettigue's account of Grove's European years. His "assiduous research," Pacey writes in his Preface, "seems now to have established beyond a reasonable doubt that Frederick Philip Grove of Canada was, prior to 1910 or 19 12, Felix Paul Greve of Germ any";1 and in an appendix he prints the Greve letters that have come to light. Margaret Stobie's book covers the Canadian years, from December 19 12, when Grove made his first known appearance on the Canadian scene as a destitute, agricultural labourer looking for winter work in Winnipeg, until his death on 19 August 1948 at his farm house in Simcoe, Ontario. She drew upon much of the correspondence that Pacey now prints in its entirety, and she supplemented it by contemporary records and oral accounts of those who knew Grove or observed his career as teacher, writer, and celebrity. We now have more documentation about Grove than we have about any other Canadian writer. But there are still vexatious gaps. In his European incarnation Grove was not a major figure, and Spettigue must surround the hard facts with speculation. The letters do not help us here; they shed, observes Pacey, "only a dim and intermittent light upon Grove's European years."2 They do not begin until September 19 13, when Grove had established himself as Principal of the Intermediate School in Winkler, Manitoba; they tell us nothing about the three years that he spent in the United States and Canada 245 before he emerged in Winnipeg (except to sustain the long drawn-out fantasy of the autobiographical books); and there is a great leap in the letters from 1914 to 1923, so that we learn nothing new about Grove's emergence as a Canadian author and the publication of his first two volumes, Over Prairie Trails (1922) and The Turn of the Year (1923). It is not likely that the record will be greatly expanded. Still, the two parts of Grove's career have been clearly set forth, often in great detail, and a full study of Greve-Grove is now possible. Spettigue partially attempts this, especially in the last chapter of his book where he gives a reading of the Canadian novels in the light of Grove's career and publications. One of the two published Greve novels, The Master Mason's House, is now available in English, and no doubt the earlier novel, Fanny Essler, will also be translated. But the merging of Greve and Grove will not be an easy task. The dilettante poseur, the admirer and translator of Oscar Wilde, the hedonist who acted out his beliefs, does not easily dissolve into the solemn moralizer, the grave realist, the faithful husband with the...