Across the River and Into the Trees
Encyclopedia
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. 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. 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
.
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.
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." Furthermore, Baker considers the writing of the book a necessity for Hemingway to objectify his war experiences. 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. 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.
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. Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (the 18 year-old countess with whom he spends his final days) focuses on the present. According to Cantwell "Every day is a new and fine illusion" in which always lies a kernel of truth. 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. 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.
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." 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.
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?" 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." 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.
because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight. 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. Baker calls Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism
. 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. 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."
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".
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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier.
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."
According to Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel. 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."
Generally the novel is considered better than the critical reviews received upon publication. Baker compares it to Shakespeare
's Winter's Tale or The Tempest
: not a major work, but one with an "elegiac
" tone. 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." 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.
The novel was published by Scribner's
on 7 September 1950 with a first edition print run of 75,000, 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
.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
, published by Charles Scribner's Sons
Charles Scribner's Sons
Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...
in September 1950. Prior to publication the novel was serialized
Periodical publication
Periodical literature is a published work that appears in a new edition on a regular schedule. The most familiar examples are the newspaper, often published daily, or weekly; or the magazine, typically published weekly, monthly or as a quarterly...
in Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan (magazine)
Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women. It was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine and eventually became a women's magazine in the late 1960s...
magazine. The title is derived from the last words of Confederate General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson
Stonewall Jackson
ຄຽשת״ׇׂׂׂׂ֣|birth_place= Clarksburg, Virginia |death_place=Guinea Station, Virginia|placeofburial=Stonewall Jackson Memorial CemeteryLexington, Virginia|placeofburial_label= Place of burial|image=...
.
The opening of the novel is set in Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
, on the last day in the life of the protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
, Colonel Richard Cantwell. Much of the novel is a protracted flashback
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
, 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
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
's Death in Venice
Death in Venice
The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1913 as Der Tod in Venedig. The plot of the work presents a great writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated and uplifted, then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a...
. Generally critics agree the novel is built upon successive layers of symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. As in his other writing, Hemingway employs the style known as the iceberg theory
Iceberg Theory
The Iceberg Theory is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is best known for works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea...
, 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. 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
Canon (fiction)
In the context of a work of fiction, the term canon denotes the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe's fan base. It is often contrasted with, or used as the basis for, works of fan fiction, which are not considered canonical...
.
Plot summary
Across the River and Into the Trees begins in the first chapter with the frame storyFrame story
A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
of 50-year-old Colonel Cantwell's duckhunting trip to Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
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
Flashback (narrative)
Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory...
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.
Themes
Hemingway biographer and scholar Carlos BakerCarlos Baker
Carlos Baker was an American writer, biographer and former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. He earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton respectively. Baker's published works included several novels and books of poetry and various literary...
writes in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist that in Across the River and Into the Trees the overriding theme
Theme (literature)
A theme is a broad, message, or moral of a story. The message may be about life, society, or human nature. Themes often explore timeless and universal ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character,...
is that of "the three ages of man." Furthermore, Baker considers the writing of the book a necessity for Hemingway to objectify his war experiences. 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. 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.
Baker sees a thematic parallel between Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...
's Death in Venice
Death in Venice
The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1913 as Der Tod in Venedig. The plot of the work presents a great writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated and uplifted, then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a...
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. Cantwell reminisces about the past while Renata (the 18 year-old countess with whom he spends his final days) focuses on the present. According to Cantwell "Every day is a new and fine illusion" in which always lies a kernel of truth. 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. 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.
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." The theme of death is central in Hemingway's writings and Stoltzfus argues that in Hemingway's fictional characters achieve redemption
Redemption (theology)
Redemption is a concept common to several theologies. It is generally associated with the efforts of people within a faith to overcome their shortcomings and achieve the moral positions exemplified in their faith.- In Buddhism :...
at the moment of death if death is faced with authenticity which is a form of existentialism
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
. Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
believed the "clue to facing life" was death. Therefore to face death well, is to live a heightened existence.
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?" 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." 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
Eric Dorman-Smith
Eric Edward Dorman-Smith , later de-Anglicised to Eric Edward Dorman O'Gowan, was a British Army soldier who served with distinction in World War I, and then seems to have become something of a bête noire to the British military establishment because of his lively mind, and unorthodox...
, whose military career was undermined resulting in his demotion.
Writing style and genre
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". The style is known as the Iceberg TheoryIceberg Theory
The Iceberg Theory is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is best known for works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea...
because in Hemingway's writing the hard facts float above water; the supporting structure, complete with symbolism, operates out-of-sight. 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. Baker calls Across the River and into the Trees a "lyric-poetical novel" in which each scene has an underlying truth presented via symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
. 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. 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."
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".
Development and background
Ernest Hemingway met his friend A. E. HotchnerA. E. Hotchner
Aaron Edward Hotchner, is an American editor, novelist, playwright and biographer.-Biography:He was born in St. Louis and attended Soldan High School...
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.
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
Cortina d'Ampezzo
Cortina d'Ampezzo is a town and comune in the southern Alps located in Veneto, a region in Northern Italy. Located in the heart of the Dolomites in an alpine valley, it is a popular winter sport resort known for its ski-ranges, scenery, accommodations, shops and après-ski scene...
; continued upon his return home to Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
; finished the draft in Paris; and completed the revisions in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
in the winter of 1950. In the fall of 1948 he arrived in Italy and visited Fossalta
Fossalta di Piave
Fossalta di Piave is a town in the province of Venice, Veneto, Italy. It is southeast of E70. It is 40 miles in the north of Venice.The town's approximately 4,000 inhabitants make their living in tourism and in the vine industry....
where in 1918 he had been wounded. A month later, while duck hunting with an Italian aristocrat he met 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich. He and his fourth wife Mary
Mary Welsh Hemingway
Mary Welsh Hemingway was an American journalist and the fourth wife of Ernest Hemingway.Born in Minnesota, Welsh was a daughter of a lumberman. When she was 32, she married Lawrence Miller Cook, a drama student from Ohio. Their life together was short and they soon separated...
then went to Cortina to ski: she broke her ankle and, bored, Hemingway began the draft of the book.
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. In the autumn he had returned to Europe and at the Ritz
Hôtel Ritz Paris
The Hôtel Ritz is a grand palatial hotel in the heart of Paris, the 1st arrondissement. It overlooks the octagonal border of the Place Vendôme at number 15...
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. 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.
Reception
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." However, O'Hara's was one of the few good reviews, with negative reviews appearing in more than 150 publications. 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. The novel was criticized for being an unsuitable autobiographyAutobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier.
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."
According to Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel. 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."
Generally the novel is considered better than the critical reviews received upon publication. Baker compares it to Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's Winter's Tale or The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...
: not a major work, but one with an "elegiac
Elegiac
Elegiac refers either to those compositions that are like elegies or to a specific poetic meter used in Classical elegies. The Classical elegiac meter has two lines, making it a couplet: a line of dactylic hexameter, followed by a line of dactylic pentameter...
" tone. 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." Stoltzfus agrees, and he believes Hemingway's structure is more comprehensible for the modern reader—exposed to the Nouveau roman
Nouveau roman
The nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
—than for those of the mid-20th century.
Publication history
Cosmopolitan Magazine serialized Across the River and Into the Trees from February to June 1950. Adriana Ivancich designed the dustjacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner's promotions department.The novel was published by Scribner's
Charles Scribner's Sons
Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...
on 7 September 1950 with a first edition print run of 75,000, after a publicity campaign that hailed the novel as Hemingway's first book since the publication of his 1940 Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
novel For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is assigned to blow up a...
.
External links
- Hemingway Archives, John F. Kennedy LibraryJohn F. Kennedy LibraryThe John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is the presidential library and museum of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy. It is located on Columbia Point in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, next to the Boston campus of the University of...
- Literary Encyclopedia Review