10. Midge himself, with his rules against record playing after nine p.m. and aversion to dancing, is a deviation from the norm, or from Norma—at least in the eyes of his mother-in-law, who calls him a “pill.”
11. At a small museum in Mexico, Midge finds Dupree’s comments in the guestbook: “A big gyp. Most boring exhibition in North America.”
12. Many years after the publication of Gnomonism Today, a sharp-eyed disciple discovers that the printers have omitted every other page.
Our Least-Known Great Novelist
By Ron Rosenbaum
Ron Rosenbaum graduated from Yale with a degree in English literature and then dropped out of Yale Graduate School to write full time. He is the author of seven books, most recently Explaining Hitler, The Secret Parts of Fortune, The Shakespeare Wars, and How the End Begins. He once met Charles Portis at a Waffle House near the Little Rock airport.
When this essay was first published in 1998 in Esquire, four of Portis’s five novels were out of print. His championing of Portis’s non–True Grit oeuvre spurred Overlook Press to acquire the rights to republish the unavailable books in paperback, and now all Portis’s novels, including True Grit, are available in editions from Overlook.
Listen, I bow to no one when it comes to expertise on the myth and reality of secret societies in America, in distinguishing the dark nimbus of paranoia and conspiracy theory surrounding them from the peculiar human truths at their heart.
As the author of the still-definitive study of America’s ultimate secret society, Skull and Bones, I have been shown the much-whispered-about photos that the all-woman break-in team took of the interior of the Skull and Bones “Tomb”—complete with its candid shots of that sanctum sanctorum of America’s clandestine ruling-class cult: the Room with the License Plates of Many States. I could tell you the secret Skull and Bones nicknames of the class year of D154, in the coded Skull and Bones calendar of the years. (Let’s give a shout out to good old J. B. “Magog” Speed, for instance.)
I say I bow to no one, but that’s not true. When it comes to knowing and limning the heart of the heart of the secret-society-esoteric-knowledge-weird-nickname-ancient-mysteries-of-the-East racket, I bow—we should all bow—to one man, one novelist. Not Pynchon or DeLillo or any of the other usual suspects on the secret-society subject, but a maddeningly under-appreciated American writer who in a brilliant and shockingly little-known novel has somehow captured more of the truth about this aspect of America, about the longing for Hidden Secrets, the seductions of secret societies, than all the shelves of conspiracy-theory literature. The only man to penetrate the true heart of dimness. I’m speaking of Charles Portis and his now-almost-impossible-to-find novel (suppressed by You Know Who?), Masters of Atlantis.
It’s an indictment of the dimness of our culture that the film Conspiracy Theory made millions while Masters of Atlantis languishes in the recesses of secondhand-bookstores, out of print, not even in paperback, and Portis gets neither the popular nor the literary-world acclaim that he deserves. In a way, Portis has not helped matters; he lives off the beaten path down in Arkansas with an unlisted phone number, doesn’t do publicity, has never networked, and refused, politely but firmly, to talk to me for this piece.
Who is this man Portis? His is not a Salinger-like antisocial reclusiveness, more a kind of publicity-shy modesty. And we do have a few clues about his past. We know he grew up in a tiny town near the Arkansas-Mississippi border. We can guess from a recent short story he published in The Atlantic Monthly that he served as a marine in the Korean War. We know that he was a rising star at the legendary writers’ newspaper The New York Herald Tribune, eventually heading its London bureau, and that he departed abruptly in the mid-sixties to return to Arkansas to start turning out a remarkable series of novels, beginning with Norwood in 1966.
Meanwhile, Portis has become the subject of a kind of secret society, a small but fanatic group of admirers among other writers who consider him perhaps the least-known great writer alive in America. Perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America. A writer who—if there’s any justice in literary history as opposed to literary celebrity—will come to be regarded as the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain, a writer who captures the soul of America, the true timbre of the dream-intoxicated voices of this country, in a way that no writers-workshop fictionalist has done or is likely to do, who captures the secret soul of twentieth-century America with the clarity, the melancholy, and the laughter with which Gogol captured the soul of nineteenth-century Russia in Dead Souls.
Tom Wolfe once spoke about the way city-born creative-writing types go directly from East Coast hothouse venues to places like Iowa City, where “they rent a house out in the countryside, and after about their fifth conversation with a plumber named Lud, they feel that they know the rural psyche.”
Charles Portis is the real thing to which these grad-school simulacra can only aspire in their wildest dreams. He is a wild dreamer of a writer, and I don’t want you misled by the references to Mark Twain into thinking he is some kind of regionalist or humorist. Nora Ephron, one of the founding members of the Portis Society (as I’ve come to think of the circle of devotees), compares him in scope, sophistication, and originality to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “He thinks things no one else thinks,” she says.
For some members of the Portis Society, an appreciation of his work is a matter of life-and-death urgency. Roy Blount, Jr., has written of Portis’s third novel, The Dog of the South, “No one should die without having read it.” And that’s not even his favorite (although it is mine). He’s partial to Norwood and speaks of those for whom Portis is a kind of life-and-death test of human beings. How a fellow Portis Society member couldn’t decide whether to marry the woman he loved until she read Norwood.
It’s funny: Before I spoke with Blount and learned of his “Don’t die until you’ve read The Dog of the South” pronouncement, I’d used the rhetoric of imminent death in my appeal to Portis for an interview. I’d tried to explain in a letter to him how much his work mattered to me by telling him that if I had to choose any one section of any one novel to be read aloud to me on my deathbed in the hours before expiring, to remind me of the pleasures that reading had brought me during my lifetime, it would probably be certain passages in The Dog of the South involving one of Portis’s inimitable, seedy-but-grandiose con men, Dr. Reo Symes.
I’ll try to explain why those passages in particular fascinate me, but first I need to discuss the initiation rite to the Portis Society, the barrier you literary sophisticates must be able to get past (or limbo beneath) if you are to show yourselves worthy of Portis’s genius. A kind of test of true—as opposed to surface, image-conscious—literary sophistication.
The test is a novel Portis wrote before The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos, his great dreams-of-secret-knowledge trilogy. A novel that was—I hesitate to use the word, it’s so deeply shaming in literary terms—too popular for its own good. A novel whose title I almost dare not utter to the uninitiated, because it may completely throw you off the scent of Portis’s greatness. (Not because there’s anything wrong with it in itself, but because of its image.) A novel whose title I’m therefore going to disguise and not utter for the moment. Or maybe I’ll give it a more inoffensive (at least in this context), substitute title, say, Necrophilic Whores of Gomorrah.
Well, admit it, you’d probably be more receptive to my case for Portis’s greatness if he’d written some Burroughsian necrophilia novel rather than the all-too-fatally popular novel he did write, whose title is, I blush to say, True Grit. Yes, he’s that guy, and they made a movie out of it that won John Wayne his only Oscar. Now, get over it and let me get back to Dr. Reo Symes. He’s the greatest in a great gallery of Portisian talkers: brilliant and garrulous con artists, deliriously gifted fabricators, delusional mountebanks, disbarred lawyers, defrocked doctors, disgruntled inventors, dispos
sessed cranks, and disgraced dreamers who crawl out of the cracks and crevices of Trailways America with confident claims that they have the Philosopher’s Stone, the key to all mysteries. Or, more often, that they had it and lost it, or had it stolen from them but are close to getting it back.
This Dr. Symes is quite a character himself. No longer a doctor—he lost his medical license over some trouble with a miracle arthritis cure he was peddling called “the Brewster Method.” (“You don’t hear much about it anymore but for my money it’s never been discredited,” Symes says.) Lately, he’s been involved in a scheme to manufacture tungsten-steel dentures in Tijuana (the “El Tigre model,” he calls it), and he seems to be on the run from some scam involving “a directory called Stouthearted Men, which was to be a collection of photographs and capsule biographies of all the county supervisors in Texas.” Somehow, the money collected from the stout hearted supervisors is missing, although Symes insists, “It was a straight enough deal.”
But when he runs across Portis’s narrator, Ray Midge, an Arkansas guy who’s retracing the steps of his runaway wife by using credit-card receipts, all Dr. Symes can talk about is the mysterious, elusive John Selmer Dix, a writer of inspirational books for salesmen. Symes is obsessed with Dix’s greatness, with the idea that in his last days Dix had somehow broken through to some new level of ultimate revelation that tragically was lost to the world with his death, when the trunk in which he carried his papers disappeared.
“Find the missing trunk and you’ve found the key to his so-called ‘silent years,’” Symes tells Ray Midge. Symes is fixated on what might be false sightings of Dix and what seems to be a proliferation of Dix impostors. He knows of only one man who claims to have seen Dix “in the flesh…in the public library in Odessa, Texas, reading a newspaper on a stick.”
“Now the question is, was that stranger really Dix? If it was Dix answer me this. Where were all his keys?” (The keys to his trunk of ultimate secrets, of course.) “There are plenty of fakers going around.…You’ve probably heard of the fellow out in Barstow who claims to this day that he is Dix.…He says the man who died in Tulsa was just some old retired fart from the oil fields who was trading off a similar name. He makes a lot of the closed coffin and the hasty funeral in Ardmore. He makes a lot of the missing trunk.…There’s another faker, in Florida, who claims he is Dix’s half brother.…They ran a picture of him and his little Dix museum in Trailer Review.”
Dr. Symes’s delirium rises to a pitch of inspired madness tinged with an element of Oliver Stone paranoia (“the hasty funeral in Ardmore”), a poetic desperation that makes you intuit that it’s not the reality of Dix that obsesses him but the idea of Dix—of someone somewhere who Had It All Figured Out but who disappeared in a Trailways haze. What Portis is getting at is the deep longing, the profound, wistful desperation in the American collective unconscious, to believe that somehow things do make some kind of sense, that life is not all chaotic horror and random acts of cruelty by fate, that there is an Answer, even if it’s locked in a trunk somewhere and we’ve lost the keys.
The search for the lost keys is at the heart of Portis’s subsequent two novels as well. In Masters of Atlantis, a secret society founded by a con artist and his gullible dupe comes to be a source of genuine meaning and faith for half a century of devotees (with the suggestion that all secret societies pretending to esoteric knowledge, from Skull and Bones to the Masons to the CIA, are the products of collective self-delusions). In Gringos, a beautiful, intense, comic-phantasmagoric novel, it’s the search for the Inaccessible Lost City of Dawn somewhere in the Mayan rain forests that draws, like a magnet, all the lonely and dispossessed, the mad romantics and con artists of the States, to seek out what is missing from their lives by going Below the Border to search for the indecipherable truths encoded in the Mayan hieroglyphics.
Rereading Portis is one of the great pure pleasures—both visceral and cerebral—available in modern American literature. Except it’s really not available to those who aren’t Portis Society initiates (who have squirreled away multiple copies of Masters of Atlantis in locked trunks to ensure a lifetime supply). It is a crime and a scandal, it’s virtually clinically insane, that Portis’s last three books are out of print and not in paperback—almost as inaccessible as the lost works of John Selmer Dix. Some smart publisher will earn an honored place in literary history and the hearts of his countrymen by bringing out a complete and accessible edition soon—now.
Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about Dr. Symes and Dix. What is it with all those Dix impostors, those shadowy half brothers with their little Dix museums in Trailer Review? Are they real or figures of Symes’s Dix delirium? Is the proliferation of Dixes a way of expressing the notion that we’re all, in some way, Dixes, hauling around locked trunks containing the inaccessible, unimaginable secrets we hide from one another? Perhaps Portis could tell, but Portis isn’t talking, at least not to me.
On True Grit
By Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt is the author of the novels The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002).
It’s commonplace to say that we “love” a book, but when we say it, we really mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean only that we have read a book once and enjoyed it; sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in our youth, though we haven’t picked it up in years; sometimes what we “love” is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray…madeleines…Tante Leonie…) as opposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to love books they haven’t read at all. Then there are the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. I think it goes without saying that most books that engage readers on this very high level are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.
Not only have I loved True Grit since I was a child; it is a book loved passionately by my entire family. I cannot think of another novel—any novel—which is so delightful to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes. Four generations of us fell for it in a swift coup de foudre—starting with my mother’s grandmother, then in her early eighties, who borrowed it from the library and adored it and passed it along to my mother. My mother—her eldest granddaughter—was suspicious. There wasn’t much over lap in their reading matter: my gentle great-grandmother—born in 1890—was the product of an extremely sheltered life, and a more innocent creature in many respects than are most six-year-olds today; whereas my mother (in her twenties then) kept books like The Boston Strangler on her bedside table. Purely from a sense of duty, she gave True Grit a try—and was so crazy about it that when she finished it, she turned back to the first page and read it all over again. My own middle-aged grandmother (whose reading habits were rather severe, running to politics and science and history) was smitten by True Grit, too, which was even more remarkable since—apart from the classics of her childhood, and what she called “the great books”—she didn’t even care all that much for fiction. I think she might have been the person who suggested that it be given to me to read. And I was only about ten, but I loved it too, and I’ve loved it ever since.
The plot of True Grit is uncomplicated, and as pure in its way as one of the Canterbury Tales. The opening paragraph sets up the premise of the novel elegantly and economically:
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 but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California g
old pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
The speaker is Mattie Ross, from Yell County near Dardanelle, Arkansas, and the time is the 1870s, shortly after the Civil War. Mattie leaves her grief-stricken mother at home with her younger siblings and sets out after Tom Chaney, the hired man who has killed her father. (“Chaney said he was from Louisiana. He was a short man with cruel features. I will tell more about his face later.”) But Chaney has joined up with a band of outlaws—the Lucky Ned Pepper gang—and ridden out into the Indian territory, which is under the jurisdiction of U.S. Marshals. Mattie wants someone to go after him; and she wants someone who will shoot first and ask questions later. So she asks the sheriff in Fort Smith for the name of the best marshal he knows:
The sheriff thought on it a minute. He said: “I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say that Quinn is about the best they have.”
I said, “Where can I find this Rooster?”
Movie fans will call to mind the aging John Wayne, who famously portrayed Rooster Cogburn on the screen, but the Rooster of the novel is somewhat younger, in his late forties: a fat, one-eyed character with walrus mustaches, unwashed, malarial, drunk much of the time. He is a veteran of the Confederate Army; and, more particularly, of William Clarke Quantrill’s bloody border gang, notorious in American history for the massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, and also for launching the careers of the teenaged Frank and Jesse James. Mattie runs Rooster to ground in his squalid rented room at the back of a Chinese grocery store. “Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone,” she remarks, disapprovingly, and he’s happy enough to take Mattie’s money to ride out after her father’s killer—but not to let Mattie come along.