The Master of the Mill by Frederick Philip Grove

First published: 1944

Type of work: Domestic chronicle

Time of work: 1882-1939

Locale: Langholm, a fictional city acting as the gateway between eastern (industrialized) Canada and western Canada (the agricultural heartland)

Principal Characters:

• Samuel (Sam) Clark, the protagonist, the master of the mill
• Rudyard Clark, Sam’s father, the financier who built the mill
• Edmund Clark, Sam’s son, the idealist who wants to use the mill to liberate man from labor
• Maud Carter, Sam’s wife, who prizes the arts rather than the mill
• Maud Doolittle, Sam’s secretary, who understands Sam’s dream of using the mill to help mankind
• Maud Fanshawe, Sam’s daughter-in-law, who marries Edmund Clark for convenience rather than love

The Novel

Much of the action of The Master of the Mill takes place within the mind of Samuel Clark, an old man in his eighties. Sam’s mind broods on the past, and the actions, events, and shifts in point of view follow no simple pattern. Only Sam’s own processes of association give coherence and unity to the whole. The mixture of reminiscing and reflecting makes the reading difficult, but worthwhile. By the end of the novel, it becomes evident to the reader that this complex and fragmented pattern not only traces but also reenacts Sam’s effort to work his life into a meaningful and significant pattern.

The novel opens with Sam looking out the windows of his home. Outside the window is the great mill, structured like a huge ancient pyramid. As Sam sees the mill, which towers over everything around it, he recognizes that the mill also towered over him and his every action. For the rest of the novel, he wonders how free he was to decide anything.

After the opening chapter, the novel oscillates between the present, 1939, and the past. Numerous specific episodes, actions, and people come to Sam’s mind, and as he recalls them, he wonders how they affected him. The key issue, however, is clear for Sam. He knows that, no matter how misunderstood he has been by others, he wished to master the mill and the community dependent upon it only for the betterment of mankind. He knows, however, that this hope was not realized. Whether that failure was his fault will always be his main question, and the reader’s.

The central struggle in the novel, however, is clear, despite the extremely complex narrative pattern. Sam knows that his father, Rudyard, was a great financier who was capable of planning, acting, and building. Rudyard, however, was motivated by one simple drive: the desire for wealth. Sam had taken the mill when his father died of a sudden stroke. Sam was not interested in mere wealth; he hoped to use the mill for the betterment of all. Sam, however, failed, for he could not control the forces of automation. To give men all they needed he had to use more and more machinery, but machinery put men out of work. As the workers’ discontent grew, Sam realized that gradual automation created a climate of discontent. Edmund, Sam’s son, took over the running of the mill by outmaneuvering his father at a stockholder’s meeting. Edmund, believing that the benefit to future generations was more significant than the discontent of the present generation of workers, automated everything as quickly as possible, thereby throwing more men out of work and disrupting an entire community dependent upon the mill. As a consequence, Edmund was shot during a worker’s revolt, and Sam became, once again, responsible for the mill.

Reflecting on his desire to improve the lot of mankind, hoping to tame automation so that it would help rather than hinder man, the old Sam is left to face approaching death, wondering whether man is fated to work by the sweat of his brow forever. The novel ends with a foreshadowing of the Depression, suggesting that building an Eden may be an impossible dream.

The Characters

Samuel Clark is an imaginative, sensitive man who inherits the mill because of his father’s ruthlessness. Sam has great ambitions, but he is incapable of realizing them. He is an idealist, who has little practical sense of man’s immediate needs and wants. Because he thinks only in terms of ideal visions, Sam is continually frustrated by man’s smallness, pettiness, and greed. He is, in a sense, a dreamer. His dream is great, even magnificent, but his capacity for action is limited.

Rudyard Clark, Sam’s father, is a very different man. He often takes Sam’s ideas and plans, but he uses them in an immediate and ruthless fashion. Rudyard is a financier, an extremely practical one, who can, and does, turn an idea into a profitable venture. Rudyard is the great financier, the builder and owner of trusts and combines. He wields power ruthlessly to gain more power and wealth for himself and his immediate family.

Edmund Clark, Sam’s son, is also an idealist, but he is an idealist who thinks little about man’s immediate needs. In fact, Edmund can accept and tolerate the suffering of mankind as long as, eventually, there might be relief. Edmund becomes a senator to put his dream into action. Moved only by a vision of a better future, he becomes a cold man of action, determined to control and manipulate everything and everyone—his father, his wife, his workers—to have his own way. His every action is perfectly practical and perfectly heartless. There is no sympathy for him when he is finally shot by a stray bullet during a workers’ revolt. Three other characters need some attention. The reader may, initially, be puzzled by the fact that three women in the novel are called Maud. Yet Frederick Philip Grove deliberately called the women by the same name to indicate how often the men in the novel overlook the key values the women embody: love, compassion, and feeling. That the protagonist, in his old age, confounds one Maud with another is, for Grove, to suggest that his main character senses that the three women (or the three characteristics they embody) are somehow necessary to his life and ambitions.

Critical Context

The Master of the Mill has received a mixed reception. The book is usually admired for its grand design and aim. Furthermore, the author’s handling of various sections of the book—particularly those sections dealing with social problems and individual moral problems—has been greatly admired. The overall narrative method and technique, however, have not won universal acceptance. The deliberate use of three Mauds, for example, has often struck critics as too contrived. In Grove’s development as a writer, however, the book is central. Unlike the author’s earlier works, which follow a direct chronological line of development, The Master of the Mill approximates a “stream-of-consciousness” novel. Grove tried, for the first time, to create a narrative form which not only records but also actually re-creates the mind of the protagonist. The book, then, shows Grove to be a key modernist of Canadian literature. The modernists attempted to make form and content one. The mode of presentation was not to be an incidental characteristic of the work, but rather a central and necessary one. In his letters, Grove described his need to find that “inevitable form” which would perfectly reveal the cast of mind of his protagonist. Although the techniques used at times disrupt and confuse the reader, and although the various shifts in time make the novel difficult to follow, Grove integrated the various sections of the novel well, if not perfectly.

A comparison of The Master of the Mill with Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904) is helpful here. Both writers wanted to use a pattern that realistically traced the various shifts, alterations, and changes that characterize the human mind’s processing of experience. Because the reader is forced to fit the pieces of the past together, the reader, like the protagonist, is continually aware of the process by which the past is transformed into a meaningful sequence of actions. Grove’s experiments in this direction were not always successful, but his efforts won for him a permanent place in Canadian literature.

Bibliography

Nause, John, ed. The Grove Symposium, 1974.

Spettigue, Douglas O. FPG: The European Years, 1973.

Stobie, Margaret R. Frederick Philip Grove, 1973.

Sutherland, Ronald. Frederick Philip Grove, 1969.