The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose by Raymond Knister

Abstract

505 ally it is Samuel who kills the last survivor when Saul does not have the stomach for it. There are many other points from this introduction that I would have liked to mention more fully. Djwa's examples of Heavysege's editing of Count Filippo are especially interesting, as are her comments on how the vigour of Heavysege's tone sets him apart from other romantic writers of his time, such as Sangster and Mair. She also takes issue with Frye's reading of jephthah's Daughter, on which he rests part of his thesis that Canadians saw the land as hostile and savage. This, as well as the Atwood thesis that follows from it, has been tremendously influential, and although it may contain some truth for twentieth-century literature, it has little validity for French- or EnglishCanadian literature in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Clearly we need more texts like this Heavysege volume, so that readers can examine for them­ selves the many generalizations that have been made about our literature. ro n ald b . hatch / University of British Columbia Raymond Knister The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose, Selected and edited by Peter Stevens (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976). xxx, 469. $22.50 cloth, $7.95 paper In his introduction to the New Canadian Library edition of White Narcissus, Philip Child states that "in his writing, whether verse or prose, Knister's originality lies in bringing to life in his pages an atmosphere in which realism, that paints sharply and clearly the Ontario landscape or the subjects of farm life, is combined with realism's own kind of poetry," and that this combination constitutes "a new note in Canadian fiction." Some years later, in a review of Michael Gnarowski's edition of Knister's stories, Dorothy Livesay argues in much the same vein, applying the term "magic realism" to his fiction, and proposes that "whereas Knister sought for a simple realistic effect he possessed, in addition, an intensity and sensitivity by which he was able to make the ordinary extraordinary." And now, in his introduction to this present collec­ tion, Peter Stevens assumes a similar position, proclaiming that "Knister has never been given the recognition that he deserves as one of the first truly modern writers in Canadian literature" (p xiii). All three of these critics thus imply that Knister as an artist in the modern tradition stood apart from his contemporaries in terms of what he did with the subject matter arid methodol­ ogy of realism, a proposition which clearly gains credence when his works are measured against the literal and unimaginative realism of a number of writers of the 1920s who for various reasons have earned a higher reputation than Knister - Stead, McClung, Grove, and Callaghan. 5o6 The views that these recent critics hold were in large part shared by a small number of Knister's own contemporaries, and one must therefore attribute his relative obscurity since then to the quantity, and not the quality, of his work. Writing in The Canadian Forum at what must have been about the precise time that Knister met his untimely death, Leo Kennedy berated those Canadian critics who maintained that Canadian literature had nothing new or experimen­ tal to offer, and suggested "to those despairing of a Canadian literary renais­ sance that the published writings of Raymond Knister be duly thumbed and well considered, for the reason that they contain matter of considerable moment to us today." Frederic Philip Grove, too, though he quibbled about the conclusion of White Narcissus, expressed constrained respect for Knister's work, though characteristically he was never one to praise extravagantly any of his contem­ poraries who posed a threat to his own stature as a novelist. Nevertheless, he was instrumental in choosing Knister's second novel, My Star Predominant, as the winning entry in Graphic Publishers' literary competition of 1930. I give this general background to Knister's reputation because in my own case I have always relegated him to the edges of Canadian literature, shouldered aside, as it were, by his more prolific contemporaries. My opinion and, I suspect, that of most readers, derived from knowing...