Once upon a time in the distant and not so distant past there was a privileged caste of scholarly notables and monastic scribes who oversaw, in written form, the power of knowledge and proper thinking and thrived apart from the less prescient masses below–those who muddled along in thought-free mediocrity, or so those above believed.  In the Christian era, religious faith was linked to the City of God and the Catholic Church.  In ancient times the anthropomorphic gods of Olympus looked down on mankind and governed our fate.

This dichotomy of intellectual apartheid changed when Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable-type press converted the scrolls of Roman and Greek wisdom to books for the educated bourgeoisie and launched a fifteenth century Renaissance of learning that was not under ecclesiastical control.  Thinking was more than ever the property of the individual and not the Church.  Ideas sprang up unobstructed and washed across the academic centers of European hegemony.  Ancient truths became subject to new scrutiny and the modern era was born.

In our times, the power of knowledge was widely dispersed among students and their paper and pen instructors who ruled academia for decades. Type-written communications, mimeographs, telexes, and monaural electronic devices, not to mention chalk boards, limited the scope of how we learned for some time. Then, digitized systems of information delivery were invented by thinkers of a different twist; silicon chips in down-sized computers appeared on the market and thinking in abstract terms had to be either 0 or 1 in long numerical strings…or not at all. Conceptual thought became more democratized with the advent of the electronic pulse and blip. Now the thought masters of old, who wrote with abandon on lined paper, had met their master, if I may, in the cold world of artificial intelligence or A.I. which is all the cognitive rage these days.

Logic or clear-headed thinking now abounds in every phase of our formal writing: no more vague intuitions or ill-founded suppositions or flights of fancy that prime the pump of creative thought;  no humor or delicious irony a la Jonathan Swift or Voltaire.  In today’s world, facts, data-rich texts, and algorithms channel the linear flow of words toward approved ends, stripped of ambiguity–just dull clarity and little else.

Since the days of Aristotle and other famous pundits, logic has been a tool for seeking the truth.  No fuzziness, emotional overtones, hyperbole or puns are permitted.  To think in a logical manner means compressing thought into patterns where there is a right and wrong answer.  The Aristotelian syllogism, judiciously applied, must yield a conclusion that cannot be questioned: ergo, Socrates, based on solid evidence, has to be mortal.

The world of modern science reigns supreme and unchallenged according to most media outlets.  Syllogisms, spatial ether, the four elements, and the absence of vacuums are myths of ancient origin. Medieval alchemists hoped vainly to extract gold from humble matter; modern chemistry came from their attempts at transmogrification. Copernicus, Galileo, and similarly far-sighted colleagues disavowed the geocentric universe of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the Catholic Church.  The foundations of truth were evolving as curious, probing minds expanded their quest for knowledge.

Truth in science can only be temporary, to be displaced when more facts and procedures come to light.   In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, great men stand on the shoulders of other geniuses to see farther ahead as they remake the shape of the future.  One day, perhaps, based on Stephen Hawking’s parallel universe vision, our truths of the moment will not be valid in yet undiscovered worlds and other dimensions. Inspired by the Greeks, the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, summed up our dilemma by saying that the universe has no center, no discernible circumference, and floats indeterminately beyond human comprehension.  As he famously stated:  “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot comprehend.”  Knowledge is both fact-based and colored by intuition’s grasp of reality.

Logic is at the heart of scientific truth which lives and breathes in a mathematical schema of data-based reality. However, if so many truths of the distant past are now only partially true (e.g. the physics of Sir Isaac Newton and Aristotle; Rene Descartes’ discredited vortices to explain planetary movement), how do we know what discovery is worth trusting?  When asked, scientists just shrug and affirm that technology will make inroads in the days ahead and inventions will clear the way to a world beyond our ken.  After all, rocket science and aviation owe their beginnings to Chinese fireworks and the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.

Over the past few centuries, science and other fields of knowledge have splintered into overlapping disciplines which claim complementarity but are, in their own way, subject to reasonable doubt at times. For example, Sigmund Freud’s legacy is little more than a lexicon of terms that were the product of observing troubled Viennese matrons whose sexual repression fueled the core of psycho-analysis.

We freely use his terminology today without traditional scientific corroboration: the sex-laden and conflicted Id, bubbling with dark forces that the conscious mind doesn’t recognize or acknowledge; the ego struggling with its moral and social arbiter, the super ego, that produces dutiful citizens carved out of a Germanic model in the early twentieth century.  Freud’s psychology, like that of Adler and Jung, are clever assumptions that hard-core science cannot prove to be factual or capable of being replicated.  Do we truly covet our mothers as Oedipus mythically did? Do little girls wish they had their brother’s penises?  Is there a Yin or Yang from Far Eastern cosmology that nourishes life’s primal forces, or even an anima and animus that inform the Jungian collective consciousness?  Can troubling psychoses be uprooted and erased through talk therapy? Probably not.  Pharmacology has replaced this strategy. Rarely challenged assumptions have therefore become scientific “fact” through public acceptance.

In a cultural context, do Chinese children experience the same trauma as Afghan youths during wartime? Is the mind hard-wired to follow the pedagogical stages of Jean Piaget’s philosophy? Similarly can we prove that linguist Noam Chomsky’s “Deep Structure” is an integral part of childhood language acquisition? Are we all alike as humanists assert or does the environment affect our reaction to external stimuli in different ways?  Is there an acceptable answer to these ponderous, lofty questions?  Probably not, yet we continue to ask why and construct clever ways to resolve thorny issues. Our curiosity as cogent beings is insatiable.

And then there is the question of logic and religiosity that weighs heavily upon Western civilization.  Religious fervor, with the exception of Islamic cultures, seems to be declining in more advanced societies. In America, the Church serves as a social institution and is run with corporate precision: above all, it is a focal point for community identity.  The desire to expand services and infrastructure is built into their mission: preach the Gospel, recruit the “unchurched,” meet the budget, hire more personnel to be servants of the faith, and whenever possible, launch a building campaign that gives the impression of progress.

Religious inquiry is limited to discussing scriptural excerpts in Bible study groups sponsored by the Church; the essence of faith is rarely questioned in these sessions.  Exegesis is avoided in favor of bearing personal witness to Christian tenets.  Quoting scripture has an aura of theological truth but is not logic-based because, for all Christians, the Bible is the defining  reference work of faith. As the Catholics once said:  “Outside the Church there is no salvation.”

Logic and theology are generally at odds with one another.  There is the “historical” Jesus that we know very little about.  Scholars have concluded that He was most likely a simple peasant-artisan, an itinerant and charismatic preacher who challenged Jewish authority and secular beliefs (chasing the money lenders from the Temple).  His populous rebellion against the Roman occupational forces sealed his fate.

The New Testament affirms the divinity of Jesus, the son of God, based solely on the writings and oral history of the apostles and other chroniclers in the decades following His crucifixion.  What separates Jesus’ “movement” from other Abrahamic monotheistic religions is the Cross, the symbol of his passion and resurrection or deification.  Judaism and Islam reject His role as a divine entity; in their eyes Jesus was no more than a highly respected prophet.

For Biblical historians, the miracles He performed are hard to explain from a scientific perspective. Very few modern scientists accept the providential, almost mystical nature of His life.  In the absence of facts, we have little to support our beliefs except faith alone which science calls into question.  Faith is the purest form of escaping from the burdens of the material world; it requires the acceptance of an intuitive, personal reality with no measurable contours.  Nonetheless, many men and women of science embrace the Christian way of life.

Faith reassures and comforts true believers. Science can only measure and codify the known universe. How does one reconcile these contradictory forces?  Without believing in the supernatural, the life and divinity of Jesus are illogical.  Therefore, if we apply modern techniques to this issue, Christianity becomes a religion founded on false premises: “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” are at the core of its philosophy.  These ideas of communal peace and compassion are also found in other religions.

What gives Christianity a distinct identity is the concept of the crucifixion and resurrection of an itinerant preacher and carpenter by trade, Jesus of Nazareth. Abraham, Moses, and Mohammed were leaders of their faiths, not divinities in the guise of humans who suffered for others.  In theory Jesus died for all men: He is the Messiah incarnate who visited the earth, accomplished His mission, and was recalled to Heaven by our Maker.  No other faith has the concept of immaculate conception, evangelization, and universal salvation.  Christ is the Redeemer, not the titular head of a religious movement. According to the scriptures, He is a living, internal presence in the converted, not a dignitary who judges.  He exalts the common man and promises a better life for the downtrodden.  He spoke to the humble and not to the crowned heads of His era.

Sadly, throughout history, the Church has deviated from its first principles of compassion and forgiveness and  become a punitive institution that rejected transgressors and continues to do so (through excommunication).  Large numbers have died over the centuries in the name of a forgiving Savior.  During the Crusades Arabs were pitted against Christian zealots who sought to liberate the Holy Land from pagan dominance. Moreover, heretics threatened the political authority of a Church wedded to the State; these rebellious minds that abjured Christianity were “purified” by fire at the stake as dictated by the Spanish Inquisition (“auto-da-fe”).  Numerous horrors were perpetrated to cleanse the Christian world of miscreants.  Its intolerance has sparked revolutions that saw religiosity become a form of oppression, more controlling than liberating.

Contrary to the Catholic repudiation of profit as sin (which has now been revoked), Protestantism linked Christian values with financial success and not liturgical piety. In this reformed version of Christianity, God favored the wealthy who were rewarded with a greater status in life.  Prosperity and saintly goodness were one and the same.  The modern world of materialized faith was born in the late sixteenth century when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the Wittenberg Cathedral door to protest indulgences.

The Reformation, divorced from papal authority, gave birth to an economic freedom that reshaped Protestant strongholds in Europe.  In addition to other beliefs, the infallibility of the Pope and hagiography were denied to be free of religious restrictions and enjoy life’s many treasures. Matters of faith between Catholics and Protestants brought about civil wars  that ravaged European nations and spilled over into their colonial possessions.

Pure logic guides the rational and demonstrable world of science; intuition lies at the heart of religious faith.  To believe in divine spirits, one must accept the inconsistency of reason and grant substance and credibility to intuitive truth.  Scientists will rework and change the material world with reason and technology; at the same time, the inner self will cry out for religious solace and release.  The twenty-first century will give us little hope for global peace in our conflicted, tribal debates.  Where will the human species be in the coming years and centuries of strife?

No matter how we react, time will move us forward against our will. Our dueling masters, faith and logic, will determine the nature of what it means to be human: scientifically, there will be sentient clones, cyber engineers crafting even more functional robots to serve our needs, geneticists tweaking the genome to fight disease and correct flaws in our DNA–a new “science” of eugenics? and alternative  sources of governance to replace the failed or inadequate systems of the past.

In spite of the manipulation of the species and internal longing for power, there will always be decent folks who think in logical ways but deeply hope for the promise of eternal life and salvation.  On the other hand, there will be the fearful ones–burdened with doubt and distrustful of rigid thought patterns–who see life, without faith, as devoid of purpose and meaningless.   Will socialism’s future utopia give them relief from their anguish?

Nonetheless, the meaning of life’s infinite mystery will trouble our thoughts and guide our search for reassurance. The quest for spiritual values and scientific truths will define the parameters of tomorrow’s world just as the rebirth of tribalism will ensure continuing territorial conflict.  Without science there will be no progress; without faith the human spirit will weaken and religious belief will falter.  Our long-term survival depends on striking a viable compromise between the two.

In 2001, I published a book on the White advocate William Pierce (1933–2002) called The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds.  Given the obsessive concern currently for what is deemed the unimpeachable evil of White racism and the modern-day inquisition against White racists tainted with this sin, I think it would be useful to re-visit what Pierce had to say about this topic in the Fame book two decades ago and see what it brings up for you.

*    *     *

Pierce believes that over the past forty or fifty years [this is 2001, remember] white people have been conditioned to feel guilty about their natural inclinations around race.  The media in particular, but also the schools, politicians, and mainstream churches, have waged an all-out campaign to get them to deny their natural—and healthy—impulses.

What are these natural racial impulses or inclinations?   In order to get at that, Pierce offers that we must examine the way whites thought and behaved before the conditioning program began.

In times past, most whites accepted the fact that people of a particular race preferred to live and work and play with others like themselves.  White people were curious about other races. They would study the lore of the Indians, for example.  Indeed, whites found much to admire in other races and cultures—Chinese art for example. Still, they retained a sense of separateness and exclusiveness and pride in their own European heritage, in their own racial characteristics. They didn’t feel it necessary to apologize for teaching the history of their own race to their children, that is to say, European history.  They didn’t feel the need to balance things out by giving equal treatment to other races and cultures. They left Japanese and Tibetan history to the scholars in those fields.  They certainly didn’t feel a conciliatory obligation to invent a false black history to elevate the self-esteem of blacks or to persuade young whites that blacks were their cultural equals.

Did whites feel their race was superior to other races? In general, yes, they did, says Pierce, which is not to say that they were blind to the fact that other races and cultures could do some things very well, and in some cases were better than whites were at things. But whites valued what they were good at, and so by the standards they set up, they looked very good to themselves. They were confident in their abilities and accomplishments as thinkers and problem solvers and civilization builders. They liked their literature and art best. They valued their way of life—their concept of virtue and morality and their approach to family and work and so on.

Basically, they believed they had a superior culture and superior race. In that sense, they were what today would be called white supremacists. But they were not alone in feeling that way; it is natural for a people to think their ways are the best, that they are the best.  The Chinese have historically believed that they are superior to the “foreign devils.”   That the Chinese thought that way didn’t bother whites. It didn’t threaten whites’ sense of their worth, their sense of their place in the world.

Pierce argues that an outgrowth of people’s natural feelings of racial identification and favoritism is to segregate themselves from other people, to live among their own in the ways they prefer.  That is their normal impulse.  That way of living has been typical throughout the history of humankind.  It may seem a good idea for people to live mixed up with other peoples, but it doesn’t work as well as we have been told that it does, and it isn’t inherently a superior or a more elevated way to live.  Living amid so-called diversity is not the only legitimate, morally acceptable, way to live, and hardly an urgent moral imperative.   It is only in recent years that whites have been pressured to think in those terms.

World War II brought big changes in this pattern of thought and conduct, says Pierce. Those who wanted Germany destroyed painted it as a war for democracy and equality.  As the narrative went, the Germans believed in a master race while we believed in the equality of the races.  This rationale brought increased stress on an equality theme in American life in contrast to an emphasis on the qualitative differences among individuals and groups.  The idea of the equality of whites and blacks went along with that theme. From the assumption that blacks were equal to whites, it followed that if blacks were observed to accomplish less or conduct themselves less admirably, something external to them must be causing it. And that cause was identified—white oppression. Whites must have made blacks the way they were.

While white villainy seemed to make sense given the false notion of racial equality, it simply didn’t square with the facts. The vast majority of whites didn’t concern themselves with blacks and wasted no time trying to suppress them. The vast majority of whites didn’t care what blacks did. They simply wanted to go their way and let blacks go theirs. But the facts of the matter aren’t what is important. What is important is to understand that World War II served to heighten the belief that if blacks had any problems at all, they could be laid at the feet of whites.

Pierce sees the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s as another important element in the development of the “whites-as-bad-guys” perception that has taken hold.  During those years, the media showed us images of inoffensive blacks marching and protesting amid what looked to be white hooligans who were screaming at them, assaulting them, and in some instances killing them.  After scores of television clips, news stories, and commentaries that painted this picture, resistance to what the civil rights activists wanted became equated in most people’s minds with KKK types and beefy Southern sheriffs and their German shepherds and water hoses.  It is understandable that most white people came to sympathize strongly with the dignified demonstrators and their cause and to be repulsed by their boorish and brutal white attackers and what we were told they represented.

Indeed, there were white working-class people who saw their way of life threatened and acted in an undignified and intemperate and violent way.  The media were quick to record it and place it in a context—within a story line—that appealed to what Pierce calls the innate white sense of propriety and fairness. The media transmitted these carefully selected scenes of white resistance to racial integration along with particular interpretations of what was happening over and over and over again. The white people who saw on their television screens and read about what their own people were doing were embarrassed by it and felt guilty over it. The media made the whole idea of resistance to racial integration shame- and guilt-inducing to most white people.

The media paired up names, labels, for what whites were seeing and hearing and reading and feeling during the civil rights revolution: racism, and racist. The media associated racism with white resistance to the civil rights organizations.  Again and again and again, they paired up white resistance to a single idea/explanation—racism.  Again and again and again, the media paired the image of the roughneck white opponent of civil rights being portrayed on the screen or in print with the label/identity of racist.  

After a time, the words themselves—“racism,” “racist”—came to evoke pangs of revulsion and guilt on their own, just as the sound of a dinner bell resulted in Pavlov’s dogs salivating.  The media had created a conditioned response to the word racism.  Now, all anybody has to do to get whites to turn pale, become apologetic, and give in is call them racist.  People don’t have to argue the facts with whites; all they have to do is push the right emotional button.  If they ring the “racist bell,” whites—even the most rugged and proudest of whites—will bow their heads and put their tails between their legs and let people have their way with them.

The media could have worked the conditioning the opposite way if they had wanted to by associating different things with white resistance to the civil rights movement.  They could have presented interviews with middle-class whites—professional people, academics, artists and writers, philosophers—who believed in racial and cultural integrity and pointed out the negative impact on countries like Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Portugal when the races were mixed together. The media could have shown what happened to white schools and neighborhoods after an infusion of blacks—the decay and disorder and crime. They could have interviewed white women raped by blacks. They could have presented case studies of white girls who mated with black boys they met in school and shown us their mixed-race children and let us see how we really felt about that. But they didn’t do that. That wasn’t consistent with the program.

During this time and since, Pierce points out, the schools joined the campaign of re-shaping white attitudes.  The curriculum kept students from understanding the rationale for segregation.   Segregation was linked to mindless hatred and oppression.  History was de-Europeanized and infused with the real and imaginary accomplishments of non-whites.  The churches also got into the act of decrying racism and promoting a multiracial society.  White politicians pandered to minority interests and lectured their own people about how they must share their lives with minorities and to give them anything they wanted. The schools, churches, and politicians promoted the idea that anyone opposed to an integrated society was evil and irrational, that is to say, a racist.  The only thing that operated against this wave of cultural re-shaping of whites, says Pierce, is the actual physical presence of blacks so that people could experience for themselves the glaring contradictions between the theory of racial equality and the reality of racial differences.

Pierce notes that race has become such a hot-button issue that it is very difficult to discuss it rationally at the present time. He says talking about race today must be how it was for Presbyterians to talk about sex a century ago.  He says he gets letters and messages from white people who say he ought to be killed for advocating separation of the races and opposing miscegenation.

As difficult as it is to do, however, whites must think and talk about race rationally and honestly.  They must not be embarrassed about it and feel guilty about it.  They must be willing to entertain the idea that wanting to live and work among their own people is a natural, healthy feeling they were born with.  Nature gave whites that impulse so that they could evolve as a race.  Living among their own allows them to develop special characteristics and abilities that set them apart from every other race. Living with their own is essential to their survival as a race. What is irrational and destructive is the very thing that is being pushed upon them—a multiracial, culturally conglomerate society and way of life.

It is going to take determination for whites to open up their eyes and their minds to reality, and more courage than they have shown in the past to begin to report to the world what they truly believe. But that is what whites must do.  Whites are being controlled by their fear of being smeared as racists if they disagree with the orthodoxy about race in this country.

In a Free Speech [a periodical Pierce published] article entitled “The Importance of Courage,” Pierce relates how he has dealt with his own fears around being called a racist.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen that same sort of timidity in myself.  When interviewers have asked me whether or not I am a racist, I have responded by asking, “Well, what do you mean by the word ‘racist’?” I’ve tried to wriggle out of giving a direct answer to the question.  I have resolved not to try to wriggle away from saying exactly what I believe when someone asks me whether or not I am a racist because it’s pretty clear what the interviewers have in mind when they ask me whether or not I am a racist.  These days anyone is a racist who refuses to deny the abundantly clear evidence that there are inherited differences in behavior, intelligence, and attitudes.  A racist is any white person who prefers to live among other whites instead of among non-whites and prefers to send his children to white schools.  A racist is any white person who feels a sense of identity with, a sense of belonging to, his own tribe, his own people, his own race, and who shows an interest in his race’s history, heroes, culture, and folkways.  A racist is a white person who finds the members of his own race more attractive physically than members of other races and who is instinctively repulsed by the idea of racial intermarriage or by the sight of a white person intimately involved with a non-white.  A racist is a white person who is disgusted with the multiracial cesspool that America is becoming. . . . Yes, I’m a racist.

*    *    *

William Pierce, 2001.  A brief footnote from me, 2021:

Individuals and groups use exaggerated, distorted, and false negative depictions and stories—White racism is a great example–to get attention, power, self-validation, and advantage, and hurt and destroy people.

My response these days to “You’re a racist” and “Are you a racist?” is “That’s your business, not mine.  But I’ll say this.   I’m not taking any more of your shit.”

Hemingway circa 1950,  when he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees.

My take on Ernest Hemingway is that, first and foremost, he wrote from a journalistic perspective.   That is to say, he sought to tell the truth about what is going on in particular situations and with particular people, whether real or fictional.  Right out of high school, he got a job as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star newspaper.  They gave him a manual of style to follow—use short sentences, eliminate every superfluous word, avoid adjectives—and he took it to heart and stuck to it for the whole of his writing life.

Hemingway was at heart a reporter.  He wasn’t trying to be arty, dazzle you with his prose, entertain you, put things into a context, philosophize, advocate, or moralize.  He was attempting to depict the truth about singular, here-and-now, experienced reality—things and people, actual and imagined.

Bullfights and A Farewell to Arms, it was the same challenge to Hemingway.   There he’d be, early in the morning, standing at his desk (standing was better for his bad back), doing his level best to write the truest, most accurate, sentence he possibly could, the one that best captured the reality of a moment.  When he was satisfied with that sentence, he went on to the next one, and the next one and the next one and the next one.  He worked incredibly hard at it, and he was exceedingly good at it.

For me as a reader, Hemingway has been a mixed experience.  I read him and respond, “Yes, that’s the way it is, that rings true to me, and it’s fundamental, basic, it really matters for something.  He’s showing me what it is like, what he or she is like, at this instant.  And that’s good, and that’s why I keep coming back to his writings.”

But truth isn’t equated with depth.  Despite the “iceberg” talk—all the submerged meanings that are supposed to be there beneath Hemingway’s simple, declarative sentences, for me he stays on the surface of things; no iceberg, or not much of one.   Something can be true without being complete or profound.  She shot him (“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”).  Or did she?   Has Hemingway taken me deep enough to discern why she did whatever she did?   Maybe not.

But then again, maybe it doesn’t matter.  Maybe it’s my problem to think I have to probe beneath the surface of things and articulately figure it all out.  Oscar Wilde said that the secret of living a rewarding life is to stay on the surface of reality.  For Hemingway, that could mean writing today’s sentences describing the struggle of an old fisherman to reel in a marlin and then going out on his boat and doing some marlin fishing himself.  For me, it could mean writing this up about Hemingway and then watching an old French New Wave film.  Do it because for whatever reason it’s there and you feel pressed from within to do it.  Quit trying to understand it, because if you do that you’ll come up with reasons to do it half-assed or later.

It would be nice to have a richer aesthetic experience reading Hemingway’s fiction, and to be caught up in a story with twists and turns that keep me postponing bedtime, but that doesn’t happen for me with him.

Bottom line, while I like Hemingway’s oeuvre, I’m not bowled over by it as I know many people are.  At this writing, Ken Burns’ Hemingway-exalting three-part series was recently on PBS, and I just read a memoir—Dad’s Maybe Book—by the highly regarded contemporary American writer Tim O’Brien, who idolizes him.   I respect Hemingway very much, but connect with his Noble Prize greatness?   I’m not there.

*   *   *

This week, I read Hemingway’s 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees with my usual reaction: good but I wanted more.  Although, I must say that re-reading the book and thinking about it for this writing, I’ve found significantly more in it to like and admire.  That has helped me realize that a lot of my reservations about Hemingway come from my inability to engage him at the level he deserves.

The book takes place in Italy after the end of WW II.  Richard Cantwell, the central protagonist, is a fifty-year-old U.S. army colonel.  The book is about Cantwell (can’t well?) going duck hunting, getting a physical exam from his doctor, and engaging in mawkish lovey-dovey talk with Renata, his 18-year-old Italian girlfriend and regaling her with his exploits and opinions with reference to World Wars I and II.  The book is largely conversations between the two of them with Cantwell doing most of the talking.   Typical of Renata’s side of it:

“I love you,” the girl said.  “I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked.  I love your hand and all your other wounded places. Tell me about Paris, please”

Hemingway in WWI.

Cantwell is more than up for obliging her.  He tells her about fighting with the Italians in WWI (Hemingway was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy during that war), taking Paris, Normandy, the battle of the Hurtgen Forest, and his views on generals Eisenhower, Patton, and Rommel (Hemingway was a war correspondent during WWII).  He is bent on referring to Renata as “Daughter.”   I assumed it was akin to Hemingway’s desire in real life to be known as “Papa,” kind of putting himself one-up.  There’s a lot of sex talk by both of them, but it isn’t clear how much carnality is actually happening, or how much either of them really wants it or, in Cantwell’s case, is up to the task, if you’ll pardon the expression.  Through it all, I had the distinct feeling that I was being set up for Cantwell’s imminent demise, and sure enough, at the end he knocks himself off in the back seat of a chauffeured luxury car—or so I thought; more on that later.

Did Across the River and into the Trees ring true to me?  Yes, it did.   Especially now that I’ve reached antiquity, fifty doesn’t seem all that old.  But nevertheless, I bought the idea that Cantwell thought he had played out the string in his life.  He was still up to hunting ducks proficiently, but that was about it.  Apart from whether or not he could still pull things off, the world wasn’t anywhere near as enthused about him as it once was.  Case in point, he’d been demoted from general to colonel.  I flashed on the title of the late comic actor Charles Grodin’s memoir, It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here.  I could personally relate to being relegated to playing bit parts—if that—in life’s movie.

The truths being offered up to me in Across the River and into the Trees seemed to include what Hemingway wished were so about himself but weren’t—a full-fledged fighting man rather than an ambulance driver and news reporter, that sort of thing.  At the time the book was written, Hemingway was fictional character Cantwell’s age and gaga over a 19-year-old beauty named Adriana Ivanich he had met on a trip to Italy.  From what I can tell from reading biographic accounts, Hemingway’s feelings weren’t reciprocated, and judging by the portly look of him in pictures taken at that time, it is highly unlikely that Adriana would have swooned over his “hard, flat body.”

Hemingway with Adriana Ivanich, who was the real-file counterpart to the Renata character in Across the River and Into the Trees.

Did I like Across the River and into the Trees?   To the extent I like any of Hemingway’s writing, yes.  I’d give it four stars out of five, and consider it to have been a decent enough use of my time.  What I most respected about the book was the care Hemingway put into writing it.  I’ve read critics’ contentions that he knocked it out, getting antsy about not having produced a novel and the money that comes with it since For Whom the Bell Tolls a decade before.  Not so.  Hemingway slaved over this book, I’m sure of it.

I don’t consider Across the River and into the Trees a major literary accomplishment, so why am I putting energy into writing about it?  It’s 11:51 p.m. and I’ve been spent all day typing this up, and I’m far from done.  It’s because after I finished the book I did what I often do with books and films, cruised the internet reading what other people, including scholars, have said about it and it hit me that if the people I read are right, I misread the book’s plot in a big way, and that intrigues me.  I’ll spend the rest of this writing going into that.

*   *   *

I thought Cantwell committed suicide in the back of the car, shot himself with one of his shotguns.   But no, he had a heart attack.   Wikipedia says that, every reviewer and academic I read says that; those SparkNotes-type books say that.  And not only did I miss the ending, all sorts of other things got by me, such as I didn’t pick up that Cantwell had a bad heart condition.

Here are some examples of what I read about Across the River and into the Trees that don’t square with what I took from the book:

[A] flashback to a physical examination that the colonel took three days earlier, when a skeptical army surgeon allowed him to pass even though both men knew the colonel to be dying of heart disease. 

[Cantwell] goes by boat to the Gritti Palace Hotel and, once settled there, dines with his young mistress, Countess Renata. Afterward they make love in a gondola on the way to Renata’s home.

In the end Cantwell dies of a heart attack in his car, shortly after he reminds his driver of the dying words of Stonewall Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.”

After repeating General Stonewall Jackson’s final words, he moves to the back seat of the Buick and firmly closes the door. Jackson [the driver] finds him dead shortly thereafter and reads a note that the colonel had written minutes earlier ordering that the portrait and his shotguns be sent to the hotel for Renata to claim.

What heart trouble?  From the book:

“Wasn’t my cardiograph O.K.?”  the Colonel asked.

“Your cardiograph was wonderful, Colonel. It could have been that of a man of twenty-five.  It might have been that of a boy of nineteen.”

Cantwell had a blood pressure issue, which a lot of people have, including me, and I wouldn’t call that a heart problem.  He was taking mannitol hexanitrate for his blood pressure.   I take lisinopril, but no doctor is telling me that I have a heart problem.

Cantwell’s doctor was concerned about his head not his heart.

 “How many times have you been hit in the head?” the surgeon asked him.  “Concussions, any time you were out cold or couldn’t remember afterwards?”

[Concussions were a big concern around Hemingway.  There’s much speculation that they were causal in his suicide.]

“Maybe ten,” the Colonel said.

“You poor old son of a bitch,” the surgeon said.

“[T]hey make love in a gondola on the way to Renata’s home,” so I read online.  There’s nothing that definitive about their love life anywhere in the book.  With them, maybe there’s consummation and maybe there isn’t, with the reader left to make that call.

Negative reviews of the book scoff at the idea of a young girl being turned on to an old coot like Cantwell.  Implausible?  Really?  A senior military officer, a participant in the central historical events of the age, wicked eyes, wounded places, and a hard, flat body?   A chiseled, weathered older man, strong, a father figure?   No?  Are you sure?  Is fifty that old?  Brad Pitt is 57 and I can imagine a 19-year-old being more than a bit interested in a gondola romp with him.

I kept reading about what a big flop the book was.  True, it wasn’t a critical success, though it had its defenders at the time it was published, and over the years esteem for the book has risen.  While I’m not jumping up and down cheerleading for the book, I take it seriously as a literary work.  A film based on the book is currently being produced, so it’s stayed in the public consciousness after seventy years.  And it was a popular success.  It spent seven weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list.  And it was a commercial success, selling more copies than any other Hemingway book up to that time.

Hemingway in WWII

As for the ending, it sure seemed to me reading the last pages that it wasn’t Cantwell’s heart that had given out.  Rather, his life has given out, and he was going to end it.   I thought about how a decade later with a shotgun blast to his forehead, Hemingway had ended his own life.  In Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway is foretelling his own death, that was my impression.

Here are passages near the end of the book.  There should be some ellipses in this, but I’ve decided they are distracting, so I’ve left them out.

“Turn left,” the Colonel said.

“That’s not the road for Trieste, sir,” Jackson [his driver] said.

“Don’t you point me out a God-damn thing and until I direct you otherwise, don’t speak to me until you are spoken to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry, Jackson. What I mean is I know where I’m going and I want to think.”

You are no longer of any real use to the Army of the United States.  That has been made quite clear.

You have said good-bye to your girl and she has said good-bye to you. That is certainly simple.

Just then it hit him as he had known it would since they had picked up the decoys.  Three strikes is out, he thought, and they gave me four.  I’ve always been a lucky son of a bitch.  It hit him again badly.

He reached into his pocket and found a pad and pencil. He put on the map-reading light, and with his bad hand, printed a short message in block letters.  “Put that in your pocket, Jackson, and act on it if necessary. If the circumstances described occur, it is an order.”

“Yes, sir,” Jackson said, and took the folded order blank with one hand and put it in the top left-hand pocket of his tunic.

“Jackson,” he said. “Do you know what [Southern American Civil War] General Thomas J. [Stonewall] Jackson said on one occasion?  On the occasion of his unfortunate death.  I memorized it once. I can’t respond for its accuracy of course. But this is how it was reported: ‘Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action.’ Then some more delirious stuff.  Then he said, ‘No, no, let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.’

“Pull up at the side of the road and cut to your parking lights.  Do you know the way to Trieste from here?”

“Yes, sir, I have my map.”

“Good. I’m now going to get into the large back seat of this god-damned, over-sized luxurious automobile.”

That was the last thing the Colonel ever said.  But he made the back seat all right and he shut the door. He shut it carefully and well.  After a while Jackson drove the car down the ditch and willow lined road with the car’s big lights on, looking for a place to turn. He found one, finally, and turned carefully. When he was on the right-hand side of the road, facing south towards the road junction that would put him on the highway that led to Trieste, the one he was familiar with, he put his map light on and took out the order blank and read:

IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THE WRAPPED PAINTING AND THE TWO SHOT GUNS IN THIS CAR WILL BE RETURNED TO THE HOTEL GRITTI WHERE THEY WILL BE CLAIMED BY THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNER SIGNED RICHARD CANTWELL, COL., INFANTRY, U.S.A.

“They’ll return them all right, through channels,” Jackson thought, and put the car in gear.

And that’s the end of the book.  Where’s the heart attack death?   It seems like a suicide to me.  Really, the book is much stronger, and makes more sense, as the depiction of someone who isn’t in the game anymore and is left chattering on to a young girl of another generation who really doesn’t connect to what he is talking about.   The battle’s over.  Go into the trees and rest.  I can relate to that sentiment, that impulse.  It’s a true one.

The main point I want to make here, however, comes out of the fact that my experience of Hemingway doesn’t square with the word that comes down to me about him.  When I take him in with my senses—in an immediate, experienced way—he comes off as a highly capable and dedicated, though not particularly informed, insightful or wise, writer and a hard worker, but no huge deal as an artist.  This week, I read his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast—same conclusion.  Even the plot of Across the River and Into the Trees isn’t what the experts tell me it is.  And if Hemingway isn’t what the mediators of reality—the people who do the talking and writing and show me pictures and tell me stories—say he is, what else isn’t what I’ve been led to believe it is?

Recently, I wrote an article that set out a possible defense of White Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin convicted of murdering Black George Floyd during a May, 2020 arrest.  I assumed Chauvin was guilty of something, it was just a question of the extent of his culpability, but writing up the article, it hit me, I’ll be damned, the guy is arguably innocent of the charges against him!  I had accepted uncritically what I had been told and shown about the case (the big thing, the cell phone video of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck and the media’s interpretation of it).  It came home to me, and this Hemingway writing gets at it, that we all need to think things through for ourselves and come to our own conclusions and not just run with whatever people with a public platform put in front of us.  And that means everybody with a public platform, public voice, including the writers for this magazine and me right now.