Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  REED: Let me just fill in a couple of small gaps. When and where were you born?

  PORTIS: December 28, 1933, in El Dorado, Arkansas.

  REED: Oh, you’re just a kid.

  PORTIS: A few weeks ago I had to dig out that birth certificate. An ominous Dr. Slaughter delivered me.

  REED: Born in El Dorado and lived in…?

  PORTIS: Well, let’s see. Norphlet, El Dorado, Mount Holly and Hamburg. All roughly on a line along the Louisiana border.

  REED: And went to school in all those places?

  PORTIS: Yes, except for Norphlet. I was too young there. I went to the first two grades in El Dorado, at Hugh Goodwin School, then to Mount Holly, and then to Hamburg for the eighth through twelfth grades.

  REED: I remember you once wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazette, denying that you were from El Dorado. I don’t know how you put it, but…

  PORTIS: I think that was about some reference in the paper, saying I was from El Dorado, period. I was setting things straight. A quibble. I must not have had much to do that day.

  REED: Right, okay. Since the newspaper days you’ve been in the novel writing business.

  PORTIS: Yes.

  REED: You have written six?

  PORTIS: Five.

  REED: And occasional non-fiction?

  PORTIS: Now and then, yes. Keeping my hand in.

  REED: Was the most recent one for The Atlantic? For Bill Whitworth?

  PORTIS: Yes, I believe it was.

  REED: Buddy, can you think of anything we haven’t covered about the Gazette, or anything else?

  PORTIS: No, that pretty well does it.

  REED: Okay, if I think of something else, I’ll call you. Thanks very much.

  PORTIS: You’re welcome.

  Appendix

  TRIBUTES

  Comedy in Earnest

  By Roy Blount Jr.

  Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-three books, covering subjects from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to the Marx Brothers’ film Duck Soup. He is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me! and is a member of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel. Born in Indianapolis and raised in Decatur, Georgia, Blount now lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, the painter Joan Griswold.

  The risk you take on Charles Portis, of course, is that you may sound like Dr. Reo Symes on the author John Selmer Dix. According to Symes, Dix wrote his masterpiece, Wings as Eagles, while riding back and forth from Dallas to Los Angeles on the (noon out of Dallas) bus for a whole year. “He was a broken man all right,” says Symes, “but by God the work got done. He wrecked his health so that we might have Wings as Eagles”—compared to which, according to Symes, all other writing is just “foul grunting.”

  Symes (a character in Portis’s The Dog of the South who, incidentally, has “long meaty ears”) is going overboard. But it’s hard to shrug off his opinion, because Wings as Eagles is a book of tips for salesmen, and Symes “had sold hi-lo shag carpet remnants and velvet paintings from the back of a truck in California. He had sold wide shoes by mail, shoes that must have been almost round, at widths up to EEEEEE. He had sold gladiola bulbs and vitamins for men and fat-melting pills and all-purpose books and hail-damaged pears. He had picked up small fees counseling veterans on how to fake chest pains so as to gain immediate admission to V.A. hospitals and a free week in bed. He had sold ranchettes in Colorado and unregistered securities in Arkansas.”

  I can’t help thinking that Portis has in his travels met people who sold each of these things. But Portis never seems to be selling anything himself. His fiction is the funniest I know, but the last thing in the world his characters have in mind is putting themselves across as comical. They are taking on the world in earnest. Hershel Remley, Lucky Ned Pepper, Sidney Hen: their perfect names never seem made up. Lesser comic writers drag their characters onstage and shout, “Get a load of this guy!” Portis’s characters just show up.

  Take Squanto, the talking bluejay in Portis’s craziest novel, Masters of Atlantis. Any ordinary writer would wring no end of hilarious chatter out of an articulate bluejay. You know how bluejays in nature can get carried away. The single thing Portis directly quotes from Squanto is “Welcome June. To Mystery Ranch. Welcome June. To Mystery Ranch.” The italics, Portis’s, are not I think for emphasis but to suggest how any talking bluejay would sound. Yet Squanto is a vivid character, who also affords the author, and the reader, considerable narrative mileage.

  Squanto—a gift from an admirer—is a sign that his master, Austin Popper, a subordinate crank in the international order of Gnomons, is getting ideas of his own. Squanto helps to propel, though not in the direction Popper has in mind, an extraordinary sequence in which the June whom Squanto addresses is fecklessly—by Popper, that is—wooed. And as Squanto ages, and evinces an inner life (“Popper fed a glazed cherry to Squanto. The jaybird was getting old. One wing drooped and he no longer talked much in an outright way. During the night he muttered”) and dies, we realize that our story, however delusional and even inconsequential it might seem to the casual observer, is moving briskly along.

  Ray Midge, the narrator of The Dog of the South, is another dead-serious bird. He is not upset when somebody calls him “rat face,” because “it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.”

  Midge is tracking his runaway wife, Norma, and her paramour, Guy Dupree, by following the trail of receipts from his credit card, which they stole along with his car. A Mexican hotel owner apologizes for booking Midge into the same room that Norma and Guy stayed in when they came through. Midge says it doesn’t matter. “Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, ‘It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.’”

  The mop caught fire! Midge himself is less combustible. The Dog of the South is, in this sense, willful: Portis purposely undertook to write a novel with a boring narrator. But that doesn’t mean Midge lacks feeling. He recalls the unsuitable houses he looked at to buy with Norma, when they were still together:

  “The last one had been a little chocolate-brown cottage, with a shed of the same rich color in the back yard. The real-estate fellow showed us around and he talked about the rent-like payments. In the shed we came across an old man lying on a cot. He was eating nuts from a can and watching a daytime television show. His pearly shins were exposed above his socks. A piece of cotton covered one eye.

  “‘That’s Mr. Proctor,’ said the real-estate bird. ‘He pays fifty a month for the shed and you can apply that, see, on your note.’ I didn’t want an old man living in my back yard and the real-estate bird said, ‘Well, tell him to hit the road then,’ but I didn’t want to do that either, to Mr. Proctor.”

  Uncanny the radiance that “eating nuts from a can” takes on, in this context.

  Midge at twenty-six is a prematurely old man himself, and afraid of getting older. (“Think about this,” someone tells him. “All the little animals of your youth are long dead.”) But he is unbowed. In engineering school, which he didn’t finish, Strength of Materials was his favorite subject. “Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn’t listen.…He would always say—boast, the way those people do—that he had no head for figures and couldn’t do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.”

  Portis’s characters are insensitive and narrow in ways often held against men. But the characters have tensile strength. This applies not only to Rooster Cogburn, the male protagonist of True Grit, but also to the narrator and female lead, Mattie Ross, a tough little nut. The love story, buddy story, loyalty sto
ry, whatever you want to call it, of those two is all the more poignant for its utter lack of romance, sex, or even outright affection.

  As for rat-faced Midge, he staunchly persists in not being a rat to anybody, even to such a conscienceless rat as Dr. Symes, who while his own mother is dying (or so it appears, but she rallies) is angling to get his hooks into the little island off Ferriday, Louisiana, that she does not want him to turn into something profitable like a Christian boys’ ranch or a theme park called Jefferson Davis Land. (“Every afternoon at three Lee would take off his grey coat and wrestle an alligator in a mud hole.”)

  When the mother Symes presses Midge to express an opinion on the afterlife, he says, “It’s just so odd to think that people are walking around in Heaven and Hell.”

  “Yes,” says Mrs. Symes, “but it’s odd to find ourselves walking around here too, isn’t it?”

  If a religion should organize itself around that principle, I’m in.

  Like Cormac McCarthy, but Funny

  By Ed Park

  Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days (2008), which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. He is a founding editor of The Believer, where this essay originally appeared in March 2003, and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. He is currently the literary fiction editor at Amazon Publishing’s New York City imprint.

  CHARLES PORTIS, AUTHOR OF TRUE GRIT, GOT JOHN WAYNE HIS ONLY OSCAR. HE ONCE HAD KARL MARX’S OLD GIG (AS THE LONDON BUREAU CHIEF FOR THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE). HE’S WRITTEN FOUR OTHER NOVELS, THREE OF THEM MASTERPIECES, THOUGH WHICH THREE IS UP FOR DEBATE. HERE’S 7,000 WORDS ABOUT A GUY YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF, BUT SHOULD, WE SAY.

  DISCUSSED: Dr. Slaughter, Gringos, The Dog of the South, Turnip Greens, a Japanese Napkin-Folding Club, Ink-Stained Wretchdom, Gore, True Grit, the Old Testament, Glen Campbell, the Covered Path, Occult Mischief, Ambidextrous Romanians, Pure Nitro.

  I. AMONG THE JOURNALIST ANTS

  In 1964, in the midst of so-called Swinging London, Charles McColl Portis had Karl Marx’s old job. Portis (who turns seventy this year) was thirty at the time, not yet a novelist, just a newspaperman seemingly blessed by that guild’s gods. His situational Marxism would have been hard to predict. Delivered into this world by the “ominous Dr. Slaughter” in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1933, Charles Portis—sometimes “Charlie” or “Buddy”—had grown up in towns along the Arkla border, enlisted in the Marines after high school and fought in the Korean War. Upon his discharge in 1955, he majored in journalism at the University of Arkansas (imagining it might be “fun and not very hard, something like barber college”), and after graduation worked at the appealingly named Memphis Commercial Appeal. He soon returned to his native state, writing for the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock.

  He left for New York in 1960, and became a general assignment reporter at the now defunct New York Herald Tribune, working out of what has to be one of the more formidable newsroom incubators in history—his comrades included Tom Wolfe (who would later dub him the “original laconic cutup”) and future Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham. Norwood’s titular ex-Marine, after a fruitless few days in Gotham, saw it as “the hateful town,” and Portis himself had once suggested (in response to an aspersion against Arkansas in the pages of Time), that Manhattan be buried in turnip greens; still, he stayed for three years. He apparently thrived, for he was tapped as the Trib’s London bureau chief and reporter—the latter post held in the 1850s by the author of The Communist Manifesto (1848). (More specifically, his predecessor had been a London correspondent for the pre-merger New York Herald.) Recently, in a rare interview for the Gazette Project at the University of Arkansas, Portis recalls telling his boss that the paper “might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better.”1

  Indeed, as Portis notes in his second novel, the bestselling True Grit (1968), “You will sometimes let money interfere with your notions of what is right.” If Marx had decided to loosen up, Portis wouldn’t have gone to Korea, to serve in that first war waged over communism, and (in the relentless logic of these things) wouldn’t have put together his first protagonist, taciturn Korea vet Norwood Pratt, in quite the same way. Perhaps the well would have run dry—fast. Instead of writing five remarkable, deeply entertaining novels (three of them surely masterpieces, though which three is up for debate), Portis could be in England still, grinding out copy by the column inch, saying “cheers” when replacing the phone.

  In any event, Portis left not only England but ink-stained wretchdom itself—“quit cold,” as Wolfe writes in “The Birth of the New Journalism: An Eyewitness Report” (1972), later the introduction to the 1973 anthology The New Journalism. After sailing back to the States on “one of the Mauretania’s last runs,” he reportedly holed up in his version of Proust’s cork-lined study—a fishing shack back in Arkansas—to try his hand at fiction.

  These journalists work pretty fast, and the slim picaresque Norwood appeared in 1966, to favorable notice. Portis’s signature drollery and itinerant protagonist (Norwood Pratt, auto mechanic and aspiring country singer, ranges from Ralph, Texas, to New York City and back, initially to recover seventy dollars loaned to a service buddy) are already in place. The supporting cast includes a midget, a loaf-groping bread deliveryman and a sapient chicken, and a looser hand might have plunged the tale into mere chaos or grotesquerie. But Portis’s sense of proportion is flawless, and the resulting panorama, clocking in at under 200 pages, stays snapshot-sharp throughout—a road novel as indispensable as On the Road itself.2

  With reportorial precision, and without condescension, Norwood captures all manner of reflex babble, the extravagant grammar of commercial appeal—stray words bathed in the exhaust of a Trailways bus. This omnivorous little book has a high metabolism, digesting everything from homemade store signs (“I Do Not Loan Tools”) and military-base graffiti to actuarial come-ons and mail-order ads for discount diamonds. Appropriately enough, the characters are constantly chowing down. On one leg of the journey, Edmund B. Ratner (formerly the “world’s smallest perfect man,” before he porked out) and Norwood’s new sweetheart, Rita Lee Chipman, are described as having eaten their way through the Great Smoky Mountains. Norwood’s decidedly humble (call it American) menu nails the country’s midcentury gastronomy with a precision that today takes on near archaeological value: canned peaches, marshmallows, Vienna sausages, cottage cheese with salt and pepper, a barbecue sandwich washed down with NuGrape, a potted meat sandwich with mustard, butter on ham sandwiches, biscuit and Br’er Rabbit Syrup sandwiches, an Automat hot dog on a dish of baked beans, Cokes and corn chips and Nabs crackers, a Clark bar, peanuts fizzing in Pepsi, a frozen Milky Way.

  * * *

  No bloat for Portis, and no sophomore slump, either: In 1968 The Saturday Evening Post serialized True Grit, a western that both satisfies and subverts the genre. (The only title of his to have remained almost continuously in print, True Grit has just been republished by Overlook, joining that press’s recent paperback reissues of the author’s four other books.) The novel, published later that year by Simon & Schuster, could hardly seem more out of step with the countercultural spirit of ’68.3 Writing in 1928 (i.e., on the eve of the Great Depression), a spinster banker named Mattie Ross revisits the central chapter in her life: the winter of 1873, when, as a fourteen-year-old from Yell County, Arkansas, she hunted down her father’s killer, Tom Chaney, with the help of a tough U.S. marshal that she hires (the “old one-eyed jasper” Rooster Cogburn) and a young Texas Ranger (the cowlicked LaBoeuf).

  “Thank God for the Harrison Narcotics Law,” Mattie declares, in what might have read as a sort of antediluvian rebuke to the era of one-pill-makes-you-listen-to-Jefferson-Airplane. “Also the Volstead Act.” Mattie never minces words or judgments—she’s not from Yell County for nothing—and the poles of wrong and right are firmly fixed. Unlike Huck Finn, to whose narrative hers is sometimes compared, Mattie knows the Bible back to front, handily settling sp
iritual debates by citing chapter and verse. To those men of the cloth, for example, who might conceivably take issue with her belief that there’s something sinister about swine, she says: “Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8:26–33.”4 (Portis’s father was a Scripture-studying schoolteacher, and his mother—whose name he gives to the steamer Alice Waddell—was the daughter of a Methodist minister.) Her steadfast, unsentimental voice—Portis’s sublime ventriloquism—maintains such purity of purpose that the prose seems engraved rather than merely writ.

  When Roy Blount, Jr., says that Portis “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny,” he may be both remembering and forgetting True Grit, which for all its high spirits is organized along a blood meridian, fraught with ominous slaughter. Blood literally stains the book’s first and last sentences, and Rooster, though admirable in his tenacity and his paternal protectiveness of Mattie, has a half-hidden history of trigger-happy law enforcement and less defensible acts of carnage. Indeed, the Overlook reprint provides a necessary corrective for latter-day Portis enthusiasts, a prism for the acts of violence in his other books: the cathartic fistfight punctuating Norwood’s homecoming and Gringos’ startlingly gory if swift climax. (The latter novel’s narrator, Jimmy Burns, is also a Korean War vet, and Norwood reveals to Rita Lee that he killed two men “that I know of” in that conflict.) Portis’s current reputation as a keen comedian of human quirks, though well-deserved, is limiting. Put another way: After cars, Portis is most familiar with the classification and care of guns. (Even Ray Midge, the ever-observant milquetoast who tells his story in 1979’s The Dog of the South, knows his firearms.)