SOURCE: An introduction, in The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose by Raymond Knister, University of Toronto Press, 1976, pp. xi-xxvi.

[Stevens is an English-born Canadian poet, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, he surveys Knister's short stories, essays, and reviews.]

It is tempting to read the facts of Raymond Knister's life as a legend of the romantic artist, the writer whose blossoming career was cut short by early death. The parallel with someone like John Keats is uneasily apparent, particularly when one remembers that Knister wrote a novel My Star Predominant, based on the life of Keats, and shortly before his death Knister's wife reported in the diary she kept at that time that her husband was full of optimism about his future: he said, 'I feel just as Keats did when he said he was just coming into his powers. I feel as though I am just coming into mine.'

But the facts of Raymond Knister's life need no romantic interpretation. His life is illustrative of the role of the writer in the first decades of the twentieth century in Canada, and Knister himself seemed well aware of the difficulties involved in that role in this new country.

Raymond Knister was born in Ruscom, near Comber, in Essex County, Ontario on 27 May 1899. His father was of German stock, a man who industriously farmed the land in several places in Essex and Kent counties. There is no doubt that such a story as 'Mist Green Oats' is autobiographical, expressing Knister's feelings of entrapment within the farming community, and the emphasis on daily chores had an obvious deadening effect on the sensitivity of the writer. And yet paradoxically much of Knister's success as poet and short story writer derives from his meticulous recording of farm life.

Early in his life he suffered a bad fall in the school playground. From that day he stammered badly and although he was given therapy and in later life practised reading poetry aloud, he never overcame this disability. It is perhaps easier in this light to understand his enthusiasm in the 1920s for the work of Wilson MacDonald, who was not only a great champion of poetry in Canada but also an inveterate public reader of his own work.

Knister's further education was ended by the influenza epidemic which followed World War I, after he had enrolled as a student at Victoria College, Toronto. He returned to live on his father's farm, but the lack of a university degree was no barrier to his own pursuits in literature. From his early days he had been an avid reader. He kept a list of the titles of the books he read from the age of fourteen to his early twenties, and his essays and reviews show a remarkable knowledge of world literature, both of the classics and of new developments in twentieth-century writing.

Early in the 1920s Knister began to concentrate on his own writing both of short stories and poems. His work was accepted and reviewed in the United States, England, and in France, in the magazine This Quarter, published in Paris. Eventually he moved to Iowa City, where he took some courses at the State University of Iowa and worked for the magazine The Midland which had accepted some of his stories and poems. The early 1920s seem to have been a fruitful period for Knister. His work was being published in reputable magazines, he was writing stories, poems, and novels and reviewing books.

By the end of 1924 he returned to Canada and continued to write in all manner of forms: poems, essays, short stories, novels, and plays. The picture of the writer that emerges here and virtually to the end of his life is of a man confident in his own abilities (although some of his letters reveal that he went through the usual depressing moods that most writers suffer). He was ready to experiment in all forms of literature, looking critically at the past in Canadian literature, trying to assess his own ideas in the light of those past writings, examining recent developments in Canada and other literatures, testing personal ideas against those he was constantly encountering in his own wide reading.

Knister worked as a free-lance writer, publishing principally in the Toronto Star Weekly during the years 1925-7. He also reviewed for newspapers and magazines while working on the writing he considered more literary, read widely to prepare the anthology of Canadian short stories he edited, and wrote some scholarly criticism. His first published novel, White Narcissus, was written in 1927 and published in 1929. The second novel, My Star Predominant, was awarded a prize, some of which he collected, although the publisher went bankrupt. Knister moved to Toronto in September 1926; in the winter of 1931-2 he moved to Montreal, continuing his free-lance work. It was at this time that he became acquainted with some Canadian writers then living in Montreal, most notably F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, and Leo Kennedy.

His life brightened considerably when Lome Pierce of Ryerson Press accepted his prize novel for publication and also offered Knister a position as an editor. He intended to move to Toronto in the early fall to take up his position with Ryerson. However, in August 1932 the Knisters visited Raymond's aunt and uncle, who showed them a furnished cottage they owned at Stoney Point on Lake St Clair. Knister liked the cottage and when his relatives offered it to him, he accepted gratefully, particularly as it was a short distance from his sister, Marjorie, to whom he was very attached and who was at that time living in Walkerville, a settlement now part of the city of Windsor.

On the day the Knisters were ready to leave the cottage to visit his sister for the week-end before moving to Toronto, Raymond went for a last swim in the lake. He was not a good swimmer and rowed out in a boat without an anchor. His family believe that he was pulled down while swimming by a strong undertow as the boat drifted away from him. Many boats, divers, and a plane searched for his body during the following anxious days. An entry in his wife's diary describes the final discovery: 'The divers themselves were almost pulled down into the holes by the pressure. Finally they found his body wedged in a hole at the bottom of the Lake.'

Although Raymond Knister has never been given the recognition that he deserves as one of the first truly modern writers in Canadian literature, certain portions of his work keep reappearing in standard anthologies of short stories and poetry. His first novel, White Narcissus, is still available in paperback and recently a limited selection of his short stories was published. His collection of poetry, first published in 1949, will be reissued in an extended form to include some previously unpublished poems.

This present edition contains the stories from that recently published selection, but also brings together a wider variety of Knister's prose, both fiction and non-fiction, long buried in magazines, together with several unpublished stories and critical statements. These last make an interesting study, for they reveal Knister's perceptive views about literature, particularly about the position of the artist in Canada and the problems facing a modern writer in relation to the development of his country's literature and the assimilation of new techniques learned from other literatures.

In his early piece about the Canadian short story (published in The Canadian Bookman, August 1923), Knister makes a plea for the short story as an acceptable literary genre, not one which becomes bound by commercial demands but one which embodies an author's vision of life. He shows his scepticism about the formulaic approach of the correspondence schools, touching on the inherent Americanization of Canadian stories if would-be Canadian writers follow the standards of the correspondence school which 'has its finger on the market.' Knister is much more interested in the short story as a literary form of artistic merit, stressing that good short stories will arise only out of the study of the best models, although he obviously feels that mere imitation is not enough. The writer in Canada must persevere in his studies, taking what he can from a broad selection of sources, aware that the outlets for his talents are severely limited.

In spite of all this, Knister retains a kind of spirited optimism about Canada and Canadian literature: 'It is hard to be skeptical, not to think that there are infinite spiritual possibilities in a land as huge and undeveloped as this, open to the variety and potency of influences which bear upon it.' He deals with this question with humour and yet reprimands excessive adulation of Canadian products in his 'Canadian Letter,' probably written at the same time as his article for The Canadian Bookman. He singles out Canadian authors he admires and shows a surprising capacity to see real merit. Perhaps the two most significant comments he makes are his rejection of a new Charles G.D. Roberts chapbook, even though he generally accepts Roberts' achievement as very good, and his acknowledgment of Arthur Stringer's early attempt in Open Water to make a case for free verse.

He developed these ideas later in the introduction to his anthology Canadian Short Stories, which ends with a tribute to the short stories of Duncan Campbell Scott. He was not afraid to criticize Scott's poetry. For example, his review of Scott's collected poems complains that one of the poems 'begins with stale afflatus like the copy for a special advertisement to be illustrated in full colour.' This kind of criticism is counterbalanced by some fulsome praise. The impression that this article, and the one devoted to Wilson MacDonald, give is of a critic who wishes to share his enthusiasm for Canadian poets with his readers. Such enthusiasm tended at times to run away with his critical sense and yet the reader is also brought up short by very telling insights and perceptions. Knister was of course writing here for a general audience and perhaps he tempered his criticism in the hope of reaching out in order to encourage a wider readership for Canadian authors.

The same is true of the monthly columns he wrote for The New Outlook in which he reviewed the poems he had read in magazines and newspapers in Canada. There was some uncertainty in his views but that is understandable in a writer who is working month by month with contemporary poems. He was constantly on the look-out for fresh and invigorating material, always aware of the technical facility of a poem, even if it remained only 'pleasant and neat work' as he once summarized a Roberts poem. He emphasized the importance he placed on technique in the letter to a Miss Frankfurth included in this selection: 'Details of craftsmanship scamped or awry spoil any piece of writing for me, and it is only after the mind assents to the technical mastery that the emotion is allowed to reach me.' He labelled one poem as 'windy confusion,' and although he obviously was sympathetic to free verse his standards in that regard were rigorous: 'There is free verse in this … magazine, but the current notion of free verse appears to be a prose description of a poem, shredded into lines arbitrarily long and short—not a piece of work aiming at qualities of sound, of emotion and image as veritably if more directly, as metrical verse.' He usually picked out some of the better of the minor poets who were beginning to flourish in the 1920s in Canadian magazines: Edward Sapir, Joseph Schull, George Walton among others. He praised the general standard of poetry in The McGill Fortnightly Review, quoting with approval poems by A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott. He was very careful to suggest to his readers that the individual poems he chose to quote and comment on rose above the dross of much writing published in the magazines: 'Reading the output of verse appearing in Canadian magazines and newspapers is a sadly disappointing business if one is looking for the pure gold of poetry. Perhaps it is too much to expect to find several fine poems each month, but one is struck by the disproportion between our literary pretensions and our achievements.'

There speaks the reasonable voice of a critic who wants to find achievement in the current literature of his own country but who has a well-formulated sense of what is good in writing, a sense we can see at work in the short articles on E. A. Robinson and the poetry of Ireland. It is easy to read into his ideas about Robinson some of his own predilections that appear in his poetry and stories, predilections that recur in the long essay on The Shropshire Lad. The tone of stoicism and sadness he sensed in Housman's work applied also to his own writing. Knister suggested that Housman's poetry is the portrayal of a 'soilloving, life-loving, inarticulate but artlessly downright yeoman' sometimes expressing 'fateful emotion combined with a zest for living.' If Housman did represent for Knister a model for his own writing about the Ontario countryside, then we must examine his work to see whether the same 'zest for living' occurs in it. Certainly these moments appear in some of the stories, even in the dourest ones, 'Mist Green Oats,' for instance. The usual view of Knister's work as being pessimistic and emphasizing the dull routine of farm work and the killing, mind-deadening effects on the sensitive spirit is qualified not only by the epiphanies within some stories and poems, but by the sequence of journalistic sketches written mainly about a specific rural community called Corncob Corners. In this light Knister's comments on The Shropshire Lad give a clear indication of a tendency in him which has been overlooked.

His best and most extensive critical works are the two articles on Archibald Lampman and Wilfred Campbell. Campbell for him was a poet trapped by Victorian responses and forms: 'He reacted to the conventional stimuli in the conventional way, supplying a norm of Victorian opinion and taste in verse.' All the values in Campbell's verse were superimposed, not arising from his own vision of the scene or the individual characters he is presenting. Knister found some of the same faults in Lampman. While appreciating the observed detail of nature in Lampman's poetry, he claimed that there is no felt tension between the poet and his environment. Such tension is obviously a major ingredient in Knister's prose and poetry. He argued that Lampman's failure in this regard derives from a kind of colonial mentality: the details in the poems are Canadian, yet the general tone and form come from outside Canada. He recognized that 'to have accepted Canadian experience and written of Canada in terms of nothing else would have been, if not impossible, at least immediately fruitless and unrewarded.' He sensed a change in the later Lampman, a more modern sensibility which would have led to greater poetry for Lampman had he lived.

Again it is possible to see developing in Knister's criticism ideas which inform his own work: the specific Canadian detail with ideas embedded in an integral development of form. Certainly one can feel this process taking place in the poetry contained in the volume published in 1949. In the foreword to that volume, which he intended to be published as a preface to his projected selection of poems, he gathered together some of the notions that underlay his critical essays and reviews. One such notion was that the subject matter of poetry should be

as real as sweating men and swilling pigs. But the feeling about them is not always so real, any more, when it gets into words. Because of that, it would be good just to place them before the reader, just let the reader picture them with the utmost economy and clearness. In the end we in Canada here might have the courage of our experience and speak according to it only.

That reality is presented in many of the stories. But Knister is not merely a direct realist; he had read too much Anderson, James, and Chekhov to rely on simple realistic detail. His essay on Katherine Mansfield made clear his belief that the realistic surface of a story should contain a symbolic depth: 'Minutiae should matter, should index ineffable inward things.' But he was not totally convinced by Mansfield's method; according to Knister, she falls into sentimental endings, and he missed local colour in some of her stories.

Local colour and surface minutiae are very much apparent in Knister's stories. He describes the atmosphere and appearance of the farm country of southwestern Ontario, and in two factual articles he wrote about Pelee Island and Long Point… he showed that he was aware of local history.

Much of his feeling about locality and community was expressed in the journalistic sketches about rural life published in the 1920s, mainly in the Toronto Star Weekly. For these pieces, set generally in his imaginary settlement of Corncob Corners, he included some of that realistic tone of the rigours of farm life, a tone which is most apparent in his longer stories about farming, but the sketches have a lighter touch. In 'Hitching Bertha to the Sled,' for instance, the farmer's sons certainly have chores to do and the father seems something of a hard-driving taskmaster, but once he is out of the way, the boys have a great deal of fun inveigling the large calf out of the stall and hitching it to the sled. As the calf runs away, ditching the two on the sled into a snowbank, the oldest boy watches. Having been trained to take over the farm, he knows that the calf has been raised to be sold and that allowing it to run free will not put much fat on its ribs. And yet his own yearnings for freedom from the monotonous tasks of the farm are expressed in his closing exhortation to the calf, 'Go it, Bertha.' That sentiment is perhaps not so far removed from that of Len in Knister's most-anthologised story, 'Mist Green Oats,' but the whole tone is different, for Len's thought at the end of that story is 'What's the weary use?' Even though he has experienced one or two bright moments during the depressing farm day, he has also thought about escaping to the city and has interpreted his father's demands on him as unwarranted tyranny. Len and the oldest boy in 'Hitching Bertha to the Sled' have much in common. Len, of course, is a fuller study, and his story is one of muted despair, whereas the sketch, although it is only a simple anecdote, manages to suggest a lighter side to the bone-wearying and 'blind unwitting stupor of life' that Len experiences. This weariness is usually associated with 'Mist Green Oats' in the version printed in anthologies. In this collection a later, slightly different version is used; the addition of two short paragraphs to the end of the story militates against the oppressive ending and indicates that Knister felt there was some hope for Len's life.

Most of the sketches proceed along similar lines. Some deal with other farm animals, most notably in the short pieces in 'A Row of Horse Stalls.' The horses with their slow patience are held up as models for man, although Knister does not use the animals simply as moral examples, for he describes the particular characters of the horses. He makes it plain that man on the farm can retain some sense of himself in the tough battle with the land, just as the horses do. They suffer from the same blind routine as the farmer and they may also harbour thoughts of rebellion:

If ever they become as experimentally speculative as they are contemplative, if ever a whiff of human restlessness touches them—well, the rest may be left to your imagination. There might be a conspiracy and some fine morning every man who approached a horse might be neatly despatched.

Omens of Animal Farml

Other sketches focus on the eccentrics of the community, and Knister has some good-natured fun with people like Mrs Plethwick, whose obsession with birds leads to the conjecture in the village that she is a cat-killing witch. Blankenhorn, the crusty, miserly farmer, whose shrewdness and cunning are 'as arbitrary as a levelled pistol,' receives his come-uppance as the butt of a practical joke. Knister sees these people as comic characters, although he is never malicious at their expense. He takes a delight in the way in which they get the better of officialdom in govermment and business, as in the story of the man fooling the customs official, and in Anthony Whicher's tribulations in trying to repair the water jacket for his mill engine. Although Whicher is buffetted, and the repair finally fails, Knister's sympathies are with him. There is something of the old pattern of country yokel caught in the trammels of the city slicker in this sketch, but it is Whicher, the yokel, who is presented as the better man.

It has become almost a cliché to regard Knister's stories as equivalent to those American stories of the mid-west with their themes of entrapment, the sensitive spirit chained in narrow-minded small-town life or fastened to the mindless activity of subsistence farming. Certainly that tone is evident in many of his stories, but the sketches tend to emphasize the irrepressible spirits of these rural people. Knister presents the young sympathetically; they are not all like Len Brinder in 'Mist Green Oats.' Some are like Archie in 'No Gumption,' who is subjected to the tyranny of his widowed mother. By an ironic twist he is able to convert his mother's plan to retain him for herself on the farm into a proposal of marriage to the girl he has been mooning about. Knister ends the sketch at that point: we are not given a glimpse of what might happen to Archie and his wife, for their future plays no part in this story of youth's triumph over petty authority.

A marriage also closes the sketch about Henrietta Gray. She has an impish gaiety of manner that offends the more morose and staid elders of the community, and it is fitting that she marries Hughie, whose motorcycle is a symbol of the carefree recklessness of the 1920s. This same sketch mentions in passing the community enterprises of the young—they are holding a wiener roast on the shore of Lake Erie—and Knister is at his best in these sketches in which he describes group festivities in the rural community. His account of a rural Christmas indicates how it was celebrated both in the family and in the neighbourhood. The neighbours visit for Christmas dinner and then everyone gathers on Christmas evening for a community concert. The farm chores are still to be done on the holiday, and the neighbours still discuss farm matters, and the mailman still calls on Christmas Day. Running through this is the excitement of the children as they prepare for the concert in the evening. The sketch is a simple factual account which catches the festive mood of the family in a small community with charm and without sentimentality.

The best of the sketches about community activities are those devoted to the harvest festival and the community dance. Knister deftly describes the rising excitement and jocular gossip of the farmers' wives as they prepare the harvest home supper in the church hall, which is full of the smell of 'coal-oil, fresh lumber and cooked pumpkin.' All this activity seems haphazard until suddenly the meal is under way. No characters are developed, yet the reader is allowed glimpses of some of the village people, particularly in the jocose banter about the size of some appetites. This feeling of community among the villagers is further emphasized by setting against it brief flashes of outsiders—the minister smiling meekly over his third cup of tea, the schoolteacher keeping her slightly superior attitude to the amateur performances in the concert. Knister makes clear that the performers at the concert are not star material, yet he obviously admires the community's togetherness and camaraderie.

'The Dance at Corncob Corners' best exemplifies Knister's concern with rural values. Although some 1920s dances are included, with the usual square dance, it is only the traditional ones that draw all the people together, young and old. Indeed, a stranger dancing the Charleston too vigorously is curbed by the village constable. The dance is very much a community affair: whole families attend and it is not simply a dance. Supper is served beforehand with the same gossipy tittle-tattle bandied about as at the harvest home supper. Knister stresses the participation of everyone in everything, so that the whole entertainment lasts until the small hours: 'When these people had determined upon making a night of it, a night of it they made.'

Knister also explores change and growth versus the status quo. The two old-time callers in The Dance at Corncob Corners' reminisce nostalgically about dances in the past, although the author carefully includes details about the internal feuds that broke out on occasions at those dances. Knister does not sentimentalize the old days, nor does he necessarily side with the modern element. He allows both past and present to be seen in the sketch and the principal effect is one of good-natured tolerance, a tolerance which seems also to be the attitude of the community.

Nearly all Knister's stories deal with such rural communities, but included in this collection are two stories based on his years in the American mid-west and these in particular show his response to the city of Chicago. 'Hackman's Night' conjures up that free-wheeling bootlegging legend of the windy city in the twenties with a clever use of the slang of the period that gives the story a realistic flavour. The story itself does not give much emphasis to the characters, but rather concentrates on abrupt flashes of action, the hackman in question being caught in violent confrontations between rival gangs and between criminals and police. All this action works well for the hackman, who considers himself lucky when the night is over. The story gives some sense of the sordid elements in the city, and the language used charges it with authenticity.

A much better story is 'Innocent Man.' Almost of novella length, it describes the night spent by the protagonist, an innocent man, in the cells of a police department. The telling is determinedly realistic, reminiscent perhaps of some of Stephen Crane's Bowery tales. Ominous threat keeps emerging, sometimes anonymous, sometimes meaningless, sometimes motivated, so that at times the story takes on what amounts to a kind of Kafka-like allegory. Throughout there is an insistence on innocence, even among the others in the cells who are palpably criminal. Jack, the protagonist, is really on the border of innocence. It is established at the beginning that he is somewhat irresponsible, a great tease, and, perhaps technically, evading the legality of his contract for the ownership of his car. The effect of the story is to allow the reader to listen to the excuses and recriminations of the other prisoners. This cross-section of the population forced into cramped cells becomes a symbol of the human condition. All are protesting their innocence but the innocent along with the guilty are subjected to violence and humiliation by one of the guards. Jack in fact feels some sort of brotherhood with the other inmates, so that he can think that 'they were innocent, being men,' until he links them all together in a vision of innocence:

Yes, they were innocent, these men, even as they had told with their lies. The comradeship, the encouragement, the little gifts they gave one another—their best. The way they strove to some ideal, the best their senses would let them recognize. The effort to win the approval of the people they had learned to admire. Weren't they all good children? Weren't they, these children, these ruffians, these men, all innocent?

The juxtaposition of'children,' 'ruffians,' and 'men' at the end of that paragraph suggests real innocence, constantly battered by forces both within the characters themselves and also from an external, almost incomprehensible, source.

Early in the story Jack reaches the conclusion that 'when you're innocent, you've got to take what's coming,' subject as men are to 'the weird sneer of Fate.' This vision of innocence is not that of child-like idyllic existence. Indeed, somehow innocence has learned to survive in this place set within a dark and mysterious world, a state of existence that leads also to a recognition of the evil within each man: 'It seemed that right had departed from the world, that the world had departed, leaving this hell of grinning faces that saw nothing but their own evil.'

In some ways the protagonist of 'The Strawstack' is similar to the characters in 'Innocent Man.' He is a man carrying a burden of guilt for a 'crime' against his sister in early adolescence. As he discovers later, he is innocent of injuring his sister, but he nevertheless becomes involved with the world of real crime. Paradoxically, he remains aloof from corruption, in spite of the fact that he has committed crime: 'He had never had great faith in the evil of man.' But on his return to the farm (and the collapsed state of the farm buildings and his memory of his own wayward method of piling the straw in the stack take on symbolic implications vis-à-vis his life) the world of evil crowds in on him. The new moon stares down on him, on the run from the law, and its newness seems to him to offer an escape to a new life. Michael Gnarowski sees the story as one of a double initiation, and there is validity in that reading, although the notion of innocence lost at the strawstack and then strangely regained at the same place under the new moon is consistent with the repeated idea of innocence in Knister's stories.

If the returned man of 'The Strawstack' has 'no great faith in the evil of man,' Mrs Lucier in The Fate of Mrs Lucier' has worked herself into a state of acute distress, neurotically terrorized by visions of disasters involving herself. These imaginings could have been used to depict a rather comically pathetic woman, but Knister instead allows them to be etched realistically in Mrs Lucier's mind in order to illustrate her 'plenary terror of the world.' She is forced out into the dark, threatening landscape, and although she is saved from the consequences of her terror, she knows that she has been on the borderline of collapse.

The theme of youthful innocence fading, of the sudden revelation or vague realization of knowledge beyond innocence, runs through many of Knister's stories, whether it is, as in 'Elaine,' a girl's gradual awareness of what kind of woman her mother is, or, as in 'Lilacs for First Love,' a young girl's loss of her romantic notions about men. A more subtle evocation of this kind of experience occurs in 'Peaches, Peaches.' This rather long story seems to wander without focus and yet is cleverly understated. The younger brother, Ed, is somewhat like Len Brinder: he resents the farm chores and wants to be allowed to make up his own mind about his future. He admires the jaunty selfconfidence of Murray, the hired man, who is the same age as Ed, yet more at ease with the farm work and with the women hired to pick peaches. Ed agonizes about his own growing attachment to one of the helpers, Florine, and watches with uneasiness as Murray involves himself with Florine's friend, May, although Murray ignores May's apparent seriousness in her friendship with him. Ed has noticed a secret knowingness between Murray and his brother's wife, which grows in his mind without real definition. The hints are all there and by the end of the story Ed has come to a dim awareness about Murray's nature, although he himself still remains uncertain in his dealings with the opposite sex. All this personal confusion is set within the framework of late, hot summer days when there is a surfeit of peaches, giving a background of overblown fruitfulness to Ed's tension, fading away into the fall and Murray's leaving, with no resolution except that Ed is conscious of larger dimensions in human relationships and perhaps of human deceit. What on first reading seems a rather directionless story leaving conflicts unresolved becomes a cleverly oblique narrative on the nature of innocence and the discovery, perhaps inarticulate, of the dilemmas of adulthood.

'Grapes' is a similarly oblique story with a younger boy as the central character who watches an older, reserved man move tentatively towards two adolescent girls. All of them seem caught in a state of unconsciousness about their relations, and in general the unfocussed nature of this story leaves the reader somewhat dissatisfied, although Knister manages one superb scene depicting a time of tense togetherness in a water fight on a very hot day.

The notion of innocence is evoked almost imagistically in 'The First Day of Spring,' as a father tells the story of a local girl's seduction without realizing that his own son has had romantic notions about the girl. The boy is still young and is unconscious of his own romantic admiration. But Knister includes in the story a few details seemingly unrelated to the narrative development. These details add to the realistic framework but, more than that, they point the reader to the boy's growing awareness. His romantic innocence is still strong as he hears a girl's voice (that of the cousin of the girl whose story his father is telling) in the distance. It is almost like the mysterious song of Wordsworth's solitary reaper: 'A girl's voice came from across the fields, a few words of singing, a voice with something wild and strong in it.' At the end of the story the voice returns, 'and then it stopped, as though for an answer.' The warmth of the first day of spring has vanished, the daylight disappears, 'and with the darkness Winter seemed to be returning.' Perhaps after hearing the story the boy's innocence is disappearing too, for the mysterious voice is answered to some extent by the last words of the story, spoken by the boy to the colt: "'You're going to be broken in," I whispered. He was strangely quiet.'

Innocence is seen in a different context in 'Horace the Haymow,' written in part in an inflated style. This style, incongruous in relation to the subject, is occasionally comic, although the story is closer to the sketches in mood and reworks the conflict between city slicker and country yokel. Again it is the city slicker who is the butt of the story, for he is an innocent in country matters.

Innocence is not the only theme Knister deals with in these stories. As mentioned earlier, Michael Gnarowski tends to see the stories in terms of initiation and maintains that in Knister's writing there are archetypal patterns derived from Frazer and Weston. Although such patterns may be in the stories, it is perhaps easier to recognize that Knister uses a variety of fictional techniques as well as archetypal patterns to develop his stories. I have already mentioned the oblique narrative method of some stories and the use of dialogue as a prime source of narrative. More generally than archetypal patterns, the stories contain symbolic detail, the details mentioned above in 'The First Day of Spring,' for instance, and those in 'The Strawstack.' Sometimes perhaps they are overworked and draw attention to themselves as symbols, but because Knister operates within a realistic framework, the details serve both at the realistic and symbolic levels and on the whole he controls them well.

Most of the stories of innocence focus on young people, but some have older characters as their protagonists. In these cases the theme of loss and apartness surfaces. Billy Dulckington in 'The One Thing' allows his obsession with rearing horses to overwhelm any desire he might have for friendship, although the story indicates early on that he was never considered seriously by the women of the district. His small stature translates into a pusillanimity to such an extent that he withdraws further into himself. His farmhouse deteriorates and his farming becomes minimal, even though he retains a delight in plowing. Incidentally, a paragraph in the story offers an alternate, ironic reading for Knister's poem 'The Plowman':

He liked above most things, though he did not formulate to himself any reason for the liking, the constant attempt to make each furrow straighter than the last, and, when a good furrow was attained, to keep those following it right, to have each of his 'hands' properly and symetrically shaped.

The poem is usually interpreted as a parable about the search for perfection and man's inadequacy in the face of that search. In the context of Dulckington's life the poem may be saying ironically that such a search for perfection is too obsessive and that such singlemindedness may have a warping effect; in that lies man's inadequacy. Dulckington's alienation is expressed finally by a break-down, although at least there may be in that a self-recognition of the damage his obsession has wrought. At his time of life, however, such recognition may be too late.

Alienation between people takes a different turn in 'Indian Summer.' Knister sets up the withdrawn character of the spinster in describing her furniture and house with its 'narrow windows made narrower by curtains starched stiffly and warped perpendicularly in sentry-like columns at either side.' But, unlike Billy Dulckington, Ida Tenny is keeping hope alive, although the renewal of an old friendship keeps gossips like Mrs Lamb busy speculating and prying. Knister provides the realistic details customary in his stories, details concerned with youth and age such as the kittens and the old tomcat, the young printclad girls passing Ida's house and the old hens in her yard.

So far the story works well enough, but the melodrama of Gregory's near death as he works in the field opposite Ida's house disturbs the quiet fabric of the story. The thought that the accident was caused because the horse was 'old and lazy' makes a nice point in relation to Ida. She must not be lazy herself, must in fact be more positive unless she wants to grow old alone. So Indian summer dawns at the end as Ida and Gregory talk, but the authorial comment in the last sentence makes the sentimentality of the ending too obvious. Knister himself was obviously dissatisfied with the ending of this story and later reworked it at greater length.

It should be apparent from this brief discussion of some of Raymond Knister's writing that he is a much more varied author than the scanty critical pronouncements maintain. Certainly many of his stories cleave to the same themes but he develops those themes in different ways. The sketches show an obverse side to the view he presents of rural life in the stories that have appeared in anthologies and selections. His criticism shows a man acutely conscious of trends in writing and with an ability to see the valuable both in earlier Canadian writing and in world literature. He is a writer willing to try his hand at many forms of writing. A play based one of his own short stories demonstrates this flexibility, and it is not his only attempt in drama—a full-length play also remains unpublished.