Yogi Johnson
A veteran of the Western Front who works beside Scripps at the pump factory and has noticed that spring is coming and he does not want a woman.
To want a woman again. In one day he looks hard at the librarian, at the waitress where he holds a meal ticket, and at a group of girls walking home from the High School, and wants none of them. The rest of the book is him trying to work out what is wrong with him.
The book
At a glance
- One of two main characters — pump-factory worker in Petoskey, Michigan
- Landed in France in May 1917; says he was the first man to go from Cadillac
- Came from Sweden, or possibly Norway; he is not certain which
- Played centre at American football, which is his comparison for combat
- Two weeks there on leave — "Two weeks that were to have been the happiest weeks of his life."
- Four dollars and thirty cents, in an hour and a half
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeYogi Johnson is the other main character in The Torrents of Spring, the 1926 comic novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. The book opens on him at a window of the pump factory in Petoskey, Michigan, watching snow on the crated pumps in the yard and wondering whether spring is coming. He fought in France, and his problem is stated without ceremony in chapter eleven: it is spring, and he does not want a woman.
Almost everything else he does follows from that. He tests himself on a team of horses outside a feed store and they show him their teeth. He walks out onto the Charlevoix road, falls in with two Indians, and delivers a long speech to them about the war. They take him to a private club, where he is thrown out. He ends up at the same beanery as Scripps O'Neil, and there he finally tells the story he has been carrying since 1917.
The war material is the part of the book that stops being funny. Hemingway hands Yogi his own argument with Sherwood Anderson — that a writer should not write about combat he does not know — and lets him make it in plain, unparodied prose for several pages before the joke resumes.
How the book draws them
- Where he worksThe pump factory, at a window one along from Scripps O'Neil. He shows the new man round the place, explains that the misfit pumps are broken up and recast as axe heads and trombone slides, and points out that nothing is wasted.
- The speech he makes about the warSitting on a pile of logs with two Indians, he explains that combat was like playing centre at American football: unpleasant, and mostly a matter of remembering the signals. He says he knows he killed five men and probably more, and that he does not believe the men you kill haunt you.
- His argument with a novelThe librarian has lent him a book by Sherwood Anderson, and Yogi keeps returning to a character in it, a soldier called Fred who is destroyed by the one man he killed on patrol. Yogi does not believe a word of it. This is the parody speaking through him, and it is the one place the book makes its case straight.
- The day nothing worksHe looks at the librarian, at a waitress and at a group of schoolgirls, and feels nothing for any of them. Falling back on horses, he approaches a team hitched outside a feed store with no sugar in his pocket. One puts its ears back and shows its teeth. The other jerks its head away.
- The excuse and the pool gameAsked outside the pool room whether he shoots pool, he says his right arm was crippled in the war. He then plays anyway, for an hour and a half, and loses four dollars and thirty cents to a man with two artificial arms.
- The Paris storyOn his first day of leave a woman called him into a car on the Boulevard Malesherbes and took him to a mansion he could not afterwards find again. Days later, having paid a guide for a look at something expensive, he watched through a slit in a wall as the same woman came into a room with a young British officer. He has not wanted a woman since.
In chapter fourteen a Native woman walks into the beanery wearing only a pair of worn moccasins, with a baby on her back and a husky dog beside her, and is thrown out into the snow by the cook. Something in Yogi gives way. He announces that he is cured, hands the two Indians five dollars, tells them the Paris story, and calls it the happiest day of his life. In the same paragraph, and without pausing over it, the book says he had been on the verge of killing himself in the beanery.
The last chapter puts him on the railroad tracks north of Petoskey after midnight, walking beside the woman and taking off his clothes one garment at a time, dropping each by the track until he is wearing nothing but a worn pair of pump-maker's shoes. The two woods Indians follow behind and pick the clothes up. The chinook wind arrives, spring finally comes to the town, and the novel stops.