Across the River and Into the Trees - Ernest Hemingway

I went through a Hemingway phase near the end of high school and into my undergraduate years. Big surprise the guy who wrote about bull-fighting, shooting, and dying would appeal to the teenage boy. The phase ended some time ago, and I hadn't read any of his work since then, but the books were still on my shelves, several unread. No time like the present.

Across the River and Into the Trees details an American colonel's acceptance of his mortality. It isn't set in a war, he's in his fifties, and I think that's roughly when the story takes place (it's post WW2, for certain). His fighting is behind him, but his heart can't go any further, and he knows it. So he travels to Venice, a town he loved in the First World War, to visit friends, to see the young woman he loves, and to go on a duck hunt. He tries to enjoy himself, but specters loom over it all. Not just his impending death, but the past. The battles he's fought, the men he's lost, the commanding officers whose stupidity he's resented, he can't move past it, despite his best efforts. By the end, I believe he'd made peace with it, but those last few days were rocky ones.

One thing I remember liking about Hemingway's writing was this sense that he got to the point. He didn't waste time blathering on about irrelevant details, and so his books didn't seem to drag. Looking back, I think it was actually that the things he talked about were more interesting to me than what Faulkner or Fitzgerald's topics of choice. If you're interested in something, you can read about it forever.

His dialogue is more stilted than I remember. Maybe because this is later in his career, or not one of his stronger works. Also possibly because they're speaking English, but that isn't Renata's first language, so she's a bit awkward. I think the repetition, the frequent description of the Colonel as being "rough" or "bad" in his speech, the imploring him to say he loves her, it's all part of something. I guess the book was described by some affair he had shortly before he read the book, and I imagine there's much of that in this. I'm not sure whether Renata is meant to be uncertain if the Colonel is genuine in his feelings, if she believes that if he loved her enough he'd find a way not to die, or if she simply enjoys having him wrapped around her finger. She isn't written as possessing any sort of malevolence, but the Colonel is the only one we have to describe her, and he's smitten. He tends to describe her as an effortless beauty, someone who simply has something that draws the eye, but who can say? Ah hell, I should not doubt her, she is a perfectly pleasant and compassionate sort, whatever doubts I have that the Colonel isn't giving her enough credit.

Even with the repetition, the book speeds along. There's something about his writing style, not only his ability to describe things well and succinctly, but something in it that carries its own forward momentum. He's fond of run on sentences, with a lot of commas in there breaking them up, and somehow that makes it like rolling a ball down a hill, as my eyes feel like they're gaining momentum, hurtling down the page. It's pretty impressive, even in one of his lesser works.

Even though I haven't read any of Hemingway's work in years, I've read three or four books about him in that span, and I found myself incorporating what I'd learned from those into my view. Even without looking online to see he'd carried on an affair shortly before this was written, it wasn't hard to see Hemingway in the Colonel. Just into his fifties, beat-up, scarred, simultaneously critical of his physical appearance, but strangely proud of it, because of what it signified about his experiences. Trying to recapture a feeling of youth with a much younger woman. Frequently rude or coarse with his remarks, but almost instantly regretful of them, but internally and externally, leading to vows to be nicer, which are always broken before too long, leading to more internal rebukes. The Colonel's journalist ex-wife almost has to be Hemingway's 3rd wife, Martha Gellhorn, and the Colonel's scorn for General Montgomery is likely Hemingway's as well.

I don't know who - if anyone - the pockmarked and pitted writer the Colonel becomes mildly obsessed with might represent, but I found the Colonel's assessment that mediocre writers are the ones who live forever, and that's why they have the most material, intriguing. Hemingway wasn't one to downplay his own skill as a writer, but I wonder if he wasn't losing a little faith at this point, wondering if he'd lost it, and was doomed to become a middling writer for the remainder of his days.