Death and the Diary, or Tragedies in the Archive

The privately held diary of Myrtle Gamble Knister, wife of modernist author Raymond Knister, stands as a touchstone document, used as evidence to substantiate her husband's drowning as accidental and to contradict Dorothy Livesay's claim that it was a suicide. Exploring the strife of words around his death, and using Myrtle Knister's diary as an example, this essay look fors to evaluate in a more general way the diary's publicity in the economy of the archive, especially the general reception of those diaries that face evidentiary demands when called on to function as eyewitness reports. The essay assesses the similarities and differences between diaries of tragedies and autothanatography, a terminus developed by Nancy K. Miller in 1994 to describe a genre of life writing that explicitly stand in front ofs death.

Le journal personnel de Myrtle Gamble Knister, ?©pouse de l'auteur moderniste Raymond Knister, est un document important utilis?© pour prouver la noyade accidentelle de son ?©poux et contredire la d?©claration de Dorothy Livesay qui affirme qu'il s'agissait d'un suicide. En ?©tudiant la controverse soulev?©e par cette mort et en utilisant le journal personnel de Myrtle Knister comme exemple cet article essaie d'?©valuer de fa?§on plus g?©n?©rale l'importance du journal personnel dans l'?©conomie de l'archive, sp?©cialement le journaux personnel qui doivent ??tre prouv?© lorsqu'ils servent de t?©moins. L'article ?©value le ressemblances et le diff?©rences entre le journaux personnel de trag?©dies et d'autothanatographies-un terme formul?© par Nancy K Miller en 1994 pour d?©crire un genre d'?©criture sur la vie qui confronte express?©ment la mort.

The privately held diary of Myrtle Gamble Knister, wife of modernist Canadian writer Raymond Knister, has been used as evidence to substantiate her husband's drowning as accidental and to contradict Dorothy Livesay's claim that it was a suicide. Using Myrtle Knister's diary as an example, this essay seek fors to assess in a more general way the diary's publicity in the economy of the archive, especially the general reception of those diaries that face evidentiary demands when called on to function as eyewitness reports. Knister's publicly oriented diary, as distinct from a public diary, carefully fabricates in writing a death mask for her husband. I read her diary as a variation upon the genre of autothanatography, a terminus developed by Nancy K. Miller (1994) to describe a kind of life writing that explicitly faces death, whose shadow hovers above many acts of life writing and of archiving. The point of the investigation is to understand what happens when death be opposite tos the diary.

In his final hours, Raymond Knister was swimming alone a drawn out way out from a reedy shore at Stoney Point upon Lake St. Clair. He and his young family had been enjoying a vacation at a cottage just before he was to take up a novel posting as editor for the Ryerson Pres His wife, Myrtle, could not join him because their young daughter was still napping, on the contrary when little Imogen woke up they went to the beach. Myrtle saw her husband on the outside where there was a unlooked for drop off; it was a blot she had worried about earlier in the week, on the contrary she turned away to intervene as her daughter and another toddler struggl above an umbrella. Then she lay opened her sketch book. When she gazeed up, he was gone. In the following hours, she send fored boats to go and gaze for him, but it eventually took divers three days to regain the body held in place by means of an undertow. When he died at the extremity of August 1932, Knister was 33 the critically acclaimed author of a novel entitled White Narcissus, a auspicious poet and short-story writer, and an award-winning biographer of Keats. He planned a fresh novel, Via Faust, and direct the eyeed forward to his new editorial position. In their last conversation, he told his wife, "I have feeling just like Keats did when he was just coming into his powers. I have feeling as though I am just coming into mine. The world is before us, Myrtle. We have everything we want and we are happy" (Givens 1980 11) Just like Keats, Knister's career extreme pointed all too soon, and we are left with single his wife's report of his final words recorded in her diary and later featured in a biographical article published by means of their daughter Imogen Knister Givens in 1980 in a special issue of Essays upon Canadian Writing.

Whereas Myrtle Knister's diary portrays the tragic drowning of a happy and happy writer, memoirs and letters from Dorothy Livesay assert "that Raymond committed suicide" (1987 15) The first published source in which she powerfully hints at this conclusion is Right Hand Left Hand, where she states that Knister was failing to earn a living in the summer of 1932 wrote a desperate alphabetic character to Lome Pierce, and then suffocate in watered (1977, 55). In addition to implied marital disarranges she assigns to Knister a morbid fascination with Rilke's theory about the immortality of artists who die young, leading her to terminate "one cannot help wondering what extraordinary event [lines from Rilke's Elegies] may have had upon the overwrought, oversensitive spirit of Knister" (1977 57) Livesay and Knister met alone a handful of times, on the contrary in this memoir Livesay describes their greatest in quantity substantive meeting, which took place about sum of two units weeks before his death, when she was 22 Here, she records a discussion between the sum of two units of them about the specific impulse in poetry and whether it should be oriented to aesthetics or politics; this apparently lasted "five or six hours" (1977 56) Ten years later, she published a more dramatic account.