Escape Velocity

  ALSO BY CHARLES PORTIS

  Norwood (1966)

  True Grit (1968)

  The Dog of the South (1979)

  Masters of Atlantis (1985)

  Gringos (1991)

  Copyright

  This edition first published in paperback in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2013 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  New York and London

  NEW YORK:

  The Overlook Press

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.

  LONDON:

  Gerald Duckworth Publishers Ltd.

  30 Calvin Street

  London E1 6NW

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  [email protected]

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.

  This book was originally published in 2012 by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System.

  Copyright © 2013 by Charles Portis

  Compilation copyright © 2012 The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Jay Jennings

  Please refer to Sources on page 359 for further copyright information.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0849-5

  Contents

  Also by Charles Portis

  Copyright

  Introduction, by Jay Jennings

  One. SELECTED NEWSPAPER REPORTING AND WRITING

  Memphis Commercial Appeal 1958

  Arkansas Gazette 1959–1960

  New York Herald Tribune 1960–1964

  General Assignment

  Civil Rights Reporting

  London Bureau

  Two: TRAVELS

  That New Sound from Nashville

  An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja

  The Forgotten River

  Motel Life, Lower Reaches

  Three: SHORT STORIES

  Damn!

  Your Action Line

  Nights Can Turn Cool in Viborra

  I Don’t Talk Service No More

  The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

  Four: MEMOIR

  Combinations of Jacksons

  Five: DRAMA

  Delray’s New Moon

  Epilogue: INTERVIEW

  Gazette Project Interview with Charles Portis

  Appendix: TRIBUTES

  Comedy in Earnest

  Like Cormac McCarthy, but Funny

  Our Least-Known Great Novelist

  On True Grit

  The Book That Changed My Life: Gringos, by Wells Tower

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Charles Portis

  About the Author

  Introduction

  By Jay Jennings

  I. What You Will Find Here

  This collection began life as a fat folder in my file cabinet. For years, in haphazard fashion, I had torn out (or in later Internet times, printed out) every mention I saw of Charles Portis and placed it in the folder. A Page-a-Day calendar list of Garrison Keillor’s five favorite funny novels, including Masters of Atlantis. A column by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair after the publication of Gringos. Too infrequently, a story by Portis himself, from the Atlantic or the Oxford American, would go into the file. I had a certain home-field advantage over other Portis aficionados (and they are legion) because I am from Little Rock. For example, I had written for and subscribed to the Arkansas Times (then a magazine, now a weekly paper) and therefore found in my mailbox in New York in 1991 a long piece by Portis about the Ouachita River, which meanders through the south Arkansas of his boyhood.

  I had read True Grit sometime in my teens—it came out when I was ten and the John Wayne film the next year—but didn’t recognize its greatness. Perhaps I didn’t think then that a great book could come from our little outpost in Arkansas. The novels I borrowed indiscriminately from my mother’s stash of Book-of-the-Month Club selections were set in glamorous locales: Arthur Hailey’s Hotel (New Orleans), James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire (Paris, haunted by an absinthe-drinking poet based on Rimbaud; Annie Dillard says this book made her want to be a writer), and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (guess where).

  The earliest inclusion in my Portis file was a 1984 story from the New York Times, a paper I read daily in a small apartment in Dallas where I was unhappily teaching high school. The story told of two bookstore employees in New York who were so smitten with Portis’s five-year-old out of-print novel The Dog of the South that they bought all 183 remaining hardcover copies (it had never appeared in paperback) and set them up as the sole window display in the Madison Avenue Bookshop. The books sold fast, to the curious and to those collared by the hand-selling bookstore staff (remember independent bookstores?), and the novel enjoyed a mini-revival. The Times writer contacted Portis in Little Rock, and Portis told the reporter he was “surprised and very pleased” by the attention. He also said, “I write in a little office without a phone behind a beer joint called Cash McCoo’s.” Because I was from Little Rock, just like the book’s narrator Ray Midge, as I learned from the Times story, I knew the reporter had misheard the name of the beer joint, that it was actually Cash McCool’s. For once, I felt superior to the New York Times. And because I knew exactly the building behind Cash McCool’s, I could imagine Portis typing away in there and I could perhaps begin to imagine myself as a writer. Into a file it went.

  And out I went to Half-Price Books, the rambling Dallas used bookstore where I spent most of my dateless weekends and where I easily found a copy of The Dog of the South, emblazoned on the top spine with a little Random House colophon, the scarlet stamp of the remainder. I tried the Sir Thomas Browne epigraph at the beginning (“the Tortile and tiring stroaks of Gnatworms”) and didn’t understand it but made a mental note to read Sir Thomas Browne since William Styron had also opened Lie Down in Darkness with a Browne epigraph. When I had imagined writing a book of my own, I thought it would probably start something like Styron’s 119-word sentence that opens his first novel: “Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and…” When I read Portis’s impeccable and economical first line about Midge’s wife Norma running off with Guy Dupree, I was right into the story without any wind-up, and without the dangling modifier Styron threw in our face as evidence of his rule-breaking artistry. Seven pages in, I learned that Ray Midge was twenty-six. I was twenty-six! And that he was planning to become a high-school teacher! (Don’t do it, Ray!) But instead of the mopey, brokenhearted young adult I was, Ray was in pursuit. And the people he met. How they talked!

  “Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.”

  “Your feet, I mean. They look odd the way you have them splayed out. They look like artificial feet.”

  “I can see at night. I can see stars down to the seventh magnitude.”

  What a story!, to quote Midge, who exclaims that more than once and ends up back in Little Rock with Norma, only to have her take off again. That seemed all too true to me.

  A year later, in the fall o
f 1985, I too was back in Little Rock, driving a delivery truck, saving money for an eventual assault on New York and writing for the local alternative newspaper, Spectrum. In October, Knopf published Masters of Atlantis, Portis’s first novel in six years, and I immediately bought a copy from WordsWorth Books in Little Rock (still there! Long live independent bookstores!). Screwing up my courage with the knowledge that I was also now a published writer (Spectrum) and perhaps more significantly that my mother, Portis’s contemporary, was also from south Arkansas, I called him up (using my home-field advantage to get his number) and asked if he would sign my book. He agreed and invited me to meet him, not at Cash McCool’s, but at another beer joint called the Town Pump (still there! Long live independent bars!). I don’t remember anything about the meeting other than the fact that Portis did not wet down the four corners of his napkin before he lifted his beer and that he did treat me like a fellow writer. I moved to New York two months later, now knowing at least one novelist.

  We corresponded sporadically over the years while I pursued a career as an editor and writer at various New York magazines and then eventually as a freelance writer in Brooklyn. Whenever I was in Little Rock visiting my parents, I would call him and we would go for a beer or have lunch. My file grew in fits and starts, with a great spasm after the publication of Gringos in 1991, and another after Ron Rosenbaum’s essay in Esquire in 1998 (“Our Least-Known Great Novelist,” page 343), which spurred Overlook Press to bring his books back into print. I wrote to him after his memoir “Combinations of Jacksons” appeared in the Atlantic in 1999, and when I next returned to Little Rock, I asked if that was perhaps part of a book-to-be. He answered no, it was a “one off,” and I and others continued to wait for the next Portis book. He was still obscure to the public at large, but revered among writers. Once at a party in New York, I met novelist Jonathan Lethem and remarked that I’d seen where he had put True Grit on a list of novels overshadowed by films made from them (printed out from Salon.com, in my file). I then mentioned the idea that he was our greatest unknown novelist, and he quipped, “Yes, he’s everybody’s favorite least-known great novelist.”

  I moved back to Little Rock to work on a book of my own in 2007, my first, and began to see him more regularly, in the late afternoon at a bar near my house, the day-drinking prerogative of two freelance writers. My book, Carry the Rock, about a football season at Little Rock Central High School and the history of race relations in the city, came out in 2010, and I presented him with a copy of it at the bar one afternoon, along with an article from the Wall Street Journal that mentioned him—another for my file folder.

  The article was a review of my book and it began:

  In August 1959, two years after Little Rock became a symbol for the ugly spectacle of resistance to school integration, a young staffer for the “Arkansas Gazette” named Charles Portis took a break from his regular beat to hold up a mirror to the media glare. He filed a report on the reporters themselves—“groups of wilted Dacron and damp mustaches”—who had converged from around the world to cover the crisis. In Mr. Portis’s account, the members of the press come off as ignorant and self-righteous as the jeering mobs that had stained Little Rock’s public image.…

  Like Mr. Portis, Jay Jennings is a native son with deep roots in the area and an abiding love for the people and place.

  What more could I hope for but to see those five words strung together: “Like Mr. Portis, Jay Jennings…”?

  The Coen brothers’ film of True Grit, released during the Christmas holidays of 2010, occasioned another round of Portis publicity and renewed interest in his work, and I spoke on a panel the next spring, along with two other Little Rock residents and fans, screenwriter Graham Gordy and magazine editor Kane Webb, at the Arkansas Literary Festival. I mentioned my fat folder and expressed the desire that somebody bring together all of Portis’s miscellaneous works between covers so I wouldn’t have to root through my folder every time I wanted to reread something. Gordy mentioned that he’d performed in Portis’s play, Delray’s New Moon, which had been staged at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre in 1996 and which had almost slipped my mind.

  A few days later Rod Lorenzen, a former journalist and bookstore owner and now head of publishing at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies (a department of the Central Arkansas Library System), called me and asked, “If I can get Portis to agree to do the kind of collection you mentioned, would you edit it?” I said sure. I had suggested the same thing to Portis a few years back, but he’d dismissed it with a wave of his hand, just as he had dismissed an idea I’d cooked up with Roy Blount Jr. to have a marathon reading of Norwood in New York on the book’s fortieth anniversary. Lorenzen and Portis met for lunch and he now agreed to the project, warning that he’d be pretty hands-off about it.

  I thought it would be easy, since I had my file, but once I began researching in earnest, I ran into some difficulties. The three pieces from the Atlantic, the two from the Oxford American, the one humor piece from the New Yorker, and the long travel story from the Arkansas Times were all at hand. On eBay, I found and bought a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from 1966 that contained his story about the country music scene in Nashville. The special collections department at the University of Arkansas gave me permission to reprint the interview from the Gazette Project with Roy Reed, which many Portis adepts had already found online. The one piece totally unknown to me previously was a nine-thousand-word story from a Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine in which Portis and his friend Andy Davis drove the length of Baja California. Though it was an early piece, all the elements were there: unpretentious diction, an expert ear for the spoken word, deep knowledge worn lightly, stoic acceptance of trying circumstances, skill with internal combustion engines, and more pure reading pleasure than I’d enjoyed in a long time. Unlike many of the other stories, it’s been hard to come by and I’m thrilled to be able to make it more readily available here.

  The other treat for Portis fans, published here for the first time, is his three-act play, Delray’s New Moon. When I asked him about it, he wasn’t sure where to find his copy or if he even still had one. Gordy hadn’t kept his script, and another actor, Natalie Canerday, was certain she hadn’t thrown it away but would have to dig it out from storage at her parents’ house in a town an hour away. She also said they got standing ovations every night of its two-week run. Portis attended rehearsals and even did a “talkback” after one performance. Finally, I spoke with Judy Trice, a veteran of Little Rock stages, and she graciously provided her script and allowed me to copy it. The play is terrific to read—in places it’s like taking the Ionesco exit off Interstate 30—but I also hope it will be produced again.

  I knew from the start that I wanted to include a selection of Portis’s newspaper work, and if the L.A. Times piece was a surprise, the newspaper reporting and writing (and he was highly proficient at both) was a revelation. During his short time at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, he covered Elvis’s mother’s funeral (and gets a mention in Peter Guralnick’s comprehensive biography of the King). At that time (1958), however, the action was clearly 120 miles west in Little Rock at the Arkansas Gazette, which had won two Pulitzers for its coverage of the integration crisis, and Portis soon sought and got a job there. When I Googled “wilted Dacron” from Eddie Dean’s review of my book, hoping to find that Gazette column online somewhere so I could go to the date on the Gazette microfilm here in Little Rock, the review was the only item that came up. I contacted Dean, the co-author of Ralph Stanley’s autobiography Man of Constant Sorrow, and found that he was also a Portis devotee. He had researched the young journalist’s “Our Town” columns on Gazette microfilm at the Library of Congress on his own and was extremely helpful in pointing me to his favorite Portis stories there.

  Finally, in his four years at the Herald Tribune, Portis showed himself to be a versatile and sometimes unparalleled journalist. (That period, and especially his time on the civil rights beat, is discussed in depth be
low.) To unearth his work there, I visited the New York Public Library, which has the paper on microfilm (as does the Library of Congress, but other copies of it are scarce), and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, which had bought the paper’s morgue and clip files. As I probed the envelopes at the Briscoe Center for lost Portis stories (the flaky, fifty-year-old newsprint fluttering onto my pants), I recognized in myself traits of the fastidious copyeditor Ray Midge as he plotted the trail of his wife and Guy Dupree through the locations on the receipts of his stolen American Express card. “I love nothing better than a job like that,” he says. And I loved nothing better than this job, seeking and herding Charles Portis’s stray words, collecting them here for other Portisites and soon-to-be Portisites.

  II. Portis of Arkansas

  The title of this collection, Escape Velocity, comes from a line spoken by Ray Midge in The Dog of the South: “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.” It’s one of my favorite Portis lines, and it’s fairly representative. It’s funny as hell (I won’t drain the humor out of it by trying to explain why) and surprisingly poignant, and it’s both specific and universal. It refers to the mysterious gravitational pull of the particular place called Arkansas, but you don’t have to be from there to appreciate the hold that everyone’s home has on them. Also, it’s about wandering off and returning, a theme as old as the Odyssey.

  It’s tempting to extend the truth of the line to Portis himself. When he has allowed bios on his book jackets (the first editions of The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis had none), they have sketched his career thusly: Born and educated in Arkansas, he served in Korea as a marine and worked as a journalist in Memphis, Little Rock, New York, and London, where he was bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune; he moved back to Arkansas in 1964, and except for road-trip research in Mexico and elsewhere, he’s remained there ever since, working as a freelance writer. Tom Wolfe, his colleague at the Herald Tribune in the early 1960s, famously summed up Portis’s return to Arkansas in a New York magazine story from 1972 (which later became the introduction to an influential collection called The New Journalism): “Portis quit cold one day; just like that, without a warning. He returned to the United States and moved into a fishing shack in Arkansas. In six months he wrote a beautiful little novel called Norwood. Then he wrote True Grit, which was a best seller. The reviews were terrific.…He sold both books to the movies.…He made a fortune.…A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.” Knowing Portis a bit as I do, I suspect that he gave appropriate notice to his employers and that the fishing shack was actually a cabin, but that’s Tom Wolfe for you.