The Old Dog

Well lookey here, a piece on the elusive Charles Portis - one of the five best American authors of the twentieth century, and one of the one funniest - in Harper’s? Yes please. (H/T to the Prufrock newsletter). The piece comes as the Library of America releases his Collected Works (which includes all 5 of his novels, alongside some of his journalism), so now you know what to get me for my birthday.

The author of the article, Will Stephenson, does an excellent job capturing both the spirit of Portis’ works, and the strong allure they hold for those readers who drink the Kool-Aid. For Portis is, as Stephenson notes, very much a cult figure, his one brush with mainstream notoriety, True Grit, aside. Somewhat deliberately so, too: both his narrative voice and his eccentric characters come formed out of some deep subterranean spring of imagination, inaccessible to many readers. Hence Portis’ fascination with secret societies, a factor Stephenson does justice to by describing Portis’ bizarre, delightful mid-career Masters of Atlantis as the skeleton key for understanding his writing.

What I find most personally alluring about Portis (other than the sheer hilarity of his digressions), is the melancholic air that runs underneath the jokes, a sense of wry mourning for a world that has passed and is passing away. Stephenson perceives this tendency clearly:

“His is a temperamentally conservative vision, in which youth culture—hippies and beatniks, “kids gone feral,” kids who never fought in a war and lack respect for their elders—is an absurd and pathetic sort of menace. Where this could easily become curmudgeonly or censorious in a less imaginative writer, however, Portis always seems bemused; the disappointment is too vast to be taken all that seriously, it is foregone and always cut with an instinctual swerve toward the comic. ”

Temperamental conservatism married to bemusement — that just about encapsulates my stance toward the world. No wonder I’ve always found Portis such a congenial fellow traveler.

Do go read the piece, then run out and lay hands on one of the novels. True Grit is the most famous, but The Dog of the South is my personal favorite.