The Torrents of Hemingway

You don’t hear much talk about Sherwood Anderson these days, and it seems his only work that’s remembered is Winesburg, Ohio, but in the 1920s, he was, apparently, a respected and well-known literary figure.

In the early 1920s, Ernest Hemingway was a young man with literary aspirations. Although he didn’t have much to show for it. He wrote a few boys’ adventure stories in high school, and that’s about it. However, Hemingway got to know Anderson in Chicago by chance, and Anderson did something that set him on the road to becoming a literary star.

Hemingway’s young wife had a small trust fund. In today’s dollars, it amounted to less than $30,000 a year. Just enough to get by on if you lived modestly. In those postwar days, the exchange rate meant those dollars would go a lot further in Europe than in the U.S., and Hemingway and his wife were up for an adventure. They initially thought of going to Italy. Hemingway had served as an ambulance driver in Italy during the war, and got a lot of attention by the newspapers when he was wounded. Hemingway liked the attention, so I suppose he had a fondness for Italy. However, Anderson suggested the Hemingways head to Paris. Anderson was even nice enough to provide Hemingway with letters of introduction to the famous expatriate writers such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. These letters were gold to a young would-be writer. It wasn’t easy to break into that crowd.

Hemingway learned a great deal from these people, especially Stein. He admired her modern style, which aimed to reveal the inner life of her characters through more direct and simple vocabulary and less florid descriptions. The trouble is, Stein used a kind of stream of consciousness approach, which made it hard for the average reader to follow her. Hemingway spent several years attempting to perfect a more accessible version of the modern style.

Just before Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises—his first popular success—he wrote a mean-spirited, snide and completely unfunny parody of Sherwood Anderson’s latest novel Dark Laughter. Hemingway’s hit piece was titled The Torrents of Spring.

Hemingway might have ushered in a new modern approach to writing, but given that the style was being tinkered with by several influential writers, I think it was only a matter of time before someone came up with something many readers might actually want to read. In any event, Hemingway’s hyper-masculine themes were hardly modern, and his fascination with bullfighting was ugly. Hemingway was a sexist, bigot and homophobe, and it turns out, he was a pretty shitty friend.