The particular interest of Buckler's early sketches and stories is in following themes and characters which would appear in more serious and mature form in the later fiction. In this sense, all his early work was a dress rehearsal for The Mountain and the Valley.

Buckler's first published story was "One Quiet Afternoon," which appeared in the April, 1940 issue of Esquire magazine. Here one senses Buckler struggling to find an appropriate form for his materials. The story lacks a central narrative interest; there is simply too much going on. Any signs of such weakness had disappeared utterly with his next effort, a story called "The First Born Son," published by Esquire in July, 1941. This masterful story combined two themes which were to become central to Buckler's mature work: the tension between fathers and sons, and the city/country conflict. (pp. 55-6)

[For a beginner] the differences between city and country were a useful way to define characterization…. Buckler leaves us with a strong sense of the country as a creative force. By contrast, the city, with its disfiguring drives toward sophistication and materialism, cuts one off from a meaningful flow of experience. (pp. 56-7)

Perhaps more important than the city/country theme in Buckler's early stories is the depiction of family life…. Buckler's best achievements adopt [the narrative voice of a young country boy]. (p. 57)

"Penny in the Dust" might well stand as a kind of archetype of Buckler's achievements in the story form. To begin with, it uses a retrospective framework, a technique of thinking-back which unexpectedly creates a warm glow of memory upon events long buried in the past…. (p. 58)

[In "Penny in the Dust" the] combination of retrospective framework, realistic reconstruction of past emotion, and clear symbolic meaning became the unique imprint of Buckler's short stories. (p. 59)

The essential problem with "A Present for Miss Merriam" is Buckler's handling of Miss Merriam's narration. One feels his uneasiness in adopting the woman's narrative voice—a stiffness not found in his better work. It is therefore useful to contrast the relatively weak "A Present for Miss Merriam" with the superbly successful "Last Delivery Before Christmas." Here the story of Ronnie's gaining a second father, in the person of Syd Weston, and Syd's heroic effort to overcome Ronnie's hostility, is narrated by the very convincing voice of Ronnie himself…. We instinctively respond to the immediacy of Ronnie's narration…. (p. 62)

Taken together, Buckler's early sketches, short stories, and first draft of a novel [Excerpts from a Life] reveal a writer seeking through endless experiment the full and mature expression of his unique vision. All his early writing points unerringly toward his major work, The Mountain and the Valley (1952). (p. 65)

[The] span of perhaps three-quarters of a century [in The Mountain and the Valley] allows Buckler to pursue one of his favourite concerns: the fall-out from one generation to the next of both physical and psychological characteristics—the ways in which habits and mannerisms, oddities of speech and gesture will move down through a family.

The structural device Buckler employs to convey this sense of movement within the Canaan family is Ellen's rug. As she sits, throughout the novel, rummaging in the rag-bag for bits of cloth to weave into her growing rug, her associations in memory with each piece of cloth draw together, like the rug itself, into a kind of family history. This device for widening out the span of time adds both depth and density to the foreground narrative, the story of David Canaan's life. Ellen's rug, moreover, is being worked circle by circle. We thus seem to be watching the growth of a pattern which is closed ring after ring, like the generations of the family, and which, by the end of the novel, is finally complete. (pp. 66-7)

The depiction of David's character is the major concern of "Part One—The Play," but Buckler must also establish the minor characters and sketch in the life of the valley community. He combines these purposes by narrating the events of a single day, with a subtle shifting of focus from David's youthful dreams to the communal tragedy of a double death. In this section, too, he forges the basic symbolic tension of the whole book, the pull between mountain and valley, which will ultimately shape the narrative and open out the book's full significance. (pp. 67-8)

[David's] capacity to invest the future with a dream-like perfection, to impose upon poor mundane reality a splendour it simply cannot sustain—these reactions mark David as different, a difference which Buckler develops by way of contrast with the characters of Joseph and Chris. (p. 68)

David's sense of self is rooted in his difference from others. He exists by reason of a distinct apartness—in this case, a gift with words which marks him off from the rest of the community. One of the strategies of the novel is David's inability to find, literally, a soul mate. Buckler thus confronts us with two basic, and widely contrasting, personalities: one fulfils himself by doing; the other by naming, seeing, and describing what is done. In broader terms, the novel investigates the place of the artist or writer in a communal context which by tradition values arms and muscles more than insight and brains. (p. 69)

It is astonishing how much Buckler accomplishes in these opening chapters…. The major characters have been given unique personalities, and this effect is achieved not by block descriptions or set pieces which, in effect, say to the reader, "This is what this character is like." Buckler's narrative and descriptive process is a finer weave, in which patterns of meaning are established through concrete images. (p. 71)

In addition to the ten characters already established in these opening chapters, Buckler creates a structural pattern which will be sustained throughout. He works his materials into sharply contrasting forces, as the title of the book suggests…. [The] contrasts also exist at an abstract level: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters; youth and age; people who do and people who think; life and death. (p. 72)

By the end of Part Three, Buckler has fully orchestrated [a] powerful but fateful rhythm—David's every act of assertion, however motivated, ironically leading to failure, guilt, and isolation. In the first half of the book, however, this process has been worked mainly with David's external relationships…. The function of Parts Four and Five is to take this destructive rhythm into the heart of the Canaan family.

As Part Four opens, we are aware, from the progress on Ellen's rug, that some time has passed…. David and Joseph are clearing rocks from the field, and David has changed ominously…. [His] dull and resentful mood intensifies in David as together he and his father work the field for rocks. In perhaps the most brilliant writing in the book …, Buckler builds a terrible tension, using a structure of alternating viewpoints, placing one interior monologue over against the other, creating dramatic irony through the mutual misconceptions of David and Joseph. (p. 77)

Part Five, entitled "The Scar," is not only the most physical section of the book, but also the one which seals David's fate…. It is a deeply impressive piece of writing, in which Buckler slowly works David—no match for the other men in physical strength—into a mood of desperate recklessness. His attempt to prove equality ends in a feat of daring which nearly kills him in a fall from the barn beam, and the resultant wound and scar symbolize henceforth his physical difference, which is only aggravated in David's mind by his family's constant solicitude. (p. 79)

In the early pages of [Part Six], Buckler conveys a strong feeling of claustrophobia, partly achieved by a conscious shift in style. As Buckler approaches the final stage of David's story, his prose increasingly takes on an abstract quality, as though the time had arrived for the full meaning of the narrative to unfold…. Buckler thus transforms into empathy that earlier tendency of David to project his own desires into the external world. But it is a development which brings no sense of serenity, no feeling of the mind calmed and the passion spent. Instead, Buckler finds again a rhythm—at once excited but enervating—for this feverish state of mind…. (pp. 79-80)

[Acceptance] is the dominant mood of the Epilogue. As David makes his way by stages up the mountain, Buckler allows us to see again the course of David's life. When he meets Steve on the road, we recall a dozen instances when, disguising his true nature, David acted out the crude idiom of the valley men. The David/Joseph conflict of character is before us again. Now, however, David feels no sense of isolation or guilt; like the actor on the stage, he plays the role that Steve expects, and passes on.

Higher up the mountain, his calm mind begins to stir with thoughts and memories, but this mental activity has about it a fluidity, a truly creative ease, which allows David to enter with complete empathy into both past and present…. Here Buckler celebrates the maturing of an artistic personality. David has always been stirred by the power of the printed word, but his own efforts to write have failed because his melodramatic imagination chose subjects beyond his realm of experience…. Now, however, David sees that he must recreate the world he knows—the one that he has loved so intensely and so often been hurt by. We sense that David is just beginning the process which Buckler as novelist is just completing.

In time, this flood of creative energy overwhelms David: Buckler finds the perfect external image in the tangled variety of trees growing up the mountain slope. In a final moment of stillness at the very top of the mountain, Buckler bestows upon David a vision of creative harmony which binds together and heals the conflicts of his life: the mountain and the valley…. [David's] acceptance of himself as one of [the valley people] is achieved without any sense of strain…. Within a page, David lies dead in the snow. At the same moment, Ellen completes her rug, by adding a final piece of delicate white lace just at the centre. It symbolizes the wedding of valley—the rug is meant for practical wear—and mountain, a complexly patterned thing of artifice such as the novelist David had begun to weave at the moment of his death. (pp. 82-3)

[Buckler's second novel, The Cruelest Month (1963)], everywhere gives evidence of immensely careful planning. Its four-part structure, gradual interweaving of themes and characters, and almost total neglect of action, in the conventional sense, all indicate that he wished his meaning to emerge slowly and brokenly, as it might in a great symphony….

With the exception of the boy Peter, who dies early in the book, the novel is peopled with adults. The Cruelest Month thus tackles human relationships and problems which were largely precluded from The Mountain and the Valley because of David's inability to make, though not to imagine, meaningful adult ties. (p. 84)

Part I establishes not only the major characters but also the themes which Buckler wishes to explore…. Like Letty, Endlaw's housekeeper, Paul is a calm centre within the novel, a still eye around which rage the psychological tempests of the other characters. As such, he is more talked about than talking; Buckler seems content, much of the time, merely to describe Paul rather than to show him in action. (p. 85)

As the book develops, it becomes possible to see the characters in three distinct categories: Letty and Paul; Kate and Morse; Bruce, Rex and Sheila. While these groups are continually interacting against the backdrop of the Endlaw setting, it is clear from Part I that Buckler will use each group to work out a series of closely connected themes…. To pursue a musical analogy, Letty's questioning of her relationship with Paul functions as does a leit-motiv in a Wagner opera or Richard Strauss tone poem. We hear the theme from time to time throughout the book, now modulated or transposed to another key, but always recognizable, especially when it returns in full measure towards the close of Part IV. This is the basic structure of The Cruelest Month, a series of interwoven themes, all with an affinity of family resemblance, which the reader, like the concert goer, must hold in a creative tension as they develop and finally meld. (pp. 85-6)

[The curious trio of characters—Bruce, Rex, and Sheila]—two guilt-ridden men and a loveless woman caught between them—jostles with Paul, Kate and Morse for the reader's interest in Parts II and III of the book. Indeed this stretch of the novel attempts the mixture of memory and desire which characterizes T. S. Eliot's cruelest month in The Waste Land. The deeply buried guilts of the past (memory) are here in transition to idealized projections of future happiness and fulfilment (desire)…. While it is true that the pseudo-intellectual word-juggling of Paul, Kate and Morse can grow tedious, one needs to recognize too that this bookish banter, despite its constant puns and allusions, often accompanied by mimicry, serves a thematic purpose within the book. Buckler is not striving to be light and clever, and somehow failing at both effects. (p. 90)

Buckler's real purpose is to reveal and dramatize his characters' basic selves. Faced with the alternative, in life or in art, between surface trivia and human essence, he has chosen the more difficult narrative path which lies through the "swamp of earnestness."… His preference for the deeper layers in human relationships explains the relative slowness of the book's development…. Buckler's method insists that the reader pay attention, not to what happens, but to what is. (p. 91)

The novel's end also brings the least expected alliance of all, between Paul and Letty…. It is a curious way to end a novel about the process of becoming, this unexpected coupling of master and housekeeper in an untouched oasis of burned out Annapolis Valley—especially since Letty has received so little attention in the middle sections of the book. Buckler's final vision rests, nonetheless, with Paul and Letty, a simple and natural relationship but one deeply rooted in the flesh's longing.

Buckler originally called this novel The Cells of Love, and indicated that it was a title which faced two ways, thus implying a paradox about the human condition. In one sense of the word, each of us forms a unique cell of life, each defining that prison of personality which Eliot describes so vividly in the final section of The Waste Land. But the other sense of the word, as in cell of blood, suggests the possibility of rich and vital union with the full stream of life. The April background of The Cruelest Month, again with Eliot in mind, symbolizes the harsh discrepancy between nature joyfully regenerating itself and human nature paralyzed by a terrible awareness of death-in-life. Thus each of the characters in The Cruelest Month seeks release from the prison cell into the exciting and constantly reforming dance of the blood cells. In the background of each character is the spectre of death, but each must find a way to go on with the business of living. It is the possibility of future love, and its growth from the immuring experiences of the past, that Buckler explores here so painstakingly. Yet our ultimate feeling about the book is one of dissatisfaction, for despite the traditional importance and modern relevance of its theme, one senses here that Buckler is really an alien on uncomfortable ground. (pp. 91-2)

Ox Bells and Fireflies (1968) belongs to no obvious literary genre. Rather, it is a series of loosely connected memories imaginatively recreated along fictional lines. (p. 93)

Ox Bells and Fireflies immediately calls to mind The Mountain and the Valley, since in both books Buckler has reached back for his materials into his store of childhood memories. Memory is here the major thread, and as such it carries with it a personal character which we allow Buckler to draw out at his own pace.

There is, too, about this book a sense of freedom from restraint. If we recall Morse's general criticism of the novel as a literary form in The Cruelest Month, the need of the novelist to create conventional modes of action, and to develop recognizable characters, had been a problem very much on Buckler's mind in the earlier book. The desire to write without the incessant demands of plot and character may have shaped Buckler's decision to try on the much looser clothing, and less encumbered stretch, of the style of Ox Bells and Firefies. (pp. 93-4)

Indeed, if the book uses any major structural device, it is [the] constant shifting between the two worlds of boy and man, endless variations on a Then/Now theme…. From the time of his earliest writing, [Buckler] has tried to catch the perfect moment of experience, using what he has always regarded (irony of ironies!) as the very make-shift and inadequate net of words. (pp. 94-5)

The narrative voice of the boy Mark records only the very detailed and specific memories of childhood. When Buckler turns to the adult world, the Now of the book, this voice grows generalized, vague, imprecise. The wonderful names of the boy's world, with their exact shades of meaning and particular idioms, become distanced, as though the present somehow fails to yield the individualized accents of past experience.

This sense of time taking the edge off experience (no new phenomenon in the stages of poetic development) is rendered with especial power in the sequences which deal with human loneliness and isolation…. (p. 95)

The book is not, however, primarily an introspective affair. It is really Then which predominates, and all Buckler's youthful memories, even the sad ones, are touched with the glory of aliveness. It is a book, too, of much good humour, especially when found in the unique local idioms of the Valley people…. Indeed, the beauty of Ox Bells and Fireflies resides in [the] capacity to recreate not only such unique moments but whole segments of Valley life as Buckler knew it in his youth…. The book's real celebration is of another time and place which has been lovingly recreated and made to glow once again, especially for those who did not know that its beauty had ever existed. Perhaps few nets of words, dipped into memory's pool, have brought in such a harvest of lovely treasure. (pp. 97-8)

Buckler's The Cruelest Month affords [an] example of work which arises from materials that have not fully engaged the writer's imagination. What signifies its difference from The Mountain and the Valley is the loss of the family context, where relationships between characters have a natural basis. The Cruelest Month, on the contrary, seems artificial; the characters have to be brought together and then deployed like so many mathematical permutations. These characteristics also mar some of Buckler's later short stories, especially the long sequence, begun in 1956, for The Atlantic Advocate.

One measure of difference between [Buckler's] early and late works … is the changing emphasis from action to talk…. Possibly a novelist allows his characters merely to talk when he can no longer meaningfully dramatize their human situations, when the sense of a symbolically significant environment has permanently faded. (p. 100)

[What was clear to] Buckler, and to others of [his] generation, was that independent existence as a writer was not possible in Canada. It is thus all the more admirable that [he] went on writing, trying through experiment—and often through failure—to create literature for a country which didn't very much care. Perhaps here we may find a partial explanation for the power with which [his] most memorable characters are realized—… [for is not David Canaan an artist] without a public?… [Remember] David Canaan's longing to put it all down in words that would last forever. Surely in such characters … Buckler [has] given us a deep perception into what it was like to be born, and burdened, with an artistic personality in the first half of Canada's twentieth century. (pp. 101-02)

We acknowledge the regionalist aspect of [Buckler's] work, but the overall value of [his] books ensures a wider response. It is undeniably clear that [his] major creations …—Buckler's Canaan family and folk of the Annapolis Valley—take us into the heartland of both literature and life. The creative tensions so powerfully and dramatically rendered in [his] books, [his] sensitive awareness of beauty and of its inevitable passing, [his] compassion for the human condition—all these forge important links with the tradition of great imaginative writing. (p. 102)

Robert D. Chambers, in his Sinclair Ross and Ernest Buckler (© Robert D. Chambers; reprinted by permission of the publishers; distributed by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.), Copp Clark Publishing, 1975, McGill-Queen's University Press, 1975.