A train pulled into Union Station. It had been travelling overnight from New York City, bringing the British prime minister to Toronto as part of his North American tour. His stop in the Big Apple had been big news. Reporters flocked to cover the event, including a young journalist from the Toronto Star by the name of Ernest Hemingway. Soon, he’d be one of the most celebrated authors in the world, but at the time he was making do with a modest salary from the newspaper. He was coming back to town on the very same train as the visiting prime minister, spending much of the sixteen-hour journey leisurely drinking and joking around with the other reporters. But as the train came to a stop at Union Station, he rushed down the steps onto the platform. He’d just received word, a few kilometres back: his wife, Hadley, had given birth to their first child. He needed to get to the hospital as quickly as he could.
Toronto had built a new train station in the decades since George Brown’s triumphant return to the city. The second Union Station was an opulent building with three grand towers; the biggest train station in Canada when it first opened. It stood on the south side of Front Street, overlooking the lake, next to the spot where the modern Union Station stands today. Toronto Western Hospital, where Hadley was recovering with their new baby, was a couple of kilometres away. Hemingway was in a hurry.
But as he raced through the station, he was stopped by a fellow reporter, a colleague from the newspaper who’d been sent by his editor to collect him. He was under strict orders to head straight to the Toronto Star headquarters, a distinguished four-storey building on King Street. Hemingway had missed a scoop while he was in New York and his boss was furious. According to another paper, the deputy mayor of New York had insulted Britain; big news in British Toronto. But Hemingway didn’t care. He had bigger things to worry about right now. He stuffed his notes into the hands of the reporter and rushed away.
He’d met his wife at a party in Chicago a few years earlier. He was the most handsome man there — at least as far as Hadley Richardson was concerned. He was nearly a decade younger than she was — just twenty while she was twenty-eight, already at risk of becoming an aging spinster by the standards of the time. For years, she’d been living a half-life, nursing her dying mother. But now that her mom had passed way, Richardson was ready for love. And she found it there in that handsome young writer wearing an Italian cape.
He proposed within weeks. The engagement was far from uncomplicated: Richardson wasn’t the only woman in love with Hemingway; his other admirers included the mutual friend who’d introduced them. But their bond was strong. He wrote her so many love letters he worried he would be ruined as a letter writer forever, “Like a pitcher with a dead arm.” And she wrote more than a thousand pages back. “You’re absolutely a flame of love,” she told him, “and sweetness and understanding and strength and my I love you beyond anything. Why you’re All.” They were married on a September day in Michigan in 1921.
Two years later, in Toronto, when the contractions started, Hadley didn’t realize what was happening. Not right away. She was distracted, hanging out at their friends’ house, when the labour pains began. It was almost midnight by the time she understood, and nearly too late as he rushed down Bathurst Street to the hospital. “We got there in the nick of time,” she remembered. “Of course, I missed Ernest terribly. He should have been there with me, suffering.” But it went quickly after that. Just a couple of hours later, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
Hemingway was elated when he finally arrived to meet his new son. It’s why they’d come to Canada in the first place, taking a break from their beloved Paris because they heard Toronto had the best doctors. And in that moment, it must have all felt so worth it as they gazed down at their new baby boy: John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway — or Mr. Bumby, as they would call him. At the sight of his first child, Hemingway broke down in delight, exhausted and relieved to be reunited with his wife. That joy wouldn’t last forever. Soon, they’d be back in Paris, and Hemingway would fall in love with another woman; their marriage would end in heartbreak and betrayal. But for now, in that moment, they were truly happy.
The next day, Hemingway reported to his editor’s office at the Star. His boss tore into him for missing the scoop and for heading directly to the hospital to see his wife and child instead of straight to work. Hemingway was enraged. He was already frustrated by his heavy workload, which too often kept him from writing his fiction, and by the fact that his editor had shipped him off to New York when Hadley was nine months pregnant and due to give birth any day. His complaints would eventually drive him into a legendary act of defiance. There are many different versions of the story, but some remember Hemingway as being so incensed that he angrily typed out a venomous, sixteen-page screed against his boss. He then taped it together and pinned it to the office notice board for all to read. It was so long the pages curled up on the floor.
Hemingway was out of patience. He’d always hated Toronto. He first moved to the city in 1920. He’d been invited by a wealthy Canadian who saw him give a talk to a women’s group in Michigan. He showed up in his military cape and medals and told harrowing tales of his adventures during the First World War — complete with the war wound he’d earned as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. Many of those tales were completely imaginary — he’d only served for two months and the cape was new — but Harriet Connable didn’t know that. Hemingway was a good storyteller. She was so impressed she offered him a job: hanging out with her son, who was introverted and had a disability, in their mansion near Casa Loma. She hoped the adventurous Hemingway would rub off on her teenager. That job in Toronto led to Hemingway’s gig with the Star, and the paper eventually sent him to Paris as a foreign correspondent, writing dispatches back to Canada from the cobblestoned streets of France with his new wife, Hadley, by his side.
It wasn’t until she got pregnant that they came back to Toronto, living in a tiny apartment on Bathurst, a few blocks north of St. Clair, in a building now known as “The Hemingway.” It wasn’t much. While they did manage to squeeze in a grand piano for Hadley to play, there wasn’t even enough room left over for a full-sized bed; instead, they had to pull a Murphy bed down from the wall every night.
But Hemingway’s dislike for Toronto was the product of more than his cramped living conditions. This was 1923. Toronto was still deeply conservative, staunchly British, and thoroughly reserved. Boring, according to many. It was a city where hotels weren’t allowed to rent rooms to unmarried couples. Where on a Sunday, it was illegal to shop, to swear, or to ride a toboggan. Drinking was illegal on any day of the week: Prohibition was still years away from being repealed in Ontario. Toronto wasn’t exactly the ideal home for one of history’s most infamous alcoholics.
While he praised the TTC — “No city in the world has a better-run and more comfortable streetcar system than Toronto” — and wrote lovingly about the old trees in Queen’s Park, Hemingway was miserable in the city. In his letters to the poet Ezra Pound, Hemingway called Canada a “fistulated asshole” and claimed, “The people are all merde.” To Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, he wrote, “Canadians are all tapettes [pansies] at heart under all the big free open spaces.… It is a dreadful country.” Thanks to the blowup with his boss, he was done with the Star. That meant he was done with Toronto, too. He was determined to leave the city as soon as possible.
On Boxing Day 1923 — the day after he secured his Christmas bonus — Hemingway quit the paper. But there was still one hitch: the lease on their tiny Bathurst Street apartment. If they simply tried to move out of the building, they’d be caught by the landlord, who would certainly call the police. So, Ernest and Hadley hatched a plan. Every time a friend stopped by to say goodbye, they asked them to take a single piece of furniture out with them when they left. Ever so slowly, one belonging at a time, they secretively moved out of the apartment. When the place had finally been emptied out, they made their move. They slipped away, undetected, and headed south to Union Station.
Not three months after he arrived on that train from New York, Hemingway was waiting for a train to take him back. From there, they would catch a steamship to France. They were leaving Toronto forever, heading home to their beloved Paris, back to the artists and the cafés, back to their famous friends. In Europe, without his work for the Star to distract him, Hemingway would finally have time to finish his first novel. The Sun Also Rises was published just two years later, dedicated to Hadley and their Toronto-born son. But by the time the book went to press, their marriage was coming to an end. Fame was waiting for Ernest Hemingway in Paris, but so were the days of betrayal, heartbreak, and divorce that would haunt him to the end of his life.