This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favourite riverine travelogues – R. M. Patterson’s Dangerous River (1953), Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), and Tim Butcher’s Blood River (2007) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.
More than vivid action, more than pungent detail, more than memorable imagery, what I seek in literature is authenticity of personal experience. These three brilliant books brim with it. They are wonderful personal journals – living, breathing accounts of what their authors saw, did, felt, and thought as they made their way down (or, in the case of Dangerous River, up) the mighty rivers that are their great subject. What makes them personal is the author’s “I,” which is present on almost every page – never intrusively, never out of egotism, but only for the purpose of indicating that what’s being told really happened. The “I” authenticates the experience being described. Patterson writes, “I passed through the Gate of the Nahanni, where the walls close in and the quiet green river glides silently between tawny precipices that climb a thousand feet sheer into the sky,” and I believe him. I believe he was there. Raban writes, “I went through Lock 6 at Trempealeau and the river changed again, into another crazy terra-cotta of islands, lakes and creeks, with the buoyed channel running close under the bluff on the Minnesota shore,” and I believe him; I believe he was there. Butcher writes, “The first evidence I had that we had reached Ubundu was the sound of the rapids. For hundreds of kilometres the Congo River had ben mute and yet suddenly, as we rounded a headland, I could make out the sound of rushing water. It was terrifying.” Again, I believe him. I believe he was there. Actually, it’s not a matter of belief; it’s a matter of proof– credible evidenceadduced by invaluable eye witnesses.
Would it be different if these sentences were written in the third person? For me – absolutely. The third person is dry and impersonal. It’s detached from the reality it’s reporting. Patterson, Raban, and Butcher are not detached from their rivers. Quite the opposite: they are intimately attached. Their use of the first person powerfully conveys their attachment.
Are these books self-portraits? Yes, totally. Raban, in Old Glory, encounters a resident of Muscatine, Brad Funk, who questions his motives for making the trip. “I’m worried that you’re going to condescend to us,” Funk says. Raban replies, “I’m just passing through, trying to watch what happens to me.” Funk says, “But you’re going to write a book.” Raban replies, “Yes, but it won’t be an ‘objective’ book. It’s not going to be the inside story on America. It might be the inside story on me, but that’s rather different.”
It might be the inside story on me. Right there, I think, Raban shows awareness of the double aspect of his project – both window and mirror. The same goes for Dangerous River and Blood River. They’re subjective to the bone. That’s what I love about them. They reflect the singular, idiosyncratic personalities of their authors. For example, here is Patterson, in Dangerous River, battling mosquitoes:
It had been a devil of a day. The night before had been hot, for there was hardly any darkness and no time for the earth to cool. The early morning was dead still and hot: it was the worst morning for mosquitoes that I ever saw. As the sun rose, the hum outside my net rose to a savage humming note: I counted the brutes on a certain area of the net, and then I multiplied that out and made a very conservative estimate of the number in the air. Why, dammit, there were two thousand of the maddening insects waiting out there, shouting for my blood! It wasn’t even worth fighting with them over breakfast; I would go straight on, and stop and breakfast when the breeze got up. So I reached out from under the net, grabbed a pot of cold rice and raisins and got it inside with me and had some of that. Then I dressed myself and oiled my face and hands with citronella and put on my bit of head protection – a square yard of mosquito netting, folded cornerways into a triangle of double thickness. I put this over my head like a shawl, crossed the ends under my chin, put them round the back of my neck and fetched them to the front again and tied them there, tucking them down into my shirt which I buttoned up tightly. Then I crammed a hat on my head over the netting, crawled out, tore camp to pieces, threw it into the canoe and grabbed the pole and went on.
That detailed procedural description of how he fashioned a mosquito head net for himself is pure Patterson. He’s lively, practical, resourceful.
Raban, in Old Glory, learns the intricacies of the Mississippi as he goes. Sometimes he makes mistakes. For example, on the first day of his trip, he enters a lock prematurely. Here’s what happens:
I wasn’t even supposed to be here. In my newly won assurance I hadn’t troubled to notice the red light at the entrance, and as my boat slopped and skidded in the lock I got cursed for a blind sonafabitch sh*t who should’ve waited for the f*ckin’ green light, you asshole. Were they going to drown me in cold blood in order to teach me a lesson? The lockman allowed me my rope only after he’d run through such a lexicon of expletives that the torrent of excrement being tipped on me from the lock wall was roughly equal to the volume of turbulent water on which I was just managing to keep afloat. I was torn between fright, fury and bleating apology. As I sank into the emptying chamber, I heard my own whinnying voice collapse into a stutter of f’s. F-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f, I went, my own attempt at obscenity turning as seemly as a line of asterisks in a Victorian novel.
My own whinnying voice – Raban’s self-portrait is often unflattering. He’s as hard on himself as he is on other people.
All three writers candidly express their emotions – joy, anger, anxiety, frustration, fear. Butcher, in Blood River, makes his fear palpable. It’s in his legs:
My legs ached with fear, but I tried to stride up the river bank with confidence, approaching a group of men sitting silently on the ground next to a quiver of beached pirogues.
It’s in his eyes:
I knew my bravado to be a fragile thing with an unreliably short half-life. I also knew it would not be long before the Congolese gunman worked this out. Stomping off purposefully through the undergrowth, I was desperate to maintain the illusion of control.
All three writers are at once humanly fallible and thrillingly adventurous. They’re wonderful company. I admire them immensely.
Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
