Last year, in a rare revelation of his writing plans, Ernest Hemingway let it be known that he was writing a short novel: Across the River and into the Trees (see above). He was sidetracking work on a much longer novel to do so; the idea had come to him while recovering from serious illness. U.S. book circles were fascinated. As the story had it, Hemingway wanted to get some things down on paper that he had never managed to say before; Across the River was going to be the Hemingway credo in a nutshell. When a magazine version of the book appeared in Cosmopolitan earlier this year, it raised other questions. Wasn't the novel's hero a pretty thinly disguised version of Hemingway himself? What was Hemingway trying to say about Allied commanders in World War II? And—in view of the book's flaws—was Hemingway satisfied with it?
TIME cabled some of these questions to Novelist Hemingway. His reply, cabled from Cuba:
HEMINGWAY was ill with erysipelas, streptococcus, staphylococcus and anthrax infections in Cortina d'Ampezzo and in hospital in Padova. English spelling Padua. Received 13 million units of penicillin and 3,000,000 more later in Cortina.
His credo is to write as well as he can about things that he knows and feels deeply about.
The present novel is about love, death, happiness and sorrow. It is also about the city of Venice and the Veneto, which Hemingway has known and loved since he was a young boy.
The novel was written in Cortina d'Ampezzo; at Finca Vigia, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba; and in Paris and Venice.
It is the best novel that Hemingway can write, and he has tried to make a distillation in it of what he knows about the above subjects plus one other subject, which is war.
Hemingway is a writer not a soldier, nor has he ever claimed to be one. His son John, however, is a captain of infantry in Berlin and was severely wounded, a prisoner after he was wounded and later a hostage.
To resume answers. You have held me to $25 [cable tolls], so will omit details of any action or actions that Hemingway has participated in. His bad knee was acquired by an enemy Minenwerfer explosion which blew off the right knee cap.
Hemingway is bitter about nobody. But the colonel in his book is. Do you know any non-bitter fighting soldiers or any one who was in Hürtgen [Forest] to the end who can love the authors of that national catastrophe which killed off the flower of our fighting men in a stupid frontal attack?
Hemingway has no opinion in regard to General Eisenhower except that he is an extremely able administrator and an excellent politician. H. believes he did a marvelous job in organizing the invasion, if he was actually the man who organized it. H. means Hemingway, which I am tired of writing, and he in the above sentence means Eisenhower. Let us revere Eisenhower, Bedell Smith, the memory of Georgie Patton. But Hemingway refuses to revere Montgomery as man or soldier, and would rather be stood up against a wall and shot than make that reverence. He is the gentleman who took our gasoline to do what he could not do.