The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway

First published: 1926

Type of plot: Farcical parody

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: Rural Michigan

Principal Characters:

• Yogi Johnson, a World War I veteran working in a Petoskey, Michigan, “pump-factory”
• Scripps O’Neil, an alleged short-story writer who wanders to Petoskey and finds work in the pump-factory
• Diana, an “elderly” English waitress in a Petoskey beanery who marries Scripps
• Mandy, a younger waitress in the beanery who steals Scripps from Diana
• Two Indians, acquaintances of Yogi who live outside Petoskey

The Novel

The Torrents of Spring is a short parody of Sherwood Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter (1925) and a satire of literary manners and morals in the 1920’s. As such, it is not an extremely important work, but as the second published book—after the stories of In Our Time (1924, 1925)—by a major American writer, the novella has biographical and historical interest. To be enjoyed, however, it must be read first for its nonsense and humor.

For such a short work, The Torrents of Spring is surprisingly complex—an indication of its parodic purpose. Subtitled “A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race,” the book is divided into four parts, each with its own grandiose subtitle and each prefaced by an epigraph from the eighteenth century English novelist Henry Fielding. In the tradition of Fielding (who in Joseph Andrews was himself parodying his predecessor Samuel Richardson), Hemingway also conducts a humorous dialogue with his imaginary readers, explaining his novel—or urging them to get their friends to buy the book.

The structure of the work is equally elaborate, and to retell the story is to highlight its nonsense. Part 1 (“Red and Black Laughter”) opens with Yogi Johnson and Scripps O’Neil staring out the window of the pump-factory where they work at the empty yard where snow covers the crated pumps. (Dark Laughter opens with two characters named Bruce Dudley and Sponge Martin looking out a factory window at “a more or less littered factory yard.”)

The narrative now splits, and Hemingway picks up the absurd story of how Scripps got to Petoskey. A year earlier, he lived in the town of Mancelona, with his wife and daughter Lucy—or Lousy, as he calls her. (In Dark Laughter, Sponge Martin’s daughter is named Bugs—and the parody goes on.) One night, Scripps and his wife went out drinking, and he lost her—or, he came home one night and she was gone. It does not matter which is true. (In the same way, Scripps’s mother was either a poor Italian immigrant—or the wife of a Confederate general.)

Scripps wanders into Petoskey, meets Diana in Brown’s Beanery (“The Best by Test”), finds work in the pump-factory, and returns to marry the waitress. Just as quickly, however, he meets Mandy, the junior waitress in the beanery, and falls in love with her “picturesque” language and her endless store of literary anecdotes: “Did I ever tell you about the last words of Henry James?” she asks Scripps when they first meet. Given this competition, Diana realizes that she “can’t hold” Scripps—although she subscribes to every literary review and journal she can find in an attempt to keep her short-story writer (who claims to have sold stories to the Saturday Evening Post and The Dial). Part 2 (“The Struggle for Life”) ends with Scripps and Diana, after a year of marriage, trudging down to the beanery for still another night of Mandy’s literary gossip and small talk.

“In case the reader is becoming confused,” Hemingway interjects with his first author’s note, “we are now up to where the story opened,” although it is quite difficult writing this way, he complains, “beginning things backwards,” and he hopes that his readers will understand. “If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Cafe du Dome any afternoon talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis.” Such absurdities not only parody Fielding and Anderson but also satirize the Parisian literary life of which Hemingway himself was such a vital part.

In part 3 (“Men in War and the Death of Society”), Hemingway takes up the story of Yogi Johnson, who is worried that “he did not want a woman” and who spends the evening with two Petoskey Indians talking about the war (unpleasant but exciting, Yogi argues) and shooting pool (which the Indian with four artificial limbs wins). They go to an Indian speakeasy, but Yogi, in one of the most amusing scenes in the novella, is expelled because he is Swedish. (“In case it may have any historical value,” Hemingway adds in another note, “I wrote the foregoing chapter in two hours directly on the typewriter, and then went out to lunch with John Dos Passos”—and then he proceeds to give a detailed description of the meal.)

In part 4 (“The Passing of a Great Race and the Making and Marring of Americans”), all the characters end up in the beanery, where, Hemingway notes, “there are no red women. Are there no squaws anymore?” At which point “a squaw came into the room,” naked, but with a papoose on her back and a husky by her side. Yogi is seized by “a new feeling. A feeling he thought had been lost for ever,” and, when the naked Indian woman is thrown out of the beanery, he hurries out into the winter night after her.

“At the other end of the counter of the beanery a marriage was coming to an end.” Diana leaves; Scripps says to Mandy, “You are my woman” (even though his mind keeps straying to the naked woman); and Mandy launches into another long literary anecdote, this one about the time Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian novelist, worked as a streetcar conductor in Chicago.

The reader last sees Yogi walking down the railroad tracks beside the naked Indian woman, stripping off his own clothes—which are being picked up one by one by the two Indians following the pair, who then head into town to sell Yogi’s clothes to the Salvation Army. “White chief snappy dresser,” one of the Indians comments. In his “Final Note to the Reader,” Hemingway himself exits: “I will just say a simple farewell and Godspeed, reader, and leave you now to your own devices.”

The Characters

Characters in a parody such as The Torrents of Spring are necessarily stiff and stereotypical in order for the satire to work. The speech of Scripps and Yogi is full of literary allusions (to Willa Cather, H. G. Wells, et al.), as their thoughts are crowded with historical figures (Igor Stravinsky, the Haymarket anarchists). Yet their behavior is actually quite stupid: When Scripps first enters the pump-factory, for example, he is met by a sign that reads: “KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU. Can that mean me? Scripps wondered.” Through the Fielding epigraphs, Hemingway implies that he is satirizing the ridiculous affectations of people, and especially literary affectations among his contemporaries. Characters here are always dropping literary names— Huysmans, Ruth Suckow—and quoting, or misquoting, other writers. (“What is it that old writing fellow Shakespeare says: Might makes right’?” Scripps misremembers at one point.)

In Scripps and Yogi, Hemingway is also parodying the particular kind of primitives for which Sherwood Anderson was famous. Anderson was one of the first American writers to apply Freudian theory to literary creation, and, in his most famous work, the stories of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), one can see Sigmund Freud’s influence clearly in the rendering of internal thought and feeling. In such later works as Dark Laughter, however, Anderson’s obsession with the inner lives of his characters verges on self-parody, and it is easy to see the source of Hemingway’s humor. Characters in The Torrents of Spring are either free-associating or pondering cosmic questions. (Scripps watches a passenger train and wonders, “Were they . . . members of a worn-out civilization world-weary from the war?)

Finally, Hemingway’s characterization is a slap at Anderson and other 1920’s writers—such as Eugene O’Neill in The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922)—who saw in the lives of blacks and Native Americans a healthy, primitive antidote to the increasing industrialization (and thus deadening) of white, middle-class life. The “Indian war-whoops” and “dark laughter” of the black characters that run through the novella are satiric motifs, as are the subtitle and scenes such as the one where Yogi “felt touched. Here among the simple aborigines, the only real Americans, he had found that true communion.”

Besides being parodies of Anderson or satiric portraits of literary figures of the 1920’s, the characters in The Torrents of Spring are simply comic—like Diana, for example, who reads and orders pork and beans as “a pig and the noisy ones.”

Critical Context

The interest in The Torrents of Spring since its publication has been mainly historical. Certainly, the novella adds little to an overall appraisal of Hemingway’s talent, except, perhaps, for the recognition of his capacity for such broad slapstick humor. In this regard, The Torrents of Spring resembles the nonsense plays that Ring Lardner was writing at about the same time.

The work may be most interesting for presenting a Hemingway with whom few readers are familiar. The typical Hemingway hero—from Jake Barnes to Frederic Henry (in A Farewell to Arms, 1929) to Robert Jordan (in For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940)—is a rather unliterary “tough guy.” Hemingway himself, especially in his later years, took on the characteristics of his own heroes, for he liked to leave the impression, in interview or essay, of the hardy, macho sportsman who had little time or inclination for the niceties of the literary life. Yet The Torrents of Spring reveals a Hemingway with a wide and deep literary background: The title comes from a short novel by the nineteenth century Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the subtitle to part 4 is a veiled reference to Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925); there are numerous other allusions and references to writers both older (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and contemporary (Mencken, Ford Madox Ford, Joyce).

The 1920’s in Paris was one of the most exciting periods in literary history, especially for expatriate American writers. Rarely in American literature has there been a period of such rich literary experiment and productivity, and Hemingway was at the center of it all. The Torrents of Spring is a minor literary work but a major revelation of Hemingway’s immersion in the literary life swirling around him.

Bibliography

Benson, Jackson J., ed. New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Section 1 covers critical approaches to Hemingway’s most important long fiction; section 2 concentrates on story techniques and themes; section 3 focuses on critical interpretations of the most important stories; section 4 provides an overview of Hemingway criticism; section 5 contains a comprehensive checklist of Hemingway short fiction criticism from 1975 to 1989.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. After an introduction that considers Hemingway in relation to later criticism and to earlier American writers, includes articles by a variety of critics who treat topics such as Hemingway’s style, unifying devices, and visual techniques.

Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. A shrewd, critical look at Hemingway’s life and art, relying somewhat controversially on psychological theory.

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. A well-informed, sensitive handling of the life and work by a seasoned biographer.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Meyers is especially good at explaining the biographical sources of Hemingway’s fiction.

Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1986. The first volume of a painstaking biography devoted to the evolution of Hemingway’s life and writing. Includes chronology and notes.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Volume 2. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1989. Includes chronology and maps.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The American Homecoming. Volume 3. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992. Includes chronology, maps, and notes.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The 1930s. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1997. Volume 4 of Reynolds’s biography.