Across the River and Into the Trees: Hemingway’s Polarizing Post-War Novel – Themes, Criticism, and Enduring Legacy
- David Lapadat | Music PhD
- Jan 11
- 4 min read
Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950, stands as one of the most debated works in his canon.
Coming after a decade-long novel drought since For Whom the Bell Tolls, it arrived with sky-high expectations.
Instead, it met a storm of disappointment. Critics didn’t just dislike it—they mourned it.
One reviewer in the early 1950s captured the mood perfectly: the book saddened him not for its story of love shadowed by death, but for how far Hemingway seemed to have fallen as a writer.
The prose felt labored, the structure aimless, the whole thing a pale shadow of the man’s earlier precision. It was hard, some said, to believe this was genuine Hemingway at all.
I felt echoes of that when I read it recently.
A Story Without Edges
The novel follows Colonel Richard Cantwell, a weathered American officer in his fifties, during a weekend in Venice shortly after World War II.
He ducks hunts, drinks heavily, reflects on battles lost and won, and carries on a passionate affair with Renata, a much younger Italian countess.
That’s the core of it.
No explosive opening grabs you.
No tidy resolution ties things up.
The narrative drifts in, lingers, and slips away—like a gondola ride through foggy canals that never quite docks.
Intrigue? It’s subdued, almost incidental.
The real tension lies in Cantwell’s awareness of his failing heart and the war scars he carries, both physical and otherwise.
Cantwell unloads memories of combat, command decisions, and betrayals in long monologues.
His romance with Renata dominates the present, yet much of it unfolds in extended dialogues that cascade with declarations of love.
Page after page: “I love you,” “My dearest love,” “You are my last and only love.”
They repeat, layer, intensify.
At times, it borders on self-parody, as if Hemingway couldn’t find the brake.
The Hemingway Blueprint, Compressed
What strikes hardest is how the book crams nearly every signature Hemingway theme into a tight frame.
War’s lingering trauma.
The code of masculine honor—stoic, disciplined, unflinching.
Love as both salvation and torment.
Death’s quiet approach.
Nature as testing ground (here, the duck hunt mirrors his fishing and bullfighting motifs).
Alcohol as crutch and ritual.
Exile and displacement.
All these recur throughout his work: the wounded veterans in The Sun Also Rises, the doomed romance in A Farewell to Arms, the solitary confrontation with nature in the short stories.
Here, they crowd together in limited space, competing for oxygen.
The result feels overloaded, like a canvas with too many bold strokes and no room to breathe.
Venice itself becomes a character—decaying grandeur, watery reflections, artistic ghosts.
Cantwell admires Tintoretto’s dramatic lighting, the city’s layered history mirroring his own.
The title draws from Stonewall Jackson’s dying words in 1863:
“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”
Hemingway adapts it into a soldier’s final surrender, a release from pain.
Flashes of the Old Fire
I pushed through initially out of loyalty to the author who shaped so much of modern prose.
And I won’t pretend it was easy.
Large sections drag under repetition and indulgence.
Yet sparks remain.
Certain dialogues snap with vintage Hemingway economy—short, loaded phrases that cut deep.
A description of dawn light on the lagoon, or Cantwell’s precise recall of artillery coordinates, reminds you why he mattered.
Those moments feel like sudden clearings in fog: brief, sharp, alive.
In quieter passages, you sense psychological depth. Cantwell’s bravado masks vulnerability, a fear of irrelevance as age closes in.
Renata, though idealized, serves as more than trophy; she draws out his buried tenderness.
Their age gap invites discomfort, but it also probes power, memory, and the desperation to feel vital again.
Echoes in Mann and Beyond
The Venice setting inevitably recalls Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, where an aging writer obsesses over youthful beauty amid cholera and decay.
Both stories grapple with mortality through erotic longing, though Hemingway swaps Mann’s restrained irony for blunt emotional exposure.
Mann intellectualizes; Hemingway embodies.
Psychologically, Cantwell’s denial of his heart condition parallels aspects of Kübler-Ross’s later stages of grief—bargaining through love, anger at past commands.
He revisits old battles not just for nostalgia, but to reclaim control in a life slipping away.
Structurally, the book resembles a sketchbook more than a finished novel.
Episodic scenes, vivid impressions, unfinished threads. Hemingway wrote it quickly, amid personal turmoil—his own health issues, a new young love (the real-life inspiration for Renata).
It shows. Expansion, pruning, deeper excavation might have elevated it.
The Redemption That Followed
Two years later, in 1952, came The Old Man and the Sea.
Spare, focused, universal.
An elderly fisherman battles a marlin in solitary dignity, facing defeat with grace.
It distilled many of the same themes—age, struggle, loss, endurance—into something crystalline.
That novella restored Hemingway’s standing, earned the Pulitzer, and helped secure his Nobel.
Reading Across the River now, knowing what came next, feels like witnessing a master stumble before regaining balance.
The earlier book exposes raw nerves; the later one transmutes them into myth.
Why Revisit It Today?
In 2026, amid our own reflections on aging, legacy, and post-trauma worlds, Across the River and Into the Trees offers uneven rewards.
It lacks the taut mastery of The Sun Also Rises or the epic sweep of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Yet its flaws reveal something human about Hemingway: the fear of decline, the urge to prove vitality through words.
It’s no starting point for newcomers.
But for those who’ve traced his path—the African safaris, the Spanish bullrings, the Cuban seas—this imperfect testament adds texture.
A reminder that even giants falter, and sometimes those stumbles illuminate more than triumphs.
The colonel crosses his river.
Hemingway, briefly lost in the trees, found his way out.
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