Charles Portis: Collected Works
edited by Jay Jennings. Library of America, 1,096 pp., $45.00
Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis
by Robert Cochran. University of Arkansas Press, 224 pp., $39.95; $25.95 (paper)
The comedian George Carlin had a routine, in the 1970s, in which he offered up a series of fake headlines in a blustery newscaster’s voice. “A man has barricaded himself inside of his house,” one opens. After a beat: “However, he is not armed, and no one is paying any attention to him.” I always think of that line whenever a famous novelist is praised for their reluctance to appear—for a refusal to give interviews, participate in public forums, be photographed for dust jackets, and so forth. A precious few have managed this inside-out publicity somersault: Thomas Pynchon, Harper Lee, J. D. Salinger, Donna Tartt, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy. (Granted, varied circumstances and temperaments lie behind their Bartleby routines.) On the whole, though, it’s rare that a writer is rewarded for squirrelliness in the face of publicity opportunities.
Charles Portis is anomalous, a writer force-fielded in a durable glamour of obscurity and frequently championed for revival—“America’s most remembered forgotten novelist,” as the writer Mark Dunbar quipped. Portis’s diffidence about publicity rhymed with the self-effacing air of the novels, so richly aphoristic, rueful, and proportionate. Pigeonholed as a humorist, Portis eluded prize nominations, and his novels fell in and out of print; not one of the five, published between 1966 and 1991, was reviewed in these pages. Yet he has lately shrugged his way into the Library of America, ahead of such seriously regarded contemporaries as James Salter, Evan S. Connell, Russell Banks, and Norman Rush. (I’ve picked white guys to make this comparison vivid, not because I can’t think of other-than-white-guys who deserve celebration.)
In this sense Portis’s enshrinement by the Library of America is more of a piece with its recent embrace of twentieth-century writers who in their own time had been marginalized within genres: Shirley Jackson (horror), Elmore Leonard (crime), Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Joanna Russ (science fiction). It was among science fiction writers that I first heard Portis regularly cited as a standard of value, particularly in the circle around the beloved writer and editor Gardner Dozois, who died in 2018, though only one of Portis’s novels comes remotely close to sci-fi.1
Jay Jennings, the editor of this new edition, warmed up for the effort with 2012’s , while Portis was still alive. Functioning as both a rarities volume and a festschrift, the gathered uncollected writings, including early journalism and late stories (which make it into the LOA book) and a play (which doesn’t) together with several of the essays calling for a Portis renaissance by admirers like Roy Blount Jr., Ron Rosenbaum, Ed Park, Wells Tower, and Donna Tartt. Those efforts were influential: Rosenbaum’s 1998 essay helped drag the novels back into trade paperback. Park’s survey of the whole Portis landscape, published in in 2003, built on Rosenbaum’s effort, alerting a younger generation of readers to Portis’s work. At his death in 2020 came another burst of
