Books: On the Ropes

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES (308 pp.)—Ernest Hemingway—Scribner ($3).

Hemingway was the champ all right. He was past 50, but still the champ, and he was ready to take on all comers. He had said so himself, to a New Yorker writer, only a few months before: “It is sort of fun to be 50 and feel you are going to defend the title again. I won it in the twenties [A Farewell to Arms] and defended it in the thirties (To Have and Have Not] and the forties [For Whom the Bell Tolls], and I don’t mind at all defending it in the fifties.”

After reading Ernest Hemingway’s new novel, Across the River and into the Trees* only the most sentimental referee could raise Hemingway’s arm with the old chant: “The winner and still champion!” Hemingway likes to discuss his writing in prize-ring talk but the fact is that a writer can be licked only by himself. In Across the River, Hemingway never wins a round. Friendly fans, willing to wait for the big book that he is still working on, which “is about the sea, the air and the land” (see below), can only hope that the champ had an off day.

Martinis for the Heart. Across the River is the story of an embittered man steeped in a sense of personal failure, momently expecting death from heart disease, having his last fling at duck hunting, which he loves, and his last fling at love itself with an 18-year-old Italian countess in Venice. Hero Richard Cantwell is 51, a U.S. Army colonel demoted from general and stationed in a postwar billet in Trieste. His personal history and even some of his characteristics are startlingly parallel to those of Author Hemingway.

Like Hemingway, Colonel Cantwell was in the Italian army as a young man, was wounded, and was decorated by the Italian government. Like Hemingway, he has a game knee, loves Venice and Paris, was with the first troops to reach the French capital, takes a dim view of Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, dislikes books on war by writers who never got near the fighting. Colonel Cantwell, like his creator, addresses women he likes as “daughter,” was divorced from a war-correspondent wife, loves art and hunting, talks a carefully arranged language of tough-guy sentimentality.

Colonel Cantwell is finished and he knows it. To ease his heart pains he takes mannitol hexanitrate tablets and chases them with Martinis. In Venice he lives intensely with the things he cherishes most: his girl, whom he loves truly and well and who loves him truly and well in return, his memories of two wars, good food & drink, resentment of the high brass. His intimations of death are accurate. The time span of Across the River is three days. At the end of it, Colonel Cantwell is dead.

Cult Talk from the Colonel. In all this, Hemingway, at his best one of the few great writers of his generation, gives his admirers almost nothing to cheer about. Occasionally, as when he describes a duck shoot, his writing has flashes of its old, matchless exactness. However thin his story, he keeps it in motion and even invests it with a sense of potential explosion, though the explosion never comes off. The famed Hemingway style, once a poetic blend of tension and despair, is hardly more than a parody of itself. The love scenes are rather embarrassing than beautiful, the language of love forced and artificial. With his truculence, his defensive toughness, his juvenile arrogance, Hemingway’s hero quickly becomes a bore who forfeits the reader’s sympathy.

Infantrymen will appreciate Hemingway’s high regard for their tough, thankless chore, but they will also be made uneasy by the uncharacteristic, cultlike talk of Hero Cantwell when he belligerently discusses his “trade.” Hemingway, once a master of dialogue, seems to have forgotten how infantrymen—even colonels—really talk and think.

Many Hemingway fans simply won’t believe the champ when he says that this is the best novel he can write, will hope that soon, perhaps in the work now in progress, he will find his Sunday punch.

*From the last words of Stonewall Jackson: “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”