LITTLE ROCK — “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.” - Charles Portis, The Dog of the South.

Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany is the Arkansas writer’s first new book in more than 20 years. Its 358 pages include “almost everything that Portis has written outside the novels,” according to the publisher, Butler Center Books in Little Rock.

“I’m sure Portis fans are going to want to add this to their collections,” Butler Center Books manager Rod Lorenzen says. The book includes such rarities as a never-before-published three-act play, Delray’s New Moon.

Portis’ play is about the soon-to-be displaced residents of an old hotel in Arkansas. “If you can make me laugh,” says one of these elder statesmen from under his faded felt hat, “I’ll give you ten dollars.” For $27.95, the hardcover book promises more laughs than one.

Other contents vary, from short stories to some of the writing Portis did as a journalist, hammering a newsroom typewriter in Little Rock, Memphis, New York and London for years before his second novel, True Grit (1968), made him reluctantly famous.

Even the earliest pieces show that Portis “had his inimitable voice almost from the beginning,” the book’s editor, Jay Jennings says. “Going back, you can see how he developed into a novelist.”

In a column from the Arkansas Gazette in 1959, Portis writes about the Southern way of saying “sugar” to mean hugs and kisses - “a good wetting down” from aunts who “looked like aging toad frogs. But they were invariably the nicest ones, these affectionate ones.”

Jennings points especially to Portis’ reporting on the civil rights struggle in Mississippi and Alabama. Portis wrote from dangerous places, none more dicey for the reporter than a Ku Klux Klan gathering outside Birmingham, 1963.

The write-up concludes: “and the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.”

Portis never received the credit he deserved as an important voice in the events surrounding Medgar Evers and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jennings says. The book includes several pieces to correct the record.

Jennings tells in the book’s introduction how he met Portis, in 1985, at a “beer joint” in Little Rock, the Town Pump. The two beer occasion helped prompt Jennings’ own career as a writer (including his book Carry the Rock, about football and history at Little Rock’s Central High School).

“I bought a copy of Masters of Atlantis,” Jennings remembers. “He agreed to meet with me and sign my book.”

BACK TO THE BAR

Revisiting the scene, Jennings points across the Town Pump’s surroundings of wood paneling and concrete floor, the signs for Jagermeister and Pabst Blue Ribbon: “We sat at the bar right there.”

Although invited, Portis, 78, has declined to join in re-creating the moment. The author is a mostly unseen presence - unreported-on, anyway - in his home town of Little Rock. The book describes his involvement in assembling its contents as “pretty hands-off.”

He also evaded the 2011 Arkansas Literary Festival and its panel discussion on Portis’ work. The elusive author was “known for avoiding events like the festival,” according to that year’s newspaper coverage.

But the panel, too, was instrumental in the creation of Escape Velocity.

Jennings moved to New York shortly after having drinks with Portis. He started a collection of any loose thing he came across that Portis had written. A memoir here, a travel piece there, one thing and another - before long, as Jennings describes it, this once-thin manila file turned into a “fat folder.”

“He became a mentor to me,” Jennings says, “more in his words than in person.”

Jennings’ collection burgeoned with writings not only by Portis, but also about Portis. Notably, there was the Roy Blount Jr. comment that Portis “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” And there was Ron Rosenbaum’s essay, “Our Least-Known Great Novelist” from Esquire magazine, 1998, which the book reprints.

Rosenbaum (How the EndBegins) boasts that he once met Portis in a Waffle House in Little Rock, and calls for Portis “to be regarded as the author of classics on the order of a 20th-century Mark Twain.”

Jennings was on board for the literary festival’s panel on Portis. It was here that he and Lorenzen roughed out the idea of a book along the lines of Escape Velocity.

“Jay and I both talked to him [Portis] on and off about it, and I think he just trusted us to take over the project,” Lorenzen says.

“I think he trusted Rod,” Jennings says, “having known Rod forever.”

Lorenzen was a longtime bookstore owner in Little Rock prior to his work with The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, part of the Central Arkansas Library System.

Portis “was a customer for the long time that I was in the book business,” Lorenzen says. These days, he describes the author as apt to be found in the library.

Once at work on the collection, Jennings retrieved even more pieces of Portis that, otherwise, might have fluttered away forever. The prize turned out to be a travel story he hadn’t known existed. “An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja” is from the Los Angeles Times, 1967.

The title says it, and the story opens with Portis’ selection of a suitable vehicle, “something you wouldn’t mind banging up,” from a car lot in Santa Monica. The “rat colored” pickup sets a tone for the trip by refusing to start.

TRUTH AND FICTION

By his own admission, as quoted in the book, Charles McColl Portis was born in El Dorado, 1933, and grew up in places including Norphlet in Union County. He rose to the office of London bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune.

All of a sudden, in 1964, a certain amount of doubtful reporting if not pure myth clouds the biography. The story goes that he up and moved to a fishing shack in Arkansas to weave his fabrications about con men, wanderers, rattlesnakes and girls who carry big revolvers that prove unreliable.

Jennings tracks down and squints at the legend of the fisherman’s shed. The source turns out to be Tom Wolfe, writing in New York magazine: “A fishing shack! In Arkansas!” The italics are Wolfe’s, bringing as much exclamation to the idea as he did to astronauts being crazy for rocket rides in The Right Stuff.

Jennings suspects the “shack” was “actually a cabin,” and that Wolfe in his trademark white suit probably never set gleaming shoe in one to know the difference. Whatever, the move paid off in novels.

Portis’ novels are five in number, and nothing so frustrates a reader of all things Portis as to find that most people, even the most compulsively bookish, will name just the one: True Grit.

Each of Portis’ other books - Norwood, Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis and Gringos - musters a following of devotees and defenders, and some of them congregate in Escape Velocity. Rosenbaum rests his case for Portis’ greatness on the “shockingly little known” Masters of Atlantis.

Short story writer Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged,Everything Burned) stumps for “The Book That Changed My Life: Gringos.” It taught him that, “if you get a fair price on that set of used tires, you’ve tasted as much of life’s sweet fullness as anyone deserves.”

Jennings says his favorite Portis novel tends to be the one he read again the most recently. Lorenzen, ever the bookseller, still recommends True Grit as a good place to start on Portis, likening the book’s classic status to that of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

But for the reader whose copy of True Grit looks as well-worn as Rooster Cogburn’s hat, who has been left wanting more or just wants to jump in and find a funny line: Escape Velocity.

Not counting the daily journalism that Portis ground out like any other workaday reporter, “I think I got everything,” Jennings says - all the bits and pieces of Portis’ freelance career up to now. And this done, he admits to a selfish motive.

As a way to keep everything together, he says, a book sure does beat a file folder.

The Butler Center’s Escape Velocity book launch party will be 6 p.m. Oct. 9 at the Darragh Center in the Central Arkansas Library System’s Main Library, downtown Little Rock. Admission is free for the occasion of music, readings and actors playing scenes from the writings of Charles Portis. Books will be on hand. More information is available at www.butlercenter.org, or by calling (501) 320-5716.

Style, Pages 50 on 09/30/2012