Customer Reviews

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING: A Romantic Novel in Honour of the Passing of a Great Race

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For one to understand why Hemingway wrote a book of this caliber, it must be understood that Sherwood Anderson, whom Hem parodied, had a contract with the same company Hemingway had signed a contract with. An offer had also been made by Scribner which was more prestiegeous of the two literary firms. To get out of the contract, Hem offered this book, which he knew would be turned down by the firm of Boni and Liveright, thus giving Hemingway the chance to accept the contract from Scribner. The contract essentially said that if the second book of a three book contract was turned down, Hemingway could break the contract. Hemingway knew that Boni and Liveright would never publish a book which lampooned Sherwood Anderson (one of the stars of Boni and Liveright). Hemingway actually had other offers besides Scribner's. He did, however, take Scribner's offer, basically because he had given his word to Maxwell Perkins who worked at Scribner that he would work with them. The book was not intended as a great literary work, and thus must be examined in the light of which it is written. There are many funny idosyncrasies which Hem used for some of the characters in the book. Most of these came from people he knew there in Paris. Entertaining? Yes it was to me. A great literary work? It achieved what he was looking for. So you be the judge.

I thought I'd read everything Hemingway ever published, but I was not even familiar with this one. When I read that it was a parody, I thought I might not get it, since it had been a long time since I'd read any of the authors he was targeting. Instead I found myself laughing out loud. So much reminded me of best-sellers I had read in recent years(The Bridges of Madison County is one which comes to mind). It just goes to show, great writing can come in many styles, but bad writing remains amazingly consistant over the years.

This isn't a novel that would be very enjoyable to someone who doesn't have much experience with other literary works of the 1920s. Read alone it is pretty silly and vulgar. Read -after- you have finished Sherwood Anderson's _Dark Laughter_, however, this book is very funny. Hemingway spoofs both Anderson's style and his silly plot. And throughout, EH offers a treatise on the art of parody. The book is very short, and tightly controlled by Hemingway (something Anderson didn't get right with Dark Laughther). The book is also interesting for those invested in the perennial Hemingway was/was not a racist argument. Read alone, the bits about Indians would be highly offensive, but read in light of Anderson's horrifying primitivism and liberal use of the N-word in Dark Laughter, Hemingway's depiction of the Indians is really a chastisement of Anderson's silly racist story. Hemingway's complex sense of humor, visible in his other novels under the surface, is fully on display here. Too bad time has eradicated a fuller understanding of all the jokes. I recommend this book for Hemingway aficionados and for students of modernism who need a wake-up call about Hemingway's place (and his understanding of that place) in the modernist canon.

This little 90-page novella/short story was written in 1926, and is very representative of Hemingway's style and sense of humor. It is a parody of the early so-called vogue of a writing style, that all writers were expected to follow; but Hemingway broke the mold and wrote an entertaining story in his own way and style. He wrote in short, declarative sentences and was soon recognized for his tough, no-nonsense prose. This is a quick read enjoyed along with a glass of sherry or sogu on a cold wet evening - he mentions winter and ice quite often - so a warming toddy would be perfect.

`The Torrents of Spring' is an early novel from Hemingway that was written during his time Paris. It is relatively short in length and is a satirical parody of the literary style of his fellow expat writers at that time. This follows Yogi Johnson and Scripps O'Neil as they go about their lives in a small town in Michigan. It is quite funny and although stylised, easy enough to read. It is unlike any of Hemingway's later novels and although his style is evident throughout, you can tell he hadn't quite found his voice yet. I found this to be a short, but entertaining read and whilst it doesn't have any great depth or substance, it is still well worth a read if you have enjoyed any of Hemingway's books in the past.

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I thought Hemingway was very humorous when reading A Movable Feast; the part with the touring he did with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Torrents of Spring actually broke me up in places. How delightful to know that Earnest Hemingway had a good sense of humor. If you like the man, I recommend this read.

With Washington Irving's A Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809) and Dawn Powell's A Time To Be Born (1942), Ernest Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring (1926) is one of the funniest books in the annals of American literature. A parody of the "the Chicago school of literature" and especially of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925), the book is simultaneously a short story, a novella, and a false novel fragment that haphazardly exams the lives of Scripps O'Neill and his acquaintance Yogi Johnson, two rambling dreamers who timelessly represent the American everyman.

As a light-hearted attack on the sentimentality, humanistic philosophy, and conceptualization of the "American Dream" in the literature it parodies, the book presents Scripps as a reverie-addicted individual who is consistently but unknowingly his own worst enemy. Earnestly obsessed with self definition and struggling to grasp the larger picture in any given situation, no matter how inconsequential or obvious, Scripps lives in a constant rhetorical haze. Perceiving unbounded potential everywhere, irrepressible Scripps is actually able to concretize very little. Like Scripps, the more prosaic Yogi finds his illusory assumptions about life and other people flatly shot down at every turn.

In a hilarious series of fugue states, Scripps indulges in dramatic but false memories of being present while his ancestral home is burned to the ground during the Civil War, of his childhood as a starving urchin on the streets of Chicago, and of the ethnicity and social prominence of his forbears. Forgetting that it was Yogi, not himself, who visited Paris during the Great War, Scripps longs to make a return visit. Gloriously unsophisticated and uneducated, Scripps deduces that becoming a world-renowned composer is simply a matter of getting the job. Sensing the power and esteem attributed to words in the highest circles of society, Scripps adopts a cultish attitude towards famous writers and literature, and intermittently imagines himself to be a great novelist who has merely failed to commit pen to page.

Like Bruce Dudley and Sponge Martin, Anderson's Scripps and Yogi prototypes, the Hemingway protagonists anxiously but futilely fixate on questions concerning masculinity, sexual identity, physical prowess, and the threatening presence of the creative impulse in the psyche of the American male.

But Scripps and Yogi are also endearing, small town folk heroes clearly not to be despised, for almost every character in The Torrents of Spring lives in the same fog-bound world of desire-skewering contingency, misread signs, and naiveté. These include elderly British waitress Mrs. Scripps, who desperately subscribes to elitist literary journals in the hopes of "keeping her man," and the foreman of the pump plant where Scripps and Yogi are employed, who is unable to ascertain with absolute certainty whether "the chinook wind," the harbinger of spring, is genuinely blowing or not.

The title of Dark Laughter had several meanings, the most literal of which referred to the "high shrill laughter of the negroes," which, Anderson said "must always be imagined at the back of the story." Hemingway pushes Anderson's metaphor--and patronizing attitude towards blacks--as hard as he possibly can, and thus one of two black characters in The Torrents of Spring manifests as nothing but a disembodied voice almost continually in the throws of howling offstage laughter. Hemingway corrects Anderson by portraying both his black characters--a cook and a bartender--as the only two people who actually comprehend the absurdity of the events unfolding around them.

Hemingway's genius was to immediately perceive and respond to the multiple unintentionally amusing qualities in the Anderson novel, especially since Anderson was, at the time, the well respected author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Hemingway, an unknown, was shortly to become the highly influential voice of American literature on the world stage. Through subtle recreation, Hemingway beautifully punctures such mawkish Dark Laughter passages as "Words flitting across the mind of Bruce Dudley, varnishing wheels in the factory of the Grey Wheel Company of Old Harbor, Indiana. Thoughts flitting across his mind. Drifting images. He had begun to get a little skill with his fingers. Could one in time get a little skill with thoughts, too? Could thoughts and images be laid on paper some day as Sponge Martin laid on varnish, never too thick, never too thin, never lumpy?" Few readers will be surprised to learn that Dark Laughter has been out of print for decades.

There's little doubt that Hemingway loved Scripps and Yogi; his playful appreciation of both is abundantly evident on every page, giving the text an ironic sentimental glow of its own. In fact, it is surprising that The Torrents of Spring isn't longer. At 87 brief, disciplined pages, readers may wish that the adventures of these two remarkable men, each of whom is perennially caught in the headlights of life, continued on and on.

The only other Hemingway novel I have read is 'Fiesta'. There is something about Hemingway that seems to be illusion for me - the ease of the reading, the detail of the observation. As if, perhaps, his works are more like viewing a painting rather than reading a novel.
When I first read 'Fiesta' I was linked with the book by an early reference in it to W H Hudson - one of my favourite writers. When I read 'Fiesta' a second time (and reviewed it for Amazon) I was intruiged by another literary reference that had meant nothing to me on my first reading - Ivan Turgenev. What intruiged me even more was that Hemingway had written this novel - 'The Torrents of Spring' - and Turgenev had written a novel called (in English translation)'Spring Torrents'.
But Hemingway is nothing like Turgenev, although the penultimate chapter did bring me some reminders. And then the literary references grabbed me again as Hemingway refers to Huysmans whose 'Against Nature' appealed to me greatly.

As Spring approaches in 'The Torrents of Spring'(firstly with a false chinook) changes occur in a number of character's lives - recoveries, disappointments, brief pleasures, radical - if temporary - alterations. Sometimes the changes are slow and dreaded, sometimes they are abrupt and unexpected. Whatever the case, life does go on - dreamily it seems to me. Turgenev's idea of a torrent much more closely matched my understanding of the word than Hemingway's.
Hemingway is easy to read. You will probably enjoy this light and amusing novel. I am less sure that it will be memorable. Not in the way Turgenev's 'Spring Torrents' is.

The book came in a beautiful leather binding. I plan on purchasing all of Hemingway's major works from this company.

This was the first Hemingway book I ever read. It was about 25 years ago and at the time I had tried to read H's longer books, such as The Sun Also Rises, and failed. Well, I was only in seventh grade and I had rather puerile tastes. At the time, Torrents reminded me very much of the Richard Brautigan and the Kurt Vonnegut books I was devouring. I still think this is a great book for kids. Its not the most representative introduction to Hemingway's work, but its much more fun to read (and shorter!!!) than The Old Man and The Sea.