War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings

Chapter 17: Ac ross the Canal and into Kansas City Hemingway’s Westward Composition of Absolution in Across the River and into the Trees

324 MATTHEW NICKEL aCross THe Canal and InTo kansas CITY Hemingway’s Westward Composition of Absolution in Across the River and into the Trees Matthew Nickel 1 We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets This essay is concerned with iceberg variations in the symbolic landscape throughout Across the River and into the Trees.1 The paysage moralisé of Across the River and into the Trees is an important function in Hemingway’s calculus, and when analyzed closely, key allusions in conjunction with the landscapes of Torcello—Cantwell’s ride into Venice, the evening in the gondola with Renata, the walk to the market, and Cantwell’s and Renata’s imaginary road trip west from Kansas City—reveal a significant religious subtext containing an important pattern of absolution.2 In a novel that is largely about one man’s search for expiation in order “to die with the grace of a happy death” (240), Hemingway’s pattern ultimately presents a revelation of judgment offering the possibility for grace. In a novel largely set in and around Venice, Italy, readers may ask outright why Hemingway would choose Kansas City—the culmination of the novel’s landscape variations—as the starting point of the imaginary 324 ACROSS THE CANAL AND INTO KANSAS CITY 325 road trip between Renata and Colonel Cantwell. While this question may be answered in part throughout the following analysis, it is beneficial now to consider how the Kansas City of Hemingway’s youth, months before he enlisted with the Red Cross for the Italian front in World War I, overshadowed even his second Italian novel. Kansas City stands as the gateway to war for Hemingway, a gateway to the exposure of Europe—the people, the religion, the history, the spiritual landscape; it is the place of his wound, and of what he thereafter always dated as his baptism into the Catholic Church (Reynolds, The Paris Years 345). The frequent references to World War I battles in Across the River and into the Trees by Cantwell, who was also wounded on the Italian front, like Hemingway at Fossalta (Across the River and into the Trees 17–19) might call to mind the message in Steve Paul’s “Preparing for War and Writing: What the Young Hemingway Read in The Kansas City Star, 1917–1918”: that some “seeds” of A Farewell to Arms and Across the River and into the Trees might have been “planted in Kansas City” (18). Biographically speaking, it seems many seeds were planted in Kansas City; from his youth, through the births of his two children, and beyond, Kansas City has existed at the center of Hemingway’s American pilgrimages. While I have no intention of conflating the biography of Hemingway with the fictional Cantwell, Paul’s analysis might suggest how Hemingway’s choice of Kansas City as the place Cantwell and Renata “will cross the river and go west” (Across the River and into the Trees 263–64, italics mine)—a place symbolic of Cantwell’s rebirth into a new-old innocence—indicates what Hemingway sought in the act of writing Across the River and into the Trees after his post–World War II experience, a horror far more drawn out than his experience in World War I. It is likely Hemingway wrote a story, largely about Cantwell’s quest for absolution, as a form of atonement for his own personal horrors, and Kansas City may serve in Hemingway’s memory and imagination as a point of return and renewal. I would also suggest the imaginary trip between Cantwell and Renata and the car driving and road images throughout the novel places Across the River and into the Trees near the center of Hemingway’s 1940s and 1950s writing about the road, about motor trips, and about the American West as a place to discover, to make a pilgrimage into in search of some permanent value. The most intense road story in the Hemingway collection —which Hemingway was writing around the time he went to Venice 326 MATTHEW NICKEL in 1948—is the posthumously published unfinished story “The Strange Country” (Burwell 52). “The Strange Country” reveals a sense of both displacement and the search for a spirit of place, a struggle Cantwell is familiar with in the early...