Master of Atlantis: Charles Portis and the Absurd

 As I’ve said before, I first read True Grit after I learned that the Coen Brothers had begun production on a film adaptation of the book.  I thought that if the Coen Brothers found the book interesting enough to adapt, it was worth a read. I loved the book. But when I finished it, I didn’t feel any need to seek out Charles Portis’s other endeavors.  On the True Grit DVD (of course I have all the Coen Brothers’ films on DVD), there is a feature on Charles Portis and his other books.  It was that feature that made me put Portis’s collection on my Christmas list that year.  I’ve been reading through the books at a leisurely pace in chronological order (as is my wont).  Masters of Atlantis, then, is Portis’s fourth novel, and the fourth one I’ve read.

Portis has always had elements of the absurd in his novels, but the absurdities have always existed at the fringes of the tale.  Certainly, there is some absurd feature to all his protagonists, some obsession, or some set way of looking at the world, but the protagonists are a kind of hard center the reader holds on to as we travel through the absurdities of the world and the other characters the protagonist bounces off of. In Masters of Atlantis, Portis leans fully into the absurd at every level of his storytelling.  The tale is full of ridiculous people wanting ridiculous things and behaving in ridiculous ways.

Published in 1985, Masters of Atlantis tells the story of the rise and fall of the Gnomon Society, a secret society (that is often anything but secret) claiming to hold the sacred truths of the world collected by and known to the Atlanteans.  Lamar Jimmerson, a young American soldier in France at the end of the Great War, meets what is to the reader obviously a con man taking advantage of Jimmerson’s naivete and desire for something important and sacred.  This encounter sends the believing Jimmerson to Italy where he believes he’ll meet up with other Gnomons to partake in their society.  Instead of feeling had when he finds no trace of the society there, he decided he was being tested and must wait to be contacted.  From there, he meets another man, Sydney Hen, an Englishman, who, when told about the society and the text Jimmerson had received from his first encounter, wants in.  The two men take the study of that text—the Codex Pappus—seriously and create a full interpretation of the scribblings there.  More men come to them and they essentially start up the Gnomon Society.  The book follows the organization from 1917 to what must be the late ‘70s or early ‘80s. At their finest moment, Jimmerson can afford to live in a grand home in Burnette, Indiana that doubled as a Gnomon Temple.  Jimmerson married Sydney Hen’s sister, Fanny, and had a son, Jerome.  There were Gnomon branches (called Pillars) across the US, and the news was obsessed with them as both possible heroes and possible villains of the age.  But the new grew tired of the Gnomons and people grew uninterested in secret societies.  The Pillars dissolved.  There was a schism in the order with Sydney Hen split off from Jimmerson in their interpretations of the Codex Pappus.  Fanny found a career and moved away from Jimmerson, and Jerome, who never felt comfortable with his father, went with her.  The Burnette temple fell into disarray and the elevated freeway that was built to connect Gary to Chicago went up around the temple itself, the peak of the tower showing through the divided roadway. The novel ends in Texas, where Jimmerson and Hen are brought together again in the compound of one Morehead Moaler, the last Master of the last standing Temple, which is really a doublewide trailer.  The three old men are content with their lot, and there’s always the possibility of the Gnomons rising once more with the new cycle.

There are of course a host of characters who all find a place within the Gnomon Society, or in the case of a few permanently outside the Society in tension with it.  The absurdities lie in the way these characters feel about and respond to the Society and its goings on.  Jimmerson is a true believer, and he has little interest in how the Gnomons fair, though he does have enough of an ego to be played upon by other characters, primarily the mover and shaker, Austin Popper.  He has decided the Codex Pappus is truth, and he spends his life interpreting and building upon that truth with books and papers.  But his pursuit is silliness in terms of the book, and clearly no one reads his writings as we learn that one book was published without every other page missing, and no one notices for decades even though the book has been reprinted several times.  In fact, it seems that everyone involved in the Society are equal believers even as they claim absurd revelations about their own past lives as leaders in the Society. 

So what seems like a nest of conmen is never confirmed to be such.  Portis never steps in and tells us what “the Truth” is even though we are left to infer much.  The man in the opening who gives Jimmerson the Codex Pappus is only presented to us by what he says and does.  What seems obviously a ruse is never laid out for us as a certainty.  And Austin Popper is another case.  We do know that some of his statements are lies, and his ambition is clear to us, but what does he really do with that ambition and those lies?  He is content to sit in the dilapidated Red Room without luxury.  And at the end of the novel, his grand scheme is to live in a doublewide trailer with three old men.  There is obviously a core belief in the Society and its teachings. The absurdity comes in these characters having grand ambitions and cunning social interactions for what are the most meager ends.

However, this approach can make reading the book difficult, in that you don’t have a solid character to hold on to.  Even if you’re interested in following the course of this Society, you aren’t in a position to root for anything—you are along for the ride.  If you’re the kind of reader who is cool with being along for the ride (and in the hands of a skilled writer—which Portis certainly is—I am), then the journey through this absurd world is fun.  But I can see a number of readers having a problem with the narrative, either dropping out some ways in or making it to the end only grudgingly.  Judging by some of the reviews I’ve seen of the book, that seems right.

To me, the absurdities are not offputting because they are so perfectly human.  The Gnomon Society is often seen in light of other secret societies and cults, but how is it really any different than major religions and their major texts.  The texts are written by people, often cobbled together by other people, and then declared by a third group to hold all the answers and knowledge we need.  The gentle mix of con artist and true believers is the exact combination necessary to fuel the expansion of such a religion.  And to be clear, Portis is not mocking people who embrace religions, because those who are critical of them are just as absurd.  I loved the scene of the Texas committee hearing in which Popper is grilled about Jimmerson and the Gnomons.  The committee members are every bit as ridiculous if not moreso.  The fact is, we are a ridiculous species and the more we insist on knowing the truth about anything the more ridiculous we are.  If there is not grand meaning in the mysteries around us, then there are only absurdities in our insistence on their being grand meanings.

What I think makes the book enjoyable to read instead of painful, is the gentleness with which Portis approaches his subject.  I could see the argument that Portis is almost loving toward his creations, laying their absurdities bare and open to critique, but doing so without malice.  If it’s not love, then there is at least a feeling of camaraderie, an acknowledgment that as ridiculous as these people are, they are not especially ridiculous, no more than the rest of us.

Charles Portis's The Dog of the South

*Spoilers ahead*

Damn it’s nice to return to Charles Portis’s writing.  His magic lies in a number of things, I think: the way he creates vivid and quirky characters who never feel gimmicky, the way he diverges from one story to give you the details of another character or event with just the right details, the way he brings references and minor characters up again and again in unexpected moments to give them weight and resonance, and the way the individual narrative instances feel full of meaning and are completely absorbing so that the reader (or I, at least) am never in a hurry to get back to the “plot,” such that it is.  I leave his novels, and The Dog of the South especially, feeling like I experienced a whole world, like our own but sharper and more enjoyable.

Our narrator and protagonist is Ray Midge, a twenty-six-year-old Little Rock man whose wife, Norma, has run off with Ray’s old friend, Norma’s ex-husband, Guy Dupree, and they’ve taken Ray’s car to boot.  The novel begins with Ray having waited patiently for a month to receive the receipts from the credit card Norma and Dupree took with them, and now Ray goes through the receipts with a map to trace out their journey so far.  He then takes Dupree’s Buick, which they left in exchange for Ray’s Torino, and heads out to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to find them and get back Ray’s car, and possibly Norma.  Also looking for Dupree is Jack Wilkie, the bail bondsmen who is responsible to seeing the Dupree makes his court date (Dupree wrote threatening letters to the U.S. president).  When there is no trace of the runaways in Mexico, Ray figures they have headed down to British Honduras where Dupree’s mother has a farm, so he takes the Buick deeper into Central and South America.  In San Miguel, Ray picks up Dr. Reo Symes, an eccentric older con man of sorts who is on the run from the Texas authorities, heading to his own mother who runs a tabernacle in Belize.

Ray is a wonderful character and a hilarious narrator.  I love a well-done first-person narration, and Ray is a treat, much in the same way that Mattie is in True Grit.  They are not your classically unreliable narrators because you can readily believe what they tell you happened.  It’s just that they are such particular personalities, so certain in their views of the world, that they reveal how they think about and engage with the world in a fascinating way.  Ray is something of a control freak, critical of they way Norma, Dupree, and everyone else goes about living life.  I love his short exclamations at the world (“Topology!” (31), “Maintenance!” (25, 120), “Strength of Materials!” (58), “Gravitas!” (131)).  I love his cluelessness that he is oppressive to Norma in his rigidness—when he finally locates her near the end of the novel (I warned you there would be spoilers):

The English doctor had told me she could eat whatever she liked but I thought it best to be on the safe side and I allowed her no fried foods.  I had to turn down her request for fresh pineapple too, it being so coarse and fibrous.  After two days of forcing soup down her gullet I had her on her feet again, taking little compulsory hikes about the room.  She tottered and complained.  I bought her a shark’s-tooth bracelet.  I read to her from old magazines until she asked me to stop doing it (250).

This is a narrator I can listen to all day, even as I know I don’t want to spend more than 10 minutes in his actual presence.

Portis has an interesting habit of setting up a strong plot and then undermining it and taking the story in unexpected directions.  In the first chapter, for example, Ray packs his gun in his car for the trip, planning to have it in his encounter with Dupree.  In Texas, he hides the gun in a pie box at the bottom of his cooler, so that the authorities at the various ports of entry don’t confiscate it.  This is a genuine Chekov’s gun!  Only, upon Ray’s entering Honduras, the border agent finds the gun and takes it without ceremony.  Ray doesn’t spend any time trying to get it back or replace it.  The gun is just gone from the story.  When Ray finally tracks Dupree down on his farm, I was prepared for a confrontational scene, but it was a scene of blockages.  Dupree kept Ray at a distance, refused to tell Ray where either his car or Norma was, wouldn’t let him on the property, and wouldn’t give him any leads.  When Ray returns to force the issue with Victor and Webster at his side, Dupree isn’t there and Ray falls asleep in the field instead of launching his big assault.

In some ways, I feel like this is a story about Ray’s journey and the things he lost along the way.  He loses his gun.  He gives his bonds away to no purpose.  He gives Webster Mrs. Edge’s silverware (another item that seemed like it was set up for something grand within the unfolding plot).  He doesn’t buy his Torino when he finds it.  He drives the Buick into unusability, leaving it on the road and abandoned.  He makes no lasting friends (no one in Honduras writes him back, Dupree is gone, Norma leaves him again, Jack Wilkie gives him no lasting friendship, and Dr. Symes has vanished without sign of being either alive or dead).  He begins as an amateur-expert of history, but after making his way through the various battlefields in the Mexican Civil War (most of which he can’t find), he doesn’t even have that to guide him in Belize), so in effect, he loses his intellectual superiority as well.  Bit by bit, step by step, Ray is stripped of his belonging, certainty, and power—though it’s important to note that he is never broken.  The novel remains funny because Ray keeps trudging on with a wry sense of humor and an unrelenting stubbornness.

What we don’t get is a classic narrative of character development.  This is not the story of how Ray Midge went on an adventure that changed his life. Ray may have some moments of insight (say, about the way he should have treated Norma better), but none of those moments add up to anything significant, and we certainly don’t see him change his ways.  You could say that this book is more of a set of characters studies than a traditional “plot,” but there is a solid throughline that takes us from one encounter to the next.

For all that, I don’t know if I can comfortably say what this novel is about to me.  In some way it’s about the hubris of a white American in neighboring countries, but what it might be saying about that is unclear.  It might be about the way that we all intersect with one another without bending or yielding, bouncing off each other and taking momentary advantage of each other, seen all through a humorous lens to dull the pain of that realization.  It might be about how certain we all are (each character is as self-assured as Ray, certainly), and how that certainty creates barriers and miscommunication as characters speak across each other instead of to each other. 

Do you have any ideas?  I’ll be pondering over it for some time into the future I think.

I can tell how much I enjoy Portis’s writing because the politics of the novel, while a thorn in my side, are not enough to kill my enjoyment.  There is plenty of racism threaded through the novel in the mouths of our narrator and other characters.  There is similarly a reactionary attitude toward the counterculture movements of the late-sixties and seventies.  Yeah, the fact that it’s in the voice of this character softens the distaste, but there is no reason to think that these attitudes are not shared by the author (especially since they occur in the other books of his that I have read).  Even if the attitudes are used ironically, they do so in support of racist ideology and they are inexcusable.  It’s a shitty aspect of the novel.

Norwood

When I anticipated finishing my reading project in mid 2016, I made a request for the Christmas of 2015: I wanted a copy of all of Charles Portis’s books for my shelves.  My family came through, and now that my reading project is done, I have moved on to my 6 Portis books.  I reread True Grit first but am now taking the remaining books in Chronological order.  First up, Portis’s 1966 debut novel, Norwood. 

When Norwood’s sister, Vernell, gets married, her husband, Bill Bird, moves in to Norwood and Vernell’s family home in Ralph, Texas.  Bill and Norwood do not get along, so when Norwood gets an opportunity to travel up to New York to see an old Marines buddy, he takes it.  The remainder of the novel consists of the travels of Norwood to New York and then down to North Carolina, back over to Tennessee, and finally back to Ralph.  On the way, Norwood meets with a cast of colorful characters and ends up with a fiancée named Rita Lee, and makes friends with a British little person named Edmund Ratner, and frees a chicken named Joann from an arcade fortune-telling machine.

Norwood seems to some extent to be a comic take on On the Road and other road novels of the 50s and 60s about seeing America and making sense of this post-war country.  Portis’s interest, however, is always the people and their interactions.  He has a gift for dialogue and voice, and the book is scene after scene with the people Norwood encounters.  Portis’s dry wit and Norwood’s deadpan nature makes for a lot of humor and chuckling to oneself while reading.

Like a road trip, this book needs to be enjoyed for the journey and not for any destination.  I cannot make hide nor hair of it in thinking about what the novel is doing on any large scale.  I get the distinct impression that Portis is amusing himself, that he’s enjoying the characters and dialogue as much as we are.  Character and characterization seem to be the higher aims of the novel, and while I am in the habit of wanting  something more from my literature, I found the book to be very satisfying.

If you have a breakthrough revelation about what this book is doing in its time and place, shoot me a note and enlighten me.  Go read it and get back to me, please.

True Grit Is Truly Amazing

I first read True Grit back in 2009 when I initially learned that the Coen Brothers had turned the novel into a script.  Last week I finally had the pleasure to reread it, and better yet, to read it aloud to my wife.  She sometimes suffers from insomnia, and being read to forces her mind to stop yelling at her and let her drift off to sleep instead.  And I’ll tell you, Charles Portis writes with such music in his phrases that the rhythm of each sentence is a pure joy to read out loud.  And yes, I read the entire novel with a bad southern accent.

True Grit is a true masterpiece; everything it does, it does to perfection.  The characters are engaging and full of life.  The humor is spot on.  The relationships grow and change in subtle and powerful ways.  The writing is gorgeous and insightful.  The tone and Mattie’s voice are consistent and gripping.  Mattie Ross, our fearless narrator, is one of the finest literary creations ever.  From her opening paragraph, to her financial wrangling with Col. Stonehill over his debt to her and her family, to her handling of Rooster Cogburn and her unflinching dealings with LaBoeuf, to her facing down of Tom Chaney who had murdered her father—in all these things, Mattie is breathtaking in the sheer amount of ass-kicking she does.

Because I love the novel so dearly, I am hesitant to look into the political and ethical stances that lay at the foundation of the story.  This story is American to its very core, depicting a frontier life of self-reliance, revenge, and unexplored morality plucked from the bible.  Rooster Cogburn is a lawman who certainly has his own moral code, but who is only too happy to be judge and executioner as well.  When Mattie consults with the Fort Smith sheriff to find herself a Marshal to hunt Chaney down, she asks for the “best,” to which the sheriff replies, 

I would have to weigh that proposition . . . .  The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn.  He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. . . . Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive.  He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. . . . He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner.  He is straight as a string.  Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.

Mattie of course responds, “Where can I find this Rooster.”  For all of Mattie’s moralizing asides, she does not want morality to enter into this quest for revenge.  In case we doubted the sheriff’s characterization, we get the courtroom transcript of Cogburn’s testimony in the trial of Odus Wharton, in which it is clear that Rooster is not “straight as a string.”

There is great humor in Mattie’s choice and in Cogburn’s courtroom testimony, and Portis makes it clear who these characters are and what they want.  That Rooster rode with William Quantrill in the Civil War and defended Quantrill against LaBoeuf only reinforces who we know Rooster to be.  And don’t even get me tangling with Mattie’s outspoken devotion to the almighty dollar and capitalism.  So the question is this: is Portis making a larger statement about morality and America?  I don’t know.  It seems to be that it’s doing something there, but what exactly that is isn’t clear to me.  The story is first a foremost about this stunning protagonist and her unlikely friendship with these two brutal men.  The story softens them all, and Mattie’s restrained narrative voice only makes that softening that much more powerful.

I am planning on reading Portis’s other 4 novels as well as the published collection of his short stories and other writings, so I expect who Portis is and what is important to him will become clearer to me in time.

Whatever his politics and intentions, he is one hell of a writer, and so far, that’s good enough for me.