Gringos and Gnomons
Does Charles Portis belong in the Library of America? Yes.
Charles Portis: Collected Works, by Charles Portis, ed. Jay Jennings, Library of America, 1216 pages
Does Charles Portis belong in the Library of America? Yes. One word: diversity. How many other writers in the LOA were born and bred in Arkansas and spent most of a long life there? He also offers what might be called virtuosic neurodiversity. Open any one of Portis’s five novels at random and you will find all manner of information about cars, trucks, firearms, and such, knowledge dispensed not with the pride of the initiate as in Hemingway but matter-of-factly. In his novel Gringos, for instance: “The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated.” See, if you’re interested, Claudia Brittenham’s Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, just published by University of Texas Press and written in a very different idiom.
Alongside these casually dispensed nuggets there are characters, in both senses of the word. In Masters of Atlantis, a con man appears before a legislative committee. “I’m an orphan, Senator. I had to make my own way as a child, but I am no less a good citizen for that. I am also an outspoken patriot. My friends tell me I go too far at times but I can’t help it, it’s always been Fifty-four forty or Fight with me. I’m too old to change now.” His interrogator responds, “According to my information, you sat out the war in a small upstairs room on Grant Avenue in San Francisco, playing fan-tan with one James Wing, and emerging only for the Victory Ball.”
Far fewer Americans have read Portis than have seen one or both of the movies based on his most famous novel, True Grit. For those readers wondering where they should start, the answer is: wherever you want. I’ve only read once his first novel, Norwood—also turned into a movie, which I haven’t seen—and for some reason I’ve never gone back to it, but it has its partisans. I’ve re-read all the others several times. The first Portis novel I read, circa 1980, was True Grit, thanks to my dear friend Bill Tunilla, who presided over a bookstore in Pasadena, The House of Fiction, for close to twenty years. I absolutely loved it. Also The Dog of the South, which I went on to read right after True Grit.
Bill and I both devoured the deliciously weird Masters of Atlantis when it appeared in 1985 and Gringos in 1991, my favorite Portis, which is saying something. And then we waited and waited for another novel—there were rumors of one involving Pancho Villa—which never came. One footnote: The House of Fiction, like many bookstores, was not just a bookstore but also a meeting place for an extraordinary collection of characters who could have walked out of the pages of a Portis novel. There was “The Count,” for instance, who often wore a cape and always wore makeup. He had been an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse, not far from Bill’s store, many years earlier, and had fallen on hard times. There was Chuck, who had suffered a terrible burn on one of his arms when he was in Korea (where Portis also served in the war). Like Chuck, many denizens of The House of Fiction lived in the Crown Hotel, which was, until it burned down, two places to the right from Bill’s store on Colorado Boulevard, between a gay bar, Nardi’s, and the venerable Pasadena bookstore Vroman’s, still in business today. And there was the mysterious annual visitor from Mexico (Portis territory), a woman both beautiful and exquisitely dressed, who came to the shabby but companionable House of Fiction between Christmas and New Year’s and picked out a great number of books each time; her annual appearances came to seem uncanny.
The Library of America edition is a great investment even for readers who have all of Portis’s novels, plus the anthology editor Jay Jennings compiled a decade or so ago, Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. Jennings was the natural choice to edit this one-volume Collected Works for LOA, and he did a superb job, including several stories, pieces of reportage (Portis was a first-rate journalist before he turned to writing fiction), essays, and one short bit of memoir, “Combinations of Jacksons,” which will make you wish for more.
Why is Gringos my favorite? It has everything I love in Portis’s fiction, all entwined in a single book. Human self-deception, comedy, wickedness and goodness, quotidian joys and sorrows and mostly unspoken consolations of faith, deep absurdity, betrayal and friendship, a sympathetic narrator/protagonist who sees a lot but misses so much: you get that all in Gringos. I was terribly disappointed when no more novels followed, but in retrospect maybe that wasn’t surprising. Sentence by sentence, it is (so I think) easily among the best American novels of the last fifty years.
I want to quote the opening paragraph of Chapter 5 to entice readers who haven’t yet put a toe in the water:
The Mayas had a ceremonial year of 260 days called a tzolkin, and then they had one of 360 days called a tun, and finally there was the haab of 365 days, the least important one, not used in their long calculation. This was simply a tun, plus five nameless days of dread and suspended activity, the uayeb, corresponding somewhat to our dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
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If you enjoy this tidbit, you will probably relish Gringos and Portis more generally; if not, not.
Only long after Bill introduced me to Portis did it occur to me that one of the charms of his work was that his name had never even been mentioned when I was in grad school, nor was it bandied about in the lit mags and such I routinely read. The very name “Portis” sounded a bit odd, though I couldn’t say why. Interestingly, Portis himself was one of the great character-namers in American fiction.
There is something else too, which occurred to me only after I revisited Gringos yet again in the LOA volume. Reading it now, I am struck by the gap—“chasm” would probably be more accurate—between the world as rendered in the novel and our world in 2023. I found myself wondering what readers in their twenties and thirties would make of it. I hope the Collected Works will elicit a few responses from such readers, coming to Portis for the first time.
