Books by and about Charles Portis (RIP).
Charles Portis, one of my most favorite authors, died this past Monday, Feb. 17, at the age of 86 at a hospice in Little Rock, Arkansas, his longtime residence, from Alzheimer’s disease. A story about his death appeared in yesterday’s Houston Chronicle (reprinted from the AP). A natural raconteur who credited his stint in the Marines with giving him time to read, he later earned a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas in 1958, and spent the next few years as a night police reporter in Memphis (where I am sure he met some very interesting characters who may have influenced his future fictional characters) and eventually became the London bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune. Two of his interview subjects included Malcolm X and J.D. Salinger (where Portis interviewed Salinger on an airplane they both were flying on by sheer happenstance). He was also a firsthand journalist on the civil rights movement and in 1963 covered the riot and police beatings of black protestors in Birmingham, Alabama.
But in 1964 he left journalism to eagerly pursue his true passion of writing novels. He only wrote five, but boy are those five novels something else!: Norwood (1966), True Grit (1968), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991). He was working on a sixth unpublished novel when his Alzheimer’s prevented its completion. Portis also shied away from publicity and did not appear much in public at all, despite his popularity and renown and requests for appearances and interviews.
Portis was known for his droll, plain-spoken humor, and wry wit and perspective. He was often compared to a 20th Century Mark Twain. He loved the South—Arkansas, Texas, Mexico, and points South, and he loved cars (except in True Grit obviously) where the more ramshackle and eccentric the car the better, to match his ramshackle and eccentric characters who also take many unpredictable detours in his books. Donna Tartt described Charles Portis as: “No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does.”
All of his novels are wonderful. My personal favorite is his 4th, Masters of Atlantis, about a ne’er-do-well group of misfits, led by the endlessly credulous Lamar Jimmerson, who call themselves the Gnomons and who believe they have discovered the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis through a little known book about Gnomonry called the Codex Pappus. As the book flap describes: “Masters of Atlantis is a novel alive with feeling and laughter—a cockeyed journey into the America of misfits and con men, oddballs and innocents.”
Portis’ best known and most famous book is True Grit. You have probably seen the two movie versions, the first more softened one with John Wayne, and the second less glossy, more faithful adaptation by the Coen brothers with Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn and Hallie Steinfield as the indomitable Mattie Ross. But if you haven’t read the book, you should—it is absolutely wonderful. No one captures that totally authentic Southern/Arkansas voice for Mattie like Charles Portis, that Biblical magisterial voice, especially for a young Arkansas girl, precisely phrased, word by serious word, no contractions, like a no-nonsense Sunday sermon delivered by a very no-nonsense girl. The person whose “voice” comes closest to this is Cormac McCarthy, like in Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness In The West, but of course Cormac McCarthy is much darker and much less humorous than Charles Portis.
The other three novels are just filled with the wonderfully eccentric worlds of Charles Portis. His first, Norwood, is about an ex-Marine (hmmm) and troubadour Norwood Pratt who is sent on a mission to New York by Grady Fring, the Kredit King, in a suspicious car to collect a suspicious debt for Grady. But Norwood winds up on a Trailways bus with a circus dwarf (Edmund B. Ratner, the second shortest midget in show business and the world’s smallest perfect fat man), a chicken (named Joann “with a college education”), and who will turn out to be his true love, Rita Lee.
Portis’ third book, The Dog of the South, is about Ray Midge, whose wife Norma has run off with her first husband while also taking Ray’s Texaco card, his American Express card, and his precious Ford Torino! He chases her through Texas, Mexico, and all the way to Honduras in the first husband’s 1963 Buick Special, a compact with 74,000 miles on it and a quarter-turn slack in the steering wheel. “The Dog of the South” is the name of a broken-down bus of an old Texas M.D. in Honduras who has rickety expectations of inheriting a small island and a thousand dreams for developing it. And of course there is a cast of many eccentric memorable characters along the way.
Portis’ last book Gringos is again an eccentric Southern road trip book about Jimmy Burns trying to escape from Louise, the small and determined girl who won’t let him be, by driving to Mexico where he does various trucking jobs, finding missing persons, and unearthing pre-Columbian artifacts. Along the way Jimmy (and Louise) run into “hippies” searching for psychic happenings (which may include human sacrifice), archeologists unearthing (illegally) Mayan tombs, and Louise and her weird husband looking for UFO landing sites. A wonderfully fun and weird book with brightly writ characters that is true Charles Portis.
There is also a collection of some of Charles Portis’ nonfiction, journalism, and shorter works collected and edited by his fellow Little Rock writer and friend Jay Jennings in a book called Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, Edited by Jay Jennings (2012). This very nice book contains chapters on Selected Newspaper Reporting and Writing (with some of his gripping reportage on the civil rights movement), Travels (including a hilarious account of a bumpy auto trip of his in rugged Baja California, and his experiences with cheap motels), Four Short Stories, a Memoir, a Drama, an Interview (a rare occurrence), and lastly five Tributes written by fellow writers to Charles Portis including “Comedy in Earnest” by Roy Blount, Jr., “Like Cormac McCarthy, but Funny” by Ed Park, “Our Least-Known Great Novelist” by Ron Rosenbaum, “On True Grit” by Donna Tartt, and “The Book That Changed My Life: Gringos” by Wells Tower. The title of this collection is related to a self-deprecating quip by Charles Portis about himself and his eccentric characters that they haven’t quite reached full assimilation into American life and society because they have failed to achieve “escape velocity” from their own condition.
So if you haven’t read any of Charles Portis, please please please give him a try. True Grit is his most well known with a wonderful display of his amazing character and authentic dialogue writing. The others are also Charles Portis at his most droll, eccentric, and wonderful. A true American treasure that not enough people have read. As I said he is one of my favorite authors ever, and I plan to do some re-reading in his honor and memory.
I have also clipped out the AP story about his death and tucked it into my hardback copy of True Grit as an “Easter Egg” for someone to discover after my demise. I do that to a lot of my books—if there’s a printed article or review about it that I like, I’ll clip it out and insert it into the mentioned book for someone else to discover and enjoy later. I have had this happen to me in a few used books that I have purchased at used book stores—not often, but always a wonderful surprise when it happens. One was a small election campaign card for a Democratic Primary election for County Clerk in Hobbs, New Mexico, in 1974 (maybe used as a bookmark)—I hope she won her Primary. Another was a brief three-sentence letter to the editor cut out of an old Iowa newspaper that I found inside a 1939 edition of The Grapes of Wrath that I had purchased at Bell’s Books in Palo Alto, California 30-odd years back. The letter was written shortly after the book was published, and the writer didn’t like The Grapes of Wrath at all calling it “vile” and concluding with “We must confess that after we finished, we felt as though a good mental bath would feel fine.” I know that book was controversial at the time. But Wow, I must have read a different The Grapes of Wrath. And I marvel sometimes at what paths books can take—like how that The Grapes of Wrath made it to Iowa, then to Palo Alto, and then on to me and Houston. The next owner may be scratching his head about that even more. Still, what serendipity and interesting surprises you can sometimes find in old books!
So to Charles Portis I can only say upon your passing Thank You! Bless You and Godspeed on your next journey. I hope you finally achieve escape velocity.
