Dateline- Toronto

by Ernest Hemingway

  Wolfe’s own papers and documents passed into General Monckton’s hands on his death. To this collection have been added thirty volumes of rare books dealing with the time and many priceless manuscripts by Sir Leicester Harmsworth to make the collection as complete as possible.

  General Wolfe was no believer in the soldier marrying. In one order he states, “The lieutenant-colonel recommends to the soldiers not to marry at all. The long march and the embarkation that will soon follow must convince them that many women in the regiment are very inconvenient, especially as some of them are not so industrious nor so useful to their husbands as a soldier’s wife ought to be.”

  A threatened invasion of England from France is also revealed in Wolfe’s orders, when his regiment was brought down from Scotland and stationed in Canterbury. Wolfe orders that the men “should fix bayonets and make a bloody resistance” if the enemy makes a landing.

  From England the regiment went out to the colonies, and how the entire struggle between the British and the French in Canada looked to the man on the job is set forth in Wolfe’s daily orders. In Wolfe’s own papers is a series of conditions for the French surrender and a first draft of a scheme for governing and administering Canada, “if God’s blessing rest upon the success of our arms.”

  Old French maps of Canada, one of which shows “The New Discoveries in the West of Canada,” being especially interesting, are included in the collection. Hudson Bay is shown in a strange bulging form with a direct connection between it and Lake Superior. The lakes are all in the map, but their size and shape are such as they would appear to a voyageur whose only concern was to traverse them as quickly as possible.

  There is also a quaint map of the battles of Lexington and Concord in the American Revolution showing the British regular’s version of those affairs.

  Tancredo Is Dead

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  November 24, 1923

  No. He was neither an opera singer nor a five-cent cigar. He was once known as the bravest man in the world. And he died in a dingy, sordid room in Madrid, the city where he had enjoyed his greatest triumphs.

  For many years Tancredo was famous throughout the Latin world. For ten minutes’ work he used to get $5,000. And he worked early and often. But a woman impersonator came along and spoiled the whole game for him.

  Tancredo’s fame was made in the bullring. He was no bullfighter. But he thrilled the crowds that came to the bullfights as nothing else could. His name on the posters meant a packed arena.

  Tancredo appeared after the third bull had been killed. Dressed in white, his head bound in a white cloth, his face covered with flour, he walked out from the barrera amid a roar of applause and took his place in the center of the sanded arena, standing like a statue facing the toril from which the bull would be released. The gate of the toril would swing open and the bull dash out into the glare of the bullring. Momentarily blinded by the sunlight, he would then sight Tancredo and charge him.

  Tancredo never moved. To move would have been fatal. He simply fixed his eyes on the bull.

  Standing stiff as a statue, he gimleted the bull with his eyes. Just as the bull was about to hit him, it stopped, stiffening its short legs and plowing up the sand. Until this moment the audience was in a hush of suppressed excitement. They never knew but what the bull might not stop.

  But the bull always stopped, and with its eyes fixed on Tancredo slowly backed away, tossing its head and snorting to make itself believe it was not afraid.

  Then a torero would vault over the barrera and attract the bull away with his cape, and Tancredo would break his stiff pose and walk away across the arena while the crowd thundered applause.

  The ten-minute appearance was all he had to do, and he could name almost his own price.

  Never in all his performances was he gored by a bull. His eyes were all-powerful.

  But imitators sprang up in bullrings all over Spain. Tancredo no longer had a monopoly. He could no longer command his high prices, for the imitators had an added advantage. They were not one hundred percent effective.

  Sometimes the bull would halt and back away. Sometimes the eye of the amateur Tancredo would waver or he would give an involuntary shiver, and the bull would carry through his charge and the human statue would shoot up into the air in a tangle of gory sheeting.

  The thrill of what might happen gave the Spanish crowd the same thrill that sends people of other nations out to automobile road races and the Grand National Steeplechase.

  In the end Tancredo’s popularity was lost because of his own perfection.

  There was no possibility of an accident with Tancredo. Tancredo was too brave.

  Then a woman emulator came along. That was the final straw.

  According to the New York Herald dispatch announcing Tancredo’s death, Doña Tancredo was nowhere near perfect. She was thrown sometimes, and this the Spaniards considered unesthetic and called on the authorities to suppress the act.

  Tancredos were in operation all over the Spanish peninsula. Some of them were seated in chairs when the bull came out. Some of them would remain standing in the center of the ring throughout the bullfight. Most of them spent a large part of their time in the hospital. And then the woman.

  Bullfight fans began to complain that the old formal sport was being made into a burlesque. “No more Tancredos,” they shouted.

  So the government passed a law barring the act from Spain. With it they barred Tancredo’s livelihood.

  Don Tancredo himself tried to learn to become a matador. But he found himself up against a competitive profession in which his rivals had been trained since they were five years old. He proved slow on his feet and not particularly graceful.

  While he tried to calm the bull with his eye, he found that it was only possible if his body remained absolutely rigid. In the exigencies of the bullring there was no time to acquire this rigidity before the bull appeared. He was a dismal failure in bullfighting.

  For years he was a familiar figure around the cafés of the Puerto del Sol in Madrid and then the disappeared. It takes money to sit in a café.

  Now he is dead. To the older generation of bullfight fans he is a memory of a thrill they will never have again: the white-sheeted figure with uncanny flour-covered face standing stiff in the hot glare of the bullring while the bull that wanted only to kill him backed away, cowed by his eye.

  To the younger generation he is not even a name.

  There is a new generation of bullfight vaudeville acts. Charley Chaplins in costume who allow themselves to be gored for so much per goring. The feeling is turning against these, too. They are only allowed in the informal bullfights of the dog days where the young matadors get their tryouts on young bulls.

  Tancredo is dead. Penniless and a failure because he was too perfect.

  “Nobelman” Yeats

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  November 24, 1923

  They have given the Nobel Prize for literature to William Butler Yeats.

  This is highly satisfactory to most literati and to their friends and companions in the cognoscenti.

  The man in the street won’t know anything about it anyway, and when the publishing houses warm up to their work, everybody six months from now will be reading Yeats.

  Clubwomen will discover that Yeats is not dead. “My dear, of course he’s not dead, he’s just won the Nobel Prize and he writes the most wonderful poetry. Of course, I haven’t had time to read it yet but we’re going to have a paper on him at the club next Wednesday. There is a Yeats that is dead, though. I’m absolutely sure of it. I remember reading something about him at the time. As a matter of fact, we had a paper on him too at the club and a discussion afterwards.”

  Yes, there is a Yeats who is dead. That was Bill Yeats’ father.

  Nobody seems to know much about how the Nobel Prizes are given but they always stir up a lot of discussion.

  William Butler Yeats has written, with the exception of a few poem
s by Ezra Pound, the very finest poetry of our time.

  This is a statement that will be instantly challenged by the admirers of Alfred Noyes, John Masefield, Bliss Carman and Robert Service. Let them read what they like. There is little use in attempting to convert a lover of Coca-Cola to vintage champagne.

  Only six years ago Yeats’ poetry was being published in the States in The Little Review, which was being suppressed for publishing Joyce’s much-discussed Ulysses.

  Yeats has also written plays, communed with the fairies, and been elected a senator in the Irish Free State. His hair hangs in a lank sweep on one side of his Celtic face and he makes no attempt to dress like a businessman. He is very shy, rarely speaks above a whisper, and in the same whisper lectured here and in the States.

  By giving the Nobel Prize to Yeats, the Nobel Prize–givers had made up for a lot of things.

  In 1911 they crowned with the $40,000 accolade M. Maurice Maeterlinck of Belgium and the Côte d’Azur. Lately, people don’t seem to think so much of the writings of M. Maeterlinck.

  Again, in 1913, the $40,000 laurel wreath was ensconced on the lofty and serene brow of Rabindranath Tagore, the Hindu poet. Of late years, a good many find something a little syrupy about the poetry of Tagore.

  Neither Maeterlinck nor Tagore has successfully stood up as great literary figures.

  In the next-to-the-last year of the war, the 40,000 paper ones were divided between Karl Gjellerup and M. Pontoppidan. These gentlemen are modestly described in the records as Danish authors. Authors of what is not stated.

  Anatole France waited until he was well into his eighties when he had attained a height where neither rewards nor honors could mean anything to him, and was finally presented with the Nobel award. He received the distinction of being placed on the Index by the Pope in the same year.

  While Anatole was only in his seventies, however, the Nobel awarders singled out Verner Heidenstam, the Swedish poet, for the prize. You have doubtless read Verner’s powerful pieces? Yes, neither have I.

  In 1920 the award went to a real writer, Knut Hamsun of Norway. It was said to be awarded to him because of his epic novel, The Growth of the Soil. This is one of the few great novels since Madame Bovary.

  Immediately Hamsun received the prize, publishers made a rush for translation of his works. They appeared one after another. Not in the sequence in which they were written but often going straight back so that his earliest and most imperfect books were issued to a waiting public which had read The Growth of the Soil, and wanted to go on from there. As the result of the flood of Hamsun’s failure and pot-boilers that have been brought out in English, he has been killed off to many people that will thus never read his masterpiece.

  And yet no American author has won the Nobel Prize. It once looked as though Sherwood Anderson was headed in that direction, but he has swerved a long way off now.

  It is an Englishman that is the ghost that must haunt the Nobel Prize-givers’ consciences. That Englishman is Thomas Hardy.

  Thomas Hardy is too old now for the prize to do him any good. But he could do a great deal of good to the prize.

  It is a last chance for the Nobel Prize-winners [judges] to honor the greatest living English writer. Year after year, he has been passed over while the Tagores, the Maeterlincks, the Heidenstams, the Gjellerups, and, last year, Benavente, the Spanish dramatist, were given the coveted award.

  One Pole has received the Nobel Prize. He was Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis?

  Another Pole who has not received the prize is Joseph Conrad, the author of Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Falk, Victory, and other books which let him share with Hardy the honor of being the greatest writer writing in English.

  Perhaps if Conrad had decided to write in French at the period when he gave up the sea, and was undecided in which language to write, French or English, he might have won the Nobel Prize long ago.

  It has just occurred to me that perhaps the Nobel committee don’t read English very well. That would account for the omission of Hardy quite easily.

  There is also a chance that Yeats’ new honor [as senator] may have had more to do with determining his choice than the poems he published in The Little Review.

  Changed Beliefs

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  Nobember 24, 1923

  Before coming to Canada I believed many things about the country. Some of these came from reading books, some from magazines, many from newspapers. Some of them were hearsay from people who had been in Canada.

  Now I have changed many of these beliefs. It is a good thing to confess when you have been wrong.

  These are the beliefs I have changed:

  1—That all Canadians are in a wild political ferment about the Dominion’s status in the Empire, and are either ardent Imperialists or anxious to break loose altogether.

  This is not true. They are almost uninterested. For one Torontonian who could explain what Imperial preference means there are ten who could tell you the score of the Argos-Queen’s game.

  2—That in the first week of November all Toronto businessmen, newspaper reporters, politicians, artists, coal dealers, coal heavers and pugilists left en masse for the north to go deer hunting.

  This has not proven true. A few men who are sure of their jobs go deer hunting. The average citizen of deer-hunting age and proclivities takes it out in cleaning his rifle and kicking himself for having bought that new car instead of sticking to the old Ford.

  3—That in the great open spaces where men are men, the inhabitants wore the kind of costumes that are used in illustrations in James Oliver Curwood stories.

  Another error. The drummers and young men who stand around in front of the Hudson Bay Company’s store wear Classy Campus Cut Clothing. Men who work wear overalls.

  4—That all Indians in the great north wore their hair bobbed.

  Only the squaws do. Most of them, on late reports from Paris, are letting it grow out.

  5—That there was a great amateur athlete in Canada named Lionel Conacher.

  It seems that there was a great amateur athlete named Conacher in Canada, but that he is now, at the age of twenty-three years and six months, playing football in the States for an academy of the scholastic ranking of Upper Canada College.

  6—That the average man in a Canadian city was a great lover of all sorts of sports.

  He loves to watch games and to read about them. The playing of them seems to be left to a small minority. Since motorcars have become universal most Torontonians have even given up walking.

  7—That Toronto streetcars were overcrowded, badly run, and altogether unsatisfactory.

  This is all wrong. No city in the world has a better-run and more comfortable streetcar system thanToronto.

  8—That Toronto has the finest police force in the world.

  I know nothing about this from personal experience. But something seems to have happened to the belief.

  9—That living in Toronto would be much cheaper than in the States.

  It is if you keep house. If you eat at restaurants it is about twenty-five percent more expensive.

  10—That there are no great Canadian writers. Writers, that is, of the first rank, such as Hardy, Conrad, Fielding, Smollett and Joyce.

  There is one. Thomas Chandler Haliburton, of Nova Scotia. Although I do not believe his works are widely read.

  Bank Vaults vs. Cracksmen

  The Toronto Star Weekly

  December 1, 1923

  Shortly after midnight on a Sunday morning, five mounted bandits rode into the little town of Ville Marie on the Quebec side of Lake Temiskaming twenty-five miles south of Haileybury.

  They rode in Wild West style. Shooting out the lights as they galloped up the main street and putting the citizens of the town into a panic.

  It was just like the movies. Except it was deadly real.

  Two young clerks named Damonte and Chener were sleeping over the Quebec branch when the ma
sked riders pulled up and began shooting into the building.

  In their nightclothes, the two young clerks escaped from the building and rushed to the Bayview Hotel. When the proprietor of the hotel tried to call Haileybury on the phone to give the alarm, he found there was no answer. The telephone was dead.

  As they rode into town, the bandits had cut the telephone and telegraph wires. Ville Marie was isolated from the outside world.

  While two robbers worked inside the bank, three others kept guard outside, armed with rifles.

  The hotel proprietor, two guests and the bank manager ran toward the bank, but the masked men standing in the doorway with their rifles warned them back.

  A woman showed a lamp in a window opposite the bank building and a shot extinguished the lamp.

  Inside the bank there was a muffled roar. But the men inside did not come out. The guards at the door were nervous. They did not know what was keeping their pals. The town was rousing. In a deer country the men have rifles and the bandits did not know how long it would be before they would have to face a posse.

  Then there was a terrific explosion. A burst of flame outlined the whole scene in a sudden glare of white and black and the men inside came rushing out. The bank building was on fire. All the men mounted and rode out of the town.

  As the two men who had been working inside at blowing the safe swung into their saddles, the horses were jumping from the smell of the smoke from the burning building. A twelve-year-old boy ran toward them. Afraid he would be able to identify them from the glare of the building, which was beginning to flare up, they shot him twice. Both bullets went into the boy’s ankle. No one else came out and the bandits rode away through the town.