Charles Portis: LoA and two good appreciations

Yesterday was the official publication day of Charles Portis’s Collected Works in the Library of America. This is an 1100-page one-volume anthology that includes all five of Portis’s novels, four of his short stories, four essays, his autobiographical essay “Combinations of Jacksons” (which I quoted here last week), and a selection of his Civil Rights reporting.

I’ve been anticipating the release of this book ever since LoA announced it online a few months ago. I gather from a few reviews I’ve read that it is worth acquiring even for those of us who already own all of Portis’s novels and Escape Velocity, a “miscellany” edited by Jay Jennings, who has also edited this new collection. I’m curious to look at it; the LoA description says it includes all of Portis’s short stories but his earliest, “Damn!” is not in the table of contents. It also doesn’t include his play Delray’s New Moon. Regardless, it’s going on my wish list.

With the release of the Collected Works I have run across several reviews and appreciations. Here are two exceptionally good ones that I hope y’all will check out.

First, in an review titled “Gringos and Gnomons” in The American Conservative, John Wilson, a great Portis devotee, offers a wonderful appreciation of Portis’s capacious, idiosyncratic, and above all precise body of work from the “deliciously weird” Masters of Atlantis to Wilson’s favorite—and the one vying with True Grit to become my own—Gringos. Wilson:

Why is Gringos my favorite? It has everything I love in Portis’s fiction, all entwined in a single book. Human self-deception, comedy, wickedness and goodness, quotidian joys and sorrows and mostly unspoken consolations of faith, deep absurdity, betrayal and friendship, a sympathetic narrator/protagonist who sees a lot but misses so much: you get that all in Gringos. I was terribly disappointed when no more novels followed, but in retrospect maybe that wasn’t surprising. Sentence by sentence, it is (so I think) easily among the best American novels of the last fifty years.

Wilson’s review is paywalled online but I was able to read the whole thing in the print edition. It’s worth seeking out. When I read it to my wife she said, “This sounds like something you would have written.” Not because I’m as good a writer as Wilson, who is always a delight, but because my repeated praise of Portis has always fallen along the same lines.

The second review I’d recommend is “Signs and Wonders,” a longer essay by Will Stephenson in Harper’s. Stephenson includes not only a good overview of Portis’s novels but some great anecdotes about Portis the man, opening with a great bit about Portis’s visit to Buckingham Palace in the early 1960s. The whole essay is too full of good material to summarize, so please accept this sample paragraph and go read the whole thing:

And just as “recluse,” as Pynchon once said, can be code for “doesn’t like to talk to reporters,” so too can “cult writer” be code for “doesn’t live in New York.” After his fishing-shack sojourn, Little Rock would remain Portis’s home for the rest of his life—“as much as I can call anyplace home,” he clarified to a Memphis newspaper in a rare interview after True Grit’s release. “I guess I don’t really have one.” His regional association can confuse this point. In fact, Portis spent years living out of his truck, as well as in trailers and motels and non-descript apartment complexes. He spent a substantial portion of each year in Mexico. Even True Grit was written, he said, in a village about two hundred miles north of Mexico City; he seemed to consider San Miguel de Allende a kind of second home. His books are as much about being away from Arkansas as they are about being there. The Dog of the South and Gringos are both set predominantly south of the border, Norwood draws on his fish-out-of-water experience of living in New York (and traveling the country), and True Grit’s action takes place largely in the Choctaw Nation, present-day Oklahoma; it is a journey into the past and into historical research, his serious commitment to which is everywhere in evidence in the non-fiction pieces included in this book.

As it happens, this exilic aspect of Portis’s work—journeys to and from, with home seldom glimpsed outside the rearview mirror—is one of the most Southern things about him. One of these days I’m going to get around to writing an essay about that.

Portis’s novels rather famously went out of print during the 1990s (or earlier) until brought back by Overlook, which was seriously doing the Lord’s work there. But even since it became available again, the delight of Portis’s work has most often spread by word of mouth and the occasional paean in places like Oxford American, The Believer, and Esquire. Nevertheless, the covers of his books had to settle for blurbs that often felt faintly dismissive. The most irritating to me, reprinted again and again, was Roy Blount Jr’s: “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” Blech.

So it’s gratifying to see Portis getting this kind of recognition. Per Wilson again:

Only long after [a friend] introduced me to Portis did it occur to me that one of the charms of his work was that his name had never even been mentioned when I was in grad school, nor was it bandied about in the lit mags and such I routinely read.

Ditto. I discovered Portis, as I imagine many others did, through True Grit, which I read when the Coens’ film came out just after I finished grad school at Clemson. Very soon I moved on to The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis. I certainly felt like I had discovered something—maybe not the last precious Atlantean manuscript but dang close. And I, too, hoped for just one more novel. I think Gringos was the last of his novels that I read, just a few months before my wife and I married. That was ten years ago. Rereading it a third time this spring was a joy—better than ever. And you know how Flannery O’Connor said you can tell when a book is good.

The LoA is a nonprofit publisher and $45 may look steep, but you can’t get all five novels that cheaply in individual paperbacks. All five—and I agree with Wilson, if only through experience, that you can jump in anywhere. If you’re intrigued by Portis, have read True Grit and want to read more, or just like good stories, the LoA’s Collected Works will be worth your while.

Portis on the New South

Main Street in a purportedly Southern city

Since rereading Gringos back at the beginning of this month I’ve been revisiting more of the late lamented Charles Portis’s work, particularly the short stories and travel essays collected in Escape Velocity. This comes from his magnificent memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” published in the Atlantic in 1999. Throughout, Portis uses the phrase “combinations of Jacksons” to denote a certain kind of rural, unsophisticated, rambunctious, indeed ungovernable but good Southerner. Salt of the earth, good folks—an instantly recognizable type.

Here, Portis moves from describing how the support of a great uncle who rode with Quantrill and Jesse James for Theodore Roosevelt, a New York Republican, infuriated other Confederate veterans in 1904 (“Unseemly spectacle, coots flailing away”) to make an aside about the gradual, creeping fulfilment of the hopes of the Henry Gradys of the South:

For more than a century now, at intervals of about five years, southern editorial writers have been seeing portents in the night skies and proclaiming The End of the War, at Long Last, and the blessed if somewhat tardy arrival of The New South. By that they seem to mean something the same as, culturally identical with, at one with, the rest of the country, and this time they may be on to something, what with our declining numbers of Gaylons, Coys, and Virgils, and the disappearance of Clabber Girl Baking Powder signs from our highways, and of mules, standing alone in pastures. Then there is the new and alien splendor to be seen all about us, in cities with tall, dark, and featureless glass towers, though I’m told that deep currents are flowing here, far beyond the ken of editorial wretches in their cluttered cubicles. A little underground newsletter informs me that these peculiar glass structures are designed with care, by sociologists and architects working hand in glove with the CIA, as dark and forbidding boxes, in which combinations of Jacksons are thought least likely to gather, combine further, smoke cigarettes, brood, conspire, and break loose out of a long lull.

The essay is tinged throughout with a ubi sunt melancholy, perhaps nowhere more pointedly than here.

I live just outside a city of exactly the New South described here—glossy, polished, deracinated, full of outsiders. Not so much out-Yankeeing the Yankee as letting him take over. (Here’s a spoof I recently discovered. You laugh so you don’t cry.) I think Portis was onto something. I also hope he turns out to be wrong, that the pendulum will swing back, that his Jacksons will “break loose” and combine again.

The scorn of one crank for another crank

With my dad in front of the Castillo at Tulum. That’s Gringos that I’m carrying in my right hand.

Late last night I returned from a trip to the Yucatán, during which I got to do two amazing things—one for the first and the other for the third time. The first was visiting the Yucatec Maya city of Tulum, which I hope to write about in the coming week. The other was rereading one of my favorite novels, Charles Portis’s Gringos. I’ve been planning to reread this particular novel on this particular trip for months, as the story takes place in the Yucatán and concerns the use and abuse of Mayan sites and artifacts. I enjoy reading novels in story-appropriate settings, and this reading of Gringos was one of the best I’ve ever experienced. Five stars, would recommend.

I hope to write more about Gringos and Portis in the coming weeks, too, but for the time being I wanted to share a longish passage from early in the novel. The narrator, Arklatex expat Jimmy Burns, has just run into the young UFO researcher Rudy Kurle broken down midriver deep in the Yucatán jungle. Rudy is on his way to a Mayan city he believes is a UFO landing pad.

He wore a bush hat with the brim turned up on one side, Australian fashion, and a belted safari jacket with epaulets, rings and pleated pockets, and he wanted to be known as “Rudy Kurle, author and lecturer.” He and Louise were in Mexico to gather material for a book about some space dwarfs or “manikins” who came here many years ago from a faraway planet. There was no connection to the chaneques, as far as I knew. Their little men were benign, with superior skills and knowledge, and they had transformed a tribe of savages into the Mayan civilization. Not very flattering to the Indians, and it wasn’t of course a new theory, except perhaps for the dwarf element. There had been recent landings as well. 

As a geocentric I didn’t find this stuff convincing. I knew the argument—all those galaxies!—a statistical argument, but in my cosmology men were here on earth and nowhere else, go as far as you like. There was us and the spirit world and that was it. It was a visceral belief or feeling so unshakable that I didn’t even bother to defend it. When others laughed at me, I laughed with them. Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment. 

Rudy was often gone on these mysterious field trips, to check out reports of ancient television receivers, pre-Columbian Oldsmobiles, stone carvings of barefooted astronauts strapped into their space ships. The ships were driven by “photon propulsion,” although here in the jungle the manikins went about their errands in other, smaller, “slow aircraft.” Rudy wouldn’t describe the machines for me. He and Louise tried to draw people out without giving away anything themselves. There were thieves around who would steal your ideas and jump into print ahead of you. So much uncertainty in their work.

And so little fellowship among the writers. They shared a beleaguered faith and they stole freely from one another—the recycling of material was such that their books were all pretty much the same one now—but in private they seldom had a good word for their colleagues. There were usually a few of these people in temporary residence in Mérida. They exchanged stiff nods on the street. Rudy even expressed contempt for Erich von Däniken, his master, who had started the whole business, and for lesser writers too, for anyone whose level of credulity did not exactly match his own. A millimeter off, either way, and you were a fool. It was the scorn of one crank for another crank. 

A few observations: First, this is some really fine writing. It’s almost pure exposition but it also characterizes Rudy and his colleagues and Jimmy Burns all at the same time, and is peppered with dozens of vivid, concrete details, which as I’m always noting are “the life blood of fiction.”

Second, this is hilarious. The bit about preferring the belligerent UFO books has made me laugh for ten years now. But it was that line’s context which really struck me this time around.

Third—that context. There’s the accidentally insulting (and potentially racist) condescension of ancient aliens theories, the continuous cross-pollination and outright plagiarism of unverified and ultimately unverifiable information, the jockeying for position and originality, the caginess, the backbiting, and the strange hauteur of the precisely defined and defended wackadoo position. This is a sharply observed and pinpoint accurate description of the UFO community—or any conspiracy-minded community, for that matter.

And the whole book is like this. Actually, it gets even better.

Check Gringos out if you haven’t. While Portis’s best book is incontestably True Grit, Gringos has many of the same strengths—a straightforward plot, a brilliantly realized setting, great humor, a strong narrative voice—but a more intricate plot. That makes it certainly, I think, his most finely crafted novel. I strongly recommend it. And if you can read it while visiting Mayan ruins in the Yucatán, all the better.

I’ve written before about cranks, with reference to Chesterton, here, and—once again with reference to Chesterton—about chronological snobbery and the inadvertent (or not) racism of ancient aliens theories here and here. And Gringos was the subject of one of the very first posts on this blog, in which I quoted the “belligerent” line above as well as another gem about a subject dear to me, here.

Entertaining hypotheticals

Dakin Matthews as Colonel Stonehill in True Grit

The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit hews very closely to the source material, with the dialogue often coming from the novel verbatim. But one of my favorite lines is a Coen creation, inserted seamlessly into Mattie Ross’s haggling with Colonel Stonehill, licensed auctioneer, cotton factor.

When Stonehill insists that he is not liable to Mattie’s family for a horse stolen from his stables, Mattie argues, “You were the custodian. If you were a bank and were robbed you could not simply tell the depositors to go hang.”

Stonehill replies with this immortal line:

“I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

I have used this line many, many times in the classroom. I commend it to other history teachers.

Entertaining hypotheticals, musing over What ifs, is the great trap of historical study. Leaving behind the already “vexing” question of what actually happened to pursue imaginary alternate histories based on decisions never made, accidents that never happened, or outcomes that one would simply prefer—this is almost always a waste of time. Such histories are fundamentally unknowable precisely because they never happened. Per the late Kenneth Minogue:

“The future is largely inscrutable; indeed we may count ourselves exceptionally fortunate if we acquire much of an understanding of the past.”

Stick just with what happened and you’ll be busy the rest of your life.

Alternate history can, however, be fun. During a sick day this week I started Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, which takes place in Berlin in 1964, but a 1964 in which Nazi Germany won World War II and the city is preparing to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday. And it’s a great novel—an engaging, well-paced, suspenseful, carefully imagined mystery thriller. Harris has done his research and made this setting as plausible and as deeply rooted in reality as it can possibly be.

But there are the nagging details—foremost among them, how likely is it that Hitler, whose health was disintegrating by 1944, could have lived to the age of 75? (Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle does this slightly better, since Hitler is dead and Martin Bormann is the Führer by the time that one begins.)

This is less of a problem for a mystery thriller, of course. But then some people play the hypothetical game in deadly earnest. Yesterday, yet another Instagram story from a hugely popular law, government, and history “explainer” who bills herself as “American’s Government Teacher” came my way. Writing to celebrate a flute solo at the Library of Congress as a significant moment in American racial politics, the author attacks James Madison thus:

He was one of the reasons we have something called the 3/5 compromise, which permitted people who owned other humans to count them as 3/5 of a person in an effort to increase their political power.

Without the 3/5 compromise, slavery would have ended at least 60 years before it did.

Ignore the fact that the Three-Fifths Compromise was effectively stricken from the Constitution by the 13th and 14th Amendments, so that this should read “we had something called the 3/5 compromise;” that who exactly benefited from the compromise was hotly debated then and is, among honest historians, hotly debated now; and that the compromise did not assert that certain unspecified people were only “3/5 of a person” but stipulated that only three-fifths of their total population would count toward apportioning congressmen. This last is a self-congratulatory, politically useful, and therefore ineradicable myth, but a myth nonetheless.

No, ignore all that. Look at the “would have” in the second part. Whether slavery would have ended in 1805 as opposed to 1865 is unknowable. There is no way of knowing whether this is true, because it did not happen. This is pure speculation—an uninformed, irresponsible hypothetical. And the true story, God knows, is vexing enough.

So much for being an “explainer,” but keep celebrating that flute.

If you must entertain hypotheticals, think of it as a parlor game, or a delicate fictional trick that should only be attempted by a master craftsman. Otherwise, Col Stonehill’s advice should serve us all well.

Charles Portis, RIP

For years now, I have hoped for just one more novel from two aging Southern writers. One was Cormac McCarthy, whose most recent novel, The Road, came out in 2006, when I was in college. The other, and the one whose work I more devoutly wished for, was Charles Portis. Portis’s last novel, Gringos, was published in 1991. Escape Velocity, a 2012 miscellany of newspaper articles, travelogues, short fiction, a play, and essay-length appreciations by other writers, collects a handful of more recent stories. It looks like it will be his last book of any kind—Portis died yesterday aged 86.

An Arkansas native, Portis served in the Marine Corps in Korea—a memory obliquely evoked in at least one of his novels and his final short story—before going into journalism. After writing for regional papers in or near Arkansas he was picked up by the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked alongside Tom Wolfe (literally alongside, their desks being next to each other), among others. He covered the Civil Rights movement before being assigned to the paper’s London bureau—a job once held by Karl Marx. (He joked that the Herald Tribune “might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better.”)

The London bureau job was his final gig. He quit journalism and returned to Arkansas to write his first novel. Norwood came out in 1966 and was adapted into a film four years later, by which time he had published his second, best remembered, and arguably greatest novel, True Grit.

These first two novels have everything in them that Portis would tweak and explore in his later books. Naive but well-meaning Southerners or westerners, a picaresque road trip, loquacious cranks, con men more pathetic than threatening, a world blankly indifferent to the characters, and masterfully interwoven humor, especially deadpan snark. There is no joy like Portis’s dialogue.

True Grit also demonstrates Portis’s mastery of narrative voice. While the story takes place in narrator Mattie Ross’s fourteenth year, her acid, knowing narration is the voice of middle aged Mattie, and the wry interplay of this Mattie describing her younger self in more precocious years and livelier times—and settling theological and political scores in terse asides—is half of what makes the book great. It also helps that it’s a great story, and Rooster Cogburn a fictional invention for the ages. Throughout, the tone is what keeps the book going as much as anything, and it’s the Coen brothers’ success, in the more recent of the book’s two film adaptations, in dramatizing the tone of the book that has made theirs the better of the two film versions. Mattie is the American narrator par excellence—I’d choose her over Huck Finn any day.

His last three books came out in six-year intervals from 1979 onward. The Dog of the South is about a cuckolded bore traveling into Mexico in pursuit of his wife, who has run off with a lover. Masters of Atlantis tells the story of a naive midwesterner hoodwinked into founding a secret society to protect the arcana of Atlantis. Gringos tells the story of American expatriates—some good, some bad, most somewhere in between—living out their days in the Yucatan, passing the time leading tours of Mayan ruins, trafficking the occasional illicit antiquity, and dealing with violent millenarian hippies.

All are great.

These books have meant a lot to me since I first discovered them a decade ago, and they are among the few that I have reread with even more enjoyment a second time. I reread True Grit and Masters of Atlantis just last year. I have not only enjoyed them but learned from them, and tried especially to use the lessons in the art of fiction I learned from True Grit when I came to write Griswoldville. Anything I’ve written pales next to his work, but he remains an inspiration. My consolation is that at least I can be near him on the shelf.

Portis was a gift, and my genuine sorrow that he is no longer with us is balanced by my lasting gratitude for his work. RIP.

Gringos, by Charles Portis

Charles Portis is one of my favorite authors. He's most famous for True Grit, which is a magnificent novel, but he's also written four other less well-known and appreciated novels. The most recent (published in 1991) is Gringos.

Gringos has a lot in common with Portis's other novels. Like True Grit and The Dog of the South, it's the story of an Arkansas native in exile. Like Norwood, the protagonist finds himself falling in with all kinds of colorful characters and a certain amount of danger he's not really prepared for. Like Masters of Atlantis, the esoteric and occult figure prominently.

The main character is an American living in the Yucatan, where he gives guided tours of the jungle and Mayan ruins and occasionally traffics in a little illicit Mayan antiquities. His life is upended by a couple of changes to his circumstances, including love (kind of ?) and the arrival of a band of dangerous hippies who may have something to do with a recent kidnapping in the United States. 

To describe more of the plot would be both giving away too much and pointless. Because in any Portis novel the real joy is the narrative voice, the dialogue, the ramshackle collection of eccentric characters, and the preposterous set pieces that the plot meanders between. Also enlivening every one of his novels are marvelous little observations and asides like the two below, both from Gringos:

Simcoe read a book. It was all right to do that here. In the States it was acceptable to read newspapers and magazines in public, but not books, unless you wanted to be taken for a student or a bum or a lunatic or all three. Here you could read books in cafes without giving much offense, and even write them.

A passage that should make anyone who has ever read or written along in a restaurant grin.

Also, for a taste of the "Unsolved Mysteries"-like esoterica that drifts into Gringos:

Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren't nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.

Do check out Portis's books; not just True Grit, which is a masterpiece and well worth your time, but his others as well. They're all great, and precious few.