The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway – #ABookADayInMay Day 9

Ernest Hemingway is one of those big-name authors that I’ve never previously read. Truth be told, I’ve always assumed that I wouldn’t like his books, and that’s only partly because he seems so unlikeable as a person. When I think toxic masculinity, I think Hemingway.

BUT at some point I must have bought The Torrents of Spring (1926) – and, according to the pencil mark inside, it cost me 30p, so potentially I’ve had it a long time. And look at that Penguin cover I had – which takes various themes of the novella and puts them together in quite an unsettling still life.

I should say from the outset that I probably didn’t pick a very good starting point for Hemingway. Having finished the novella and doing a little bit of reading around it, apparently The Torrents of Spring was written speedily as a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter. I – like, I imagine, everyone alive today – haven’t read Dark Laughter. I know the name ‘Sherwood Anderson’ but wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about him or his work. So if The Torrents of Spring is a parody of a style, genre, and author that I am very unfamiliar with… I’m not sure I got out of it all that Hemingway put in.

So, what is the book about? Scripps O’Neil and Yogi Johnson are two men who work at a pump factory (I never truly worked out what a pump factory was). Scripps has a wife back home that he is estranged from, and rather suddenly has a bigamous marriage with a woman who is introduced and repeatedly referred to as an ‘elderly waitress’.

Along the way, the men (separately and together) muse on the ideal women, on fulfilment, on baked beans. Sometimes a simple narrative exposes unexpected psychological depth. Sometimes it’s just shallow. I’m afraid I didn’t get much depth from The Torrents of Spring but, as a satire, that may well have been deliberate.

For some periods, the prose reminded me of Truman Capote’s famous barb about Jack Kerouac: ‘This isn’t writing; it’s typing’. I was aware that Hemingway wrote sparse prose in short sentences, but then there’s something like this…

Inside the door of the beanery Scripps O’Neil looked around him. There was a long counter. There was a clock. There was a door that led into the kitchen. There were a couple of tables. There were a pile of doughnuts under a glass cover. There were signs put about on the wall advertising things one might eat. Was this, after all, Brown’s Beanery?

Writing that sparse and repetitive must be deliberate, and I daresay it is satirising something that Sherwood Anderson does. It doesn’t make for the most enjoyable reading, though I suppose it’s better than being very overwritten. Indeed, in the hands of another writer perhaps I’d have admired it. Here (again, perhaps because it’s a satire) it felt insincere.

Something more openly insincere, but which I did somehow enjoy, were the times that Hemingway broke the fourth wall. Quite often he addresses the reader, checking what they thought about the previous chapter and explaining various techniques and authorial choices:

I would like the reader to particularly remark the way the complicated threads of the lives of the various characters in the book are gathered together, and then held there in that memorable scene in the beanery. It was when I read this chapter aloud to him that Mr Dos Passos exclaimed, ‘Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece’.

It’s all a very bold choice for an author who had previously only published one volume of short stories. In that same year he would publish The Sun Also Rises which, of course, has had a more significant impact on literary history. I honestly have no idea if The Torrents of Spring succeeds on its aims, because I have no real sense of what its aims were.

So I hoped I had ticked off a major author with my choice today, but reading this particular book by Ernest Hemingway has really only raised more questions than it answers. Can any Hemingway aficiando tell me how similar this is to the rest of his oeuvre?