Escape Velocity

Portis Charles Portis

Description

Collected here in Escape Velocity, edited by Jay Jennings, is his "miscellany" "" journalism, short fiction, memoir, and even the play Delray's New Moon, published for the first time in this volume. A Portis covers topics as varied as the civil rights movement, road tripping in Baja, and Elvis' s visits to his aging mother for publications such as the New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post. A Fans of Portis's droll Southern humor and quirky characters will be thrilled at this new addition to his library, and those not yet familiar with his work will find a great introduction to him here. A Also included are tributes by accomplished authors including Donna Tartt and Ron Rosenbaum.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 27 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781468308495
• Langue: English

Extrait

A LSO BY C HARLES P ORTIS
Norwood (1966)
True Grit (1968)
The Dog of the South (1979)
Masters of Atlantis (1985)
Gringos (1991)
Copyright
This edition first published in paperback in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2013 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York and London
NEW YORK:
The Overlook Press
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] , or write us at the above address.
LONDON:
Gerald Duckworth Publishers Ltd.
30 Calvin Street
London E1 6NW
www.ducknet.co.uk
[e-mail]
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail], or write us at the above address.
This book was originally published in 2012 by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System.
Copyright © 2013 by Charles Portis
Compilation copyright © 2012 The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Jay Jennings
Please refer to Sources on page 359 for further copyright information.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-0849-5
Contents
Also by Charles Portis
Copyright
Introduction, by Jay Jennings
One . SELECTED NEWSPAPER REPORTING AND WRITING
Memphis Commercial Appeal 1958
Arkansas Gazette 1959–1960
New York Herald Tribune 1960–1964
General Assignment
Civil Rights Reporting
London Bureau
Two : TRAVELS
That New Sound from Nashville
An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja
The Forgotten River
Motel Life, Lower Reaches
Three : SHORT STORIES
Damn!
Your Action Line
Nights Can Turn Cool in Viborra
I Don’t Talk Service No More
The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth
Four : MEMOIR
Combinations of Jacksons
Five : DRAMA
Delray’s New Moon
Epilogue : INTERVIEW
Gazette Project Interview with Charles Portis
Appendix : TRIBUTES
Comedy in Earnest
Like Cormac McCarthy, but Funny
Our Least-Known Great Novelist
On True Grit
The Book That Changed My Life: Gringos , by Wells Tower
Sources
Acknowledgements
Also by Charles Portis
About the Author
Introduction
By Jay Jennings
I. What You Will Find Here
T his collection began life as a fat folder in my file cabinet. For years, in haphazard fashion, I had torn out (or in later Internet times, printed out) every mention I saw of Charles Portis and placed it in the folder. A Page-a-Day calendar list of Garrison Keillor’s five favorite funny novels, including Masters of Atlantis . A column by James Wolcott in Vanity Fair after the publication of Gringos . Too infrequently, a story by Portis himself, from the Atlantic or the Oxford American , would go into the file. I had a certain home-field advantage over other Portis aficionados (and they are legion) because I am from Little Rock. For example, I had written for and subscribed to the Arkansas Times (then a magazine, now a weekly paper) and therefore found in my mailbox in New York in 1991 a long piece by Portis about the Ouachita River, which meanders through the south Arkansas of his boyhood.
I had read True Grit sometime in my teens—it came out when I was ten and the John Wayne film the next year—but didn’t recognize its greatness. Perhaps I didn’t think then that a great book could come from our little outpost in Arkansas. The novels I borrowed indiscriminately from my mother’s stash of Book-of-the-Month Club selections were set in glamorous locales: Arthur Hailey’s Hotel (New Orleans), James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire (Paris, haunted by an absinthe-drinking poet based on Rimbaud; Annie Dillard says this book made her want to be a writer), and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (guess where).
The earliest inclusion in my Portis file was a 1984 story from the New York Times , a paper I read daily in a small apartment in Dallas where I was unhappily teaching high school. The story told of two bookstore employees in New York who were so smitten with Portis’s five-year-old out of-print novel The Dog of the South that they bought all 183 remaining hardcover copies (it had never appeared in paperback) and set them up as the sole window display in the Madison Avenue Bookshop. The books sold fast, to the curious and to those collared by the hand-selling bookstore staff (remember independent bookstores?), and the novel enjoyed a mini-revival. The Times writer contacted Portis in Little Rock, and Portis told the reporter he was “surprised and very pleased” by the attention. He also said, “I write in a little office without a phone behind a beer joint called Cash McCoo’s.” Because I was from Little Rock, just like the book’s narrator Ray Midge, as I learned from the Times story, I knew the reporter had misheard the name of the beer joint, that it was actually Cash McCool’s. For once, I felt superior to the New York Times . And because I knew exactly the building behind Cash McCool’s, I could imagine Portis typing away in there and I could perhaps begin to imagine myself as a writer. Into a file it went.
And out I went to Half-Price Books, the rambling Dallas used bookstore where I spent most of my dateless weekends and where I easily found a copy of The Dog of the Sout h, emblazoned on the top spine with a little Random House colophon, the scarlet stamp of the remainder. I tried the Sir Thomas Browne epigraph at the beginning (“the Tortile and tiring stroaks of Gnatworms”) and didn’t understand it but made a mental note to read Sir Thomas Browne since William Styron had also opened Lie Down in Darkness with a Browne epigraph. When I had imagined writing a book of my own, I thought it would probably start something like Styron’s 119-word sentence that opens his first novel: “Riding down to Port Warwick from Richmond, the train begins to pick up speed on the outskirts of the city, past the tobacco factories with their ever-present haze of acrid, sweetish dust and…” When I read Portis’s impeccable and economical first line about Midge’s wife Norma running off with Guy Dupree, I was right into the story without any wind-up, and without the dangling modifier Styron threw in our face as evidence of his rule-breaking artistry. Seven pages in, I learned that Ray Midge was twenty-six. I was twenty-six! And that he was planning to become a high-school teacher! (Don’t do it, Ray!) But instead of the mopey, brokenhearted young adult I was, Ray was in pursuit. And the people he met. How they talked!
“Dix puts William Shakespeare in the shithouse.”
“Your feet, I mean. They look odd the way you have them splayed out. They look like artificial feet.”
“I can see at night. I can see stars down to the seventh magnitude.”
What a story!, to quote Midge, who exclaims that more than once and ends up back in Little Rock with Norma, only to have her take off again. That seemed all too true to me.
A year later, in the fall of 1985, I too was back in Little Rock, driving a delivery truck, saving money for an eventual assault on New York and writing for the local alternative newspaper, Spectrum . In October, Knopf published Masters of Atlantis , Portis’s first novel in six years, and I immediately bought a copy from WordsWorth Books in Little Rock (still there! Long live independent bookstores!). Screwing up my courage with the knowledge that I was also now a published writer ( Spectrum ) and perhaps more significantly that my mother, Portis’s contemporary, was also from south Arkansas, I called him up (using my home-field advantage to get his number) and asked if he would sign my book. He agreed and invited me to meet him, not at Cash McCool’s, but at another beer joint called the Town Pump (still there! Long live independent bars!). I don’t remember anything about the meeting other than the fact that Portis did not wet down the four corners of his napkin before he lifted his beer and that he did treat me like a fellow writer. I moved to New York two months later, now knowing at least one novelist.
We corresponded sporadically over the years while I pursued a career as an editor and writer at various New York magazines and then eventually as a freelance writer in Brooklyn. Whenever I was in Little Rock visiting my parents, I would call him and we would go for a beer or have lunch. My file grew in fits and starts, with a great spasm after the publication of Gringos in 1991, and another after Ron Rosenbaum’s essay in Esquire in 1998 (“Our Least-Known Great Novelist,” page 343 ), which spurred Overlook Press to bring his books back into print. I wrote to him after his memoir “Combinations of Jacksons” appeared in the Atlantic in 1999, and when I next returned to Little Rock, I asked if that was perhaps part of a book-to-be. He answered no, it was a “one off,” and I and others continued to wait for the next Portis book. He was still obscure to the public at large, but revered among writers. Once at a party in New York, I met novelist Jonathan Lethem and remarked that I’d seen where he had put True Grit on a list of novels overshadowed by films made from them (printed out from Salon.com, in my file). I then mentioned the idea that he was our greatest unknown novelist, and he quipped, “Yes, he’s everybody’s favorite least-known great novelist.”
I moved back to Little Rock to work on a book of my own in 2007, my first, and began to see him more regularly, in the late afternoon at a bar near my house, the day-drinking prerogative of two freelance writers. My book, Carry the Rock , about a football season at Little Rock Central High School and the history of ra