Portis, Rambling Back to Arkansas Boyhood
By Peter Carlson
[
General praise of Charles Portis,
Transcribed by Alex T. Moore from The Washington Post (January 18, 2000), 
for non-commercial use on The Unofficial Charles Portis Website 
(http://charlesportis.cjb.net).
]

In his quirky memoir in this month's Atlantic Monthly, Charles Portis 
rambles and digresses and then digresses from his digressions and 
rambles some more. It's the kind of sprawling, shapeless essay that 
can make an English teacher start muttering and flailing away at the 
paper with a red pen. But if you're not an English teacher, it's pure 
delight. 

Portis is the author of several comic novels, including "True Grit" 
and "Norwood" and the delightfully demented "Masters of Atlantis." He 
has a cult following and I should stipulate right away that I am part 
of it. Portis's humor is droll and deadpan and frequently comes in 
odd, offhand asides. Here's how he starts this memoir of his youth in 
rural Arkansas: 

"I made my first experiments in breathing underwater at the age of 
nine, in 1943. It was something I needed to learn in life so as to be 
ready to give my pursuing enemies the slip. At that time they were 
Nazi spies and Japanese saboteurs." The spies and saboteurs were, of 
course, fantasies, there not being a great deal of Axis activity in 
Arkansas during the war. But young Portis practiced hiding from them 
by lying underwater in streams and breathing through a hollow reed, 
which turned out to be more difficult in real life than it was in 
comic books because the local reeds weren't hollow and his feet 
wouldn't stay underwater and, as he points out, "when toes break the 
surface and bob about, they will catch the eye of the dullest 
observer." 

In this essay, as in life, Portis doesn't spend much time underwater. 
Soon, he's rambling on about his eccentric relatives, the Civil War, 
Jesse James and the New South. Along the way, he reveals the 
relationship between the number of cotton gins in an Arkansas town and 
its churches:  "The normal ratio at that time and place was about two 
Baptist churches or one Methodist church per gin. It usually took 
about three gins to support a Presbyterian church, and a community 
with, say, four before you found enough tepid idolators to form an 
Episcopal congregation." He also reveals what Arkansas church elders 
looked for in a minister in the 1940s:  "a wise, saintly, hearty, 
scholarly, eloquent, thirty-five-year-old Confederate veteran who 
would be content to live on a small salary." 

If that stuff strikes you as funny, you'll love this piece. If not, 
you'll have to make do with "The Great Disruption," social scientist 
Francis Fukuyama's dense 18-page study of why crime, illegitimacy and 
alienation soared in the Western world in the past 40 years--an essay 
that is fascinating if you like that sort of thing, but considerably 
less amusing than Portis's piece.