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?
Well, I’m entertained by your review if nothing else Simon! I’m a bit leery about Hemingway myself, and I can only be sure of reading “A Moveable Feast” which I think I had a few issues with and ended up feeling he wasn’t a nice person. But I *have* read Sherwood Anderson, decades ago – “Winesburg, Ohio” which iirc was a book about smalltown America. I remember enjoying it, so why Steinbeck is parodying it, and how, idk. And I would argue with Capote – Kerouac did more than just typing…
Oh well done for reading Sherwood Anderson! That does sound fun. And your recent Kerouac review shows he was more than typing, yep – though I think Capote just liked a catty phrase.
Obviously, this isn’t one of his well-known books. I have read several, although so long ago I can barely remember them. Toxic masculinity is why I stopped reading him, although I am not sure if it showed up in his books. The only one I really liked was The Old Man and the Sea.
That is the one I should probably have started with, isn’t it…
Hah, I am hardly knowledgeable but, even so, I find it funny that this is the book (and cover illustration) to serve as your first! My first was The Sun Also Rises because of an amazing (probably not, actually, but it seemed so) film/series I had just watched, but I didn’t like the book as well. (Then I read The Old Man and the Sea and I think you’d probably have enjoyed that one a little more. Although no fun quotes!) Many years after, I worked with a guy half my age who absolutely loved The Sun also Rises, SO much that he never stopped nagging me to reread… because I must have missed how great it was. Eventually I succumbed, but I didn’t love it…however , I did like it far more, and I think going into it with a different set of expectations style-wise rly helped.
It does seem like I started in the wrost possible place :D Maybe I won’t write him off just yet.
Well, I haven’t read enough EH to be an aficionado, but I don’t think his terse style serves him well in fiction, I think he needs the bigger canvas of a novel for us to see what he’s on about. For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example is about the ambiguities and costs of war, (and , regarding toxic masculinity, it features a strong woman amongst the partisans who ends up with the leadership). It’s also a book that answers the question that many Americans might have asked themselves in WW2, and is pertinent now as the US appears to be withdrawing from its support for democracies: what are we fighting for when it’s not about the defence of our own nation?
That does sound interesting, and I like that there is a strong woman in the mix – so maybe I’ve misjudged him
This review really made me laugh. I have read four of his books but I’m not familiar with Sherwood Anderson and I have no idea what may have been going on with this book…that passage “There was a clock. There was a counter. There was a door,” reads to me like a parody of *Hemingway’s* style! What a fascinating little literary mystery :)
It’s very early in his career to be satirising himself, isn’t it :D
I really like Hemingway although I wish I didn’t, for the reasons you mention. This sounds fairly awful though, and I agree with Andrea it sounds like a parody of his style rather than his actual style. A bit of an odd one!
I won’t give up on him yet!
The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms being the only Hemingway novels I’ve read, I’m anything but an aficionado. The Torrents of Spring was tackled as a teen because it was short. This was before I’d so much as heard of Sherwood Anderson.
Short years later, Anderson would become my favourite short story writer. He assumed the position with Winesburg, Ohio and solidified it with Death in the Woods and Other Stories. I’ve never been much impressed by his novels – it seems no one is – so don’t remember much about Dark Laughter. I suppose I could read it a second time and then reread The Torrents of Spring but expect it would only make me think less of Hemingway when I think the goal was to make me think less of Anderson.
Good to know that I shouldn’t write off Anderson either! I love how you’ve phrased that final sentence. I expect you are right.