[A Canadian educator and critic, Northey is the author of The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Fiction (1976). In the following review, she praises Knister's diverse talents as a writer and critic, noting the authentic voice, nostalgia, and "concealed art" in The First Day of Spring.]

In his introduction to The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose, Peter Stevens claims that Raymond Knister is a much more varied author than the scanty critical pronouncements maintain. By bringing together in one volume Knister's short stories, a series of his sketches about rural life, and a number of his critical essays, Stevens allows us to assess Knister's versatility and to discover little recognized talents.

A refreshing discovery is that Knister has a sense of humour. Dorothy Livesay has remarked on the sombre tone of his fiction. but the sketches, collected under the title "Corncob Corners and Other Places," are humorous in a homespun way. At times they have a gently ironic tone reminiscent of Leacock's treatment of Mariposa; occasionally they are as corny as the title suggests.

A more important realization afforded by Stevens' volume is that Knister was an astute critic who had a sensitive finger on the literary pulse of his times. Dedicated to those modernist principles of writing little appreciated by the Canadian public in the twenties, he made some discerning analyses of contemporary writers, particularly of his fellow Canadians. Although his praise of Wilson MacDonald now seems excessive, we can easily agree with his favourable assessment of aspects of Frederick Philip Grove's fiction and Archibald Lampman's poetry, and his negative response to some of D. C. Scott's poems.

Knister's comments on the short story are especially interesting, since one can test his principles against practice merely by flipping a few pages. Decrying many Canadian writers' reliance on conventional formulae, he favours those stories of de Maupassant "in which the structure is so blended with the atmosphere and feeling that the planned element, the brick-upon-brick method which makes Maupassant a model for the correspondence school is altogether absent at first reading." Knister's own stories are notable for their lack of mechanical tricks and for their apparent plotlessness. His best live up to his credo that great art is concealed art; occasionally, as in "Peaches, Peaches," his rambling narrative line is exasperating.

The similarities with Alice Munro's fiction are striking, not only in their locale but in their insistence on exact, descriptive details. Moreover both writers have a sensuous suggestiveness in their stories which leads us beyond the surface to more private and mysterious levels of experience—to a type of magic realism. Knister indicates the direction of his realism when he writes:

What is known as realism is only a means to an end, the end being a personal projection of the world. In passing beyond realism, even while they employ it, the significant writers of our time are achieving a portion of evolution.

A recurring feature in Knister's fiction, as in Munro's, is an ambivalent regard for home and the routine of life it represents. "Mist Green Oats" is perhaps the most negative depiction of the dreariness and weariness of farming and its stifling effect on a youth's sensitive spirit. At the other extreme is the obvious nostalgia of the sketches, with their portraits of the old characters and customs of a farming community. In many of the stories, we feel a tension between the need for change and the appreciation of what is changeless, between the energy of new times, new ways, and new loves and the inevitability of the old cycle. Although the central character in the stories usually comes down on the side of change. Knister's attitude is less certain.

Of course not all the stories in the collection are variations on this theme, nor are they all about farm life. "Hackman's Night" and the lengthy "Innocent Man" depict the sordid underside of life in Chicago, but they are not altogether successful. Despite Knister's experience as a taxi driver in the city, the stories seem awkward and frequently inauthentic in dialogue and characterization. If these urban stories reveal another string in Knister's bow, they also suggest that in a literary, if not in a social sense, Knister felt most comfortable in the rural surroundings of his youth. Although The First Day of Spring convinces us of the diversity of Knister's talent, the finest parts of the collection are still those half dozen short stories about farming life for which he is already best known.