A Cringey Death in Venice
Review of the Scribner’s Kindle eBook movie tie-in edition (February 1, 2024) of the Scribner’s hardcover original (1950).

"Jackson," he said. "Do you know what General Thomas J. Jackson said on one occasion? On the occasion of his unfortunate death. ... Then he said, 'No, no let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.'"

I've read the cringey roman à clef of Across the River and Into the Trees several times without a review. When it came up as a Kindle Deal of the Day in May 2024 as part of the lead up to the expected 2024 release of the movie adaptation I decided to give it one more go. And I actually had a break-through this time.

It is still cringe of course, but I could understand what Hemingway was possibly doing. Perhaps you have heard of the practice of "mirroring"? It is when you are in conversation with someone and you adopt their method of speaking (i.e. you "mirror" them) due to thinking that a) they will better understand you, and b) that you create a bond of empathy with them. An example might be when you are speaking English with a non-native speaker and you start speaking a sort of broken English yourself.

Across... has post-WWII U.S. Army Colonel Richard Cantwell making a visit to Venice, Italy. He has been diagnosed with a fatal heart condition and wants to make a final trip to enjoy the city, his favoured Gritti Hotel and the company of his "best and last and only and one true love", the young Italian countess Renata. The cringe enters in several ways. At the Gritti the Colonel speaks with various hotel workers as if they were all part of a secret society "El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Caballeros de Brusadelli" (Spanish: The Military, Noble and Spiritual Order of the Knights of Brusadelli). With Renata, the dialogue is a sort of mirrored baby talk, as Renata is not a native English speaker. The further cringe is that Cantwell is 50 years old and Renata is 18 (almost 19 as she says).

See book cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Hemingriver.jpg
The front cover of the original Scribner’s hardcover edition. Cover art by Adriana Ivancich. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

It is still cringe, but I can at least understand that much of Cantwell's manner of speaking is a "mirroring" of the speech of the non-English speaking of the Italians he encounters. Even among the cringe, there is still some of the old Hemingway magic that will peek through at times:

“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.”

I wrote quite a bit about the roman à clef background to Across the River and Into the Trees when I reviewed Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Final Muse (2019), which was about the relationship between 49-year-old Hemingway and 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich (who was also the cover artist for the first hardcover edition, see above), so I won't repeat that here. Seeing the trailer for the movie adaptation, there is a chance that much of the cringe elements have been eliminated, so let us at least hope for that.

See the movie poster at https://tribunepictures.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Untitled.jpg
Poster for the movie adaptation. Image sourced from Tribune Pictures.

Trivia and Links
The film adaptation directed by Paula Ortiz is expected to be released in August 2024. It stars Liev Schreiber as Col. Richard Cantwell and Matilda De Angelis as Renata. There isn't an English language trailer yet, but you can turn on subtitles in all languages (under Settings, then Auto-Translate) at the Spanish language trailer here.

If you still have free reads or are a subscriber to The New Yorker, you can read the rather vicious parody that E.B. White wrote after Hemingway's novel which was titled Across the Street and Into the Grill from October 6, 1950. ( )

At the end of WW2, a middle-aged American colonel meets a young Contessa in Venice. He spends his days reminiscing about the war, duck hunting, drinking and dining with the young lovely. He knows he’s dying, but she gives him one last season of love.

This is so typically Hemingway! I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was in eighth grade, and I’ve been a fan of his writing since.

This isn’t his best-known work, and I read it only to fulfill a challenge to read a book that was a bestseller the year I was born. Still, there is something about his writing that captures my attention. The short declarative sentences make the work immediate and bring this reader right into the story.

But the older I get the more I’m disturbed by the way the women are portrayed … or more accurately, but the way Hemmingway writes the male/female relationships. Knowing his own history of depression (and ultimate suicide), not to mention his four wives, I see him projecting his own character on the page, and I’m getting tired of it. ( )

When I first picked this up I almost put it straight back down. The main character, Colonel Cantwell, was shooting ducks, and the exquisite description of their flight and freedom, interspersed with their violent descent to earth, was a brutal juxtaposition. But I read on, lured by the setting: Venice. This story has been widely panned for its prose and lack of plot but this is Hemingway at his most honest, reflecting on the inhumanity of war and dealing with his ageing body and failing health.

In Across The River and Into the Trees, the fifty-year-old protagonist tries to come to terms with his past as a soldier in a city that couldn’t be more different than the war zone. The beauty and tranquillity of Venice is reflected in the personality of Renata, the Colonel’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend. The story oozes with the atmosphere of post-war Venice, with the Colonel staying at the Gritti Palace and frequenting the now-famous Harry’s Bar.

I couldn’t help but draw parallels with Hemingway’s real life, and that’s when I started to connect to the story more. Hemingway as an older man was infatuated with a girl of nineteen while staying in Venice. Rather than reading Renata’s character as a fantasy, I saw her as a mirror of Hemingway himself, a way to explore the youth and innocence he felt he had lost. Hemingway first went to war at eighteen, and then spent the rest of his life chasing death, through war or safaris. How do we make up for such loss of youth and idealism – where do we even start? This is a novel full of unspoken questions such as these, winding through the story like the canals that meander through Venice itself.

The Colonel switches between soldier and lover over and over again, telling himself to be better, failing, then trying once more, as he attempts to come to some understanding of the motives and urges he has carried with him all his life. Much of the story is a recount of the vicissitudes of war. Death is everywhere in this book. Killing has been the Colonel’s ‘trade’ and in a way it was Hemingway’s too – it forms the subject of many of his stories. In the end the ducks are shot again, their helpless eyes looking into his. After reading the Colonel's recounts of the horrors of war I saw, with fresh eyes, why such a scene was so brutally rendered. ( )

As a rule, he can do no wrong by me. This is the first thing I've read by him that I've actively disliked. He said a writer should have a good bullshit detector. Seems like he didn't have it plugged in while writing this one. ( )

Reminds me of many things that have followed. Such as Before Sunrise and the Anonymous Venetian. Fluid writing and effortless dialog though most references went over my head. Hemingway writing from heart, experiences, regrets, sorrows, and sadness. ( )