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Winner of the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Award.
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First published January 1, 1981
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April 10, 2024
Snarky – 1: crotchety, snappish. 2: sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner; 3: sarcastically critical or mocking and malicious
When Jonathan Raban was a seven-year-old boy living in England, he first read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and fell in love with the Mississippi River. Or maybe he fell in love with Mark Twain’s graphic portrayal of the river. I read the same book at about the same age, but I have a more substantial basis for my fascination with the subject. Almost my entire life has been spent within at least thirty minutes of America’s mightiest natural force. The only exception being the years I spent going to college and even then I was never more than ninety minutes from the Mississippi. I have moved from my birthplace in almost a straight line north but never east nor west (or south, for that matter).
The result of Raban’s fascination was "Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi," published in 1981. It is the story of his attempt to travel almost the full course of the mighty river, 1400 miles, in a small sixteen-foot boat powered by a 15 h.p. motor.
I first read the book a number of years ago and recently gave it a second look after reading Raban’s latest travel book. I have to admit that I liked the book better the first time than I did the second go around.
Here is the problem as I see it. Raban loved the river, but didn’t have much use for what Americans have created along its banks, which in many cases is understandable. However, he seems to have a visceral disregard for the people that he meets along the way. He seems to be – well – snarky in his regard for the folks he meets.
Personally, I have had a much more pleasant experience in my contacts in the communities and rural areas that border the river. And I know why. Raban didn’t exactly re-enact Huck and Jim’s river voyage. Whereas they camped along its banks or on its islands, Raban headed for the nearest motel each evening. I don’t blame him for that, but on his way he nearly always stopped at the nearest bar – the seedier and sleazier the better. No wonder he didn’t like the people he encountered. When he stopped in the charming little historical town of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, he headed for a bar and became involved in conversation with somebody totally unlike anybody I have ever met in that community. And yet, Raban leaves us with the impression that he has just met a person who is generally representative of the town.
Raban does a similar thing in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, another town with which I am intimately acquainted. The people that he writes about are not truly representative of the people who live there either and, furthermore, in a conversation with a waitress, whom he makes out to be scatterbrained, he misconstrues her comments. He thinks she is talking about Columbia University when in fact it is the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri to which she is referring. Well, he is not a native of either the United States or the state of Missouri and could be forgiven for his error, that is, if he hadn’t been so snarky about it.
But then one reviewer writes that Raban is “a sort of English Capote; vivid, funny, accurate, full of hyperbolic wit and outrageous metaphor; no reticence at all. But at least as important is the author’s ability to make an instant connection with virtually any human being whomsoever.” (I admire a writer who can so unselfconsciously use a word like 'whomsoever,' a word that I believe I just typed for the first time.)
Even though Capote would have to be considered the epitome of snarkiness, I have always enjoyed reading him. And I admire Raban’s innate ability to connect with the people he meets, but I do believe that he and the reader could have been better served had he broadened his circle of connections.
Of course, Raban wants to write about the offbeat and thus seems to shun any objectivity in his analysis of the American people. But had he tried just a little harder he would have found some interesting people who do not frequent the bars and taverns to which he tends to gravitate. (I apologize if that came off a bit snarky.)
But having said all this, I have to admit that I like the book. It took courage for Raban to travel down the river the way he did. And he is a good writer and his vivid descriptions of the river – its seductive beauty, its dangerous siren call, and its unwillingness to be tamed -- saved the book for me.
I like "Old Glory" better than I do Raban’s "Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America" (published in 1990), but not nearly as well as his "Bad Land: An American Romance" (published in 1996).
When I originally reviewed this book the title was "Old Glory: An American Voyage," which I indicated was rather meaningless. I went on to say that I thought a much better one would have been "Big River: An American Voyage." At some point somebody else must have decided that the title was lacking, and on later editions of the book the subtitle was changed to "A Voyage Down the Mississippi."
Snarky – 1: crotchety, snappish. 2: sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner; 3: sarcastically critical or mocking and malicious
When Jonathan Raban was a seven-year-old boy living in England, he first read "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and fell in love with the Mississippi River. Or maybe he fell in love with Mark Twain’s graphic portrayal of the river. I read the same book at about the same age, but I have a more substantial basis for my fascination with the subject. Almost my entire life has been spent within at least thirty minutes of America’s mightiest natural force. The only exception being the years I spent going to college and even then I was never more than ninety minutes from the Mississippi. I have moved from my birthplace in almost a straight line north but never east nor west (or south, for that matter).
The result of Raban’s fascination was "Old Glory: A Voyage Down the Mississippi," published in 1981. It is the story of his attempt to travel almost the full course of the mighty river, 1400 miles, in a small sixteen-foot boat powered by a 15 h.p. motor.
I first read the book a number of years ago and recently gave it a second look after reading Raban’s latest travel book. I have to admit that I liked the book better the first time than I did the second go around.
Here is the problem as I see it. Raban loved the river, but didn’t have much use for what Americans have created along its banks, which in many cases is understandable. However, he seems to have a visceral disregard for the people that he meets along the way. He seems to be – well – snarky in his regard for the folks he meets.
Personally, I have had a much more pleasant experience in my contacts in the communities and rural areas that border the river. And I know why. Raban didn’t exactly re-enact Huck and Jim’s river voyage. Whereas they camped along its banks or on its islands, Raban headed for the nearest motel each evening. I don’t blame him for that, but on his way he nearly always stopped at the nearest bar – the seedier and sleazier the better. No wonder he didn’t like the people he encountered. When he stopped in the charming little historical town of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, he headed for a bar and became involved in conversation with somebody totally unlike anybody I have ever met in that community. And yet, Raban leaves us with the impression that he has just met a person who is generally representative of the town.
Raban does a similar thing in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, another town with which I am intimately acquainted. The people that he writes about are not truly representative of the people who live there either and, furthermore, in a conversation with a waitress, whom he makes out to be scatterbrained, he misconstrues her comments. He thinks she is talking about Columbia University when in fact it is the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri to which she is referring. Well, he is not a native of either the United States or the state of Missouri and could be forgiven for his error, that is, if he hadn’t been so snarky about it.
But then one reviewer writes that Raban is “a sort of English Capote; vivid, funny, accurate, full of hyperbolic wit and outrageous metaphor; no reticence at all. But at least as important is the author’s ability to make an instant connection with virtually any human being whomsoever.” (I admire a writer who can so unselfconsciously use a word like 'whomsoever,' a word that I believe I just typed for the first time.)
Even though Capote would have to be considered the epitome of snarkiness, I have always enjoyed reading him. And I admire Raban’s innate ability to connect with the people he meets, but I do believe that he and the reader could have been better served had he broadened his circle of connections.
Of course, Raban wants to write about the offbeat and thus seems to shun any objectivity in his analysis of the American people. But had he tried just a little harder he would have found some interesting people who do not frequent the bars and taverns to which he tends to gravitate. (I apologize if that came off a bit snarky.)
But having said all this, I have to admit that I like the book. It took courage for Raban to travel down the river the way he did. And he is a good writer and his vivid descriptions of the river – its seductive beauty, its dangerous siren call, and its unwillingness to be tamed -- saved the book for me.
I like "Old Glory" better than I do Raban’s "Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America" (published in 1990), but not nearly as well as his "Bad Land: An American Romance" (published in 1996).
When I originally reviewed this book the title was "Old Glory: An American Voyage," which I indicated was rather meaningless. I went on to say that I thought a much better one would have been "Big River: An American Voyage." At some point somebody else must have decided that the title was lacking, and on later editions of the book the subtitle was changed to "A Voyage Down the Mississippi."
November 4, 2018
The Mississippi is the fourth longest river in the world and drains a total of 31 states with a watershed of1,245,000 square miles over its 2300 mile length. In parts, it is up to a mile wide, though the largest lake is 11 miles wide. Raban had first come across this river that cleaves America in two after reading about the Tales of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and wanted to travel along it and absorb the American culture. Starting in Minneapolis which is about 200 miles from the source of the river, he bought a 16-foot Aluminium boat with a 15hp engine, a tiny minnow compared to the vastness of the river. After a crash course in how to handle his new transport and some advice that will prove invaluable later, he is ready to depart, but he just needs to get through the first of the massive locks.
That terrifying experience achieved, the next few days are quite relaxed while cruising downstream. After a days boating, he pulls into the bank to find the nearest hotel or motel and to find some of the locals to talk to. It is a dangerous trip and he has a few near misses. Thankfully he follows the advice that he was given earlier to get off the river when the sky looks strange and just misses a horrendous storm. Apart from these moments, it is a relaxed trip, he enjoys smoking a pipe while watching drifting down the river, only resorting to the whisky when he has been scared witless. One lock keeper advises him to travel at night, but it nearly gets him killed by a barge, so he decides against that.
Where this book comes alive though is his interaction with the people that he meets. He talks to anyone and everyone, from politicians to widows, rednecks and the transient men who work the river. In Memphis, he joins the black reverend judge, Otis Higgs, campaign to overturn the incumbent mayor and sees the endemic racism that was bubbling under the surface of society, something that is worryingly prevalent once again. Every day the river teaches him something new, sometimes it is about the places he passes and other times it is about himself.
This is the second of his books that I have read. The intention is to read them in the order that he published them. Really enjoyed Arabia, but this is another level up again. He is a keen observer of people and places and his writing is spectacular, probing and lyrical. He can sketch a place or a person in a scant number of words, making you feel that you are bobbing along in the boat or sitting alongside him at a bar. Fantastic book. Looking forward to the next, Coasting.
That terrifying experience achieved, the next few days are quite relaxed while cruising downstream. After a days boating, he pulls into the bank to find the nearest hotel or motel and to find some of the locals to talk to. It is a dangerous trip and he has a few near misses. Thankfully he follows the advice that he was given earlier to get off the river when the sky looks strange and just misses a horrendous storm. Apart from these moments, it is a relaxed trip, he enjoys smoking a pipe while watching drifting down the river, only resorting to the whisky when he has been scared witless. One lock keeper advises him to travel at night, but it nearly gets him killed by a barge, so he decides against that.
Where this book comes alive though is his interaction with the people that he meets. He talks to anyone and everyone, from politicians to widows, rednecks and the transient men who work the river. In Memphis, he joins the black reverend judge, Otis Higgs, campaign to overturn the incumbent mayor and sees the endemic racism that was bubbling under the surface of society, something that is worryingly prevalent once again. Every day the river teaches him something new, sometimes it is about the places he passes and other times it is about himself.
This is the second of his books that I have read. The intention is to read them in the order that he published them. Really enjoyed Arabia, but this is another level up again. He is a keen observer of people and places and his writing is spectacular, probing and lyrical. He can sketch a place or a person in a scant number of words, making you feel that you are bobbing along in the boat or sitting alongside him at a bar. Fantastic book. Looking forward to the next, Coasting.
September 22, 2024
About two and a half months ago, I set off on my summer holiday to Eastern Europe, landing in Moldova and travelling back by train. I had four books with me. The first one was Huckleberry Finn, the second and third were not, and the fourth was Old Glory. My trip started and ended in the literary company of travelers on the Mississippi river.
And what a privilege it was to share the last leg of my trip with Jonathan Raban on his riperian journey down America's most evocative waterway. I really felt that the hours I spent reading his resulting story were hours spent sailing down the Mississippi, avoiding its treacherous dangers, taking in its vast size and beauty. Moreover, they felt like hours spent talking to the people Raban met on the river and on the shore - hours spent in a somehow real social environment of the 1970s United States, both rural and urban, both Midwestern and Southern. Hours, in other words, very well spent.
I was, for some time, puzzled by Raban's choice for the title 'Old Glory'. I was not quite sure what the glory in the river's waters or on its banks was that he referred to, or why it was to be described as old. About halfway through the book, I realised that Raban must have had life around the Mississippi in mind when conceiving the title. The changes in attitudes towards the river also reflect the passage of time in American history and in the American's sense of self.
Raban devotes a lot of his book to American popular religion, and it is in one of these passages that this interpretation of 'old glory' appears most striking.
'...it did help to explain something important about the nature of the "born-again" Christian movement. It suggested that the powerful nostalgia which animated the born-againers was not simply a yearning for a lost theological innocence, but rather an ache to return to a specific period of American history. Once upon a time, ran the seductive story, there was an age when worldly ambition and spiritual virtue existed in harmony [...] when to be a self-reliant householder with your own plot of ground was to be blessed as a righteous man by God Himself. And in the Western states at least, this golden age, this Eden was still tantalizingly near at hand. It was far enough away for the actual brutishness of the frontier to have been conveniently forgotten, but close enough to be dated with precision and still to exert the pull of a strong hereditary attachment.' (pp.191-192)
Meanwhile, I am long back in the Netherlands and my trip has transformed into a pleasant memory. This book will be a part of that memory.
With finishing Old Glory, summer is now really over. My literary journies down the Mississippi have ended, and with that, a new season has begun.
And what a privilege it was to share the last leg of my trip with Jonathan Raban on his riperian journey down America's most evocative waterway. I really felt that the hours I spent reading his resulting story were hours spent sailing down the Mississippi, avoiding its treacherous dangers, taking in its vast size and beauty. Moreover, they felt like hours spent talking to the people Raban met on the river and on the shore - hours spent in a somehow real social environment of the 1970s United States, both rural and urban, both Midwestern and Southern. Hours, in other words, very well spent.
I was, for some time, puzzled by Raban's choice for the title 'Old Glory'. I was not quite sure what the glory in the river's waters or on its banks was that he referred to, or why it was to be described as old. About halfway through the book, I realised that Raban must have had life around the Mississippi in mind when conceiving the title. The changes in attitudes towards the river also reflect the passage of time in American history and in the American's sense of self.
Raban devotes a lot of his book to American popular religion, and it is in one of these passages that this interpretation of 'old glory' appears most striking.
'...it did help to explain something important about the nature of the "born-again" Christian movement. It suggested that the powerful nostalgia which animated the born-againers was not simply a yearning for a lost theological innocence, but rather an ache to return to a specific period of American history. Once upon a time, ran the seductive story, there was an age when worldly ambition and spiritual virtue existed in harmony [...] when to be a self-reliant householder with your own plot of ground was to be blessed as a righteous man by God Himself. And in the Western states at least, this golden age, this Eden was still tantalizingly near at hand. It was far enough away for the actual brutishness of the frontier to have been conveniently forgotten, but close enough to be dated with precision and still to exert the pull of a strong hereditary attachment.' (pp.191-192)
Meanwhile, I am long back in the Netherlands and my trip has transformed into a pleasant memory. This book will be a part of that memory.
With finishing Old Glory, summer is now really over. My literary journies down the Mississippi have ended, and with that, a new season has begun.
March 7, 2011
Cerebral, yet accessible, Old Glory is difficult to peg in terms of genre. Travel narrative approaches, but any classification would fall well short of the mark. Raban incorporates history, mesmerizing descriptive prose, biographical morsels, and sparse but welcome bits of dry British wit in this journey through America atop its longest river. In fact, Raban's Englishness is part of what makes the book so appealing. You see America, warts and all, from the eyes of an intrepid and analytical outsider. Raban is a stylist who reveals himself to the reader slowly. I found him to be a very interesting, complex, and slightly tortured figure. He is nearly as intriguing as the voyage itself.
Never again will I look at the Mississippi River as just some long line on a map. The whirlpools, the logs, the dangers; always moving atop and into the unknown on a vessel ridiculously undersized and unsuited for such a trip; a metaphor, certainly. In terms of writing style, there cannot be many better than Jonathan Raban. Here's a writer, you think, you will come back to.
Never again will I look at the Mississippi River as just some long line on a map. The whirlpools, the logs, the dangers; always moving atop and into the unknown on a vessel ridiculously undersized and unsuited for such a trip; a metaphor, certainly. In terms of writing style, there cannot be many better than Jonathan Raban. Here's a writer, you think, you will come back to.
August 5, 2009
Jonathan Raban is British, yet his childhood dream was to follow Huck Finn's path and float down the Mississippi River. When he finally decided to realize the dream, he arranged to use a 16 foot boat with an outboard motor to make his way from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. He knew nothing about running a boat or about the river, and was in for some pleasant and some frightening surprises.
There is the tranquility of quiet water just before dawn and the turbulence of the wide, straight stretches against a strong wind blowing against the current. He meets fishermen in their johnboats and barges three wide and eight deep that throw out wakes powerful enough to swamp his little craft. The changing faces and attitudes of the people along the way are interwoven with the descriptions of the places he visits and the joys and hazards of his travel.
Although the voyage took place at the end of the Carter presidency, it is still a wonderful travel book.
There is the tranquility of quiet water just before dawn and the turbulence of the wide, straight stretches against a strong wind blowing against the current. He meets fishermen in their johnboats and barges three wide and eight deep that throw out wakes powerful enough to swamp his little craft. The changing faces and attitudes of the people along the way are interwoven with the descriptions of the places he visits and the joys and hazards of his travel.
Although the voyage took place at the end of the Carter presidency, it is still a wonderful travel book.
September 30, 2020
Read over 30 years ago, this account of a trip down the Mississippi by a British author sticks in my mind.
October 17, 2021
I bought this book many years ago and somehow never got around to reading it. His writing is masterful, evocative, and calm--
A factory went by; an empty dock; a lone man with a paintbrush on the deck of a tug, who looked up for a moment from his work and waved; then summer-dusty trees, massed and entangled on a shore of powdery sand. Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. It was lovely to be afloat at last, part of the drift of things.
But when he gets into the eddys and boils of the river below Wisconsin, his struggles with the river fill me with sick fear and a desire to never, ever venture out on a boat in a river. We camped by the Red River in Louisiana once, and the list of warnings on the "Boaters Take Caution" sign was shudder-worthy.
Mr. Raban took his journey down the Mississippi in the late 70s, a time when the strident excitement of the hippie era was being replaced with the dull "me first/make money" era of the eighties. Many of the people he met were existing without ambition in a meaningless, foggy swamp of sameness. Not the river, though--it was a monster and a bully and had places to go for sure. And along he went, respectful of its moods and patient to learn all it could teach him. Strange guy.
I liked him but I didn't love him, if you know what I mean. I enjoyed going along on his journey, very much, but I didn't feel he had anything to teach me. He didn't seem to have any interest in natural history and he seldom described the many animals or birds he must have encountered. Strange.
A factory went by; an empty dock; a lone man with a paintbrush on the deck of a tug, who looked up for a moment from his work and waved; then summer-dusty trees, massed and entangled on a shore of powdery sand. Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. It was lovely to be afloat at last, part of the drift of things.
But when he gets into the eddys and boils of the river below Wisconsin, his struggles with the river fill me with sick fear and a desire to never, ever venture out on a boat in a river. We camped by the Red River in Louisiana once, and the list of warnings on the "Boaters Take Caution" sign was shudder-worthy.
Mr. Raban took his journey down the Mississippi in the late 70s, a time when the strident excitement of the hippie era was being replaced with the dull "me first/make money" era of the eighties. Many of the people he met were existing without ambition in a meaningless, foggy swamp of sameness. Not the river, though--it was a monster and a bully and had places to go for sure. And along he went, respectful of its moods and patient to learn all it could teach him. Strange guy.
I liked him but I didn't love him, if you know what I mean. I enjoyed going along on his journey, very much, but I didn't feel he had anything to teach me. He didn't seem to have any interest in natural history and he seldom described the many animals or birds he must have encountered. Strange.
November 24, 2019
Loved this book. True it is somewhat dated, having been written in 1979, but the river lore I should imagine is timeless.
You can down load for free various formats of Zadoc Cramer's 8th edition (printed in 1814) of the The navigator : containing directions for navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio and Mississippi rivers .... here:
https://archive.org/details/navigator...
You can find recently reprinted versions on Amazon or other book sellers. I picked up a used hard back copy that was reprinted in 1966 that was in excellent condition for about 5 bucks at Amazon. Very interesting book.
You can also follow Raban's trip using the same charts (although a newer version) that Raban used. These are available in PDF files to view or download on line from the US Army Corps of Engineers for free.
Here are the Upper Mississsippi Navigation Charts:
https://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/Missio...
Here are the Lower Mississippi River Navigation Charts:
http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/ut...
Note; the lower Mississippi charts are a single file and may take a while to download.
Excellent read. I am very fond of Raban's observations and writing.
You can down load for free various formats of Zadoc Cramer's 8th edition (printed in 1814) of the The navigator : containing directions for navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio and Mississippi rivers .... here:
https://archive.org/details/navigator...
You can find recently reprinted versions on Amazon or other book sellers. I picked up a used hard back copy that was reprinted in 1966 that was in excellent condition for about 5 bucks at Amazon. Very interesting book.
You can also follow Raban's trip using the same charts (although a newer version) that Raban used. These are available in PDF files to view or download on line from the US Army Corps of Engineers for free.
Here are the Upper Mississsippi Navigation Charts:
https://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/Missio...
Here are the Lower Mississippi River Navigation Charts:
http://cdm16021.contentdm.oclc.org/ut...
Note; the lower Mississippi charts are a single file and may take a while to download.
Excellent read. I am very fond of Raban's observations and writing.
March 2, 2023
Old Glory had been lying around for a while in my little collection of books, and I only got to it when news of Jonathan Raban's passing arrived. It is my kind of book: Impulsive, meandering, indulgent, and yet soft in its way of looking at the world. And the late Raban is an extraordinary traveller, both good with the boat, and not too great with it, good at navigating the river, not too great with it. What results from his long journey is an unforgettable portrait of middle America and its great river at a particular time, and a great cast of characters to go with it. Very enjoyable.
January 18, 2022
I am so conflicted about how I’m going to allocate points for this book. The writing is … maybe exquisite is not quite the right word but I can’t think of anything more appropriate. His description of nature, weather, landscape, cityscape, … I can not only see and hear it, I can feel and even taste it (and no, that is not always a good thing, for the reader – but for a writer, Wow! I will try to convey this talent with a selection of quotes but I’m sure GRs will cut me off long before I’m done.) I am totally unfamiliar with the US east of the Rockies, and as travel is not very likely in this time of the Coronavirus, going down the Mississippi with Raban is probably the next best thing.
He is as good with his descriptions of people, and therein lies my problem with his whole book. I think there was, maybe, 5% of the people he introduces us too that I would like to have a chance to meet. They were just … insular, closed-minded, and, well, boring, and often not terribly kind, at least not beyond their own circle. As we floated downriver, I began to dread our next stop. Stay on the river, I wanted to shout. The odds of you meeting someone interesting is so slim. If he honestly represented in this book an average of the people he met, then I am miserably depressed at the state of humans in that part of the country.
The state of the cities he introduces us to was not terribly uplifting either. Most were in the worse state of their existence – so sad. Maybe that’s why the people were as they are.
Thus I am torn. Do I allocate points based on the writing or the content, and the way the content made me feel? In other words, do I give it a 4 or a 2? I guess since it is not his fault what he found on the river, I shouldn’t shoot the messenger and so I shall go with the former, but I won’t be reading it again, I know that.
Quotes that caught my eye
It is a big and depthless as the sky itself. You can see the curve of the earth on its surface as it stretches away for miles to the far shore. Sunset has turned the water to the colour of unripe peaches. There’s no wind. Sandbars and wooded islands stand on their exact reflections. The only signs of movement on the water are the lightly-scratched lines which run in parallel across it like the scores of a diamond on a windowpane. In the middle distance, the river smokes with toppling pillars of mist which soften the light so that one can almost reach out and take in handfuls of that thickened air. (11)
I went to the window to stare at the city, trying to find a gap or a shadow, a sign of a winding, but the man-madness of it all looked seamless. I had spent a lot of time dreaming of losing myself on the river; it had never once occurred to me that it might be p9ossible simply to lose the river. There must be a reason for the way in which Minneapolis behaved towards the Mississippi as if the river were the skeleton in the city’s family closet. (26-27)
I don’t know nothing much about the river. The only times I go boating is on the lakes. I wouldn’t mess with the Mississippi. I guess I’m kind of sweet on the idea of staying alive. (56)
…the traffic on the river thickened. Bug tows lounged on the current, thrashing the water round their tails, their engines farting loudly as they turned. They manoeuvred lugubriously round each other, honking and grumbling, heaving their ridiculous bulk about like hippopotami at a waterhole. (76)
Here in Minnesota, between the 1870s and now, American had moulded its immigrants into a pattern of manners just as rigid as any that they had left behind in the farming communities of Europe. (78)
Mistaking reflections for the things they shadowed, water for sky, the fringe of trees for land, he had settled on the invisible island as a symbol of his condition, so confused by this amazing hall of mirrors that his own identity had temporarily dissolved in Mississippi water. (128)
I found that I had landed up in a tree slum, where overcrowding and miscegenation had made it almost impossible to make out individuals in the tangled mass. The leaves of one tree seemed to be reaching out from the branch of another which, in its turn, was growing from the trunk of yet another. They swarmed up the bluff; trees in their incontinent millions. They didn’t seem to be aware of the opportunities for trees in North America; far from yearning to be free, these huddled masses looked as if they were getting on very well as they were. (128-29)
… I thought how tamely we had all succumbed to the theory that television automatically draws the world together. Surely it had just as strong a tendency to pull the world apart. It was television which had fuelled Bob’s hatred of the ‘beautiful people’, the Washington outlaws, Los Angelenos and New Yorkers who bedevilled his imagination. He switched his set on in order to be reminded of their beastliness. (158)
“Oh, no, you’re okay. They’ll like you because you’re a foreigner. They love foreigners; it’s just strangers that they hate.” (159)
Elect a good hardline racist on an anti-tax ticket. As someone from the fringe of America’s colonial sphere, this frightened me a good deal more than even the Mississippi River did. (185)
Jerry showed me how to mount a coon, easing the wet skin over the mould. There was indeed a parallel with psychoanalysis. In life, these animals had possessed the particular identity of their personal quirks and disorders – their sagging bellies, twisted hind legs, scraggy rumps. Taxidermy restored them all to the standard shape of a normal, well-adjusted coon. (191)
In the dimmed light she looked like a pretty college student. The role of strident divorcee didn’t suit her: she was an uncertain freshman on this course of vengeance and greed. But it seemed sadly probably that she’s eventually graduate summa cum laude. (202)
“We can live off the land here. Round here…” he sniggered, choosing his words carefully, “… we fuck dawgs.”
“Really. That’ s something I’ve not tried.” (210)
Canavan just knew how to tend a good bar. With his lumbering figure, broody eyes and squeaky voice, he looked after his customers as if they were plants in a garden; watering here, weeding out there, going for apparently stony ground with a hoe until the soil was broken and things could take root. (212)
In my old, city life there hadn’t been a day when I didn’t sweat at the sheer fiddle of the thing: the rows, makings-up, the telephone ringing, or failing to ring; the brown envelopes with windows; the jumpy claustrophobia of just surviving as one small valve in the elaborate and hazardous circuit of ordinary society. If only … if only … and at the end of the sentence there was always somewhere the word free, a careless stand-in for a careless notion of benign emptiness. (223-24)
A younger man offered me a room in his apartment. “You could get laid.” I tried to imagine myself as an egg in the womb of an Amazonian hen, and politely declined. ... Hey, you seen my road-racer out there?” it was parked outside the bar window: a swollen phallus painted in acrylic stripes of white and purple. It had a phosphorescent bumper-sticker announcing IT’S GREAT TO BE SINGLE. (225)
I joined the two men and a woman in the stern, and we went crashing through the slough and into the main river. I had never seen the Mississippi treated so casually. We skipped from wave to wave at twenty-five knots, with the bow of the boat pointing into the sky. We played in the wake of a tow, treating it like a ski-jump. As I felt my stomach being left some yards behind, I hoped the river knew that I wasn’t doing the driving. It was going to have plenty of future opportunities for taking its revenge. (236)
Yet if I was right about this, it did help to explain something important about the nature of the “born-again” Christian movement. It suggested that the powerful nostalgia which animated the born-againers was not simply a yearning for a lost theological innocence, but rather an ache to return to a specific period of American history. Once upon a time, ran the seductive story, there was an age when worldly ambition and spiritual virtue existed in harmony, when there was no gulf between the language of religion and the language of day-to-doy life, when the small local community was in the front line rather than in the rearguard, when to be a self-reliant householder with your own plot of ground was to be blessed as a righteous man by Hod Himself. And, in the western states at least, this golden age, this Eden, was still tantalizingly near at hand. It was far enough away for the actual brutishness of the frontier to have been conveniently forgotten, but close enough to date with precision and to feel the pull of a strong hereditary attachment. The era would have begun in the 1840s and it would have survived the Civil War by a good twenty years. (248)
In my run-in with the birds I hadn’t noticed that something very odd was happening to the sky. It was splitting in two. The cloud had ripped away down a clean diagonal line from horizon to horizon. One side of the line was clear blue, the other was a bank of solid grey. I began to take pictures of this curious meteorological event. Bringing it into focus in the viewfinder, I remembered what the lockmaster had told me in Minneapolis.” Watch that sky. You ever see anything queer about it, if the clouds look wrong somehow, get off the river.”… the wind came up from nowhere. The glazed surface of the river puckered; and by the time I reached harbour, a quarter of an hour later, the boat was wallowing in heavy breakers.
It was a lovely piece of pure craftsmanship, as slim as a pickerel, with every joint in its timber perfectly cut and glued. It must have taken years of slow, spare time labour; of patient fitting, sanding-down, varnishing, rigging. It seemed sad, in a peculiarly American way, that anyone should build a boat as beautiful as this, launch it on a long absorbing voyage, then swamp it with such a dreary cargo of fashionable abstractions. All the grace of the thing itself had been submerged under these abstractions; yet without them, the boat would never have been built, the trip never embarked on. Poor boat. It was in its way a classic victim of the American language and its fatal preference for theories, principles, concepts over mere material objects and their intractable thinginess. (289)
The only consolation that I could see in this holy circus was that, by comparison with the Pope, Ronald Reagan was beginning to look tainted with an encouragingly dangerous shake of pink. (297)
In the light of all this, the last words of twain’s novel had taken on a further irony which even Twain, the supreme American ironist, would have found hard to swallow.
I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilise me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
Aunt Sally had won in the end, as Aunt Sally was bound to. Hannibal had adopted Twain’s angry masterpiece and civilized it into a nice, profit-making chunk of sentimental kitsch. (302-303)
“I was trying to see it as money – “
“Why, that’s 10,000 bushels an hour … six, seven dollars a bushel … works out at around $1000 a minute, give or take a cent. How much do you reckon that Mark Twain museum takes?”
“At least it makes nonsense of that saying about things not amounting to a hill of beans…”
“You get yourself a hill of means, I’m telling you, you won’t have to do no more book-writing. Whoever it was made that saying, he didn’t know nothing about beans – “ (305-306)
Drums, cornets, bugles, pipes. The bands filled the town with bangs and skirls. They were marching through Georgia, burying John Brown’s body, yankee-doodling and hailing the chief; but the tunes had all leaked into each other like wet colours, leaving the musical and military equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting in the air. (307)
Islands, islands, islands. Tangles of green willow, mounds of white powder like spilled flour, they repeated each other with the confusing regularity of the box-hedge walls of a maze. Was I really moving? Surely I’d been here before. There always comes a point in travelling when motion itself has become so habitual that it breeds its own deep stillness. There was no wind, no cloud; nothing except the imperceptible velocity of the current. (321)
For the last week, the television ads for snowblowers had been falling thicker and faster between programmes. (347)
Kingshighway. Euclid Avenue. Between them, the names defined the wistful snobbery of a city which was soft on royalty on the one hand and on the most severe of classical geometers on the other. (353)
In Memphis my own eyes had grown instinctively racist: Whitehaven didn’t look comfortable, or green, or well-tended, or decently spaced out; it just looked white. If one’s eyes could learn to see like that in ten days, what kind of crippling myopia would a lifetime’s experience give them? (442)
Here, though, is what I think I should have said:
My whiteness doesn’t mean logic, sophistication, self-control. And your blackness surely shouldn’t just mean spontaneity, warmth, the “feeling within”. Racism is another two-handed sword which cuts right and left, and you really swung it hard at the end of your sermon. You turned me into a half person, and you turned yourself into one too. You were condemning both of us to the dirty old charade of white versus black, heard versus heart, male versus female. You said at one point the election was a defeat from which we all had to climb out from under. Yet when you talked of whiteness as meaning reason and sophistication, weren’t you becoming one of the architects of that defeat? Otis Higgs told Memphis to wake up. I reckon you were still fast asleep when you were talking about me. You were in the grip of the same superstitious mythology which feeds white and black racism alike. You are in the grip of it. I know I’m a visitor. I have no right to talk to you like this, but please wake up! (444-45)
I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. … A cypress was making a crabwise crossing ahead of me: it jerked, zig-zagged, went smoothly down for fifty yards, spun round, headed for the shore, then slid into the channel again, as if a bored child was playing with it by radio control.
Louisiana was an enormous level marsh, overgrown with trees, came and vines. The river had never been happy to run along the same course for more than a few decades at a time: it had tried out miles and miles of Louisiana, leaving half the state behind as a jungly bottom of likes, sludge and sand. There were black caves running through the tangled green on the shore – curving bayous which were the last remains of experimental meanders which the Mississippi had abandoned. (478)
The old people’s home had been a terrible new world for Miss Mary
“See?” she whispered, pointing behind her. “Integration!”
On the day she had been brought in she had been helped up the verandah. The first person she saw was the man who had been her cousin’s chauffeur.
“He was sitting right there. With a big smile. In a rocker. ‘Why, hello, Miss Mary!’ You know what? As soon as I was in here I had to set and learn to call Negros ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’? I wasn’t raised to that. I know what’s behind this Integration – Yankee greenbacks and a gang of crook lawyers up in the state capitol. That’s what’s done it. And we ain’t only got Negroes in here, neither. There’s Catholics, Methodists and a lot of…” her voice dropped to an angry whisper again, “…Baptists!”
“What are you?”
She looked at me as if I was mad to ask such a question. “I’m a Presbyterian.” She was palming her lighted cigarette, shooting sideways glances in search of nurses on patrol. “And Baptists and Presbyterians don’t mix. (482-83)
This was seigneurial fatcat architecture, and whatever pretty twiddles and curlicues were incorporated into the fringes of the design it was brutally straightforward about its main intention, which was to boast and belittle. The Natchez mansion presented a standard face to the world with its triumphal portico. Four vast white columns held up a peaked tent of stucco over a spreading fan of stone steps. To cross the threshold, one had first ritually to be humbled. Just as European cathedrals bully the visitor into bowing his head and drooping his shoulders because their scale is so much grander than his own, so the entry to these mansions was constructed to make one feel shy, impoverished and small. I was happier about the idea of shrinking before the glory of God than I was about abasing myself in front of the amazing amounts of money that cotton farmers had put by. The planters of Natchez had behaved more like Pharaohs than Medicis. Their palaces weren’t furnished with masterpieces commissioned from individual artists; they were straightforward monuments to the power of the great fortune when it went hand in hand with a more or less unlimited supply of cheap labour. Even their most intricate work – the wrought-iron, the carved wooden trellis – was done to a fixed pattern. Once I had got used to the sight of these places, all I could see was their splendid bulk; and that left me cold. (485-86)
By sunrise, the fog had thickened and covered the river with a queer kind of architecture. There were tall arches, long galleries and rec4essed niches in it. The sun, breaking through, gave it the look of freshly whitewashed catacombs. We wormed our way down a corridor of open water, with the fog forming a high vault overhead. (494)
Ahead, lit by misty sunshine, it was a milky, streaky green like polished soapstone. There was no wind and no current. It looked so stable an element that one might have caved ashtrays and telephone stands out of it. Behind the boat, though, where the motor was stirring it, it was thick and peaty like black syrup. (510)
Almost every branch supported a thick, parasitic colony of Spanish Moss. The romantic associations of this stuff baffled me. It was always said to “drape” or “festoon” the trees on which it grew, as if it was a valuable ornament; yet it looked exactly like the matted dirt which collects inside the bags of vacuum cleaners, a purply-grey mess of carpet-sweepings. It didn’t festoon trees. It soiled them, as if someone had topped the contents of a giant Hoover over the forest. The real moss, though, was as brilliant as mamalachite. Tempted to stop and picnic, I tested it with an oar: the green crust broke; the oar came back coated in black slime. (511-12)
He is as good with his descriptions of people, and therein lies my problem with his whole book. I think there was, maybe, 5% of the people he introduces us too that I would like to have a chance to meet. They were just … insular, closed-minded, and, well, boring, and often not terribly kind, at least not beyond their own circle. As we floated downriver, I began to dread our next stop. Stay on the river, I wanted to shout. The odds of you meeting someone interesting is so slim. If he honestly represented in this book an average of the people he met, then I am miserably depressed at the state of humans in that part of the country.
The state of the cities he introduces us to was not terribly uplifting either. Most were in the worse state of their existence – so sad. Maybe that’s why the people were as they are.
Thus I am torn. Do I allocate points based on the writing or the content, and the way the content made me feel? In other words, do I give it a 4 or a 2? I guess since it is not his fault what he found on the river, I shouldn’t shoot the messenger and so I shall go with the former, but I won’t be reading it again, I know that.
Quotes that caught my eye
It is a big and depthless as the sky itself. You can see the curve of the earth on its surface as it stretches away for miles to the far shore. Sunset has turned the water to the colour of unripe peaches. There’s no wind. Sandbars and wooded islands stand on their exact reflections. The only signs of movement on the water are the lightly-scratched lines which run in parallel across it like the scores of a diamond on a windowpane. In the middle distance, the river smokes with toppling pillars of mist which soften the light so that one can almost reach out and take in handfuls of that thickened air. (11)
I went to the window to stare at the city, trying to find a gap or a shadow, a sign of a winding, but the man-madness of it all looked seamless. I had spent a lot of time dreaming of losing myself on the river; it had never once occurred to me that it might be p9ossible simply to lose the river. There must be a reason for the way in which Minneapolis behaved towards the Mississippi as if the river were the skeleton in the city’s family closet. (26-27)
I don’t know nothing much about the river. The only times I go boating is on the lakes. I wouldn’t mess with the Mississippi. I guess I’m kind of sweet on the idea of staying alive. (56)
…the traffic on the river thickened. Bug tows lounged on the current, thrashing the water round their tails, their engines farting loudly as they turned. They manoeuvred lugubriously round each other, honking and grumbling, heaving their ridiculous bulk about like hippopotami at a waterhole. (76)
Here in Minnesota, between the 1870s and now, American had moulded its immigrants into a pattern of manners just as rigid as any that they had left behind in the farming communities of Europe. (78)
Mistaking reflections for the things they shadowed, water for sky, the fringe of trees for land, he had settled on the invisible island as a symbol of his condition, so confused by this amazing hall of mirrors that his own identity had temporarily dissolved in Mississippi water. (128)
I found that I had landed up in a tree slum, where overcrowding and miscegenation had made it almost impossible to make out individuals in the tangled mass. The leaves of one tree seemed to be reaching out from the branch of another which, in its turn, was growing from the trunk of yet another. They swarmed up the bluff; trees in their incontinent millions. They didn’t seem to be aware of the opportunities for trees in North America; far from yearning to be free, these huddled masses looked as if they were getting on very well as they were. (128-29)
… I thought how tamely we had all succumbed to the theory that television automatically draws the world together. Surely it had just as strong a tendency to pull the world apart. It was television which had fuelled Bob’s hatred of the ‘beautiful people’, the Washington outlaws, Los Angelenos and New Yorkers who bedevilled his imagination. He switched his set on in order to be reminded of their beastliness. (158)
“Oh, no, you’re okay. They’ll like you because you’re a foreigner. They love foreigners; it’s just strangers that they hate.” (159)
Elect a good hardline racist on an anti-tax ticket. As someone from the fringe of America’s colonial sphere, this frightened me a good deal more than even the Mississippi River did. (185)
Jerry showed me how to mount a coon, easing the wet skin over the mould. There was indeed a parallel with psychoanalysis. In life, these animals had possessed the particular identity of their personal quirks and disorders – their sagging bellies, twisted hind legs, scraggy rumps. Taxidermy restored them all to the standard shape of a normal, well-adjusted coon. (191)
In the dimmed light she looked like a pretty college student. The role of strident divorcee didn’t suit her: she was an uncertain freshman on this course of vengeance and greed. But it seemed sadly probably that she’s eventually graduate summa cum laude. (202)
“We can live off the land here. Round here…” he sniggered, choosing his words carefully, “… we fuck dawgs.”
“Really. That’ s something I’ve not tried.” (210)
Canavan just knew how to tend a good bar. With his lumbering figure, broody eyes and squeaky voice, he looked after his customers as if they were plants in a garden; watering here, weeding out there, going for apparently stony ground with a hoe until the soil was broken and things could take root. (212)
In my old, city life there hadn’t been a day when I didn’t sweat at the sheer fiddle of the thing: the rows, makings-up, the telephone ringing, or failing to ring; the brown envelopes with windows; the jumpy claustrophobia of just surviving as one small valve in the elaborate and hazardous circuit of ordinary society. If only … if only … and at the end of the sentence there was always somewhere the word free, a careless stand-in for a careless notion of benign emptiness. (223-24)
A younger man offered me a room in his apartment. “You could get laid.” I tried to imagine myself as an egg in the womb of an Amazonian hen, and politely declined. ... Hey, you seen my road-racer out there?” it was parked outside the bar window: a swollen phallus painted in acrylic stripes of white and purple. It had a phosphorescent bumper-sticker announcing IT’S GREAT TO BE SINGLE. (225)
I joined the two men and a woman in the stern, and we went crashing through the slough and into the main river. I had never seen the Mississippi treated so casually. We skipped from wave to wave at twenty-five knots, with the bow of the boat pointing into the sky. We played in the wake of a tow, treating it like a ski-jump. As I felt my stomach being left some yards behind, I hoped the river knew that I wasn’t doing the driving. It was going to have plenty of future opportunities for taking its revenge. (236)
Yet if I was right about this, it did help to explain something important about the nature of the “born-again” Christian movement. It suggested that the powerful nostalgia which animated the born-againers was not simply a yearning for a lost theological innocence, but rather an ache to return to a specific period of American history. Once upon a time, ran the seductive story, there was an age when worldly ambition and spiritual virtue existed in harmony, when there was no gulf between the language of religion and the language of day-to-doy life, when the small local community was in the front line rather than in the rearguard, when to be a self-reliant householder with your own plot of ground was to be blessed as a righteous man by Hod Himself. And, in the western states at least, this golden age, this Eden, was still tantalizingly near at hand. It was far enough away for the actual brutishness of the frontier to have been conveniently forgotten, but close enough to date with precision and to feel the pull of a strong hereditary attachment. The era would have begun in the 1840s and it would have survived the Civil War by a good twenty years. (248)
In my run-in with the birds I hadn’t noticed that something very odd was happening to the sky. It was splitting in two. The cloud had ripped away down a clean diagonal line from horizon to horizon. One side of the line was clear blue, the other was a bank of solid grey. I began to take pictures of this curious meteorological event. Bringing it into focus in the viewfinder, I remembered what the lockmaster had told me in Minneapolis.” Watch that sky. You ever see anything queer about it, if the clouds look wrong somehow, get off the river.”… the wind came up from nowhere. The glazed surface of the river puckered; and by the time I reached harbour, a quarter of an hour later, the boat was wallowing in heavy breakers.
It was a lovely piece of pure craftsmanship, as slim as a pickerel, with every joint in its timber perfectly cut and glued. It must have taken years of slow, spare time labour; of patient fitting, sanding-down, varnishing, rigging. It seemed sad, in a peculiarly American way, that anyone should build a boat as beautiful as this, launch it on a long absorbing voyage, then swamp it with such a dreary cargo of fashionable abstractions. All the grace of the thing itself had been submerged under these abstractions; yet without them, the boat would never have been built, the trip never embarked on. Poor boat. It was in its way a classic victim of the American language and its fatal preference for theories, principles, concepts over mere material objects and their intractable thinginess. (289)
The only consolation that I could see in this holy circus was that, by comparison with the Pope, Ronald Reagan was beginning to look tainted with an encouragingly dangerous shake of pink. (297)
In the light of all this, the last words of twain’s novel had taken on a further irony which even Twain, the supreme American ironist, would have found hard to swallow.
I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilise me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
Aunt Sally had won in the end, as Aunt Sally was bound to. Hannibal had adopted Twain’s angry masterpiece and civilized it into a nice, profit-making chunk of sentimental kitsch. (302-303)
“I was trying to see it as money – “
“Why, that’s 10,000 bushels an hour … six, seven dollars a bushel … works out at around $1000 a minute, give or take a cent. How much do you reckon that Mark Twain museum takes?”
“At least it makes nonsense of that saying about things not amounting to a hill of beans…”
“You get yourself a hill of means, I’m telling you, you won’t have to do no more book-writing. Whoever it was made that saying, he didn’t know nothing about beans – “ (305-306)
Drums, cornets, bugles, pipes. The bands filled the town with bangs and skirls. They were marching through Georgia, burying John Brown’s body, yankee-doodling and hailing the chief; but the tunes had all leaked into each other like wet colours, leaving the musical and military equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting in the air. (307)
Islands, islands, islands. Tangles of green willow, mounds of white powder like spilled flour, they repeated each other with the confusing regularity of the box-hedge walls of a maze. Was I really moving? Surely I’d been here before. There always comes a point in travelling when motion itself has become so habitual that it breeds its own deep stillness. There was no wind, no cloud; nothing except the imperceptible velocity of the current. (321)
For the last week, the television ads for snowblowers had been falling thicker and faster between programmes. (347)
Kingshighway. Euclid Avenue. Between them, the names defined the wistful snobbery of a city which was soft on royalty on the one hand and on the most severe of classical geometers on the other. (353)
In Memphis my own eyes had grown instinctively racist: Whitehaven didn’t look comfortable, or green, or well-tended, or decently spaced out; it just looked white. If one’s eyes could learn to see like that in ten days, what kind of crippling myopia would a lifetime’s experience give them? (442)
Here, though, is what I think I should have said:
My whiteness doesn’t mean logic, sophistication, self-control. And your blackness surely shouldn’t just mean spontaneity, warmth, the “feeling within”. Racism is another two-handed sword which cuts right and left, and you really swung it hard at the end of your sermon. You turned me into a half person, and you turned yourself into one too. You were condemning both of us to the dirty old charade of white versus black, heard versus heart, male versus female. You said at one point the election was a defeat from which we all had to climb out from under. Yet when you talked of whiteness as meaning reason and sophistication, weren’t you becoming one of the architects of that defeat? Otis Higgs told Memphis to wake up. I reckon you were still fast asleep when you were talking about me. You were in the grip of the same superstitious mythology which feeds white and black racism alike. You are in the grip of it. I know I’m a visitor. I have no right to talk to you like this, but please wake up! (444-45)
I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak. … A cypress was making a crabwise crossing ahead of me: it jerked, zig-zagged, went smoothly down for fifty yards, spun round, headed for the shore, then slid into the channel again, as if a bored child was playing with it by radio control.
Louisiana was an enormous level marsh, overgrown with trees, came and vines. The river had never been happy to run along the same course for more than a few decades at a time: it had tried out miles and miles of Louisiana, leaving half the state behind as a jungly bottom of likes, sludge and sand. There were black caves running through the tangled green on the shore – curving bayous which were the last remains of experimental meanders which the Mississippi had abandoned. (478)
The old people’s home had been a terrible new world for Miss Mary
“See?” she whispered, pointing behind her. “Integration!”
On the day she had been brought in she had been helped up the verandah. The first person she saw was the man who had been her cousin’s chauffeur.
“He was sitting right there. With a big smile. In a rocker. ‘Why, hello, Miss Mary!’ You know what? As soon as I was in here I had to set and learn to call Negros ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’? I wasn’t raised to that. I know what’s behind this Integration – Yankee greenbacks and a gang of crook lawyers up in the state capitol. That’s what’s done it. And we ain’t only got Negroes in here, neither. There’s Catholics, Methodists and a lot of…” her voice dropped to an angry whisper again, “…Baptists!”
“What are you?”
She looked at me as if I was mad to ask such a question. “I’m a Presbyterian.” She was palming her lighted cigarette, shooting sideways glances in search of nurses on patrol. “And Baptists and Presbyterians don’t mix. (482-83)
This was seigneurial fatcat architecture, and whatever pretty twiddles and curlicues were incorporated into the fringes of the design it was brutally straightforward about its main intention, which was to boast and belittle. The Natchez mansion presented a standard face to the world with its triumphal portico. Four vast white columns held up a peaked tent of stucco over a spreading fan of stone steps. To cross the threshold, one had first ritually to be humbled. Just as European cathedrals bully the visitor into bowing his head and drooping his shoulders because their scale is so much grander than his own, so the entry to these mansions was constructed to make one feel shy, impoverished and small. I was happier about the idea of shrinking before the glory of God than I was about abasing myself in front of the amazing amounts of money that cotton farmers had put by. The planters of Natchez had behaved more like Pharaohs than Medicis. Their palaces weren’t furnished with masterpieces commissioned from individual artists; they were straightforward monuments to the power of the great fortune when it went hand in hand with a more or less unlimited supply of cheap labour. Even their most intricate work – the wrought-iron, the carved wooden trellis – was done to a fixed pattern. Once I had got used to the sight of these places, all I could see was their splendid bulk; and that left me cold. (485-86)
By sunrise, the fog had thickened and covered the river with a queer kind of architecture. There were tall arches, long galleries and rec4essed niches in it. The sun, breaking through, gave it the look of freshly whitewashed catacombs. We wormed our way down a corridor of open water, with the fog forming a high vault overhead. (494)
Ahead, lit by misty sunshine, it was a milky, streaky green like polished soapstone. There was no wind and no current. It looked so stable an element that one might have caved ashtrays and telephone stands out of it. Behind the boat, though, where the motor was stirring it, it was thick and peaty like black syrup. (510)
Almost every branch supported a thick, parasitic colony of Spanish Moss. The romantic associations of this stuff baffled me. It was always said to “drape” or “festoon” the trees on which it grew, as if it was a valuable ornament; yet it looked exactly like the matted dirt which collects inside the bags of vacuum cleaners, a purply-grey mess of carpet-sweepings. It didn’t festoon trees. It soiled them, as if someone had topped the contents of a giant Hoover over the forest. The real moss, though, was as brilliant as mamalachite. Tempted to stop and picnic, I tested it with an oar: the green crust broke; the oar came back coated in black slime. (511-12)
December 14, 2024
After about one quarter, I decided to abandon this. Hey, I can get on board with making fun of Americans as much as the next person, but in the end, the kind of smug tone and descriptions of folks he encountered ended up wearing on me.
May 7, 2020
I really enjoyed this book about an Englishman's boat trip from Minneapolis to Morgan City, LA, except that in his one mention of my hometown, he called it "Alton" instead of Quincy. (Later, he calls Alton "Alton." An editor or proofreader should have caught that!)
August 8, 2021
This is a wonderful travel book. The river Raban travels on is masterfully described, and the people he meets and the towns he visits are dealt with objectively. Raban demonstrates a knack for disarming people with questions that often lead them to confronting their own prejudice.
It's Raban's status as a foreigner that allows him to get away with this, and he uses it to gather and report fascinating information for us readers.
A meaty fifty-year-old in a Hawaiian shirt was saying, "When that black ... when that black puts a rock through my picture window, I'm ready for him. I got a loaded gun right by the TV, and that black, he's going to get shot."
I asked him if he was talking about some particular black who had been threatening his property. He wasn't. He was just talking about blacks, all blacks, in general. There were sixteen whites to every black in Moline.
"So what happens if a white man puts the rock through your window?"
He paused and stared at me, his eyes foggy with booze. What a goddam ridiculous question.
"I guess he'd get shot too," he said, but it was clear that his words didn't carry much conviction even in his own head.
It's Raban's status as a foreigner that allows him to get away with this, and he uses it to gather and report fascinating information for us readers.
March 30, 2011
Another Brit attempts discerning the American character -- this time -- by traveling the Mississippi in an aluminum fishing boat and stopping at every honky-tonk redneck bar along the way.
Old Glory is not a feel-good National Geographic travelogue, but it's not a negative book either. Mr. Raban treats the landscape and the people he encounters with the affection of a gloomy reprobate. He hopes for the best, but knows that he won't always find it. Raban captures the bittersweet essence of the Mississippi Valley, the lonely and lost quality of American life, and the strangeness of all once-vibrant human landscapes bypassed by "progress" (a la 1997).
Raban continually gives the impression that in his brief stops along the river he ‘figures out’ what the locals have been unable to or have failed to figure out for years. I am sure that Raban did encounter his share of rubes and rednecks, but if this book is to be believed, those types of people are practically the only ones he encountered. It’s an entertaining read – but sir, you are no De Tocqueville.
Old Glory is not a feel-good National Geographic travelogue, but it's not a negative book either. Mr. Raban treats the landscape and the people he encounters with the affection of a gloomy reprobate. He hopes for the best, but knows that he won't always find it. Raban captures the bittersweet essence of the Mississippi Valley, the lonely and lost quality of American life, and the strangeness of all once-vibrant human landscapes bypassed by "progress" (a la 1997).
Raban continually gives the impression that in his brief stops along the river he ‘figures out’ what the locals have been unable to or have failed to figure out for years. I am sure that Raban did encounter his share of rubes and rednecks, but if this book is to be believed, those types of people are practically the only ones he encountered. It’s an entertaining read – but sir, you are no De Tocqueville.
April 8, 2021
Having once edited a weekly newspaper in a town hard by the Mississippi River, I was attracted to read this book, Raban's Three Goals: (1) Take a boat solo down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans and write about the adventure to make a book, (2) Master piloting a 16-foot boat through wing dams, floating logs, jetties, boils, eddies and waves, (3) Meet “characters” along the way so as to add color to book’s narrative. Outcome: A commendable job on all counts. In sleazy bars, derelict hotels, a pig roast and sundry churches he found his colorful characters. He hunted squirrels and ‘coons with them, fished crappie and walleye with them and recaptured their lively colloquial expressions and wry wit. Many whom the author encountered envied him his adventure, but were seemingly stuck by their situations, unable to escape.
January 24, 2017
I have a tendency to do things backwards and such is the case with Raban's voyage books. Several years back I had read Voyage to Juneau and I liked it well enough and so I thought I would like this as well. It turns out that I didn't like it so much and I don't have any blame with Raban per se but it just seemed so negative...
And this seems wrong too, negative isn't the right word especially if he was accurately portraying what it is he was encountering. Through the entire book it seems that every American he comes in contact is one chromosome short or just a complete bigot. It was to me a sad testimony.
And this seems wrong too, negative isn't the right word especially if he was accurately portraying what it is he was encountering. Through the entire book it seems that every American he comes in contact is one chromosome short or just a complete bigot. It was to me a sad testimony.
July 30, 2021
dnf, in no mood to read some pretentious British guy travel around and mock literally every American he encounters. I’m sure an American wandering into every crummy bar in England would encounter a similar vibe of people.
Liked his other book better, he didn’t feel so openly hostile. All these damn travelogues where someone romanticizes a place and because it’s not their childhood fantasy, they bash it incessantly. Instead of camping on his boat half the time he’s staying in crappy hotels since he didn’t make reservations out of ~spontaneity.~
Reads like a full of ennui recent college grad’s shallow views of Middle America.
Liked his other book better, he didn’t feel so openly hostile. All these damn travelogues where someone romanticizes a place and because it’s not their childhood fantasy, they bash it incessantly. Instead of camping on his boat half the time he’s staying in crappy hotels since he didn’t make reservations out of ~spontaneity.~
Reads like a full of ennui recent college grad’s shallow views of Middle America.
December 9, 2012
I've read Raban's books in the wrong order. After discovering Passage to Juneau (great book) , this earlier work is similar but contrasting, but whatever he writes he's always an outstanding wordsmith bringing people and places to life.
February 20, 2014
This probably my favourite travel book of all time - an epic journey down almost the entire navigable length of one of the world's great rivers. Raban's private musings and the extraordinary cast of characters he meets along the riverbanks make this a compelling read.
July 12, 2008
Great writing. An interesting account of travelling down the mighty Mississippi in a fairly small motorboat. The author meets many interesting charactgers along the way.
February 15, 2011
Great "outsider" look at 1970s Middle America self-consciously placed in the existing canon of the Mississippi... Raban walks a wonderful balance between accessibility and erudition.
September 8, 2021
I lost interest after less than hundred pages. Just not that interested in random people along the Mississippi.
April 24, 2022
Although written in 1981 about the author's sailing/puttering down the Mississippi during the 1980 presidential election, Raban's (sometimes cuttingly) sharp eye captures an America very much recognizable today--one might almost say "enduring." Over the course of more than 3 months, Raban guided a 16 foot aluminum sailing boat with outboard motor down what he (and the reader) increasingly experiences as a dangerous and sovereign creature. Along the way, Raban stays in random towns along the river and actually listens and apparently faithfully records his various conversations. Sometimes his British prejudices against Americans and wit casts a critical (although often hilarious) light. However, through the course of this more than 400 page densely written book, the picture emerges of fierce independence and even courage of the generally ordinary Americans who live/survive/ and sometimes even thrive along its muddy banks. The general picture emerges that middle Americans "do what they have to do" and are often glad doing what they do--however odd (whether taxidermy, shrimp fishing, or banking).
There are so many beautifully written passages it is impossible to do them all justice, but here are a few of the good, bad and ugly:
"The [Minnesota] state fair sprawled across a hillside and a valley, and at first glance it did indeed look like a city under occupation by an army of rampaging Goths. I'd never seen so many enormous people assembled in one place. These farming families from Minnesota and Wisconsin were the descendants of hungry immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Their ancestors must have been lean and anxious men with the famines of Europe bitten into their faces. Generation by generation, their families had eaten themselves into Americans...The women had poured themselves into pink stretch-knit pant suits; the men swelled against every seam and button of their plaid shirts and Dacron slacks..."
After being filmed by a local television station starting his epic journey downstream: "My head rattled with a conundrum: if my going away didn't happen on TV, it wouldn't be real; if it did happen on TV, it couldn't be real."
Recounting President carter's efforts in 1980 to campaign along the river: "The President had stepped off the Delta Queen clutching notes for a speech. Once the crowd was already packed solid around him, he had called to his aides, 'Hey, is this Iowa? Is this Iowa?' YES, said the crowd and Carter sailed into a lengthy tribute to Iowa and Iowans. Unfortunately, his initial question had been better remembered ... than the speech that followed it. For weeks afterward, wits went putting their heads around the doors of Guttenberg's bars ad crying, 'Hey, is this Iowa?' Someone at the end of the bar was then supposed to growl, 'Hey, that ain't Ted Kennedy, is it?"
Observing a friendly taxidermist in Dubuque who had invited Raban to his house: "Jerry wore a scarlet T-shirt saying I'M A TAXIDERMIST...I'LL MOUNT ANYTHING, with the words framing a picture of an elderly maniac in dubious congress with a long-suffering elk."
"I let the city of Burlington slide by: a loss that I felt I could afford. I had read somewhere that it was famous as the place where the Westinghouse air brake had been perfected. It seemed a doleful and unalluring reason for celebrity."
At one stage he was carried by a 9-barge line dragged by a large steamer. He was given the chance to steer it: "The nearest I had come before to driving a two was managing narrowboats on British canals. The experiences are not comparable. This was more like trying to steer six or seven blocks of Madison Avenue down a twisty country lane."
But perhaps the most penetrating bit of writing in this excellent travel cum time piece was a quotation from TS Eliot which graces the initial page of the book:
"I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, trustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges,
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget."
Though more than 40 years old, Old Glory provides the reader with many useful reminders of what we are in danger of forgetting.
There are so many beautifully written passages it is impossible to do them all justice, but here are a few of the good, bad and ugly:
"The [Minnesota] state fair sprawled across a hillside and a valley, and at first glance it did indeed look like a city under occupation by an army of rampaging Goths. I'd never seen so many enormous people assembled in one place. These farming families from Minnesota and Wisconsin were the descendants of hungry immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Their ancestors must have been lean and anxious men with the famines of Europe bitten into their faces. Generation by generation, their families had eaten themselves into Americans...The women had poured themselves into pink stretch-knit pant suits; the men swelled against every seam and button of their plaid shirts and Dacron slacks..."
After being filmed by a local television station starting his epic journey downstream: "My head rattled with a conundrum: if my going away didn't happen on TV, it wouldn't be real; if it did happen on TV, it couldn't be real."
Recounting President carter's efforts in 1980 to campaign along the river: "The President had stepped off the Delta Queen clutching notes for a speech. Once the crowd was already packed solid around him, he had called to his aides, 'Hey, is this Iowa? Is this Iowa?' YES, said the crowd and Carter sailed into a lengthy tribute to Iowa and Iowans. Unfortunately, his initial question had been better remembered ... than the speech that followed it. For weeks afterward, wits went putting their heads around the doors of Guttenberg's bars ad crying, 'Hey, is this Iowa?' Someone at the end of the bar was then supposed to growl, 'Hey, that ain't Ted Kennedy, is it?"
Observing a friendly taxidermist in Dubuque who had invited Raban to his house: "Jerry wore a scarlet T-shirt saying I'M A TAXIDERMIST...I'LL MOUNT ANYTHING, with the words framing a picture of an elderly maniac in dubious congress with a long-suffering elk."
"I let the city of Burlington slide by: a loss that I felt I could afford. I had read somewhere that it was famous as the place where the Westinghouse air brake had been perfected. It seemed a doleful and unalluring reason for celebrity."
At one stage he was carried by a 9-barge line dragged by a large steamer. He was given the chance to steer it: "The nearest I had come before to driving a two was managing narrowboats on British canals. The experiences are not comparable. This was more like trying to steer six or seven blocks of Madison Avenue down a twisty country lane."
But perhaps the most penetrating bit of writing in this excellent travel cum time piece was a quotation from TS Eliot which graces the initial page of the book:
"I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, trustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges,
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget."
Though more than 40 years old, Old Glory provides the reader with many useful reminders of what we are in danger of forgetting.
August 7, 2018
After a childhood of river dreams inspired by readings of Huckleberry Finn, Jonathan Raban set out to travel the length of the Mississippi River from north to south in a 16-foot open aluminum boat.
His journey took place in 1979. The waters he drifted down were much more dangerous than the river of his childhood imagination, but Huck’s urge to escape, to light out for the Territory before someone — some woman — civilizes him was very much the same.
Raban’s Mississippi is a turbulent world of fast eddies, mysterious boils, and tow boats with acres-long fleets of barges that looked like floating apartment blocks, and that pushed up massive wakes which sucked water from the shoreline and sent back towering waves that could capsize unwary boats.
Life beyond the muddy shoreline was another world entirely, with coon hunts, Baptist churches, pig roasts, failing towns, racial segregation, and disenfranchised people who felt left behind by their leaders and their nation. These are the characters he meets along the way as he observes the journey’s single rule: to follow the current of things.
Raban’s meandering narrative is perfectly in synch with the life of the river, and with the sun-drunk lethargy of its slumbering riverside towns.
Reading Old Glory brought back so many memories of my own St. Lawrence River childhood. Mine was a very different river, running as it does from the Great Lakes east to the yawning Atlantic gulf, and I grew up in a very small town on the Canadian side of those swift waters. We didn’t have a port, either. Only a small Coast Guard base. But I knew the heavy thrum of passing ocean ships and lakers, heard from miles away when swimming underwater at the town beach. I knew the clanging sound of channel buoys, the bite of winter winds across the ice, and the freshwater smell of the river in summer that forms the background of all my early memories. I also know what it feels like to be caught by sudden storms on open water in a small boat.
But Raban’s river passed through a very different history. The Mississippi witnessed the rise and fall of slavery in the south, the cotton boom, and river towns whose geographical position generated economic prosperity before the river wiped them away in a flood, or changed its course to leave them inland and dry. As he explored these towns and spoke to their residents, I had the feeling that history had left them behind, too.
The general reader will find wonderful bits of prose in Old Glory, and the sort of observations I’ve come to regard as trademark Raban. Here he is writing about racoons and their inability to cross nighttime roads: “Bright lights mesmerized them, and they died careless hobo’s deaths on the wooded edges of tiny unincorporated towns.”
Besieged by mosquitos and stinging things on the muddy riverbank at dusk, he writes, “When I slapped at the air, it was crunchy with bugs.” And in New Orleans, “I slept alone in a four poster bed meant for honeymooning in, and woke up feeling widowed.”
My favourite passage deals with fishing: "I spent a happy half hour buying fishing tackle; flexing rods and sorting through boxes of painted plugs which were supposed to look like fish to fish. Their artists, who had decorated them in Day-glo stripes and flashes, were deeply under the influence of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. I bought a blinding handful of the things, hoping that Mississippi bass and walleyes understood the conventions of the modern movement."
I could hear my father chuckling behind him as I read this, flipping open his zippo to light another pipe or cigar.
This isn’t a new book. After 37 years, it has become a travel classic. But it remains vital reading.
His journey took place in 1979. The waters he drifted down were much more dangerous than the river of his childhood imagination, but Huck’s urge to escape, to light out for the Territory before someone — some woman — civilizes him was very much the same.
Raban’s Mississippi is a turbulent world of fast eddies, mysterious boils, and tow boats with acres-long fleets of barges that looked like floating apartment blocks, and that pushed up massive wakes which sucked water from the shoreline and sent back towering waves that could capsize unwary boats.
Life beyond the muddy shoreline was another world entirely, with coon hunts, Baptist churches, pig roasts, failing towns, racial segregation, and disenfranchised people who felt left behind by their leaders and their nation. These are the characters he meets along the way as he observes the journey’s single rule: to follow the current of things.
Raban’s meandering narrative is perfectly in synch with the life of the river, and with the sun-drunk lethargy of its slumbering riverside towns.
Reading Old Glory brought back so many memories of my own St. Lawrence River childhood. Mine was a very different river, running as it does from the Great Lakes east to the yawning Atlantic gulf, and I grew up in a very small town on the Canadian side of those swift waters. We didn’t have a port, either. Only a small Coast Guard base. But I knew the heavy thrum of passing ocean ships and lakers, heard from miles away when swimming underwater at the town beach. I knew the clanging sound of channel buoys, the bite of winter winds across the ice, and the freshwater smell of the river in summer that forms the background of all my early memories. I also know what it feels like to be caught by sudden storms on open water in a small boat.
But Raban’s river passed through a very different history. The Mississippi witnessed the rise and fall of slavery in the south, the cotton boom, and river towns whose geographical position generated economic prosperity before the river wiped them away in a flood, or changed its course to leave them inland and dry. As he explored these towns and spoke to their residents, I had the feeling that history had left them behind, too.
The general reader will find wonderful bits of prose in Old Glory, and the sort of observations I’ve come to regard as trademark Raban. Here he is writing about racoons and their inability to cross nighttime roads: “Bright lights mesmerized them, and they died careless hobo’s deaths on the wooded edges of tiny unincorporated towns.”
Besieged by mosquitos and stinging things on the muddy riverbank at dusk, he writes, “When I slapped at the air, it was crunchy with bugs.” And in New Orleans, “I slept alone in a four poster bed meant for honeymooning in, and woke up feeling widowed.”
My favourite passage deals with fishing: "I spent a happy half hour buying fishing tackle; flexing rods and sorting through boxes of painted plugs which were supposed to look like fish to fish. Their artists, who had decorated them in Day-glo stripes and flashes, were deeply under the influence of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. I bought a blinding handful of the things, hoping that Mississippi bass and walleyes understood the conventions of the modern movement."
I could hear my father chuckling behind him as I read this, flipping open his zippo to light another pipe or cigar.
This isn’t a new book. After 37 years, it has become a travel classic. But it remains vital reading.
December 3, 2023
Having just done a voyage UP the Mississippi on a cruise, I wanted to find a few books before the trip that provide some good background. This book is among those I came across. A bit too big and heavy to pack in already overfilled suitcases, I waited till I got home to read it
Raban has done his research, writes well, offers some imaginatively detailed descriptions of the Mississippi and its natural environment, and takes us along as he relays the intricacies of navigating his small craft in the midst of sometimes difficult conditions. I enjoyed the descriptions of his encounters with the various towboats and barges. There is engrossing and informative material throughout, and he has much to offer that accurately reflects my personal experiences of traveling from New Orleans to St. Paul. It took me right back to being on the river.
His encounters with a variety of unique personalities along the way are engaging to say the least. Why he felt the need to frequent so many bars, however - some of which were not exactly safe and genial destinations - raises some questions as to what he was hoping to discover. Seems to me he potentially put his life in jeopardy a few times.
The only issue I take with this book is one that has been reported in other reviews in that he's just too snide and condescending for my taste. As a devout and practicing Catholic I was sometimes a bit offended by his take on organized religion. I was particularly put off by his description of the Gateway Arch as being a 'pretentious joke' or something to that effect. What part of "Gateway to the West" didn't he understand?
I also feel he dwells a bit too long on an election in Memphis that he gets actively involved in. And, some of his less than complementary reflections on New Orleans didn't do much for me either.
Except for some of the above observations, I really liked reading it (although at times it started to bog down but then would pick up again) though not sure I'd return for a second reading. There is a sentimental attachment to the story, however, having just been on the river so I'll probably keep it and might return to it at some point if for no other reason than a reference source.
There is also a good bit of humor largely borne out of the conversations with locals. I find it interesting how so much of his dialogue with people along the river is in quotes. And yet, unless he would have actually been recording these exchanges, there's no way he'd recall word for word since he meets so many people along the way.
It's just so unfortunate that some of his attitudes and criticisms taint what otherwise is truly a most fascinating read. Definitely recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about the river and what it's like to spend some time on it.
Raban has done his research, writes well, offers some imaginatively detailed descriptions of the Mississippi and its natural environment, and takes us along as he relays the intricacies of navigating his small craft in the midst of sometimes difficult conditions. I enjoyed the descriptions of his encounters with the various towboats and barges. There is engrossing and informative material throughout, and he has much to offer that accurately reflects my personal experiences of traveling from New Orleans to St. Paul. It took me right back to being on the river.
His encounters with a variety of unique personalities along the way are engaging to say the least. Why he felt the need to frequent so many bars, however - some of which were not exactly safe and genial destinations - raises some questions as to what he was hoping to discover. Seems to me he potentially put his life in jeopardy a few times.
The only issue I take with this book is one that has been reported in other reviews in that he's just too snide and condescending for my taste. As a devout and practicing Catholic I was sometimes a bit offended by his take on organized religion. I was particularly put off by his description of the Gateway Arch as being a 'pretentious joke' or something to that effect. What part of "Gateway to the West" didn't he understand?
I also feel he dwells a bit too long on an election in Memphis that he gets actively involved in. And, some of his less than complementary reflections on New Orleans didn't do much for me either.
Except for some of the above observations, I really liked reading it (although at times it started to bog down but then would pick up again) though not sure I'd return for a second reading. There is a sentimental attachment to the story, however, having just been on the river so I'll probably keep it and might return to it at some point if for no other reason than a reference source.
There is also a good bit of humor largely borne out of the conversations with locals. I find it interesting how so much of his dialogue with people along the river is in quotes. And yet, unless he would have actually been recording these exchanges, there's no way he'd recall word for word since he meets so many people along the way.
It's just so unfortunate that some of his attitudes and criticisms taint what otherwise is truly a most fascinating read. Definitely recommended for anyone who wants to learn more about the river and what it's like to spend some time on it.
January 16, 2024
For me, growing up near the Mississippi, the river was always fascinating. As children, we heard that you could walk across it at its source, and that if we drank too much water at night, Grandma said we would "float down the Mississippi." When my family finally took the station wagon to Itasca State Park, and we stepped into the puddle of a river, we were decidedly unawed.
From my adolescent years on, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn five or six times, reveling in the adventure and American-ness of it. I attended college straddling the river's banks, and was truly awed by a classmate who had taken a homemade raft down the river's length. So the Mississippi has lived in my consciousness and unconsciousness my entire life.
A friend recommended Old Glory: An American Voyage to me in 1981, and soon after I bought a copy. Judging from the bookmark, I found it at B. Dalton Bookseller at the mall in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I remember reading a few pages at the time, then put it back on the shelf. From there it traveled around the country with me in mover's boxes through at least six moves and finally landing on a bookshelf twenty years ago where the letters on the jacket have faded from red to white.
I came across a review of Raban's posthumous memoir, Father and Son, a couple months ago, and decided to pick up Old Glory again. This time I read it clear through. Floating down the Mississippi with him was even more incredible than my classmate's journey.
Raban's encounters with the wild river and the inhabitants along its length offer a vision of the United States and our relationship with the natural world. His trip was in 1979, during the Carter presidency and the rise of evangelicalism in our politics and culture. Racial differences in the country, always present, were increasing in prominence as evident during his stopover in Memphis, where Higgs, the Black candidate for mayor's campaign slogan was "Yes We Can." Raban's descriptions of the river predate and call into mind historian Richard White's description of the Columbia River as an "organic machine." His journey ends in Louisiana where the uncontrolled river and shore are inhabited by unruly characters, alligators, invading armadillos, oil wells, and chemical plants.
The river Raban describes is a living and wild creature that can't be completely tamed, and that shapes our communities and our nature. Old Glory is a voyage worth taking.
From my adolescent years on, I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn five or six times, reveling in the adventure and American-ness of it. I attended college straddling the river's banks, and was truly awed by a classmate who had taken a homemade raft down the river's length. So the Mississippi has lived in my consciousness and unconsciousness my entire life.
A friend recommended Old Glory: An American Voyage to me in 1981, and soon after I bought a copy. Judging from the bookmark, I found it at B. Dalton Bookseller at the mall in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I remember reading a few pages at the time, then put it back on the shelf. From there it traveled around the country with me in mover's boxes through at least six moves and finally landing on a bookshelf twenty years ago where the letters on the jacket have faded from red to white.
I came across a review of Raban's posthumous memoir, Father and Son, a couple months ago, and decided to pick up Old Glory again. This time I read it clear through. Floating down the Mississippi with him was even more incredible than my classmate's journey.
Raban's encounters with the wild river and the inhabitants along its length offer a vision of the United States and our relationship with the natural world. His trip was in 1979, during the Carter presidency and the rise of evangelicalism in our politics and culture. Racial differences in the country, always present, were increasing in prominence as evident during his stopover in Memphis, where Higgs, the Black candidate for mayor's campaign slogan was "Yes We Can." Raban's descriptions of the river predate and call into mind historian Richard White's description of the Columbia River as an "organic machine." His journey ends in Louisiana where the uncontrolled river and shore are inhabited by unruly characters, alligators, invading armadillos, oil wells, and chemical plants.
The river Raban describes is a living and wild creature that can't be completely tamed, and that shapes our communities and our nature. Old Glory is a voyage worth taking.
October 20, 2025
Old Glory is the winner of The Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Award and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
The book covers the author's voyage down the Mississippi in the wake of Huckleberry Finn. The ever intrepid Jonathan Raban, who singlehandedly undertook to sail around Britain in his later novel 'Coasting', undertakes a perilous journey in a 16-foot aluminium "Mirrocraft" powered by a 15 h.p. Johnson outboard engine.
The power of the story is both Raban's descriptions of the mighty Mississippi, starting 200 miles down from the Mississippi's source at Lake Itasca where he is barely able to find the river. After some much needed lessons from from Herb Heichert, the friendly owner of Crystal Marine from whom he borrows the boat, he embarks on his voyage.
Along the way - in his usual rather laconic style - he describes the local history of the towns he docks in as well as the various characters he encounters in them. Generally he is met with a very sociable reception once people learn about his mission and there are also various waifs and strays he meets in bars and down by the river bank.
Travelling southwards, he had to cope with the rips, eddies and stump swamps, always having to be on the alert and occasionally getting into trouble, particularly when he tries one nighttime voyage, from which he emerges terrified and hits the Jim Beam hard.
He passes through the last of the locks, and comes to St Louis wherehe has a brief romantic interlude. As the river gets closer to the Gulf of America, it widens and becomes more ominous, and the author still has to deal both with the huge tows pushing their massive cargos up and down the river. He also travels on one for a time and earns the respect of the hardworking but socially isolated crew.
The book ends with the journey's ending in the old floodways south of New Orleans. Traveling along the Intracoastal Waterway and taking a detour off it, he observes the slow Cajun inhabitants and his final stop-over in deadbeat Morgan City and its fly-bitten motel seem a fitting end. As soon as he tastes saltwater he turns the boat around, feeling like one of the unfortunate armadillos, which he describes earlier, who head northwards to generally meet a fateful end owing to their weak eyesight.
The book covers the author's voyage down the Mississippi in the wake of Huckleberry Finn. The ever intrepid Jonathan Raban, who singlehandedly undertook to sail around Britain in his later novel 'Coasting', undertakes a perilous journey in a 16-foot aluminium "Mirrocraft" powered by a 15 h.p. Johnson outboard engine.
The power of the story is both Raban's descriptions of the mighty Mississippi, starting 200 miles down from the Mississippi's source at Lake Itasca where he is barely able to find the river. After some much needed lessons from from Herb Heichert, the friendly owner of Crystal Marine from whom he borrows the boat, he embarks on his voyage.
Along the way - in his usual rather laconic style - he describes the local history of the towns he docks in as well as the various characters he encounters in them. Generally he is met with a very sociable reception once people learn about his mission and there are also various waifs and strays he meets in bars and down by the river bank.
Travelling southwards, he had to cope with the rips, eddies and stump swamps, always having to be on the alert and occasionally getting into trouble, particularly when he tries one nighttime voyage, from which he emerges terrified and hits the Jim Beam hard.
He passes through the last of the locks, and comes to St Louis wherehe has a brief romantic interlude. As the river gets closer to the Gulf of America, it widens and becomes more ominous, and the author still has to deal both with the huge tows pushing their massive cargos up and down the river. He also travels on one for a time and earns the respect of the hardworking but socially isolated crew.
The book ends with the journey's ending in the old floodways south of New Orleans. Traveling along the Intracoastal Waterway and taking a detour off it, he observes the slow Cajun inhabitants and his final stop-over in deadbeat Morgan City and its fly-bitten motel seem a fitting end. As soon as he tastes saltwater he turns the boat around, feeling like one of the unfortunate armadillos, which he describes earlier, who head northwards to generally meet a fateful end owing to their weak eyesight.
May 9, 2023
I committed my first (and last) act of political violence at age seven. In the heat of the 1980 presidential election campaign, I got into an argument with my friend and neighbor Roger. He was for Reagan. For some reason (he reminded me of John Denver a little) I was for Carter. Roger and I debated the finer points of domestic policy in my backyard one day: “Carter!” “Reagan!” “Carter!” “Reagan!” Finally, Roger shoved me to the ground, and I cried a bit, but the rage boiled up from my gut and I grabbed the nearest weapon to hand, one of those big metal soil screws used to anchor a child’s swing set. I clobbered him with it.
“Jimmy Carter should be president!” I shouted. “Now get out of my yard!”
About the same time this happened, Jonathan Raban was piloting a sixteen-foot open-air boat down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. As a boy in England he had often retreated in his own mind to an imaginary Mississippi of limitless adventure in the company of Huck Finn and a boy he’d once seen in a painting, the son of a trapper, bobbing in a canoe with a pet fox on a leash. Now, in his middle-thirties and with his life a bit of a shambles, Raban was making it all real – or as real as the real world allowed.
It’s a good book, part travelogue, part memoir, part history. It’s also a catalog of comical chance encounters, romantic entanglements, and gritty dive bars throughout the Midwest and the South. The United States of Old Glory is still recognizable today: an America of racial friction, economic inflation, and partisan animosity, haunted by a devilish specter of national decline. It’s so familiar, in fact, I’m not sure whether to be alarmed or consoled. I’d prefer to be consoled.
Oh, and in case you wondered: Roger was fine; we were friends again the next day. And I made my peace with Reagan too.
“Jimmy Carter should be president!” I shouted. “Now get out of my yard!”
About the same time this happened, Jonathan Raban was piloting a sixteen-foot open-air boat down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. As a boy in England he had often retreated in his own mind to an imaginary Mississippi of limitless adventure in the company of Huck Finn and a boy he’d once seen in a painting, the son of a trapper, bobbing in a canoe with a pet fox on a leash. Now, in his middle-thirties and with his life a bit of a shambles, Raban was making it all real – or as real as the real world allowed.
It’s a good book, part travelogue, part memoir, part history. It’s also a catalog of comical chance encounters, romantic entanglements, and gritty dive bars throughout the Midwest and the South. The United States of Old Glory is still recognizable today: an America of racial friction, economic inflation, and partisan animosity, haunted by a devilish specter of national decline. It’s so familiar, in fact, I’m not sure whether to be alarmed or consoled. I’d prefer to be consoled.
Oh, and in case you wondered: Roger was fine; we were friends again the next day. And I made my peace with Reagan too.
April 21, 2025
2025 and 1979, for worse or better, seem surprisingly similar when emerging from Raban to today's news. On the small scale, we meet eco-futurists welding solar panals, 19 year old Millar's-swigging NEETS, and long-time liberals newly-converted to reactionary conservatism. On the large scale, Raban serves up American intervention in the Middle East (Iraq) and a US presidential campaign where a nice but inept-seeming Democrat had fallen from favour in the flyover states, who were feeling angry, left-behind, and ready to give the Liberal metropolitan elites a whooping.
Other reviewers with a closer connection to the Mississippi are better placed to identify gaps in Raban's account. The seedy main streets capture one dimension of the slump era Rust Belt, yet their dive bars, alongside the hollaring holiness of the evangelical churches, possibly leaves out other social circles. These encounters - along with the Huckleberry Finn throwbacks - fit with an idea of silted-up settlements turned in on themselves. It is a seductive idea for those of us interested in political lessons for the contemporary shift to political extremes. As another reviewer says, very often Raban stays in motels so only gets so far in integrating into local life. That said, with Raban nearly getting kniffed, alongside some robust exchanges on religion and race, I am not sure I would have wanted him to get much closer. The social world he uncovers feels true enough.
Raban is another well-off traveller in the Orwell-in-Wigan mould, with all the complexities that brings. Transcending class, though, Raban has an excellent pen for personality, sufficient self-deprecation, and a born quest for exploration that powers through 'Old Glory'. Glorious indeed.
Other reviewers with a closer connection to the Mississippi are better placed to identify gaps in Raban's account. The seedy main streets capture one dimension of the slump era Rust Belt, yet their dive bars, alongside the hollaring holiness of the evangelical churches, possibly leaves out other social circles. These encounters - along with the Huckleberry Finn throwbacks - fit with an idea of silted-up settlements turned in on themselves. It is a seductive idea for those of us interested in political lessons for the contemporary shift to political extremes. As another reviewer says, very often Raban stays in motels so only gets so far in integrating into local life. That said, with Raban nearly getting kniffed, alongside some robust exchanges on religion and race, I am not sure I would have wanted him to get much closer. The social world he uncovers feels true enough.
Raban is another well-off traveller in the Orwell-in-Wigan mould, with all the complexities that brings. Transcending class, though, Raban has an excellent pen for personality, sufficient self-deprecation, and a born quest for exploration that powers through 'Old Glory'. Glorious indeed.
May 18, 2022
After a divorce Raban decides to fulfill a childhood dream implanted by Huckleberry Finn and travel down the Mississippi in a 16' motor boat.
The journey takes place during Carter's re-election campaign and the Iranian Revolution, political issues that recur throughout but from a world outside the river.
Along the way he learns the wiles of this dangerous waterway with its fogs, drowned forests, eddies, boils and wakes from enormous towboats. He stays at, mostly, decayed towns on the way down which once flourished from the river but have now forgotten it or walled it off. He dives into waterside bars and, unsurprisingly, recounts meetings with a range of characters on the edge of society. Sometimes he makes it to politer society, particularly when shacking up for a few weeks with the daughter of the wealthiest man in one of the cities on the way down.
As well as bars, being the agnostic son of an Anglican clergyman, most Sundays see him in church whether stolid Lutheran, apocalyptic Catholic, best-life-now Baptist or decayed syncretistic Spiritual Voodoo.
Racial tensions are evident, as much in the North as in the South, though some towns are exceptions. In Memphis he attaches himself to the campaign of black Democratic mayoral candidate Judge (and Baptist preacher) Otis Higgs who narrowly fails to get elected, partly due to revelations of a secret love child shortly before the vote.
A well-written and diverting book given a snapshot of Americana off the beaten trail.
The journey takes place during Carter's re-election campaign and the Iranian Revolution, political issues that recur throughout but from a world outside the river.
Along the way he learns the wiles of this dangerous waterway with its fogs, drowned forests, eddies, boils and wakes from enormous towboats. He stays at, mostly, decayed towns on the way down which once flourished from the river but have now forgotten it or walled it off. He dives into waterside bars and, unsurprisingly, recounts meetings with a range of characters on the edge of society. Sometimes he makes it to politer society, particularly when shacking up for a few weeks with the daughter of the wealthiest man in one of the cities on the way down.
As well as bars, being the agnostic son of an Anglican clergyman, most Sundays see him in church whether stolid Lutheran, apocalyptic Catholic, best-life-now Baptist or decayed syncretistic Spiritual Voodoo.
Racial tensions are evident, as much in the North as in the South, though some towns are exceptions. In Memphis he attaches himself to the campaign of black Democratic mayoral candidate Judge (and Baptist preacher) Otis Higgs who narrowly fails to get elected, partly due to revelations of a secret love child shortly before the vote.
A well-written and diverting book given a snapshot of Americana off the beaten trail.
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