LITTLE ROCK — Escape Velocity makes only a brief, hard-to-spot mention of author Charles Portis’ determined ways of escaping attention, such as, well - right here, this page in the newspaper. Some of his writing is on display here. But he’s not.
“On the spectrum of author privacy,” the book’s editor Jay Jennings writes, “he probably falls somewhere between Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo [with the late J.D. Salinger as the undefeated champion].”
Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) almost never took shape in public except for now-and-then court appearances to stop people from impinging on his solitude. Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) remains so well hidden, there was a time when Pynchon’s seclusion set off rumors of him being, in fact, Salinger.
Portis is out and about Little Rock. He just doesn’t hold still for questioning - or as Mattie Ross tells the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf in True Grit, “A saucy line will not get you far with me.”
The book includes a rare exception: Roy Reed’s 25-page interview with Portis for a history project, Looking Back at the Arkansas Gazette (University of Arkansas Press, 2009). It centers on Portis’ recollections of being a newspaper reporter.
REED: Buddy, can you think of anything we haven’t covered about the Gazette or anything else?
PORTIS: No, that pretty well does it.
Style, Pages 55 on 09/30/2012