It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas. As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in 1541, members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in 1609. To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in another part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.”
Everything about this grievance is pure Portis. There’s the easy erudition—knowing that an English translation of de Soto’s journey was published in Shakespeare’s lifetime—and the sly allusion, relocating Gertrude’s lament for Ophelia to a tributary of the Ouachita River. Then, there’s the layer cake of comedy, from the impeccably plucked place name, Smackover Creek, to the possibility that anyone else, even another Arkie, would be miffed that there’s no “The Two Gentlemen of Little Rock.” Most of all, though, there’s a sense of character: de Soto ripped out of the history books, set loose with his arquebus on the American frontier and Shakespeare liberated from the Norton anthology, following the news of the day, as desperate for ideas as any freelancer.
Portis knew from characters. His most famous novel, “True Grit,” published in 1968 but set mostly in the eighteen-seventies, is narrated by the indomitable Mattie Ross, equal parts Annie Oakley, Carrie Nation, and Captain Ahab. When we first meet her, she’s an old maid recalling the adventures of her youth in the Indian Territory. “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood,” she explains, “but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” She has two Sancho Panzas in the search for her father’s killer: the one-eyed federal marshal Rooster Cogburn and the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who never discloses his first name but pronounces his surname “LaBeef” and says things like: “I believe she is trying to hooraw you again.”
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Portis’s other novels weren’t exactly Westerns—more like Southwesterns, Headed Easterns, and Getting Losterns—but they are all populated by equally memorable figures: Norwood Pratt, who drives all the way across the country just to get the seventy dollars a fellow-marine owes him; Professor Cezar Golescu, an alchemist experimenting with the auriferous qualities of creeping ragweed by testing soil types along the headwaters of the Pig River; Grady Fring, the self-proclaimed “Kredit King,” who sells hot cars and shoddy health insurance in Texarkana while serving as a part-time pimp with a “talent agency” in New Orleans; Lamar Jimmerson, who in exchange for his Old Gold cigarettes is given a supposedly sacred text with which he revives a cult called Gnomonism; and Joann the Wonder Hen, a college-educated chicken who wears a mortarboard and answers yes-or-no questions for a nickel.
A new volume by the Library of America, edited by the Arkansas journalist Jay Jennings, gathers all these characters and more, collecting Portis’s five novels together with his short stories and some of his journalism, including the parody of an advice column that ran in this magazine. It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country.
Portis was a character, too. Born in El Dorado, Arkansas, he grew up along the Louisiana border, moving between such places as Norphlet, Mount Holly, and Hamburg. Great-grandfathers on both sides of his family fought for the Confederacy; one of them was born the same year as Jesse James and lived long enough to tell Portis about the hundreds of federal mules that were set loose by fleeing Yankees in the canebrakes of the Saline River. His father, Samuel, was a schoolteacher and superintendent; his mother, Alice, the daughter of a Methodist minister, dabbled in newspaper writing, including a column called “Gal Thursday.” He had two younger brothers, Richard and Jonathan, and an older sister named Alice Kate, who generally went by Aliece to keep from being confused with their mother.
The Library of America volume includes a spectacular if all too short essay titled “Combinations of Jacksons,” in which Portis recounts his childhood on the Gulf Coastal Plain. By the light of day, he and his friends assembled model airplanes and tried to swing from vines like Tarzan; by “dusk-dark,” when flying squirrels were gliding through the front yard, they’d go set their trotlines in streams. His formative exposure to literature came from the “funny books” he bought for ten cents apiece, featuring not only Batman and Superman but also Bulletman, the Sandman, Plastic Man, and Doll Man; one of his earliest forays into artistry involved, aptly, a mail-order course in ventriloquism. His family was chock-full of “strong and fluent talker[s] with far-ranging opinions,” like his great-uncle Satterfield Fielding, who, Portis writes, “may well have been the last man in America who without being facetious called food ‘vittles,’ ” and who convinced his great-nephew that dipping W. E. Garrett & Sons Scotch Snuff could protect him from tuberculosis.
There were a lot of tall tales, but a shortage of gasoline and candy bars: oil was being saved around the country for the war effort, and the sweets, local rumor had it, were being given to the German P.O.W.s at Camp Chaffee and to the Japanese Americans held in the internment camps at Rohwer and Jerome. Portis spent years trying to learn to breathe underwater with snorkels made from creek-bank reeds in case any of the Axis powers arrived in Arkansas and he couldn’t fight them off with his pinecone grenades. After he graduated from Hamburg High School, during the Korean War, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. Jennings writes that Portis was turned away from officer training because he lacked “natural molars on the lower right side.” Still, he worked his way up from infantryman to sergeant.
Portis was given medals for his service; perhaps more significant, a corporal at Camp Lejeune gave him a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel.” Later, when he enrolled at the University of Arkansas, he majored in journalism and worked for the Northwest Arkansas Times, editing “lady stringers” like his mother, who submitted social reports and gossip sheets. After that, he got hired as a reporter by the Commercial Appeal, in Memphis, and then the Arkansas Gazette, in Little Rock, covering everything from civil rights to rock and roll. He sent some of those clips to the New York Herald Tribune and got himself a job on the general-assignment desk. He moved to Manhattan and filed features about a Brooklynite with a pet lion, the National Barber Show convention, and his own failures with the “Five-Day Plan to Stop Smoking” at the Bates Memorial Medical Center in Yonkers. During the ’62 newspaper strike, he worked briefly at Newsweek, where he met and dated Nora Ephron, who praised his “spectacular and entirely eccentric style” in her memoir, joking that it was so good it made him awful “at writing the formulaic, voiceless, unbylined stories with strict line counts” that the magazine required. Back at the Herald Tribune, he worked alongside Jimmy Breslin, Lewis Lapham, and Tom Wolfe. “He was polite enough not to roll his eyes when I asked if he might be related to the other Thomas Wolfe,” Portis remembered later, long after he’d been promoted to the paper’s London bureau, a post that he liked to point out was “Karl Marx’s old job.”
The dean of New Journalism had more than patience for Portis. In the 1972 manifesto that defined the movement, Wolfe memorialized his colleague and summed up his gear shift from journalist to novelist: “Portis did it in a way that was so much like the way it happens in the dream, it was unbelievable. One day he suddenly quit as London correspondent for the Herald Tribune. That was generally regarded as a very choice job in the newspaper business. Portis quit cold one day; just like that, without a warning. He returned to the United States and moved into a fishing shack in Arkansas. In six months he wrote a beautiful little novel called Norwood. Then he wrote True Grit, which was a best seller. The reviews were terrific . . . he sold both books to the movies. . . . He made a fortune. . . . A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too god-damned perfect to be true.”
“A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later,” Portis once wrote. “They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.” It wasn’t the novelist speaking, but one of his characters, the narrator of his third book, “The Dog of the South.” Published more than a decade after “True Grit,” the picaresque novel is essentially one long monologue by Raymond E. Midge, a cuckolded Little Rock copy editor who is trying to track down his wife, Norma, and her ex-husband turned new lover, Guy Dupree, a co-worker whom Midge recently bailed out of jail after the man was arrested for writing menacing letters to the President. The two lovebirds have fled to Belize (at the time, British Honduras) in Midge’s blue Ford Torino, stealing not only his car but also his credit cards and his prized cassette tape of the Ole Miss professor Dr. Buddy Casey’s lecture on the Siege of Vicksburg.
Any given page of “The Dog of the South” has as much plot as some novellas. Midge finally meets the titular dog more than a thousand miles into his quest; it turns out to be a brokedown school bus turned camper painted all white except for the black-lettered name on the side. A little while later, at a bar in San Miguel de Allende called the Cucaracha, he encounters the bus’s owner, Dr. Reo Symes, who wants to hitch a ride in Midge’s borrowed ’63 Buick Special, because he’s trying to get to Belize to persuade his missionary mother to give him the deed, or at least the development rights, to an island she owns in the Mississippi River. Another thousand miles of road-tripping follows, with Symes passing the time by explaining to Midge how he lost his medical license and all the ways he now makes money without it: a sports-betting scheme that depends on beating other bookies via the time zones; a publishing scheme involving a series of short biographies of Texas county supervisors called “Stouthearted Men”; a jewelry scheme wherein he sells “birthstone rings and vibrating jowl straps.”
But the hardest sell the Louisianan makes isn’t for himself. It is for a self-help guru named John Selmer Dix, who, Symes explains, wrote his best book on the express bus between Dallas and Los Angeles, riding back and forth for an entire year to finish his masterpiece, “With Wings as Eagles.” “Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse,” Symes says by way of endorsement. When Portis returns to the subject of Dix a few chapters later, suddenly there’s a Dix museum, lost Dix manuscripts in a missing tin steamer trunk he carried with him on the bus rides, and Dix impersonators in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, and Odessa. “The Dog of the South” sounds shaggy, and it is; so is almost everything else Portis wrote. “Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,” he once explained.
That’s true, yet Portis was selling himself short. Although his novels have the fun of farce, part of what’s so charming about them is their relentless plausibility. Many of us have met someone like Reo Symes, usually while he’s holding court on a barstool or a street corner, and we’ve all talked with a character like Ray Midge, often on an airplane when there’s no way to change seats. Even the most outlandish of Portis plots are populated by the kind of Everymen found in almost every Zip Code in this country: barmaids, shopkeeps, shade-tree mechanics, high-and-dry hippies, would-be writers, secretaries, veterans, junkyard scrappers. They are themselves a kind of Library of Americans, and Portis is excellent not only on their day jobs but also on their daydreams and stray thoughts and endogenous knowledge of the world. His characters know things like the last year coins were made of silver, the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, how to jump a car and free a rusty flywheel, the going price of cotton or PVC pipe, what to do about dirt-dobber nests, and the number of Vienna sausages in a can. Portis’s own remarkable store of knowledge began to dwindle only when he developed Alzheimer’s. He died from complications of that disease in 2020, and was buried in the city where he graduated from high school.
His last novel, “Gringos,” published in 1991, is narrated by Jimmy Burns, another great monologuist from Ark-La-Tex who served with the First Marine Division in the Korean War and has gone to live in Mérida, Mexico. (When there was nowhere west left to go, Portis’s characters started going south.) “Christmas again in Yucatán,” he says with a sigh in the opening line. “Another year gone and I was still scratching around on this limestone peninsula.” He used to make a living by selling looted Mayan artifacts, but now he’s gone legit, delivering supplies to archeological digs while tracking down bail jumpers and runaways for the reward money. If Marshall Rooster Cogburn of “True Grit” had been born a century later, he might have been renting the room next to Burns’s at the Posada Fausto, both of them dreaming of striking it rich enough to move into the local trailer park. Here is the reference letter one Mayanist sent on the man’s behalf to some Mormons in search of the Jaredites: “Jimmy Burns is a pretty good sort of fellow with a mean streak. Hard worker. Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. Trustworthy. Facetious.”
“Punctual!” Burns thinks, “the puniest of virtues, nothing to brag about, but Doc was right, I was always on time.” Portis’s novels are full of plainspoken discussions, like this, of moral character, but his characters never sound like virtue ethicists. The descendants of circuit riders and frontier evangelists, they are trying to make sense of the moral universe they’ve inherited and the modern world they’re making as the gravitational pull of grander virtues weakens.
These puny, lower-order virtues steadily emerge from Portis’s revenge plots, road trips, and secret societies; not just punctuality but competence, frugality, and grit. Knowing how to repair an engine or change a tire or read a map isn’t what Aristotle had in mind, but these skills are highly valorized here; so are haggling, bartering, and not overpaying for anything. Persisting in your quest—whether you’re searching for the coward who shot your father and stole his two gold pieces, your soon-to-be ex-wife, Norma, the self-help genius John Selmer Dix, or Pletho Pappus and the Telluric Currents of the New Cycle of the Gnomon Society—is meritorious, even if, when you find said person, you have nothing to show for it.
The always on time Jimmy Burns, for example, is surrounded by people searching for higher powers and deeper meaning: the U.F.O. enthusiasts who think that Mayan ruins hold proof of their extraterrestrial theories; the hippies convinced that human sacrifice on an ancient altar will bring about the end of the world; the academics trying to decipher hieroglyphics and make sense of human history. But Burns is just trying to get by and get paid, and, in lieu of anything loftier, he finds sufficient satisfaction in this: “You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck.”
The virtues of auto maintenance turn out to be considerable; Burns ends up on his quest because of someone else’s car trouble. His grandfather was “a Methodist preacher, who included the Dionne quintuplets and the Postmaster General in his long, itemized prayers,” and Burns, ministerial in his own modern way, comes to feel responsible for the fate of Rudy Kurle, one of the flying-saucer fellows, whose Checker Marathon and pop-top tent trailer the marine helps tow after a failed river fording. Kurle hopes to find traces of the “space dwarfs” he thinks come and go from the Yucatán using “photon propulsion,” but when he goes missing Burns, having already rescued his rig, rescues the researcher himself. In keeping with the questing genre, Burns is compensated for his trouble with romance; in keeping with these novels, even that compensation is modest. “We were comfortable enough,” Burns says of the love of his life. “We didn’t get on each other’s nerves in close confinement.”
That move is as Portisian as they come, at once hilariously deflationary and hopelessly tender. Life’s highways aren’t all made of asphalt; Portis’s plots hark back to those moral pilgrimages of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Bunyan. But the stakes in his work are never quite salvation or damnation—there’s nowhere as high as Heaven or as low as Hell. Instead, his pilgrims traverse the eschatological latitudes in between, relying for guidance on the modern scriptures of advertising, legal writs, and road signs. Like other postwar novelists from Jack Kerouac to Patricia Highsmith, Portis preferred the theatre of the automobile to the battlefield or the courtroom. During high school, he’d worked at a Chevrolet dealership, and one suspects that the road trip became his form not only by grand literary design but from genuine delight. It’s hard to imagine a writer who loved auto parts, cheap motels, or U.S.G.S. maps more: the Gnomons come to rest in La Coma, Texas; Ms. Mattie Ross hails from Yell County, Arkansas; Portis himself once wrote a love letter to the three-dollar-a-night cabin he found in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Life’s a quest whether or not you want one, and the obstacles Portis’s characters face are allergic to allegory and symbolism; their rewards, even at their most fantastical, are humble and fleeting. In a Portis novel, when you ride off into the sunset you have to make camp in the dark.
“True Grit” doesn’t end with a sunset ride but with what’s left of the Wild West going gray and getting stiff in a travelling museum. Mattie Ross lives long enough to find Jesse James’s brother sipping Coca-Colas with Cole Younger in a Pullman car, the pair waiting to stage a vaudeville show in the stadium of the Memphis Chicks, a minor-league baseball team. “Spectators can watch this unique exhibition in perfect safety,” brays an advertisement in the Commercial Appeal, the newspaper where Portis worked in his early days as a journalist. (That line and so many others are masterfully delivered by the novelist Donna Tartt in the audiobook. Two film adaptations have brought the novel to the screen, but the Mississippi Delta native bests both, drawing on a lifetime of experience, since Tartt’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all read the book out loud to her. She distills that inheritance into a version that is a hundred-and-eighty-proof, comic and almost deadly.)
“Perfect safety” seems like a pretty good deal compared with getting shot to death outside a rooming house or losing your arm to a rattlesnake, but it is the unmistakable position of Mattie Ross that this spectator life is postlapsarian and that in fact all of American life is lapsing more than ever before. Already in the nineteenth century you had to go looking for a man with true grit because most of them didn’t have any, and the few who did were soon dead and buried while others charged admission to pantomime the past. Even the brave girl who “avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground” grew up to be a banker, hassling farmers over crop loans and denying mortgage extensions. Worse than that, she’s become a lady memoirist—a writer, of all things, the least honorable vocation in a Portis novel.
Mattie Ross has aged into believing the great American nostalgic fallacy, the unshakable certainty that everything was better in the olden days. Many of Portis’s characters share this sense that all things, including one’s own moral fibre, are diminished from what they were. Today, this kind of nostalgia is nearly always invidious, but in Portis’s novels it manifests mostly as sentimentality or silliness. If only more political theorists and op-ed columnists shared Portis’s gift for humor and understood its absolute lethality. “One’s father was invariably a better man than one’s self, and one’s grandfather better still,” a Gnomon says in “Masters of Atlantis,” but he’s in the middle of expounding a theory that he calls “bio-entropy,” wherein humanity is “steadily degenerating into lower and lower forms, ultimately back to mud.”
Mattie Ross is too devoted to the Presbyterian Church ever to fall for Gnomonism, but plenty of Portis characters could and do. Conspiracies and con men are always cropping up in his novels, not just new religions and cult leaders but swindlers and snake-oil sellers of all stripes. They flourish because of another American impulse, nostalgia’s mirror image: the wild optimism that everything will be better if you join the right fraternity, find the right guru, eat the right root vegetables, or read the right book.
Gullibility comes in as many forms as guile, and Portis is as good on the duped as he is on the duping. That might be because the novelist was a little bit of both: enchanted by America, especially by Arkansas, and willing to both buy it and sell it. He understood too much about this country to mythologize it, but he loved his compatriots too much and too tenderly to scorn them. ♦
