By John Brummett
“Did you hear that the Coen Brothers are remaking ‘True Grit’? They’ll do it right, unlike that other disgrace. And Buddy Portis didn’t even know who the Coen Brothers were.”
“Who’s Buddy Portis?”
That’s how a conversation around here often goes. It’s almost precisely how one went Sunday.
It doesn’t surprise me that Charles Portis, nicknamed Buddy, wasn’t familiar with Joel and Ethan Coen, the greatest filmmakers of our time. You know: “Fargo,” “Raising Arizona” and the Oscar winner, “No Country for Old Men,” from the Cormac McCarthy novel.
Portis isn’t a great student of modern culture. He’s a great student of history and human misadventure.
But it does surprise me when otherwise well-informed people around here have no idea who Portis is.
He grew up in Hamburg and did Marine service in Korea. Then he went to the University of Arkansas, did newspaper reporting for the Arkansas Gazette and in New York and London and then, by the late 1960s, became such a novelist that he has a cult following among people in New York, mainly, who think he’s our time’s Mark Twain.
He lives in Little Rock, more quietly than reclusively, a bit the eccentric, or a lot, writing by morning, bar-visiting by early evening and driving around town in an old pickup. Or he might be in Mexico, where a couple of his characters from novels confronted stressful situations.
Usually what happens in his rare novel, published at a rate barely exceeding one per decade, is that some marginally competent character in Arkansas, or maybe from barely on the Texas side of Texarkana, goes on a trip and meets oddballs and gets into predicaments.
Roy Blount, noted Southern humorist, says he could never marry a woman who didn’t laugh aloud within five minutes of starting to read Portis’ “Norwood.” Personally I get more cracked up by “Dog of the South.”
In that one, Ray Midge confronts all manner of inconvenience while tracking his wife from Little Rock into Mexico from billings on his own credit card. He’s driving her male accomplice’s car, an old Buick that has a quarter-turn slack in the steering wheel and needs frequent repairs. His wife and her man-friend took off in Ray’s Ford Torino, you see. It may well be that Ray wants the car back first and his wife secondarily if at all.
Portis writes in a smart, sparse, minimalist way. Sometimes you stop and go back because you suspect you just missed a joke. You probably did. That’s called deadpan. And the Ark-La-Tex dialogue is dead-on.
So now he’s past 70 and people don’t read books much and no one has made a movie of one of his books since the early ‘70s. He seems to deplore attention, as evidenced the other night.
The Oxford American magazine sought to raise money to get itself out of the red. So it put on a “Best of the South” gala in Little Rock and presumed to honor actor Morgan Freeman and Portis as the best of this or that about Southern arts and culture.
Portis showed up dressed in finery appropriate to the occasion, but got uncomfortable and departed when people wanted to take his picture. He returned in every-day clothes, too late for dinner, but in time to pick up his award.
So now the Coen Brothers are in New Mexico, where there are tax breaks for filmmakers and mountains that’ll pass for Ozark hills. They’re endeavoring to get “True Grit” right, in the way Portis created it, and erase mercifully from our memory that debacle with John Wayne and — Lord help us — Glen Campbell.
Jeff Bridges, fresh from an Oscar, will play Rooster Cogburn. Matt Damon will be the Texas Ranger.
Mattie Ross will get played by an actual Southern girl of 13 or 14 instead of by a grown woman named Kim Darby offering some over-emoted variation of perky spunkiness where the heroic character’s precocious nobility and strength were supposed to be.
Before this is over, y’all may know who Charles Portis is, even if he’d prefer that you not.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
