Saturday, July 21, 2012

Richard Bissell's Stretch on the River


I’ve been rereading, for the upteenth time, A Stretch on the River, the first novel by my favorite American writer, Richard Bissell. Not only is Bissell my favorite writer, he’s also the writer who made me want to be a writer myself. And I’m not the only one. Elmore Leonard has said that 75% of what he knows about writing he learned from reading the books of Richard Bissell.
        Richard Pike Bissell was born June 27, 1913, in Dubuque, Iowa. He was the second son in a prominent, wealthy family. He was educated at Exeter and Harvard. But somehow all this class and culture did not seem to matter much to him, and he chose to join the working class.
        After college he became an ordinary seaman, then worked as a deck hand on riverboats on the Mississippi, Ohio, and Monongahela Rivers. Eventually he earned a pilot’s license on the Upper Mississippi, the first writer since Mark Twain to have that distinction. His novels A Stretch on the River (1950) and High Water (1954) draw from his experiences working on tugs and barges on the Mississippi.
        A Stretch on the River is the story of Bill Joyce, the second son in a wealthy family, who decides to forsake high society and sign on as a deckhand on a Diesel towboat called the Inland Coal. He finds himself keeping company with hard-working, hard-drinking, fast-talking, loud-laughing rowdies, not to mention lady friends in port towns up and down the river. Bissell’s ear for dialogue is brilliant, funny, and true. He does clearly like the work and the working life of the working class—this is his own experience he’s writing about, after all—but he doesn’t romanticize it or downplay the difficulty or the danger. One remarkable chapter is about the drowning death of a deckhand named Shorty, told almost entirely by Shorty himself in one long paragraph that goes on for six pages. That may sound gimmicky, but it’s not. Wallace Stegner included this chapter as a standalone story in his anthology Great American Short Stories.
        Not all of Bissell’s work experience came from the river. He also worked in the family clothing business, which he called the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory in 7-1/2¢. That novel, his second (and his third book) brought him fame and fortune in the form of the Broadway musical The Pajama Game, for which Bissell co-wrote the script. The musical in turn formed the basis of his fourth novel, Say Darling (1957), an affectionate but stinging satire of the New York show business scene, as seen by a Midwestern hick brought in to convert a novel into a musical. Say Darling itself became a musical, and once again Bissell co-wrote the script.
        His next novel, and for my money his best, was Goodbye, Ava (1960), set back in Dubuque (called Blue Rock in the book) and back on the river, this time not on a tugboat but on a houseboat. By this time, Dick and Marian Bissell were living in a houseboat on the Mississippi, docked at the harbor of his home town. In Goodbye, Ava Bissell is at the top of his form, focusing more on the people than on the dangers of life on the river.
        Richard Bissell also wrote travel articles and comedic nonfiction, but his best work is his fiction. And his best fiction is found in his four Midwestern novels, be they on the Mississippi River or in the town he calls Junction City in 7-1/2¢ and Blue Rock in Goodbye, Ava. Both towns are thinly disguised versions of Dubuque, where Richard Bissell was born, where he lived most of his life, and where he died on May 4, 1977. His tombstone, which he shares with Marian, is a giant granite slab with a map of the Upper Mississippi carved into it from top to bottom.
        No grander epitaph is necessary, but if there were room, it would be good to see, etched into the granite, this passage from The Monongahela:
        “To have a river in your blood, you have to work on her for wages.…Oh, they’re not all bold and reckless adventurers. A heap of them are as dumb and drab and spiritless as can be, but in the main they want to go places and do big things out under the sky. And when the whistle blows and they have to get out and make a lock they cuss and moan and claim they’re gonna quit. But mostly they stay. That’s the way it always was on the river, and the way it always will be, until the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny and the Tygart and the West Branch run dry, and the last steamboat whistle has echoed back off the hills, filling the valleys with that mournful music that haunts you wherever you go.”

16 comments:

  1. Wonderful learning what author inspired you, John. For me, it's P.D. James. Hopefully, we'll inspire someone, someday--do you think? (smile) It's a nice thought.

    Great post,

    Madeline

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    1. That is a nice thought, Madeline. But for now we should be content to entertain them, I suppose. That's a writer's first job, I think.

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  2. John - this is a lovely tribute. I've never read any of Bissell's work, but I think I'm going to start!

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    1. You won't regret it, Bill. Unfortunately, most if not all of his books are out of print, but you can find good copies at abebooks.com.

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  3. This was nicely done, John. The author who spoke to my heart and is an inspiration is Joyce Carol Oates.

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  4. Like Bill, I haven't read any of Bissell's work. Thanks for telling us where we might find copies of his books. I'm a big Elmore Leonard fan; so Bissell inspired him!

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  5. What a wonderful post. I never heard of Bissell, but I have heard of THE PAJAMA GAME because the original Broadway production kick-started the career of my favorite actress, Shirley MacLaine. She was an understudy when Carol Haney was out with a broken ankle. Shirley went on and the rest is show biz history.

    Now, as you discuss them, Bissell's books sound like great reading, so I will have to look them up. Sigh. So many books, so little time.

    Pat Browning

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  6. Many thanks for sharing the above about my Dad. It's great to know that there are more writers out in the world, who, like you, were inspired by him. Besides Elmore Leonard, another luminary who enjoys and collects my Dad's works is Dan Rather; I recall seeing him on the tv several years ago, talking about who most inspired him to write the way he does.

    Yesterday marked the 100th birthday of my Dad. While I didn't read any of his works to celebrate, I chose to enjoy the music that filled our lives as we were growing up. So, I spent most of the day playing the music he loved, among them Jimmie Rodgers "The Yodeling Brakeman", Meade Lux Lewis, Benny Goodman, Hoagy Carmichael, Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, Louis Armstrong, Lotte Lenya, Glenn Miller, Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, and many, many more.

    I say with a smile on my face that wherever my Dad is now, what he did today included doing as many things as possible near any body of water including boating on it, swimming in it, looking for places where no one else is so he could enjoy the serenity of the river, and building bonfires on beaches that are buried deep within sloughs off the sides of the Mississippi, which we did so many times when I was growing up.

    Thanks again for sharing the reasons why you were inspired by him, along with the mini-bio of him.
    All my best-
    Sam Bissell

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    1. What a pleasure and honor it is to hear from you, Sam. And I'm also delighted to learn that Richard Bissell, to whom I dedicated my first published book, Play Melancholy Baby, enjoyed the same kind of music that I do. Thanks so much for responding!

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    2. Hey Sam, when I was growing up in Dubuque we used to moor at Frentress. It seemed like there was always a large, comfortable houseboat anchored by itself (or with another boat) on the NW side of the lake across from the marina. Was this your family's boat as my mom claimed it was? If so, what was it's name and do you know what became of it? Thank you. Steve Merritt

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    3. Hi, Steve-
      Sorry it's been so long since I've seen this. Yes, some kind of Bissell houseboat was moored in Frentress Lake. The white one was my Uncle's and it was quite large though it was only 3 rooms, probably 15' x 30'; it was named Hernando's Hideaway, after the song from The Pajama Game, which my Dad wrote. It was always quite neat and trim**.....unlike my Dad's more quaint houseboat, The Cave, which although it was white, it was a bit dingy with green trim. The Cave had all sorts of things hanging on the outside of it including lobster buoys, tackle, small flags of some sort, odds and ends found on sandbars and the link; it was about the same size as my Uncle's. Unfortunately, the hull (or pontoons, more likely) of The Cave split and it sank one winter in the early 80s. As I recall, my cousin, John Bissell, had a rather odd houseboat on Frentress, as well; it was probably 8' x 15' and had a single square room on it so he could sleep on it but it also had an upper shelf in the room so he could look out the top of it, like an outlook tower. It was a drab grey. We had another much larger houseboat, The No Bottom, which was always tied up in Dubuque Harbor; while it never made it into Frentress Lake, it was frequently tied up to an island that was just outside the slough that is used to get to Frentress from the Mississippi during the summers....though not after 1975, when the houseboat left the river to return to land as an office for a business down around Bellevue, I believe.
      Thanks for mentioning your interest in my family's houseboats, Steve.
      All my best-
      Sam
      PS** I forgot to mention that when my Uncle's houseboat left the river, it landed on a piece of my Grandmother's property, out off the end of Plymouth Street, next to the Golf Club.

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  7. What a pleasure and honor it is to hear from you, Sam. And I'm also delighted to learn that Richard Bissell, to whom I dedicated my first published book, Play Melancholy Baby, enjoyed the same kind of music that I do. Thanks so much for responding!

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  8. Love this post, John. I see that a year ago I vowed to look up Bissell's books. Life got in the way, but it's never too late. Will do it today!
    Pat Browning

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  9. As a longtime River Rat, got on my first towboat in 1962, Richard Bissell captured the rhythms of the life. The most important thing his writing showed me was, that even though the equipment changed over the years, the people never did. The River men Twain worked with, were the same Bissell worked with and the same I rode with.

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    1. I envy you, Greg. Wish I'd had a chance to work on, or at least ride on, a working boat on the Mississippi.

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