The Way We’re All Crazy

The Dog of the South a novel by Charles Portis.  From Charles Portis: Collected Works.  Library of America  pp. 261-461.  $45.00  ****1/2

I see The Dog of the South as a real step forward in the work of Charles Portis.  His first novel, Norwood, gave an indication of where he was heading.  Then he wrote a classic novel, True Grit, which seems weirdly unlike the rest of his work, though it made his reputation and his fortune.  He seems to have spent ten years dealing with the aftermath of that, including the first film version and a sequel, Rooster Cogburn, for which he wrote the script.  In 1979, eleven years after True Grit, he published his third novel, in which he seemed to discover his true subject, though I’m not sure what to call it.  Human eccentricity?  Primal insanity?  The larger public met his final three novels with indifference.  But his real fans like these books the best.

Our protagonist, Ray Midge, is a 26-year-old man who has not discovered the work he wants to do, is thinking of going back to grad school and becoming a teacher (the last gasp of the truly desperate).  He inhabits a world of similar people, grad school hangers on, intelligent people who don’t have much direction or motivation.  I know that world well, because I was part of it while I wrote my second novel (the first to be published).  I hung around the edges of the university community, going to potlucks where you never knew what was in those grayish green casseroles and where people drank from large jugs of Gallo red.

Ray’s supposed best friend Guy Dupree has run off not only with Ray’s wife Norma, but also with his credit cards and his Ford Torino, leaving behind a far inferior 1963 Buick Special.  “I had found it in my slot at the Rhino Apartments parking lot, standing astride a red puddle of transmission fluid. . . . Dupree had shamefully neglected it.  There was about a quarter-turn of slack in the steering wheel and I had to swing it wildly back and forth in a childlike burlesque of motoring.”  It is in this car that he sets off in hot pursuit.

Midge has realized—a trifle too late—that he wasn’t a model husband.  “I should have talked to her and listened to her but I didn’t do it. . . . She wanted to dye her hair.  She wanted to change her name to Staci or Pam or April.  She wanted to open a shop selling Indian jewelry.  It wouldn’t have hurt me to discuss this shop idea with her—big profits are made every day in that silver and turquoise stuff—but I couldn’t be bothered.  I had to get on with my reading!”

That last sentence nailed me.  That was what I often thought at age 26.  Still do, at age 74.  Do I think I’m getting somewhere?

Midge takes off in this problematic Buick without much in the way of cash.  He doesn’t have his credit cards but suddenly discovers some savings bonds and hopes to cash in on them.  He just wants to find his wife.  Or—to get his priorities straight—his Ford Torino.  Things are difficult enough when he pursues the adulterous couple into Texas, and on into Mexico.  But eventually he remembers that Dupree’s family has spent time in Belize, and decides that’s where they must be headed.  On his way he runs into a man named Dr. Reo Symes who owns a school bus-camper on the side of which he had painted the words, The Dog of the South.  By a wild coincidence, he too is headed to Belize (which he calls British Honduras).  His bus has broken down, and he needs a lift.  Midge is quite drunk when the man makes this request.  He takes him on as a passenger.

Portis is a master of offbeat conversations in the mouths of wildly eccentric characters, and in Reo Symes he has struck the mother lode.  I would now like to quite a minimum of five or six pages of dialogue, and could pick from any number of passages, but I’ll try to restrain myself and zero in on my favorite subject.  The two men are on their way to Belize, and Symes questions him about his reading.  He tries to determine if Midge is a big reader.  Finally, in exasperation, Midge says,

“’I have more than four hundred volumes of military history in my apartment.  All told, I have sixty-six lineal feet of books.’”

To which Symes replies: “’All right.  Now listen to me.  Throw that trash out the window.  Every bit of it.’

“He reached into his grip and brought out a little book with yellow paper covers.  The cellophane that had once been bonded to the covers was cracked and peeling.  He flourished the book.  ‘Throw all that dead stuff out the window and put that on your shelf.  Put it by your bed.’

“ . . . I couldn’t take my eyes from the road for very long but I glanced at the cover.  The title was With Wings as Eagles and the author was John Selmer Dix, M.A.

“‘Dix wrote this book forty years ago and it’s still as fresh as the morning dew.  Well, why shouldn’t it be?  The truth never dies.  . . . This is the book you want on your night table right beside your glass of water, With Wings of Eagles in the yellow cover.  Dix was the greatest man of our time.  He was truly a master of the arts, and of some of the sciences too.  He was the greatest writer who ever lived.’

“’They say Shakespeare was the greatest writer who ever lived.’

“Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.’”

This, to say the least, is just the beginning.  Symes has family in Belize, including an elderly mother and aunt.  Midge also finds Dupree there, and eventually, after an incredible series of adventures which I couldn’t begin to enumerate, finds his wife, but what strikes me about the hilarity of all this is that everyone in this novel, but everyone, is—like Dr. Reo Symes—absolutely certain he’s right, while we’re convinced he’s totally off his rocker.

At some point we realize that, though we’re not quite as weird as these people, we’re just as convinced we’re right.  That is a disquieting moment.

I thought the novel got a bit out of hand at the end.  There’s a catastrophic flood where people are dying, an odd way to end a comic novel.  Midge does get back together with his wife, but in the end—spoiler alert!—she drifts away again, and (an older and wiser man) he doesn’t bother to go after her.  Those grad school marriages often don’t work out.

I think it was in this novel that Portis discovered his comic genius.