Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse by Andrea di Robilant

Abstract

Reviewed by: Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse by Andrea di Robilant Mark Cirino Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse. By Andrea di Robilant. Knopf, 2018. 368 pp. Cloth $26.95. Andrea di Robilant introduces Autumn in Venice, his deft, readable chronicle of Ernest Hemingway's mystifying relationship with Adriana Ivancich in a curious way: "I have a faded memory of Adriana" (xii). With this tantalizing remark, di Robilant lays bare the charm and great value of this book, but also its inevitable frustration. Just as Hemingway said he felt like he was struck by "lightning at the crossroads" when he met Ivancich in Latisana in 1948, this book also finds itself at crossroads of its own, caught between being an intimate personal reflection of di Robilant's father and his group of friends, and also an objective study of Ernest Hemingway and his "muse." As he openly confesses, di Robilant does not know Ivancich well enough to make it a memoir; instead, his narrative addresses the Hemingway fan who is casually intrigued by this dalliance, rather than hoping to open a new strain of Hemingway scholarship. [End Page 106] Despite its limitations, the book's contributions to Hemingway studies are not insignificant. To have di Robilant working in English is a considerable contribution to our understanding of Hemingway's post-war Italian years. He does not bluff his treatment of all the ancillary characters in Hemingway's circle, minute details of Italian culture, its geography and language. He has authentic insight into the Veneto of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This is the first English language treatment of Hemingway's immersion into the post-war Italian aristocracy that introduces all the familiar names of Hemingway's biography (Franchetti, Kechler, Pivano; and yes, di Robilant) and allows them to blossom into characters with personalities and traits that individuate them. At its best, Autumn in Venice shares details no previous writer has unearthed. In a footnote (59), di Robilant relates that he found the carpenter in Fossalta di Piave who loaned Hemingway the shovel that he used in 1948 to bury money at the site of his wounding, the symbolic gesture that Hemingway memorialized in Across the River and into the Trees. What an astounding act of detective work! Another revelatory footnote explores the mysterious "girl from Turin" that Hemingway knew during World War I and her nebulous role in the young Hemingway's life (285); it is a knowing excavation of a previously underutilized piece of information. That access to the minutiae of Hemingway's Italian world needed to be the prevailing register of the book, rather than consigned to almost apologetic footnotes. No previous writer has ever been more authoritative about Hemingway's post-censorship publishing arrangement in Italy. Di Robilant writes expertly about Hemingway's important relationship with Mondadori, his exclusive Italian publisher—both their business and personal relationship. Hemingway's relationship with Mondadori was also leveraged to great effect for Ivancich, too, leading to her providing the illustrations for the book covers of Across the River and into the Trees and The Old Man and the Sea. Mondadori also published Ivancich's book of poems in 1953. Di Robilant's commentary about Fernanda Pivano, Hemingway's exclusive Italian translator, is useful and adds granularity to the network of personal and professional relationships Hemingway maintained during his Italian sojourn. Di Robilant is on less firm footing when it comes to analysis of Hemingway's writing. His claim, for instance, that Across the River and into the Trees is the most scrupulously edited of all Hemingway's novels is demonstrably untrue. The novel, in fact, was hurriedly finished and never subjected to any serious revision. Di Robilant asserts: "Always a careful, even obsessive editor [End Page 107] of his own prose, he raised the bar to a new level in the case of Across the River and into the Trees, reworking each sentence, each paragraph with a maniacal attention to detail" (174). In fact, rather than being "painstaking" (174), a study of the manuscript and the galleys reveals that, unwisely, Hemingway changed comparatively little from the first draft; if in previous novels...