Today I was reading a little about Hemingway because I read him heavily one year in college and loved his language-bending, and I was surprised to learn that he wrote a novella.

It wasn’t the novella itself that surprised me, but rather, that he wrote a novella that was meant to be a parody of a Sherwood Anderson work, and a bit of a mockery of Anderson’s efforts in another book, which Hemingway considered poorly done.

Hemingway’s novella was “Torrents of Spring”, published in 1926, and one that I never read, and it poked fun at Anderson’s book, “Dark Laughter”.

I haven’t read much Sherwood Anderson, but the one book of his I did read back in the day- and by back in the day, I mean when I first thought I would try to read for reading sake and someone referred me to it- was “Winesburg, Ohio”, which was THE book that opened my eyes to the joys of reading for pleasure, helped me to discover that literature is art, and then introduced me to the Rushmore of my all-time favorite authors, most whom I also came to know around that time of discovery- Cather, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and, of course, Hemingway.

“Torrents of Spring” was not a major book on any level. Hemingway’s close writer friends mostly laughed about it, because it made fun of writers pretending to be something, which Hemingway disdained. It was an early work, created before Hemingway dropped “The Sun Also Rises”, and so it was eclipsed quickly by anyone who had sampled it by his consequent masterpiece.

Still, Hemingway was like that. Inspired by muscle and machismo, bravery and bravado, grit and gravitas, passion and purism, Hemingway had no problem bashing at the people or things that didn’t fit or didn’t live up to his ideals. Anderson’s effort was less than what Hemingway expected from the heralded writer, so- the story goes- Hemingway let his pen pal have it.

Publicly.

That’s what friends are for, I guess.