Reading Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees by Mark Cirino (review)

When Mark Cirino began writing his Glossary and Commentary for Across the River and into the Trees, he faced a challenge vastly different from the one H. R. Stoneback encountered when he began the same endeavor on The Sun Also Rises. Stoneback would be dealing with a novel consistently ranked among the masterpieces of twentieth-century American literature, the novel critics regularly judge Hemingway's greatest. What better way to inaugurate the Reading Hemingway series than by selecting the first novel of the young genius who by age twenty-five had learned to write short stories of immense skill? For half a century and more, The Sun Also Rises has been regularly taught in the nation's colleges, and the world thinks of it every July while the Fiesta San de Fermín is again celebrated in Pamplona. Scholars have not ceased exploring the novel's themes and nuances.

Across the River and into the Trees, on the other hand, carries a markedly different history. Published in 1950, it was the first Hemingway novel to follow For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the novel that Carlos Baker thought Hemingway's greatest. Many agreed with Baker and the novel quickly made its way into college classrooms. It would remain popular with academics and the general public. A decade later, expectations were understandably high as the public awaited release of Hemingway's sixth full-length novel. With a first printing of 75,000, the bookstores were ready and sales were brisk: the novel remained on The New York Times best-seller list for twenty-one weeks. Several reviewers in high places offered extravagant praise. John O'Hara's review became legendary, the new novel having led him to declare Hemingway "the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare." But there were influential voices arguing a steep decline in the level of achievement. In Commentary Philip Rahv called the novel "egregiously bad." In the Saturday Review, Maxwell Geismar labeled it "Hemingway's worst." In The New Yorker, Alfred Kazin declared that Hemingway had made "a travesty of himself." Carlos Baker would later summarize the critical reception as a mixture of "boredom and dismay" (xiv-xv). Across the River and into the Trees would never win the general reader; it seldom makes its way into the classroom.

Wisely, Mark Cirino did not set out to rescue a neglected masterpiece. He summarizes the novel's flaws: Richard Cantwell is too much like Ernest Hemingway, both men too self-pitying; Cantwell's muse, Renata, is a wish-fulfillment, not a believable character; the novel is mainly talk; much of the prose-style is self-parodic (xv). Cirino nonetheless argues that an understanding of Across the River and into the Trees can enrich understanding of the enduring Hemingway masterpieces. He pinpoints two quintessential subjects in those works: "the soldier after war and the function of love at the exact center point of the bloody and bellicose twentieth century" (xvi). Cirino can assume that his readers have likely explored other Hemingway before coming upon Across the River and into the Trees.

Approaching the novel for the first time, a reader might profitably explore Cirino's book before commencing that reading. Entries chart the plot, identify the major characters, highlight the major themes and allusions, and are seldom more than a paragraph in length. A glance reveals which entries are primarily glossary and which primarily commentary. Sampling the commentary will provide a solid direction for the first reading and prevent or minimize frustration that readers often experience. Puzzled along the way in any chapter, the reader will know that Cirino's glossary will likely provide the needed direction.

The reader returning to the novel, perhaps after long absence, will appreciate Cirino's careful attention to the geographies and history of the Venetian setting; his guidance as Cantwell recalls battles and major military figures in two world wars; his care in highlighting...