No Ball Game For Him

About two-thirds of the way into Charles Portis's novel Masters of Atlantis, a character named Dolores is arguing with her boyfriend, named Maurice, about his adherence to a strange, and going-nowhere cult, of the currently harmless Freemasons variety, if Freemasons still believed all of their ancient nonsense, called Gnomonism. Dolores intuits that Maurice is not especially happy with the part of his life that is steeped in Gnomonism, which involves him living part of his time in a temple located in Burnette, Indiana, and here she argues her case:

"But a tower in Burnette, Indiana. At your age. A professional man like you. I just don't get it, Maurice. I just can't believe there's much to it. You tell me you're sleeping in a chair. You admit you can't get your apricots stewed the way you like them and you say you can't get your brown eggs or your three-bean salad at all. Can't you see you're living in a house of -- cards? I almost said a house of pancakes."

I regard those last two lines as among my favorite bits of dialogue, as well as among the funniest I've ever read. This is no doubt a matter of taste, but I have an abiding love for any writer who can faithfully -- though not necessarily with complete slavishness to kitchen sink realism -- and imaginatively recreate these sorts of quirks in human speech. More than that, though, this passage is a nice illustration of Portis's style, which is a kind of deadpan absurdity that can be much admired but rarely emulated to the same effect. I know that among Portis's cultish (hey, that's I guess ironic) group of fans can be counted comedians like Conan O'Brien (who I remember, in an interview with Rolling Stone offering to lend Masters of Atlantis to his interviewer, as O'Brien regards it as one of the few laugh-out-loud novels he's ever read, but then mildly regretting his generosity and making sure the journalist knew that he wanted the book back at some point), David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, and Bill Hader (who is currently, with director Greg Mottola, working to make a film of Portis's The Dog of the South), but I can't say I can see much direct influence from Portis on any of them. There are no doubt a host of reasons for this, but I think paramount would be that in Portis, you rarely find any jokes, as we would normally define them. Outside of a few omniscient narrator interjections, which are in any case rare, everything in his fiction is played as straight as can be, to the degree that you actually sort of are laughing at the characters, rather than with them. But gently. But also loudly. In any event, I think it's probably very difficult to accurately, and genuinely, reproduce what it is Portis does, this sort of ridiculousness without ever winking at it, or signalling it. Portis's brand of absurdity must be, as Johnny Caspar once said regarding friends, a mental state.

Portis is, blessedly, still with us. He's 78, lives in Arkansas, as he has pretty much his whole life, and hasn't written a novel since Gringos in 1991. Before that was Masters of Atlantis in 1985, The Dog of the South in 1979, True Grit in 1968, and Norwood in 1966. And that's it. I'd very much like to know what happened after 1968, not to mention after 1991. Could the fairly wild success of True Grit, and the subsequent film adaptation by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne, have had anything to do with the eleven-year gap? I have no idea, and don't want to speculate, so I won't. But I can't help but wonder if Portis, as J. D. Salinger is reported to have done, has been writing this whole time, and simply stashing it all away because actually publishing doesn't much interest him. He's a recluse, which maybe helps to fuel my Salinger-esque fantasy, though unlike Salinger he can be rustled out in front of a journalist from time to time, most recently in a few short pieces -- I read one where the journalist pointed out that while Portis agreed to be interviewed, he would not allow himself to be directly quoted -- that coincided with the Coen brothers' 2010 remake of True Grit. It must be said, though, that as publicity-shy as Portis is, he does owe a lot to articles written about him in the years since he's gone quiet. Especially articles written by Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a piece for Esquire in 1998 called "Our Least-Known Great Novelist." Sadly, this article doesn't appear to be available on-line*, but I read it way back when, and it immediately sparked my interest. At the time, I only knew Portis as the author of True Grit, and I only knew True Grit as the John Wayne movie where he says "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!" I wish I could remember the Rosenbaum article better, but what's most important about it is that it actually made something happen. Along with simultaneously exciting and frustrating, because the books were out of print, save True Grit, people like me, it also caught the eye of Tracy Carns of Overlook Press, a publishing company whose area of expertise can be inferred from their name. And, over a period of a few years, beginning in 1999, Overlook reprinted all five of Portis's novels, and they have remained in print ever since. This is not some flash-in-the-pan, trendy kind of resurgence, clearly. Portis's books are hanging in there once again. He's just not writing any more of them.

I was inspired to think, and to write, about Portis after rereading Norwood recently, and I was struck again by his effortless, or seemingly, but probably actually not, effortless, comic tone.  And incidentally, if you’re new to Portis, Norwood is an excellent place to start, for several reasons.  For one thing, it can be easily read in a day, by anybody, though if it were ten times as long I don’t think I’d kick up much of a fuss.  More importantly, having also reread Masters of Atlantis, a book written almost twenty years later, not too very long ago, I can attest that Portis’s voice, or style, or whatever you want to call it, was pretty much fully formed right out of the gate.  He knew at once the particular way he wanted to be funny, or was funny, and how to put that on the page.  You could safely argue that Masters of Atlantis is more ambitious than Norwood -- and though it’s hard to pick, I might rank Masters of Atlantis as my favorite (that or True Grit, but please don’t tell Portis that) – but you couldn’t claim it was more mature, or a more accomplished example of his prose style.  He had that down early.
 
Norwood is about Norwood Pratt, a recently discharged Army veteran who is returning home to Ralph, TX following the death of his father.  The primary reason he needs to take over the family home is because somebody needs to take care of Vernell, Norwood’s sister.  This is established much more economically by Portis in the novel’s first sentence, but I’ll dispense with the rest of the plot summary by saying that Norwood is essentially a road novel, which is kicked off in part by Norwood’s too easy-going, slightly naïve manner, as well as his understanding that these parts of his personality can only be stretched so far, and Vernell’s recent taking up with ex-Marine blowhard Bill Bird has stretched them pretty taut.  So he agrees to take a job with a shady businessman named Grady Fring, who wants him to drive two cars to New York City and deliver them to Fring’s man up there, for which Norwood will be paid probably not enough, but the trip will also give him the opportunity to collect the seventy dollars he’s owed by one of his Army friends, who also happens to live in New York.  And off he goes.

Nothing lasts for long in Norwood.  It’s typical of road stories that they bounce from incident to incident, that’s their nature, but Norwood sheds characters and locations and modes of transportation at a furious clip.  And since it’s a short novel anyway, this has the effect of making the thing pretty impossible to set aside.  But it’s never rushed, nothing is short-changed, you never wish Portis or Norwood would linger somewhere or with someone longer than they do.  Portis’s imagination may chug along, but he has a very sharp sense of pacing, and an ability to elegantly sketch out a place, or a character, or a comic...I was going to write something like “interlude,” but that sounds way too stuffy.  So here’s what I’m talking about.  Norwood has recently arrived in New York, and he sees a man dressed as Mr. Peanut outside the Planter’s store, beckoning to potential customers.  Norwood goes over and starts talking to him.
 
”Do they pay you by the hour or what?” Norwood said to the monocled peanut face.

“Yeah, by the hour,” said a wary, muffled voice inside.

“I bet that suit is heavy.”

“It’s not all that heavy.  I just started this morning.”

“How much do you get an hour?”

“You ast a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“Do you take the suit home with you?”

“No, I put it on down here.  At the shop.”

“The one in Dallas gives out free nuts.”

“I don’t know anything about that.  They don’t say anything to me about it.”

“He don’t give you many, just two or three cashews.”

“I don’t know anything about that.  I work at the post office at night.”

“Well, I’ll see you sometime, Mr. Peanut.  You take it easy.”

“Okay.  You too.”

I think this passage pretty nicely encapsulates Norwood, so if you found it funny you should love every page of the novel. Even if you don't understand what I'm on about, read it anyway. There's a subtle profundity to all of Portis's work (though I haven't read Gringos yet, which is why I keep not mentioning it; I'm told it's very much a lesser work, by a friend who knows his Portis, but I remain undaunted and will read it presently) -- True Grit is especially magnificent in this way, though as a more-or-less straightforward Western, one that still happens to be very funny in parts, it does count as something of an outlier among Portis's small body of work.

But in Norwood, for instance, there's a bit where Norwood and a couple of characters who have gathered themselves among him at this point, including a chicken, are traveling by bus and find themselves passing by an accident, another bus carrying Elks, the Rotarian or Oddfellow kind of Elks, not the animal, and among the wreckage Norwood sees...

One Elk was lying on the grass, maybe dead, no ball game for him, and others were limping and holding their heads.

That "no ball game for him" is both fairly hilarious and glibly, intentionally so, touching. The suddenness of the fatality, even the unfairness of it, is contained within that bit of flippant gallows humor. Also, a woman named Rita Lee, who has caught Norwood's eye, and Norwood has reciprocated in his typically laconic fashion, questions Norwood about his military service, and asks:

"Did you kill anybody?"

"Just two that I know of."

"How did you do it?"

"I shot 'em."

"I mean but how?"

"Well, with a light machine gun. They were out there in front of the barb wire and one 'em hit a trip flare. It was right in front of my bunker and they just froze. My gun was already laid on 'em, except I had to traverse a little and I cranked off about thirty rounds and dropped 'em right there."

"Did they scream?"

"If they did I didn't hear 'em. A bunch of mortars come in and when that let up me and a old boy from South Carolina name Tims went out there and throwed a plank acrost the war and brought their bodies back."

But, crucially, this isn't Portis making a statement. This is all pure character, or straightforward observation. If Norwood has a message -- and it doesn't, but if it does -- it's that if you take enough shit, after a while you won't take it any longer. Not that you shouldn't take it any longer, because Portis never insists on anything, but simply that you won't. It is a quietly beautiful book in some ways, though the beauty isn't as easy to root out as it is in True Grit. Laughter can sometimes obscure things a little bit, so once you've read Norwood, go ahead and plan on reading it again. And everything else Portis wrote.


*In the absence of Rosenbaum's Esquire article, you can read this one he wrote about Portis for the New York Observer in 1999. For the record, this is where I got my information on the Overlook reprints.

A Love of Decency Does Not Abide in You

.

Just recently -- like last night -- I realized that it's difficult for me to write about True Grit. I watched the 1969 film, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, a U. S. Marshal hired by a young girl named Mattie Ross (Kim Darby in that version) to hunt down the man who murdered her father, countless times when I was a kid. I've lived with the "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!" climax as one of the central movie moments of my life. I have since then read Charles Portis's books, and other Portis books, and become a member of the Portis Cult that I like to think is sweeping the globe. Now that my favorite living filmmakers, the Coen brothers, have adapted Portis's book, or remade Hathaway's film, depending who you ask, I find myself feeling possibly too familiar with the story, or maybe content to simply be an audience member as my favorite filmmakers unspool a new version of one of my favorite stories. I don't know what it is, but I wonder what I could possibly have to say. Thank Christ I'm not being paid for this.
.

Still, though, I feel compelled to write about the film a little, because I'm seeing some curious reactions. First thing's first: I loved it. I thought it was a beautifully made film, which is something that goes without saying regarding the Coens at this point. It's also exceptionally well-cast. A few members of that cast have some rather large shoes to fill, but while Matt Damon is asked only to replace Glenn Campbell from the Hathaway film he's still terrific as LeBoeuf, the vain Texas Ranger pursuing Tom Chaney, the man who killed Mattie's father, for a separate crime. It's the kind of role Damon was either born for, or has played some version of so often at this point that he can do it in his sleep. I'm not sure which, but it could be both. Either way, he's terrific. As are Josh Brolin as Chaney -- employing a slightly odd cadence to his speech, and apparently wearing some dental thing that renders Chaney somewhat less evolved than those around him, both choices achieving the desired effect -- and Barry Pepper, nearly unrecognizable as the coincidentally named Lucky Ned Pepper, onto whose gang Chaney has latched himself since fleeing Frank Ross's murder. In the Hathaway film, Ned Pepper was played by Robert Duvall as a fairly cool customer, or so I remember it, while Barry Pepper plays him as a kind of manic professional, one who recognizes the ability to exude menace a part of his job.

.

After that, we need only concern ourselves here with Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld, who play Rooster Cogburn and Mattie Ross (respectively, of course), which in turn will take us into Coen vs. Hathaway and both vs. Portis, and who changed what and why and to what purpose. One thing I've heard, a sort of complaint, about this new version of True Grit is that it's nothing but a "straight" Western, that it isn't very much like a Coen brothers film. Taking the second part first, I should point out that another regular feature of reviews of True Grit so far is a mention of the film's dialogue, and how much of it has been pulled straight from Portis's novel. Rarely mentioned is that a big part of what makes a Coen brothers film a Coen brothers film is their way with language -- from Blood Simple on, their characters have talked with some level of literary knowingness, or raw, precise brutality, or both at once. They have a hell of an ear, those guys, or a pair of them, and it's unusual to me that anyone would bother to point out that the dialogue in True Grit is largely the work of Portis and not think to also mention that his words are pretty much the perfect marriage with the Coens' sensibility. Several times already they've seemed to make films that are simply adaptation of Portis novels that Portis never wrote. The very act of adapting Portis is already a Coenesque thing to do.
.

I guess it's also a Hathawayesque thing to do, because, since this is the way of things, a lot of people have used the Coens' excellent True Grit as a stick to beat Hathaway's True Grit, even though, having refreshed my memory of that earlier film by rewatching crucial scenes, it turns out back in '69 they used a pretty healthy pantload of Portis's language their own selfs. The big difference between the films in this regard is that Hathaway doesn't seem to care especially if you notice how great these lines are or not -- in other words, he doesn't make a big deal of it, doesn't foreground it, kind of tosses it away. This may be, or at least sound, preferable to you, but the Coens care about this language very deeply, and foreground it in the way they foreground their own language: by having the actors play their roles as men and women who would actually speak this way. I happen to think Kim Darby is quite good in Hathaway's film, but if one of the stated motives of the Coens to remake that film is to hew more closely to Portis's book, it's worth noting that in this sense Darby plays Mattie as altogether too eager and girlish. Hattie Steinfeld, on the other hand, makes her arrogant, but -- and this is key -- shows her arrogance to be well-earned. She's very smart, smarter than anybody else she meets throughout the story. She knows it, and she proves it again and again. She's the kind of 14-year-old who really would talk like this:

.

"I have left off crying, and giggling as well. Now make up your mind. I don't care anything for all this talk. You told me what your price for the job was and I have come up with it. Here is the money. I aim to get Tom Chaney and if you are not game I will find somebody who is game. All I have heard out of you so far is talk. I know you can drink whiskey and I have seen you kill a gray rat. All the rest has been talk. They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you. I am not paying for talk. I can get all the talk I need and more at the Monarch boardinghouse."

.

So, too, does John Wayne's inarguably iconic (and Oscar-winning) performance as Rooster Cogburn differ from Jeff Bridges' in the Coens' film. Wayne plays Cogburn as a fairly jolly sort, which is not quite Portis. Wayne's Cogburn is a guy who likes to drink, a lot, but is pretty much a delightful fellow to be around, whatever the circumstances. Bridges plays the role very broad, but his Cogburn is also more dissolute and worn out. Bridges's Cogburn is a guy you have to watch.

.

What's really curious about these two films are the changes they make to Portis. Neither film is entirely slavish. The Hathaway film begins with a scene between Mattie and her father before he's murdered, while the book, and the Coens' film, begins after the death. A more puzzling change made for the Hathaway film has to do with aspects of the film that would count as spoilers -- Hathaway's version may be 41-years-old, but we're talking about differences here -- but basically in 1969 they hardened one aspect of the film, darkened it up, so that they might be free to soften up another, possibly more objectionable (commercially speaking) aspect of Portis's book. I'm assuming certain things here, but it seems fair enough. I do believe that people who are hardcore fans of the John Wayne film and who don't know Portis's book will be up in arms over the Coens' film, believing their more faithful film has actually chickened out, and Hollywooded that shit up. They didn't, though. The Coens made only minor changes -- the bearskin trader, the hanging man, LeBoeuf's brief separation from Mattie and Rooster are all their creations (okay, I didn't reread the whole book yesterday, but watching their film, those bits seemed original to them, and some reasonably intensive browsing and skimming through the novel seemed to confirm that. Please correct me if I'm wrong).

.

The real difference between the two films is tone, and this is where those who claim this new True Grit is simply an ordinary Western confuse me. If they feel that way, I can only assume that's because they're familiar with the story already and are letting that get in the way of the Coens' truly original approach to this genre, or at least truly particular take. In his review of the Coen brothers' film, Glenn Kenny said: "[T]he Coens' True Grit is not just a different film than the more classical Henry Hathaway-directed one; it's a different idea of a film than that one." I believe that's at the heart of things here. All you need to compare is, as I say, the tone. Hathaway is making a unique Western in a fairly ordinary way, at least behind the camera. In the remake, there's a genuine sense of these events -- the pursuit of Chaney by Mattie, Rooster, and LeBoeuf -- having happened in the past, which is importan, and that something will follow after the ending we know from Hathaway's film (itself different in a couple of important ways). And there's a melancholy to it all because of that, and hidden inside of that, which is entirely absent from the original film. Just take the night-time ride of Rooster and Mattie that is the emotional climax of both films: in Hathaway, it's filmed as a basic race against time, but with the Coens it's solemn, fierce, desperate, even impressionistic, and deeply moving.

.

Then there's what comes after that, and the little twitch in your memory when you meet one character and remember the reference to Cogburn's history with Quantrill during the Civil War, and the Coens' film comes out just plain richer than Hathaway's. But that's probably because Portis is richer. Either way, so what? Wayne's Rooster is a performance for the ages -- I think he's great in the role, and I don't care what the revisionists say -- and the rest of the film is plenty brisk and entertaining and well-made. And so we have two good film versions of a masterful book, plus we have the book. I'm looking for a reason to complain here, but I'm not finding one.