3 - The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism: Raymond Knister, “The First Day of Spring” (written 1924/25)

Summary

John Raymond Knister (with the “k” pronounced and with a long “i”) was born in Ruscom, Ontario, on 27 May 1899 to a farming family of partly German ancestry. Helping out on the fields and with his father's pedigree horses, young Knister thus experienced directly the kind of life — its chores and plights but also the compelling, mystical beauty of nature — he would later write about in his farm stories, such as “The First Day of Spring.” Alongside his farm poems, these stories (more than his less prominent “state-of-mind stories” and crime/Chicago stories) bear witness to the influence of Knister's rural upbringing on his writing. On the one hand, it provided the author with his major themes and characteristic setting and inspired the development of a modernist-realist style, in defiance of the popular romance/adventure tradition. On the other hand, the numbing hardship of farming infuses many of these stories with a sense of futility, if not tragedy; Knister's own strenuous and unsteady career — a constant struggle between bread-and-butter-jobs and artistic vocation — is certainly a case in point here.

“Mist Green Oats” (1922) — Knister's most frequently anthologized short story — can thus be read as a portrait of the artist as a young man, representing Knister's biography in the truly modernist manner of “objectified pictures” (“The Canadian Short Story,” 1976, 389). One of his most explicit engagements with generational and vocational conflict in the farming context, the story features adolescent protagonist Len Brinder, who toils away on his father's farm while daydreaming about the “impossible wonders of the city” (74) and his higher, presumably artistic (“transcendently congenial,” 67) ambitions. This unresolved conflict between loyalty and longing, harsh reality and sweet delusion, farm routines and city lure, is potently evoked by the still life in the story's last scene, when the frustrated youth leaves a packed suitcase in the kitchen for his father to discover and for the reader to understand as a portrayal of Knister's closely associated life and works. Note, for example, the way the story draws on Knister's childhood and frequent returns to the countryside, on his restless adult life moving from one job to the next, and on his nonetheless unwavering “determination” to demand nothing but the highest standards from and recognition for Canadian literature. At the end of the story and a hard day, the aspiring artist