Master of the petty indignity

This week on my commute I took a break from podcasts to revisit Charles Portis’s oddest novel, Masters of Atlantis. Though I love and enjoy all of Portis’s books and Masters of Atlantis has much of what make his others so good, it has gradually sifted to the bottom for me. One of these days I might write a full review if only to sort out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me.

In the meantime, one of the things that works brilliantly throughout Masters of Atlantis is Portis’s use of the “petty indignity.” Character after character is embarrassed and deflated in minor ways.

The funniest instances involve the main character, Lamar Jimmerson, perhaps the most passive protagonist of any novel I’ve read. After being duped into founding a secret society based on purported Atlantean arcana, Jimmerson spends most of the book in a state of gentle obliviousness, pottering around the Gnomon Society’s headquarters in Indiana, book in hand, and ballooning in size like Ignatius J Reilly at 1/100 speed. Every few decades, some shady type ropes Jimmerson into a scheme to bring Gnomon wisdom into the spotlight and establish it in its rightful place of influence.

These schemes usually involve politics. In 1942, Jimmerson is convinced to visit Washington, DC, where he believes he’ll give an important speech about America’s path to victory—following the esoteric geometric principles in the Gnomons’ Codex Pappus—and visit important leaders for one-on-one consultation. Jimmerson dutifully dresses in his ceremonial robes and poma, a goatskin dunce cap that signifies his office as master, and sets out.

The trip turns into a conga line of petty indignities. An overcrowded train means he has no berth to sleep in and he arrives in Washington already fatigued. As it turns out, his assistant has not actually contacted Congress or national broadcasters about hosting Jimmerson’s speech, and during their search for someone important to whom Jimmerson can impart his secret knowledge he gets lost. He wanders Washington until his robes are soaked in sweat and his flimsy sandals disintegrate. Everyone in the city gawks at him.

Portis captures the mood perfectly. Upon Jimmerson’s arrival:

Hotel rooms were all but impossible to get. At the last minute their congressman was able to secure them one small room at an older downtown hotel called the Borger. It was a threadbare place near the bus station. The trip was hot and tiring. At the Borger a midget bellboy called Mr. Jimmerson a “guy.”

“Is that guy with you?” he said, in his quacking midget voice, as Mr. Jimmerson, a little dizzy from his long train ride, veered off course in crossing the lobby.

“Yes, he is,” said Popper.

“Hey! Hey! Hey! Yeah, you! Where do you think you’re going? The elevator’s over here!”

And later, after getting lost:

At the zoo a bum called Mr. Jimmerson a “schmo.” The bum was reclining on the grass with a friend and said, “I wonder who that schmo is.” The other bum ventured no guess. Mr. Jimmerson passed the rest of the day there admiring the great cats and looking into the queer dark eyes of the higher apes. There was reckoning behind those eyes but the elegance of the triangle would forever escape them. In the lion house he found a dime. His corset would not allow him to bend over far enough to pick it up. He pushed it along with his foot while trying to form a recovery plan, and then a boy came along and grabbed it.

When Jimmerson finally arrives back at the hotel, he finds that his mission to pass his wisdom to the Federal government has been superseded. His assistant has met an even bigger crank, an ambidextrous Romanian alchemist, and the whole trip has been for nothing—the crowning indignity. Jimmerson ends the chapter a broken man, lying in bed thinking about picking up chocolate for his wife while his assistants natter about gold all night. A later run for the governorship of Indiana and a state senate hearing in Texas go about as well as you’d think.

What Portis does brilliantly is to prepare you to feel the offense of being called a “guy” or a “schmo” by strangers. Jimmerson feels constantly put on the spot. He is so tense, so anxious to complete his exalted mission, that every petty indignity finds its mark. His self-consciousness is his undoing.

But this is about as self-conscious as Jimmerson ever gets. As I mentioned, he spends most of the novel unaware of anything. Here, for contrast, is Ray Midge, narrator of Portis’s previous novel, The Dog of the South:

I ordered a glass of beer and arranged my coins before me on the bar in columns according to value. When the beer came, I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.

I’ll admit here that this level of detail-oriented self-consciousness is uncomfortably familiar.

But what Ray Midge has that Lamar Jimmerson does not is self-regard. He’s self-deprecating about it throughout The Dog of the South but he can’t resist mentioning his many skills and talents. Jimmerson hardly thinks of himself, or much of anything but Gnomon triangles. Couple self-consciousness and self-regard and you’ve got a volatile mix. The petty indignity can embarrass a character like Jimmerson—who is motivated, when he has any motivation at all, by a pious sense of duty—but self-serving characters like Austin Popper, his assistant and general shyster, or Sir Sidney Hen, Jimmerson’s brother-in-law and chief rival, can be destroyed by it.

After all, destruction follows after pride, which is what we’re really talking about here.

And Portis exploits pride really well. He peopled all of his novels with blowhards, arrogant cranks, self-appointed grandees, and at least one false Messiah—all people who live permanently on their high horse—and all of his novels feature the humbling comeuppance. In that way Portis’s novels, in addition to picaresques, sharply observed local color tales, and comic shaggy dog stories, are also morality plays.