The Torrents of Spring

The Torrents of Spring is a novella written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926. Subtitled "A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race", Hemingway used the work as a spoof of the world of writers. It is Hemingway's first long work and was written as a parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter.

Set in northern Michigan, The Torrents of Spring concerns two men who work at a pump factory, World War I veteran Yogi Johnson and writer Scripps O'Neill. Both are searching for the perfect woman, though they disagree over this ideal.

The story begins with O'Neill returning home from the library to find that his wife and small daughter have left him, explaining that "It takes a lot to mend the walls of fate." O'Neill, desperate for companionship, befriends a British waitress, Diana, at the beanery where she works and asks her to marry him immediately. However, he soon becomes disenchanted with her British accent and her penchant for strange footwear. "Her feet ain't sweet so what's the reet?" he muses in doggerel verse as he loafs about the laundry.

Diana makes an attempt to impress her spouse by reading books from the lists of The New York Times Book Review, including many forgotten pot-boilers of the 1920s. But O'Neill soon leaves her (as she feared he would when she first met him) for another waitress, Mandy, who enthralls him with her store of literary (but possibly made up) anecdotes.

Yogi Johnson, who has become depressed after a Parisian prostitute leaves him for a British officer who makes her dress in a German soldier's uniform, has a period during which he anguishes over the fact that he doesn't seem to desire any woman at all, even though spring is approaching, "which turns a young man's fancy to love." At last, he falls in love with a Native American woman who enters a restaurant clothed only in moccasins, the wife of one of the two Indians he befriends near the end of the story, in the penultimate chapter. Johnson is cured of his impotence when, viewing the naked squaw, he is overcome by "a new feeling" which he hastens to attribute to Mother Nature, and together they “light out for the territories.”

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