Places

When in September 1950, John O’Hara reviewed the release of Beyond the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway in the New York Times, a novel set between Trieste and Venice, he was not afraid to define the author, already famous for A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, as the most important writer since Shakespeare. And he did so, on the one hand, by recalling the impressive collection of works, including novels, articles and short stories that 51 year-old Hemingway had published over the previous 27 years of uninterrupted writing and literary testimony, and on the other hand, by bluntly attacking the critics, in his opinion guilty of wanting to drag an artistic personality of such high caliber down to the mediocrity of the common man by calling the writer short-tempered, an alcoholic, a liar and a coward. A few years later, Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea (published in 1952, prize awarded the following year) and then the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954), and although not all critics shared O’Hara’s praise for the novel set in the lagoon, the story about a heartbroken Richard Cantwell is now at the heart of renewed interest, with the recent confirmation that the first film version will be directed by Martin Campbell, starring Pierce Brosnan as Cantwell. Born in New Zealand in 1943, Campbell has an extensive filmography behind him and is known for directing films such as The Mask of Zorro (1998) and for having successfully launched the James Bond series also starring Pierce Brosnan – with the actor’s debut in the role in Golden Eye (1995) – as well as the Daniel Craig version, which marked a clear evolution in the representation of the famous character created by Ian Fleming. In fact, in Campbell’s hands, and following the line of the screenplay written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Oscar winner Paul Higgins, James Bond turned into a more contemporary and mature version of himself, revealing a certainly darker (and more muscular) man than his illustrious predecessors, whose iconic status was not at all undermined, but rather skilfully “rewritten” for the present. The 2006 film Casino Royale is already a classic since it represents a crucial watershed in a big screen narration of the world’s most famous secret agent. Instead, Beyond the River and Into the Trees, tells the story of a colonel in his fifties, stationed in Trieste since 1945 – an area occupied by American and British troops from 1945 to 1954 – a highly decorated war hero who now only feels the weight of his uniform, oppressed by a persistent sense of doom due to his experience in the war as well as his poor health. Set in the elegant rooms of Hotel Gritti and Harry’s Bar in Venice, with the ubiquitous lagoon serving as the natural background for the course of events, the novel unfolds along the Tagliamento river and follows the relationship of troubled Cantwell, who is suffering from a heart condition, with Renata, a young Venetian noblewoman of just nineteen, the perfect counterbalance for his frustration with the world. Many have written that the story often seems an intense and wrathful soliloquy, almost like a treatise or testament of the author/protagonist when it touches topics such as love, war, memories and the future. It is also, at the same time, a work of self-criticism and self-defence, in which death is perceived in a suddenly real and imminent manner, each line pervaded by the “maturity of despair” we read of in the introduction. The lagoon used for duck hunting and vine growing, sometimes rippled and sometimes calm, crossed by speeding gondolas operated by more or less experienced and/or affable boatmen, popular with the elegant ladies and their well-mannered butlers, becomes the ideal background, so misty and rare, for a story in which space and time overlap and become confused in long flashbacks in which the protagonist attempts to lay himself bare. The shooting of the film directed by Campbell will start in the early months of 2017, while initial location scouting has already taken place: all we have to do is wait to see Hemingway’s lagoon at the movies.

Words Silvia Schirinzi 
Photography Paolo Monti