Across the River and into the Trees

Venice in the late forties gave Hemingway his last prewar-style romance: duck shoots in the lagoon at dawn, the Gritti bar, and an eighteen-year-old Venetian aristocrat named Adriana Ivancich, with whom the married, fifty-year-old novelist conducted an infatuation that never became an affair — and immediately became a novel. Colonel Richard Cantwell, fifty, heart-sick in both senses, spends a weekend in Venice with a young countess named Renata; the title is the deathbed sentence of Stonewall Jackson.

Cosmopolitan serialized it and Scribner published it in September 1950, and the reviews were the worst of his life — a decade of pent-up parody found its target, most famously E. B. White's New Yorker send-up 'Across the Street and Into the Grill.' The wounded-lion posturing, the battlefield monologues, the girl called Daughter: critics who had imitated him for twenty years lined up to say the master had become his own imitation.

The sequel to the humiliation is the point of remembering it: stung, he went back to Cuba and wrote The Old Man and the Sea in two months. Meanwhile this book's defenders — and it has serious ones — keep pointing at the Venice light, the professional tenderness about death, and the fact that the old man's comeback was carried in the same tackle box. Read it after the legend, not before.

Colonel Richard Cantwell, fifty years old, twice demoted, and living on nitroglycerin tablets for a failing heart, comes to Venice for a weekend he understands better than anyone around him: a last one. The frame is a duck shoot in the frozen lagoon at dawn; the body of the book is the day and night before it — the Gritti Palace, the bars, the winter city he loves more than any place on earth, and Renata, the nineteen-year-old Venetian contessa who loves him and whom he loves with a tenderness the book dares you to find ridiculous.

Between gondola rides and dinners, Renata draws out of him what she calls his trade: the wars. Cantwell's monologues — the Great War fought in these same river plains at eighteen, the lost regiment in the Hürtgen Forest that cost him his star — are the novel's spine, a professional soldier auditing his century. He performs one private ceremony: revisiting the exact spot by the Piave where he was first wounded, and burying there, with a folding shovel and full military irony, his own monument.