Hemingway's novel opens with Colonel Richard Cantwell, a 50-year-old US Army officer, duck hunting near Venice, Italy at the close of World War II. It is revealed that Cantwell has a terminal heart condition, and most of the novel takes the form of a lengthy flashback, detailing his experiences in Italy during World War I through the days leading up to the duck hunt. The bulk of the narrative deals with his star-crossed romance with a Venetian woman named Renata who is over thirty years his junior.
During a trip to Italy not long before writing the novel, Hemingway met young Adriana Ivancich, with whom he became infatuated, and he used her as the model for the female character in the novel. The novel's central theme is death, and, more importantly, how death is faced. One biographer and critic sees a parallel between Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.
Hemingway described Across the River and into the Trees, and one reader's reaction to it, using "Indian talk": "Book too much for him. Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually."[2]
Written in Italy, Cuba, and France in the late 1940s, it was the first of his novels to receive negative press and reviews. It was nonetheless a bestseller in America, spending 7 weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller's list in 1950, and was, in fact, Hemingway's only novel to top the list.[3] In recent years, the novel has been received more positively.[4]
Plot summary
The first chapter of Across the River and Into the Trees begins with a frame story depicting 50-year-old Colonel Richard Cantwell duck hunting in the Marano Lagoon, between Venice and Trieste in the present, taking place during the closing days of World War II. It is eventually revealed that Cantwell, referred to throughout the book simply as Colonel, has a terminal heart condition. Beginning in the second chapter, the book is presented primarily through a flashback narrative of the Colonel's experiences during both World Wars, from his service in the Italian army during World War I, to his time in the American Army, ascending to general before being demoted to colonel. Hemingway provides great detail in describing Italy, from its landscape to its food and drink.
The primary narrative of the book focuses on the Colonel's romance with the 18-year-old Venetian Renata, whom he calls Daughter. Renata is aware of the Colonel's terminal illness, and the book details how both characters come to terms with the Colonel's impending death. Many of the Colonel's wartime memories are revealed as stories he tells to Renata, who wants to "share" in his experiences.
The novel ends with Cantwell suffering a fatal series of heart attacks as he leaves Venice after the duck hunt, on the same day as the book began. Shortly before dying, the Colonel recounts to his driver Stonewall Jackson's last words, from which the novel draws its name: "No, no, let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." The final scene shows the driver reading a note the Colonel had given him, indicating that his belongings should be given to their "rightful owner", Renata.
Background and publication
Ernest Hemingway first met A. E. Hotchner, who later became a close friend, in 1948 when Hotchner, recently released from the Air Force, had taken a job with Cosmopolitan Magazine as a "commissioned agent." Hemingway's name was on the list of authors Hotchner was to contact, so he went to Cuba, asked for a meeting (Hemingway took him to a bar), and for a short article. Hemingway did not write an article, but he did submit his next novel Across the River and into the Trees to Hotchner, which Cosmopolitan then serialized in five installments.[5][6][7] The protagonist is generally considered to have been based loosely on a friend of Hemingway, Charles T. Lanham, with components of the character also being autobiographically based on the author himself.
Hemingway worked on the book from 1949 to 1950 in four different places: he started writing during the winter of 1949 in Italy at Cortina D'Ampezzo; continued upon his return home to Cuba; finished the draft in Paris; and completed revisions in Venice in the winter of 1950.[8]
In the fall of 1948, he arrived in Italy and visited Fossalta where in 1918 he had been wounded. A month later, while duck hunting with an Italian aristocrat he met 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich.[9] He and his then-wife Mary then went to Cortina to ski: she broke her ankle and, bored, Hemingway began the draft of the book.[10] Hemingway himself then became ill with an eye infection and was hospitalized. In the spring he went to Venice where he ate lunch with Adriana a few times. In May he returned to Cuba and carried out a protracted correspondence with her while working on the manuscript.[9] In the autumn he returned to Europe and he finished the draft at the Ritz in Paris. Once done, he and Mary went again to Cortina to ski: for the second time she broke her ankle and he contracted an eye infection.[10] By February the first serialization was published in Cosmopolitan. The Hemingways returned to Paris in March and then home to Cuba where the final proofs were read before the September publication.[7]
Cosmopolitan Magazine serialized Across the River and Into the Trees from February to June 1950.[11] Adriana Ivancich designed the dust jacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner's promotions department.[12] The novel was published by Scribner's on 7September 1950 with a first edition print run of 75,000,[13] after a publicity campaign that hailed the novel as Hemingway's first book since the publication of his 1940 Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.[14]
Writing style and genre
Hemingway started as a journalist and writer of short stories, and Baker suggests that he thus learned how to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".[15] The style is known as the Iceberg Theory because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight.[15] The concept of the iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission." Hemingway believed that a writer could describe one thing, while an entirely different thing occurs below the surface.[16] Baker calls Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism.[17] According to Meyers, an example of omission is that Renata, like other heroines in Hemingway's fiction, suffers a major "shock"—the murder of her father and the subsequent loss of her home—to which Hemingway alludes only briefly.[12] Hemingway's pared-down narrative forces the reader to solve connections—as Stoltzfus has written: "Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."[18]
Across the River and into the Trees is constructed so that time is seemingly compressed and differentiated between present and past – as one critic says, "memory and space-time coalesce."[18] To move Cantwell into the extended flashback, Hemingway uses the word "boy" as a bridge between time-present and time-past. The dialogue stays in the present tense, despite the time shifts, according to Stoltzfus, and the word "now" is repeated to "reinforce the illusion".[18]
Themes
Cantwell, a 50-year-old military officer in love with the teenaged Renata, (whose name means "reborn"), is shown unlikeable as a character; one critic writes of him that his "lovemaking is described in terms of an infantry attack over difficult terrain".[19] He is dying of heart disease and his relationship with Renata can be interpreted as a means of seeking youth or immortality.[19] Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers believes Renata represents the city of Venice, she "connected" Cantwell (and Hemingway) to Italy, and in her characterization Hemingway romanticized what may have been a father-daughter relationship and he says Hemingway probably used Cantwell's fictional relationship with Renata as a substitute for his own relationship with Adriana, who looked almost identical to Renata's description.[9]
Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker says Hemingway captured the theme of "the three ages of man," and in writing the book he finally objectified his own youthful traumatic war experiences.[11] Baker sees a thematic parallel between Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Across the River and into the Trees, presented in a series of commonalities and differences. Death in Venice is set in the summer on Venice's Lido; Hemingway puts Cantwell in Venice in the winter. Mann's protagonist is a writer; Hemingway's a soldier. Both faced death, and in the face of death sought solace in a much younger character.[20] Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (an 18-year-old countess with whom Cantwell spends the last days of his life) lives in the present. Cantwell says that "Every day is a new and fine illusion" where a kernel of truth can be found.[21] Cantwell is a character in opposition: a tough soldier yet a tender friend and lover. The two Cantwells at times overlap and bleed into one another.[21] Hemingway added yet another layer in the characterization: 50-year-old Cantwell in his dying day is "in an intense state of awareness" of his younger self of 1918 to the point that meld – yet retain the differences wrought by time.[22]
Charles Oliver writes the novel shows a central Hemingway theme of "maintaining control over one's life, even in the face of terrible odds." Cantwell knows he is dying and faces death "with the dignity which he believes he has maintained throughout his military service."[13] Oliver thinks the two male characters, Cantwell and Alvarito, have an unstated understanding – both men love Renata, but Cantwell accepts and is happy to know Renata will almost certainly marry Alvarito. Within hours of dying, he says to himself: "You have said goodbye to your girl and she has said goodbye to you. That is certainly simple".[13] The theme of death is central in Hemingway's writings and his characters routinely achieve redemption at the moment of death, which can be seen as a form of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre believed to face death well is to live a heightened existence.[23]
Jackson Benson writes that how a writer transforms biographical events into art is more important than looking for connections between Hemingway's life and his fiction. He believes autobiographical events may have a "very tenuous relationship" with the fiction similar to a dream from which a drama emerges. Hemingway's later fiction, Benson writes "is like an adolescent day-dream in which he acts out infatuation and consummation, as in Across the River."[24] Meyers agrees that parallels exist between Hemingway and Colonel Cantwell, but he sees more similarities with Hemingway's friend of many decades "Chink" Dorman-Smith, whose military career was undermined causing his demotion.[25] Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details to work as framing devices to write about life in general—not only about his life. For example, Benson postulates that Hemingway used his experiences and drew them out further with "what if" scenarios: "what if I were wounded in such a way that I could not sleep at night? What if I were wounded and made crazy, what would happen if I were sent back to the front?"[24] For example, he describes Hemingway's experiences in the World War II battle of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest succinctly as "Passchendaele with tree bursts."[26]
Hemingway himself stated that Cantwell was based on three men: close friend and mercenary Charles Sweeny, American officer "Buck" Lanham, and most importantly, himself.[27]
Reception
It was met with an unenthusiastic critical reception, one critic, J. Donald Adams writing in The New York Times, describing it as “one of the saddest books I have ever read; not because I am moved to compassion by the conjunction of love and death in the Colonel's life, but because a great talent has come, whether for now or forever, to such a dead end”. Only a few contemporary critics praised the novel. John O'Hara wrote in The New York Times; "The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is Across the River and Into the Trees. The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616."[6] Tennessee Williams, in The New York Times, wrote: "I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway's new novel. It is the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city, and when I say I think it is the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done, you may think me crazy. It will probably be a popular book. The critics may treat it pretty roughly. But its hauntingly tired cadences are the direct speech of a man's heart who is speaking that directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done."[28]
Williams and O'Hara were among the very few positive contemporary reviews,[29] while negative reviews appeared in more than 150 publications.[18] Critics claimed the novel was too emotional, had inferior prose and a "static plot", and that Cantwell was an "avatar" for Hemingway's character Nick Adams.[29] The novel was also criticized for being an unsuitable autobiography, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier.[30]
Sure they can say anything about nothing happening in Across the River, all that happens is the defense of the lower Piave, the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris... plus a man who loves a girl and dies.
—Ernest Hemingway about critical reception to Across the River and into the Trees.[31]
According to Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel.[32] Furthermore, Baker explains Hemingway was unaware that those close to him agreed with the majority of critics. For example, his wife Mary, who disapproved of Across the River and into the Trees, said: "I kept my mouth shut. Nobody had appointed me my husband's editor."[29]
Later literary scholars consider the novel better than the contemporary reception.[33] Baker compares it to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, or The Tempest: not a major work, but one with an "elegiac" tone.[34] Literary biographer Jeffrey Meyers believes the novel shows a new "confessional mode" in Hemingway's work, and that it "would have been hailed as more impressive if it had been written by anyone but Hemingway."[29] Critic Ben Stoltzfus agrees, and he believes Hemingway's structure is more comprehensible for the modern reader—exposed to the Nouveau roman—than for those of the mid-20th century.[18]
In 2016, it was announced that a feature film based upon the novel was being developed with producers Kirstin Roegner and John Smallcombe.[35] Filming started in Venice, Italy on December 9, 2020, with Liev Schreiber in the lead role and Paula Ortiz directing.[36] The film debuted at the Sun Valley Film Festival on March 30, 2022.
Related Research Articles
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. He is known for the economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, who admired his adventurous lifestyle and public image. Most of Hemingway's works were produced between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, during which he published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of these became classics of American literature, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
A Farewell to Arms is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, set during the Italian campaign of World War I. First published in 1929, it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel describes a love affair between the American expatriate and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley.
The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 novella written by the American author Ernest Hemingway. Written between December 1950 and February 1951, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging fisherman, and his long struggle to catch a giant marlin. The novella was highly anticipated and was released to record sales; the initial critical reception was equally positive, but attitudes have varied significantly since then.
A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expatriate journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously. The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France.
The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. It portrays American and British expatriates who travel along the Camino de Santiago from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.
To Have and Have Not is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1937 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The book follows Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain out of Key West, Florida. To Have and Have Not was Hemingway's second novel set in the United States, after The Torrents of Spring.
In Our Time is the title of Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York, and of a collection of vignettes published in 1924 in France titled in our time. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord".
True at First Light is a book by American novelist Ernest Hemingway about his 1953–54 East African safari with his fourth wife Mary, released posthumously in his centennial year in 1999. The book received mostly negative or lukewarm reviews from the popular press and sparked a literary controversy regarding how, and whether, an author's work should be reworked and published after his death. Unlike critics in the popular press, Hemingway scholars generally consider True at First Light to be complex and a worthy addition to his canon of later fiction.
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson was the first wife of American author Ernest Hemingway. The two married in 1921 after a courtship of less than a year, and moved to Paris within months of being married. In Paris, Hemingway pursued a writing career, and through him Richardson met other expatriate American and British writers.
The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.
Islands in the Stream (1970) is the first of the posthumously published novels of Ernest Hemingway. The book was originally intended to revive Hemingway's reputation after the negative reviews of Across the River and Into the Trees. He began writing it in 1950 and advanced greatly through 1951. The work, rough but seemingly finished, was found by Mary Hemingway among 332 works Hemingway left behind at his death. Islands in the Stream was meant to encompass three stories to illustrate different stages in the life of its main character, Thomas Hudson. The three different parts of the novel were originally to be titled "The Sea When Young", "The Sea When Absent" and "The Sea in Being". These titles were changed, however, into what are now its three acts: "Bimini", "Cuba", and "At Sea".
"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just three times. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon.
"Cat in the Rain" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), first published by Richard Hadley of Boni & Liveright in 1925 in the short story collection In Our Time. The story is about an American husband and wife on vacation in Italy. Critical attention focuses chiefly on its autobiographical elements and on Hemingway's "theory of omission".
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man is a 1962 American adventure film directed by Martin Ritt based on Ernest Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams, and featuring Richard Beymer as Adams. A.E. Hotchner wrote the screenplay, originally calling the film Ernest Hemingway's "Young Man". The cast includes Diane Baker, Jessica Tandy, Ricardo Montalbán, Eli Wallach, Arthur Kennedy and Paul Newman. It was released in July 1962.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—makes his first appearance in "Indian Camp", told from his point of view.
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 New York edition of In Our Time, by Boni & Liveright. The story is the second in the collection to feature Nick Adams, Hemingway's autobiographical alter ego. "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" follows "Indian Camp" in the collection, includes elements of the same style and themes, yet is written in counterpoint to the first story.
Adriana Ivancich was an Italian noble woman and poet. She was also known for her romantic relationship with the writer Ernest Hemingway.
Across the River and into the Trees is an unreleased 2022 film produced by Tribune pictures of London directed by Paula Ortiz and written by Peter Flannery based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. It stars Liev Schreiber and Matilda De Angelis alongside Josh Hutcherson and Danny Huston. The film previewed at the Sun Valley Film Festival on March 30, 2022 with an Anticipated US theatrical release in Q2 2024.
The 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the American author Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."
↑ John Bear, The #1 New York Times Best Seller: intriguing facts about the 484 books that have been #1 New York Times bestsellers since the first list, 50 years ago, Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992, pp. 47
Baker, Carlos. (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN978-0-691-01305-3
Benson, Jackson. (1989). "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life". American Literature. 61.3, 354–358
DeFazio, Albert. (2005). Dear Papa, dear Hotch: the correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E Hotchner. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. ISBN0-8262-1605-6
Mellow, James. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN978-0-395-37777-2
Meyers, Jeffrey. (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN978-0-333-42126-0
Oliver, Charles. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing. ISBN978-0-8160-3467-3
Ross, Lillian. (1951). "How Do You Like it Now, Gentlemen?". The New Yorker, May 13, 1950. 36.
Sanderson, Rena. (2006). Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN0-8071-3113-X
Stoltzfus, Ben. (2003). "The Stones of Venice, Time and Remembrance: Calculus and Proust in Across the River and into the Trees". The Hemingway Review. 22.2. 20–29
Stoltzfus, Ben. (2005). "Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories". Comparative Literature Studies. 42.3. 228–250
Svoboda, Frederic J. (2000). "The Great Themes in Hemingway: Love, War, Wilderness and Loss". in A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway edited by Linda Wagner Martin. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19512-151-1
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