Hemingway, Ernest

The Torrents of Spring. A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race. New York: Scribner’s, 1926



In 8s (7 7/16  x 5 1/8  in.; 189 x 130 mm). Original dark green cloth; half-inch split at top of front inner hinge. Pictorial dust jacket depicting a scene at a lunch counter; some trivial rubbing, a tiny tear at top of spine. Cloth slipcase.

Dr. Don Carlos Guffey (sale, Parke-Bernet, 28 April 1959, lot 247) — Jonathan Goodwin (sale, Sotheby Parke Bernet, Part I, 29 March 1977, lot 133)

Hanneman A4a

First edition,  consisting of 1,250 copies, of the author’s first novel and second regularly published book. With a long inscription by Hemingway about Torrents to Dr. Don Carlos Guffey, the obstetrician who delivered Hemingway’s two sons by his second marriage, the inscription filling the front free endpaper: “Dear Dr. Guffey: — Scribner’s gave me $500 advance royalties on this book when it was published in 1926 or 1927 or whatever year it was and in my royalty statement for 1931 I still owed them about $9.00 — Ernest Walsh, the late Ernest Walsh, wanted me to let him serialize it in This Quarter which he edited with Ethel Moorhead and published with her money and when I could not let him because there was not time since his magazine came out at very irregular quarterly intervals he attacked it in the New Masses as The Cheapest Book I Ever Read — well, well, well, well, well — Ernest Hemingway.”

Dr. Don Carlos Guffey, a noted Kansas City physician, was essentially the Hemingway family doctor, delivering both of Hemingway’s sons by his second wife Pauline by Caesarean section: Patrick in June 1928, and Gregory in November 1931.  He was also a bibliophile and was one of the first important collectors of Hemingway books and manuscripts, soliciting inscriptions from the author in which he said something of interest about the writing/publication of a particular book (as with The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises in this sale). His library — including the first significant Hemingway collection to appear at auction — was sold at Parke-Bernet on 14 October 1958. Duplicate copies of several Hemingway titles also with his (different) inscriptions were sold in a Parke-Bernet general sale on 28 April 1959,  with Dr. Guffey designated as the consignor. This copy of Torrents is from that second sale; the copy of Sun in a following lot is from the Guffey auction. Because of the unusually meaningful and lengthy (for Hemingway) inscriptions, Guffey copies are very desirable. 

The Torrents of Spring, the author’s short first novel, is a parody of the styles of several of the writers of the day, in particular Sherwood Anderson and his l925 novel Dark Laughter.  Hemingway wrote it in ten days, had it hurriedly typed, and sent it off to his publisher Horace Liveright on 7 December 1925: the manuscript for the second book on his three-book contract with the firm. Whether it was a devious ploy on Hemingway’s part (with some assistance from F. Scott Fitzgerald) to consciously break his contract with Liveright, evidence is not conclusive. But it did achieve this result. Liveright declined to publish this satire cudgeling his star author Anderson, the contract was broken, and Hemingway was free to publish elsewhere. As seen from the letter to Bill Smith and Harold Loeb in the previous lot, Hemingway signed with Charles Scribner during his quick visit to New York in February 1926. Three months later Scribner’s published The Torrents of Spring. This is a fine copy, with a choice inscription, of what F. Scott Fitzgerald (in a letter to Liveright at the end of November 1925) termed “about the best comic book ever written by an American.”