The FPG Reading Room
Overview
Archive and Reading Room: Building 35, Room E 41
The CCAC's Archive and FPG Reading Room houses all of FPG's books and papers extant in Saarbrücken, a good collection of papers by and about FPG, FPG memorabilia, a permanent exhibition, a large collection of research materials, photos, documents, and other holdings about FPG and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and archival material of related interest. A documentary collection of the Berlin and Munich and international European literary scenes 1890-1914 provides a useful guide to literary and cultural interrelations of that era and the milieux in which FPG and Elsa moved. Most importantly, the FPG Reading Room contains a very substantial collection of FPG's correspondence with major European and Canadian authors.
The Virtual FPG Reading Room
This feature - regularly updated - is a permanent service of the CCAC website. The Virtual Reading Room provides capsule glances at FPG's life and work in Europe and Canada, including short interpretatory essays on issues having to do with FPG, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and related topics of interest.
Exhibit 1: Day-of-Issue letter and stamps for Frederick Philip Grove and Émile Nelligan. The 17-cent stamps are decorated with motifs from Fruits of the Earth (Grove) and Le vaisseau d'or (Nelligan) From the F.P. Grove Reading Room. Gift of A.Leonard and Mary Grove
Exhibit 2: Detail from stamp
Case: The Question of Identity
This very public philatelic event was well-meant for it was in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Grove's (real) birthday, 14 February 1879 in Radomno, West Prussia, which finally had been conclusively established by D.O. Spettigue only as late as 1972, thirty-four years after the author's death. Spettigue had found that the Canadian F.P. Grove had formerly been the German poet, novelist and literary translator Felix Paul Greve who had pretended a suicide in 1909, disappearing from Germany. In Canada FPG (for short) had taken care to conceal his German background by changing the year of his birth to 1871-2 (it varied in his accounts), his birthplace (Lund or Malmö in Sweden, Moscow in Russia), and the year of his arrival in Canada (about 1891-2, twenty years before his actual arrival in Winnipeg and seventeen years before disembarking for the first time in Canada after his June 1909 ocean crossing aboard the liner Megantic).
In hindsight, details regarding Grove's life and vital statistics as contained in a number of documents, public statements, capsule biographies on the dust-jackets of his books, interviews and his two semi-autobiographical books A Search for America and In Search of Myself, however, appear as a collage of sometimes wildly conflicting data. One conclusion to be drawn from the contradictoriness of these data is that they were meant to conceal identity as much as - possibly subliminally - to call attention to the hidden identity actually there by the very confusion evident.
The shock following the discovery of FPG's past and identity could not damage his reputation and achievement as a major Canadian writer, as the Day-of-Issue letter and stamp above clearly show. But there is irony in the unmistakable fact that the man portrayed to the left on the letter that bears the commemorative stamps, whoever he may be, is most certainly NOT GROVE, as can easily be seen when one compares the picture on the stamp with any picture of F.P. Grove in profile from the 1920s and 1930s elsewhere on this website. We also do not know who the man pictured on the stamp, wrongly identified as Grove, may be.
Exhibit 3: Dustjacket of Fruits of the Earth, FPG's 1933 novel mentioned on the commemorative stamp.
Exhibit 4: Title-page of FPG's manuscript of "My Life" (1939-40), a first version of his autobiographical novel In Search of Myself (1946). The motto, in FPG's handwriting, reads: "Ca vous amuse, la vie?
The man wrongly identified as Grove, now with a moustache, appeared earlier, if it is he, on the back cover of the New Canadian Library's (No. 1) eight reprint (1970) of their 1957 paperback edition of "Frederick P. Grove's" Over Prairie Trails. No, doubt we may expect other false representations of our author as a person of spurious identity, flitting mysteriously through literary history, not wholly unlike James Joyce's "Man in the Macintosh," in Ulysses, so wittily discussed by Frank Kermode in an essay contained in his The Genesis of Secrecy (1979).
