Now that I have read four of his five novels and will in all likelihood have read most of his work before the end of the year, I can say that Charles Portis is one of my favorite American novelists of the Twentieth Century. He is perhaps the best thing to ever come out of Arkansas, the state where he was born, lived most of his life, and died.
First of all, here are his five novels:
Norwood (1966)
True Grit (1968)
The Dog of the South (1979)
Masters of Atlantis (1980)
Gringos (1991)
Undoubtedly, you have heard of True Grit. Hollywood turned it into two enjoyable movies, one starring John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, and the other (produced by the Coen Brothers) starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin.
The only Portis novel I have not read so far is Masters of Atlantis. He also produced a collection of essays in 2012 called Escape Velocity. The name comes from a quote from one of his novels: “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”
Like J. D. Salinger, Charles Portis was a man who avoided the limelight. He would point out, however, that his phone number was in the Little Rock phonebook.
Everything I have read by Portis can best be described as gentle humor. As one reviewer said of True Grit, “Only a mean person won’t enjoy it.” Too true!
Some forty years ago, I visited my friend Mike Prendergast and saw some intriguing books on his shelf. They were early volumes published by the Library of America. They were slipcased hardbound volumes averaging 800-1000 pages each with authoritative editions of American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin Franklin, and Herman Melville. The attempt was to do for the United States what the Pléiade editions did for France.
I wasted no time in contacting the L of A, and in no time at all I started receiving all the volumes they published. As the publisher branched out more, I had to cut back considerably. Today, I have more than 200 volumes containing the works of William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Henry James, and scores of other authors.
For a while, I started to look down on American literature and concentrate my reading efforts on European authors. I now realize that was short-sighted, so I started to dig into some of the volumes on my shelves. Among the works I discovered were:
Dawn Powell (The Locusts Have No King and Turn, Magic Wheel)
Kenneth Fearing (The Big Clock)
William Lindsay Gresham (Nightmare Alley)
Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle)
Jack Kerouac (The Subterraneans)
Henry David Thoreau (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and The Maine Woods)
William Faulkner (Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes, and A Fable)
Mark Twain (Following the Equator)
One of my long-term projects is reading all the published works of Joan Didion in order, which was made easier by the L of A publishing her novels and essays in two volumes (The 1960s & 1970s and The 1980s & 1990s). I have no doubt that her later works will appear in a volume to be published.
I am also thinking of reading all of Henry James’s shorter works, including some of the novels I have not yet read, such as The Awkward Age and Wings of the Dove.
There are hundreds of treasures to be found in the Library of America. I can only hope to live long enough to do them justice.
If you are ever feeling blue, the thing to do is pick up a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Within minutes, you will be in the hands of a master who can turn your frown upside down. I am currently most of the way through his The Girl in Blue. As I found myself laughing at Wodehouse’s mastery of the language, I thought I would share some of the funniest passages from his novels with you in this post.
Looking for a good place to start with Wodehouse’s books? I would recommend any of the Jeeves novels (particularly The Code of the Woosters) or the ones featuring Blandings Castle (such as Full Moon). You can find an extensive bibliography here.
In the meantime, here’s a sample of some of Wodehouse’s most penetrating observations:
A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably by now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have out-generalled the man this time by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.
He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.
He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.
At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.
“What ho!” I said. “What ho!” said Motty. “What ho! What ho!” “What ho! What ho! What ho!” After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.
I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it‘s Shakespeare who says that it‘s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.
A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.
Mike nodded. A sombre nod. The nod Napoleon might have given if somebody had met him in 1812 and said, “So, you’re back from Moscow, eh?”
“Oh, Jeeves,” I said; “about that check suit.” “Yes, sir?” “Is it really a frost?” “A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.” “But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.” “Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.” “He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.” “I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.”
She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice.
Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don’t hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.
If any writer alive today has a handle on the future—what it is likely to be—that writer is William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and the inventor of the term cyberspace. I have just finished reading his book of essays, entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor. In a talk delivered o the Book Expo America in 2010, he wrote:
But I really think [that pundits are] talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that, If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.
The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on a hill or radioactive postnuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely … more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidia.
I think of Gibson’s capital-F Future as being more along the line of the old The Jetsons animated television program or the novels of H. G. Wells or Isaac Asimov. The future presented in those works is more a reflection of their creators’ times, and not our own.
William Gibson
I think that, because of his belief regarding the future, Gibson’s more recent novels have been less science fiction-y. Books such as Zero History are set in what appears, on one hand, to be the present—but instead are set in some not-too-distant future with multiple hooks to our present.
In a number of essays, Gibson examines our strange atemporal present, with fascinating essays on Tokyo (“My Own Private Tokyo”) and Singapore (“Disneyland with the Death Penalty”).
Today was a brief respite from a week of heavy rain, so I decided to take a walk. I had read an article in last week’s Los Angeles Times about a new bookstore in Santa Monica. Now typically, my walks involve stopping at a bookstore en route and usually buying one or more books.
Not today, however. The City of Santa Monica used to have some good bookstores, such as Martindale’s and A Change of Hobbit (dedicated to sci-fi). Now it has what could only be described as a froufrou book shoppe featuring current works of interest to a young upper middle class demographic which is interested only in perpetrating a shallow somewhat feminized lifestyle.
Not My Cup of Tea
Virtually everything on the shelves was published within the last five years. Absent were almost anything that could be described as a classic.
I guess that’s what you get when an influencer opens a bookstore. I myself have never been influenced by a so-called influencer, and I rather doubt that my blog has seriously influenced anyone. My posts are as much of a compulsion as anything else. There isn’t any money being made here, and there are no thousands of readers extracting their credit cards the moment I open my lips.
My short walk on Montana Avenue dissatisfied me so much that I drove down to Marina Del Rey to the nearest Barnes & Noble. There were a lot of the same recently published bumph, but I found a John Le Carré that I didn’t have. As long as there are a sufficient number of kernels of grain among the chaff, I am satisfied.
I was looking for information on the Internet about Thomas Hardy when I came upon an interesting article on the Paris Review website. The opening paragraphs captured my attention:
Are you enjoying yourself at the moment? Please stop. It’s Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and he will wipe the smile right off your smug, contented, life-affirming face. You’re dealing with a man who knew how to deploy the word Niflheim, defined by the OED as “the region of eternal darkness, mist, and cold inhabited by those who died from old age or illness.” Hardy uses it to dispirited perfection in The Woodlanders, relating a kind of failure to connect: “But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.” Actually, The Woodlanders is full of an evocative, despondent murkiness. It extends even to the tiny twigs on the ground, which Hardy takes care to describe as they’re destroyed by a passing carriage: “they drove on out of the grove, their wheels silently crushing delicate-patterned mosses, hyacinths, primroses, lords-and-ladies, and other strange and common plants, and cracking up little sticks that lay across the track.”
Hardy wrote with a special zeal for death, and his sense of the morbid often lapsed into tone deafness. He witnessed two executions when he was a boy—maybe that had something to do with it. One of them was the hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, who was convicted of murdering her husband. By his own account, Hardy, then only sixteen, stood close enough to the gallows to hear her gown rustling; the hanging left an indelible mark on him such that seventy years later, in 1926, he could render it vividly in a letter to Lady Pinney, casting Brown’s final seconds in an unmistakably erotic light:
I am ashamed to say I saw her hanged, my only excuse being that I was but a youth and had to be in the town at that time for other reasons … I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.
He added later:
The hanging itself did not move me at all. But I sat on after the others went away, not thinking, but looking at the figure … turning slowly round on the rope. And then it began to rain, and then I saw—they had put a cloth over the face—how as the cloth got wet, her features came through it. That was extraordinary. A boy had climbed up into a tree nearby, and when she dropped he came down in a faint like an apple dropping from a tree. It was curious the two dropping together.
Although I still read more novels by far, I have found myself increasingly drawn to the medium of the short story. This evening, I decided to take a quick look at my reading long during the past twelve years. As the period progressed, I noticed myself reading more and more short story collections.
I was surprised to find that there were relatively few women writers whom I thought had mastered the genre. In fact, the only ones who impressed me were Virginia Woolf (no surprise there!), the Argentinian Silvina Ocampo, and—closer to home—Joyce Carol Oates and Shirley Jackson. Why this is I do not know. It could be that they are out there, but to date I am not familiar with their work.
Another surprise was that the United States was well represented, what with writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Stephen Crane, Henry James, J. D. Salinger, Barry Gifford, Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury.
Latin America has some outstanding representatives. Topping the list are Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges and Mexico’s Juan Rulfo. Not far behind are Roberto Bolaño and Francisco Coloane from Chile, Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo (who were married to each other) from Argentina.
Britain gave us Somerset Maugham, George Mackay Brown, G. K. Chesterton, and Graham Greene. In France, there was Guy de Maupassant. From Central Europe there was Franz Kafka and Bohumil Hrabal (Czechoslovakia) and Bruno Schulz (Poland).
The greatest Russian short story writer was Anton Chekhov, but there was also Leo Tolstoy, Varlam Shalamov, and Andrei Platanov.
I have just finished Barry Gifford’s The Cuban Club: Stories, and I find several other story collections in my TBR (To Be Read) pile. I guess I’m hooked.
As I wrote in my post dated January 1 of this year, I like to devote a whole month out of each year reading authors I have never read before. As this is the last day of my Januarius Project for January 2023, I thought I’d report on the authors I have discovered.
I have read eleven books this month. Six of them turned out to be excellent:
Thomas Hodgkin. Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. I. The Visigothic Invasion. The first of eight volumes and 5,000 pages on the Barbarian Invasions. Excellent scholarship and exciting even!
Magda Szabo. The Door. A superb Hungarian novel about a writer and her domineering housekeeper.
Laszló F. Földényi. Melancholy. Another Hungarian author dealing with the history of melancholy in Western literature and civilization. Not an easy book to read, but worth the effort.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Writing Across the Landscape. Travel Journals 1960-2010. It’s always fascinating to see other places from a poet’s perspective.
Lucretius. The Nature of Things. An ancient Roman poet describes the science of his day—in verse. Reading Lucretius tells me we may have advanced in some respects, but not all.
Juan Rulfo. The Plain in Flames. Why have I not heard of this Mexican author before? Like John Webster, he could see the skull beneath the skin; and his short stories are powerful and gemlike.
The remaining five were merely really good:
Vilmos Kondor. Budapest Noir. A top-notch mystery set in the Budapest of the 1930s, on the track of a young woman’s murder.
Han Kang. The Vegetarian. A young woman goes from vegetarianism to pushing the envelope of what is human. The author is Korean.
Don Carpenter. Hard Rain Falling. A noir crime novel about a pool shark whose life goes from bad to worse. The beginning is particularly powerful.
Yu Miri. Tokyo Ueno Station. The author is a Japanese woman of Korean ancestry. A powerful look at urban homelessness in Tokyo.
Horacio Quiroga. 7 Best Short Stories. One for the kiddies. A Uruguayan author writes stories about the Argentinian jungle that are reminiscent of Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
I can see myself reading other works by Hodgkin, Szabo, Ferlinghetti, and Rulfo in the year to come.
My friends Alain Silver and Jim Ursini, whose many books on the subject are in my library, introduced me to the joys of film noir. In time, I decided to investigate the fiction from which these films were adapted. I was already familiar with the triumvirate of greats—Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain—but I decided to dig further.
Of the novelists who wrote two or more books that I read were:
David Goodis: Black Friday, Down There (Shoot the Piano Player), Of Tender Sin, Dark Passage, The Moon in the Gutter, The Burglar, Nightfall, Cassidy’s Girl, and Street of No Return
Jim Thompson: Numerous titles, the best being The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, After Dark My Sweet, and A Swell Looking Babe
Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish): I Married a Dead Man and The Bride Wore Black
Charles Willeford: Pick-Up, The High Priest of California, Understudy for Death, The Burnt Orange Heresy, and the four Hoke Moseley novels
Robert Edmond Alter: Carny Kill and Swamp Sister
Then there is the category which I refer to as Oddities and One-Shots, people who were either famous for a single work or, if they wrote more, I only read one of their books. They include, in no particular order: W. R. Burnett (High Sierra); Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling), Elliott Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel); Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They); Kenneth Fearing (The Big Clock); William Lindsay Gresham (Nightmare Alley); Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley); and Chester Himes (The Real Cool Killers).
Reading these books, one becomes painfully conscious that the streets of America are not paved with gold. Life is not necessarily a walk through the park—unless it is night and the forces of evil are lurking in the shadows.
Having finished my jaunt to the decaying Roman Empire during the Visigothic invasions, I decided to read three books in a row written by Hungarian authors:
Vilmos Kondor’s Budapest Noir (2008), a first novel about a murder on the streets of Budapest.
Magda Szabo’s The Door (1987), a novel about the relationship between two women, a writer and a peasant.
Laszló F. Földényi’s Melancholy (1984), a history of melancholy through the ages.
As we begin 2023, I find the farther I get from my own Hungarian roots, the more at loose ends I feel. There is a figure in Greek mythology called Antaeus, about whom Wikipedia writes:
Antaeus would challenge all passers-by to wrestling matches and remained invincible as long as he remained in contact with his mother, the earth. As Greek wrestling, like its modern equivalent, typically attempted to force opponents to the ground, he always won, killing his opponents. He built a temple to his father using their skulls. Antaeus fought Heracles as he was on his way to the Garden of Hesperides as his 11th Labour. Heracles realized that he could not beat Antaeus by throwing or pinning him. Instead, he held him aloft and then crushed him to death in a bear hug.
Returning to my Hungarian roots is like Antaeus renewing himself by touching the earth. (If, however, I run into Heracles, I will pointedly avoid wrestling with him.)
So far, I am on schedule with my Januarius reading program.
Tarnmoor 
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