White Narcissus (19 page)

Raymond had also been working on an anthology of Canadian short stories for Macmillan, and that book shows how lovingly he combed the country for any writer who had distinction in the writing of short fiction.
Canadian Short Stories
, published in August 1928, stands out now as a pillar of the times in Canadian writing.

By 1928, knowing I had a novel and a book of stories published in New York, and having finished law school, I got married and went to Paris. For over a year I saw nothing of Raymond. When I returned to Canada, the depression had begun. Those were hard and terrible times for writers. Many stopped writing. I can’t remember seeing Raymond for two or three years. I heard that he had gone to Montreal, married, and now had a daughter. I couldn’t imagine how he could be earning a living, although he had written his novel
White Narcissus
, which Pelham Edgar had praised highly. And Edgar was right. It is indeed a remarkable book, remarkable in that it seems to demonstrate so perfectly the aspects of Knister’s talent that were so strong. The book is a kind of
The Return of the Native
book. A young man returns to his native hearth, the family farm, and the life he had lived there. The woman he was to love is there too. It is the Knister stuff, the real Knister stuff, and here he reveals all his power to create a farm atmosphere and do it all so effortlessly that we never think, here is a writer deliberately creating atmosphere. The smell, the feel, the taste of farm things is in his own bones, and so he works this farm spell on the head.

I saw Raymond for the last time one afternoon in Toronto when he dropped in at my place on Avenue Road and stayed a few hours. He looked very much like himself. He talked about the Montreal literati. Apparently he had met them all. Then he sat down and read a story of mine that was in the
New Yorker
. Smiling, he said enigmatically, “You’re now like the ancient mariner.” Instead of exploring that one, I asked him how he planned to live now, and he told me that his friend Pelham Edgar had a friend who owned a nice cottage at Port Hope and Edgar had arranged for him to live there. Right now he was trying to finish a story titled “Peaches, Peaches.” He wanted to enter the story in a big contest being staged by an American magazine. There was $10,000 in it for the winner. I wished him luck.

Later on he sent me a copy of “Peaches, Peaches,” which he had worked on feverishly to get it in to the magazine just under the wire. His wife, he said, had worked just as hard as he had, copying the manuscript. They had high hopes. I read the manuscript. It was full of good work and wonderfully authentic, and yet it was weak in narrative power. I couldn’t bear to tell this to him when he still had such high hopes.

A little later, at his uncle’s cottage at Stoney Point on Lake St. Clair, Raymond went swimming by himself and drowned.

FICTION
White Narcissus (1929)
My Star Predominant (1934)
Selected Stories of Raymond Knister
[ed. Michael Gnarowski] (1972)
The First Day of Spring: Stories and Other Prose
[ed. Peter Stevens] (1976)

POETRY
Collected Poems of Raymond Knister
[ed. Dorothy Livesay] (1949)
Windfalls for Cider: The Poems of Raymond Knister
[ed. Joy Kuropatwa] (1983)

SELECTED WRITINGS
Raymond Knister: Poems, Stories and Essays
[ed. David Arnason] (1975)