Hemingway in Italy

by Richard Owen

  Hemingway was in reality “too passionate as a hunter”, according to Baron Alberto Franchetti, Nanuk’s son, who as a boy was often present when Hemingway went duck hunting on the Franchetti estate at San Gaetano. “Most of the hunters would bag at least thirty or forty birds, and I myself would shoot perhaps a dozen or more, but Hemingway only ever shot a handful – though he was very proud of the few he had.” Hemingway also cut an odd shambling figure, Franchetti recalls, a “huge man” in Canadian flying boots open at the top, military trousers and “a green jacket of the kind the hippies wore later”.

  Hunting was an all-male affair, usually at the weekends, with the gentlemen of the party – who unlike Hemingway all wore ties and smart Loden jackets – backed up by ghillies, known in Italian simply as ‘the men’ (uomini), one for each guest. The ‘men’ carried the hunters’ guns, cartridges and bags. The lagoon or valle had a wooden observation tower, or altana, from which the party could assess the situation: windy and rainy days were preferable because they drove wildfowl in from the coast.

  As the estate owner, Baron Nanuk Franchetti would consult his head ghillie (capocaccia, or capovalle) when to start shooting – and in which order. The party assembled in the afternoon on the Saturday, and ate supper in a brick lodge (casone) with a fireplace in the long dining room downstairs and rooms upstairs, equipped with fireplaces and oil lamps but no electricity or heating. Hemingway was especially fond of grilled eel, including the skin.

  The hunters then played cards until midnight, when they settled down to sleep for a few hours before being woken around 4 am on Sunday morning to start hunting. Hemingway was often unable to sleep however, Franchetti recalls. “He would write in his notebook, standing up, or walk up and down in the dark and then go into the ghillies’ huts and wake them up to ask in the mixture of English, French, Italian and Spanish which he called his Lingua Franca about the weather outlook for the shoot, or where ducks slept at night.”

  At dawn Nanuk Franchetti would decide which positions the guests could take for the shoot instead of drawing lots (as was traditional), invariably assigning the closest spots to Hemingway so that he could reach them easily with the help of his boatman (barcaiolo). The sound of a hunting horn signalled the end of the shoot, Alberto Franchetti recalls, “but Hemingway was always the last one back, his game bag and the crate of gin he took with him both nearly empty.”

  Yet Hemingway’s descriptions of hunting in Across the River and Into the Trees, Franchetti acknowledges, are “masterly”: he describes a hunter (dressed in “hip boots and an old combat jacket”) setting off two hours before daylight with a boatman down the icy canal with his guns and wooden decoys to the lagoon hides, or “pit blinds” made of sunken oak barrels, or botte. “From behind him, he heard the incoming whisper of wings and he crouched, took hold of his right-hand gun with his right hand as he looked up from under the rim of the barrel, then stood to shoot at the two ducks that were dropping down, their wings set to brake, coming down dark in the grey dim sky, slanting towards the decoys.”

  As David Wyatt has noted in The Hemingway Review (Spring 2016), the opening of the novel is “so hauntingly beautiful that a reader can be sad to leave it”. “They started two hours before daylight”, Hemingway begins, “and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead”. Each boat has a boatman (or ‘poler’) standing in the stern, invisible in the dark, the shooter on a stool fastened to a box containing his shells and his lunch, guns propped up against wooden decoys, and “a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness”.

  What began as a short story about duck shooting in the lagoon however swiftly developed into something much more ambitious: the story of a 50-year-old man (himself) revisiting the landscape where he had been wounded as a boy of 18 on the Basso Piave within “distant eyeshot” of Venice. Across the River and Into the Trees was still only a sketch when Hemingway and Mary boarded the Jagiello at Genoa at the end of April 1949 for their return journey to Havana. But it grew into a novel, with Adriana as its focus.

  The book’s title is taken from the dying words of Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the Confederate General in the American Civil War: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” It begins with 50-year-old Cantwell looking back over his life while duck hunting “down in the marshes at the mouth of the Tagliamento”. Cantwell is clearly Hemingway, though the character also draws on his army friends Major General ‘Buck’ Lanham, and ‘Chink’ Dorman-Smith.

  Cantwell has come to Venice in his Buick from Trieste, where two days earlier he had undergone a check-up for heart disease. His driver, a mechanic from Wyoming, is called Jackson (presumably a nod to the Civil War general who provided the novel’s title.) Cantwell is on medication but is told he is in “good shape”, apart from a relic of his wartime wounds, a “slightly misshapen” hand which had been “shot through twice”.

  The journey to Venice takes him “along the old road that ran from Montfalcone to Latisana”, a landscape which reminds Cantwell of the First World War when – like Hemingway himself– he had been wounded. It “moved him as it had when he was eighteen years old and had seen it first, understanding nothing of it and only knowing that it was beautiful”. But it all looks different now: “Everything is much smaller when you are older.”

  They pass a bridge and a villa destroyed in the more recent war – a reference to the Ivancich estate – leading Cantwell to reflect that it was a mistake for Venetians to have had any church or villa frescoed by Giotto, Piero della Francesca or Mantegna anywhere near a bridge which might be a strategic target. “Do you know a lot about painters sir?” the driver asks, to which Cantwell replies, “quite a little”, adding that he has seen the house where Titian was supposedly born (“not much of a place”). Jackson’s only views on Italian art are that there are too many pictures of the Madonna and child, though the painters “were probably big bambini lovers like all Italians”.

  They pass through the “cheerful town” of San Dona di Piave, a contrast with the “miserable and gloomy” Fossalta just up the river. This leads the colonel to recall that he had recently – like Hemingway – “gone out along the sunken road to find the place where he had been hit, out on the riverbank”, at a point where the river was slow and “muddy blue”, with reeds along the edges. The crater on the bend of the river, heavy with autumn rain, had been cropped by sheep or goats, “until it looked like a designed depression in a golf course”.

  No one being in sight Cantwell had squatted down and “relieved himself” (as Hemingway had wanted to do) at the exact spot where “by triangulation” he reckoned he had been badly wounded thirty years previously. He then dug a hole with his Solingen clasp knife “such as German poachers carry” and buried a brown 10,000 lire note (ten times the sum Hemingway himself claimed he had actually buried), to pay for his war medals, symbolising “fertility, blood, money and iron”.

  “We fought along here when I was a kid”, Cantwell tells Jackson when he returns to the car. As a parting gesture he spits in the river: “It was a long spit and he just made it.” This is not, as might be supposed, an act of contempt. Rather it is an act of closure, for as a young man at the front, with Austrian guns just yards away, Cantwell (Hemingway) was unable to spit, the fear drying up his throat. “I couldn’t spit that night nor afterwards for a long time”, he tells Jackson.

  And now he can. The novel, set over a long weekend, is in effect one long flashback which returns to the present at the very end, when Cantwell dies of a heart attack on the way back to Trieste after heavy consumption of champagne and Valpolicella while in Venice on top of his heart disease pills. But the core of the novel is his infatuation with Renata. It is, as Hemingway himself remarked, a story of death – but also of love.

  18

  Love in a Gondola

  “Only tourists and lovers take gondolas”

>   Across the River and Into the Trees

  ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TRESS bears comparison with Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, but has arguably been misunderstood and under-estimated. Initial reviews were negative, with even fans of Hemingway disappointed by what they saw as the novel’s self-indulgent slow pace and lack of plot. Cantwell himself is an unlikeable character, much given to self-regard as he reminisces in Harry’s Bar about his wartime exploits, with Renata as an unlikely teenage admirer hanging on his every word (though she twice – understandably – falls asleep).

  Mary Hemingway – who had reasons of her own for being critical – found Colonel Cantwell’s conversations with Renata “banal beyond reason”, but hoped an editor at Scribner’s (his publisher) would improve matters (she was not mollified when Hemingway dedicated the novel to her ,“with love”.) Cantwell’s conceit that he is head of a mythical masonic-style organisation called the Order of Brusadelli, with the head waiter at the Gritti (who plays along with the fantasy) as its Gran Maestro, becomes something of a tired joke.

  But Hemingway is using here once again the “iceberg theory” of writing fiction, in which the real story takes place just below the surface. We are never told, for example, why Cantwell has been demoted to the rank of colonel from general. As David Hughes has observed, Hemingway “left so much unsaid in his stories that they say far more than you think”.

  Hemingway himself explained what he had tried to do by saying the book started slowly, but then built up layers of emotion to the point where “you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers”. He was baffled when critics complained that “nothing happened” in the novel: “all that happens is the defense of the lower Piave, the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris and the destruction of the 22nd Inf. Reg. in Hurtgen forest plus a man who loves a girl and dies”. That, he felt, was plenty.

  Tennessee Williams agreed, writing in The New York Times “I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway’s new novel.” It was “the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city”, and “the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done”. Readers would think him crazy for saying so, and critics might treat it “pretty roughly. But its hauntingly tired cadences are the direct speech of a man’s heart who is speaking directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done.” As Mark Cirino notes in his astute analysis of the novel, while critics complained that Colonel Cantwell was too much like Hemingway, Renata a “wish fulfillment”, the book too “talky” and the prose style “self parodic”, admirers responded that, even if this was not the epic they had been expecting, Hemingway’s powers of description and ear for dialogue were unchanged, the duck hunt which frames the novel was “beautifully written”, and the author’s love for Venice was “unmistakable and effectively conveyed”.

  Sergio Perosa, Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at Venice University, also finds Across The River “a very interesting book” and one preferable to a number of other later Hemingway works. “If I had to choose between Across the River and Into the Trees and For Whom the Bell Tolls”, Perosa told me, “I would choose the former, without a doubt. It is a novel full of sensitivity toward Venice which skilfully uses the city and the lagoon as settings for introspection on love and death”. It is deliberately “silent about some things and explicit about others. What Hemingway leaves out is as important as what he puts in.”

  The novel is above all a tribute to Venice, once “the queen of the seas”: “Christ I love it”, Cantwell reflects to himself, adding, “I’m so happy I helped defend it when I was a punk kid”. Cantwell even gives Jackson a history lesson as they admire the former Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on the island of Torcello, explaining that it was “the Torcello boys” who after being driven out of “a little place up the coast called Caorle” by the Visigoths, Lombards and other “bandits” had later decided to build Venice on stilts because the lagoons and the mouth of the Sile River were silting up, breeding mosquitoes and malaria.

  Cantwell also explains that the remains of St Mark were located in Alexandria by a “Torcello boy” and smuggled to Venice and its Byzantine cathedral (which Jackson, who knows St Mark’s square is where the pigeons are, describes as being like a “moving picture palace”). Like a tourist guide, Cantwell also points out the “lovely campanile” or belltower on Burano, a “very over-populated island” where the women make wonderful lace, and Murano, where the men make wonderful glass “for the rich of all the world” during the day and at night either “make bambinis” or go duck hunting on the lagoon. “Now when you look past Murano you see Venice. That’s my town.”

  He even dreams of retiring there: “I could read in the mornings and walk around town before lunch and go every day to see the Tintorettos at the Accademia and go to the Scuola San Rocco and eat in good cheap joints behind the market, or maybe the woman that ran the house would cook in the evenings.” On the Grand Canal he identifies the palazzo where Lord Byron lodged and “slept with the gondolier’s wife” two floors below. Byron was nonetheless well loved, being “a tough boy”, Cantwell suggests, whereas Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who also lived on the Grand Canal, were not, because they were “not Venetians no matter how well he wrote of it”.

  Later in the novel he visits the fish market near the Rialto, which Hemingway himself loved. On the slippery stone floor, in baskets and rope-handled boxes he sees soles, “heavy, grey-green lobsters” destined to die in boiling water, prawns, eels, and clams, which he buys “for a pittance” and opens with a curved knife, “cutting close against the shell” and drinking the juice.

  His own home, inevitably, is the Gritti Palace, a “three storey, rose-coloured, small, pleasant palace abutting on the Canal. It had been a dependence of the Grand Hotel but now it was its own hotel and a very good one. It was probably the best hotel if you did not wish to be fawned on, or fussed over, or over-flunkied in a city of great hotels, and the Colonel loved it.”

  He also loves the nearby church of Santa Maria del Giglio, which looks as if it will become airborne at any moment; the beautiful girls “with their long, easy striding Venetian legs”; and the shops, “the charcuterie with the Parmesan cheeses and the hams from San Daniele and the sausages alla cacciatora and the bottles of good Scotch whisky and real Gordon’s gin”. When Hemingway started the story, Mary says, she told him, “Please don’t let it be just ducks and marshes. Please put in Venice too.” He did – and the Venice he described next to the Gritti Palace is still there.

  He would probably be taken aback by the tens of thousands of tourists who nowadays crowd into the lagoon city, the loss of many of the food shops he described and their replacement by tourist gift shops, and the entry charge of 3 Euros for the Giglio Church. But the jewellery shop which Renata and the Colonel visit in the novel, and where in real life Hemingway bought Mary a necklace, is still there, and the magic he felt can still be encountered when you cross a bridge and unexpectedly find yourself in a hidden campo (piazza) or by the side of a small canal with a magnificent if crumbling palazzo.

  But if Across the River and Into the Trees is a declaration of love for Venice, it is also a love letter to a woman. It was Hemingway’s first novel since For Whom the Bell Tolls ten years earlier, and clearly owes its very existence to Adriana, who even designed the dust jacket. She acknowledged that she was the model for Renata. But she always denied that she and Hemingway had made love – rather as Agnes had denied having sex with Hemingway all those years ago in Milan.

  The Contessa Renata of the novel (we never learn her surname) is more than a character, she is a symbol of impossible love – and perhaps an agent of death, with the gondola as a floating hearse. “How would you like to be a girl of nineteen years old in love with a man over fifty years old that you know was going to die?” she asks Cantwell at one point. When they meet at Harr
y’s Bar and drink a succession of ice cold Martinis with garlic olives, it becomes clear they already know each other – though we are not told when or how – and that an affair is already under way, though with more passion on his part than hers.

  When Cantwell tells her she is beautiful and he loves her, Renata replies, “You always say that and I don’t know what it means but I like to hear it.” At the Gritti they kiss by the open window in his room: “The Colonel ... felt her wonderful, long, lithe and properly built body against his own body.” She asks him to kiss her again, “and make the buttons of your uniform hurt me but not too much”. They do not make love, Renata telling the colonel she has “a disappointment”, presumably meaning that she is menstruating.

  Renata tells Cantwell she loves him, and promises to marry him and give him five sons. At the hotel they dine on Dalmatian lobster and steak accompanied by Capri Bianco, Valpolicella and Roederer champagne. Cantwell calls Renata “Daughter”, and appears to be the dominant figure, given their age difference. But when they take the gondola ride at night, with a bottle of wine in an ice bucket, it is Renata who chooses the gondolier and the route, and sits like “the figure head of a ship”, her hair blowing in the wind.

  Then under the army blanket on the gondola Cantwell runs his “hurt hand” over her “upraised breasts” – though the flowery elliptical language (“his ruined hand searched for the island in the great river with the high steep banks” ... “the great bird had flown far out of the closed window of the gondola”) appears to mean that they stop short of making love, the rather strained metaphors (to quote Mark Cirino) implying that the colonel brings Renata to orgasm manually. She offers to spend the night with him at the Gritti Palace, but he tells her it “wouldn’t be right” either for her or for the hotel: instead he has a portrait of her brought to his room and talks to it.