A Boy & a River

"As I get older," Poet T. S. Eliot has said, "I find I can't read novels." But Poet Eliot, 62, was not too old to read one novel that will hit the bookstalls this week; he was so much in favor of it that he had written an introduction to the book--which, he says simply, is "a masterpiece."

It "makes you see the [Mississippi] River," says Eliot, "as it is and was and always will be, more clearly than . . . any other description of a river known to me." And the hero, Eliot goes on to say, is "one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction; not unworthy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet . . ."

The book which drew such hot blood from one of the stoniest critics of the day was, on the face of it, the simple account of how a boy floated down the "Father of Waters" on a raft in the middle of the last century, and of the adventures he met with on the way. The story is told in the first person, by the boy himself, in a lingo that rolls fresh and sweet off his tongue--the real true talk of Missouri a hundred years ago. Eliot calls the author's style "a new discovery in the English language."

Brief excerpt: "The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift-logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late ... It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next."

The only man who could write that way about the vast Mississippi or a small boy was, of course, Mark Twain, and the book is a reissue of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chanticleer; $2).

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