Everybody Behaves Badly by Lesley M. M. Blume

Author:Lesley M. M. Blume
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The Torrents of Spring

A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race

No one in-house seemed particularly invested in promoting the book. Hemingway had predicted to Horace Liveright sales of at least 20,000 copies, but Scribner’s answered that bluff with a modest first printing of 1,250 copies. The publication schedule had been so rushed that the book was not included in the house’s spring catalogue, and only a limited advertising campaign was attempted.

The house used the book’s launch, however, as an opportunity to tease the upcoming novel and get the drumbeat going about Hemingway himself. Scribner’s vigorously marketed him as a new leader of “modern tendencies in writing,” as Perkins had put it. In a supplement to the spring catalogue, the house announced that “Hemingway as a writer is in revolt against the soft, vague thought and expression that characterizes the work of extremists in American fiction today.” His writing was “utterly direct” and “completely fearless,” and would give readers “a shock like cold water.” The Torrents of Spring provided a hint of the “extraordinary talent of the writer, a talent which will be even more clearly revealed when his first novel, ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ is published next fall.”

In reality, The Torrents of Spring did little to showcase Hemingway’s revolutionary style, as it was a satire of Anderson’s, but no matter. The house’s ads for Torrents echoed these sentiments, driving home the message that Hemingway was brilliant, promising, and young.

Most of the reviewers who did bother to write up the book did not take the bait, however. At least one of them simply seemed confused by The Torrents of Spring: How had Hemingway made the leap from In Our Time, with its terse, brutal prose, to this? Another reviewer—Harry Hansen of the New York World—made short work of Hemingway’s attempt at satire.

“Parody is a gift of the gods,” he wrote. “Few are blessed with it. It missed Hemingway.”

He also called the book out as a blatant betrayal of Anderson: “When Hemingway published ‘In Our Time’ it was Sherwood Anderson who turned the handsprings and welcomed this newcomer to the ranks of America’s great men . . . and now Hemingway pays him back.”

Yet as far as Scribner’s was concerned, there was positive news too: Hemingway’s apparent attack on Anderson was proving good, gossipy copy—and so was Hemingway himself. The Kansas City Star included some colorful albeit inaccurate background about his war years: the author of this “audacious little volume” had “volunteered in the Italian army and got himself gloriously shot up.” A reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune commented, “Mr. Hemingway’s name, which one hears everywhere now, [may be] more famous than his prose.” This all portended well for a major publicity push when it came time to release The Sun Also Rises.

Some of Hemingway’s acquaintances were stunned by The Torrents of Spring, which had suddenly revealed his capacity for public betrayal. It was shocking even to those on the outer rings of the Paris Crowd: Hemingway had been among the privileged few admitted into the den, and now he was eating his own.

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