The Blue Ontario Hemingway Boat Race

B.J. Busch is Associate Librarian (Access and Information Services) at
the University of Alberta.

This is David Donnell’s first attempt at fiction, his previous efforts being three books of poetry and the non-fiction Hemingway in Toronto (Black Moss Press, 1982). Doubtless arising out of Donnell’s research for the latter, these stories or, rather, related vignettes are told from Ernest Hemingway’s point of view as he plies his talents for the second time at the Toronto Daily Star in the 1920s. Hemingway muses on many topics — Paris, horse racing, Freud, philosophy — and reminisces on artists and writers from his European days. It is a disgruntled Hemingway speaking. Toronto is not Paris, or even Buffalo across the water, and he has returned from Europe a published writer, only to be given the assignment of covering fires for the newspaper. His criticism of Toronto is harsh, and his nostalgia for Paris poignant; and both are rife throughout the work: “...Paris, the old buildings, the mix of people...Toronto would rather stay in the middle and talk about mortgages and shipping prices.” The Blue Ontario Hemingway Boat Race is clearly meant to appeal to a circumscribed audience — Hemingway fans and aficionados of “Paris in the ‘20s,” all of whom would know that Shakespeare & Co. is a bookstore in Paris, and La Coupole (misspelled as Coupoule in this book) is a cafe. They would also appreciate Donnell’s attempts to write run-on Gertrude Stein-type sentences of a page and a half here and there, and the odd piece of Ezra Pound-style spelling in the midst of otherwise normal sentences. The chapters are exceedingly short, for which one can be grateful at times. This work is evocative of Hemingway, but it suffers from the same shortcomings that all such attempts share: it is written by an apparent devotee of the great writer, not by the writer himself.