Norwood’s world is that of the Louisiana Hayride radio hour and bread trucks you can hitch a ride with; the city he arrives in is full of beatniks and journalists, equally reprobate in the eyes of the novel—as well as, one assumes, the eyes of the novelist, himself a defector from both journalism and New York. Norwood finds a writer named Dave Heineman is living in the apartment on East 11th Street where he expected to find Reese. Heineman writes travel journalism without traveling. He riffs off tip sheets he gets from travel agents: “Sunny and gracious old Lima, city of contrasts, where the old meets the new. Old guys making pots and plying similar ancient trades in the shadow of modern skyscrapers. That’s what I write.”
Norwood is standing in a tenement that could be out of a Grace Paley if not a Stephen Crane story, and he himself is a living relic of Old Weird America, but the guy he’s talking to could have wandered in from Great Jones Street or Inside Llewyn Davis. The year is 1961 and they’re barely a mile from Dylan at the Gaslight if they only knew to go check him out. Heineman introduces Norwood to Marie, a beatnik who lives upstairs and wants to form a folk duo with him. In a telling detail, they take their repertoire “from a book” because for all his country-fried bona fides, Norwood doesn’t know any folk songs. “I like modern love numbers better,” he says, by which he means the emergent radio-friendly country music of Hayride veterans such as Dale Evans, Hank Snow, Roy Rogers, Kitty Wells and Lefty Frizzell. (Norwood was adapted for the screen with Glen Campbell in the title role.) The murder ballads, work songs, antebellum anthems and dustbowl laments fetishized by the Greenwich Village set would surely register to Norwood as the music of his parents’ or even grandparents’ generation—antique and hopelessly uncool—assuming he recognized them at all.
It occurred to me on this read of the novel (my third or fourth time through it) that the sci-fi writer William Gibson’s proverb, “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” is the obverse of Faulkner’s “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Rather than wait for the future to find him, Norwood has sought it out, but unwittingly, which is why he cannot recognize that he has arrived. When his New York sojourn ends, the bus trip back to Texas (a repetition of the bus trip that opened the novel) feels like travel through time as much as space. The closer he gets to his rightful realm, the better things go for him: he finds Joe William Reese, picks up that genius chicken and meets a girl. Contra Thomas Wolfe, it turns out that sometimes you can go home again, and furthermore if you can then you probably should.
Norwood did well for itself: edited by Robert Gottlieb, excerpted in the Saturday Evening Post, adapted for the screen. But Portis’s major commercial and aesthetic breakthrough was True Grit (1968), the story of Mattie Ross, a sharp-tongued fourteen-year-old farm girl who seeks justice for her murdered father with the help of a drunken U.S. Marshal named Rooster Cogburn and a popinjay Texas Ranger. The film rights sold for $300,000 (roughly $2.5 million in today’s money) while the novel was still in galleys, and the book spent 22 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. True Grit has so massively overshadowed the rest of Portis’s oeuvre that you can read pieces complaining about it unto this day, though even the most vociferous defenders of Portis’s other work do typically concede that True Grit lives up to its hype.
From a certain point of view, True Grit is Norwood all over again, set a century back in time and with the locus of its farce shifted from the goal of the quest to the person who undertakes it. Nobody doubts the righteousness of Mattie Ross’s cause, they only find her an absurd agent of justice on account of her age and gender. Perhaps too they have seen enough of the world to find her faith in justice itself somewhat naïve. The idea that power derives from moral authority rather than moral authority from power is something that most of the adults in her world have left behind long ago, whether on Civil War battlefields or Indian raids or simply from lifetimes of cheating each other at everything from commerce to cards. Mattie’s convictions, candor and absolute lack of irony make her ridiculous in the eyes of everyone she meets, but they take their own dismissive attitude toward her as a referendum on what she is capable of, which is why she always gets the better of whoever she’s dealing with. Where Norwood is all the more a patsy for thinking himself a player, Mattie is an irresistible force in a world of pushovers who have mistaken themselves for immovable objects.
Mattie narrates the novel from a present day that I take to be the Twenties or Thirties, roughly half a century after the events in question. The Wayne film dispenses entirely with adult Mattie’s point of view; the Coens reinstate it, but sparingly, more as a gesture than a fully developed frame. To truly understand Mattie, you have to know her on the far side of her own middle years, around the age Cogburn would have been when she knew him. She is thinking back with wonder and unease to the strangest thing that ever happened to her, in the autumn of a long life in which not a lot has happened. Mattie is loath to admit emotion, cites Bible verses to underscore whatever point she’s making, and is given to nonplussed reflection on how things have changed since the turn of the twentieth century. She is a last link to a lost world, to a whole mode of being barely intelligible to a modern listener of her own day, let alone ours.
As a girl, her Ahabian single-mindedness made her heroic. What’s more, it brought out the latent heroism in Cogburn, a veteran of the Confederate terror cell known as Quantrill’s Raiders. Before Mattie, his shame over the atrocities he committed during the war manifested primarily as alcoholic nihilism. As her quest becomes his own, her faith in him surrogates his long-extinguished faith in himself; he becomes her ward as much as she his, and so they are each the other’s saviors. For a while. But it is Mattie’s same single-mindedness—ossified across decades and brought to bear on countless events of lesser merit—that has hardened her into a scolding moralist telling a story whose deepest profundities are ever slipping out of her grasp. This is the comfortless lesson at the heart of Portis’s hilarious, huge-hearted novel: not even salvation lasts forever. It can come and go in the blink of an eye, or the echo of a rifle’s report, or, as Mattie might put it, citing 1 Thessalonians 5, “like a thief in the night.”
By the time Portis’s third novel, The Dog of the South, appeared in 1979, the momentum from True Grit had long since dissipated. He had fallen into cult-writer eclipse, which, however badly it may have galled his fans and champions, seems to have suited him just fine. Without a proper biography to refer to, it’s hard to say what Portis did with his decade of silence. The “Chronology” section of the Library of America edition mentions some screenwriting work, and “his first and only appearance” in the New Yorker in 1977, with a satiric sketch called “Your Action Line,” which is duly collected here. He might have been chipping away at Dog all the while; he might have started something else and abandoned it; he might have just needed a break after writing two novels in three years. Two things that we can be certain he was doing: spending considerable stretches of time in Central and South America, where much of Dog and later Gringos would be set, and watching the Sixties curdle into the Seventies. Portis was enough of an outlaw from the straight life (no day job, no family, sometimes no fixed address) to sympathize with anyone who wanted to escape the horse latitudes of the mid-century middle-class. But starry-eyed aquarians, wannabe revolutionaries and drug-addled free lovers pushed his live-and-let-live tolerance (and, one suspects, his small-c conservatism) to its breaking point. For starters, the hippies wanted to do everything together. Their love-ins, be-ins, festivals, orgies, communes and communism can only have repulsed a consummate loner such as Portis. Whenever the counterculture shows up in his post-Sixties novels, it is portrayed as a cesspool of violence, criminality and sleaze.