Everything Slightly Off

Norwood from Charles Portis: Collected Works Library of America. pp. 1-110. $45.00 (unless you get a bargain, as I did) *****

I will now take on the impossible task of saying what is great—or at least addictive—about a Charles Portis novel. Probably the least of his books is the most famous (and most conventional), True Grit. The others—The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos, are nearly indescribable. Yet I’d happily read any of them right now. I expect to re-read all of them in the coming weeks. I love the Library of America.

The Portis touch has little to do with plot. In Norwood, the first of his novels, a man returns to Texas from the army in order to take care of his sister Vernell, “a heavy sleepy girl with bad posture” who is having trouble getting out of the house. He eventually persuades her to take a retail job but comes to regret it; she finds a man to marry and brings him home. Unfortunately, he’s disabled (in what way he doesn’t specify) and sits around the house all the time, making the place a living hell. Norwood decides to take off after an old army buddy who owes him some money.

The man is supposedly in New York, so Norwood goes there, but when he arrives he finds the man has gone back home, so he heads back. On the way he finds a woman he wants to marry, eventually finds his friend, gets the money and gets back to Ralph, Texas. A happy ending (as befits a comedy). Here you see the whole problem of trying to sum up a novel. This sounds dull as hell.

It’s anything but. The Portis touch isn’t his crazy, madcap, but recognizable characters. It’s how he writes about them. The books are not side-splittingly funny, so you’re falling out of your chair, but you have a constant smile on your face, which breaks out now and then in a roar. You also have a feeling of utter delight. The book stretches ahead and you see hours of enjoyment. You wish it would go on forever.

What’s unique is how he observes the world and writes the sentences. These things cannot be taught. You have to have a knack. Then there’s the dialogue. My God. I opened the book completely at random and found a scene that illustrates everything I’ve said. Norwood had gone to check out a local skating rink when he heard someone cracking nuts on the other side of a tree.

He peered around for a look. A very thin and yet very broad man was standing there expertly cracking pecans in his hands and getting the meats out whole. He was as flat and wide as a gingerbread man. He was wearing a smooth brown saddle-stitched sport jacket and some blue slacks with hard creases and a pearl-gray cattleman’s hat. He grinned and dusted the hulls from his huge flat hands and extended one to Norwood.

“Hello there, Norwood.”

Norwood shook his hand. “I thought I heard somebody back there. Do you know me?”

“Well, I feel like I do. I see your name stitched there over your pocket. Of course you might have someone else’s shirt on. In that case your name might very well be Earl or Dub for all I know.”

“Naw, it’s my shirt all right.”

“My name is Fring. I’m glad to know you, Norwood. Tell me, is everyone at home well?”

“Just getting along fine. How about your folks?”

“They’re all dead except for me and my brother Tilmon. I’m fine and he’s doing well, considering his age.”

This is like two Southern men meeting but it’s slightly off. He looks like a gingerbread man? His name is Fring? All his people (as we say in the South) are dead? Even so, he asks about Norwood’s people? W.H. Auden once said that the best way to review a volume of poetry would be to quote the poems, and I think the same thing is true of a certain kind of comic writer. I could show you what’s great about this novel, but I’d have to quote the whole thing.

Norwood, as I said, is looking to get to New York, and Fring just happens to have a car he would like the man to drive up there. He’ll pay all expenses, and a fee as well. Except that, when Norwood goes to make the pickup, it’s two cars coupled together. And there’s a woman who needs to go along too, “a long tall redbone girl.”

To Fring, she says, “I hope you don’t think I’m gonna ride to New York with this country son of a bitch.”

He thinks exactly that.

I came across Portis because, perhaps fifteen years ago, I was at the Y and my friend Bob Sherrill spoke approvingly of the novels of “Charlie Portis,” as if he knew the man. Bob had started off as a journalist in the South, eventually made his way to New York, where he worked at Esquire for a while (his golden years) then came back South and worked as a copy editor. Portis had a similar origin, moving from the Northwest Arkansas Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to the New York Herald Tribune and doing well there before abruptly, at age 32, returning to Arkansas to rent a cabin and write fiction.[1] Bob Sherill read a lot and hated most books, so when he liked one, I perked up my ears. I got started on Portis for that reason, and have read him ever since.

The new LOA volume includes not just all five of the man’s novels, but also some short stories, journalism and essays (including one irresistible title, “Motel Life, Lower Reaches”), and a memoir. What a feast.

I’ve always wondered how a man who wrote such idiosyncratic work made a living from them, but True Grit was made into not just one, but two movies, and Portis also wrote the screenplay to a sequel, Rooster Cogburn. Apparently, Norwood itself was made into a movie. Glen Campbell and Joe Namath (???).

It can’t be as good as the book.

[1] Portis had read almost no serious fiction before, as a soldier at Camp Lejeune, he read Look Homeward, Angel and found it to be a revelation. Sherrill once told me that, as a thirteen-year-old boy who grew up in Asheville, he once saw Thomas Wolfe waiting for a streetcar, crossed the street and shook his hand, telling him he’d written a great novel.