Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  Symes’s limitless patter circles the indissoluble truths contained in this criminally overlooked document, and his earnest-rabid claims for With Wings as Eagles sound not unlike those of Portis fanatics to the uninitiated: “Read it, then read it again.…The Three T’s. The Five Don’ts. The Seven Elements. Stoking the fires of the U.S.S. Reality. Making the Pep Squad and staying on it.” All else in the world of letters is “foul grunting.” When Midge modestly counters that Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer who ever lived, the doctor responds without hesitation, “Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.” Midge, “still on the alert for chance messages,” reads a few pages of Symes’s copy of Wings, but finds its dialectical materialism a touch opaque:

  He said you must save your money but you must not be afraid to spend it either, and at the same time you must give no thought to money. A lot of his stuff was formulated in this way. You must do this and that, two contrary things, and you must also be careful to do neither.

  As important to Symes as the visible text is what happened after its publication, the story behind the story, during the time when Dix “repudiated all his early stuff, said Wings was nothing but trash, and didn’t write another line, they say, for twelve years.” Symes has an alternate theory: He believes Dix continued writing, at greater length and with even more intense insight, but “for some reason that we can’t understand yet he wanted to hold it all back from the reading public, let them squeal how they may.” Thousands of pages repose in Dix’s large tin trunk—which, of course, is nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  Portis’s trunk resurfaces, after a fashion, in his next book, Masters of Atlantis (1985), which sustains its seemingly one-joke premise through tireless comic invention and an ever-shifting narrative focus. At once the oddest ball among his works and a full-vent treatment of themes common to Dog and Gringos, a clearinghouse of obscurantist scribblings and a satire that skewers without malice, Portis’s sprawling third novel loosely follows the life of Lamar Jimmerson, whose eventual sedentary existence is in perverse contrast to the typical Portis rambler. Jimmerson’s destiny crystallizes after the First World War, when a grateful derelict gives him a booklet crammed with Greek and triangles—an Nth-generation copy of the Codex Pappus, containing the wisdom of lost Atlantis. Portis’s inspired tweaking of subterranean belief systems touches on alchemy, lost-continent lore, and reams of secret-society mumbo-jumbo. The original codex, written untold millennia ago, survived its civilization’s destruction in an ivory casket, which eventually washed ashore in Egypt, to be decoded after much effort by none other than Hermes Trismegistus (the mythical figure deified by the Egyptians as Thoth, the Greeks as Hermes, and the Romans as Mercury). Hermes became the first modern master of the Gnomon Society, which counts among its elite ranks Pythagoras, Cagliostro, and, as it happens, Lamar Jimmerson of Gary, Indiana.

  That the document is bunk is the obvious joke, but Portis wraps it in antic bolts of faith and failure. Indeed, Masters of Atlantis works as a thoughtful, whimsical companion to Frances A. Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), a study of the magical and occult reaches of Renaissance thought. Yates lays her cards on the table, explaining that the “returning movement of the Renaissance with which this book will be concerned, the return to a pure golden age of magic [i.e., the supposed era of ancient Egyptian wisdom], was based on a radical error of dating.…This huge historical error was to have amazing results.”

  The amazing result in Masters is an alternately deadpan and high-flying pageant of secret sharers, unreadable tracts,12 and highly dubious theories, determining the rise and fall—and rise?—of an institution insulated from the American century unfolding outside by nothing more than the unshakeable belief of its adherents. The adepti cultivate their secrecy and self-regard by maintaining rules against dissemination to outsiders, or “Perfect Strangers,” a code as strict as it is arbitrary. For instance, the Romanian-born alchemist Golescu, a caretaker at the Naval Observatory, would seem a shoo-in for Gnomonic acceptance. His achievements read like a variation on Symes’s catalogue of Dixian wisdom:

  Through Golescuvian analysis he had been able to make positive identification of the Third Murderer in Macbeth and of the Fourth Man in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. He had found the Lost Word of Freemasonry and uttered it more than once, into the air, the Incommunicable Word of the Cabalists, the Verbum Ineffabile. The enigmatic quatrains of Nostradamus were an open book to him. He had a pretty good idea of what the Oracle of Ammon had told Alexander.

  But Golescu doesn’t make the cut. He knows too much—or at least says too much. His strident claims betray an insufficiently covered path. The point of the Verbum Ineffabile—the unspeakable word—is that you don’t say it.

  Most mortals, it seems, are doomed to remain Perfect Strangers, but at least there’s the possibility of writing something oneself, a validating work of comprehensive greatness. In Gringos, freelance bounty hunter and former antiquities dealer Jimmy Burns journeys to the Inaccessible City of Dawn, bringing along his friend Doc Flandin, an ailing Mexico hand. Doc is ever on the lookout for the Mayan equivalent of Dix’s tin trunk or the Hermetically unsealed casket—a fabled cache of lost libros that would provide further pieces to the puzzle of that vast and vanished civilization. Burns doubts any such books even exist. In any case, Doc claims to be nearly finished with his own “grand synthesis” of Mexican history, a scholarly tour de force explaining the truth behind myths and answering ancient riddles; among other things, Doc’s book would “tell us who the Olmecs really were, appearing suddenly out of the darkness, and why they carved those colossal heads that looked like Fernando Valenzuela of the Los Angeles Dodgers.”

  Somewhere in limbo, apart from or behind the printed ephemera—confession magazines and pre-1960 detective novels and something called Fun with Magnets—that crop up in Portis’s novels more frequently than any work of high literature, is a dream library stocked entirely with vanished books and unwritten ones, impossible genius texts that tantalize from across the void. Chances are that Doc’s unfinished manuscript will join the rest of those ghostly titles. But time doesn’t always run out, and at least once the dream becomes manifest. Mattie Ross waits half a century to write True Grit, and during those years the factual grit of her life story at last forms a pearl. Though Portis’s compositional timeframe isn’t quite as long as Mattie’s, his periodic absences from the thrum of publication help give each one of his books what those Burmese journalist ants call a “nacreous glaze,” a shimmering coat of perfect strangeness.

  * * *

  Portis has published a single work of fiction since Gringos—“I Don’t Talk Service No More,” a spare, haunting short story that appeared in the May 1996 Atlantic. [The short story “The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth,” page 170, appeared in the Oxford American in 2004 under the column “Writers on Writing,” though it is a work of fiction.—Ed.] The unnamed narrator, an institutionalized Korean War veteran, sneaks into the hospital library every night to make long-distance calls to his fellow squad members, participants in something called the Fox Company Raid. He remembers their names, though some other details have grown hazy. At the end of this call, his fellow raider “asked me how it was here. He wanted to know how it was in this place and I told him it wasn’t so bad. It’s not so bad here if you have the keys. For a long time I didn’t have the keys.”

  Instead of closure, the last sentence casts a pall over the story, and the mention of keys conjures the great locked enigmas drifting through Portis’s last three books.

  In Dog, Symes disputes an alleged Dix sighting, musing, “Where were all his keys?”(According to Dixian lore, the great author, wise with answers, never went anywhere without a jumbo key ring on his belt.)

  The “Service” narrator’s resounding isolation connects with the loneliness found in so many Portis characters. Norwood Pratt and Jimmy Burns, wry loners capable of brute force, wind up married and in more or less opti
mistic situations. But happiness eludes the other protagonists. Lamar Jimmerson and most of the Gnomons in Masters of Atlantis can’t form mature emotional attachments; Jimmerson barely notices as his wife leaves him and his son avoids him. And how is it that The Dog of the South, Portis’s finest comic achievement, subtly shades into melancholy? When Midge finds Norma, by chance, in the hospital, he calls it a “concentrated place of misery”; his earlier angst-free, even chipper take on his cuckoldry suddenly shifts, in her presence, to a terrible feeling of rejection. The mere fact of his being strikes her as wearisome:

  “I don’t feel like talking right now.”

  “We don’t have to talk. I’ll get a chair and just sit here.”

  “Yes, but I’ll know you’re there.”

  Dog’s last two lines erase miles of cheer that have come before. True Grit’s matter-of-fact final sentence (“This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground”) harbors a more cosmic sadness; as pathetic fallacy, it feels like an American cousin to the faintly falling snow that closes Joyce’s “The Dead.” Portis carries over this precipitous finish to his own life in “Combinations of Jacksons.” A “peevish old coot” himself now, he peers back over the years to when his Uncle Sat showed him scale maps of tiny Japan and the immense U.S., to dispel his boyhood fears of a protracted war. The last lines run: “I can see the winter stubble in his fields, too, on that dreary January day in 1942. Broken stalks and a few dirty white shreds of bumblebee cotton. Everyone who was there is dead and buried now except me.”

  Portis is careful to keep the tears at bay with laughter; to borrow the impromptu skeet targets from Rooster and company, he’s a literary corn dodger. In Dog, Dr. Symes’s mother, a missionary, periodically grills Midge on his knowledge of the Bible, a knowledge he repeatedly professes not to have. “Think about this,” she says, pointedly fixing his thoughts to the matter of last things. “All the little animals of your youth are long dead.” Her companion Melba promptly emends the truism: “Except for turtles.”

  The statement, at once hilariously random but completely realistic, neutralizes the threat of gloom; it’s the sort of bull’s-eye silliness that pitches Portis’s reality a few feet above that of his fellow page-blackeners. Significantly, he gives Lamar Jimmerson some experience with skyey matters: Masters of Atlantis opens with the young man in France during the First World War, “serving first with the Balloon Section, stumbling about in open fields holding one end of a long rope.”

  The truth is up there—well, maybe. (Gringos, among its other virtues, navigates UFO culture with more than cursory knowledge and without easy condescension.) Of all the moments when Portis’s prose turns lighter than air, my personal favorite involves the aforementioned Golescu, whose chaotic turn in Masters of Atlantis gives the book an early-inning jolt. In addition to claiming membership in various sub rosa brotherhoods, some of them seemingly contradictory, Golescu possesses the talents of a “multiple mental marvel,” to borrow magician Ricky Jay’s term. Asking for “two shits of pepper,” he takes pencils in hands and demonstrates for a bemused Lamar Jimmerson his ambidexterity and capacity for cerebral acrobatics, in a rapid-fire paragraph of undiluted laughing gas. It’s what Dr. Symes would have called pure nitro.

  “See, not only is Golescu writing with both hands but he is also looking at you and conversing with you at the same time in a most natural way. Hello, good morning, how are you? Good morning, Captain, how are you today, very fine, thank you. And here is Golescu still writing and at the same time having his joke on the telephone. Hello, yes, good morning, this is the Naval Observatory but no, I am very sorry, I do not know the time. Nine-thirty, ten, who knows? Good morning, that is a beautiful dog, sir, can I know his name, please? Good morning to you, madam, the capital of Delaware is Dover. In America the seat of government is not always the first city. I give you Washington for another. And now if you would like to speak to me a sequence of random numbers, numbers of two digits, I will not only continue to look at you and converse with you in this easy way but I will write the numbers as given with one hand and reversed with the other hand while I am at the same time adding the numbers and giving you running totals of both columns, how do you like that? Faster, please, more numbers, for Golescu this is nothing…”

  Read it, then read it again—at a spittle-flecked rush, with a mild Lugosi accent—and observe how everything turns into nothing, how all that is solid melts into air.

  Endnotes

  1. Many of the biographical details about Portis in this piece have been gleaned from a leisurely interview, conducted by Roy Reed on May 31, 2001 (page 285).

  2. Whereas Kerouac was said to have been more passenger than driver, Portis knows his cars inside out, and his oeuvre overflows with automotive asides. Even the Gazette interview is graced with these vehicular discursions: Speaking of his stint at the Northwest Arkansas Times, Portis conjures up the vehicle he drove to work in, a 1950 Chevrolet convertible, “with the vertical radio in the dash and the leaking top,” and notes the species-wide “gearshift linkage that was always locking up, especially in second gear.”

  3. The new Portable Sixties Reader, ed. Ann Charters (Penguin, 2003), does not mention Portis at all.

  4. Mattie also has strong opinions on particular political matters, but the issues could not be at a more distant remove for the general reader in 1968 (or today), lending an air of comedy and verisimilitude. On Grover Cleveland: “He brought a good deal of misery to the land in the Panic of ’93 but I am not ashamed to own that my family supported him and has stayed with the Democrats right on through, up to and including Governor Alfred Smith, and not only because of Joe Robinson.”

  5. If the film of True Grit somewhat revises the book, the less-known screen adaptation of Norwood (Jack Haley, Jr., 1970), also scripted by Marguerite Roberts, scrambles both Norwood and True Grit. Glen Campbell (Grit’s LaBoeuf) here plays Norwood, and Kim Darby (Mattie) is Rita Lee Chipman; Mattie’s unacknowledged teenage longing for LaBoeuf (“If he is still alive and should happen to read these pages, I will be happy to hear from him,” Mattie writes at the novel’s close) becomes consummated in Norwood, or just about. Roberts’s Grit script shunted Mattie in favor of the bigger-than-life Rooster; for this film the screenwriter dilutes some of Norwood’s cool by revealing that Rita Lee has been made pregnant by another man before they meet—a significant, possibly feminist tweak of the original plot. (Incidentally, the contra-hippie theme that runs through Portis, made more explicit in Gringos, is elaborated in this film, most notably when Campbell-as-Norwood takes the stage after a numbing sitar exhibition. He sings a good-timey country number presciently called “Repo Man” to the uncomprehending, wigged-out crowd, until a more lysergically inclined combo unseats him.) As it’s unlikely I’ll ever have the chance to write about this film again, let it be noted that the date of Norwood’s theatrical release, a year after Midnight Cowboy won the Academy Award for Best Picture, lends Campbell-as-Norwood a certain Voightian frisson during the scenes in New York, where he sticks out like a Stetsoned sore thumb. Which makes the bit in Cowboy where Voight regards himself in the mirror and says approvingly, “John Wayne,” a sort of anticipatory gloss on Wayne co-star Campbell’s future appearance in Gotham. (The celluloid True Grit also spawned a 1975 sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn.)

  6. Toward the end of Norwood, a conversational non sequitur seems to anticipate True Grit’s heroine. Someone mentions a Welsh doctor to the British-born midget Ratner: “Cousin Mattie corresponded with him for quite a long time. Lord, he may be dead now. That was about 1912.”

  7. In books and in blood, as in this analysis from Masters: “One’s father was invariably a better man than oneself, and one’s grandfather better still.”

  8. Travel writers, not to say homo britannicus, get ribbed by Portis again in “Motel Life, Lower Reaches,” part of the Oxford American’s relaunch issue (January-February 2
003). Describing a cheap motel in New Mexico, he notes a small population of “British journalists named Clive, Colin, or Fiona, scribbling notes and getting things wrong for their journey books about the real America, that old and elusive theme.”

  9. Portis is well aware of the seemingly disproportionate effects of punctuational caprice. In Masters of Atlantis, Whit and Adele Gluters’ suitcase bears their surname in caps and quotes, leading to this flight of fancy: “Babcock wondered about the quotation marks. Decorative strokes? Mere flourishes? Perhaps theirs was a stage name. Wasn’t Whit an actor? The bag did have a kind of backstage look to it. Or a pen name. Or perhaps this was just a handy way of setting themselves apart from ordinary Gluters, a way of saying that in all of Gluterdom they were the Gluters, or perhaps the enclosure was to emphasize the team aspect, to indicate that ‘THE GLUTERS’ were not quite the same thing as the Gluters, that together they were an entity different from, and greater than the raw sum of Whit and Adele, or it might be that the name was a professional tag expressive of their work, a new word they had coined, a new infinitive, to gluter, or to glute, descriptive of some new social malady they had defined or some new clinical technique they had pioneered, as in their mass Glutering sessions or their breakthrough treatment of Glutered wives or their controversial Glute therapy. The Gluters were only too ready to discuss their personal affairs and no doubt would have been happy to explain the significance off the quotation marks, had they been asked, but Babcock said nothing. He was not one to pry.”