It is likely no surprise to readers who love the novels of Charles Portis that everything delightful about his books was delightful about him as a person. The surprise, if anything, was how closely his personality tallied with his work. He was blunt and unpretentious, wholly without conceit. He was polite. He was kind. His puzzlement at the 21st-century world in which he found himself was deep and unfeigned. And yet almost everything out of his mouth was dry, new and pungently funny.
Portis died in February. I’ve loved his work all my life — “The Dog of the South” is a family favorite, as is “Masters of Atlantis” — though the work closest to me is “True Grit,” which I recorded as an audiobook a number of years ago. I’m often asked how I came to record another author’s book; most simply, the answer is voice. I grew up hearing “True Grit” read aloud to me by my mother and my grandmother and even my great-grandmother. This was a tremendous gift, as Portis caught better than any writer then alive the complex and highly inflected regional vernacular I heard spoken as a child — mannered and quaint, old-fashioned and highly constructed but also blunt, roughshod, lawless, inflected by Shakespeare and Tennyson and King James but also by agricultural gazetteers and frilly old Christian pamphlets, by archaic dictionaries of phrase and fable, by the voices of mule drivers and lady newspaper poets and hanging judges and hellfire preachers.
Then too, the books are so funny that they cry to be read aloud. Pick up any novel by Portis and open it to any page and you will find something so devastatingly strange and fresh and hilarious that you will want to run into the next room and read it aloud to somebody. His language is precise but whimsical, understated but anarchic, and as with Barbara Pym or P.G. Wodehouse, it’s tough to communicate the flavor of it without resorting to long quotes. All readers who love Portis have lines they like to swap back and forth; and a conversation among his admirers will mostly consist of such gems — committed to memory — exchanged and mutually admired. . . .
His characters, who like the characters of Samuel Beckett often find themselves thrown in with one another on long perplexing journeys, are single-minded and completely un-self-conscious innocents (veterans, pedants, failed schoolteachers and salesmen) whose speech startles and delights, on nearly every page. Though it’s often said of Portis that he’s the least known of great American novelists, I cannot think of another 20th-century writer — any writer, American or otherwise — whose works are beloved among quite so many differing age groups and literary tastes, from the most sophisticated to the simplest. Walker Percy was a fan; so was Roald Dahl. As Wells Tower pointed out in The New Yorker: “Portis’s diffident, modestly gallant characters were a world away from the marital bonfires and priapisms of other male writers of his crop — Roth, Updike, Yates. His male heroes practiced a masculinity that by the standards of the day was uniquely (and unfashionably) nontoxic.”
Comedy is the most ephemeral of the arts. There are very few comic novels that do not wither with time, and even fewer novels — comic or otherwise — that can be given to pretty much anyone, from an old person to a small child. Even more rare is a novel one can reliably turn to for cheer when one is sick or sad. But “True Grit” is this rare novel, and Mattie Ross, its narrator, is one of the greatest of Portis’s innocents: a Presbyterian spinster who in old age relates the story of how, as a child, she struck out in the 1870s to avenge her father’s murder. . . .
It’s hard not to go on with the quotes; suffice it to say that I could hear my grandmother’s voice — and a bit of my own — very clearly in this. But though I knew how wonderful a book it was to read aloud, I also felt there was very little chance of interesting Portis in an audiobook recording. After abruptly quitting his job as London bureau chief of The New York Herald Tribune in the early 1960s, he had gone back to live in his native Arkansas, and no one in New York had seen him for years. People liked to use the word “recluse,” which, I suspected, spoke less to an abnormal way of life than to an ex-newspaperman’s natural distrust of the press. It seemed clear enough in any case that he didn’t enjoy dealing with inquiries about his novels. . . . . .
He was modest about his achievements and uninterested in talking about his life as a novelist or indeed about novels, period; though the diction of his books — effortless as birdsong — pervaded his every spoken sentence, from his conversation one would never suspect that he’d written a novel at all, much less several great ones. His preferred subjects were local history, his boyhood in Arkansas, his time in the military (a postscript to a 2006 letter informs me: “This stamp shows your fellow Virginian and legendary Marine hero Chesty Puller. He was my commanding officer years ago at Camp Lejeune, N.C.”) and above all his life as a newspaperman (somewhat perplexingly to me, he regarded himself mainly as a former newspaperman instead of the major and singular American novelist he was). . . .
If there’s a guiding style of Portis’s books, it’s those tangents and lively asides. (When I asked him about the origins of “True Grit,” he told me that after he left The Tribune and “didn’t have much to do” he liked nothing better than to go to the library and read rambling “local color” pieces in the archives of rural newspapers.) Those homely old American voices — by turns formal, tragicomic and haunting — are crystallized on every page of his work, with the immediacy one sometimes sees in a daguerreotype 150 years old. One would have to return to the 19th century, and Twain, to find another author who captured those particular cadences as well as he. More than this, he understood at the highest level those same voices filtered through advertisements and film of the mid-20th century; hence the hilarious, incisive and equally pure diction of “Norwood” and “The Dog of the South” and his other books set in the ’60s and ’70s. . . .
We never talked about publishing or the literary world; it was of no interest to him. The closest he ever came was a passing mention of “the quality lit game” (dutifully attributing the quote to Terry Southern) as if “quality lit” were a concern in which he himself had no part. But it was a game he played at the highest level, despite the fact that he had no inclination to play it in the conventional chest-beating, ego-driven way. His pitch was pure. There was no meanness in him. He understood, and conveyed, the grain of America, in ways that may prove valuable in future to historians trying to understand what was decent about us as a nation. And I can’t help thinking that the novels he left us will continue to provide refuge and comfort for readers, perhaps in times even darker than our own.
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From an earlier About Editing and Writing post:
From a New York Times obit, by the late Roy Reed, of author Charles Portis:
Charles Portis, the publicity-shy author of “True Grit” and a short list of other novels that drew a cult following and accolades as the work of possibly the nation’s best unknown writer, died on Monday at a Little Rock, Ark., hospice. He was 86. . . .
Mr. Portis was in his early 30s and well established as a reporter at The New York Herald Tribune in 1964, when he decided to turn to fiction full time. The decision astonished his friends and colleagues at the paper, among them Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron.
He had covered the civil rights movement in the South: riots in Birmingham, Ala.; the jailing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Ga.; Gov. George C. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. And he had been assigned to a coveted post, London bureau chief. His future in journalism was bright.
But he said he was heading home; he was going to move into an Arkansas fishing shack and write novels. . . .
Within two years Mr. Portis had published his first novel, “Norwood.” It told the story of Norwood Pratt, a naïve ex-Marine from East Texas on a road trip to collect a $70 debt. Along the way he encounters, among other things, a con artist and a chicken that can play tick-tack-toe. “Norwood” set the pattern for Mr. Portis’s use of misfits, cranks and sly humor in his fiction. . . .
Like “Norwood,” “True Grit” was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. And like “Norwood,” it was turned into a movie, twice—in 1969, with John Wayne in the Cogburn role (for which he received an Academy Award), and in 2010, starring Jeff Bridges and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. (“Norwood” became a movie in 1970 starring Mr. Portis’s fellow Arkansan Glen Campbell.)
The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned. . . .
Between 1979 and 1991, Mr. Portis published three more novels, “The Dog of the South” (1979), “Masters of Atlantis” (1985) and “Gringos” (1991). Like his first two, they relied on deadpan humor, oddball characters and occasional bursts of melodrama. . . .
Mr. Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”
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Also see “The Literary Genius of Charles Portis,” by Alex Heard, in the New Republic of October 8, 2012. From the story:Portis enrolled at the University of Arkansas after he got out of the Marines in 1955 and started working in 1958, soon after graduation. Colleagues remember him as a lively social presence, a man who “loved to stand at a bar telling good stories and listening to them.” He once broke the arm of a loudmouth from The New York Times who had challenged him to arm-wrestle at Greenwich Village bar. “It was a just a freakish thing,” he insisted. “A weak bone or something.”. . .
Not surprisingly, Portis-the-man sounds a lot like Portis-the-writer: concise, quirky, funny. Here he is on the forlorn spirit of modern newspaper offices: “[T]hey’re pretty sad places. Quiet, lifeless. No big Underwood typewriters clacking away. No milling about, no chatting, no laughing, no smoking. That old loose, collegial air is long gone from the newsrooms.”
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The Washington Post’s obit, by Harrison Smith, adds this:Mr. Portis graduated from high school in nearby Hamburg, not far from the Louisiana border. Against his parents’ wishes, he enlisted in the Marines and fought in Korea, where he began reading “book after book,” according to his brother Jonathan.
He eventually mustered out a sergeant and enrolled at the University of Arkansas with vague plans to focus on writing. “You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism,” Mr. Portis later said. “I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college—not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service.”
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