Exploring a Writer Whose Characters Have the Truest of Grit By Mark Feeney [ General Praise of Charles Portis, Transcribed by Alex T. Moore from The Boston Globe (March 14, 1999), for non-commercial use on The Unofficial Charles Portis Website (http://charlesportis.cjb.net). ] Several lifetimes ago, aspiring to be a serious person, I would now and then read a writer's body of work straight through. Sometimes this proved highly rewarding (Flannery O'Connor). Sometimes the experience was more mixed (John Cheever really ought to have stuck to short stories). Every once in a while it did not go as anticipated (Michel Foucault: too much discipline, too much punish). A few months ago - why I cannot say - I returned to my old practice and read the three-fifths of Charles Portis's published oeuvre (a serious person's word if ever there was one) that had previously eluded me. And a good idea this turned out to be. Not Flannery O'Connor good, maybe, but within at least shouting distance of Milledgeville. The O'Connor reference might seem like a setup, seeing as how Portis's second-best-known character could well be the product of a tryst between one of her ferociously unsentimental teenagers and, oh, Roy Rogers. The creation in question is Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine-narrator of "True Grit" (Signet, $5.50, paper), Portis's second novel and the only one of the five there's much likelihood you've heard of. "True Grit" (titles just don't come any better) was an enormous bestseller 30 years ago, but you're more likely to recognize it on account of Portis's best-known creation, who figures prominently in the novel and, more to the point, gave John Wayne his one Oscar- winning role. The gentleman in question is one Rooster Cogburn, an endearingly skanky deputy US marshal whom Mattie enlists in her efforts to bring to justice (i.e., kill) the man who murdered her father one sodden night in Fort Smith, Ark., some time after the Civil War. The movie, understandably enough, made Rooster the center of attention - no sane producer ever second-billed the Duke - but "True Grit" is Mattie's story, and she is Portis's greatest character. The number of truly memorable females in American fiction is scandalously small. Hester Prynne, Isabel Archer, Lily Bart, maybe Sister Carrie, maybe Lolita Haze. Who else? Mattie's not quite of their magnitude, but she has a secure place in the next rank. Walker Percy likened her to Huck Finn, and she certainly displays the same boundless individualism and a comparable knack for idiom. But Huck, underneath all his riotousness, is still basically a kid, one whose fundamental sweetness is obscured by the fact that hard use has made him have to grow up far too fast. Not Mattie: She emerged from the womb already well past voting age (and that was about a century before it got lowered to 18) and never looked back. "A woman with brains and frank tongue" is how she describes herself at novel's end, and truer words were never spoken. Portis has several specialties, a slyly deadpan wit being foremost among them, but not far behind is his fondness for obsessives. Indeed, by Portis standards, Mattie's single-mindedness about avenging her father's death is positively Euclidean. Justice, family honor, love: As determining factors go, those don't do badly in justifying an all- consuming passion. But what about Norwood Pratt, the hopelessly unworldly ex-Marine who heads from Ralph, Texas, to New York because a buddy there owes him $70? Even factoring in for inflation, $70 wasn't exactly big bucks in 1966, when "Norwood" (out of print), Portis's first novel, was published. Or then there's the car-loving, aggrievement-nursing know-it-all who narrates "The Dog of the South" (Penguin, $13.95), Ray Midge (when it comes to naming characters, Portis would seem to have a direct line to some country-and-Western corner of Plato's cave). He sets off in hot and inexplicable pursuit of one Guy Dupree, who has high-tailed it to Belize with Ray's wife and late-model Ford Torino. The inexplicability comes from the fact that Ray doesn't much care for his missus - and Dupree makes two. As Ray rather nicely puts it, "I don't believe we've ever had a President, unless it was tiny James Madison with his short arms, who couldn't have handled Dupree in a fair fight." So why bother? You'd think Ray would prefer to sit tight - and that is the word - in Little Rock and enjoy Dr. Buddy Casey delivering his celebrated lecture on the siege of Vicksburg (Ray has this on tape and likes to listen to it while shaving). But, no, Ray's a Portis hero and has to answer the call of compulsion. Norwood and Ray are as nothing, though, compared with the inhabitants of that ground zero of Portisian obsessiveness, "Masters of Atlantis" (also out of print). "Masters" relates the saga of the Gnomon Society, a decidedly daft, if indubitably dedicated, band of adepts of the wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. Part fraternal organization, part intellectual cargo cult, the Gnomon Society is headed by one Lamar Jimmerson (that's Mr. Jimmerson to those of us as yet uninitiated in the higher mysteries), the author of such arcane treatises as "Why I Am a Gnomon," "101 Gnomon Facts," and "Tracking the Telluric Currents." Now, as such unprepossessing titles might suggest, Mr. Jimmerson is not exactly the acutest angle in the parallelogram. He manifests a kind of blundering obliviousness humankind would not again see until that fateful day Kato Kaelin raised his right hand in Judge Ito's courtroom. The scene of Mr. Jimmerson venturing to wartime Washington - in full Gnomon regalia, no less, of white linen robe, tall conical cap, and sandals - to deliver a nationwide radio address and present President Roosevelt with the society's "10-point victory plan" is hilarious and heartbreaking. It's hilarious for obvious reasons. It's heartbreaking because, of course, no one - from White House guards to hotel bellhops - will give him the time of day. Even more excruciating is Mr. Jimmerson's abortive attempt to run for governor of Indiana, an effort that, however inadvertently, manages to conjure up the image of Dan Quayle, another good-natured Hoosier politico known to flounder his way across the public consciousness. Jimmy Burns, the hero-narrator of Portis's most recent book, "Gringos" (1991 and it, too, out of print), is the self-described "very picture of an American idler in Mexico." He reverses the standard Portis equation: It's other people's manias he suffers from rather than his own. He spends his time hanging out in the Yucatan, supporting himself by hauling freight and doing odd jobs. When a bunch of New Age types believe some sort of great spirit is scheduled to appear at a Mayan pyramid nearby, it's Burns who ends up having to deal with the very messy consequences. This he does, and does just fine, in the ambling, oddball way that marks everything Charles Portis writes. A former boss once described Burns this way: "Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. Trustworthy. Facetious." Never having met the man, I can't swear that that fits Burns's creator, too, but it certainly sounds right.