I’d have Lee too, and Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston, walking around the midway. Hire some people with beards, you know, to do that. I wouldn’t have Braxton Bragg or Joseph E. Johnston. Every afternoon at three Lee would take off his gray coat and wrestle an alligator in a mud hole. Prize drawings. A lot of T-shirts and maybe a few black-and-white portables. If you don’t like that, how about a stock-car track? Year-round racing with hardly any rules. Deadly curves right on the water. The Symes 500 on Christmas day. Get a promotional tie-in with the Sugar Bowl. How about an industrial park? How about a high-rise condominium with a roof garden? How about a baseball clinic? How about a monkey island? I don’t say it would be cheap. Nobody’s going to pay to see one or two monkeys these days. People want to see a lot of monkeys. I’ve got plenty of ideas but first I have to get my hands on the island.
Midge, who considers himself a scholar of Civil War history on account of two years spent at Ole Miss, ignores everything Symes has said except for the proposed omission of Bragg and Johnston from the theme park. He defends the generals’ honor while Symes suggests that what his island needs is a fifty-story tower with a revolving restaurant at the top. The ensuing exchange is hilariously absurd, and goes on for several pages, but it also has real moral and thematic weight. Portis wants us to see that the interwoven conversations about the war theme park and the war itself are fundamentally interchangeable. Both are examples of bullshitters bullshitting each other and themselves about their bullshit dreams: of the past, of the future, of any place where glory and riches and respect once were or yet may be found, because their present lives are squalid and hopelessly sad.
All the principal characters in The Dog of the South are looking to the generation above theirs for a handout and a steadying hand. None of them gets one. They’ve been cut loose and cut off, left to wander the wilderness of adulthood. When Midge finally catches up with Dupree in Belize, he finds him living alone on a failed plantation with Norma nowhere to be found. As Dupree draws down on Midge with Midge’s own gun, he realizes that they are more alike than not: a couple of losers on the lam from minimum respectability, who have crossed an entire hemisphere to have a standoff they could have had back home. “We are weaker than our fathers, Dupree,” Midge says. “Here we are, almost thirty years old, and neither one of us even has a job. We’re worse than the hippies.” In Portis’s universe, worse than a hippie is about the worst thing that you can be.
If the scheming quack Dr. Symes is the scene-stealing secret star of The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis (1985) takes place in a world populated entirely by Symeses. Everyone in this novel of cults, secret societies and esoteric knowledge is either a con man or a fool; most are both. The kindest but also most piteous thing to be said of them is that they maintain a perfect childlike faith in all their own stupidest ideas.
Masters of Atlantis begins in France in 1917, when a young World War I vet named Lamar Jimmerson meets a mysterious stranger who reveals that he is “an Adept of the Gnomon Society.” Jimmerson, himself an apprentice Freemason, is intrigued. The stranger is gone within a page, but Jimmerson will become a master of Gnomonry, developing its tenets and swelling its ranks, first assisted and later thwarted by Sydney Hen, a wealthy Brit who funds Jimmerson’s efforts before a feud instigated by an upstart Gnomonist named Austin Popper leads Hen to found a schismatic sect of his own. Popper befriends a strange Eastern European named Cezar Golescu, a self-described alchemist and member of countless secret societies (some so secret they may not exist) who has a scheme to harvest gold from the leaves of a pest plant grown in pots of soil taken from abandoned gold mines in Colorado.
Popper, Jimmerson, Hen, Golescu and a rejected acolyte turned FBI agent by the name of Pharris White will spend the twentieth century bouncing in and out of each other’s lives. Though it vamps at times as a systems novel and ably satirizes the peculiarly American enthusiasm for secret societies, Masters is really a story about the lengths to which people will go to convince themselves that the world is not indifferent to their existence, that their suffering has a purpose as well as a limit, to be revealed and made good in the fullness of time. The novel is Portis’s broadest comedy, derived from his silliest premise, yet it finds opportunities for small, breathtaking moments of intimacy and desolation, such as the scene in which Austin Popper, after barely escaping from a burning house and evading arrest at the hands of Pharris White, lays to rest his talking blue jay, Squanto, in the mineshaft where he is hiding out. “He scooped out a little grave for Squanto with a sharp rock. One day they would put him away like this, with dirt in his mouth. He ended the day on his knees, gasping for breath and smelling of burnt wool.”
Portis’s next novel, Gringos, picks up on this elegiac atmosphere and makes it even more pervasive. Though as whacked-out in concept and deft in execution as anything else in Portis, Gringos is a far less cartoonish novel than Masters of Atlantis, and his most earnest (the word is used advisedly) since True Grit. Portis was in his fifties when he wrote Gringos, which is nothing if not a novel of middle age. It is a book about regret and renewal, belatedness and compromise, making right what you can and making do with what you can’t (and, per the famous cliché, seeking the wisdom to know the difference). The story begins on Christmas and takes place over the following week, with its climactic action set on New Year’s Day. Our narrator is a white expat living in South America named Jimmy Burns, who gets by as a part-time artifact smuggler and PI, though he’s uneasy about the ethics of both lines of work. A chance encounter with some sketchy tourists leads him into a world of UFO cultists, apocalypse-hungry hippies and sundry New Age maniacs, all flooding the Yucatan in search of a lost, possibly nonexistent City of Dawn. It reads as though someone took The Crying of Lot 49—with its labyrinthine plot and conspiratorial mood—and triple-distilled it through the hard-boiled detective ethos of Sanctuary, Brighton Rock and The Long Goodbye.