The dark comedies of Charles Portis

By Justin Taylor

---

From The Point

When Charles Portis died in February 2020 at 86 years old, of complications from Alzheimer’s, even some of his fans were surprised to hear he’d still been alive. His last brush with mainstream attention had been in 2010, when two good things happened to him. First, the Oxford American magazine presented him with an award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literature. Second, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of his sophomore novel True Grit (1968) premiered Christmas week, grossed a quarter-billion dollars worldwide, and was nominated for ten Oscars. The first adaptation from 1969—starring John Wayne, Glen Campbell and a young Kim Darby—is often misremembered as a classic by people who haven’t seen it lately. The Coens’ version—starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfeld—is far more spirited and faithful, but let’s get back to the Oxford American party.

It was a black-tie fundraising gala held at the finest hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Portis lived. (The magazine, founded in Oxford, Mississippi in the late Eighties, had relocated to Conway, Arkansas in 2004.) Mary Steenburgen was master of ceremonies, and the other marquee honoree was Morgan Freeman, whose purchase of the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi had kept it from going under and therefore constituted an Outstanding Contribution to Southern Culture. Portis hadn’t published a novel in nearly twenty years, but he turned up finely turned out, only to bolt for home before the ceremony began. By the time the organizers tracked him down he had changed out of his evening wear into khaki pants and a beige windbreaker. He was coaxed back to the gala but didn’t want to change again, so it was in this garb that he took the stage and accepted a golden statue of a rooster from then-editor Marc Smirnoff.

It’s a perfectly Portisean moment, in which an almost pathologically unassuming figure is coerced by circumstance into wagering a personal reserve of dignity against the overweening silliness of the world. The masterful touch—the one Portis would have invented if it hadn’t been invented for him—is of course the golden rooster statue, which was based on the magazine’s colophon but could not help alluding to True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn as well as Joann, “The College Educated Chicken,” from his debut novel, Norwood (1966). As far as I can tell, this was the last public appearance he ever made.

Portis was born in El Dorado, Arkansas in 1933. He joined the Marine Corps in 1952, saw combat in Korea, then studied journalism at the University of Arkansas. He held jobs at a string of regional papers before moving to New York in 1960 to work at the Herald Tribune, which sent him back South in 1963 to cover the civil rights movement, then promoted him to London bureau chief, a job once held by Karl Marx. (Portis liked to joke that if the paper had paid better, history would have been spared a lot of heartache.) In 1964 he quit journalism and moved back to Arkansas, which would be home base for the rest of his life, though he spent a lot of time traveling in Central and South America. He wrote Norwood in a rented fishing shack and sold it almost as soon as he finished. It was published to warm reception in 1966 and he never worked a straight job again.

The hallmark of Portis’s work is farce delivered with a straight face in successions of tightly choreographed set pieces, splitting the difference between the picaresque and the grotesque. He draws on a tradition established by Melville in Moby-Dick, and sustained across the generations by writers as varied as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, John Kennedy Toole, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Donald Antrim, Mary Robison, Paul Beatty, Percival Everett and Nell Zink.

“Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce,” Portis told Newsweek in 1985. “I can’t seem to control that.” But one should not mistake lightness for slightness. Portis is a comedian of the highest order, but he is finally—as all comedians must be—a moral philosopher, because comedy, like prophecy, is always grounded in a critique of the world as it is based on a vision of the world as it ought to be. I’m reminded of a remark of Flannery O’Connor’s, made in a brief preface to the second edition of Wise Blood, published in 1962, two years before the end of her life and four years before Portis’s debut. “All comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death,” O’Connor wrote. A few lines down, she poses a question: “Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do?” For O’Connor’s Hazel Motes, the answer is yes: his inability to refuse Christ is the bedrock of his integrity and the path to his salvation, brutal as it is when it arrives. For Portis’s schemers, dreamers, dropouts, road-trippers, scammers and pilgrims, the answer varies based on who is driving the given story and what it is they’re after. But Portis, unlike O’Connor, has a baseline level of respect for anyone stubborn enough to sustain whatever quest they may happen to be on, separate from the question of whether said quest is worth completing or if it ought to have been undertaken in the first place.

Such pioneer spirit is a distinctly American quality, and nobody embodied it more fully while also mocking it more ruthlessly than Portis in his five peerless novels. A new Library of America Collected Works gathers them together in one volume, supplemented by a judicious selection of “Stories & Other Writings”—all told 1,100 pages of handsomely bound bible-paper well worth your $45 and the mild eye strain. What comes into focus as you make your way through is a worldview that favors that old Emersonian notion of self-reliance, as well as the observation made by the man in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” that “good fences make good neighbors.” These are loquacious, peripatetic novels written by a guy who thought that people ought to stay home and keep to themselves. Exactly none of his characters are able to do this, and it is from their extravagant failures of silence and stillness that Portis’s comedy derives.

---

“Anything I set out to do degenerates pretty quickly into farce”

Charles Portis

---

Norwood, the novel borne out of the fishing shack, is appropriately country-fried in its concerns. It begins, “Norwood had to get a hardship discharge when Mr. Pratt died because there wasn’t anyone else at home to look after Vernell. Vernell was Norwood’s sister. She was a heavy, sleepy girl with bad posture. She was old enough to look after herself and quite large enough, but in many ways she was a great big baby.” Norwood takes his discharge, “which he felt to be shameful,” and heads home on a bus from the East Coast to Ralph, Texas. Then he remembers that a fellow Marine named Joe William Reese owes him seventy dollars. This uncollected debt haunts him all the way back to Ralph, and eventually leads him to take a job with Grady Fring the Kredit King, a local entrepreneur who needs a car delivered to New York City, where it’s rumored that Reese has been living.