<\/p>\n
Ernest Hemingway back in Paris in 1924, having made good on his escape from Toronto, and the Star, the year before.<\/p>\n
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Universal Images Group via Getty Images<\/p>\n
It may sound implausible. But I don\u2019t think it is completely absurd. Hemingway lived in this city twice, by choice. He worked for this newspaper for most of four years, as a cub feature writer, a foreign correspondent and finally a full-time staffer for the Daily Star. Some of his most famous fictional stories were spun out from real events he covered first for the paper. There\u2019s no reason why, if he had enjoyed his second stint, Hemingway couldn\u2019t have kept that relationship alive, travelling out to Europe from a Toronto home to bring back stories of the Siege of Madrid, the Allied landing on D-Day and the birth of the nuclear age, all while falling deeper for the natural world of his adopted home: the snows of Mount Logan, the green hills of Cape Breton, the old men fishing in Masset, B.C.<\/p>\n
(If you doubt somehow that the Canadian wilderness could inspire great literature, I invite you to read Ondaatje\u2019s lesser-known poems set in Ontario cottage country.)<\/p>\n
But of course, that isn\u2019t what happened. Ernest, Hadley and baby John (aka \u201cBumby\u201d) fled Canada in January 1924, departing by train from the same Union Station that Ondaatje would make pivotal to Patrick Lewis in his fictional 1923. \u201cThe train station was a palace, its niches and caverns an intimate city,\u201d Ondaatje wrote about Lewis\u2019s arrival. \u201cHe spoke out his name and it struggled up in a hollow echo and was lost in the high air of Union Station. No one turned. They were in the belly of a whale.\u201d<\/p>\n
It seems inevitable now that Hemingway would leave, that after four horrible months the whale would spit him back to Paris (via New York). He\u2019s Ernest Hemingway. He had to get drunk with F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Left Bank. (Who else, after all, but Hemingway would have examined Fitzgerald\u2019s penis in the bathroom at Michaud\u2019s?)<\/p>\n
But history always looks inevitable in retrospect. And having examined Hemingway\u2019s letters from his Toronto years, I\u2019ve come to believe that it is entirely possible he could have stayed in this city. Barring that, I think it is close to likely he would have come back again after departing Paris a second time (with a second pregnant wife) in 1928.<\/p>\n
For all the mythology and lore, Hemingway lived most of his life in North America, in places like Ketchum, Key West, Florida and the Folly Ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming. He was no lifelong Parisian. His relationship to the city was like my friend Grant\u2019s to Korea: It was a place he lived a few years in his 20s and he never quite got over after coming home.<\/p>\n
No, the reason Hemingway never chose Toronto again wasn\u2019t because he hated the city (or loved Europe above all). His letters, with a few colourful exceptions (he did once tell Pound that Canada was \u201cthe fistulated a\u2014\u2014-e of the father of seven among Nations\u201d) make that pretty clear. It was because he really, really hated his boss at the Toronto Daily Star.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Longtime Star editor Harry Hindmarsh.<\/p>\n
TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO<\/p>\n
Harry Comfort Hindmarsh was that most Toronto of things in the business world: someone\u2019s kid, or in his case, kid-in-law. Hindmarsh was married to the daughter of Joseph \u201cHoly Joe\u201d Atkinson, the Star\u2019s legendary owner. He ruled over the newsroom at this paper for more than 40 years, including those four telling months in 1923. To say that Hemingway loathed him would be an understatement. Hemingway worked for him for a single winter and openly hated him for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In the late 1930s, when Star staffers were trying to organize a newspaper guild (the precursor to today\u2019s Star newsroom union) Hemingway sent his former colleagues a cheque for $200 and a long letter urging them to \u201cbeat Hindmarsh.\u201d He added that he\u2019d still welcome the chance \u201cto take a swing at\u201d his old boss. Even his \u201cfistulated a\u2014\u2014-hole\u201d letter to Pound came in the wake of a massive fight with Hindmarsh and seems, in context, more about his boss specifically than it was about Canadians in general.<\/p>\n
(The only obviously Canadian character in \u201cThe Sun Also Rises,\u201d the novel Hemingway wrote immediately after leaving Toronto, is the likeable socialite \u201cMrs. Braddocks.\u201d \u201cShe was a Canadian,\u201d Hemingway wrote, \u201cand had all their easy social graces.\u201d)<\/p>\n
When Hemingway first worked for the Star, in 1920, he reported to the weekend magazine. He wrote \u201cfeatures,\u201d often creative scene- and character-driven pieces that he pitched and produced himself on his own timeline. As a foreign correspondent in Europe between 1921 and 1923, Hemingway was essentially forced by distance and technology to decide on his own assignments. But back in Toronto, Hindmarsh pencilled him into the daily paper. That meant back-breaking days of non-stop chasing on stories Hemingway thought beneath his skills.<\/p>\n
Hindmarsh, several historians have noted, seemed bent on crushing Hemingway. That wasn\u2019t unusual. The \u201cHindmarsh treatment\u201d was legendary at the Star. \u201cIt was Hindmarsh\u2019s method to break in any new man by \u2018putting him in harness\u2019 \u2014 testing his endurance until he quit, cracked up, was fired or landed in a detox centre,\u201d Hemingway scholar (and longtime Star staffer) William Burrill wrote in his book \u201cHemingway: The Toronto Years.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ernest Hemingway with his second wife Pauline on the SS Paris during its 1934 journey across the Atlantic to New York City. For all that he loved the city that gave the ship his name, he never lived anywhere but the Americas again.<\/p>\n
Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n
In his first months back in Canada, Hindmarsh had Hemingway working 19-hour days filing stories from all over the province. He had no time to work on his fiction and no energy for any fun. \u201cErnest is distracted by the job \u2026 and is also greatly overworked,\u201d Hadley wrote in a letter to Hemingway\u2019s parents that fall. \u201cSo many trips, no sleep and countless unimportant assignments.\u201d<\/p>\n
The breaking point for Hemingway came that October, when Hindmarsh dispatched him to New York to cover a tour by former British prime minister David Lloyd George. As a result of the assignment, Hemingway missed Bumby\u2019s birth. When he returned to the city, Hemingway rushed directly to the hospital instead of checking in at the newsroom, earning him a next-day tirade from Hindmarsh. That dressing down so enraged the young Hemingway that he soon decided to quit not just the Star, but all of Canada, for good. \u201c(A)ll work done by me from now on would be done with the most utter contempt for (Hindmarsh) and all his bunch of masturbating mouthed associates,\u201d he wrote to Pound shortly afterward.<\/p>\n
Hemingway held on at the Star until Dec. 26, just long enough to collect his Christmas bonus. His last act in Toronto was to throw a wedding party for his friend and colleague Jimmy Cowan. He held it in his family\u2019s now-empty apartment near Cedarvale Park. (That building, now known as \u201cThe Hemingway\u201d still stands on Bathurst Street, just north of St. Clair Avenue.)<\/p>\n
Hemingway\u2019s relationship to this city, though pained at the time, still endures. There\u2019s a reason the Hemingway Conference is being held in Toronto. But looking back on it, more than a century later, I can\u2019t help but see Hemingway in Toronto as a missed opportunity for both sides.<\/p>\n
If he\u2019d had a better boss, I really do believe Hemingway might have stayed, at least for that whole year and maybe longer. I don\u2019t buy the idea that he never would have written \u201cThe Sun Also Rises,\u201d that we wouldn\u2019t have \u201cHemingway\u201d as we know him today. He was too driven, too ambitious. His formative Paris years were the ones between 1920 and 1923. With a better, less taxing schedule, he would have produced literature in this city. Who knows, with a solid home base, he might even have produced more of it. He might have shaped this city and this country and been shaped by them in turn. Hemingway, after all, only wrote one decent book after turning 40 (\u201cThe Old Man and the Sea,\u201d published in 1952). Ondaatje didn\u2019t produce a single novel until his 43rd year. Who knows what a Canadian Hemingway might have produced given longer, more peaceable years?<\/p>\n
On the other hand, maybe that\u2019s just the reporter in me. Like anyone who has done this job long enough, I look at editors like the ancient Greeks looked at their gods: For good or evil, they control our fates. They shape our lives.<\/p>\n
Harry Hindmarsh certainly had something of the Greek god in him. Capricious, uncaring and all-powerful, he ruled over this newsroom until the day he died. (Literally. He had heart attack in his office in 1956.)<\/p>\n
Yes, he beat Hemingway in 1923. He had his victory then. But it remains to be seen who had the last laugh. When Hindmarsh died, Pierre Berton said \u201che was considered the greatest newspaperman in Canada.\u201d Today, almost anyone who has heard his name has like heard it as a punchline. Harry Hindmarsh: the newspaper editor so blind he couldn\u2019t see the talent in Ernest Hemingway, the writer who would ride newspaper-style prose all the way to the Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like Ernest Hemingway, Michael Ondaatje \u2014 for my money the greatest Canadian writer who has ever lived \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49,48,44],"class_list":["post-813128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}