Escape Velocity, Page 2

  “In Arkansas!” Wolfe wrote, the assumption being that Arkansas was a kind of nowhere, and his italics and exclamation point are descendents of Mark Twain’s tweaking of the state as full of “lunkheads” (in Huckleberry Finn) and of H. L. Mencken’s hyperbolic decrying of its “miasmatic jungles.” (A century or so later, the rise of Bill Clinton and Walmart will either refute or support those claims.) In any case, Portis set up his writing shop there, and if it wasn’t exactly a jungle, it was a good place to go to work, far enough from both coasts as to be invisible to them. A writer in Arkansas, especially in 1964, could go peacefully about the daily grind of making perfect novels without the distracting noise emanating from literary fashion in Manhattan or the movie world in Hollywood. Portis produced five.

  How perfect are they? Each fan has his or her own ranking, but unlike, say, Kingsley Amis or Robert Penn Warren, who produced one generally acknowledged great novel and many dismissible lesser works, Portis wrote at least one great novel, True Grit, and four maybe better ones. Ed Park’s essay on Portis that originally appeared in the Believer magazine in 2003 and is included in the Appendix (along with tributes by other writers) sums it up this way: “He has written five remarkable, deeply entertaining novels (three of them masterpieces, though which three is up for debate).” The consistency of the quality of his work seems to me in line with Chekhov or Alice Munro, while the variety of Portis’s subjects would require Chekhov to have ventured a play about, say, the California gold rush or Munro to have attempted to send one of her Ontarians into space. There’s simply nothing like his oeuvre for its combination of excellence and heterogeneity.

  Although he has lived 70 or so years in Arkansas, the state is not a fundamental part of the imaginative world of his novels in the way that Oxford is for Faulkner or Los Angeles for Chandler or Albany for William Kennedy. His first fictional creation, Norwood Pratt, lives in east Texas and merely passes through Arkansas—slamming on the brakes once, disastrously, to watch a possum climb through a fence—on his way to New York and back. (By far the most frequent response I’ve received when I tell people I’m from Arkansas is, “Oh, I’ve been through there.”) Mattie Ross of True Grit fame is proudly from Yell County but lights out for the Territory on her revenge quest before coming home to spend her spinsterhood and eventually tell her tale. Ray Midge of The Dog of the South departs and returns to Little Rock but seems more a citizen of Phlegmatopia than anyplace else as he deliberately hunts his wife and her paramour through Texas and into Mexico. And the word “Arkansas” makes a lone appearance each in Masters of Atlantis (“Moaler was in his Arkansas duck blind”) and Gringos, where Jimmy Burns IDs himself as being from the Arklatex, and even then from Louisiana. With each novel, Arkansas recedes.

  If Arkansas has a claim on him, it is as the place where he learned to listen. In the interview with his former Arkansas Gazette colleague Roy Reed, in the Epilogue (page 291) here, Portis notes that, though his mother “liked writing and had a gift for it, but never the time to work at it much,” his father’s side of the family “were talkers rather than readers or writers. A lot of cigar smoke and laughing when my father and his brothers got together. Long anecdotes. The spoken word.” (The interview also captures the voice of the low-key raconteur that readers of his novels will instantly recognize.) We read about his family in the one piece of direct memoir he has written so far, “Combinations of Jacksons.” In it, he describes how his great-uncle Sat discoursed at length and “may well have been the last man in America who without being facetious called food ‘vittles’ (‘victuals,’ a perfectly good word, and correctly pronounced ‘vittles,’ but for some reason thought to be countrified and comical).” Portis’s ear was honed in Arkansas while reading, too. He worked for the Northwest Arkansas Times when he was a journalism student at the University of Arkansas and edited dispatches from “lady stringers in Goshen and Elkins,” he tells Reed, and his job “was to edit out all the life and charm from these homely reports. Some fine old country expression, or a nice turn of phrase—out they went.” Ed Park suggests that he created the voice of Mattie Ross in “penance” for that act.

  As far away as his imagination travels, Portis has stuck fast to Arkansas, where he has obviously paid careful heed to those not usually given close attention, whether they’re passing through, native, or long deceased: salesmen, bar regulars, sixteenth-century explorers (“Those earnest enunciators who say ‘bean’ for ‘been’ should know that Hakluyt, the Oxford scholar, spelled it ‘bin,’ as did, off and on, the poet John Donne”), local historians, elderly people (“Don’t you have any chirren to look after you?”), Confederate generals, random citizens (“We know a man in South Arkansas who says ‘Pass those molasses’ and ‘These sure are good cheese’”), and cafe waitresses (“That woman that runs it, that was her sister that run it at night, and she got married and moved to Shreesport”).

  Norwood Pratt is not the most reliable guide to life, but he affirms one truth in the face of pretension, when his passenger to New York, Yvonne Phillips, claims New Orleans rather than Belzoni, Mississippi, as her home because, “If you live someplace a long time you can count it as your home.” He counters, “Naw you can’t.…You could live in Hong Kong for seventy-five years and Belzoni would still be your home.”

  III. Portis as Journalist

  As good as Portis’s ear is, his eye is its equal. While it seems to have been keen from the start (the memories of his youth are evidence of that), journalism’s charge to observe dispassionately no doubt honed his skill at finding the salient detail in a scene.

  Over and over in the journalism—from his first job after graduation in Memphis to his dispatches from London—strikingly sharp and memorable details leap out, usually in the last few paragraphs of the story when the who, what, where, when, and why have been taken care of. In an otherwise ordinary report about a PR stunt, Portis notices that among the Memphis Jaycees costumed in Confederate uniforms is one who was “wearing a Harry Truman shirt and Japanese sandals.” When he relates that Elvis Presley was “leaning on a windowsill” in the hallway of a hospital where the singer’s mother would eventually die, we see instantly Elvis’s trademark slouch.

  As a columnist of the local scene for the Arkansas Gazette, he could indulge his eye more freely. There’s the cluster of reporters in the heat of an Arkansas August with their “damp mustaches.” At the Herald Tribune, even on deadline stories, he found the strange, novelistic detail amid the broader event. His story of an explosion at a New York Telephone Company building that killed 21 workers, mostly young women in an accounting office, closes with this: “A pair of high-heeled shoes stood upright in a bare spot where there must have been a desk. A disembodied desk phone was on the floor ringing, its little red extension light winking.” His description of a Klan rally one night in Alabama, with two enormous flaming crosses, is more vivid for this observation: “There were a lot of bugs in the air, too, knocking against the crosses and falling into open collars.” Perhaps he was remembering this scene less menacingly in Norwood, written just two years later, when the narrator comments that Norwood had lived in a tin-roof house in the middle of a Texas gas field with a “spectacular flare that burned all the time” and that “copper-green beetles the size of mice” came to die in it. “At night,” he continues, “their little toasted corpses pankled down on the tin roof.” Portis’s journalism is rich with the kind of writing that presages the skill of the novelist.

  It’s easy to see why the Herald Tribune’s London bureau job might not have been such a plum assignment after the rush of the civil rights beat. Besides harboring a desire to write novels, he went from feverish reporting on the most pressing issues of the day to acting as bureaucratic overseer of the office in London (with those attendant frustrations) and covering things like former prime minister Harold Macmillan’s seventieth birthday events. I’ve included only one piece from that time, a travel story to Wales and Ireland. After one year, he left the paper, and by 1967, i
t was out of business for good.

  Despite his sometime (well, frequent) cutting comments about the profession, Portis was a skilled, diligent, and sometimes brilliant journalist, which I hope this selection of his best work will demonstrate. The failure of historians studying the civil rights era to acknowledge and draw upon Portis’s work on the beat in the busy summer of 1963 is a mystery to me. His name is absent from David J. Garrow’s Bearing the Cross (1986), Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters (1988) and Pillar of Fire (1998); Diane McWhorter’s comprehensive history of Birmingham’s troubles, Carry Me Home (2001); and perhaps most egregiously, from The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Neither is he included in the two volumes of the Library of America’s collections Reporting Civil Rights (2003), though one of his Herald Tribune colleagues, Robert J. Donovan, is.

  Even at the time, however, his journalism was recognized for its excellence, and his account of two bombings in Birmingham that threatened to derail a desegregation agreement (“How the Night Exploded into Terror,” page 43) was reprinted in the collection Twentieth Century Reporting at Its Best (1964), which praised it as a “crisp, tightly-written story.” More impressive still is the deadline duress under which it—and an accompanying story about a Klan meeting—was produced.

  On the evening of Saturday, May 11, 1963, Portis went to nearby Bessemer to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally. The animosity toward the press in Birmingham—and especially toward the New York and national press from the local authorities, including the police—was significant. Earlier that month, a Life reporter and his photographer, who captured with his camera demonstrators being pummeled by fire hoses, were arrested and had to flee the state after being bailed out, certain they could not get a fair trial. As tensions between the protesters and civic authorities rose, more press descended on Birmingham, including Portis, who had previously covered Martin Luther King Jr.’s jailing in Albany, Georgia. It looked as if King was making progress toward negotiating a kind of truce with the city business leaders to provide equal access to and opportunities for employment in downtown stores, but the Klan’s meeting nearby was an ominous sign that the quietude might be ending.

  Portis was aware of himself as a target for those local elements who despised the press. In a story filed earlier that day, he had written of a meeting Friday night in the county courthouse in which “angry white extremists” who opposed the businessmen’s concessions “ejected” the newsmen. He added, with wry pride, “a reporter from the Herald Tribune, in particular, was booed.” It must have taken no small amount of courage to then present himself at the Klan meeting the following night. Fortunately for him, the crowd there “was not rising to the rhetoric,” as McWhorter writes, and when it ended at about 10:15 p.m., Portis headed back to the Tutwiler Hotel with some other reporters. Around midnight, he and the others heard the “dull whoomp” of an explosion—it was the same onomatopoeic word one of the girls in the New York Telephone explosion had used—and they rushed to the scene, the Gaston Motel four blocks away.

  What followed was a full night of rioting, arson, and general civil unrest, unquelled until 6 a.m., by which time more than a thousand policemen and state troopers had brutally subdued the African American participants and spectators both. Portis himself, along with other reporters, had been in some peril from the fire, thrown bricks and bottles, and the reckless course of the city’s armored police vehicle, which, he writes as he dips briefly into the first-person plural, “mounted the sidewalk once and made a headlong pass down it, sending about 50 of us spectators diving for the dirt.”

  The next day, no doubt on very little if any sleep, he produced a 1,900-word front-page story of that evening’s chaos, one that manages not only to capture the scene with immediacy and concreteness but to give it context and lyricism. When he describes the attack of a Col. Lingo on some defenseless black bystanders, he takes the time to remind us that “Col. Lingo and his men had been chafing all week at the moderation and restraint of Chief Moore and his city police.” When he notes that at dawn a police car is announcing for residents to “get off the God damn streets, get,” he adds with subdued irony, “but someone put a stop to that, evidently because it was Sunday and Mother’s Day.”

  Included with the long piece was Portis’s sidebar about the Klan rally. Readers will recognize in it more clearly Portis the novelist, casting a gimlet eye on any organization or person that leans toward groupthink and messianism, much less notions of superiority underpinned by violence (see Gringos). His report portrays the gathering and its participants as tedious and shabby, reserving the unkindest cut for the visiting grand dragon of Mississippi in what is my favorite line of this collection: “Everyone drifted away and the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.” For Portis, any man who can’t even keep his car tuned is a man to be scorned indeed.

  To my mind, Portis’s complete coverage of that marathon evening is one of the great deadline reporting efforts of the civil rights era and maybe of the second half of the 20th century. Why has it, along with his other work of that time, gone unrecognized?

  For one thing, his coverage of civil rights events was largely limited to that year; by November 1963, he had moved to England to be the paper’s London man. So he lacked the length of time on the beat of other newsmen who made it their career, like Claude Sitton of the New York Times and the Herald Tribune’s own Donovan, who was based in Washington DC rather than on the front lines. Many of these reporters went on to write books about this pivotal time in American history while Portis left it behind to write novels.

  Another reason might have been the dubiousness with which the tactics of the so-called New Journalism were viewed (though Hemingway had explored the more personal, “novelistic” style in his war dispatches decades before). The Herald Tribune was known as a writers’ newspaper, and its marketing slogan at the time was “Who Says a Good Newspaper Has to Be Dull?” The answer for a few critics was, We do. Walker Gibson, for example, in his book Tough, Sweet & Stuffy: An Essay on American Prose Styles (1966), pointed to a Portis story about an earlier day’s action in Alabama (“Birmingham’s Trigger Tension,” page 36) and accused the journalist, with horror, of employing “the model of the novelist” (italics in the original). Gibson favors Sitton’s concurrent New York Times piece, which even he admits may be “a little dull, considering the circumstances.”

  Further, and perhaps ultimately more important, was the imminent demise of the Herald Tribune, which expired for good in its final incarnation after frequent starts, stops, and strikes in 1967. That abrupt ending left the work of Portis for the paper—not to mention that of other illustrious alumni like Dorothy Thompson, Dick Schaap, Red Smith, Lewis Lapham, Tom Wolfe, Virgil Thomson, Art Buchwald, and Jimmy Breslin—as an orphan of the eventual Internet age, consigned to microfilm, undigitized, and even so, the microfilm is rare. Some Internet billionaire would do literature, history, and journalism a great service by funding a project to convert the Herald Tribune’s microfilm to a searchable digital archive.

  Finally and most obviously, a significant reason for the obscurity of Portis’s journalism is the same one that caused his books to go out of print for a time: what some have called his reclusiveness, but as I prefer to think of it, a desire for privacy.

  IV. What You Won’t Find Here

  I won’t say very much about the topic of his aversion to publicity in general, which tends to make him sound like someone insistent on hiding his identity. On the spectrum of author privacy, he probably falls somewhere between Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo (with the late J. D. Salinger as the undefeated champion). He usually politely declines to speak to the press, but otherwise he seems to lead a fairly ordinary life, which includes having a beer at a local bar and visiting family and watching the Super Bowl and enjoying conversation with friends and going to the library and, th
e one extraordinary thing, laboring over his writing until he gets it perfect.

  V. !

  Gary Goldsmith, one of the Madison Avenue Bookshop employees behind that Dog of the South display, also told the Times reporter, “The book doesn’t have a false note in it.” The care with which Portis’s sentences are constructed without having them come off as labored is a marvel, though he’s quick to deny any overt struggle. In the Gazette Project interview, Portis says about his process, “I go pretty much by feel. People who know more about grammar than we know, well, aren’t they pedants?”

  There’s a big difference between being a pedant (and he’s created some of the most memorable pedants in American letters) and thinking carefully about what the right word is, or even what the right punctuation mark is. One of the joys of his writing is the attention he gives to the smallest details: a lawyer with an office in a hotel room next to his, he notes in “The Forgotten River” (page 110), had secured the sign on his door with a single, centered screw and had also added “bits of Scotch tape on the ends to keep it from tilting, perhaps demoralizing his customers.” Similarly, he seems to be as minutely attentive to each stroke of the typewriter. When there’s only one appropriate word to use, he will use it without hesitation; in “Your Action Line” (page 157), a “nacreous glaze” covers the facts collected by the “journalist ants” described. When there are no appropriate words, he will make them up, like the word “pankled” in the Norwood line mentioned above.