Hemingway and Italy: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives ed. by Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway and Italy: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives ed. by Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott Leonardo Buonomo Hemingway and Italy: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives. Edited by Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. 262 $79.95 (cloth). In their introduction to Hemingway and Italy: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives, editors Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott emphasize the formative and pervasive role that the Italian experience played in Ernest Hemingway's life and career. As they justly remind us, Italy not only provided the setting for two of Hemingway's novels, A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Across the River and into the Trees (1950), as well as a number of short stories, but remained an important presence, a rich emotional and cultural reference point in Hemingway's imagination even after he ceased travelling there. This topic is, in their words, "now almost a full century old," and Hemingway and Italy provides readers with a timely opportunity to assess the state of the art in relevant current scholarship (2). Working with a selection of papers originally presented at the Hemingway Society's biennial international conference in June 2014 in Venice, Cirino and Ott have divided the book into five parts which neatly cover the most significant areas of Hemingway's relationship with Italy, namely his wartime experience, his travels and friendships with locals, his treatment of Italian settings and characters, and his comparative assessment of Italy and his home country. Hemingway and Italy also includes a previously unpublished Hemingway sketch entitled "Torcello Piece," a lovely act of homage to the island in the Venetian lagoon, which serves as an appropriate prologue for a book in which Venice looms large. That prologue ties in nicely with the first two parts ("Reminiscences" and "Hemingway's Italy in Context") which, given their focus on Venice, seem to encourage, in particular, a reconsideration of Across the River and into the Trees, a novel which undoubtedly occupies a much lower status in the Hemingway canon than its "Italian" predecessor A Farewell to Arms. Often misguidedly read as a thinly autobiographical narrative, Across the River and into the Trees features prominently in the unassumingly eloquent personal recollections of former ambassador Giacomo Ivancich, who first met Hemingway in 1948 in Venice when he was sixteen, and whose sister Adriana was the initial inspiration for the novel's protagonist, Renata. Hemingway's handling of the setting (both in spatial and symbolic terms) can be further appreciated if placed in the context of the illustrious history of the literary representation of Venice (from Shakespeare to Byron, Browning, Ruskin, James, and Pound), which is precisely what Sergio Perosa's and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi's contributions to Hemingway and Italy make possible. On the other hand, Scott Donaldson's biographical sketch of Hemingway, his first wife Hadley Richardson, and their forays into Italy in the early 1920s, serves as an informative introduction to the essays on A Farewell to Arms in Part Three. Donaldson efficiently recounts the profound impact that Hemingway's experience on the Italian front in World War I had on his writing and indeed his view of the human condition. Donaldson calls particular attention to Hemingway's repeated attempts (both in real life and in his work) to retrieve that Italy (and, one assumes, his former younger self), only to find that the scene had shifted and it was hard to find his bearings. Donaldson also touches on the evolution of Hemingway's views about Mussolini: from an early sympathetic interview to subsequent, increasingly damning, portrayals of the Italian dictator. Indeed, as Alberto Lena notes in his essay on A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway became "one of the first American writers who understood the danger of Fascism" (80). Inviting us to revisit the novel's Italian ideological milieu, Lena shows how the older Hemingway took to task not only his own youthful romanticizing of the Italian army, but also the exploitation of patriotic discourse in World War I Italy as well as in the fascist-ruled Italy to which Hemingway returned as a reporter. [End Page 236] John D. Schwetman's essay also discusses the way Hemingway critiqued ideological constructions of...