Charles Portis
Monday, September 26, 2005
Four out of Five Novels by Charles Portis
This summer I worked my way through most of the novels of Charles Portis. When I started, I just liked the way the latest Overlook reprints stacked up on my bookshelf. They're good looking volumes, in colors chosen for their resemblance to new toys in plastic cases. Purples and oranges zag across the covers. An impression I had a long time before buying or even reading the books was that they were exemplary consumer products. In my rounds at the bookstore I'd pull them off the shelf, flip them around and run my hand across their spines. I read the back endorsements repeatedly.
It wasn't until this summer that I actually started to read Portis. I worked my way through to Gringos, his final book, and then stopped because the summer ended. Fall is a time for poetry and the biographies of poets, I feel. Novels can go to hell in the fall--even the novels of Charles Portis, who's exemplary. An aside-- it's too bad so much poetry is badly designed: thin volumes aired out with pictures of acorns and birds feeding at autumn-hued riverbeds, etc. Not much pleasure running your thumb across their little knife-spines. Another aside--you may think this emphasis on read-what-at-which-time is a little milquetoasty. But have you asked yourself, maybe he enjoys it? Maybe it's part of his job? You'd be correct on both counts. Either way, to bring us back on topic, I can't recommend Gringos because I haven't read it.
Still, I'd like to recommend everything else by Portis. You can even go read it now if your loose sense of propriety allows you read word-hunks instead of poetry in the chill air of Fall. It's difficult to parse the best of his books from the worst, mostly because there is no worst (though I've heard some grumbling about Gringos): they all rise roughly to the same level. He is a humorist like Chandler is a crime novelist. I come for the familiar voice and the familiar setting and receive the gift of a universe. All an author like Portis or Chandler has to do, as the saying goes, is show up and put the word-hunk in order. If they repeat themselves it is because they haven't exhausted themselves. As Ed Park said a couple years ago in the Believer, Portis wrote five novels; "three of them surely masterpieces, though which three is up for debate."
His first novel, Norwood, is about travel. So is his second novel, True Grit, and his third novel, The Dog of the South. I should reiterate here that he only wrote five of them: say what you will about themes. In each of these three books, travel corrects some insult. The shame of past insult and the potetial for future insult hovers over his character's heads like a bad omen. It sends the characters out and gets them moving.
In Norwood, the title character, last name Pratt, travels from Ralph, Texas to New York City to collect a debt of 70 dollars, only in part because he needs the money. Principle is the thing. Principle on a higher order is displayed by Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old protagonist of True Grit who travels out to the fabled Indian Territory to avenge her father's death against his killer. These novels were published in 1963 and 1968, respectively. Then ten years went by, and Dog appeared, narrated by a military-history geek named Ray Midge, who-- aside from proving that Portis, 10 years on, was still writing at the peak of his abilities--goes in search of his wife, who stole his Ford Torino and his credit cards and left with Ray's co-worker.
Their travels are usually recounted several years after the event takes place, most heartbreakingly in the case of Mattie Ross, fifty years on a wealthy spinster, who, after recounting the principle narrative of the book (in which she loses an arm) sums up the rest of her life thusly: "I would marry an ugly baboon if I wanted to and make him a cashier. I never had the time to fool with it. A woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for is at some disadvantage." Over everything lies a specter: that this is the only adventure the protagonist is going to have in his or her life. You can feel the weight in days becoming years for these characters. Nothing gets done before or after the events of the novel. Ray Midge's wife's friends call him a "pill." Mattie Ross defends herself from the charge of being a spinster. Travel helps for a few days--it's the one story they have worth telling.
The pleasure in reading about these characters can come in one of two forms. If life has worked out pretty well for you on the basis of the hard work and determination you put into your professional life, and if your equal commitment to "playing hard" in order to "vent steam" and "stay balanced" as a human being is second-to-none, then the pleasure you recieve from these novels will come in a certain form. After all, they're excellently written and timed like recipes. Soon after, however, you may scold yourself for looking down on these characters. This corresponds to the way in which good earners generally view satirical work and its usually beset protagonists, who often find themselves dealing with problems larger than themselves and not entirely of their own making. Why the hell can't Candide just pull himself up by his own bootstraps at the beginning of the novel instead of the end? Why doesn't Don Quixote just get a life, already? So, go-getter that you are, you will return to the narrative problems of other go-getters who struggle to leave their underaged secretaries and go back to their wives and generally deal with all the grey areas that success calls into question.
For the rest of us, who sometimes find themselves muddling through one day, or inspired by the park in the next, Portis seems to have called to life something that had gone undramatized before: the moment of self-definition in an otherwise wandering soul's life. His verdict, of course, is that it doesn't last. But that brief moment of clarity is fairly novelistic--or if not, suited especially to Portis, a slacker with five novels to his name in a 42-year career.
Masters of Atlantis does not fit this mold. Perversely, I'm recommending it above the others. This, in spite of the fact that it does many of the things I dislike most in novels. It has a large cast. It sprawls around and gets inside everyone's head like a purse-dog Tolstoy. The narrative arc flops and snaps like a sheet on a clothesline. It's messy. Fine. It's still a great novel.
What's it about? From the back cover: "This comic masterpiece centers on Lamar Jimmerson, the leader of the Gnomon Society, the international fraternal order dedicated to preserving the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis." Etc. That is, he's the center of the novel as a pole is to a carousel. Circling are Sidney Hen, Jimmerson's brother-in-law and English rival for the head of the Gnomon society, Austin Popper, the most Falstaffian in a long line of Falstaffian Portis foils, Professor Cezar Golescu, owner of the the cards of many secret societies and possessor of cryptic talents, ("See, not only is Golescu writing with both hands but he is also looking at you and conversing with you at the same time in a most natural way. Hello, good morning, how are you? Good morning, Captain, how are you today, very fine, thank you..."), Maurice Babcock, troubled and spiritually pure, sort of the novel's Alyosha Karamazov, and Pharris White, the spurned ex-Gnomon, now a federal agent, sworn to take the Gnomon society down. No one in the book travels except on Gnomon business. All the adventures in the novel happen in the margins. Now and again someone--more than likely Popper--is chased into the bushes for perjury or misappropriation or draft dodging. Masters is about a lot of men trying to build a system and failing--it is also about trying to live in that system anyway. As the phrase "they were sick with fear and worry" appears in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, so, too, does the phrase "there followed another long Gnomon stasis" appear in Masters of Atlantis: repeatedly. Lamar Jimmerson spends most of the novel in his clerical robe and slippers waiting for signs. Lost men wait with him. It is like the United States of America. Now and again something happens. In the end, the conclusion of that something is more or less the same as it was before. Then all the principles find a place to rest. The language is beautiful, then it is banal or malicious, then it is funny. I hope that Gringos is at least this good, when I finally get around to reading it this winter.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:43 PM,
