Escape Velocity

  Not that True Grit stints on comedy—in one of the funniest set pieces to be found in all of Portisland, Rooster, LaBoeuf, and a Choctaw policeman suddenly break into an escalating marksmanship contest, pitching corn dodgers two at a time and trying to hit both, eventually depleting a third of their rations. Mattie’s precocious capacity for hard-bargain-driving (selling back ponies to the beleaguered livestock trader Stonehill) is revealed in expertly structured repartee, and her rock-ribbed responses to distasteful situations amuse with their catechism cadences. (When Rooster, in his cups, offers sick Mattie a spoonful of booze, she intones, “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains”). But Mattie also re-creates, poignantly and despite herself, her stark discovery of a world gone suddenly wrong, and what had to be done to set it right. Old Testament resonances are always close at hand: Her father’s killer bears a powder mark on his face, a Cain figure to say the least, and not to be pitied, and her own taste for frontier justice will lead her into a pit of terror, biblically populated by snakes. The price that Mattie pays may be greater than she knows.

  True Grit’s fame, of course, extends well beyond the book itself. The phrase has lodged in the culture, somewhere below catch-22 and above nymphet. And Henry Hathaway’s enjoyable if foreshortened film version (1969) firmly yokes the story to John Wayne, who at sixty-two won his only Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster. Alas, the movie (which also stars Kim Darby as Mattie and Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf) doesn’t capture the retrospective quality of Mattie’s voice, as she fixes on the events over the widening gulf of years (“Time just gets away from us,” she writes, in the book’s penultimate and heartbreaking line). Wayne, in a full-bodied performance, draws the focus away from his employer/charge, so that the title refers far more to Rooster than Mattie.5

  Some see the book as Portis’s albatross. Ron Rosenbaum, whose enthusiasm for the novelist’s lesser-known works was instrumental in their republication, found it necessary (in a 1998 Esquire piece) to distance Portis from his most famous creation (“too popular for its own good”), in order to make his case for the true gems of the Portis canon. But the novel occupies a position similar to that of Lolita in relation to Nabokov’s works: Though it might not be your personal favorite, it cannot be subtracted from the oeuvre; nor can his other writings fall outside its shadow.6 If Portis’s subsequent novels—The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, Gringos—have as a shared theme the seriocomic echo of lost, irretrievable greatness,7 it’s possible that True Grit is the genuine article—a book so strong that it reads as myth. As Wolfe notes of Portis’s enviable success: “He made a fortune.…A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.” And here it is—here it is, again.

  * * *

  In The New Journalism, Wolfe invokes the original laconic cutup, who happened to sit one desk behind him at the Trib office south of Times Square, as stubborn proof that the dream of the Novel—with its fortune-changing, culture-denting potential—never really died, even at a time when journalists were discovering new narrative ranges, fiction-trumping special effects. There was only one trophy worth typing for, one white whale worth the by-line and fishing wire, the Great, or even just the Pretty Good, American Novel, and Charlie Portis was going to try and snag it.

  Or maybe the scoopmonger’s life just bugged him. In “Your Action Line,” a two-page lark published in The New Yorker at the end of 1977 (still in the eleven-year no-novel zone between True Grit and The Dog of the South), Portis addressed such pressing queries as “Can you put me in touch with a Japanese napkin-folding club?” (If a similar peep had emerged from Camp Salinger, it would scan as Zen koan.) The exchange ends with encyclopedia-caliber dope on a heretofore obscure insect:

  Q—My science teacher told me to write a paper on the “detective ants” of Ceylon, and I can’t find anything about these ants. Don’t tell me to go to the library, because I’ve already been there.

  A—There are no ants in Ceylon. Your teacher may be thinking of the “journalist ants” of central Burma. These bright-red insects grow to a maximum length of one-quarter inch, and they are tireless workers, scurrying about on the forest floor and gathering tiny facts, which they store in their abdominal sacs. When the sacs are filled, they coat these facts with a kind of nacreous glaze and exchange them for bits of yellow wax manufactured by the smaller and slower “wax ants.” The journalist ants burrow extensive tunnels and galleries beneath Burmese villages, and the villagers, reclining at night on their straw mats, can often hear a steady hum from the earth. This hum is believed to be the ants sifting fine particles of information with their feelers in the dark. Diminutive grunts can sometimes be heard, too, but these are thought to come not from the journalist ants but from their albino slaves, the “butting dwarf ants,” who spend their entire lives tamping wax into tiny storage chambers with their heads.

  If Portis had long since escaped the formicary, his books nevertheless continued to draw on his previous work environment. Here and there, fixed in amber, his former fellow ants appear.

  Heading the London bureau, Portis kept getting entangled in “management comedies,” expending too much precious time trying to stamp out unscrupulous freeloaders; he describes (for the Gazette Project) setting up a small sting operation to nab a writer who was using a tenuous Trib association—a single review, written years prior—to score theater tickets gratis. But Portis’s fictional portraits of the less-upstanding members of the trade are not without a certain affection. The rogues are legion: Norwood breaks bread in Manhattan with Heineman, a freelance travel writer (supposedly on deadline for a Trib piece) who writes articles on Peru from his Eleventh Street digs and frankly aspires to the freeloading condition. (Laziness, he confesses, holds him back.) In Masters of Atlantis, hack extraordinaire Dub Polton, commissioned to compose the biography of Gnomon Society head Lamar Jimmerson, has a formidable reputation (“He wrote So This Is Omaha! in a single afternoon,” says one awed Gnomon), and is so confident in his vision for Hoosier Wizard that he doesn’t take down a single note. The master of this subspecies of charlatan might be overweening travel writer Chick Jardine. In Portis’s jaunty 1992 story for The Atlantic, “Nights Can Turn Cool in Viborra,” the consummate insider confesses to his readers, “I seldom reveal my identity to ordinary people,” while taking pains to mention his “trademark turquoise jacket”—perhaps a gentle dig at the dapper Wolfe. Chick has also devised a product called the Adjective Wheel, which he sells to his fellow (well, lesser) travel writers at $24.95 a pop.8

  More abusive than even writers, of course, are editors. In the Gazette Project interview, Portis mentions a job in college for a regional paper, where he edited the country correspondence:

  …from these lady stringers in Goshen and Elkins, those places. I had to type it up. They wrote with hard-lead pencils on tablet paper or notebook paper, but their handwriting was good and clear. Much better than mine. Their writing, too, for that matter. From those who weren’t self-conscious about it. Those who hadn’t taken some writing course. My job was to edit out all the life and charm from these homely reports. Some fine old country expression, or a nice turn of phrase—out they went.

  Perhaps as penance for these early deletions, he created Mattie Ross, whose idiosyncratic style is most immediately identifiable by her liberal, seemingly arbitrary use of “quotation marks”—as if to let a phrase “stand alone” was to risk having it “fall by the wayside” at the whim of some “blue pencil.” (A brief list of Mattie’s punctuated preferences would include “Lone Star State,” “scrap,” “that good part,” “moonshiners,” “dope-heads,” “Wild West,” “land of Nod,” “pickle,” and “night hoss.”) The punctuation not only highlights the phrases in question—some of them perhaps “old country expressions” of the time—but also comes to reflect her thriftiness. If True Grit is Mattie’s true account, meant for publication, then the quote marks act as preservatives—insurance that her hard work will not be weeded out
by some editorial know-it-all. Quotation marks mean the thing is true—to the degree that someone said it, or that it had some currency then.9

  For Mattie has, apparently, tried her hand at the freelance game. An earlier experience with the magazine world came to grief. She has written a “good historical article,” based mostly on her firsthand observation of a Fort Smith trial, prior to meeting Rooster Cogburn. Though the piece has a rather vivid (or as she would say, “graphic”) title—“You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge”—the magazine world “would rather print trash.”

  As for newspapers, the cheapskate editors “are great ones for reaping where they do not sow”—always hoping to short-change contributors, or else sending reporters around to get an interview gratis. Ever the banker, Mattie means for her story to make money—which True Grit went ahead and did.

  * * *

  Totting up his fee sheets, a struggling Rooster opines that unschooled men like himself have a raw deal. “No matter if he has got sand in his craw, others will push him aside, little thin fellows that have won spelling bees back home.” A century hence, this orthographical ace might be Raymond E. Midge, the twenty-six-year-old ex–copy editor and perpetual college student who narrates The Dog of the South (1979). That Portis effortlessly makes Midge, a nitpicking, book-burrowing cuckold, as indelible and appealing as the battle-scarred man of action (or strong-willed girl revenger) is ample proof of his scope and skill.

  Thanks to a few wizards of international fiction, the proofreader has had some pivotal roles—Hugh Person in Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972), Raimundo Silva in José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1996). Denizens of the copy desk have not enjoyed a similar literary profile. Though the professions bear some resemblance, the latter’s task is more Sisyphean and perhaps more conducive to despair—sweating the details on something as disposable as a newspaper, in most cases gone inside a week, if not a day. No novel captures the occupation’s particular brand of virtues and neuroses as well as The Dog of the South; it’s the perfect job (or former job) for a character so constitutionally driven to remark on deviations from the norm. (At twenty-six, he’s lived as many years as there are letters in the alphabet.) Ray Midge sets out for British Honduras to recover his car and perhaps Norma, his wife10—both stolen by his former co-worker, the misanthropic Guy Dupree. Dupree’s errant behavior—he’s finally investigated for writing hostile letters to the president—and burgeoning anarcho-communist tendencies reflect a harsh if hysterical world view possibly aggravated by his days in the newspaper office: “He hardly spoke at all except to mutter ‘Crap’ or ‘What crap’ as he processed news matter, affecting a contempt for all events on earth and for the written accounts of those events.”11

  Midge, conversely, pays enormous attention to all events on earth, and The Dog of the South, his written account of them, allows the reader to share his pleasure. “In South Texas I saw three interesting things,” he writes, and then lists them. Indeed, he’s inordinately proud of his better-than-average vision, noting that he can “see stars down to the seventh magnitude.” Perhaps it is something to boast about, but in compensation for his assorted failings, he seems to have attributed to his eyesight super-hypnotic powers:

  I watched the windows for Norma, for flitting shadows. I was always good at catching roach movement or mouse movement from the corner of my eye. Small or large, any object in my presence had only to change its position slightly, by no more than a centimeter, and my head would snap about and the thing would be instantly trapped by my gaze.

  * * *

  A military history buff with “sixty-six lineal feet” of books on the topic (he would know the exact dimensions), Midge sees himself on a mission, and in his hilarious, unconscious self-inflation, he makes vermin sound like Panzer units trying some new formation.

  Freed from copy editing, then, Midge proceeds to read the world at large, the way any good Portis protagonist would—but his job training means his observations are that much more acute. He contemplates spelling errors (a strange man hands him a card that reads, inscrutably, “adios AMIGO and watch out for the FLORR!”), the abysmal Spanish-language skills of his traveling companion, Dr. Reo Symes, and the bizarrely mangled locutions of the chummy Father Jackie (e.g., wanter instead of water). Encountering an emergency flood relief effort, Midge fervently pitches in, but is nevertheless distracted when a British officer reprimands someone “to stay away from his vehicles ‘in future’—rather than ‘in the future.’” It’s funny enough the first time; when a similar omission occurs twelve pages later, after Midge discovers Norma in the hospital (“I would have to take that up with doctor—not ‘with the doctor’”), the repetition alleviates, if just for an instant, the unspoken sadness that’s dawning on him.

  In British Honduras, Midge meets Melba, the friend of Dr. Symes’s mother. At Symes’s insistence, he reads two of her stories, and like an amateur Don Foster [the professor who identified the anonymous author of the novel Primary Colors by analyzing sentence structure and diction—Ed.], he notes certain compositional tendencies:

  Melba had broken the transition problem wide open by starting every paragraph with “Moreover.” She freely used “the former” and “the latter” and every time I ran into one of them I had to backtrack to see whom she was talking about. She was also fond of “inasmuch” and “crestfallen.”

  Like all good copy editors, Midge is something of a pedant; nevertheless he seems more to relish than disdain such human details. He may debate, at length, some nicety of Civil War lore, but he rarely passes judgment on the people he meets, even when they forget his name: Dr. Symes calls him Speed; an addled Dupree mistakes him for Burke (yet another copy editor); for some reason, Father Jackie thinks his name is Brad. But names are important, as a character asserts in Masters of Atlantis. Midge notes the nominal errors with exclamation points, but no real outrage, until the end of his quest, when a dazed Norma calls him by Dupree’s first name—not just once, but repeatedly. It’s the only slip that really hurts.

  “I was interested in everything,” Midge confesses early on, and in the book’s final paragraph, right before his quietly devastating revelation which colors all that has come before, Midge notes that upon his return to Little Rock he finally received his BA, and is contemplating graduate work in plate tectonics. He wants to literally read the world, to study its layers and its lives.

  II. THE BALLOONIST

  At age nine, a daydreaming Portis conducted underwater breathing experiments at Smackover Creek—a life-saving measure, rehearsed in the eventuality of pursuit by Axis nasties. The toponym, he explains in “Combinations of Jacksons” (published in the May 1999 Atlantic), is “an Arkansas rendering of ‘chemin couvert,’ covered path, or road.’”

  Few could have predicted that after the brisk gestation of Norwood and True Grit, eleven years would pass before The Dog of the South emerged, a period that constitutes a chemin couvert of sorts. Silence, with side orders of cunning and exile, can lend luster to a writer’s work. Deep processes are afoot, some calculus of genius or madness, penury or plenty. Given the Central American trail of Dog and Gringos, and the occult mischief of Masters, one imagines Portis hitting the road, unearthing pre-Columbian glazeware, eavesdropping in hotel bars—and reading, reading, reading: Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis and Colonel James Churchward’s Lost Continent of Mu, special-interest magazines like the ufological Gamma Bulletin, dense books “with footnotes longer than the text proper,” to say nothing of the whole of Romanian fiction, which contains “not a single novel with a coherent plot.”

  That earlier Portisian lag, alas, is now officially smaller than the one between 1991’s Gringos and whatever he’s currently working on. In Portis’
s last book to date, Jimmy Burns observes of a fellow expat:

  Frank didn’t write anything, or at least he didn’t publish anything.…The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep in the earth and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated. Then they covered it up again.

  Is a new cycle of Portisian activity on the horizon, at the end of a decade-and-change? The recent magazine appearances of “Combinations of Jacksons” (1999) and “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” (2003), memoiristic pieces that bookend the Overlook reprint project, is enough to make one wonder whether (or if you’re me, pray that) Portis is writing at length about his life.

  Maybe he’ll fill in the blanks, reveal what he’s been up to all these years, though if anyone understands the character of silence, the value of secrets, it’s Charles Portis. The Dog of the South contains its own Portis doppelgänger—its own commentary on authorial mystique—in the figure of John Selmer Dix, MA, the elusive writer of With Wings as Eagles, which he penned entirely on a bus, a board across his lap, traveling from Dallas to L.A. and back again for a year. His whereabouts remain a mystery; assorted reported sightings, like those of Bigfoot or Nessie, cannot be taken at face value. Dr. Reo Symes, the most vigorous, wildly comic jabberjaw in all of Portisland, is Wings’s unlikely champion (“pure nitro,” he calls it)—a huckster on the skids who maintains an unlikely reverence for what appears to be nothing more than a salesman’s primer and its reticent creator.