A search for America

Front matter

TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

GORDON ROPER

A SEARCH FOR AMERICA FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE

BOOK I THE DESCENT i

I. I EMIGRATE . 3

II. I LAND ON AMERICAN SOIL . 15

III. I SECURE WORK . 26

IV. I SUBMERGE . 41

V. I EARN A PROMOTION . 56

VI. I MEET THE EXPLANATION FOR ONE KIND OF SUCCESS 71

VII. I MOVE ON . 85

Book II Tiie Relapse . 105

I. THE ISSUE IS OBSCURED . 107

II. I SCOUR THE CITY FOR WORK . 128

III. I GO ON THE ROAD . 150

IV. I SEEK NEW FIELDS . 162

V. I JOIN A NEW COMPANY . 183

VI. I LAND SOMEWHERE . 201

VII. I WJND THINGS UP . 217

Book III The Depths . 223

I. I GO EXPLORING . 225

II. I LOSE SIGHT OF MANKIND . 239

III. I COME INTO CONTACT WITH HUMANITY AGAIN . 250

IV. I TRY TO FIND WORK FOR THE WINTER . 265

V. I BECOME A ’’HAND” . 282

VI. I WIDEN MY OUTLOOK . 294

VII. I AM KIDNAPPED . 3o6

Book IV The Level . 317

I. I LEARN TO BEAT MY WAY . g,9

II. I START WORK IN THE HARVEST . 338

III. I BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH THE HOBO . 355

IV. I MEET MOTHER AND SON ,!72

V. MY PROBLEM DEFINES ITSELF AND I SOLVE IT . 38i

THE AUTHOR

Introduction

A Search for America, first published in 1927 by Ottawa’s Graphic Press, has been one of Frederick Philip Grove’s most widely read books. Grove states that he finished the first draft in 1894, several years after his initial arrival in North America, and later rewrote the manuscript eight times, reducing it by seventy per cent before it finally went to press. Canadian critics generally accepted this personal account of the book’s genesis, and it became traditional to view A Search as a forerunner of North American realism. However, recent scholarship has raised significant questions about the validity of many of Grove s recollections. Douglas Spettigue, basing his claim upon evidence supplied by Mrs. Grove, argues convincingly that the first drafting of the book took place as late as 1920, with the final revised manuscript being completed in 1923. If the book is a product of the nineteen twenties, then, at best, we can only claim Grove as a pioneer in Canadian realism.

Although Grove never made any explicit claim that such was the case, A Search for America has generally been treated as thinly disguised autobiography. Grove, like many before and after him, created imaginative literature out of the fabric of his own past. Such writing demands a continual re-ordering of experience, and Grove lost the ability, or perhaps the desire, to distinguish between illusion and reality. Grove’s blending of fact and fancy became to him a real and continuing mythology which sustained his vision of himself as an artist. He ap¬ parently felt the need to relive his past and seek for some destiny, some universal principle at work which would absolve him of personal responsibility for his many failings. This desire to purge the past of personal responsibility is suggested in his author’s note to the fourth edition:

The book which follows is essentially retrospective; which means that it is teleological; what was the present when it was written had already become its telos. Events that had followed were already casting their shadows backward. By writing the book, in that long-ago past, I was freeing myself of the mental and emotional burden implied in the fact that I had once lived it and had left it behind.

IX

X

In writing A Search for America, Grove was creating a per¬ sonal mythology. "Imaginative literature," Grove said, "is not primarily concerned with facts; it is concerned will) truth. . . . In its highest flights, imaginative literature, which is one and indivisible, places within a single fact the history of its future to the moment of its final extinction." It now appears that even in his autobiographical writing Grove was producing imagina¬ tive literature. Much of the information which lie supplied in his autobiography, In Search of Myself, remains unverified, few records have been found to substantiate his place <>l birth, his parentage, his early education, or bis association with prominent Europeans. Until scholars manage to sift fac t from fancy and solve some of these basic problems about Grove’s origins, our knowledge of how he used biographical material in his work must remain rather tenuous. It is significant, however, that Grove was striving to interpret his own past as an expression of the North American experience. In so doing, he was arti¬ culating some of the essential myths of North American culture.

In A Search for America, (dove gave his fable about life in America its lirst form. The book provides a panoramic view of various levels of society in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and concludes with a rejection of the basic aims and ideals of that country. In his other books Grove turned to Canadian society where lie felt that there was still hope for a realization of a life based on the essentials: on the: raising of families, the growing of food, on an awareness of the fellow¬ ship of man.

By IH92 the debate over the future of the Promised Land in the New World was being conducted by those who favoured the agrarian life against those who felt that the new convenant could best be achieved through the advances of an industrial society. Grove believed that the technological vision provided least opportunity for man to lincl his soul. In his work he set out to explore the nature of the' Promised Land debate and his novels reveal the complexity of his reading of the myth.

Philip Branden’s quest for personal equilibrium establishes a pattern which recurs frequently in Grove’s fic tion. As a young man he leaves an old society for a new one. lie has vague humanitarian ideals about serving mankind; he has notions about a life devoted to quiet study and contact with nature.

XI

Barred by a lack of means from returning to his upper-class European milieu, Branden now looks to the New World to refurbish his fortune so that he can once again enjoy an essentially Old World style of life. In order to earn the neces¬ sary capital recjuired to support this leisurely existence, Branden is willing to sacrifice from ten to twenty years of his life. He is staking his happiness on the ultimate acquisition of wealth, and, as long as he strives to accumulate this capital, his life is really lived in the future. Grove’s heroes often find their lives com¬ plicated by failing to realize the advantages of living life on a daily basis.

As a result of his economic commitment, Branden must fol¬ low a path of hollow and unrewarding activity, ultimately him¬ self preying on mankind rather than serving it. It becomes necessary for Branden to examine his role in the universe. To this end he is brought to the seashore where he realizes that millions of shells have been cast upon the beach to die a meaningless death. In a fit of despair, which he says is nearly suicidal, he sees himself “such a shell thrown on these shores in the process of being ground to pieces and fragments, in order to furnish th£ soil for others to stand on and maybe to thrive on.” For the first time Branden is confronted with the prob¬ lem of being a mortal man in an apparently hostile universe. At this point he lacks any insight into the positive value of human existence. Branden now strives to disprove his vision of himself as a meaningless shell cast on the beach. In spite of his depression he becomes aware of an intuitive sense which holds forth a promise of a better way of life, a yet undiscovered Promised Land in which his existence will have some signific¬ ance. In order to gain understanding he abandons his economic striving and surrenders to his intuitive urge to define experience in some positive way. From this point on Branden is on a quest. He must find the proper environment in which his soul can develop according to its own innate laws. Grove once said that "most people go through life in the blissful ignorance of the fact that they have a soul.” Branden has become aware of his soul, but as yet he is unable to orate his true position in the world.

Branden sets out to find this “place,” using nature and great literature as his guides. His journey is a search for personal xii

equilibrium. In the next section of the book the themes become those of exile and isolation. Branden must spend his time in the wilderness, he must take his trip to Sinai or Ararat where he can listen to the still small voice of truth. His quest is both external (the search for landscape) and internal (the search for the meaning of his own soul). Symbolic of this dual quest are the two “guide books,” The New Testament and The Odyssey, which he carries into the wilderness with him. He tries to read The Nana Testament but it seems irrelevant; he finds The Odyssey more agreeable. The tramping improves his health and general mental outlook. The Greek conception of a healthy mind in a healthy body is at work, and with this new physical and mental well-being he is able to establish a rapport with nature. Ultimately he finds other men like the hermit and Doctor Goodwin who have an inner awareness, and from them he learns that the true Promised Land is a state of mind, a state of soul. His attention now shifts to The New Testament, the "guide book” of the soul. He has gained that equilibrium, that maturity which was lacking before he entered the wilder¬ ness, and he can now rejoin the society of man. As a result of his new awareness he is able to pursue a life of study and humanitarian service. His new view is basically stoic in nature. He has abandoned his concern for economic security, which, for the stoic, is an unprofitable concern for an unpredictable future, and he has abandoned his past, which as a stoic he knows is forever lost. He strives to maintain his pure soul, and discovers that it doesn’t matter whether he is in the country or in the city as long as he is faithful to his vision. While the agrarian landscape is less complex and therefore a better en¬ vironment in which to follow a life based on such essential activities as child rearing, tilling the soil, and humanitarian service, there is no reason why an equally meaningful life shouldn’t be lived in urban surroundings. Grove was well aware that it was no longer possible to escape from the influences of technological culture, and his heroes face the problem of living in an environment bombarded by the nonessentials of mat¬ erialism. finally, Branden sets out on a life of service, to his fellow men, helping “recent immigrants to build their partial views of America into total views.”

Phil Branden’s quest establishes a prototypal pattern which

Xlll

Grove was to employ in many of his other novels. To begin with we have a man leaving one way of life for another. Usually the hero has some hazy, ill-defined dream about what he wishes to achieve in his new life, but he lacks any ethical consideration of how this goal is to be realized. “I had no definite plans,” Phil Branden says, ‘‘It did not matter how I did it or what I might do to reach my goal. The aim was all important, nothing else of any consequence.” Invariably, the hero pursues a materialistic course, setting his happiness aside until he acquires the material means to realize his dream. Even Grove’s pioneers deliberately choose the material world for the arena of their struggles. They are pioneers, but not in the mould of the first settlers who fought Nature just for a full belly and mere survival. Grove’s heroes are the economic pioneers whose suc¬ cess is measured in dollars, not in hunger satisfied. The drive for materialistic success results in a stifling of the spirit. Com¬ mitted to some future happiness, his heroes allow their lives to slip by unlived. They find themselves unable to enjoy the fruits of their labour since they have lost all touch with those they love.

Grove was well aware that the pursuit of a goal was the most significant part of living. “It is,” he said, “one of the fundamental tenets of my creed that an ideal realized would be an ideal destroyed. If God revealed Himself, He would be dead. The aim, the ideal, to be of value as a guide must be unattainable.” Materialism offers realizable goals. As a result, the Grove hero must redefine his role in the universe. This process of redefinition usually takes the hero into a period of isolation and depression while he sorts out the essential ele¬ ments of life from the incidental ones. Ultimately, he comes to a state of acquiescence in which he is able to accept himself as a finite creature at war with a hostile universe but capable of making a positive contribution in spite of his frailty. Supported by a stoic belief in the value of individual endeavour, he sets out to live a life of humanitarian service. Moses was an arche¬ typal figure in Grove’s literary imagination, and, like Moses, his heroes will never themselves enter the Promised Land. However, by making good prevail, by passing on an awareness of value hard won, they are paving the way to an rddmate realization of that Promised Land.

XIV

In A Search for America, Grove worked out the basic premises of his fable. The quest for meaning in a society committed to materialistic goals became the central motif underlying his whole creative life. He was too astute an observer to believe that it was still possible to escape from die influences of the technological society, and what he offers in his books is a way of life which allows men to co-exist with materialism without losing their souls in the process. Employing his belief in the value of individual struggle for humanitarian goals, Grove moved into the realm of pure fiction and moulded the stuff of the semi-autobiographical Phil Branden into the fictional lives of Abe Spalding and Niels Lindstedt. In Fruits of the Earth and Settlers of the Marsh, Grove looked at life in the past. Here he is concerned with the pioneer who expends his energy in his battle with the soil. These men set out to wrest the land from nature, shaping it to their dream of the Promised Land. Next Grove examined his own contemporary world, and in Two Generations and Our Daily Bread he presents the pioneer after he has successfully established his farm and family. John Elliot and Ralph Patterson are concerned with passing on their dream of the Promised Land to their children. These novels con¬ sider the conflict between the first and second generations. The Yoke of Life is a transitional book, moving the scene from the farm to the city. Len Sterner is the son of a pioneer who must come to grips with the pressures of an industrial society. In many ways he proves a misfit, unable to cope with either the land or the city. He moves through both, finally rejecting each and returning to the wilderness to die. The Master of the Mill expands Grove’s vision of life in the Promised Land into the realm of a technological society. In this book the problem of life for future generations is considered. It questions whether the covenant of the Promised Land can be achieved through science and technology. Central to each of these books is a basic vision of life in the Promised Land of North America. The vision, for the most part, remains fairly consistent through¬ out Grove’s fiction.

In A Search for America, the careful reader will find in¬ cidents, characters, and attitudes which Grove incorporated into his other books. A good example is provided in die charac¬ ter called Whiskers” who works in a Toronto restaurant.

XV

Branden says, “he stood for Old Age looking back on Youth; for failure incarnate, such as in the essentials awaits us all, no matter what our apparent success may be.” The figure of an old man slowly losing his faculties haunts Grove’s imagination. Blaine, in Fruits of the Earth, Sigurdson, in Settlers of the Marsh, and above all John Elliot, in Our Daily Bread, come to mind. A Search for America is, in a sense, a large working canvas upon which Grove sketched his overall design. Many of the figures on the canvas received a more complete perspective and colouration in the later fiction.

In his seven novels, Frederick Philip Grove has employed theme and variation to produce one of the most complex and sustained examinations of North American culture yet at¬ tempted by a Canadian author. A Search for America is perhaps the most important book in the Grove canon for the reader who wishes to grasp the full implications of Grove’s range of vision.

Stanley E. McMullin,

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

Since this book, written in 1893-1894, appeared in print in 1927, I have often been asked whether the story which it presents is fact or fiction. My answer, a prevaricating answer, was that every event in the story was lived through; but that only a very few events that had taken place in the years with which the book deals found their place in it; and among them there was not one of the terrible things.

I should like to seize this opportunity to add a word or so.

Every work of so-called imaginative literature, good or bad, is necessarily at once both fact and fiction; and not only in the sense that fiction is mingled with fact. In every single part fact and fiction are inextricably interwoven.

Imaginative literature is not primarily concerned with facts; it is concerned with truth. It sees fact only within the web of life, coloured and made vital by what preceded it, coloured and made significant by what followed. In its highest flights, imaginative literature, which is one and indivisible, places within a single fact the history of the universe from its inception as well as the history of its future to the moment of its final extinction.

The reason for this is that, in imaginative litera¬ ture, no fact enters as mere fact; a fact as such can be perceived; but, to form subject-matter for art, it must contain its own interpretation; and a fact interpreted, and therefore made capable of being understood, becomes fiction.*

The book which follows is essentially retrospective; which means that it is teleological; what was the present when it was written had already become its telos. Events that had followed were already casting their shadows backward. By writing the book, in that long-ago past, I was freeing myself of the mental and emotional burden implied in the fact that I had once lived it and had left it behind. But the present pervaded the past in every fibre.

One more point. Why, so I have been asked, did I choose a pseudonym for my hero? Well, while a pseudonym ostensibly dissociates the author from his creation, it gives him at the same time an oppor¬ tunity to be even more personal than, in the con¬ ditions of our present-day civilization, it would be either safe or comfortable to be were he speaking in the first person, unmasked.

F. P. G.

Simcoe, Ontario,

February, 1939/

*See Hueffer, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance , for Conrad’s perfectly sincere reminiscences of his seafaring life. In their oral pre¬ sentations, they varied as their significances unfolded themselves in the telling.

Book I The Descent

“ As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very hand¬ some air; but once get under the wheels, and you wish society were at the devil. 1 will give most respectable men a fort¬ night of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Chapter I I Emigrate

I WAS twenty-four years old when one day in the month of July I took passage from Liverpool to Montreal. I was not British-born; but my mother had been a Scotswoman, and from my earliest childhood I had been trained to speak the English of fashionable governesses. I had acquired — by dint of much study of English literature — a rather extensive reading and arguing vocabulary which however showed — and, by the way, to this day shows — its parentage by a peculiar stiff-necked lack of condescension to everyday slang. My father, Charles Edward Branden by name, had been of Swedish extraction, himself rather an Anglophile. For many years previous to my emigration, I, too, had affected English ways in dress and manners; occasionally, when travelling in Sweden or in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, I had connived at being taken for an Englishman. I am afraid, if I could meet myself as I then was, I should consider my former self as an insufferable snob and coxcomb.

I must explain at some length what induced me to go to America.

When I was a boy, my parents lived “ in style ”; that is to say, they had a place in the country, a rather “ palatial ” home, and a house in the fashionable residential district of a populous city on the continent of Europe. The exact localities are irrele¬ vant. Every summer, as soon as at home the heat became oppressive, my mother, whpm I adored and whom I remember as a Junoesque lady of very pronounced likes and dislikes, used to pack up and to go to the French coast — to Boulogne, Harfleur, St. Malo, Paris plage — or to Switzerland — the Zurich Lake, Landshut, Lucerne. She preferred the less frequented places, such as were prepared to meet her demands for comfort without being infested by tourist crowds. And invariably she took one of her ten children along, mostly myself, probably because I was the youngest one and her only boy. She died when I was an adolescent.

About a year after my mother’s death I went on a “tour of the continent,” planned to take me several years. The os¬ tensible reason was that I intended to pursue and to complete my studies at various famous universities — Paris, Bonn, Ox¬ ford, Rome. In reality I went because I had the wandering instinct. I by no means adhered to the prearranged plan, but allowed myself to be pushed along.

I will give one example. At Naples I made the acquaintance of a delightful young man — I forget whether he was Dutch or Danish — who knew the artistic circles of Paris — Gide, Regnier, and others. He somehow declared that I was the in¬ variably best-dressed man whom he had ever met, a highly desirable acquaintance, and just the young Croesus who should interest himself in modern literary aspirations. He wished me to meet his Parisian friends and offered me cards of introduc¬ tion; and although I had not been thinking of France just then — rather of Egypt and Asia Minor — I promptly took the next train to Nice and from there the Riviera Express to Paris. Soon I was all taken up with that particular brand of literature which was then becoming fashionable, filled with contempt for the practical man, and deeply ensconced in artificial poses.

My reputed wealth opened every door. I sometimes think that some of the men with whom I linked up — or upon whom I thrust myself — men, some of whom have in the meantime acquired European or even world-wide reputation, must have smiled at the presumptuous pup who thought he was somebody because he threw his father’s money about with noble in¬ difference. It is a strange fact that they received me on a footing of equality and led me on; they had time to spare for exquisite little dinners no less than for the nonsensical prattle of one who gave himself airs. Of course, there was an occasional man who kept himself at a distance; but on the whole I cannot avoid the conclusion that these idols had feet of clay.

Whenever my father enquired about the progress of my studies, I put him off by affected contempt. Anybody could pass examinations and take degrees; I was going to be one of the few Europeans who counted. Of course, nobody but myself ever valued me at exactly that figure. I had not done anything to make others aware of my worth. It would, however, have been a tremendous shock to my self-estimation, had I been able to foresee that one day I should value myself at exactly what the world valued me at while I remained utterly and absolutely unknown. I simply was not in a hurry. My aims were lofty enough. To master nothing less than all human knowledge was for my ambition — or, had I better say, for my conceit? — no more than the preliminary to swinging the earth out of its orbit and readjusting, while improving upon, the creator’s work. What puzzles me to this day, is that my father seemed to accept these ravings at their face-value — though maybe the revela¬ tions which followed a few years later made it appear somewhat less astonishing. I was, after all, a true scion of his stock.

But you must not imagine that I went idle, for I did not. My work lacked simply that measure of coordination which might have made it useful for the purpose of earning a living when the necessity arose. I mastered, for instance, five modern languages, wrote an occasional tract in tolerable Latin, and read Homer and Plato with great fluency before I was twentytwo. I dabbled in Mathematics and in Science, and even at¬ tended courses in Medicine. Theology and Jurisprudence were about the only two fields of human endeavour which I shunned altogether.

Meanwhile, having seen in an incidental way a good deal of Europe, I longed for more extensive travel. In my reading I had, so I thought, pretty well exhausted the literatures of the world — difficile est satiram non scribere — and so there re¬ mained the world itself to see.

An opportunity offered when an uncle of mine took a transcontinental trip to Vladivostock — it was before the days of the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad. I accompanied him and returned to Europe by way of Japan and Singapore. Hardly home again, I struck at my father’s pocketbook by asking him for ten thousand dollars to finance a year’s tour around Africa. I got the money and made the trip. America beckoned — not so much Canada, or the “commercialised” United States — both of which I despised — as Mexico and Peru with their great traditions.

Then the entirely unexpected happened.

I asked my father for an interview and submitted to him my intention of spending a year or two on the continent of America. Without a word of argument or explanation, he drew his cheque-book, made out a cheque, and pushed it across the table at which we were sitting.

We were in the library of his town house, a high and im¬ posing room done in dark oak, with its walls nearly hidden by the vast array of books which he had assembled during a half century of what I imagined to have been a most successful career in the business of raising trees for the reforesting activ¬ ities of various governments around the Baltic Sea. He was the tallest and most distinguished looking septuagenarian I have ever beheld. To the very day of this interview he had lived like a “grand seigneur ” of the old school — with three ideals: social prestige, liberal culture of the mind, physical prowess. He was six feet five inches tall, with a long, narrow, still fair¬ haired head sitting on wide, straight shoulders, and a slender body still under perfect control, encased in an immaculate “ morning-coat.” To imagine a man like him without money would have been an absurdity.

I had asked him for ten thousand dollars. When I glanced at the cheque, as a preliminary to slipping it into my pocket, I saw that it read for seven hundred and fifty. The world seemed to reel — I did not understand. My father was looking at me with great and expectant seriousness; but not without kindness. It even seemed as if behind his earnest and nearly anxious look there lingered in his grey, white-lashed eyes a twinkle of humour.

Then he spoke substantially as follows.

“When, fifty years ago, your mother married me, my boy, she brought me about half a million in addition to the landed estate which I owned. My father had been a peasant, but a money-maker. We have been calling him a landed proprietor, probably to cover the ignominy of our origins; but when he started out, he owned only a very small farm. He amassed property — under my hand it has melted away. To-day, after allowing for a fair valuation of all these things that still go as mine” — he looked about as if he could cover it all with a glance — “there are no more than ten thousand dollars left. I am glad that your sisters are married and provided for. As for you, I might hand you what is left and blow my brains out. You surmise that that is not my way.

“ I have often longed to drop all pretence, to quit this ‘mansion,’” — he smiled at the word — “and to retire into the country in order to live as I should like to live; that is, to buy myself a small cottage, with one or two rooms, to appoint it in the simplest manner, and to prepare myself for the life to come by reading about the life that is past. These books which were the pride of your mother were to be the consolation of my old age. To put it briefly, I am on the point of becoming a hermit.