Obituary: Charles Portis, 1933-2020

Press accounts of Portis’s death last week proved the persistence of his image as an ink-stained mystery man. The New York Times’s headline this time: “Charles Portis, elusive author of ‘True Grit,’ dies at 86.”

Of course, there was nothing “elusive” about Portis’s writings. Consider, for example, the hilariously candid, unequivocal language of the revenge-mad heroine of True Grit, Mattie Ross. Early in the novel, Ross says the following about the miscreant who offed her father: “That night Tom Chaney went to a barroom and got into a game of cards with some ‘riffraff’ like himself and lost his wages,” Ross says, clear as a bell. “He did not take the loss like a man but went back up to the room at the boardinghouse and sulled up like a possum.”

Such descriptive, clearheaded prose notwithstanding, Portis did his part to earn his reputation as a literary lone wolf. A native of El Dorado, Arkansas, Portis chucked a newspapering career that had landed him at the New York Herald Tribune to return to his backcountry roots with the goal of producing fiction. On returning home, Portis was said to have written from a fishing shack, much to the delight of onetime New York Herald Tribune colleague Tom Wolfe, who said in a 1972 piece: “A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.”

The setting was not, apparently, a cauldron of productivity. He eked out five novels, averaging about one per decade until the turn of the millennium: The brilliant True Grit was preceded by Norwood in 1966 and followed by The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991).

In a 2013 article in Men’s Journal, Wolfe remembered Portis explaining his rationale for omitting a photo of himself on the back jacket of Norwood: “Charlie had this beautiful Southern mountain drawl — not the lowlands drawl — and he said, ‘Well, I figure that nobody’s going to buy this book because of how I look, and nobody’s going to not buy the book because of how I don’t look,’” Wolfe recalled. “And I said, ‘Actually, that’s not a bad strategy.’”

Interviews with Portis were scarce as hen’s teeth. He is quoted here and there, but he never sat for a one-on-one with The Paris Review or at the round table of Charlie Rose.

Portis’s anti-publicity stance, too, fed the perception of him as a mythically hermitic figure. By the time the Coen brothers’ True Grit made its way to theaters, Portis’s novels had been freshly issued in paperback, and he was the subject of much fawning. In 2010, the Oxford American paid homage to him at a fancy shindig, though a photographer assigned to cover the occasion couldn’t easily locate him, according to an account in the Arkansas Times: “I’m telling you, dude is like a recluse.”

Portis’s quest for solitude was sincere. The most thoroughgoing obituary published since his death, found in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, suggests not a man toying with the public — he did not, as did Thomas Pynchon, make a cameo on The Simpsons — but of a newspaperman who never got used to the idea that he would be the subject of the story. One of his two brothers, Jonathan Portis, said: “He preferred to go as an unknown person because he was a people watcher. He would hear snatches of conversations or see people who had a particular look, and he would take note of that.”

His literary legacy is scant but enduring. True Grit certainly anticipated what might be termed the twee historical genre, exemplified in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon or the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Even the revenge fantasies of Quentin Tarantino are foretold in it. But all of his novels express affection for the mavericks who dot the American scene.

Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.