In desperate need of comedy this morning, I pulled a Charles Portis book off the shelf. I turned to a story in Escape Velocity about Portis trying to stop smoking. I craved a brief respite from grim news, looming deadlines, and eerie realities. Portis provided—as always–a much needed laugh.
The writer Jonathan Lethem once said of Charles Portis: “He’s everybody’s favorite least-known great novelist.” Born in El Dorado, Arkansas, on December 28, 1933, Charles Portis spent his youth in southern Arkansas. After high school he enlisted in the Marines, which at that time was fighting the Korean War. After his discharge he attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville where he earned a journalism degree and graduated in 1958.
Portis wrote for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Arkansas Gazette before moving on to the New York Herald Tribune. In 1966, Portis quit journalism and wrote his first novel, Norwood. Portis’s signature deadpan humor combined with tragic undertones define his work. Portis’s second novel True Grit exposed a broad audience to his work when John Wayne and Glen Campbell starred in the 1969 film. Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen adapted True Grit in 2010 with Jeff Bridges playing the lead role of Rooster Cogburn.
His kaleidoscope of characters captured a true American spirit with a sense of High Adventure. Portis’s other books—The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos–rank as some of America’s finest literature. Portis lived in Little Rock and avoided interviews and literary society as a rule. In 2012, Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany a collection of Nonfiction, Short Stories and Drama was published. This compendium contains a memorable Introduction by Jay Jennings who also edited the book and knew Portis. Ray Midge, the narrator from The Dog of the South, coined the title: “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”
Jay Jennings wrote in the Introduction: “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.”
Escape Velocity includes Portis’s coverage of the death of Elvis Presley’s mother in 1958 for the Commercial Appeal where Portis wrote: “Singer Elvis Presley, shaken and limp with grief, almost collapsed several times yesterday afternoon during the funeral services and burial of his mother.”
One of the funniest pieces in Escape Velocity is a four-part article Portis wrote for the Herald Tribune called “Those Awkward Moments with a Room Full of Smoke”. The story revolves around Portis entering a five-day plan at Bates Memorial Medical Center to quit smoking. Portis counted as the only patient out of twelve to fail the program. The reader—especially if a current or former smoker–will laugh out loud throughout these dispatches.
Portis’s civil rights coverage remains unparalleled. He witnessed the historic 1963 riots and bombings in Alabama and reported them for the New York Herald Tribune. Portis was staying at the Tutwiler Hotel in Birmingham on May 13, 1963, when two bombs were left on the front porch of Reverend A.D. King, Martin Luther King’s brother. Riots ensued. Portis also covered the June 1963 murder of Medger W. Evers in Jackson, Mississippi.
Portis dove straight into the heart of country music for a Saturday Evening Post article titled “That New Sound from Nashville”. “An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja” appeared in the Los Angeles Times in February 1967 alongside an excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson’s book Hell’s Angels. In “The Forgotten River” Portis documents history and lore surrounding the Ouachita River. Portis wrote a travel piece for the Oxford American in 2003 titled “Motel Life, Lower Reaches” that captures him in his element. Portis delivered his best work while traveling. In fact, all his novels involve travel. Portis revealed his motive for “Lower Reaches”:
“I was driving across the state at the time, very fast. There were signs along the approaches to town advertising cheaper and cheaper motel rooms. The tone was shrill, desperate, that of an off-season price war. It was a buyer’s market. I began to note the rates and the little extras I could expect for my money. Always in a hurry then, once committed to a road, I stopped only for fuel, snake exhibits, and automobile museums, but I had to pause here, track down the cheapest of these cheap motels, and see it. I would confront the owner and call his bluff.”
Portis’s first published fiction story titled “Damn!” graces the pages of Escape Velocity interspersed with essays such as “The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth,” which provides a dim, but of course hilarious view of modern journalism. Portis’s autobiographical memoir “Combinations of Jacksons” contains the lines: “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.”
Portis’s humorous play “Delray’s New Moon”, which the Arkansas Repertory Theatre premiered on April 18, 1996, ends this invaluable collection. Escape Velocity’s Epilogue preserves a rare Portis interview conducted by Roy Reed from 1991. Tributes to Portis by Roy Blount Jr., Ed Park, Ron Rosenbaum, Donna Tartt and Well Tower lace the final pages.
Portis died on February 17, 2020, at the age of 86, in Little Rock, Arkansas. Read his books. I slid Escape Velocity back on the shelf with a grin.
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