It was September 1923, and Ernest Hemingway and his wife had arrived in Toronto from Paris, awaiting the birth of their first child. Although Ernest had been happily working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star in Europe since late 1921, he had been hired as a staff reporter under the grudging direction of Harry Hindmarsh, the paper’s bullying editor.
On his first day of work, Hindmarsh sent Hemingway on a night train to Kingston to cover the story of five convicts who escaped from the penitentiary, including the already notorious bank robber Norman “Red” Ryan.
Author Marianne Miller came across that information while researching what was meant to be a non-fiction book about the famous author’s time in Toronto.
(It was brief. He and wife Hadley Richardson left for Paris in 1924, but not before son John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, a.k.a. Jack, was born in Toronto in October 1923.)
“What came to fascinate me was Ernest feeling trapped by circumstances and then he was sent on his first day working at the Star to cover ‘Red’ Ryan, who risks everything to be free,” said Miller, author of what turned into the novel “We Were the Bullfighters,” in an interview from her Toronto home. “Then I started reading about Ryan and went to Archives Canada in Ottawa, and that was amazing. They had all of the telegrams about the five guys who broke out of Kingston Pen. You can feel the panic in the telegrams flying back and forth.”
The front page of the Sept. 11, 1923 edition of the Toronto Daily Star, with Ernest Hemingway’s story about a jailbreak at Kingston Penitentiary.
What Miller felt was missing in her research — conducted through biographies of Hemingway, his papers at the JFK Library in Boston, Toronto Star online archives and Hadley’s letters at Middlebury College in Vermont — was not knowing for sure how either Hemingway or Ryan felt. So she decided to try to get at their emotional truths by writing a novel.
To begin, “I put Ernest, exhausted and stressed out, on the late train to Kingston, thinking about covering a story about these guys who had the guts to go over a 20-foot wall while people shot at them.”
After she had written chunks of “We Were the Bullfighters,” Miller discovered a scribble in a notebook, made while Hemingway was trying to figure out what to write after his 1926 debut novel “The Sun Also Rises,” that he was considering a novel about “Red” Ryan. That affirmation made her feel she was on the right track.
Juggling the Hemingway and Ryan narrative threads simultaneously proved tough, however.
“I’m a lawyer,” Miller said. “I’ve had files that are two feet thick and never had trouble keeping them straight in my head. Ask me something and I can pull out the right piece of paper. But with this novel I needed help, so I took a ‘How to Structure Your Novel’ workshop with Andrew Pyper and he changed my life. I did what he suggested: write down each chapter and every scene in each chapter. I put it up on the wall in my office. Having that visual cue really helped.”
The novel started about a decade ago with a poem, a task set by the writing group that Miller met with at Paupers Pub on Bloor Street West.
“When I was in university, I took 20th-century fiction and read ‘The Sun Also Rises.’ Many of the guys in the class travelled to Pamplona in Hemingway’s footsteps and I was thinking that they must be as old now as Hemingway was when he killed himself, and I wondered how they felt about aging and if they still considered him to be a model, and I wrote a poem about that,” Miller said.
Over the years, Miller took several creative writing courses through the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto, and is grateful for the encouragement and support she received from authors Michael Winter, Marina Endicott and Kim Echlin, remembering reading a James Joyce story and then having to write her own mimicking its structure.
Interestingly, there are echoes of Joyce in her novel: when Hemingway is standing outside Kingston Penitentiary in a scrum with other newsmen, he notices a Martello tower like the one in Dublin in Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the book Hemingway helped to pre-sell in Paris so his friend Sylvia Beach of the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company could afford to have it printed in 1922.
Miller is particularly indebted to Kingston writer Helen Humphreys who, she said, “did a final edit before I submitted my book anywhere. She was very clear-headed. Originally, I had three narrative threads: Hemingway, the convicts and Hadley. Helen told me the Hadley chapters were slowing the book down and she was absolutely right. I was in awe of her clarity of vision.”
Ernest Hemingway in Paris in 1924 with his son Jack, also known as Bumby. Jack was born in Toronto on Oct. 10, 1923.
Of her debut novel, Miller hopes readers “realize that it’s based on real facts in Hemingway’s life. The bits I had to make up I tried to make jive with what was really happening, like when he goes to New York City to cover the visit of former British PM Lloyd George and misses the birth of his son Jack because of it.”
She has, she said, “two or three ideas for a new book that are partly started and I have to decide which one I’m going to go the whole distance with. I’ll know which one is right when the characters start to call to me, saying, ‘We’re here, waiting.’”
Janet Somerville is the author of “Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949.”
