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Ernest Hemingway
lived his life strenuously, preferring the diversion of action to obsessive
introspection. The task of scrutinizing the inner Hemingway fell to legions
of scholars, who pored over every facet of his existence, from his birth and
childhood in Oak Park, Ill., to his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. That makes
William Burrill’s Hemingway: The Toronto Years surprising. The
Toronto journalist covers Hemingway’s four years as a staff reporter for
The Toronto Star, investing the period with new significance, depth and
fresh insight. While acknowledging the considerable work of dozens of
Hemingway scholars who preceded him, Burrill also found a trove of
previously uncollected Hemingway journalism — 30 pieces in total.
The author’s
affection for Hemingway is apparent throughout the text, but it is unclouded
by sentimentality. According to Burrill, Hemingway was a combination of
macho bluster, towering insecurities, intense competitiveness and monk-like
dedication to his craft. He was also a drunk, a cheat and a tiresome liar.
Burrill’s account offers an evenhanded view of both Hemingway’s selfishness
and his sensitivity. Nor does Burrill — a former Toronto Star
reporter himself — stint on detailing the petty cruelty of some of
Hemingway’s editors at the Star’s city desk, as well as the
encouragement he got from more sympathetic mentors on the Star Weekly
staff. Hemingway’s most bitter battles were fought with Star city
editor Harry Hindmarsh. Yet in a strange backhand way, Hindmarsh is
responsible for Hemingway’s leap of faith to full-time fiction writing. The
book chronicles how Hindmarsh made Hemingway so frustrated and furious that
the relative uncertainty of writing novels for a living looked preferable to
staying on at the Star.
Hemingway often
counseled younger would-be novelists that journalism instilled discipline
and honed one’s facility with the language. But he also insisted that any
reporter with novelistic aspirations had to quit journalism — with its
reliance on the limited techniques of reporting — to succeed as a fiction
writer creating imagined worlds. Ironically, it was precisely Hemingway’s
journalism that allowed him to develop his distinctive style. One of the
more intriguing passages details Hemingway’s experiments with language. (He
called the brute rhythms of his prose “cablese,” after the blunt style he’d
learned compressing information into terse wire reports.)
The book’s last
third comprises previously overlooked Hemingway material, found in
university library collections at Harvard and Princeton and at The
Toronto Star. There are straightforward accounts of everything from
dying oak trees to a new kind of anesthetic perfected by a Toronto
surgeon in 1920. Some show Hemingway’s technique in embryonic form. Others
offer a view of a reporter cranking out what he obviously considered
pointless exercises to satisfy the demands of that day’s assignment docket.
And there are some illuminating fragments about his co-workers. Burrill’s
book — with material ranging from 250-word duty assignments to unguarded
private rumination — offers a fuller portrait than most Hemingway
biographies. Although he is identified as a lifelong Hemingway aficionado,
Burrill is not a mere acolyte. He retains a distance from — and skepticism
about — his subject, which keep his work thoughtful and lively.
The Toronto of the
early 1920s is very much a character in the account, too. Its Anglophilia
and Protestant repression are strongly evoked. In a letter to poet Ezra
Pound, Hemingway complains about the city’s antiquated liquor laws and its
narrow-mindedness. [Things] “couldn’t be any worse,” he writes. “You can’t
imagine it.” It was that button-down stiffness that finally helped drive
Hemingway from the city for good at the beginning of 1924.
Burrill’s book
stands as both a crucial addition to the already considerable body of
Hemingway scholarship and a vital, elucidating volume in its own right — a
tough challenge, delightfully accomplished. |
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