The torrents of spring

Book info: The torrents of spring (Hardcover, 90 pages – Scribner, 1972) – Scribner, 1972. Language: Eng.

Condition: Good

The Torrents of Spring is technically Hemingway's first novel, tho The Sun Also Rises was his first major success. He wrote this novel in a way that would force his publisher, Horace Liverwright, to refuse it & thus break contract. It parodies Liverwright's star author, Sherwood Anderson. He was then able to take up a more lucrative offer from Scribner's. The novel relates the intersecting lives of WWI veteran Yogi Johnson & writer Scripps O'Neill, both of whom work at a pump factory. Both are searching for the perfect woman. O'Neill takes mescaline & hallucinates he is President of Mexico. Johnson is cured of his impotence when, viewing a naked squaw, he is overcome by "a new feeling" which he immediately attribute to Mother Nature, & together he & the squaw "light out for the territories" The hero is impotent. The hero of The Sun Also Rises suffered from a war wound preventing intercourse. Many of Hemingway's short stories from this period (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen) also treat sexual dysfunction. Tho primarily a send-up of Anderson's poorly-esteemed negro novel Dark Laughter, the literary proclivities of American & British writers close to Anderson, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce & John Dos Passos, are wound into the monkey-barrel of satire & parody.