With the Current

A STRETCH ON THE RIVER (242 pp.)--Richard Blssell--Little, Brown ($2.75).

Dick Bissell, 37, is now the manager of a clothing factory in Dubuque and a settled citizen, but for a while he had river fever as bad as Huck Finn ever did.

It came over him gradually. When he was packed off to Phillips Exeter Academy from his home near Catfish Creek in Iowa, he became coxswain of the crew when he graduated from Harvard in 1936 he shipped out on a Standard Oil tanker bound for South America. Finally he went to work as deck hand, mate and pilot on a succession of Mississippi river boats--diesel towboats and stern-wheelers. A Stretch on the River is his first, largely autobiographical novel based on those days.

Mark Twain would have liked A Stretch on the River, but not Mark's genteel wife Livy. The fact is that Deck Hand Bill Joyce thought and talked mostly about women and so did Joe, the second mate.

Like Author Bissell, Bill Joyce had some fancy schooling and a well-to-do father. When he reported for work on the towboat Inland Coal after being turned down by the Navy in 1942, he went aboard sardonically quoting from Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael") at the tow-boat's second mate. But after he had finished his first year Joyce had river fever bad, had his sights set on a mate's job and even put river life above his girl. Of course he got the girl, wound up a pilot.

A Stretch on the River is a slight and rambling saga and its humor runs largely to wisecracks, but it has a fine, easy familiarity with river life and describes its spell with casual, vernacular effectiveness. Though the book is no Huckleberry Finn, it has some of Mark Twain's own feeling for the rugged, easygoing river hands on the Mississippi.

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