The
publicity-shy Mr. Portis earned a modest but devoted readership and accolades
as America’s “least-known great writer.”
Feb.
17, 2020
Charles
Portis, the publicity-shy author of “True Grit” and a short list of other
novels that drew a cult following and accolades as the work of possibly the
nation’s best unknown writer, died on Monday at a hospice in Little Rock, Ark.
He was 86.
His
death was confirmed by his brother Jonathan, who said Mr. Portis had been in
hospice care for two years and in an Alzheimer’s care facility for six years
prior.
Mr.
Portis was in his early 30s and well established as a reporter at The New York
Herald Tribune in 1964, when he decided to turn to fiction full time. The
decision astonished his friends and colleagues at the paper, among them Jimmy
Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron.
He
had covered the civil rights movement in the South: riots in Birmingham, Ala.;
the jailing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Ga.; Gov. George
C. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama.
And he had been assigned to a coveted post, London bureau chief. His future in
journalism was bright.
But
he said he was heading home; he was going to move into an Arkansas fishing
shack and write novels.
“A
fishing shack!” Mr. Wolfe recalled in his book “The New Journalism.” “In
Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.”
Within
two years Mr. Portis had published his first novel, “Norwood.” It told the
story of Norwood Pratt, a naïve ex-Marine from East Texas on a road trip to
collect a $70 debt. Along the way he encounters, among other things, a con
artist and a chicken that can play tick-tack-toe.
“Norwood”
set the pattern for Mr. Portis’s use of misfits, cranks and sly humor in his fiction.
Two
years later came “True Grit,” a best seller and his biggest success. A tale of
the Wild West, it revolves around the grizzled, irascible federal marshal
Rooster Cogburn, “an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of
Grover Cleveland.”
Like
“Norwood,” “True Grit” was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. And
like “Norwood,” it was turned into a movie, twice — in 1969, with John Wayne in
the Cogburn role (for which he received an Academy Award), and in 2010,
starring Jeff Bridges and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. (“Norwood” became a
movie in 1970 starring Mr. Portis’s fellow Arkansan Glen Campbell.)
The
narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie
Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when
she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr.
Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an
interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions,
and the language is insistently old-fashioned.
One
of Mattie’s first impressions of Cogburn, who patrols the territory out of Fort
Smith, is harsh. She finds him in bed at 10 o’clock in the morning, fully
clothed and hung over.
“The
brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed,” she says.
“Rooster coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and
coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and
took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown
drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats
if they are let alone.”
The
dialogue throughout has the same tone. In one scene Cogburn confronts four
bandits across an open field:
“Lucky
Ned Pepper said, ‘What is your intentions? Do you think one on four is a
dogfall?’
“Rooster
said, ‘I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith
at Judge Parker’s convenience! Which will you have?’
“Lucky
Ned Pepper laughed. He said, ‘I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!’
“Rooster
said, ‘Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!’ and he took the reins in his teeth
and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his
strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits.”
Between
1979 and 1991, Mr. Portis published three more novels, “The Dog of the South”
(1979), “Masters of Atlantis” (1985) and “Gringos” (1991). Like his first two,
they relied on deadpan humor, oddball characters and occasional bursts of
melodrama.
In
“The Dog of the South,” the narrator, Ray Midge, drives to Mexico from Little
Rock, Ark., in pursuit of his wife, who has run off with her first husband and
Ray’s Ford Torino. In “Masters of Atlantis,” two men found a sect based on
wisdom from the lost city of Atlantis. And in “Gringos” an American expat in
Mexico gets involved with U.F.O. enthusiasts and archaeologists searching for a
lost Mayan city.
All
were reissued in paperback in 1999 and 2000 by the Overlook Press after Esquire
magazine ran an article by Ron Rosenbaum proclaiming Mr. Portis America’s
“least-known great writer.”
“Mr.
Portis evokes an eccentric, absurd world with a completely straight face,”
Charles McGrath wrote in The New York Times in 2010. “The trick of his books,”
he added, is that “they pretend to be serious.”
He
went on, “In one way or another the subtext of all these novels is the great
Melvillean theme of the American weakness for secret conspiracies and arcane
knowledge, and our embrace of con men, scam artists and flimflammers of every
sort.”
In
his later years Mr. Portis produced a sparse collection of magazine articles,
notably for his Arkansas friend William Whitworth, the longtime editor of The
Atlantic Monthly. He also wrote a few short stories for The New Yorker, The
Atlantic and Oxford American.
Jay
Jennings, an Arkansas writer and friend, compiled a collection of Mr. Portis’s
work that included excerpts from his newspaper reporting on civil rights during
the early 1960s. It also included a short memoir, “Combinations of Jacksons,”
and a three-act play, “Delray’s New Moon.” The collection, “Escape Velocity,”
was published in 2012 by Butler Center Books in Little Rock.
Mr.
Portis shrank from the attention his more celebrated novels attracted. He
steadfastly refused to be interviewed, although he made himself available to
talk about his life for this obituary. When drawn into public gatherings, he
dodged photographers. But he didn’t like to be called a recluse or compared to
the likes of J.D. Salinger. He pointed out that his name was in the Little Rock
phone book.
Ms.
Ephron, a friend from his New York days, talked about his penchant for privacy.
He was charming, she told The Times in 2010. “But he was a newspaper reporter
who didn’t have a phone. The Trib had to make him get one. So even back then
the pattern was there.”
Charles
McColl Portis was born on Dec. 28, 1933, in El Dorado, an oil town in southeast
Arkansas, to Samuel Palmer Portis, an educator, and the former Alice Waddell.
He grew up in various towns in the region, including Hamburg, where he went to
high school.
After
graduating he worked as an auto mechanic and, in 1952, at 18, joined the
Marines over the strong objections of his father. He served in Korea during and
after the war there and left the service as a sergeant.
After
enrolling at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, he wrote for the
student paper, The Arkansas Traveler, and the local paper, The Northwest
Arkansas Times. One of his tasks at The Times was handling country
correspondents, who were known for their eccentric spelling and matter-of-fact
reporting on the ailments and family events of local citizens.
“My
job was to edit out all the life and charm from these homely reports,” he said
in the 2012 interview.
After
graduating with a journalism degree in 1958 he was a reporter for The Memphis
Commercial Appeal and a reporter and columnist for The Arkansas Gazette in
Little Rock. He joined The Herald Tribune in 1960. After reporting from the
South, he was assigned to London, where he was the bureau chief for a year
before deciding to become a novelist.
Mr.
Portis never married. Besides his brother Jonathan, he is survived by another
brother, Richard.
Mr.
Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his
days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job
description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s
own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell
them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I
do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great
ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send
reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young
reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with
their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”