The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway — A Narrator Asking Favors
Reading Note: The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway
This reading note discusses selected passages, including the final author’s note.
How do we give an honest opinion after someone has made liking their book a condition of our friendship? The authorial voice in The Torrents of Spring keeps putting us in that awkward position. He offers to read our manuscripts, reassures us that we belong among his literary companions, and hopes we will recommend his book. We have acquired obligations before having much opportunity to answer.
The sales request in the fourth part is particularly deft. First he allows that we may like what he has written. Then he asks whether we will persuade our friends to buy it. Soon the conditional liking has become an established fact: everyone will enjoy the book “as much as you and I do.” Our opinion has been quietly supplied for us while the conversation seemed to be leaving it open.
Twenty cents per copy interrupts the friendliness with a calculation. The sum is small, he explains, but hundreds of thousands of sales would make it substantial. His enthusiasm now has an income attached. Even so, the invitation to bring along our own writing remains available; he will help with it, perhaps rewrite parts. Generosity and recruitment occupy the same breath, and the staged writer makes their combination sound perfectly companionable.
The reader repeatedly named in the notes is someone the narrator can flatter, instruct and place under obligation. Alongside the characters’ entanglements, we follow his effort to keep that person close. The recurring address gives his own need for approval a continuity that survives each departure from the story.
The reader inside Hemingway’s author’s notes
An explanatory interruption ought to help us recover the story. The note after Part Two promises to do that: it places Scripps O’Neil and his wife on their way to the beanery, then takes us back to Yogi Johnson, another worker at the pump factory. The narrator admits that beginning backward is difficult. His explanation gradually expands into the allowances we should make for him, the anecdotes he can provide and the writing he would gladly read for us.
We are asked to cooperate with the difficulty that the authorial voice has announced. He even wishes we could help him work out what will happen to the couple. That appeal is funny because the reader has been promoted from recipient to assistant without acquiring any control over the next page. The narrator can distribute responsibility for the book while retaining the right to tell it.
In Part Three, literary company provides a different inducement. A reported lunch with John Dos Passos leads to the claim that Dos Passos acclaimed a chapter as a masterpiece. H. G. Wells has supposedly discussed the reader during a visit. These episodes belong to the comic persona’s performance; taking them as independent testimonials would miss the way the notes manufacture their own witnesses. Fame is made to recognize us, and we are encouraged to feel pleased about our place in its conversation.
He calls his praise of Dos Passos logrolling, with a mock explanation for provincial readers. The exchange has been named inside the note, where recognizing how literary compliments circulate can itself become a little badge of belonging.
The promise of “sweep and movement” makes the coming achievement a joint enterprise. We should want it as much as he does, since it will mean so much to both of us. He can even postpone writing a difficult chapter until tomorrow while explaining how much effort it will require. The friendliness keeps extending the time we owe him.
Then Fitzgerald sits in the fireplace. The absurd visit supplies an excuse for a potentially weaker passage, followed by a declaration that the author will defend Fitzgerald against anyone—including us. Our recently acquired friendship is suddenly at risk. A companion who has volunteered to improve our writing now reserves the power to rebuke us, and his next appeal checks whether we are still upset. Hemingway gives the interruption an unstable social rhythm: welcome, obligation, reprimand, reconciliation.
There is room for a dissatisfied reader as a hypothetical applicant for alterations. We can write to the publishers about anything we dislike; they will change it, or he will. That solicitude reaches beyond what the printed copy in our hands can provide: its words stay in place as he volunteers to replace them. Without giving another voice a reply on the page, the narrator can stage our possible complaint and the accommodation that would answer it. His promise of flexibility prolongs a conversation he continues to conduct alone.
Diana’s literary courtship
Inside the story, another person works hard to hold an audience. Diana, Scripps’s wife, fears losing him to Mandy, whose literary reminiscences fascinate him. Hemingway repeatedly returns Diana’s thoughts to “Could she hold him?” Around that question, reading becomes an increasingly urgent set of tasks.
“Diana subscribing,” “Diana reading,” “Diana waiting”: her name keeps beginning the separate activities, from acquiring magazines to visiting the library and waiting for the postman in the snow. The accumulation has the persistence of someone attempting a remedy again and again. Titles change; the person doing the work remains in place. We feel the disproportion between the variety of her preparations and the single result she needs them to produce.
Learning editorials by heart briefly restores interest in Scripps’s eyes. A mistake in wording, a misunderstood phrase or a difference of attitude makes the performance ring false. Intimacy has become dependent on reproducing the right literary language, with very little tolerance for error. The precision of that failure gives the satire a human cost: Diana has done the reading and still cannot make her borrowed fluency hold him.
At the close of the chapter, a newly redesigned Harper’s Magazine suggests another possibility. Its changed format is comically slight beside the marital problem she hopes it might solve. Hemingway has compressed a fresh round of preparation into the promise of a different-looking magazine; her hope continues beyond the remedies whose failure we have already watched.
Placed beside the author’s notes, this effort gives the repeated appeals to us a less comfortable character. Diana tries to secure affection through literary competence; the authorial persona offers literary companionship while soliciting approval and purchases. The transactions differ, and Diana’s anxiety has more immediate vulnerability. Their proximity nevertheless lets the book’s literary talk carry the desire to retain somebody’s attention, whether that somebody is a husband or the purchaser being addressed as a friend.
A walk burdened with significance
The announced sweep has an amusingly small destination in Chapter Thirteen. Yogi Johnson and two Indigenous veterans are walking through Petoskey toward a place to eat. Short fragments and repeated walking establish their motion, while questions keep enlarging the difficulty of deciding where to go. War, collective purpose and racial supremacy crowd around the prospect of a meal.
Once the beanery has been suggested, movement can continue. Yogi’s associations continue too: Paris, Huysmans, Gertrude Stein, experiments with words. The practical destination competes with the mind’s rapid acquisition of literary significance. Hemingway makes the paragraph travel farther by association than the men need to travel on foot. Their ordinary hunger provides a useful measure for the inflated concerns accumulating around it.
There is a limit to the wit of this scene. The Indigenous men can supply the practical answer that Yogi lacks, but their speech remains a caricature. Giving them the useful suggestion does little to enlarge their individual voices. The joke against grand white self-importance is carried partly by a simplification of the people who interrupt it, and that simplification costs the scene some of the distinction its deflation might otherwise achieve.
The interruption itself has limits as well. Repetition can make a needy speaker funnier: each renewed assurance adds another demand, and the earlier hospitality becomes harder to accept innocently. Once we can predict the flattering address and the next request for indulgence, however, further explanations spend space without always changing the relationship. Recognizing the comic design does not oblige us to find every recurrence equally successful.
The final author’s note prolongs the contact by explaining Diana’s earlier story about her mother’s disappearance in Paris. The narrator supplies an elaborate account involving plague and the exposition authorities, places the explanation outside the novel, and turns it into advice about travel. A story has finished, but something still needs to be clarified for our benefit. Even the farewell includes a declaration against long goodbyes.
The Torrents of Spring remains an uneven, fairly modest achievement (at least at a Hemingway scale). Its construction is most rewarding when an interruption changes what the narrator asks of us: an explanation solicits patience, literary company solicits admiration, friendship solicits sales. We can follow those adjustments with interest while keeping a restrained judgment of the book. The staged author has spent considerable energy trying to make that combination awkward for his reader.
Sources
Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (1926), Scribner’s 1987 reprint, available in a Wikisource transcription. Passages discussed: Chapters 9 and 13; the author’s notes in Parts Two, Three and Four; and the final author’s note.
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