Merrily, Merrily

By R.Z. Shepard

DRIFTING by Stephen Jones, with illustrations by Richard Brown. 442 pages. Macmillan. $12.50.

"To most people," says Stephen Jones of Shennuck, R.I., "things do not flow, especially small bodies of water in their vicinity." The former Coast Guardsman, lobsterman and author of the bizarre novel Turpin believes that most people view such water as a static extension of their own property, "a background against which lawn furniture may repose." In Drifting, an antique-flavored narrative of his small-craft outings in Louisiana, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island, Jones asserts his ancient riparian rights to re-establish spiritual and public relations with the basic element that flows and quenches.

Sprayed and Spayed. Shoving off in a 10-ft. Styrofoam hull, sometimes with friends, sometimes with his wife, the mysterious "L," Jones bobs along the polluted waters that separate his fellow citizens one from the other and each from himself. The urban river, says Jones, "is the memory bank of all past bodily errors, assaulting the most carefully bathed, sprayed, spayed and pressed." To Jones' eye, despoliation, like nearly everything else in Drifting, can be delightfully ambiguous. The Lincoln Tunnel reminds him of an extended lavatory wall; there is fascination in the waverings of tin cans, tires and old shoes under a few inches of water.

Yet drifting can be dangerous. In a narrow South Jersey channel, flanked by buildings and shadowed by vehicular traffic, the Joneses are nearly run down by the Kuddle-Toi, Too, an expanse of costly cabin cruiser operated by a corpulent man who apparently makes little distinction between yachting and barreling a large sedan. "We're gonna crush your crappy little boat!" cries the man's wife, as Mrs. Jones skillfully mars the word Kuddle with her paddle. In Delaware, Jones accidentally splits his wife's scalp with an anchor, and later nearly comes to grief against a drawbridge as a guest on a Chinese junk manned by incompetents and flying a masturbating pet monkey from its masthead.

Wharfing Yarns. Mostly, however, drifting gives Jones the chance to chart the indirections of his own ironic, eccentrically ballasted mind. It is the kind of mind that can easily mingle references to Henry James, Robbe-Grillet and Li-yue with equations on dam overflow, yarns about wharf characters and slices of local history. It is the kind of mind that can see The Story of O and Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain as two monastic classics and, like Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn, revel in naming objects for their own sake. Jones' notes at the ends of his chapters are models of tart New England wit and his conversations with his friends have the unworldly, though undeniably human quality of Alice in Wonderland or Edward Lear's poem about the Jumblies--who, incidentally, did their drifting in a sieve.

As distinct from those wanderers who, to mock the present, dress like Depression Okies, trading-post Tontos or deserters from the Bolivian army. Jones seems very much at ease with himself. Where a certified counterculture writer like Richard Brautigan beats a well-attended retreat into an America of little more than his own enchanting imagination, Jones and his friends privately brave real effluvia. It would be a grand experience to be up a creek with them--with or without a paddle. sbR.Z. Shepard

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