Charles Portis: "So be it"

John Wayne and Charles Portis

Donna Tartt on True Grit by Charles Portis:

As for the novels, they’ve gotten me through times of bleakness and uncertainty from fifth grade to now, and are a never-ending source of amazement, gratitude and joy. All writers who attempt to convey their magic eventually knock into the problem: How to describe the indescribable? Probably the best description I can give of “True Grit” is that I’ve never given it to any reader — male or female, of any age or sensibility — who didn’t enjoy it. 

As for the others, which I love just as much, they are if anything weirder and funnier, filled with some of the best and most particular American vernacular ever written, and even amid the scrape of Covid-driven anxiety they’ve convulsed me with laughter and given me some of the few moments of escape that I’ve found.

The caption on the picture above in yesterday's NY Times Book Review:

John Wayne, left, and Charles Portis, on the set of the 1969 movie version of Portis’s novel “True Grit.”

Good thing those guys are identified, since readers might have puzzled over who was who. Odd, too, that the online version of Tartt's essay is dated June 9, though it appeared in yesterday's Book Review. Why sit on it for more than two weeks?

At least the Times spared us the usual pointless pedantry of including their middle names or initials. Portis did have a middle name, though Wayne's name was a Hollywood creation, since his real name, Marion Michael Morrison, was unacceptable for an actor who made westerns.

Tartt is right about Portis's wonderful novel, which provided Wayne with his best part and an Academy Award.

A New Yorker critic after his death in February:

The closest he gets to self-portraiture comes in his short memoir “Combinations of Jacksons,” the essay published in The Atlantic. Toward the essay’s close, the author spots an “apparition” of his future self in the form of a geezer idling his station wagon alongside Portis at a traffic light in Little Rock. He wore “the gloat of a miser,” Portis writes. “Stiff gray hairs straggled out of the little relief hole at the back of his cap...While not an ornament of our race, neither was he, I thought, the most depraved member of the gang.”

...“I could see myself all too clearly in that old butterscotch Pontiac, roaring flat out across the Mexican desert and laying down a streamer of smoke like a crop duster, with a goatherd to note my passing and (I flatter myself) to watch me until I was utterly gone, over a distant hill, and only then would he turn again with his stick to the straying flock. So be it.”