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.