Across The River and Into The Trees - Reception

Reception

John O'Hara wrote in the New York Times; "The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is Across the River and Into the Trees. The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616." However, O'Hara's was one of the few good reviews, with negative reviews appearing in more than 150 publications. Critics claimed the novel was too emotional, had inferior prose and a "static plot", and that Cantwell was an "avatar" for Hemingway's character Nick Adams. The novel was criticized for being an unsuitable autobiography, and for presenting Cantwell as a bitter soldier.

Tennessee Williams, in The New York Times, wrote: "I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway's new novel. It is the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city, and when I say I think it is the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done, you may think me crazy. It will probably be a popular book. The critics may treat it pretty roughly. But its hauntingly tired cadences are the direct speech of a man's heart who is speaking that directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done."

Sure they can say anything about nothing happening in Across the River, all that happens is the defense of the lower Piave, the breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris ...plus a man who loves a girl and dies.

—Ernest Hemingway about critical reception to Across the River and into the Trees.

According to Baker, Hemingway was "deeply wounded by the negative reviews" of this novel. Furthermore, Baker explains Hemingway was unaware that those close to him agreed with the majority of critics. For example, his wife Mary, who disapproved of Across the River and into the Trees, said: "I kept my mouth shut. Nobody had appointed me my husband's editor."

Generally the novel is considered better than the critical reviews received upon publication. Baker compares it to Shakespeare's Winter's Tale or The Tempest: not a major work, but one with an "elegiac" tone. Meyers believes the novel shows a new "confessional mode" in Hemingway's work and that it "would have been hailed as more impressive if it had been written by anyone but Hemingway." Stoltzfus agrees, and he believes Hemingway's structure is more comprehensible for the modern reader—exposed to the Nouveau roman—than for those of the mid-20th century.