A Peek Inside Portis

Literary evening spotlights collection by Arkansas author

Arkansas native Charles Portis, author of the novel “True Grit,” met John Wayne on the set of the 1969 movie.
Arkansas native Charles Portis, author of the novel “True Grit,” met John Wayne on the set of the 1969 movie.

When Jay Jennings was a young writer just starting out - mainly doing movie reviews for an alternative Little Rock newspaper - the only Arkansas novelist whose name he knew was Charles Portis.

Jennings wasn’t shy. He wrote to the author acclaimed for “True Grit” and “The Dog of the South,” told him he’d just bought a copy of his latest book, “Master of Atlantis,” and asked him to sign it.

“He invited me to lunch, and that was the start of a correspondence and eventually a friendship,” Jennings recalls.

A quarter of a century later, Jennings begged Portis for another boon - but this time, he was turned down.

“We were having a beer one day, and I had long had this folder of various pieces of his I’d found in The Atlantic Monthly or The Oxford American or The Arkansas Times that I’d torn out,” he remembers. “I’d occasionally take it out and reread things, and one day it occurred to me the folder was fat enough there could be a book there.

“I mentioned it to him after I’d moved back to Little Rock after 20 years in New York, told him I’d really love to edit a collection of these works. He waved it off, saying it was just stuff he wrote for a paycheck.

He didn’t think anybody would want to read it.”

Jennings let the idea drop, but in 2011, Portis’ work was the topic of a panel at the Arkansas Literary Festival, andthe concept came up again.

This time, Rod Lorenzen of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies approached Portis and got a “yes” - and Jennings was asked to edit the book.

“Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany” was released last fall by Butler Center Books, a division of the Central Arkansas Library System. It’s fallen to Jennings to introduce the collection around the country because Portis does not make public appearances.

“He has a group of friends that he trusts and is gregarious with,” Jennings says of Portis, “but one thing I admire about him and find myself unable to pull off is he relies on the work to convey his vision and feels no need to publicize it or explain it or do any of the stuff that to him is the extraneous part of publishing. For him tosay ‘no,’ to stand on the work, is a position a lot of writers would like to be in. He was doing it even when his books weren’t being well received.

It wasn’t a pose. It’s what he believes.”

Neither did Portis want to be part of the process of creating “Escape Velocity.”

“He didn’t really want to go over the pieces that had already been published,” Jennings says. “I think he feltthey were finished works. He’s an amazingly precise and clean writer, so (as the editor) there wasn’t anything to improve upon. My role was more about collecting and gathering.”

Among essays included in the book is one Portis wrote about a 1960s trip the length of the Baja Peninsula - which he’d forgotten he’d written - and “Delray’s New Moon,” a play that was performed by the Arkansas Repertory Theaterin 1996 but had never been published.

“The great thing about including (the play) in the book is that the response of the critics has been wonderful,” Jennings says. “A couple of them have said they consider it his sixth major work - and it might have been lost if we had not done the book.”

Jennings also thinks the literary world has gained more insight into Portis himself.

“The thing that keeps coming back from readers of the book is even though he’s funny and has a satirical streak, he has great empathy and affection for even the characters he’s making fun of. That’s a rare quality, and it comes out in the man as well,” Jennings says. “He’s a very kind and empathetic person - and I’ve experienced that personally because I wrote to him out of the blue and from the start, even though I’d published very little, he saw me as a fellow writer and treated me that way. It had a huge impact on my career.”

Whats Up, Pages 16 on 01/11/2013

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