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.