[

Note: This paper is meant only for non-commercial use on the Unofficial Charles Portis Website (http://charlesportis.cjb.net). This paper is considered intellectual property. To use it, you must get permission from Alex T. Moore by emailing him at .

]

Charles Portis Through His Critics’ Eyes:

All Eighty-eight Pages of Atlantean Puzzles, Egyptian Riddles and

Extended Alchemical Metaphors

By Alex T. Moore

Professor Vesterman

12/11/01

“Look at that, sir, leaves. He had leaves in his pocket. I wonder what kind of leaves they are. In what way are they special, do you think? Well, you can just bet there’s a story behind them, and a good one too. What in the world will this fellow come up with next?”

-Austin Popper, on Professor Golescu, Masters of Atlantis, 47[i].

I. Our Least-Known Great Novelist?

In the midst of his survey of Charles Portis’ works, Barnesandnoble.com writer Mark Winegardner remarks on the futility of his task. He says, “There is no really good way to appreciate Charles Portis’s novels without breaking down and reading them.”[ii] This presents a problem, because few people would want to read a book that they couldn’t conceive of appreciating. What is more, for many years it was very difficult to find, much less “break down and read” Charles Portis’ novels, since four of them were out of print for several years. Touching on the past unavailability of his literature, Gene Lyons of Newsweek relates an anecdote that Portis reportedly told, in which Portis laments the dearth of Dog of the South readers. Lyons says of Portis, “It was only after a friend's car was robbed, he reports with typically self deprecating humor, that he realized the true value of his work. ‘They took everything,’ Portis says. ‘Old envelopes, a broken screwdriver. . . but they didn't touch The Dog of the South. They were probably right. If they hadn't heard of it, what were the chances it was any good?’”[iii] Without a John Wayne movie and with little critical attention, who did originally know about The Dog of the South? And, to address Winegardner’s earlier point, without critics to entice potential readers, few would “break down and read the novel” at all. When a text is worthy of reading, it is the responsibility of the literary critic to introduce it to its audience, so that it does not end up unread in the back of a car.

Literary reviews are a crucial variable in the formula resulting in a book’s popularity, but not all reviews necessarily add to sales. Differing opinions about a book will clash; some will be quoted on dust jackets, and some will collect dust in the waste bin. Occasionally, two book critics will even vie for control over the interpretation of a specific passage in the text. For example, several critics treat as representative the passage in which Doc describes Jimmy for a potential employer in Gringos, saying he is ““Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. Trustworthy. Facetious.’”[iv] In a glowing review, Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe uses this fragment to propose Jimmy Burns as an alter ego of Portis: “Never having met the man, I can’t swear that that fits Burns’s creator, too,” he says, “but it certainly sounds right.”[v] This is meant to be a complement. The very same quotation is used almost antithetically by critic Dan Cryer in a venomous review of the book in Newsday. Cryer aims to cast Burns as a hollow character over whom Charles Portis has little mastery, this being exemplified by what he sees as the inaccuracy of the above representation of Jimmy. He says, “What we see, rather than are told, is the hard work and punctuality. But he is almost never alone, seems not to have a single mean bone and his facetiousness toward the oddballs around him is tempered by his willingness to consort with them.”[vi]

That these two critics pull very different conclusions from the same quote points to what Malcolm Jones Jr. posits in Newsweek, that “Whatever the reasons, critics have never known what to make of Portis's original, contrary voice,”[vii] or at least that they don’t collectively know what to make of it. Adam Woog of The Seattle Times, though, suggests that there is considerable collectivist thought on the author, when he says, “Portis has been a kind of secret weapon in Southern-humorist circles for a long time.”[viii] Having read more than 40 articles criticizing Portis’ work, I am more receptive to the latter statement; only a small fraction of the reviews that I read were negative, while a couple were ambivalent. There is – from what I have seen – a strong critical support of the Southern humorist: much consensus on his tendencies in characters, humor, and themes, and much articulate, insightful writing on his work.

Whatever the agenda, one thing that almost every critic tries to do want is to take ownership over the way the author is seen by his potential and eventual audience. In order to write a persuasive review, it is imperative to have a finger on the pulse of the literary zeitgeist of the likely readers of this review. Newsday writer Charles Taylor says of Portis’ best selling “western” True Grit, “[T]oday most people are more likely to be familiar with the John Wayne movie version that appeared in 1969, and that’s a pity. The film sticks to the plot and gets the tone wrong.”[ix] Many of the critics I have read are conscious of this, when writing retrospective reviews for that novel, and even when writing about other novels. Easily a third of the reviews that I have come across proclaim a disdain for the film version of True Grit. The critic must consider the reader for whom Charles Portis is “the author of the book upon which a John Wayne movie was based,” and introduce to him the Charles Portis who is “a deadpan reporter of human folly, a master of pathos, a compassionate portrayer of life’s absolute absurdity, and a man with a voice,”[x] as Boston Globe writer Katherine A. Powers puts it.

Ron Rosenbaum concedes in Feed magazine that this critical distancing from the film is spurned by “a kind of literary snobbery that slips in,”[xi] I feel this attitude is forgivable because of the laudable goal of trying to convince a reader to discover an author whose wonderful books are belied by a less than wonderful film. Of the critics I have read, only Philip Herter of The St. Petersburg Times holds the film version of True Grit against Portis, saying that “Gringos reads like it was written by a man with Hollywood looking over his shoulder. The characters are cutouts and the plot is so loose as to be incontinent.”[xii] What sometimes comes off as overzealous hyperbole in Herter’s review is easier to understand in the context of the critical climate surrounding Charles Portis. His proponents are many, and dissenters – like Philip Herter – are relatively few.

If, then, many of Portis’ critics aim to extol his virtues, how successful have they been? How much truth is there in Winegardner’s statement, “There is no really good way to appreciate Charles Portis’s novels without breaking down and reading them”? It seems that Winegardner is only partially correct: a more complete appreciation of his works would require reading his texts, but smart, insightful commentary on his characters, themes, and plot, when coupled with representative quotations, can and have fostered an appreciation for the author.

The most glaring example can be found in the case of Ron Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum says, “Tracy Carns, publishing director of Overlook Press [ . . . ] says in the release accompanying The Dog of the South, ‘I read an article by Ron Rosenbaum in The New York Observer raving about how great Portis was and what a scandal it was that the books were out of print. I tracked down copies at the Strand, read them and instantly became a Portis convert.’” [xiii] Rosenbaum’s exaltations of the Southern humorist, in The New York Observer and elsewhere, seduced into addiction Tracy Carns, the publishing director of Overlook Press. The voices of Rosenbaum, and others like Robert Houston and Rudy Rucker, have taken significant ownership over the way that Charles Portis is understood, and they have provided impetus for the republication of his novels.

II. What kind of person criticizes Charles Portis?

Scott McLemee in Newsday – and several others – has commented that Portis is a writers’ writer. He says, “[J]ournalist Ron Rosenbaum revealed that Portis has a sort of cult following among other writers. Nora Ephron compared him to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. On The Dog of the South, Roy Blount Jr. said, ‘No one should die without having read it.’”[xiv] Mark Winegardner of Barnes&Noble.com says, “[T]o paraphrase Brian Eno’s famous line about the Velvet Underground, only a (very) few thousand people bought The Dog of the South, but every single one of them tried to become a writer.”[xv] It does indeed appear that many Portis aficionados have written books of their own. This leads to several questions. If many of his critics are themselves authors or seasoned literary critics, to which other writers do they liken Portis? How do critics feel about his characters and style, about his comic technique and thematic profundity?

One reason that writers often like Portis might be that they sense in him a style and zest that reminds them of another author dear to them. As one might guess with a writer of Portis’ caliber, the Southern, American wordsmith is most frequently likened by his proponents to that prototypical Southern writer, Mark Twain. McLemee says, “All members of the [Portis Appreciation] Society agreed that ‘Dog’ was perhaps the funniest American novel since Huckleberry Finn.” [xvi] Mark Feeney says, “Walker Percy likened [Mattie] to Huck Finn, and she certainly displays the same boundless individualism and a comparable knack for idiom.”[xvii] As always, there are dissenters, like Gene Lyons of Newsweek, who says, [Of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis] “Each gets compared too often to one particular big, canonical American master (McCarthy to Faulkner, Portis to Twain), when what people should be saying about them both is that they’re like Samuel Beckett, only with actual stories.”[xviii]

Not all of the comparisons are meant to be flattering. Dan Cryer of Newsday feels that Gringos “is comic in the Vonnegut or Brautigan mold, if only fitfully so; frisky as a spaniel, but less entertaining, and whimsical to a fault.”[xix] And Philip Herter of The St. Petersburg Times complains that Gringos finds Portis indulging too much machismo, a la Ernest Hemmingway. He says, “It's been a long time since Hemingway wrote his last book. Manly books about manly men living meandering, manly lives are less plentiful than they used to be. In Gringos, Charles Portis serves up a dose of masculine Meso Americana.”[xx] Among others are Flannery O’Conner, Joseph Conrad, Richard Brautigan, and Gabrael Garcia Marquez.

Still, Twain easily remains the dominant literary point of reference in the reviews that I have read, as well as one of the closer likenesses. Mattie Ross – the spunky narrator of True Grit – is frequently compared to Huck Finn. Charles Taylor of Newsday says, “The order and duty, if not the fussiness, of the ‘sivilized’ life that Huck Finn couldn't stand is in some ways the life that Mattie Ross longs for. But like Huck she springs from the blood and memory of the American past, her every word a hymn to the plain grace of Puritan forbearance.”[xxi] John Anthony West says in The New York Times that “True Grit is virtuoso storytelling in that American tall-tale, Huck Finn vain.” [xxii]

It may strike some as odd that a journalist for The New York Herald Tribune would be able to make the jump to writing fiction comparable to Mark Twain’s. The question lingers: does Portis’ journalistic background affect his fiction, and to what degree? Ron Rosenbaum, in an interview with Feed magazine, commented on “Literary Journalism,” a cousin of the “New Journalism” writing style championed by author Tom Wolfe (who reported with Portis at The New York Herald Tribune). In New Journalism, the self is not regulated to the bylines, and the journalistic process, the means to the end, often eclipses the end. Rosenbaum says of “Literary Journalism,” “Literary Journalism at its best asks the questions that literature asks. The nature of human nature and its place in a meaningless or perhaps meaningful cosmos. Those kind of questions [ . . . ] there will sometimes be a great scholar who finds a way of writing that takes you into the heart of a scholarly mystery you might not otherwise be able to see the dimensions of.”[xxiii]

Charles Portis wrote a letter to a woman in my seminar in which he denies ties to New Journalism. In Portis’ literary work, the absurd regularly trumps the rational, and Portis as an author is virtually hidden. Birds talk, chickens think, and peanuts make conversation. Charles Portis does not use the journalistic inverted pyramid style – in fact we often never learn who these characters are, what exactly they are doing, and most importantly, why they are doing it. In journalism – and even New Journalism – a concrete “why” is coveted. With Portis, the method to the madness is a mystery to be unlocked, if it even has a key. Rosenbaum says in The New York Observer,“What Mr. 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 there is an answer even if it’s locked in a trunk somewhere and we’ve lost the key.”[xxiv] Portis’ presence, too, is minimal as an author. Wolfe offers explosive, often somewhat solipsistic quotes in Bonfire of the Vanities, such as, “This time the explosion of the telephone threw his heart into tachycardia, and each contraction forced the blood through his head with such pressure – a stroke! – he was going to have a stroke! – lying here in his high-rise American hovel! – a stroke!” [xxv] Portis – in contrast – is so deadpan and removed as to suggest to the reader that he might not disagree with Mr. Jimmerson, and perhaps sport a Gnomon poma from time to time himself. The jokes and characters are left for the reader to discover, and the author’s presence is felt minimally.