Hemingway: The Toronto Years

David Kimmel is a Ph.D. candidate in history at York University.

There are already so many books about Ernest Hemingway that we hardly
need another. It seems more unlikely that we would need one on the great
American writer’s so-called Toronto years, but Burrill argues we do.
“No other critical biography,” he says, “has focused on his
Toronto connection.” Sure, but there’s a good reason for this:
Hemingway’s connection to the city was fleeting and inconsequential.
He was not at all involved in the burgeoning intellectual milieu of
Toronto in the 1920s, and his “years” in the city actually add up to
about eight months. Finally, the 200 or so articles he contributed over
a four-year period to a Toronto newspaper might have appeared in any
North American journal. It just happened to be The Toronto Star. Several
books already cover this period quite capably.

As literary criticism, Burrill’s point about the importance of
Hemingway’s Toronto journalism is also overstated, or at least does
not bear repeating. Later in life, the writer himself dismissed his
newspaper work as “unimportant.” Regardless, it can be argued that
his work as a roving European correspondent did influence his fiction
writing, but this case has been made before.

What is new in this book is found in its appendices. Burrill offers the
reader 25 “previously unrecognized Hemingway stories.” Most of the
pieces appeared in The Toronto Star, but several were published
pseudonymously, by competing papers, or not printed at all. These few
are Burrill’s real “finds”: most researchers would assume that
Hemingway’s journalistic output was limited to The Toronto Star and
would, therefore, look no further. Of course all one must do is peruse
the Hemingway Collection in Boston to find these curios. In any case,
these articles are uninteresting and, like the book as a whole, have
little critical merit.