The Torrents of Spring

The debt was real: Anderson had met the unknown Hemingway in Chicago in 1921, told him Paris was the place and Stein the person, and written the letters that opened the doors. Four years later the pupil read Dark Laughter — Anderson at his most mannered, all rhetorical questions and mystic primitivism — and produced this counterblast in a week and a half: two dim heroes wandering a wintry Petoskey, Michigan, through parodies of Andersonian reverie, complete with mock authorial asides inviting the reader to admire how the book is going.

Nobody involved mistook the second purpose. Hemingway's three-book contract with Boni & Liveright gave them right of first refusal — but they could hardly publish a burlesque of their own star author. They refused it, as calculated; the contract dissolved; and Max Perkins at Scribner got both the parody and, months later, The Sun Also Rises, beginning the century's most storied author-publisher marriage. Anderson took the blow with more grace than his pupil had shown; Stein, loyal to Anderson, cooled toward Hemingway permanently. As comedy the book is genuinely funny in stretches; as biography it is the first clear sighting of how the century's most competitive writer treated fathers.

Petoskey, Michigan, in the slush of late winter. Two workers at the pump factory — Scripps O'Neil, a tall writer of vague sorrows who acquires wives with Andersonian abruptness, and Yogi Johnson, a war veteran worried he may never want a woman again — drift through beaneries, snowfields, and portentous meditations on the meaning of America. Waitresses are wooed over beans; an Indian war whoop sounds across the frozen town; every epiphany arrives in solemn, cadenced prose that is the joke.

The plot exists to be interrupted: mock 'Author's Notes' check in with the reader ('It was at this point in the story, reader, that Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald came to our home one afternoon...'), the chapters bear subtitles out of eighteenth-century burlesque, and the whole machine runs on the gap between manner and matter. It ends the only way a parody can — mid-gesture, everyone walking off into the primitivist night the book has spent a hundred pages mocking.