The River, the Lagoon, and the Distant Island

Piero Ambrogio Pozzi

The River, the Lagoon, and the Distant Island

The Story of Ernest and Adriana

Translated by Allyson McKay

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Dragomanni

The River, the Lagoon, and the Distant Island

The Story of Ernest and Adriana

by Piero Ambrogio Pozzi

Translated by Allyson McKay

Original title:

Il Fiume, la Laguna e l’Isola Lontana

La storia di Ernest e Adriana

First edition: June 2014

Copyright © 2014 by the respective authors

Published with the support of Dragomanni (http://www.dragomanni.it)

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Ebook created with Writer2ePub by Luca Calcinai and Sigil by Strahinja Marković and John Schember

The River, the Lagoon, and the Distant Island

The Story of Ernest and Adriana

by

Piero Ambrogio Pozzi

Translated by Allyson McKay

Latisana, Tagliamento and San Michele al Tagliamento on a watercolour map from the first half of the 18th century, by A. Banchieri. We can see the Da Vincian ferry where there are now bridges. In the bottom left-hand corner, we can see the Mocenigo villa in San Michele, with its two elegant stables designed by Longhena. The villa, which later belonged to the Ivanciches, was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1944–1945. Sourced from http://www.latisana.com/storia.php (14 June 2014)

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Dragomanni

I also thought ‘The River, the Lagoon, and the Distant Island’ was a good title,

but more suited to a novel than poems.

It would be the right title for our story, partner,

for the story that I will never write, because no-one would believe it:

‘Someone will think this and someone will think that

and only you and I will know and we will be dead.’

Adriana Ivancich, La Torre Bianca

This book is dedicated to the memories

of Adriana Gräfin von Rex Ivancich-Biaggini

and Ernest Miller Hemingway

Introduction

On the afternoon of Friday 10 December 1948, ¹ in the rain, Ernest Hemingway met Adriana Ivancich for the first time, at the Quattro Strade crossroads in Latisana. From that moment, everything about Adriana – her life, her haunts, and especially her spirit, and the love that she incited – became an inspiration for Ernest. His love flowed over into his literary writings, which are accessible to all, and into his private correspondence, where it can still be found, despite the letters’ being subject to Mary Welsh Hemingway’s ‘filter’ before being published posthumously. ² Without that meeting, Ernest Hemingway’s last two books, Across the River and Into the Trees (Across the River) and The Old Man and the Sea, could not have been written.

This work attempts to demonstrate the importance of Adriana in Hemingway’s final works.

In a letter written to Bernard Berenson in August 1949, quoting Kipling, Hemingway writes about the Veneto region: ‘A man has only one virginity to lose and there his heart will ever be.’ ³ It is difficult to imagine that such a loaded statement refers to anything but the virginity of his soul, which he had recently lost to Adriana – after all, he had been in love with the Veneto for some 30 years.

In a letter written to Charles Scribner the following day, he talks about Venice’s countesses: ‘But the finest one writes a lovely letter too. You would like her very much I think. Is an admirable woman. All this time I work at being a good and faithful husband to Mary whom I love. Think you will like book.…’ ⁴

The trailing off cannot be accidental. Ernest is devoted to Mary, as is to be expected, but admires Adriana above anyone else, and Venice above anywhere else. This admiration will become apparent in Across the River, the book he is writing, which – as is to be expected – he dedicates to Mary. In the same letter he says: ‘Christ I wish I was there now for this week-end.’ ⁵

He was always frank with his publisher and friend, Charles Scribner: ‘…These are our local moral problems. Also that I love A[driana] to die of it and that I love Mary as she should be loved; I hope.’ ⁶ Scribner probably had a confidential relationship with Adriana as well. In talking to Ernest about him she referred to him as un tesoro [a treasure]. ⁷

To Harvey Breit, who was asking about the character of Renata in Across the River, Ernest replied on 17 July 1950 that ‘it was a portrait – possibly unsuccessful – of someone he [Hemingway] loved more than anyone in the world.’ ⁸

In a letter dated September 1950 to his friend, General Charles Lanham, he says of Gianfranco Ivancich: ‘He is the brother of a girl I know in Venice (a town I left my heart in and haven’t been able to find the son of a bitch since).’ ⁹

In the confines of his heart, Ernest leads a transfigured life with Adriana for seven years. This life is lived in parallel to the everyday life that prevents him giving free rein to his feelings and finding new and different inspiration. During those seven years, Adriana blossoms both as a woman and as a poet. She accompanies Ernest to the summit of his art. He once said to his son Gregory: ‘Adriana is so lovely to dream of, and when I wake I’m stronger than the day before and the words pour out of me.’ ¹⁰ The relationship was unbalanced, both with respect to the strength of their feelings and with respect to their age: he was 49 and she was 18 when they first met. Colonel Cantwell is aged 50 and Renata is almost 19 in Across the River. The number 19 appears often in that book, in the way that pleasant thoughts do.

Adriana was the third child of the noble Carlo Ivancich and Dora Betti. She was a member of a Venetian family – whose forebears were ship owners in Lussinpiccolo in Quarnaro – who owned land and a villa in San Michele al Tagliamento. The villa was across the river from Latisana, where she first met Hemingway. Her family also owned a palazzo in Calle del Rimedio in Venice. They also owned Palazzo Ferro and Palazzo Fini next to Palazzo Pisani, which later became the Hotel Gritti.

Readers of Hemingway’s later books might also find it helpful to read Ho guardato il cielo e la terra ¹¹ and La Torre Bianca ¹² by Adriana Ivancich, although they are extremely hard to come by. The first is a collection of poems, the latter the tale of her years as Hemingway’s muse and platonic love, which was possibly written in reaction to Mary Hemingway’s autobiography, How it Was. ¹³ Adriana’s books offer plenty of clues to their extraordinary love story. I will examine these many clues carefully and try to refrain from making their interpretation too emotive, to avoid imagining things that did not ever actually happen.

This book is closely based on La Torre Bianca. I have borrowed heavily from it to structure my story. As such, I did not feel it was necessary to reference quotations from that work. My primary sources are exclusively the books by Adriana and Gianfranco Ivancich; Hemingway’s books, which I re-translated for this purpose; letters written by them or to them, and objective data sourced from several academic studies and biographies. I have only used the internet and newspapers to clarify a few details to avoid the trap of many, oft-recycled, absurdities, such as malicious gossip, false conjections and poor translations.

Piero Ambrogio Pozzi

In the Rain

Their meeting in the rain in Latisana, which is the opening scene for La Torre Bianca, inspired the main characters in Across the River. Hemingway is Colonel Cantwell; Adriana is Renata; the big, comfortable Buick is the big, comfortable Buick. Adriana’s friend, Baron Nanuk Franchetti, who is the equally extravagantly named Baron Alvarito, was waiting for them in the hunting lodge in the Valle [marshland] di San Gaetano near Caorle, between the Livenza and Tagliamento rivers. Another Venetian friend of Adriana’s, the lanky Count Carlo di Robilant (who was of her father’s generation), was the inspiration for the lanky Count Andrea.

During that first ride in the Buick, they talk about the villa in San Michele al Tagliamento, that was destroyed by Allied bombing, which Colonel Cantwell describes as being disgracefully close to the railway overbridge. It is, or rather, was, the Ivancich family’s country house and formerly belonged to the Mocenigo family. Today, only relics of the elegant stables built by Baldassare Longhena remain.

After the usual pleasantries, Hemingway’s first words are to lament the destruction of the villa across the river and through the trees. ‘The war is a bloody dirty whore’, he exclaims. This gives a hint of the terrible, devastating force that the war also had on Hemingway as a writer – to the point of drying up his pen. From the time the United States entered the war in December 1941 until the moment he met Adriana, Hemingway experienced seven biblical years of creative famine. This came to