An Author’s Note to the Reader

Hemingway’s first try

The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway

The author of this newsletter commends his own words to you and asks that you listen (or rather read). This has been a hard review to write, as you might well know from reading it. Dashed off at top speed in twenty minutes, barely proof-read, but nonetheless having a bit of the vitality, a little of the acid, a little of the sour and the sweet, that so add flavour to our literary life.

Just as Hemingway – that old man so famous that these days that they name leather satchels and shotguns after him and hold lookalike competitions in Key West, Florida – dashed off his book and filled it with a lot of self-regarding notes on what he did the day that chapter was written and how much he had recently drank and with whom. Just as he did that, I will invite the reader of this somewhat interesting newsletter behind the curtain and into the metaphorical parlour, where I might not pour a drink (the stuff being expensive) but I will offer a little self-portraiture, a little knowledge otherwise unknown to the reader whose engagement with these newsletters has always been so gratifying, and so scant.

The newsletter you’re reading today was written after a day – indeed several days – of almost total paralysis, thanks to what the author believes is a hereditary – and violently cruel – back problem. In between reading chapters of the book under review, the newsletter author has watched some of The Shining on his laptop and has cried out in pain upon attempting to move the self-same laptop or, separately, to stand up or to sit down. He has moved his position a few times from bed to floor (where a mat was placed) and from mat to chair, and he has not always called out in agony upon making those transits. Throughout the day he has dreamt of bloody marys, which he has recently decided to take up making, and tonic water. But he did not make any bloody marys in his condition.

He had an idea when he woke in the morning that his back was better but that proved delusional and illusory – delusory, one might say. Upon sitting up – or rather lunging in a failed bid to sit up, the gears grinding and sparking as he did – the author was put right and shown the error of his ways. He must have sinned very terribly in his youth to be so afflicted. He must have done some terribly profane things while unaware to merit such punishment from the heavens.

Thus terminates the note of the author to the reader. The review commences herewith.

This book was a first effort by its author and is not a well-remembered one. Hemingway always denied that he wrote The Torrents of Spring to get out of a publishing contract he did not like, but he never denied – indeed, he boasted of the fact in the book itself – that he wrote it in ten days. (How good, how lasting, can something made in such terrible haste actually be? That’s what readers will justly ask themselves if they see this book on the shelf and wonder why no one talks about it any more.)

Because it is so clearly laden – overladen, many will justly say – with essentially pointless literary gossip and ephemera (which even some of Hemingway’s more substantial non-fiction, including Green Hills of Africa, also teeters on the brink of), it is a book that cannot truly be enjoyed because any reader born after, let’s say, 1970 won’t know 90 per cent or so of the names mentioned. They won’t get the parodies; they won’t understand it at all. I might be different from the majority in that I actively enjoy old works that are filled, overstuffed, with references that I will then either have to decipher or to brush past, not taking the time to learn.

But I find myself enjoying the book, just the same. I think some of the jokes are funny – particularly the ones the British law will not permit me to quote about some of the Native Americans whom one of Hemingway’s characters encounter and who later hustle him hard at the pool table.

I enjoy the idea that the centrepiece of this small town is a restaurant which only serves beans and which is called a beanery. I like some of the stories of the Great War, comic though they are, which are sprinkled in to the meal. And I enjoy the author’s notes, peppered in lightly at first and then more heavily, like snow building up. I like hearing about Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford.

I enjoy the gossip, foolish though it all is. Sue me – so sue me – if you think that’s a bad thing. Just be prepared to face the pathetic spectacle of an invalid in court, whose condition will doubtless elicit some tear-eyed judicial sympathy.