I Will Keep Writing About Charles Portis Until You Start Reading His Books!

 I have other posts here about Charles Portis.

My threat is not an idle one.

I am tardy about posting The Curse of True Grit How Charles Portis’s greatest success overshadowed the rest of his work by Scott Bradfield, and published by The New Republic.

Yet while these later novels were often his most comically unusual and inventive, they failed to sell very well, and, though widely reviewed, they often suffered unfavorable comparisons to the earlier work. None achieved the cinematic clarity of True Grit; they don’t translate into other media, and can’t be explained in terms of familiar commercial genres (such as science fiction, or “the Western,” or even “serious literature”). Like their central characters, they remain uniquely, supremely, and self-indulgently themselves. As a result, Portis’s life’s work has never been properly appreciated, despite a legion of prominent admirers, from Ed Park and Donna Tartt to Wells Tower. (Jonathan Lethem has called Portis “everybody’s favorite least-known great novelist.”) For while True Grit was an almost perfect combination of imaginative storytelling and commercial success, it set the stage for one of the most remarkable disappearances-in-plain sight of contemporary literature.

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Like Mark Twain, William Saroyan, or even Damon Runyon, Portis was a poet of American vernacular; the oddly rhythmic ways his characters spoke reflected more than the regions that formed them—they marked the deep twists and contradictions of their inner nature. But despite frequent comparisons to Huckleberry Finn, Portis’s Mattie and the eponymous Norwood are not the sort who, on a whim, will “light out for the territory ahead of the rest,” but rather are always looking to return home and settle down to their normally humdrum, routine lives. (There is more of L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy Gale about them than Huck Finn.) If anything, Mattie only wants to bring the wild West back to Arkansas in the embodiment of Cogburn’s casket, which, at True Grit’s conclusion, she buries in the family plot and memorializes with a $65 tombstone.

If that doesn't whet your whistle, then more the pity for you.

More recently, The Library of America published Notes on Charles Portis’s notes: Jay Jennings pores over a cache of papers by America’s “least-known great writer” may be of more interest to writers and his readers. It reproduces outlines and drafts.

In particular, the notes and drafts and changes for True Grit are a rich vein for exploration. Early pages have the book’s indelible characters, whom I have trouble imagining under any other names, as Carrie White (for Mattie Ross), Evans (for LaBoeuf), and James Chaney (instead of Tom, which Portis changed after remembering that James Chaney was the Black civil rights activist murdered in Mississippi in 1964). Rooster was always Rooster, though in early drafts his surname is Kinkaid or Poindexter. That should put to rest any claim that the character was based on a real marshal named Cogburn. In a letter from 2000, answering questions from the superintendent of the Fort Smith National Historic Site, in the western Arkansas city where Mattie first meets and recruits Rooster, Portis said he landed on the name Cogburn because it was “Scots,” the background he wanted Rooster to have.

A very early chapter outline using those previous names—typed on yellow long bond paper (for all you archive nerds)—follows the well-known beginning of the book: “Carrie opens story”; her father is killed by Chaney; she travels to Fort Smith, witnesses a hanging, “[g]oes to trial next day,” and seeks out Rooster afterwards; Evans and Rooster team up and leave her, but she follows. By Chapter 8 of the outline, Portis is asking himself “What happens on trail?” The rattlesnake pit is there from the beginning, but a potential cattle drive will be dropped and a proposed showdown scene with Rooster and Odus Wharton, whose family history with Rooster is part of the early trial scene, winds up mentioned in the final manuscript secondhand, in Mattie’s postscript to the main events.

sch 4/28