John Raymond Knister (27 May 1899 – 29 August 1932) was a Canadian poet, novelist, story writer, columnist, and reviewer, "known primarily for his realistic narratives set in rural Canada ... Knister was a highly respected member of the Canadian literary community during the 1920s and early 1930s, and recent criticism has acknowledged him as a pioneer in establishing a distinctively modern voice in Canadian literature.""Raymond Knister 1899–1932," Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, eNotes.com, Web, Apr. 1, 2011.
Life
Born at Ruscom (now part of Lakeshore), Ontario, near Windsor, Knister attended Victoria College at the University of Toronto,Peter Stevens, "Knister, Raymond," Canadian Encyclopedia, (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988), 1144 but had to drop out after catching pneumonia. At the age of eighteen he began to take a serious interest in literature, writing his first poems and short stories.Dorothy Livesay, "Memoir," The Collected Poems of Raymond Knister (Toronto: Ryerson, 1949), xvi–xvii While in Toronto he contributed articles on Miguel de Cervantes and Robert Louis Stevenson to Acta Victoriana, the college literary magazine.4Bonita O'Halloran, "Chronological History of Raymond Knister," Journal of Canadian Fiction, No. 14 (1975), 194. He worked on his father's farm until 1923.
In 1919 Knister began writing and publishing stories and poems about Canadian farm life. He worked in 1922 and 1923 as a book reviewer for the Windsor Border Cities Star and the Detroit Free Press. He moved to Iowa in 1923 to become associate editor of literary magazine The Midland ("the most important magazine America had produced," according to H. L. Mencken) in Iowa City for a year. During the same time he took courses in creative writing at Iowa State University.
By 1924 Knister was a taxi driver in Chicago, as well as a reviewer for Poetry magazine and the Chicago Evening Post. "In 1926 he moved to Toronto, where he freelanced; his work appeared in the Toronto Star Weekly and Saturday Night." In Toronto he became acquainted with writers Morley Callaghan, Mazo de la Roche, Merrill Denison, and Charles G.D. Roberts.
Knister had work published in the Paris literary magazine This Quarter in 1925.
In 1926, Knister put together a collection of nature poetry, Windfalls for Cider. Toronto's Ryerson Press accepted the book for publication, but later had to cancel because of the company's finances.W.H. New, "Knister, John Raymond," Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002, 586. Google Books, Web, Apr. 1, 2011
Knister married Myrtle Gamble in 1927. They had one daughter, Imogen, born in 1930.
In 1928, Knister edited the anthology Canadian Short Stories."Notes on Life and Work," Selected Poetry of Raymond Knister (1899–1932), Representative Poetry Online, Web, Apr. 1, 2011 The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (2002) calls the book a "trend-setting anthology."
Knister published his first novel, White Narcissus, in 1929. The book is still in print as part of McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library series of classic Canadian literature."Author Spotlight: Raymond Knister," McClelland & Stewart, McClelland.com, Web, Apr. 1, 2011
Knister was fascinated with John Keats, the 19th century English Romantic poet who had died young. He accumulated "letters and stacks of books about Keats," according to his daughter, and enrolled his wife as a research assistant to help him go through it all. "Apparently, she was to use her reading time on this only, and he frowned upon her spending time reading women's magazines." The Knisters spent eight months researching Keats's life: the result was a 200,000-word, 700 page non-fiction novel, My Star Predominant.Carol Steedman, "Author's life marked by glory, tragedy," Brantford Expositor, Article ID# 1243485. Web, Apr. 1, 2011.
In 1931, Knister moved to Montreal, Quebec. There he became acquainted with the poets of the Montreal Group – with poet Leo Kennedy he began planning an anthology, similar to his Canadian Short Stories,Leo Kennedy of Canadian modernist poetry (an idea that eventually resulted in the landmark New Provinces in 1936). He also got to know poet Dorothy Livesay and novelist Frederick Philip Grove.
Grove read My Star Predominant, and encouraged Knister to enter the manuscript in the Graphic Publishers' Canadian Novel contest. (Knister's daughter later said that her mother had encouraged him to enter the novel.) Knister cut the book to 120,000 words, mailed it off, and forgot about it. My Star Predominant won the $2,500.00 first prize in the 1931 cross-Canada contest. However, "owing to the failure of the firm of publishers which offered the prize," the novel was not published."Knister, Raymond," Encyclopedia of Canada (Toronto: University Associates, 1948), III, 346.
In 1932, Ryerson Press, which had picked up the rights to My Star Predominant, offered Knister a job as an editor. Before he was to begin working there, Knister drowned in a swimming accident on Lake St. Clair while on a picnic with his family. (In a memoir published in the 1949 Collected Poems of Raymond Knister, Livesay maintained that Knister had committed suicide. His wife and daughter strongly disputed that allegation.)
My Star Predominant was published in 1934 in Canada by Ryerson and also in England.
Knister's daughter, Imogen Givens, wrote a 5,000-word memoir of him, "Raymond Knister: Man or Myth?". The memoir, which made extensive use of her mother's diary, was published in the journal Essays on Canadian Writing (No. 16, Fall-Winter 1979–80).
In 2007, Alberta poet Micheline Mayler published Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems, an account of Knister's life and death written as a series of poems."Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems,'" Wolzak and Wynn, Web, Apr. 3, 2011
Knister is buried in Port Dover, Ontario. His poem "Change" is inscribed on his tombstone.
Dorothy Livesay has claimed that "Knister seemed to epitomize the struggle of a generation" ("Memoir" xxxvii). The struggle of his generation of writers was to bring Canadian poetry into the Twentieth Century. Like E.J. Pratt, W.W.E. Ross, Arthur Stringer (whose Open WaterArthur Stringer, Open Water (Toronto: Bell and Cockburn, 1914). was the first book of modernist free verse by a Canadian), and others, Knister was a "Transitional modern"Sandra Djwa, "The 1920s: E.J. Pratt: Transitional Modern," The E.J. Pratt Symposium (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1977), 55–68. whose poetry, fiction, and criticism showed the effects of the many forces which were changing Canadian poetry and Canadian society.
Writing Besides his four novels, Knister wrote roughly one hundred poems, almost as many short stories and sketches, and dozens of critical works, including essays, editorials, and book reviews. "To his own writing and criticism, Knister brought a mind attuned to new literary developments."
Fiction After 1925 Knister devoted less time to poetry and more to fiction. Two of his novels, White NarcissusRaymond Knister, White Narcissus (1929: rpt. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962). and My Star Predominant,Raymond Knister, My Star Predominant (Toronto: Ryerson, n.d.) were published in his lifetime. Although he was known and respected by writers such as Morley Callaghan, Mazo de la Roche, Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, and A.J.M. Smith, Knister was never a popular success.
"Farm work provided him with realistic details for his stories and his first novel, White Narcissus (1929)." Set in rural Ontario, "The novel concerns a writer, Richard Milne, who returns home in order to make a final attempt to convince his childhood sweetheart, Ada Lethen, to marry him. Ada feels it is her duty to stay at home because for years, as a consequence of a quarrel, her parents have communicated only through her.... While the novel is usually and justly considered a work of realism, it has also been suggested that it contains elements of romanticism, and that the lyricism of some passages approaches prose-poetry."
Knister's fiction provides us with some important clues for a clearer understanding of his verse. In My Star Predominant Knister has Keats give voice to ideas about poetry which are really his own. The novel shows Keats going through a process of growth as an artist. He progresses from sentimentality to a desire for direct contact with life and from ignorance to self-knowledge. He says that "a man's knowledge of his faults, so they do not paralyse his endeavors, is a good thing" (p. 160) and he recalls that as a boy he would have granted artists exemption "from the common tribulations of mankind" (p. 267). Although Knister did not write poetry in the manner of Keats, it is plausible to assume that he went through a similar series of changes.
In 2006 Black Moss Press published There Was a Mr. Cristi, a previously unknown novel discovered by Knister's daughter Imogen. In it, Knister tells the tale of a woman who leaves her husband in 1930s Ontario, and moves to Toronto to open a boarding house. "What follows is a fascinating tale of life in the 1930s in a house that is inhabited by all these bizarre characters. In the background is the 'tall and dark and good looking' Mr. Cristi, and we begin to wonder if we will ever come to know him. He is shrouded in mystery as the characters in this rambling old house come alive vividly for us.""Raymond Knister," Black Moss Press, Web, Apr. 1, 2011.
"Of Knister's many short stories, probably the best known is 'Mist-green oats', about a young man's break with his life on the family farm. His stories recurrently focus on some form of psychological initiation." For example, "The First Day of Spring," which "dramatizes the moment when an adolescent farmboy moves from imagining love's pleasures to learning about its possible horrors (a baby's murder, or at least a savage accident) and his naiveté gives way to a need for order."
Poetry Change I shall not wonder more, then, But I shall know.
Leaves change, and birds, flowers, And after years are still the same.
The sea's breast heaves in sighs to the moon, But they are moon and sea forever.
As in other times the trees stand tense and lonely, And spread a hollow moan of other times.
You will be you yourself, I'll find you more, not else, For vintage of the woeful years.
The sea breathes, or broods, or loudens, Is bright or is mist and the end of the world; And the sea is constant to change.
I shall not wonder more, then, But I shall know. — Raymond Knister, The Midland 8.12 (December 1922), 332.
Knister's imagist nature poetry includes "such poems as 'The Hawk,' 'Boy Remembers in the Field,' 'Lake Harvest,' 'A Row of Stalls,' and 'The Plowman,' which vividly depict rural experience and the Canadian landscape. In both his poetry and his fiction Knister presented sharply realistic portrayals of everyday images and events in order to illustrate their exceptional qualities, and communicated these impressions in a conversational language style." Also read the hokku-like "Reverie: The Orchard on the Slope," the metaphysical "Change", and the whimsical "The Quiet Snow."