BOOK REVIEW: ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S "ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES"

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

Historian Charles Whiting once remarked that Ernest Hemingway's novel "Across the River and Into the Trees" was "bitter, irrational, and cynical." This view was in keeping with its critical reception upon its release in 1950, which was overwhelmingly negative -- the first Hemingway novel ever to take a critical drubbing. And in truth it is not a very good novel, though like nearly everything Hemingway wrote, it contained more-than-occasional flashes of profundity and what might be called observational genius. But it seems to me that calling a Hemingway piece "bitter, irrational and cynical" is like calling a bomb heavy, noisy and destructive. It's an accurate description, but not an intelligent one. Nearly everything Hemingway ever wrote was bitter and cynical, and his characters seldom if ever acted in a rational manner: that was part, if not nearly all, of his literary signature. The flaws that cripple "Across the River" are not bitterness, cynicism or irrationality, but aimlessness and repetition.

The story is extremely simple. In the immediate aftermath of WW2, an aging professional soldier in the U.S. Army named Richard Cantwell (who is referred to simply as "The Colonel") travels to Venice to meet with old friends and his young paramour, the 18 year-old Countess Renata. Cantwell is dying of heart disease and believes his demise is imminent, so he wishes to spend his last day hunting, dining and romancing young Renata, who is as infatuated with him as he is with her. The book details Cantwell's final day, but much of the story revolves around a stream-of-consciousness inner monologue the Colonel is having about his own past -- his service in Italy during WW1, his failed marriage, and the terrible experiences he had as a regimental and assistant divisional commander during the European campaign during WW2. Cantwell is a man trying to come to terms, it seems, not only with imminent death, but with regrets about his life.

As a novelist, Hemingway was always very strong coming out of the gate but -- I'm sorry to say this -- often not worth much coming down the stretch. A superb short-story writer, the rigidity of his style, which was based around brevity, simplicity and implication (rather than description), did not work anywhere near as well for full-length books. "Across the River" suffers acutely from this weakness; though shorter than many of his other works it "reads heavy" in second and third acts, and is full of the infuriating shallowness and ugliness that makes it so damned difficult to care about his characters. (It would be interesting to count the number of times the characters exchange sappy, sophomoric "I love yous" or how many times Renata asks her bitter old beau to be "kind.") As always, we get long passages about Hemingway's obsession, the city of Paris, and as always, there is a great deal of talk about food and drink and a lot of facetious and somewhat sophomoric banter, which is amusing in small doses but almost intolerable in the long run. I'm not exaggerating when I say the exchanges between Cantwell and Renata are almost unreadable after awhile. Doubtless this is the way Hemingway spoke to his lovers -- his biographer and friend Ed Hotchner made that clear in his book, PAPA -- but it isn't the way anyone else on the planet spoke to theirs, and it comes off as self-indulgent, creepy and boring. I am again forced to conclude that the Hemingway who wrote this book was out of touch in more ways than one, and perhaps did not grasp the degree to which his famous literary style could turn into a pastiche of itself if not handled with self-awareness and skill. His hand is simply too heavy.

The book is at its strongest when Cantwell recalls the two wars in which he has served. Hemingway served in Italy during the '14 - '18 war and as always, whenever he touches upon that time of his life his prose comes alive in a way it seldom does at any other time. I was greatly amused -- and many must have been outraged at the time -- at the "bitterness and cynicism" Cantwell displays about WW2 and the top Allied brass, especially Eisenhower, Montgomery, Leclerc, Patton, and Bedel "Beetle" Smith. After the war the deification of the top Allied leaders was in full swing and it must have come as a great shock to the readership to learn that many combat soldiers despised and even hated the public's top military idols for their venality, egotism and, yes, incompetence. Hemingway has performed a service by scraping away some of that whitewash here, and I wish he had reined in his pathological tendency to ramble and blather and written more clearly and fully on a subject he was in quite a good position to talk about. Overall I can't really say I'd recommend this novel to anyone except Hemingway fans -- those who have no experience with his work would best start somewhere else (with his short-stories, perhaps) and work their way toward this exercise in "bitterness, cynicism and irrationality." They may find it more palatable once they are warmed up to his style than they would going in cold.

In closing, I'd like to say that Hemingway's greatest strength was his ability to compress huge, profound life-truths and life-lessons into single sentences of roughly poetic simplicity, and "River" has a number of these, but not quite enough to salvage it. It's a promising book in many ways -- all of Hemingways' books contain some level of genius -- but even at its modest length it feels too long, talks too much and says too little. By this point in his career Hemingway was almost a god to many in the public, and perhaps had grown too lazy or self-satisfied for his own good. It is therefore comforting to know that despite this stumble, some of his greatest works still lay ahead of him, as anyone who has ever read A MOVEABLE FEAST or THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA can attest.