Fruits of the Earth (43 page)

But what Dent published in 1933, despite its 140,000 words, is merely the section on Abe Spalding that Grove had hacked out over the years from the much longer “Chronicles” to make it conform approximately to what was then considered publishable novel form and length. In a similar way,
Settlers of the Marsh
(1925) is one truncated part of a much longer manuscript called “Latter-Day Pioneers,” and it is possible that
The Yoke of Life
(Grove called that a “horrible and misleading publisher's title”–his own was “Adolescence”) comes from the same quarry of Marsh stories. “The Weatherhead Fortunes; The Story of a Small Town” was never published, and even while debilitated by illness in the very last years of his life, Grove was still working on another massive project, “The Seasons,” which was to present in four parts “a bird's-eye view of all that happens typically within an area thirty miles square, including the (imaginary) town of Rivers and its whole population and all its activities, from the odd-job man to the great industrialist with an income of fifty thousand and over.” “If I live to finish it,” he wrote to Desmond Pacey in 1941, “it will be an enormous book, of course; I mean a book of probably over 1000 pages.” “The Seasons” was, of course, never completed or published.

Grove's 1919 letters to his wife Catherine confirm that while he was writing his first English work,
Over Prairie Trails,
in seven weeks during October–November, 1919, he was already at work on the “Pioneers” chronicle, which he had begun in German. And from that time until his death in 1947, Grove continued to struggle with this massive form of fiction. On the basis of his careful examination of the
Grove manuscript collection, Douglas O. Spettigue explores with a fine critical perception these “unpublishable” struggles in
Frederick Philip Grove
(1969), but it strikes me there is more involved than what he calls Grove's unencouraged “penchant for the chronicle form.” Spettigue defines chronicle as “the fictional form which celebrates the life of the community without exalting anyone to the role of hero,” its seeming patternlessness always cyclical and generational, and gives as example John Gait's
Bogle Corbet
(1831). As far as it goes, I accept that definition, but a better example for Grove would have been
The Old Wives' Tale
by Arnold Bennett (a writer he greatly admired), or even
War and Peace,
whose scope Grove, in a 1941 letter to Pacey, hopes his “The Seasons” will emulate, “though,” he adds quickly, “I do not mean to compare my gifts with those of Tolstoy.”
The Peasants,
by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Ladislas Reymont, first published in the United States in 1927, might be most useful of all, since Grove speaks of it particularly in a 1929 letter: “Yes,
The Peasants
is a pretty big book [it is structured around the four seasons, 1161 pages]; and yet it is
too
long;
too
slow. If my pace and its pace were mixed or averaged up, there'd be a book. I'm going to try that with ‘Abe Spalding.'…Apropos of
The Peasants:
the worst, to me, seems that the book leads nowhere: I want a definite
end:
tragic or otherwise.”

It seems to me that these comments to Catherine Grove outline one Canadian fiction problem Grove never resolved. They were written toward the end of his lecture tour when train travel had shown him the immensity and range of prairie/mountain/shield Canada all fall and winter; he writes, from the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa on February 9, 1929, his literary comments scattered between details of his probably refusing to go to tea with former Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden (“I'd be
looking on at a sort of hypocritical function”), home news (“Too bad about Mrs. Westwood”), his reading on the trains (
“Giants in the Earth–
and I want to read it”), his bothersome expenses (“the money simply melts”), and the clumsy problem of clean laundry while travelling for weeks (to save money they were actually sending his underwear from places like Manyberries, Alberta and Govenlock, Saskatchewan and Nanaimo, British Columbia back and forth to Rapid City, Manitoba by mail). The problem is the form of the fiction that will best express his particular vision of what he sees in the endless Canada.

Three traditional literary forms I believe Grove did master very well were the essay (
The Turn of the Year, It Needs to be Said),
the novel (
Our Daily Bread, Two Generations, The Master of the Mill, Consider Her Ways
), and the short story (
Tales from the Margin,
though never published as a book in his lifetime). In a fourth he achieved what I consider his unique brilliance: the fictional autobiographical picaresque of
Over Prairie Trails, A Search for America,
and
In Search of Myself
. But the fifth, his potential masterpiece of chronicle, eluded him.

Grove's publishers wanted him to write nothing but novels because novels were what they could easily sell. And again and again, pressured by poverty and whatever else with pride he longed for in recognition, Grove chopped powerful novels out of his best narratives, yet that was never really what he wanted to do. What he wanted was something different, as different it seems to me as what Sherwood Anderson wanted in
Winesburg, Ohio.
Anderson wrote in his memoirs:

The stories belonged together…I considered then, as I consider now, that my earliest stories [i.e. novels]…had been the result not so much of my own feeling about life as of reading the novels of others. There had
been too much H.G. Wells, that sort of thing. I was being too heroic. I came down off my perch. I have even sometimes thought that the novel form does not fit an American writer, that it is a form which had been brought in. What was wanted was a new looseness…. Life is a loose, flowing thing. There are no plot stories in life.

The novel form, as perfected in nineteenth-century middle-class England and imported holus-bolus by Canada's colonial publishers as a great and necessary cultural form, was not adequate to portray the life that Grove with his relentless mind, clear eye, and sensitized European imagination discovered in the Canadian west: “my hero [if you must have a hero, Mr. Ayre] is the Prairie!” At the same time, he did not want the sprawling peasant narrative developed in the villages of central Europe, though he certainly must have found many possibilities for such stories in the Mennonite villages of southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan–their Dutch-German settlement pattern and architecture, their claustrophobic taboos, gossip, and inter-marriages–that he could not help but know intimately through his own marriage. Rather, he somehow wanted closure; he wanted the heroic possibility of tragedy because that is what the Canadian west revealed to him in the immigrant dominated by his past (Niels Lindstedt in
Settlers of the Marsh),
in the obsessed homesteader (Abe Spalding), in the disillusioned woman (Mrs. Weatherhead in “The Weatherhead Fortunes”). All are tragic figures, but tragic within a necessary landscape and community–largely an unformed society trying to shape itself with no awareness of local pride or history–without which the particular dimension of individual tragedy is not comprehensible.

It strikes me that what electrified Grove into writing in Canada (he always seems to write very rapidly at white-hot inspiration, an inspiration that sometimes carries him for months and no adversity, poverty or illness, can wipe it away), was landscape and the way a human community is slowly formed by it. I see this understanding as essentially native, that is, aboriginal American, and whether Grove recognized this as such is not the question; the point is that his experiential imagination absorbed this from the Canadian landscape and its people as year after year he lived with them. At the same time he remained intellectually dominated by the individualism which is western civilization's great heritage: Greek thought and Hebrew piety. His own tragedy, in practical writing terms, was that no Canadian publisher or editor ever encouraged him in his possible exploration for other forms (as Ben Huebsch at Viking encouraged Sherwood Anderson); all the timorous Canadians (and they were the best the country could offer at the time) ever said to him was “get to the core of the matter,” “cut!” I'm certain that if James Joyce and William Faulkner had been born Canadian, they too would have been expected to hack away, to try and hammer one middle-class English novel out of their boundless imaginations. Well past the first energy of his youth, impoverished, living the humiliating secret of his German past in a world that hated Germans, Grove was certainly no wealthy, absolutist, overwhelming Tolstoy, he could not assert his vision and perfect the particular fictional form his literary intuition told him must be made. All we have are his continuing, and continually frustrated, attempts.

For an unconventional book to be published requires both an imaginative editor and a nervy publisher who can be (or wants to be) convinced that he should overrule the
recommendations of his invariably conventional readers. Grove never had that for his chronicles. And neither Sherwood Anderson (
Winesburg, Ohio,
1917) nor John Dos Passos (
U.S.A.,
1930–36) provided him any model in his struggle for an indigenous fictional form. In fact, he may have found both of them too much “United States” and not enough truly “American.” Duncan Campbell Scott (
In the Village of Viger,
1896), whom he met in Ottawa, or Mazo de la Roche (sixteen novels about Jalna, the first published in 1927) might have suggested some possibilities closer to home, but their fictions were doubtless too soaked in what seemed to Grove spongy romanticism for him to swallow. But his return again and again to the chronicle, unencouraged as he was by either understanding or publication, convinces me that he found the novel unfit, too imported a literary form for the emerging society he experienced in the pioneer west.

What Grove dreamed of doing remains a dream for many contemporary writers. It may very well be that we, like Grove, do not have the architectonic gifts to create overwhelming narrative forms like
War and Peace,
or
The Brothers Karamazov,
or
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
or
Poor Fellow My Country,
but it is significant that many contemporary Canadian writers find the usual simplistic categories of short story and novel and essay too restrictive. Aritha van Herk does not write critical essays but rather what she calls “fictocriticism” by analogy my clumsy “fictional autobiographical picaresque” label for Grove's best writing might become “bio-fiction.” Robert Kroetsch and Robertson Davies write fiction tetralogies or trilogies which, taken together (as at one stage they must be), become something quite different from the ordinary concept of “novel.” My own continuing fascination for chronicle is visible in
The Blue Mountains of China.
Shades
of chronicle are surely there when Sandra Birdsell admits she had “a growing frustration with what I perceived to be the restrictiveness of the short-story form. It seemed to me too neat, too compartmentalized and unrealistic to capture and contain a character…” and so she writes the generational family cycle of
Agassiz Stories.
Chronicle is also lurking behind Edna Alford's
A Sleep Full of Dreams,
Margaret Laurence's
A Bird in the House,
and Alice Munro's
Who Do You Think You Are?
These writers have simply resolved some of its problems, not by levelling all into a chronological continuum, but by taking dramatic connected moments and letting them imply massive wholes.

Fruits of the Earth
would, I think, have revealed even greater strength than it now has if Grove had had the freedom to build these–what can they be called?–story spirals, whole-book sequences? inter-connected stories? discontinuous narratives? Despite the complexity of our literary vocabulary, we still have no suitable name for what those books obviously are. Surely the most memorable and best parts of Grove's book are easily seen as short stories: Abe's arrival and the plowing, the flood, the election, saving the great crop, Charlie's death, to name only a few. Marion's betrothal (which has little to do with the community as a whole) is certainly a short story, and the unsatisfactory ending to the book would change completely if the confrontation in the schoolhouse were structured as the denouement of one. Grove was a very fine short story writer–why did he not try what Duncan Campbell Scott and Stephen Leacock (
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
) and Sherwood Anderson tried with varying success? The massive character of Abe Spalding might then have developed like that of Mika in
Agassiz Stories,
Grandfather Simpson in
A Bird in the House,
or Flo in
Who Do You Think You Are?:
sometimes
on-stage and often off, but forever looming over everything, a primal force growing greater for every absence. And the prairie would truly have been the book's unchallenged hero.

It is, of course, silly and presumptuous of me to conjecture what Grove
should
have written; every text he ever published in English (except perhaps the first) was worked over for years, and it must be respected as the text he was willing to let stand. Certainly his four prairie novels are for me the finest fiction written about the Canadian west between the wars. Nevertheless, every writer knows the unbendability of words–Grove with his mastery of several languages was more aware of this than most–and, above all, the dictatorship of required and acceptable forms. As some stories cannot be told in a half-hour television drama, so some stories refuse to reveal their necessary complexity by focusing on one person to a maximum of 100,000 words. All his life Grove wrestled with the form of his texts; in spite of painstaking efforts, he seems rarely to have been satisfied with the form that appeared in print. And we are being critically inept if we, despite Grove's own statements, treat
Fruits of the Earth
as if it were a novel.