Long Time Leaving (29 page)

T
he risk you take trying to convey your enthusiasm for a book by Charles Portis, of course, is that you will sound like Dr. Reo Symes on
With Wings as Eagles,
by his hero, John Selmer Dix. According to Symes, Dix wrote
With Wings as Eagles,
his masterpiece, while riding back and forth from Dallas to Los Angeles on the bus (the noon one out of Dallas) for a whole year. “He was a broken man all right,” says Symes, “but by God the work got done.” Compared to
With Wings as Eagles,
says Symes, all other writing is just “foul grunting.”

Dr. Symes is a character in
The Dog of the South,
which many regard as Portis's masterpiece. I have this negative to say about
The Dog of the South:
I think
Norwood,
also by Portis, is a little better. But
The Dog of the South
is the Portis book that at the moment I will try not to go overboard on—which, you are inclined to suspect, is what Dr. Reo Symes does on
With Wings as Eagles.
You hate to doubt Symes, because he commands a breadth of experience. “We learn in
The Dog of the South
that Symes “had sold hi-lo shag carpet remnants and velvet paintings from the back of a truck in California. He had sold wide shoes by mail, shoes that must have been almost round, at widths up to EEEEEE. He had sold gladiola bulbs and vitamins for men and fat-melting pills and all-purpose books and hail-damaged pears. He had picked up small fees
counseling veterans on how to fake chest pains so as to gain immediate admission to V.A. hospitals and a free week in bed. He had sold ranchettes in Colorado and unregistered securities in Arkansas.”

I'm not even sure I want to keep on quoting from
The Dog of the South,
because maybe these excerpts won't be delightful to you if I take them out of context and jump up and down about them too much. It would be a shame to thrust Portis's work upon people when the work itself is so bent on minding its own business. When somebody asks me for advice about how to write humorous fiction, I say take a look at Portis's characters. The last thing in the world they have in mind is being funny. Some of them are loud and some of them are reticent, and frequently they are less than straightforward (or clear in their own minds) about what they are up to, but they are all taking on the world as seriously as they know how.

And they are taking it on in apt (pale word!) detail. Here is a passage from
The Dog of the South
that is famous among Portis devotees: “When the beer came,” says Raymond Midge, “I dipped a finger in it and wet down each corner of the paper napkin to anchor it, so it would not come up with the mug each time and make me appear ridiculous.” Maybe you can't see why that would be so famous. Well…

Here's something. Midge is talking to a Mexican hotel owner. The owner has just said that he's made a mistake and booked Midge into the same room that Midge's runaway wife, Norma, and her paramour, Guy Dupree, stayed in when they came through. (Midge is tracking them down by following the trail of receipts from his credit card, which they stole along with his car.) “Did I wish to be moved? I said no, it made no difference. Then there was a disturbance in the kitchen and he went to investigate. When he came back, he said, ‘It was nothing, the mop caught fire. All my employees are fools.’ ”

The mop caught fire! But never mind details.
The Dog of the South
has themes. Raymond Midge recalls the unsuitable houses he looked at to buy with Norma, when they were still together:

Midge at twenty-six is a prematurely old man himself in many ways, and he is afraid of getting older. (“Think about this,” someone tells him. “All the little animals of your youth are long dead.”) But he is staunch. Strength of Materials was his favorite subject in engineering school, which he didn't finish. “Everybody else hated it because of all the tables we had to memorize but I loved it, the sheared beam. I had once tried to explain to Dupree how things fell apart from being pulled and compressed and twisted and bent and sheared but he wouldn't listen…. He would always say—
boast,
the way those people do—that he had no head for figures and couldn't do things with his hands, slyly suggesting the presence of finer qualities.”

Portis's characters, in their various often seemingly feckless ways, are staunch. His central characters, furthermore, though overtly insensitive and narrow in various male ways (this would include Mattie Ross, the female protagonist of
True Grit,
a tough little nut), have finer qualities. They are full of cranky, unwilled generous-heartedness. One reason I like
Norwood
better than
The Dog of the South
is that Norwood Pratt is a more appealing fellow than Ray Midge, who is not upset when somebody calls him “rat face,” because “it was old stuff to me, being compared to a rat. In fact, I look more like a predatory bird than a rat but any person with small sharp features that are bunched in the center of his face can expect to be called a rat about three times a year.”

But that is just narrowness on my part. On rereading
The Dog of the South
I gained a new appreciation of how staunchly this rat-faced man persists in not being a rat to anybody, even to such a conscienceless rat as Dr. Reo Symes, an old man (“There were dark bags under his eyes and he had long meaty ears”) who, even as his own very old mother is dying (apparently—she rallies), is figuring the angles on how to get his hooks into the little island off Ferriday, Louisiana, that she doesn't want him to turn into something profitable like a Christian boys’ ranch or a Civil “War theme park. (“Every afternoon at three Lee would take off his grey coat and wrestle an alligator in a mud hole.”) Ray Midge would never kick Mr. Proctor out.

In fact Portis set himself the task, in
The Dog of the South,
of writing a
novel with a boring narrator. That's about as unshowy a tour de force as I can imagine. Unshowy I say, not unpretentious.
The Dog of the South
contains the only bit of theology that has struck me as cogent since I was a child. Reo Symes's mother asks Midge whether he believes that Heaven and Hell, as places, exist. After hemming and hawing under further pressure from Mrs. Symes (who has “the same raccoon eyes” as her son), Midge says, “It's just so odd to think that people are walking around in Heaven and Hell.”

“Yes,” counters Mrs. Symes, “but it's odd to find ourselves walking around down here, too, isn't it?”

C
arl Perkins, interviewed by the
Oxford American,
said this about his wife: “I never thought she would be my sweetheart.” Wouldn't that make a good line in a song?

Songs that spring from how people talk. Jimmie Rodgers: “Everybody does it in Ha-wa-ya.” Roger Miller: “You took my young head and filled it full / Of pure-D B-U-Double-L bull.” Someone who has written in interesting conversational rhythms is Tom T. Hall. If “A Week in a Country Jail” were a poem, you'd have to scan it as alternating seven-foot and five-foot lines. Here is my favorite seven-footer: “That part about me being who I was did not impress him.” For one thing, the sentiment. If you try to be who you are in order to impress somebody, here is what you are: unimpressive. But the great thing is the movement of the words.

I was at a writers’ conference in Arkansas with Tom T, and he told me he was going down the road in a carful of musicians once, along about 7 p.m., and all was quiet, when suddenly the bass player of the group sat up bolt upright, stared out through the windshield, and cried:

“I hate to see it! I hate to see it!”

“What?” the others demanded.

“That evening sun go down.”

“I hate to see that evening sun go down.” What would you give to have written that? You can hear and see Bessie Smith sing it (brace yourself first) in a 1929 film short with the same title as the song
St. Louis Blues.
Bessie Smith singing toothpaste ingredients could stop a person's heart, but even on their own, on the page, the words are moving. Those long, long
e
's; those down, down
n's.
The sentiment universal (some evenings, anyway), the rhythm inevitable. You don't have to make any effort to read it. Just ride it along.

W. C. Handy wrote it. When he was trying to get started as a musician, he said, “I had to sleep on the levee of the Mississippi River, on the cobblestones, broke and hungry. And if you've ever slept on cobblestones, or had nowhere to sleep, you can understand why I began that song with “I hate to see that evening sun go down.”

Elizabeth Bishop called it her favorite line of iambic pentameter. Remember when there was lots of agitated discussion of Ebonics, pro and con? I kept waiting for someone to make the point that if you acquire white English, you can become Clarence Thomas, whereas if you acquire black English, you can become Quentin Tarantino. Anyway, isn't it good to know that Shakespeare and the blues come in the same meter? I am not a good enough shade-tree musicologist to examine how twelve bars twine together with five feet of bah-
dum
bah-
dum,
but it can't hurt to quote Robert Frost: “I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle.”

I gave a talk at the New York Public Library in which I tried to bring literary criticism down home by maintaining not only that the word
text
has the same root as
Texas
but also that it first appeared in a cowboy poem entitled “I Feel Like I Been Read Hard and Put Up Wet.”

Then I tried to illustrate my sense that Southern African American English has a rhetorical savor, a fluidity and sense of linguistic fun, that hearkens back not only to Africa, presumably, but also to Elizabethan English. I quoted the definition of
buzzard's luck:
“Can't kill nothin and nothin won't die.” Comparable to Shakespeare's “Death once dead, there's no more dying then,” and “A bliss in proof—and proved, a very woe,” and “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

Last summer, I heard a black kid in Atlanta deliver a line of downright blank verse. He was addressing a couple of smaller kids who were having trouble dealing with Atlanta's transit system:

“Y'all like y'all never rode no bus befo’.”

A word about the word
y'all.
I remember twenty-some-odd years ago, I hadn't been living in New York long, and my first wife told me she had addressed some new feminist friends as “y'all,” and they had turned up
their noses. I thought this over for half a second. It was clear to me there was nothing wrong with the word
y'all
except other people's prejudices, and I'd be John Brown (as my father used to say) if I was going to give any consideration to not using it, and I haven't. “What are y'all doing tonight?” I asked a couple of Northern black people (that is to say, first-or second-generation Northern) I had just met at a writers’ conference recently, as I would have asked any other group of more than one person who looked like they might know where the interesting party was, and they looked at me, and it occurred to me, “They're thinking for a moment that I'm trying to talk black.” Then they saw I was just from the South.

I don't guess
y'all
is Shakespearean, but the expression
did her wrong
is. “Lucrece swears he did her wrong,” in
The Rape of Lucrece.
“He
done
her wrong” is just a refinement.

For the library crowd, I tried to find a couplet from a Shakespeare sonnet that would make a good blues stanza. Best I could do was the last two lines of Sonnet 50, in which a man laments that the horse he is riding is carrying him away from his lover (so you might say it's a cowboy poem). It's not the horse's fault, of course—the man has to make the trip, for business reasons—but the man gets angry at the horse and jabs him with his spurs, which makes the horse groan. That groan, the man says, hurts him more (easy for him to say) than the spurs hurt the horse,

That effort suffered, as I knew it would, from how badly I sing. So I tried going the other way, with a sonnet proceeding from W. C. Handy's line. It's spoken by an old boy whose good woman has gone West, lured by the bright lights of Hollywood: