F. P. GROVE: AN IMPORTANT VERSION OF THE MASTER OF THE MILL DISCOVERED

ROBIN MATHEWS

Frederick Philip Grove's place in Canadian letters is secure, despite some famous doubting readers. People as widely different as Mordecai Richler (who regularly asperses Grove as our most deservedly unread author) and his two most recent biographers, Margaret Stobie and Douglas Spettigue, convey uneasiness, at the very least, about the measure of Grove's achievement. Remarking that he had twelve (?) books published in his lifetime, Stobie allows that he "deserves attention because of a couple of those ... and a number of isolated passages."¹ Spettigue writes with the same damp enthusiasm. "Much of his writing is powerful", Spettigue writes, "but few of his books are satisfying. Much of the writing he laboured at has little interest and remains unpublished."² Grove, quite clearly, has not been blessed in recent years with biographers fired with his importance. Even though work on Grove's writing goes ahead, one cannot help believing--considering his major publication, his intriguing and symbolic life, and the richly interesting unpublished papers extant--that his biographers have held back attention by belittling a writer who is much more interesting and important than they will admit or see.

This essay is not about the quality of Grove criticism. But because of what I will be saying here, I feel called upon to preface my comments by pointing out that Grove's published and unpublished work will repay close examination for a long time to come. He was an utterly serious writer who engaged major issues of the century and came up with a major body of work. The Master of the Mill, for instance, is probably a great novel. We now have been able to examine eight versions, all different enough to provide a fascinating study of 'ripening' over several years. I have not undertaken a fully comparative study of all the versions. But in my work on The Master of the Mill versions, I have been struck with areas still waiting for study even after Paul Hjartarson's thesis on seven of the versions, entitled "Frederick Philip Grove at Work, A Study of the Drafts of The Master of the Mill."³ To begin, the movement through the varying structures of the novel's versions deserves close study to see how Grove shifted intention and emphasis, and why--in terms aesthetic and philosophical--he arrived at the final, published structure. Grove's shifting attention to class and its implications in the versions will tell much about his mind, especially since he wrote of himself that he gave "intellectual assent to the doctrines of socialism or communism."⁴ Indeed, the political Grove has never been examined. The development of character through versions of The Master of the Mill, moreover, especially in the creation of the females and Edmund, will reveal a great deal about Grove's relation to ideas of the time and, of course, to the kinds of statement he was striving for in other fictions. His work has been looked at in relation to Rousseau, Gide, and Stefan George to some extent, but it hasn't been thoroughly or even convincingly placed in the development of modernism, in Grove's Canadian response to it, and in the particular influence upon him of writers like Hardy, Conrad, Madox Ford and the movements of naturalism and realism. He has not been paid the respect of having a full-scale examination done so that his world view--influences and all--may be shown in a clear and developing form.

The recent, major work done on him by Stobie, Hjartarson, and Spettigue, good and fundamental as it is to further research, leaves unexamined vast areas of interest. What is more, all those examinations take Grove's In Search of Myself (in fact, and figuratively speaking) to be a major apology for real failure. They don't grant that work importance as a fictionalized autobiography--in which Grove reveals the kind of character and experience necessary for a certain kind of artist who wishes to do significant work here in Canada; to see uniquely on this landscape fundamental values of humanity that may be expressed by the writer in terms relevant to any time or place.

Those who do see that important dimension of In Search of Myself realize the centrality and significance of Grove's whole life and work. For that reason any discovery of previously unexamined Grove material is of wide interest. The work that I have been privileged to examine is a version of The Master of the Mill largely different from the published text of 1944 and importantly different even from the text most closely related to it. I shall call the newly discovered text the Edmund version. In it the time taken by the action is shorter than in the published text: the novel ends with Edmund Clark's death. The time between Edmund's and Sam Clark's death is dealt with in the published text but not in the 1935/36 Edmund version. The plot, also, is significantly different in the Edmund version. Characterization--even of main characters--is so altered in the published text that the 1935/36 version presents a quite different view of reality, especially if the main characters are intended to be representative people in the march of technological civilization since Confederation. Finally, the mode of narration is a good deal different from that of the published text. There Sam Clark is an old man in his dotage. He recollects parts of the past, but much of it is told through the recollections of other major characters and by means of the history of the mill being written by Mr. Stevens. In the Edmund version Sam Clark is able and clear-minded throughout, the story is related more conventionally by use of an omniscient observer; events are described in the present, with some use of recall.

The appearance of the new version of The Master of the Mill opens, again, the fascinating question about the possible existence of other versions of Grove's texts waiting for discovery.

In his doctoral thesis for Queen's University, Paul Hjartarson records and describes seven versions of The Master of the Mill, if we include the published version.⁵ Because he has established admirably a way of distinguishing the texts for scholars, I shall use the names he gives to the various versions. Grove himself alludes to other versions not apparently extant and to various spans of time during which he worked on the novel. Because he combined a tendency to romanticize the time of his labour over texts with a normal human tendency to confuse blocks of time, no certainty exists over what versions he wrote or what ones remain extant.

In 1945 he wrote about the book to Carleton Stanley, that,

the first version (1934) was straight narrative in 1300 pages and that, during the five years following, while I put it into its present form, I reduced it through that form, to 400 pages.⁶

In a last page of the published text he records the span of writing as simply "1930-1944".

However, he writes in various other places of an even longer time spent on the novel. In 1939 he writes of having completed the book earlier than 1944, but of having begun earlier than 1930.

I have this moment finished the typing of the final manuscript of what I hope will be the next book of mine to appear. On this Master of the Mill I have been at work since the early summer of 1929, having, even then, pondered it for almost exactly 30 years. It is one of the three books for which all else has been preparation .⁷

In a slightly earlier letter in 1939, Grove suggests, perhaps, a version which seems very surely to have existed and which others appear to have read.

Throughout the winter I have been at work giving a big novel its final shape, The Master of the Mill. Under pressure of financial difficulties I offered it, in 1933, in an unfinished or bungled state, to Dent's in London. Mr. Dent had been out here at my place in the spring and offered me, when I outlined the theme to him, $100.00 a month for the first refusal. I accepted: and--I don't know whether you'll understand this--that spoiled the book on which I had even then, been at work for four or five years.⁸

A draft was submitted to Dent, and Grove included in the Lorne Pierce letter part of a reader's report. The report describes the book as "monumental" and "a book on the grand scale," though the piece Grove quotes doesn't specify its length in pages.

Strange as it may seem, Grove had written to Lorne Pierce four months earlier, appearing to describe all the typed drafts he had made of The Master of Mill to that time.

I have been working at it since 1929; and there are three successive versions. One of these went to England and was read by such people as Church and Pocock, both of whom called it a book 'in the grand style' . . . . The present, fourth, version on which I am at work will be the final one. I call it The Master of the Mill.⁹

Laying aside Grove's later claim, or suggestion, of a partial version in 1905 and his claim to W. J. Alexander in 1939 that he had been "pondering the novel for almost 30 years," and laying aside, also, his claim to Pacey in 1945 that he was using his "shelves of manuscripts" for fuel, we may look at his statements that accord, now, with the evidence we have. He writes of working on the book since 1929 and completing a first version in 1934. He writes of offering a version in an "unfinished or bungled state" to Dent in 1933; he writes of four versions completed between 1929 and 1939. Paul Hjartarson claims that Grove began writing The Master of the Mill in 1930 at the earliest, and that between then and 1944 he produced seven drafts:

the 278-page Anstruther manuscript; the 284-page Fanshawe manuscript; the 208-page Stanley manuscript; the 260-page Hardy typescript; the 332-page Spartacus typescript; the 297-page Alexander typescript; and the typescript--no longer extant--of the published novel.¹⁰

We now know Grove wrote at least five typescripts. The genesis of the manuscripts and typescripts from 1934 to 1936 relates to Dent's interest in the idea, to an apparent international competition discussed (but not identified) in a diary entry for February 12, 1936,¹¹ and to Grove's determination "to construct an architectonic whole of the idea and conceptions."¹² Hjartarson clarifies (with the omission of the newly-discovered version, of course) the activity of Grove's work between 1934 and 1936,¹³ and there is no need to pursue that matter here. His conclusion about a shift in structure of the developing novel is, however, important. The first typescript made around 1934 ends with the death of Maud, Sam Clark's wife, in childbirth. That death concludes the first part of the published version of The Master of the Mill. "All subsequent drafts," Hjartarson remarks,

add the major events of Book Two of the published novel. Grove's attempt "to construct an architectonic whole" out of the work would thus appear to describe his struggle to fashion the two-part "Death of the Master"/ "Resurrection of the Master" structure that characterizes all subsequent versions of the novel.¹⁴

That claim seems to be true. However, what Hjartarson suggests is the fourth draft (and the second typescript) appears now to be the fifth draft (and the third typescript). Hjartarson calls that version the "Spartacus" version because Grove, for some reason uses the pseudonym "Spartacus" on the title page, perhaps for competition purposes. "On the last page of that typescript the novelist has written," Hjartarson says, "the dates '1929/1936' in ink thereby indicating that the Spartacus draft is the version completed in 1936."¹⁵

That claim is complicated by the newly discovered version, for it is marked on its title page, in Grove's hand, "1935/36".

Essentially, the newly discovered version is an immediate predecessor to the Spartacus version. Parts of it are carbon copies of the Spartacus draft. Its major significance--apart from the fact that it seems to verify Grove's statement to Carleton Stanley that the 1939 version was the fourth (typed) version--is that it contains an additional forty-five pages in a section of its own, called "INTERLUDE: THE CHILD EDMUND." In addition Part Two opens slightly differently from the Spartacus text and Grove rewrites nine pages and integrates them into Part Two. The newly discovered version which I call "the Edmund version" is the only one that has a special part--called "Interlude: the Child Edmund"--dealing specifically with Edmund's childhood. The version is directly linked to the Spartacus version and to the two-part architectonic Grove writes of. It is the third typed version as far as we can now tell. And it adds about fifty-five unique typed pages to The Master of the Mill material. Moreover, it is the version that most fully presents a text in which Edmund's vision of the future is the vision to which Grove gives himself--and the novel.

The unique pages of the Edmund version are important because they suggest to us what Grove himself thought of as the shaping influences upon Edmund in his early years--though Grove may have changed them in his own mind when he shifted the major statement of the novel. Since Edmund is a peculiarly ambiguous figure in the published novel, the newly discovered version cannot but be of major interest. I shall describe, first, the version that I have examined.

It is a boxed typescript carbon copy of 373 pages in all: 371 pages of text and two preliminary pages numbered in Roman numerals. Each page bears the watermark "Progress Bound" over a circle containing a beaver and the numeral 5. Underneath, the watermark is completed by the phrase "Made in Canada." The related typescript in the University of Manitoba Collection has no watermark.

The heavy, gray 8 1/2 by 11 inch cardboard cover which fits inside the box is written on in pen and ink. The title is in printed capital letters. Then the cover bears the following words in Grove's writing: "by F. P. Grove/Carbon Copy of version/of 1935/36". The front papers, numbered in Roman numerals, are made up of two pages. The first is a title page. It is numbered I. The next page is numbered III and carries the table of contents. Unlike the Spartacus version and the published version, which are divided into "Part One, Death of the Master," and "Part Two, Resurrection of the Master," the Edmund version is divided into three: one entitled "Part one: Death of the Master," another entitled "Interlude: The Child Edmund," and a third entitled "Part Two: Resurrection of the Master." The bulk of Part One and Part Two, as I have said, is made up of carbon copy pages of the Spartacus typescript. The reason for knowing that the Edmund version came first, however, is quite clear. The Edmund version is made up of 371 pages of text. When the section "Interlude: The Child Edmund" is removed and the bridge and slight re-writing are taken into consideration, the typescript contains the 332 pages of the Spartacus version. If that isn't enough proof, pages from the Edmund version fit exactly their counterparts from the Spartacus script even in regard to early hand-written changes. Finally, the Spartacus version has the same page numbers typed at the top as the Edmund version has; but because 45 pages have been extracted the whole second section has the Edmund version pagination struck out and the new necessary pagination written in beside it. For instance, page 371 has been typed on in the Spartacus version. That page number has been struck out and the number 332 written beside it.

The series of typescripts produced between 1934 and 1936 have a peculiar importance, for much of the published version is made up of only slightly altered material from them. Grove makes changes in the published version that speed the action, sharpen style, focus and intensify description, and remove some unwonted material. But structural changes are more significant than that. (1) Minor re-writing and recasting occurs throughout. (2) Whole sections are moved in the published text. (3) The portion dealing with Edmund's early life is dropped and the information from it is cut significantly. (4) The ending is recast. (5) The memory and recall structure is increased in the published version. (6) Mr. Steven's history is introduced. (7) The compulsion among the women to know the whole story of the Clarks and the mill is intensified. (8) The shift is made from Edmund's vision as the ultimately true one to the ambiguously wrought conclusion of the published text.

Grove's shift of narrative technique in the published text is dependent upon his rearrangement of time in the novel. Both versions relate a large chunk of history. But the Edmund version deals, step by step, with a large slice of Sam Clark's life. The published text concentrates everything into the last days of Sam's life, during which time he is reviewing his soul's history and the women are attempting to understand why major decisions were made in the history of the mill. The published text--in comparison with the 1934-1936 versions--has more of the effect of a play-within-a-play. A character in the novel is reliving an incident or being told of one, and the reader is witness, from the outside, to the situation which is at once dramatic and removed. Moreover, the use of reported accounts allows Grove both to detach the reader from the major characters and to shape the major male characters as historic forces. They seem both larger and more credible in the published text than in the 1934-36 versions.

The largest portion of the earlier versions which is significantly unlike anything in the published text is the section entitled "Interlude: The Child Edmund." That section, from pages 155 to 199 of the Edmund version, contains eight divisions. Some of the same information appears in the published text, of course, but there is, in the earlier version, a concentration on Edmund in relation to his father's almost compulsive withdrawal from the mill and from social connections that creates a different quality to both their characters than is present in any other known text.

Edmund is described in the Edmund version as a boy who sees the mill as a place

populated by giants naked to the waist and toiling with super human expenditure of energy. Their toil consisted in a fight with machines, forcing them to a pace hardly to be endured. These giants were his father's slaves; but in some incomprehensible fashion they were held in subjection by his grandfather who was dead. They were dangerous giants, disaffected, threatening a subversion of the world, menacing to his father, to him, to all who lived on his side of the lake. (pp. 163-164)

His father hires a classicist, multi-lingual tutor, Mr. Kirkpatrick, from England who influences Edmund profoundly. Mr. Kirkpatrick, though bright, is from a family of agricultural labourers, and he is hypnotised by the Clark wealth. The tutor proves to be "a hard taskmaster who suppressed every childish urge, who imposed a sense of responsibility out of place in one so young" (p. 167).

Because of his hothouse circumstances, Edmund is a precocious child. He asks the tutor how his grandfather got money enough to rebuild the mill after the fire, and Sam, overhearing, rules against any further discussion of the kind. Sam's ruling and the tutor's desire to please increase the intensity of an already unnatural atmosphere. Finally, at twelve years old, Edmund is sent to the "oldest and most famous boarding school of the country" (p. 175). Ruth, his sister, is sent to an appropriate school shortly after.

The children return and an entertainment is held at which the hypnotic relation between Miss Doolittle and Edmund develops. Edmund is only thirteen. Sam realizes he mustn't intervene in a relation that, later, becomes a full-blown liaison.

Edmund continues to develop precociously. After cruising the Mediterranean, he goes to flying school at the time of the First World War. He is rejected by the armed forces at first, but a little later he becomes a decorated air ace. He is noticed by the king, and is reported in the papers. He is the key person enabling the British prime minister to get private capital to develop aeronautical ideas Edmund and friends have developed. Finally, Edmund becomes chief of air operations on the Atlantic front, is severely wounded, and receives daily inquiries from the "king, the prime minister, great ladies of the realm" (p. 196).

Most of the section is narrated. Grove spends much time in the section laying a basis for Edmund's later actions. Secrecy, for instance, is early forced into the Clark household because of Sam's refusal to permit questions about the financial origins of the mill. The English tutor is an insecure worshipper of wealth, and he schemes to keep Edmund and his father apart. As a child Edmund fantasizes about the mill and its origins. Later, he becomes a daring man physically and a cunning one financially. Finally, the extent of his wounds is more emphasized than in the published novel. He is wounded on two occasions, once in the leg and then in the breast and arm. Partly as a result of having hovered at death's door, Edmund develops a view of the world, technology, and man's destiny that sets him to work to change the social order.

But Grove doesn't manage in the Edmund version to present him as a clearly understandable figure, despite the attempt to concentrate especially on his growth. Some statements the narrator makes about Edmund are either vague or eccentric. For instance, it is said of Edmund who, at six years old, has been romanticizing his small grandfather into a man of titanic proportions that he saw power in the family degenerating,

that we are given a vision of the child's disturbed idea of a sort of general decay, of a degeneration which, from a grandfather of giant stature, had produced a father of average proportions and a puny being like himself, forever to remain four feet high. (p. 163)

There is a general sense in both the Edmund version and the published text that the Clarks are small people but surrounded by big men who do their will. It seems as if Grove may have intended, at some point, to have the Clarks perceived as unnaturally small--as some comment on the development to technological humanity.

The sexuality of the Clarks, too, through both the Edmund version and the published text, is related to some idea, not completely clear, that Grove has about technology, power, and the psychological effects of power relations. In the earlier version Edmund is ultimately a positive force and is able to father children. Ruth is an image of alienated personality moving to decadence. She is probably sexually perverse. In the published text Edmund is essentially a negative force and is, apparently, sterile, if not impotent. Edmund mentions his "suffering" to his father who calls for an explanation. Edmund replies:

"Can't you guess? Maud knows. She and I have been married for two years. There is no sign of a child, there never will be. If I had not come to love, I have almost come to revere my wife for understanding why that could never be."¹⁶

In the Edmund version, Ruth is a more frankly presented representative of decadence than in the published novel, and her sexual concerns are more sharply characterized. Her relations with the Marquis de Montamar are almost satirized. She arrives with an entourage. The marquis has a facsimile valet, and both men speak "a ludicrous English interlarded with French." The marquis is "exquisite in manners, foppish in dress" (p. 302). Ruth speaks to him in mawkish pidgin English. "Dat ees de place ou de shekels come from, chéri" (p. 303). She makes no bones about her terms of life with the marquis:

"He's not to come near my bed or into my dressing room. When I broached that condition, he bridled; but when he saw what I wanted--undoubted standing in European society and absolute freedom, he gave in gracefully." (p. 305)

Ruth suggests, moreover, that she may have sought sexual relations that were unconventional for her time.

"In Europe freedom is impossible without marriage. Impossible for me to live anywhere but in Europe. Here I am in a void. There aren't enough of us here; and those who are are of a low class." (p. 305)

Sam connects her to his vision of society in the last stages of collapse:

This young woman was preternaturally old: a spent volcano or a dead plant. (p. 306)

He wonders "whether a world capable of bringing forth such offspring was capable of rejuvenation" (p. 306). In the published novel, Ruth is equally firm about her relations with the marquis, but there is no suggestion of another sexual life; and she is seen very much as a victim of circumstances. She is described in the published text as without sex" (p. 232) and "altogether tragic" (p. 235).

The Interlude part of the book tells a good deal more about Sam's character, too, as I have suggested, and, in fact, helps to build a significantly different person than exists in the published text. His activity as a botanist, philanthropist, builder of an arboretum, and as a collector of art, emphasized in the earlier version, is skimmed over in the published text. In the Edmund version his withdrawal from the mill is very emphatic. His alienation is underscored. His sense that he is living in a decaying civilization is harped upon. His desire for escape and the forms that the desire for escape take are dwelled upon significantly more than in the published text. Sam becomes a book collector, too, thinks sophisticated thoughts about music and art, is actively anti-materialist, and desperately seeking some form of self-sufficiency and spiritual self-abnegation. In fact, he has an experience of Nirvana when he takes to driving in order to give "his desire for escape an almost abstract turn" (p. 183).

Suddenly it seemed to him that he was carried along on wings silent and unfelt. The sound of the engine became a sort of cosmic hum. Faster and faster they went towards the star; and never, never would they stop. He was one with universal motion; he was merged in that which is, whatever it may be: in a fluid of which he formed part, alive, but only dimly conscious, himself circurnambient to the globe and pervading it: it was Nirvana achieved and complete.

The sensation, which was one of mystic escape, was broken when the car topped the summit of the long rise and began to dip down. (p. 184)

To the influences upon Grove of Rousseau, Gide, and Stefan George we should add, it would seem, the influence of Schopenhauer and, to some extent, of Nietzsche. The Master of the Mill can be seen, at one level, to present various manifestations of the will in history. While Sam's concern with Nirvana in the Edmund version clearly points to Schopenhauer's orientalism, Edmund's suffering and development of will, his ruthlessness and lust for power suggest Nietzschean compulsions. Sam thinks of Maud as one whose "very essence had been the search for an ultimate reality." He, himself, he realizes, "had never groped after reality: what he had groped after was a feeling of nothingness, of oblivion, of a nirvana which would dissolve all his troubles in a vague, inarticulate sensation of life" (p. 181). For Schopenhauer, as for Sam in the Edmund version, intensity of will is the cause of suffering; and so the less one exercises will the less, apparently, one suffers. At the end of the version Sam is ready to throw off the mill completely, but the second Maud, Edmund's wife, will not permit him his final escape.

In the Edmund version, Sam is presented as a more sensitive, more cultured, and weaker man than in the published text. Many allusions to learning, to objets d'art, and the cultural life with which he is associated in the Edmund version are left out of the published text. His relationship with Maud Fanshawe, too, is more developed, more intimate in the earlier version, suggesting aspects of both their characters not evident in the published text.

Presentation of her character is more uncertain--she is more uncertain--in the Edmund version. But both are modified by the shift Grove employs in the use of time from the earlier versions to the published text. In both drafts, for instance, she tells Sam Clark about her pre-marital relationship with Edmund. In the 1944 text she is relating a past many years old. In the Edmund version she is discussing a contemporary relationship shortly before the marriage takes place. Her statements that Edmund doesn't love her and that she doesn't love him seem much more stark, even brutal, as contemporary observations. The recollection of those feelings after time has passed, in the later version, somehow softens them. Perhaps too, a prospective daughter-in-law appears either hard or not very credible saying to her prospective father-in-law a few weeks before her wedding:

".. . I have told him exactly what I am going to tell you now; namely, that I do not love him." (p. 252)

Maud and her father-in-law become closer in the Edmund version than in the published text:

Maud and her father-in-law drifted into a strange friendship--strange because it had the air of an alliance, of a conspiracy against Edmund. (p. 272)

Sam increases her "alienation, if such it could be called, from her husband" (p. 274). Sam questions the age, the materialism of modern technology, the precipitous move towards a workless world. Edmund is the instrument of that age and of its future destiny. Sam sees the coming "revolution" (p. 253), and he is concerned at the scepticism of the younger generation. Maud wants to know what it is he means. Sam explains:

It is the old struggle between those who have and those who have not. I am one of those who have; and naturally those who have not see in me the villain who has schemed to have and who has succeeded. That is not what I am; it is not even what my father was. Whether Edmund is that or not, I cannot tell. Here is the point. All previous revolutions have been political: they arose from the growth of the democratic ideal. Men lived under the delusion that political equality was the cure-all for their ills; and so long as political equality did not exist, that was what they fought for. The social and economic conditions remaining unchanged, every society became top-heavy; and every revolution resulted in a mere change of tyranny. But at last political equality was achieved; and the have-nots saw that it means nothing if not the power to bring about social and economic equality which they meant to bring about when they fought for their share in the task of government. (p. 254)

He goes on to tell her how technology and consciousness have worked, as jobs have been made redundant and men have demanded an equal share of wealth.

"The question is, what will the masses do? Submit or fight? If they submit, we shall have to feed them; if they fight, who will conquer?" (p. 256)

Sam tells Maud of the need for dedication to a view of man's potential, in the face of the technological revolution. She replies sympathetically:

"I have been self-centred," she said. "I thought my own problem the hardest of all. It was nothing. I have been warm; I have been fed. I have been selfish. You have shown me to myself. I will not rest," she went on, "till every one of these men has what I have."
"Then," Sam said, "you and Edmund must abdicate."
"Abdicate?"
"Surrender what has fallen to your share."
"No!" she cried. "Not level down, level up."
"There is not wealth enough in the world to do that."
"Then we shall fight till there is." (P. 257)

As the action develops Edmund calls for Maud's support. She has watched him manipulating to bring about the effects he wants, and she has maintained a strong tie with Sam because, partly, of Edmund's ruthlessness. But she finally goes with Edmund, who explains how he must win all in order to establish the new order. Sam shows his negative side and admits he has "always been a pessimist." When Edmund says he is going to educate the men, Sam scoffs.

"You can educate a dog, in the sense of training him. You cannot educate man in the sense of making him see reason."
"Do I [Edmund says] hear a Victorian speaking? Is mankind divided, finally, hopelessly, into two camps, those who know and those who don't?"
"I'm afraid so," Sam replies. (p. 349)

When the argument pauses, Sam looks to Maud.

Maud understood the question implied; and, lowering her eyes, she said, I shall stand by Edmund." (p. 351)

She stands by the man who, in the earlier version, is the most positive and, ultimately, the most humane. Sam is weak, uncertain philosophically, withdrawn, and negative. Edmund, though sometimes puzzling, is none of those things. When the final strike is in process, Sam is negative about the possibility of creating an order possessing justice and equality. Maud and Edmund are not, and they solidify their alliance.

Edmund confers with the men, making them offers. He and Arbuthnot, the union man, argue what is, effectively, the claims of marxism and capitalism. Arbuthnot says what the strikers want: "The management of the means of production for the benefit of the workers" (p. 354). Edmund argues that savings on capital are necessary to increase employment. He shows the union men to be naive about management skills, and then he unveils his plan.

"propose to deal with the present situation as I believe the centuries will deal with all industry. I shall enlarge the unit of production. By that I mean that I shall weld the whole of that industry which produces the primary food-stuff of bread into a single organization in whose prosperity all who accept my plan will share." (p. 357)

Edmund is disclosed in the earlier version as more human, but less large than he appears in the published version. In the Edmund version of the novel the men gather near the dam, but the ice is out and Edmund travels in a boat. The Terrace is set on fire and the whole town is declared to be lost. Before leaving he looks through the great windows at the mill.

There, two miles away, stood the titanic structure, flood-lighted from the dam to the bridge.... (p. 364)

The mill is not seen as a pyramid in the Edmund version, because Grove's view is essentially optimistic. To create, as Grove does for the published version, the image of the mill as a pyramid is to suggest vain pride and a passing civilization. Those are some of the large implications of the published text. The Edmund version, however, balances the powerful sense of futility expressed by Sam and mirrored by Ruth with the optimistic ideas that grow and develop in Maud and Edmund.

The death of Edmund is concentrated upon in the earlier version because the novel ends at that point. In the published text Sam Clark takes over the Mill, and runs it for some years, and so the novel opens in his dotage, and fills in the years from Edmund's death. In the Edmund version, the novel opens the day after Rudyard's funeral and covers the time until a few hours after Edmund's death. Sam Clark is still an active and able person. But he is a consistent character in the Edmund version--a man who hates everything about the mill and wants no part of it. Thinking about the implications of Edmund's death, Sam is horrified.

There was only one way out; and that was the way in which, as his son had hinted, he could, a quarter of a century ago, have escaped from his father: by repudiating the mandate implied in the old man's will. At last he must leave the mill; he must leave Langholm. Let others, strangers this time, grapple with the disaster: he would turn his back. He would sell his stock, at any price; in case of need he would give it away; he wanted only one thing: to be rid of that mill which stood intact. The mill had conquered him as well as the men; it had now drunk blood; it was best to leave the mill in possession. Maud, he added, by way of second thought, must do the same: there was no way out of it. (p. 369)

But when he faces Maud, she, too, acts characteristically, for the Edmund version, and she makes the final decision bringing the version to a close. After looking at Edmund's corpse, Maud speaks as someone who has "died inwardly" and "considers all things in the light of the widest issues.... Things were at stake compared with which a domestic tragedy was a mere trifle" (p. 370). Maud announces that they are not at an end, but a beginning. Sam disagrees with her.

"There is no reason why the load should not be shifted to other shoulders; you are a woman; I am an old man."
"No reason except one," she said.
He looked up. "That reason?" he asked.
"Is the child which I carry under my heart. That child must not be born into chaos." (p. 371)

That ending closes the Edmund version. The Spartacus version which removes the whole special Interlude section adds two sentences to the dosing of the Edmund version:

Sam stood and stared. He felt like a man who has died and must come to life again-to be either his father or his son, the past or the future.

At that point Grove seems, now, to have been launched for the final published version in which Sam Clark returns to the mill, and the ending balances positive and negative views of man's destiny in an effectively haunting ambiguity. In the published version there is no doubt about Edmund's perversity, however. Grove turned the final text of The Master of the Mill away from the essential optimism of the Edmund version. Did he do so because of the Second World War? The newly discovered version gives no hint of an answer to that question. But it thickens and deepens the characters for us and complicates the profoundly philosophical questions Grove is dealing with in the version published in 1944. The Edmund version suggests, too, that the various drafts worked on from 1929 to 1944 may provide a record of shifting forces in the world of the time, against which Grove may have shifted in his evaluation of man's possible future. Finally, the newly discovered version of The Master of the Mill underscores, again, the centrality and seriousness of Grove as a major writer. In it he can be seen struggling to characterize the age through a vision of economic forces, individual psychology, and world politics. The version underscores, too, the way in which Grove was willing to experiment, to shape and re-shape structures and ideas. He was a writer with a world view that he achieved through struggle in the market-place and profound thought about the human condition. All of his life and work are significant. As time passes his work grows increasingly important and we know that we shall be addressing both the published and unpublished materials more as we attempt to sum up the meaning of the decades in which he lived and wrote.

NOTES

¹ Margaret Stobie, Frederick Philip Grove, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), p.18.

² Douglas Spettigue, FPG The European Years, (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1973), p. 19.

³ Paul HJartarson, "Frederick Philip Grove at Work, A Study of the Drafts of The Master of the Mill." Diss. Queen's University 1981.

⁴ F. P. Grove, "Thoughts and Reflections," November 22, 1936, p. 40, unpublished diary, The Grove Collection, University of Manitoba, Box 22, Folder 2.

⁵ Hjartarson, pp. XI and XII.

⁶ F. P. Grove to Carlton Stanley, November 3, 1945, The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove, ed. Desmond Pacey, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 471.

⁷ F. P. Grove to W. J. Alexander, August 10, 1939, The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove, ed. Desmond Pacey, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 360.

⁸ F. P. Grove to Lome Pierce, May 24, 1939, The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove, ed. Desmond Pacey, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 353.

⁹ F. P. Grove to Lome Pierce, Jan. 4, 1939, The Letters of Frederick Philip Grove, ed. Desmond Pacey, (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 344-345.

¹⁰ Hjartarson, p. 61.

¹¹ F. P. Grove, "Thoughts and Reflections," p. 3 1.

¹² IF. P. Grove, "Thoughts and Reflections," p. 30.

¹³ Hjartarson, pp. 88-93.

¹⁴ Hjartarson, p. 91.

¹⁵ Hjartarson, p. 92.

¹⁶ F. P. drove, The Master of the Mill, (Toronto: McMillan, 1944), pp. 249-250.