Frederick Philip Grove - Pseudonyms

Pseudonyms

Though Greve used so many false names that Karl Wolfskehl called him a "Pseudologe" & referred to his "Munchhausiaden", only two are attested with certainty (2.4 below) so far. Grove offered "potboilers" & erotic fiction under assumed names as well, but one highly revealing pseudonym is on file in his UM mss poetry (2.3). It is more than likely that further pen-names will eventually come to light in Europe & North America.

Grove's most clever and obvious pseudonym is FPG: he used these initials on both sides of the Atlantic, for his legal birth name Felix Paul Greve and his Canadian name Frederick Philip Grove. Queen's University Professor D. O. Spettigue, who discovered Grove's true identity in October 1971 in the British Museum, published his sensational finding in his 1973 book FPG: The European Years.
The name Grove itself is an elegant modification of the author's real name Greve. On the Immigration Manifesto of the White Star Liner Megantic on July 31, 1909, it appears that Grove's name was smudged, leaving the nature of the crucial central vowel uncertain, though it looks like an "o". Possibly, the German Gothic writing in Greve's passport left his name open to a variety of interpretations, & Grove was non-committal as to its true spelling.

Grove suggested the name Andrew R. Rutherford as a pseudonym for his first Canadian book publication Over Prairie Trails (1922). The same name appears in relation to his unpublished typescript in the University of Manitoba Archives, Jane Atkinson (ca. 1923, e-publ. 2000). This name is a direct reference to Grove's friend Herman Kilian's maternal grandfather, a renowned Scottish judge. Though Kilian had Grove arrested, tried & sentenced for fraud in May 1903, Grove appropriated Kilian's entire family background for his invented Canadian autobiography in the early 1920s, except that he claimed to be of Scottish-Swedish rather than Scottish-German origin. Gerden & Thorer Only two pseudonyms are attested in Grove's correspondence with Insel Publishers: he used F. C. Gerden for translations of decadent literature (Dowson, Browning), and Konrad Thorer for translations of Cervantes & Lesage. Fanny Essler In 1904-05, Greve published an accomplished, Petrarchan poetry cycle with his lover Else Endell, under the joint pseudonym Fanny Essler in Die Freistatt. In a revealing letter to Gide, Greve explained daring plans concerning the so-called 'Fanny Essler' complex, which included his first novel about Else's life, which was entitled Fanny Essler (1905).