The Grove Symposium

Introduction

Introduction John Nause University of Ottawa I would like to send my condolences to all Canadian scholars . . .who are not here these two days because they have missed an extremely fascinating dramatic and historical development. . . . People who participated in this were walking on glass before they arrived because they did not have this definitive knowledge [i.e., the knowledge of Greve/Grove's identity]. So we took risks and we were sitting there shaking a little bit in our boots as this was going on ... waiting to see whether what we had written out was going to be able to be delivered at all. And it worked so beautifully. Everything just came out right in the end. Those words, spoken by Louis Dudek during the dying moments of the Grove Symposium, catch perfectly the spirit of the entire venture. When, in the summer of 1972, it was decided that the University of Ottawa English department would host a conference on Frederick Philip Grove, many questions — crucial questions — were posed to which there were no definite answers. Would it be possible to engender sufficient interest in a symposium devoted to one single Canadian writer? Would the papers eventually selected have enough homogeneity to lend an aura of unity to this two-day event? Most of all, considering the biographical mysteries enshrouding Grove, would questions concerning his identity detract from the value of the symposium as a primarily literary happening? And would it be wise to have papers presented which accepted the new premise that FPG was really Felix Paul Greve? After all, D.O. Spettigue's convincing and masterful study, F.P.G.: The European Years, had not yet been published. The events of May 5 and 6, 1973, finally and happily put to rest the doubts implicit in all these questions. Now, as a permanent record of the highlights of The Grove Symposium, we are publishing here, in book form, most of the papers which were delivered. Ronald Sutherland's paper, What was Frederick Philip Grove?, opened the symposium; and quite fittingly, it represents an attempt to place Grove within the framework of a particular literary tradition as a writer, and of a particular moral and cultural tradition as a man. Sutherland concludes that Grove "was a feeling humanist as well as a strong Canadian nationalist and a literary naturalist." Peter Noel-Bentley's paper is a meticulous and detailed examination of Grove's unpublished "Jane Atkinson" and "The Weatherhead Fortunes", whose composition Professor Noel-Bentley dates "in the middle 1920's", and which he sees as forming "a rather natural trilogy with Our Daily Bread". Noel-Bentley sees the heroines of these novels, Ada Weatherhead and Jane Atkinson, as matriarchal figures living in an environment that has allowed them to dominate. It is interesting, then to juxtapose his paper with that of Lorraine McMullen, which reveals that Grove, who had stated that "My sympathies were always with the women", was creating a female protagonist who "rebels against being locked into . . . [the role of earth mother or of femme fatale] and creates a new role for herself, a role we hear more commonly discussed today than in Grove's time, that of the independent woman." And while, as Dr. McMullen points out, many of Grove's women "are unable to do so", Grove has nevertheless created women "of courage and initiative" who are often stronger than their husbands, and in his later novels has tended toward portrayal of a society which is androgynous in nature, "in which roles are no longer sex-stereotyped." These analyses of unpublished and published novels fuse beautifully with A.O. Riley's examination of the two German novels of Felix Paul Greve, and furnish further evidence (if this were still needed) that Grove and Greve must have been the same man. The characters examined by Professor Riley are early (1905 and 1906) versions of those dissected in the Noel-Bentley and McMullen papers. Hence, these three studies strengthen and complement each other, although each has an integrity of its own. Another study of an unpublished work is Birk Sproxton's paper on MAN: His Habits, Social Organizations and Outlook: a title which perhaps indicates a dependence upon Pope's "An Essay on Man" in both its projected scope and thematic preoccupation. Professor Sproxton draws attention to "Grove's interest in Rousseauistic theories of education", an interest which was later accentuated by Professor Stobie in her discussion of Grove during the final panel discussion of the...