Note: This paper is meant only for non-commercial use on the Unofficial Charles Portis Website

Note: This paper is meant only for non-commercial use on the Unofficial Charles Portis Website (http://charlesportis.cjb.net). This paper is considered intellectual property. To use it, you must get permission from Alex T. Moore by emailing him at alextmoore@yahoo.com.

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Charles Portis Through His Critics’ Eyes:

Extended Alchemical Metaphors

By Alex T. Moore

Professor Vesterman

12/11/01

“Look at that, sir, leaves. He had leaves in his pocket. I wonder what kind of leaves they are. In what way are they special, do you think? Well, you can just bet there’s a story behind them, and a good one too. What in the world will this fellow come up with next?”

-Austin Popper, on Professor Golescu, Masters of Atlantis, 47ⁱ.

I. Our Least-Known Great Novelist?

In the midst of his survey of Charles Portis’ works, Barnesandnoble.com writer Mark Winegardner remarks on the futility of his task. He says, “There is no really good way to appreciate Charles Portis’s novels without breaking down and reading them.”ⁱⁱ This presents a problem, because few people would want to read a book that they couldn’t conceive of appreciating. What is more, for many years it was very difficult to find, much less “break down and read” Charles Portis’ novels, since four of them were out of print for several years. Touching on the past unavailability of his literature, Gene Lyons of Newsweek relates an anecdote that Portis reportedly told, in which Portis laments the dearth of Dog of the South readers. Lyons says of Portis, “It was only after a friend's car was robbed, he reports with typically self deprecating humor, that he realized the true value of his work. ‘They took everything,’ Portis says. ‘Old envelopes, a broken screwdriver. . . but they didn't touch The Dog of the South. They were probably right. If they hadn't heard of it, what were the chances it was any good?’”ⁱⁱⁱ Without a John Wayne movie and with little critical attention, who did originally know about The Dog of the South? And, to address Winegardner’s earlier point, without critics to entice potential readers, few would “break down and read the novel” at all. When a text is worthy of reading, it is the responsibility of the literary critic to introduce it to its audience, so that it does not end up unread in the back of a car.

Literary reviews are a crucial variable in the formula resulting in a book’s popularity, but not all reviews necessarily add to sales. Differing opinions about a book will clash; some will be quoted on dust jackets, and some will collect dust in the waste bin. Occasionally, two book critics will even vie for control over the interpretation of a specific passage in the text. For example, several critics treat as representative the passage in which Doc describes Jimmy for a potential employer in Gringos, saying he is ““Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. Trustworthy. Facetious.’”^iv In a glowing review, Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe uses this fragment to propose Jimmy Burns as an alter ego of Portis: “Never having met the man, I can’t swear that that fits Burns’s creator, too,” he says, “but it certainly sounds right.”^v This is meant to be a complement. The very same quotation is used almost antithetically by critic Dan Cryer in a venomous review of the book in Newsday. Cryer aims to cast Burns as a hollow character over whom Charles Portis has little mastery, this being exemplified by what he sees as the inaccuracy of the above representation of Jimmy. He says, “What we see, rather than are told, is the hard work and punctuality. But he is almost never alone, seems not to have a single mean bone and his facetiousness toward the oddballs around him is tempered by his willingness to consort with them.”^vi

That these two critics pull very different conclusions from the same quote points to what Malcolm Jones Jr. posits in Newsweek, that “Whatever the reasons, critics have never known what to make of Portis's original, contrary voice,”^vii or at least that they don’t collectively know what to make of it. Adam Woog of The Seattle Times, though, suggests that there is considerable collectivist thought on the author, when he says, “Portis has been a kind of secret weapon in Southern-humorist circles for a long time.”^viii Having read more than 40 articles criticizing Portis’ work, I am more receptive to the latter statement; only a small fraction of the reviews that I read were negative, while a couple were ambivalent. There is – from what I have seen – a strong critical support of the Southern humorist: much consensus on his tendencies in characters, humor, and themes, and much articulate, insightful writing on his work.

Whatever the agenda, one thing that almost every critic tries to do want is to take ownership over the way the author is seen by his potential and eventual audience. In order to write a persuasive review, it is imperative to have a finger on the pulse of the literary zeitgeist of the likely readers of this review. Newsday writer Charles Taylor says of Portis’ best selling “western” True Grit, “[T]oday most people are more likely to be familiar with the John Wayne movie version that appeared in 1969, and that’s a pity. The film sticks to the plot and gets the tone wrong.”^ix Many of the critics I have read are conscious of this, when writing retrospective reviews for that novel, and even when writing about other novels. Easily a third of the reviews that I have come across proclaim a disdain for the film version of True Grit. The critic must consider the reader for whom Charles Portis is “the author of the book upon which a John Wayne movie was based,” and introduce to him the Charles Portis who is “a deadpan reporter of human folly, a master of pathos, a compassionate portrayer of life’s absolute absurdity, and a man with a voice,”^x as Boston Globe writer Katherine A. Powers puts it.

Ron Rosenbaum concedes in Feed magazine that this critical distancing from the film is spurned by “a kind of literary snobbery that slips in,”^xi I feel this attitude is forgivable because of the laudable goal of trying to convince a reader to discover an author whose wonderful books are belied by a less than wonderful film. Of the critics I have read, only Philip Herter of The St. Petersburg Times holds the film version of True Grit against Portis, saying that “Gringos reads like it was written by a man with Hollywood looking over his shoulder. The characters are cutouts and the plot is so loose as to be incontinent.”^xii What sometimes comes off as overzealous hyperbole in Herter’s review is easier to understand in the context of the critical climate surrounding Charles Portis. His proponents are many, and dissenters – like Philip Herter – are relatively few.

If, then, many of Portis’ critics aim to extol his virtues, how successful have they been? How much truth is there in Winegardner’s statement, “There is no really good way to appreciate Charles Portis’s novels without breaking down and reading them”? It seems that Winegardner is only partially correct: a more complete appreciation of his works would require reading his texts, but smart, insightful commentary on his characters, themes, and plot, when coupled with representative quotations, can and have fostered an appreciation for the author.

The most glaring example can be found in the case of Ron Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum says, “Tracy Carns, publishing director of Overlook Press [ . . . ] says in the release accompanying The Dog of the South, ‘I read an article by Ron Rosenbaum in The New York Observer raving about how great Portis was and what a scandal it was that the books were out of print. I tracked down copies at the Strand, read them and instantly became a Portis convert.’” ^xiii Rosenbaum’s exaltations of the Southern humorist, in The New York Observer and elsewhere, seduced into addiction Tracy Carns, the publishing director of Overlook Press. The voices of Rosenbaum, and others like Robert Houston and Rudy Rucker, have taken significant ownership over the way that Charles Portis is understood, and they have provided impetus for the republication of his novels.

Scott McLemee in Newsday – and several others – has commented that Portis is a writers’ writer. He says, “[J]ournalist Ron Rosenbaum revealed that Portis has a sort of cult following among other writers. Nora Ephron compared him to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. On The Dog of the South, Roy Blount Jr. said, ‘No one should die without having read it.’”^xiv Mark Winegardner of Barnes&Noble.com says, “[T]o paraphrase Brian Eno’s famous line about the Velvet Underground, only a (very) few thousand people bought The Dog of the South, but every single one of them tried to become a writer.”^xv It does indeed appear that many Portis aficionados have written books of their own. This leads to several questions. If many of his critics are themselves authors or seasoned literary critics, to which other writers do they liken Portis? How do critics feel about his characters and style, about his comic technique and thematic profundity?

One reason that writers often like Portis might be that they sense in him a style and zest that reminds them of another author dear to them. As one might guess with a writer of Portis’ caliber, the Southern, American wordsmith is most frequently likened by his proponents to that prototypical Southern writer, Mark Twain. McLemee says, “All members of the [Portis Appreciation] Society agreed that ‘Dog’ was perhaps the funniest American novel since Huckleberry Finn.” ^xvi Mark Feeney says, “Walker Percy likened [Mattie] to Huck Finn, and she certainly displays the same boundless individualism and a comparable knack for idiom.”^xvii As always, there are dissenters, like Gene Lyons of Newsweek, who says, [Of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis] “Each gets compared too often to one particular big, canonical American master (McCarthy to Faulkner, Portis to Twain), when what people should be saying about them both is that they’re like Samuel Beckett, only with actual stories.”^xviii

Not all of the comparisons are meant to be flattering. Dan Cryer of Newsday feels that Gringos “is comic in the Vonnegut or Brautigan mold, if only fitfully so; frisky as a spaniel, but less entertaining, and whimsical to a fault.”^xix And Philip Herter of The St. Petersburg Times complains that Gringos finds Portis indulging too much machismo, a la Ernest Hemmingway. He says, “It's been a long time since Hemingway wrote his last book. Manly books about manly men living meandering, manly lives are less plentiful than they used to be. In Gringos, Charles Portis serves up a dose of masculine Meso Americana.”^xx Among others are Flannery O’Conner, Joseph Conrad, Richard Brautigan, and Gabrael Garcia Marquez.

Still, Twain easily remains the dominant literary point of reference in the reviews that I have read, as well as one of the closer likenesses. Mattie Ross – the spunky narrator of True Grit – is frequently compared to Huck Finn. Charles Taylor of Newsday says, “The order and duty, if not the fussiness, of the ‘sivilized’ life that Huck Finn couldn't stand is in some ways the life that Mattie Ross longs for. But like Huck she springs from the blood and memory of the American past, her every word a hymn to the plain grace of Puritan forbearance.”^xxi John Anthony West says in The New York Times that “True Grit is virtuoso storytelling in that American tall-tale, Huck Finn vain.” ^xxii

It may strike some as odd that a journalist for The New York Herald Tribune would be able to make the jump to writing fiction comparable to Mark Twain’s. The question lingers: does Portis’ journalistic background affect his fiction, and to what degree? Ron Rosenbaum, in an interview with Feed magazine, commented on “Literary Journalism,” a cousin of the “New Journalism” writing style championed by author Tom Wolfe (who reported with Portis at The New York Herald Tribune). In New Journalism, the self is not regulated to the bylines, and the journalistic process, the means to the end, often eclipses the end. Rosenbaum says of “Literary Journalism,” “Literary Journalism at its best asks the questions that literature asks. The nature of human nature and its place in a meaningless or perhaps meaningful cosmos. Those kind of questions [ . . . ] there will sometimes be a great scholar who finds a way of writing that takes you into the heart of a scholarly mystery you might not otherwise be able to see the dimensions of.”^xxiii

Charles Portis wrote a letter to a woman in my seminar in which he denies ties to New Journalism. In Portis’ literary work, the absurd regularly trumps the rational, and Portis as an author is virtually hidden. Birds talk, chickens think, and peanuts make conversation. Charles Portis does not use the journalistic inverted pyramid style – in fact we often never learn who these characters are, what exactly they are doing, and most importantly, why they are doing it. In journalism – and even New Journalism – a concrete “why” is coveted. With Portis, the method to the madness is a mystery to be unlocked, if it even has a key. Rosenbaum says in The New York Observer,“What Mr. Portis is getting at is the deep longing, the profound, wistful desperation in the American collective unconscious, to believe that somehow things do make some kind of sense [ . . . ] that there is an answer even if it’s locked in a trunk somewhere and we’ve lost the key.”^xxiv Portis’ presence, too, is minimal as an author. Wolfe offers explosive, often somewhat solipsistic quotes in Bonfire of the Vanities, such as, “This time the explosion of the telephone threw his heart into tachycardia, and each contraction forced the blood through his head with such pressure – a stroke! – he was going to have a stroke! – lying here in his high-rise American hovel! – a stroke!” ^xxv Portis – in contrast – is so deadpan and removed as to suggest to the reader that he might not disagree with Mr. Jimmerson, and perhaps sport a Gnomon poma from time to time himself. The jokes and characters are left for the reader to discover, and the author’s presence is felt minimally.

Rosenbaum’s model of Literary Journalist fits Portis better than that of New Journalism. Mark Winegardner of Barnesandnoble.com says, “He’s as smart a writer as anyone you can name [ . . . ] but you never get stopped by elocution, education, erudition. He doesn’t show off.”^xxvi Portis does not come across as ostentatious, and he covers scholarly topics in a layman style. When speaking on True Grit, Richard Rhodes of The New York Times feels that, “In his second novel, Charles Portis almost imagines what it was like to be a 14-year-old Arkansas girl in the 1880's.”^xxvii Brian Garfield of The Saturday Review echoes this, saying, “This remarkably moving book possesses a universality long lacking in American fiction [ . . . ] It is also a commentary on the American character, then and now.”^xxviii Although these quotes suggest that Portis might have that of the “literary journalist” in him, the title fits him loosely at best, and the temptation to link him in a real, tangible way to the exciting “New Journalism” of his colleague at The New York Herald Tribune becomes more frustrating than fruitful.

Indeed, it seems that Portis’ critics practice more of a “New journalistic” style than Portis himself. Mark Feeney opens his Boston Globe review, saying, “Several lifetimes ago, aspiring to be a serious person, I would now and then read a writer’s body of work straight through.” ^xxix He goes on to mention books he does and doesn’t like. Katherine A. Powers, in the same newspaper, starts her Portis commentary, “My mind recently became invaded by another person's voice, which made the job of sitting around all day reading novels even more demanding than usual.”^xxx She then goes on at length about Evelyn Waugh. Here the process and the personal are overvalued by the reviewer, and both are shared with the reader in what feels like an attempt at honesty and narrative flair.
III. Mr. Jimmerson, I presume.

As to the question of why Portis’ works might resemble those of the aforementioned authors, one reason that quickly springs to mind is his facility with humor. This skill has been characterized in many ways, which can be loosely amalgamated into the idea that Portis delivers to us obsessive, often humorless eccentrics that produce unself-conscious monologues over the course of fruitless quests, all in a deadpan tone that doesn’t give so much as a wink to the reader. Katherine A. Powers of The Boston Globe says, “It would be difficult to say who gives me the greatest case of the creeps, but it could well be Father Jackie with his nasal accents in The Dog of the South. Here he is revealing – as all Portis’s characters do – a little more than he knows and illustrating the author’s marvelous ear for quirks and for huge banalities that pass as conversation when things really get going.” ^xxxi

Mark Winegardner, in once again lamenting his task as critic of a very funny man, says, “there is nothing less funny than explaining why something is funny.” ^xxxii And, once again, I would like to add my own caveat to Mr. Winegardner’s statement: There is nothing less funny than explaining why something is funny when one cannot articulate the mechanics of the humor. Thankfully, several of Portis’ critics achieve this, combining representative passages with insights.

Rudy Rucker of The Washington Post makes an attempt at representing Portis’ comic formula in Masters of Atlantis. “At times he reminds one of Mark Twain, at other times of Woody Allen [ . . . ] Much of the book’s humor derives from the gap between the cosmic afflatus of Gnomonism and the fumbling lives of the Masters who profess it.”^xxxiii Rucker is close here, but he misses his mark. The missing link in his assessment is the reception of the Gnomons’ ambition. The fact that they take themselves as seriously as they do, and are allowed to by Portis, provides a milieu in which such disparities can be extremely comical. An example of this formula in action in Masters of Atlantis is when Sydney Hen envisions the international proselytizing of the Gnomons. The somewhat focalized, almost always sympathetic narrator says, “He, Sydney, would be responsible for Europe an Asia, and Lamar would establish the ancient order in the Americas, in accordance with Pletho-Robert’s plan. There was no time to lose.” ^xxxiv There is no “straight-man” to play off of the endearing lunacy of the Gnomons, there is no reprimanding narrator, and so their manic ambitions are treated as commonplace. Scott McLemee, in Newsday, captures this flavor of Portis’ texts when he says, “Portis shows a rare sensitivity to loners and eccentrics. He possesses much of Flannery O’Conner’s humor, without any of her cruelty.”^xxxv

Not all critics are won over by Charles Portis’ unorthodox brand of comedy. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times says, “In several places, Mr. Portis almost overindulges his genius for low-key gags,”^xxxvi and John Anthony West – also of The New York Times – finds fault with The Dog of the South: “There are ominous, extended sojourns on the other side of that elusive line that separates being funny from trying to be funny.”^xxxvii Portis’ “low-key gags” actually seem to cast the author as ingratiating for these two critics. I could sympathize the most with this view relating to Masters of Atlantis. Although it is – in my opinion – among Portis’ funnier novels, its deficiencies in plot and character development place much pressure on Portis’ comedy to save the day.

A third New York Times writer – Scott Veale – says of Martis Levin’s 1966 review of Norwood: “The tale’s funniness derives, reviewers said in 1966, from the author’s perfect ear for dialogue and ’Norwood’s unstinting goodwill in a world of junk.’”^xxxviii As a dynamic humorist, Portis employs varying comic techniques from novel to novel. Veale here is right to pick up on the juxtaposition of Norwood’s earnestness and his world’s cynicism. Where Masters of Atlantis found its manic eccentrics unchecked, Norwood finds its sympathetic simpleton’s silliness reprimanded in a world of harsh realities inhabited by a prostitute and a scam artist. One example of Norwood’s childish non-sequitors bouncing against unflinching world weariness finds Norwood excited by a possom that “’looked like a big old slow rat.’”

Miss Phillips – his lascivious companion – rebukes, “’What the hell is wrong with you, fellow!’ she shrieked. ‘Look at what you’ve done! You think I wanted to a possom crawling through a fence!’

‘He’s already through the fence,’ said Norwood. ‘He’s already back there in that field now looking for something. He’s probably looking for some chow.’” ^xxxix

Winegardner, of Barnes&noble.com paraphrases Blount in saying, “[Portis is] funny with a straight face. As Blount said, it’s not Portis’s characters who have a sense of humor; they, too, are humorless.”^xl This praise for Charles Portis’ subtle yet powerful comic talents is a refrain among the criticism that I have read. Accordingly, there is much resistance from critics to Gringos as a comic work, a work in which the protagonist – Jimmy Burns – is a more pragmatic, straightforward, and cynical quest-leader.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt diagnoses the problem in The New York Times, saying, “innocence does not collide with reality in the way that lends Mr. Portis's fiction its usual comic flare.”^xli Mark Feeney reinforces this in The Boston Globe when he says, “[In Gringos, the author] reverses the standard Portis equation: It’s other people’s manias [Jimmy Burns] suffers from rather than his own [ . . . ] Portis has several specialties, a slyly deadpan wit being foremost among them, but not far behind is his fondness for obsessives.”^xlii Without a Mr. Jimmerson or a Norwood, we are left with a novel that certainly has its moments – like when Burns’ motley crew infiltrates a hippie compound, or an equation involving women and raccoons – but it cannot reach the same heights. Gringos is a comical ride, but it is a darker one that Portis’ earlier quest-novels. C. Gerald Fraser of The Los Angeles Times says, “Because it makes room for explicit contemporary viciousness and bloody homicide, it is less funny than the aforementioned books.” ^xliii

Robert Houston of The New York Times is able to see past these shortcomings. [W]hat truly drives Gringos,” he says, “is pure love -- Mr. Portis's love for his characters, for Mexico, for all the magnificent eccentricities and pathos and comedy of both.” ^xliv

C. Gerald Fraser of The Lost Angeles Times comments of Gringos, “Burns imagines that the prospective employer must have wondered how anybody could be both trustworthy and facetious. The challenge of the comic novel.”^xlv The problem is that this is not the challenge of Portis’ comic novels. Many of the characters are trustworthy and sincere, wide-eyed and ambitious. The fact that Portis is able to pull humor from this more unorthodox technique makes his comic writing all the more laudable.

Portis’ characters yield big laughs, but to reduce them strictly to vehicles for comedy would be a severe mistake. This is a mistake that the critics I have read do not make, as they applaud Mattie’s true grit and as Brian Garfield of The Saturday Review says, “Mattie Ross is nineteenth-century America; it is impossible to doubt her, impossible to doubt the tale that she tells.”^xlvi

Part of the answer can be found in the novels’ subject matter. Norwood makes the classic pilgrimage to the American urban Mecca that is New York City. Gringos follows the adventures of Americans in a foreign land. True Grit finds a headstrong girl looking for justice in a story partially governed by elements of that great American fetish, the Western novel. Even Masters of Atlantis could be read to be an assertion of the freedom to be absolutely ridiculous, begging for the platitude, “Hey, it’s a free country.” Ultimately, though, it is the characters that inhabit these texts encourage critics to think that they have found an author whom they can declare to be one of the great American originals.

Jimmy is a capitalist entrepreneur in Mexico, a wanderer that Michael Malone of The Washington Post calls, “that classic American loner often found narrating ‘drifter’ movies.”^xlvii Of The Dog of the South, Walter Clemons of Newsweek says, “[Midge’s] narrative is a classic piece of American gab.” ^xlviii Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times says, “[Austin Popper and Mr. Jimmerson] represent respectively the active and contemplative ways of life in 20^th-century America.”^xlix His claim is unsubstantiated, and might well earn him a place in the Gnomon circle with its tone of confident proclamation of the peculiar, but it highlights the critical yearning to peg Portis as a – or even the – paradigm of the American author.

Joseph McLellan of Book World says, “As in his earlier novel, True Grit, Portis populates his exotic landscape with odd but clearly homespun American types, and in his dialogue he has caught to perfection the special intonations of American vocal chords, the motley concerns – ranging from eternal salvation to a quick buck – that occupy the American soul.”^l While Americans do not have a monopoly on the sanctity of the soul or even capitalism for that matter, he does get at something here. Several of Charles Portis’ characters have served in the American military, several are entrepreneurs, and several are fiercely independent. Ron Rosenbaum says in The New York Observer, “What Mr. Portis is getting at is the deep longing, the profound, wistful desperation in the American collective unconscious, to believe that somehow things do make some kind of sense.”^li

American ideals are not the only common thread running through the zeitgeist of Portis’ characters. It is important for the reviewer to draw a sketch of the common Portis character, in order to initiate the reader, and also for comparative purposes.

A survey of criticism on critics’ senses of Portis’ characters as a whole produces the following prototypical Portis character: naïve, demented, innocuous, humorless, funny without knowing it, and saying more about himself than he realizes in a dark, comical world he doesn’t understand. For example, Katherine A. Powers of The Boston Globe writes, “[Father Jackie] is revealing – as all Portis’s characters do – a little more than he knows.”^lii Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times says, “The protagonists in Charles Portis's wonderfully comic novels tend to be determined innocents [ . . . ] Mr. Portis's characters always set off on outlandish quests with an eye to winning a hostile world to their odd points of view.” ^liii Scott McLemee says in Newsday, “Readers now have a chance to explore the whole of Portis' distinctive literary territory: a world of cranks, unsuccessful con men and utterly naive souls, adrift in a world they'll never quite understand.” ^liv

Not all critics find Portis’ characters endearing when taken as a whole, however (as might be expected). Dan Cryer of Newsday says, “Most of Portis' characters, alas, are cartoons wholly summed up in a sentence or two.”^lv One interesting thing about these schools of opinion is that they are not necessarily in opposition. A general sketch of a Portis character might indeed yield a cartoon that could be summed up in a sentence or two. Such a sketch would be more of a caricature than a character, because – while Portis’ characters do seem to share several of the above characteristics – they are distinct enough to defy the overgeneralizations that so many critics try to apply to them. They may tend to share an innocence and quirkiness that leads to potent comedy, but they are distinct and real enough to warrant investigation and appreciation on an individual level.

If a character were to actually fit well the mold of the oblivious eccentric detailed above, it would probably be Mr. Jimmerson from Masters of Atlantis. Gene Lyons of Newsweek says, “Like all Portis characters, Jimmerson is a harmless, lone demento, just as all Portis plots save one – True Grit – have shaggy-dog aspects.”^lvi Lyons characterization of “all Portis’ characters,” while tempting in its simplicity, is clearly inaccurate and should be limited to Mr. Jimmerson.

Mattie, for instance, breaks through this mold in certain respects. She is hardly harmless: she helps to avenge the murder of her father. Nor is she naïve, as McLemee suggests; as Richard Rhodes says in The New York Times, “Action, milled fine through Mattie's edged, ironic voice, makes the story. Mattie is the soul of pragmatism. She may have secretly loved [Rooster] all her life, the only man she ever knew who had grit true enough to match her own – and a wit as sharp.” ^lvii Brian Garfield of The Saturday Review paints a similar picture, “Bred on McGuffey, the New Testament, and Horatio Alger, homely young Mattie is a hardy pioneer girl - tough, sassy, and free of self-doubt.”^lviii This “hardy pioneer girl” shares too little with Mr. Jimmerson to be assimilated accurately into a sweeping generalization about all of Portis’ characters. This is not to mention myriad minor characters that break the mold, e.g. Miss Phillips, Austin Popper, and Grady.

Few characters deviate more from this mold than Jimmy Burns, however. As an extreme anomaly in the world of Portis’ characters – he attracts much critical attention. Phil Surguy of The Toronto Star likens his perceptiveness to Mattie’s, “[L]ike other Portis protagonists, he initially comes across as a rather folksy bumpkin [ . . . but] rather than being taken in by the trash and nonsense around him, Jimmy Burns sees it through Mattie's eyes and knows exactly what it's worth.” ^lix Michael Malone goes so far as to say in The Washington Post that, “[Burns is] the Bogart or Glenn Ford type with a laconic blend of cynicism and sentiment: wry, self-contained, omni competent and uncommitted.” ^lx This captures Burns well, and presents a convenient means of juxtaposing him to his near binary opposite, Mr. Jimmerson. Malone might have said that the Gnomon is happily humorless, proselytizing and politicizing, incompetent and overzealously dedicated to the rules of the Codex Pappus. Were Burns to encounter Mr. Jimmerson’s mysterious friend “Robert,” he would have rejected his Codex Pappus from the outset – as long as it didn’t have any value, that is. Further, Jimmy Burns forces a new style for Portis develop comically, since, as Adam Woog of The Seattle Times writes, “He's very good at observing and judging the other nutty outcasts, American and otherwise, who wash up in the area.”^lxi

Burns, as a less sympathetic and more self-conscious protagonist than most of Portis’, has his detractors. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times articulates this, saying, “Because Jimmy Burns lacks the high gloss of innocence with which Mr. Portis is usually so good at varnishing his characters, you remain indifferent to his fate.” ^lxii Dan Cryer of Newsday also finds Burns uninteresting, but more because he feels he is undeveloped. He writes, “Jimmy Burns [ . . . ] describes, with eyes more innocent than wry, the strange goings-on about him in the Yucatan. He is a banal shell of a central character, though. We know next to nothing about him. Background, motivation or expectations of the world that would allow us to care are all missing.” ^lxiii The fact that Cryer finds Jimmy Burns to be poorly developed should be weighed with the fact that Cryer does not like anything that Portis has done. In his review of Gringos, he lists Portis’ novels and says that Portis “ought to light out for new territory.”
Are there great ideas beneath those silly hats?

Dan Cryer says that Portis “ought to light out for new territory,” but it is not even certain what territory he is currently occupying. That is to say, his critics disagree about the scope and depth of Charles Portis’ novels.

Scott McLemee casts Charles Portis as an eloquent humorist, but little more. He says in Newsday, “You don't read Portis for big ideas. He's not riding the wave of the Zeitgeist or exploring depths of the psyche. A master of small details and lopsided observations, Portis also possesses a rich sense of spoken language: the dry, sly tones of understatement, evasion, irritability and bloviation.” ^lxiv Further, Charles Taylor of Newsday reads True Grit to be “plain, direct and deep, like an old ballad.” ^lxv Philip Herter of The St. Petersburg Times says, “Gringos has no thrills, no ideas and barely enough style to get you out of the gate.” ^lxvi These critics see Portis as a humorist (albeit a failed one in Herter’s case), but not necessarily a dramatist or philosopher.

McLemee and Herter may find Portis’ texts straightforward, but Ron Rosenbaum does not. He suggests in The New York Observer what those critics might be missing. He says, “[T]iny things take on significance in Mr. Portis’ art – the universe in a grain of sand, the notions of a higher intelligence in the restless motions of a gnat.”^lxvii Most of the critics that I have read find at least some philosophical, literary, or emotional depth in Portis’ work, but certainly none as much as Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum well articulates the challenge of decoding the cosmos in Portis’ comedy in The New York Observer: “Charles Portis is a tricky writer in that he rarely discloses explicitly any deeper resonance, any thematic preoccupation beneath the comic picaresque surface of his prose.” ^lxviiiOne undercurrent that several critics agree flows through his text, though, is a deep river of pathos.

Malcolm Jones, Jr. says in Newsweek in a review of Gringos, “But underneath the comic ambling lies a bedrock melancholy. Again and again, death comes calling.” He sees Gringos as “Portis's most inward-turning book, a story of a grownup trying to grow up, to keep it together with some dignity.” ^lxix Rudy Rucker of The Washington Post contributes to the sense that Portis’ texts hold anguish beneath the laughter in a review of Masters of Atlantis, “Like all truly great comedies, Masters of Atlantis has a touch of sadness at its core,” ^lxxhe asserts.

Robert Houston challenges the straight reading of pain in The New York Times, in an interpretation that I find to be particularly insightful. “Beneath all that, however, what truly drives Gringos is pure love -- Mr. Portis' love for his characters, for Mexico, for all the magnificent eccentricities and pathos and comedy of both.” ^lxxi This is evident in the juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic, in the comical dialogues on profound subjects, dialogues a 20^th century Shakespeare might have assigned to one of his fools. In Dog of the South, Mrs. Nell Symes asks Midge, “What about Heaven and Hell? Do you believe those places exist?”

“Well, I don’t know,” the clown responds. “I wouldn’t be surprised either way. I try not to think about it. It’s just so odd to think that people are walking around in Heaven and Hell.”^lxxii

In this vain, Joseph McLellan of Book World says of The Dog of the South, “If it weren’t so darned funny, it would be tragic.”^lxxiii The truth is, it is “so darned funny”; the comic usually does eclipse the tragic. After reading such texts for some time, the reader might believe as Rudy Rucker says in The Washington Post that, “[Portis’] basic stance seems to be that, in the hands of ordinary human beings, great ideas have no more meaning than silly hats.” ^lxxiv It is easy to see the absurd enveloping the pragmatic. The completely opposite view is voiced by Brian Garfield in his review of True Grit for The Saturday Review, and it is far harder to substantiate. “Portis destroys absurdity by overwhelming it with truth,”^lxxv Garfield claims.

Ron Rosenbaum – ever the Portis enthusiast -- compares the author to Vladamir Nabokov “Of course, this habit of seeming to lose track – the restless tortile digression and diversion of attention – is not the product of inattention but of a heightened attentiveness [ . . . ] they share that heightened attentiveness to the restless currents and eddies of the stream of consciousness.” ^lxxvi Ed, from Masters of Atlantis, offers many such currents. “Now and then out of a silence Ed would utter in a defiant way some paradoxical truth he had once heard, or arrived at himself, one that he seemed to think was too little known or appreciated. ‘Fat guys are strong,’ he said, and ‘You can brush your teeth too much.’” ^lxxvii Slightly analogously to Ed, Portis sometimes defiantly offers the reader characters that are themselves paradoxical truths of sorts, through a rambling, stream of consciousness dialogue. It turns out, though, that the characters are indeed too little known and appreciated, and the reader ends up the better off for Portis’ defiance of literary conventions.