Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by Ernest Hemingway. The title is derived from the last words of US General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson.

Synopsis

The story follows the last three days in the life of a retired US Army officer in Venice.

In the wake of the Second World War, a fifty-year-old American colonel pays a visit the site where he was nearly decapitated during the First World War, and spends his time in Venice duck hunting, eating, drinking, and living the good life. He is kept company in his last days by a nineteen-year old Italian contessa, Renata, to whom he narrates his war experiences, and makes love to. His nostalgic liberty over, Colonel Cantwell anticipates his death by quoting the last words of Stonewall Jackson to his aide, and then crawls into the back seat of his staff car and dies of a heart attack.

Cantwell is a skilled soldier, having risen quickly through the ranks in his thirty-year career and having personally killed 122 men. However, these achievements of his aroused the envy and mistrust of his seniors, who had reached their ranks mostly by playing politics. Needing a scapegoat, the military politicians demoted him to the rank of colonel after he, following his orders, had lead his brigade into an impossible battle in France and lost a large portion of his brigade. After his demotion, he becomes bitter, and criticizes most of the Allied generals, especially Eisenhower, Leclerc, Patton, and Montgomery. He feels that they have subjected him to "friendly fire" in doing what their enemy had not been able to do to him.

Before his death, Cantwell gives orders for the return of some personal belongings to Venice, but his aide, angered by his criticism, decides to return the items "through channels", meaning that the honest colonel will still be the victim of politics even after his death.

Commentary

Criticism and public opinion

Hemingway had difficulty during the 1940s in getting back into the swing of writing of fiction after his traumatic work as a war correspondent during World War II. Returning to his abode in Cuba, he began one project that would eventually be published posthumously as The Garden of Eden (1986), then shelved that manuscript to work on two others that would be known as Islands in the Sea ' and the unpublished "Isle of Pines" manuscript. During a trip to Italy in 1949, he began a new short story which promptly evolved into Across the River and Into the Trees.

This novel was excoriated by critics and has generally been regarded as the low-water mark of Hemingway's career. Morton Zabel , writing for The Nation, declared it "the poorest thing its author has ever done – poor with a feebleness of invention, a dullness of language, and a self-parodying style and theme." A New Yorker review by Alfred Kazin expressed "pity and embarrassment" for an excellent writer who had produced such a poor work late in his career. Northrop Frye made the comparison between Hemingway's work and Mann's similarly-themed Death in Venice but wrote that Hemingway's effort was amateurish. Meanwhile, "Across the Street and Into the Grill", a parody by E. B. White published in The New Yorker skewered the novel mercilessly.