| Across the River and Into the Trees | |
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First American edition |
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| Author(s) | Ernest Hemingway |
| Cover artist | Adriana Ivancich |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
| Publication date | 1950 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 320 pp |
Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in September 1950. Prior to publication the novel was serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine.[1][2][3] The title is derived from the last words of Confederate General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson.
The opening of the novel is set in Trieste, on the last day in the life of the protagonist, Colonel Richard Cantwell. Much of the novel is a protracted flashback, during which Cantwell reminisces about a young Venetian woman, Renata, and his life as a soldier during the war. An important theme in the novel is that of death and how one faces death. One biographer and critic sees a parallel between Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Generally critics agree the novel is built upon successive layers of symbolism. As in his other writing, Hemingway employs the style known as the iceberg theory, in which much of the substance of the work lies below the surface of the plot itself.
The novel was written in Italy, Cuba and France. While visiting Italy, Hemingway met a young woman with whom he had a protracted relationship which has been defined as a father-daughter relationship. The woman, Adriana Ivancich, became the model for the female character in the novel.[4] With some exceptions, Across the River and Into the Trees had bad reviews, and was the first of Hemingway's novels to receive consistently bad press. In the years since its publication, however, some critics have come to believe it is an important addition to the Hemingway canon.
Contents |
Across the River and Into the Trees begins in the first chapter with the frame story of 50-year-old Colonel Cantwell's duckhunting trip to Trieste set in time-present. In the second chapter, Hemingway moves Cantwell back in time with a stream of consciousness interior monologue, presenting an extended flashback and continues for 38 chapters. In the final six chapters Cantwell is presented again in the frame-story set in the time-present.
Cantwell, who is dying of heart disease, spends a Sunday afternoon in a duck blind in Trieste. In the flashback he thinks of his recent weekend in Venice with 18-year-old Renata, moving backward in time to ruminate about his experiences during the war. The novel ends with Cantwell suffering a series of fatal heart attacks as he leaves the duck blind.
Hemingway biographer and scholar Carlos Baker writes in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist that in Across the River and Into the Trees the overriding theme is that of "the three ages of man."[5] Furthermore, Baker considers the writing of the book a necessity for Hemingway to objectify his war experiences.[6] Jeffrey Meyers, author of Hemingway: A Biography, believes Hemingway saw Adriana as a representation of Venice, that she "connected" him to Italy, and that theirs was a type of father-daughter relationship which Hemingway romanticized.[7] As she appears in the novel, Renata is physically the same as Adriana, and Baker presents the probability that Hemingway used Cantwell's fictional relationship with Renata as a substitute for his own relationship with Adriana.[7]
Baker sees a thematic parallel between Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Across the River and into the Trees, presented via a series of commonalities and differences. Death in Venice is set in the summer on the Lido; Hemingway places Cantwell in Venice in the winter. Mann's protagonist is a writer; Hemingway's a soldier. Both face death, and in the face of death seek solace in a much younger character.[8] Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (the 18 year-old countess with whom he spends his final days) focuses on the present.[9] According to Cantwell "Every day is a new and fine illusion" in which always lies a kernel of truth.[9] Baker considers Cantwell as a character with opposing qualities: he is a tough soldier and he is a tender friend and lover. The two Cantwells are juxtaposed and at times overlap and bleed into one another.[9] Moreover, Baker explains that Hemingway added yet another layer in which the 50-year-old Cantwell of 1950 is "in an intense state of awareness" of the young Cantwell of 1918: they are the same character yet different.[10]
Charles Oliver, author of Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, writes that the novel shows a common 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."[11] The theme of death is central in Hemingway's writings and Stoltzfus argues that in Hemingway's fictional characters achieve redemption at the moment of death if death is faced with authenticity which is a form of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre believed the "clue to facing life" was death. Therefore to face death well, is to live a heightened existence.[12]
Jackson 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?"[13] In "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life" Benson argues that critics must ignore finding connections between the author's life and fiction and instead focus on the manner in which biographical events are transformed into art. He believes the events in a writer's life might have only a "very tenuous relationship" to the fiction in the manner of 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 consumation, as in Across the River."[13] 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 resulting in his demotion.[14]
Hemingway began as a writer of short stories, and as Baker explains, he 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 the writer could describe one thing though 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.[18] Hemingway's pared down narrative forces the reader to solve connections. As Stoltzfus remarks: "Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator's help."[19]
Hemingway constructed Across the River and into the Trees to allow time to be compressed in the novel such that "memory and space-time coalesce." For example, to move Cantwell into the extended flashback Hemingway uses the word "boy" to bridge time-present with time-past. Stoltzfus points out Hemingway kept the dialogue in the present tense, despite the time-shifts, and to "reinforce the illusion" he repeatedly used the word "now".[19]
Ernest Hemingway met his friend A. E. Hotchner in 1948 when Hotchner, recently released from the Air Force, took 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 serialized in five installments.[1][2]
From 1949 to 1950 Hemingway worked on the book 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 the revisions in Venice in the winter of 1950.[5] 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.[7] He and his fourth wife Mary then went to Cortina to ski: she broke her ankle and, bored, Hemingway began the draft of the book.[20] Hemingway himself then became ill with an eye-infection and was hospitalized. In the spring he went to Venice where he met Adriana for lunch a few times. In May he returned to Cuba and carried out a protracted correspondence with Adriana while working on the manuscript.[7] In the autumn he had returned to Europe and at the Ritz in Paris he finished the draft. 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.[20] By February the first serialization was published in Cosmopolitan and in March the Hemingways returned to Paris and then home to Cuba where the final proofs were read before the September publication.[3]
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."[2] However, O'Hara's was one of the few good reviews,[21] with negative reviews appearing in more than 150 publications.[19] 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.[21] The novel was criticized for being an unsuitable autobiography, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier.[22]
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." [23]
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.
According to Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel.[25] 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."[21]
Generally the novel is considered better than the critical reviews received upon publication.[26] Baker compares it to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale or The Tempest: not a major work, but one with an "elegiac" tone.[27] 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."[21] 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.[19]
Cosmopolitan Magazine serialized Across the River and Into the Trees from February to June 1950.[28] Adriana Ivancich designed the dustjacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner's promotions department.[18] The novel was published by Scribner's on 7 September 1950 with a first edition print run of 75,000,[11] 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. [29]