I have long had a fascination with rivers; they are, in my opinion, the most beautiful form water takes. However much one may bask in the hyaline gems and foaming crests rolling across the face of the seas, or contemplate the heavens reflected in a pond’s stillness, or bath in the icy translucence of a mountain lake, the river and its subspecies exert a vastly greater hypnotism, born from the intermingling of rest and motion. They are blessed with an infinite sinuosity, rolling and rippling in all directions even as they fall ineluctably to the ocean, and yet their presence is ongoing, mysteriously still. Such balancing of opposites powerfully captures both the imagination and the senses, and I have spent many hours of my life watching the scatterings and warping of light over the surface of rivers or in the limpid bodies of creeks, the eddies that form over bodies of rock, the whorls twisting through tree roots. The riparian ecosystems that rivers summon are equally beautiful and hybrid, giving rise to the amphibious in the shifting and eroding materials of forever-transforming borders, as earth and water dance back and forth in the swelling and sinking of the seasons.
Given this sometimes obsessive love of rivers, it was with significant delight that I read Henri Bosco’s L’enfant et la rivière (The Child and the River). Sometimes compared to Huckleberry Finn, The Child and the River is an adventure story of sorts about a boy named Pascalet who succumbs to the temptation to see the river, an act forbidden by his parents due to the wild nature of the place and its inhabitants. He cannot help himself, however, and left alone with his aunt, who spends the days secretively trotting about the house, Pascalet is drawn to the river and steps out into a boat tied to the shore. He watches the ceaseless flow as it pushes downstream. He is dazzled, sinks into a waking dream—and then the rope breaks, and he is adrift alone on the water, only to wash up on a large, central island inhabited by a band of gypsies. Here he rescues a boy of similar age, Gatzo, and the two escape to the river’s backwaters, among the whispering reeds and rustling birds.
Besides an ending that I shall not give away, other than to say it is equally cloaked in an otherworldly mysteriousness and childlike wonder, this is nearly the whole extent of the plot. Indeed, to call The Child and the River an adventure story, and to compare it to Huckleberry Finn, is a bit misleading. It is rather a meditation, even a long prose poem or ode, upon the river. It is indeed an adventure, but one of immense peace, like slipping into a cool dream or the first days of creation. Pascalet and Gatzo barely speak, and neither makes any effort to discern the other’s history. Bosco himself does not seem interested in such details—he directs us away from them or merely gestures to them in brief hints. These are, in the eyes of the book, unimportant. And this is as it should be; the grandeur of the river reveals itself, after all, through the eyes of a child as told by an aged narrator. “Now, all this took place a long, long time ago, and today I am very nearly an old man. But for the rest of my life, however long I may live, I will never forget those early days when I lived on the water,” the narrator informs us.1 The (nearly) old man and the child become one in the narration, and the activity of middle life is forgotten, is perhaps an obscuration of the clarity seen from the promontories of life. Bosco himself remarked once that he considered the book “very good . . . for children, adolescents, and poets.” It might be better to say that poetic consciousness and childlike wonder at the world are one and the same, a state that is beautifully captured in The Child and the River.
Indeed, the splendor of book is its vision of the natural world shining in a glory especially perceptible to children. The characters slip into silence in the face of this beauty, recognize the superfluity of adult concerns with the past or the future; they dwell together in the water’s radiance, beneath the purple hills and many-colored flowers: “The days that followed were like the first day, the nights like the first night. Within us and all around us was a great peace. After the rapture of the first hours, we attuned our life to the life of these still waters. We regulated our actions by the sun and the wind, by our hunger and thirst. And our hearts were wondrously full.”2
This being so, I believe a better comparison for the book than Huck Finn is The Wind in the Willows, particularly “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” as it also exists somewhere between dream and reality, in a poetic reflectiveness suffused with golden light, singing reeds, the mysterious calls of bush-hidden birds. In both works, the river is a central character and is filled with numinous presences flowing through the water and flora, the air, the silver ripples. Compare the following passage from Grahame’s masterpiece with that given above: “Fastening their boat to a willow, the friends landed in this silent, silver kingdom, and patiently explored the hedges, the hollow trees, the runnels and their little culverts, the ditches and dry water-ways. Embarking again and crossing over, they worked their way up the stream in this manner, while the moon, serene and detached in a cloudless sky, did what she could, though so far off, to help them in their quest.”3
Such moments of radiant natural glory, blended with an innocence and near fairy-tale wonder, form the core of The Child and The River, which captures in writing the attunement of life to the ways of rivers. And if we are able to read with sensitivity, with patience, and most of all with the open sincerity of Pascalet, we too might find ourselves drinking the harmony of the river, becoming still and silent, attuned to the world flowing and rippling past us.
Henri Bosco, The Child and the River, trans. Joyce Zonana (New York: NYRB Press), 25
Bosco, 36
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (Arcturus Press), 99