Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title is derived from the last words of Confederate States Army General Thomas J. «Stonewall» Jackson, who was mortally wounded by friendly fire during the American Civil War: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” In the 19th century, this was understood to refer to the Jordan River and the passage to death and afterlife in Christianity.
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. Most of the novel takes the form of a lengthy flashback, detailing his experiences in the Italian Front 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 more than 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. 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, by 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.»
Written in Italy, Cuba, and France in the late 1940s, this novel was the first of his 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. It was Hemingway’s only novel to top the list.
Critics were unenthusiastic. J. Donald Adams writing in The New York Times, described 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.
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 service in the Italian Royal Army during World War I, to his time in the United States Army during World War II, 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 Countess 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. 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.
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 then-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 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. 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. 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.
Cosmopolitan Magazine serialized Across the River and Into the Trees from February to June 1950. Adriana Ivancich designed the dust jacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner’s promotions department. 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.
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». 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. 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. 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 has written: «Hemingway walks the reader to the bridge that he or she must cross alone without the narrator’s help.»
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.» 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».
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». He is dying of heart disease and his relationship with Renata can be interpreted as a means of seeking youth or immortality. 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.
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. 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
