T.L. Morrisey

Showing posts with label D.O. Spettigue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D.O. Spettigue. Show all posts

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Frederick Philip Grove in November



Frederick Philip Grove begins his autobiography, In Search of Myself (1946), with a prologue that was originally a separate essay, also entitled "In Search of Myself". In this essay Grove captures perfectly the essence of a November day in Canada, which is also the essence of November, a month of shadows and cold. Indeed, the month of November begins the Celtic season of Samhain, a time when the spirits of the dead walk and communicate with us. This is my experience of November, always profoundly experienced, and something I tried to communicate in my poem, "November", published in Girouard Avenue (2009).

I would have included the quotation below from Grove's introduction in my poem had I remembered it from when I used to teach the book back in the late 1970s in Canadian Literature. I remember much discussion of Grove's literary deception--his falsifying the events of his life, and also reading D.O. Spettigue's marvelous FPG in which Spettigue exposes the truth of Grove's life--in Louis Dudek's graduate seminar at McGill back in the early 1970s.

Here's the passage I'm referring to from Grove's introduction:
It was a dismal November day, with a raw wind blowing from the north-west and cold, iron-grey clouds flying low--one of those [Ontario] days which, on the lake-shores or in a country of rock and swamp, seem to bring visions of an ageless time after the emergence of the earth from chaos, or a foreboding of the end of a world about to die from entropy.