American Losers and Crackpots
Charles Portis's timely assessment of the United States
The second Trump administration sent me back to the novels of Charles Portis. Portis is best known for True Grit, but its reputation as a “normal western” belies Portis’s weird Southern sensibility, his sick sense of humor, and his general pessimism about humanity.
There are two particularly American aspects of Portis’s novels that ring so true these days that I wondered why they were so rare in other American novels: his characters are losers, and his characters don’t listen. Yes, novels are filled with all sorts of quasi-losers, but Portis’s losers are a particularly extreme breed: people who have settled for so little that they either have melted into total obeisance to life or else have picked some delusion to cling to in defiance of reality. And alongside their loserdom, they hardly ever hear anything anyone else says: conversations are just barking noises, not exchanges of information.
These two traits are very unliterary characteristics, things that get in the way of making coherent and inspiring writing. Portis’s commitment to them is unusual. Ann Douglas wrote of Melville:
Melville’s writing is alive with his at times outraged conviction that he cannot produce a work significantly better than his culture…Melville defined the test which every formidable American author in his day and since has had to impose on himself: how to exploit and resist the crude American material which both enriches and impoverishes the writer; how to take the exact measure of the reader who belongs to and is that material, how to know him utterly and intimately without being absorbed by him.
Melville strained to the limit and beyond. Portis, like few others, wallows in the limitations themselves. Given where we are today, he feels nonchalantly prophetic.
1. Americans are Losers
By losers I mean people doomed to failure—people for whom “success” is not just impossible, but nonsensical. There is no character in Portis for which this isn’t true.
Despite the presence of UFOlogists, cult leaders, and would-be Communist revolutionaries, Portis’s novels don’t foreground those characters to the exclusion of more “normal” types of people. Even in Masters of Atlantis, which is all about two-bit cults, there’s very little to distinguish the crackpots from the hucksters and the rubes. They are just variations on the overall archetype of the American loser.
In Dog of the South, Dupree is a useless would-be Communist who somehow charms the narrator Midge’s wife away from him despite being her ex-husband. She should have known better, but she was bored. Midge should have known better than to go after her, but maybe he was bored too. The “Dog of the South” itself is a broken-down camper full of the entombed, stillborn dreams of the crackpot Dr. Symes, who forces a “How to Win Friends”-style book on Midge as though it were the Bible itself.
Midge is the only character even vaguely conscious of the gap between aspiration and reality, and this may be why Portis was attracted to losers as narrators: deluded narrators make for rough going, which is why his tale of dueling magickal cults, Masters of Atlantis, had to be written in the third person. For the less self-aware, nothing ever gets through to them to make them acknowledge the gap between their aspirations and cruel reality—that American frontier spirit keeps them attached to their dreams to the bitter end. When they meet with failure, as all but the luckiest do, they refuse to connect it to any failure of reality-testing. They just lash out at whatever’s closest.
The lack of even a plausible specter of meaningful success is uncommon in American literature. Disappointment and disenchantment are everywhere, but Portis’s outlook renders a lot of those novels redundant by his terms. “Success” isn’t just chimerical, it’s ridiculous. Offhand, only Bob Slocum in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened shares the level of loser-dom Portis takes for granted. For Portis, America orients itself so thoroughly around a spiritual void that efforts to fill it are pitifully funny.
2. Americans Don’t Listen
One of Portis’s signatures is dialogue in which the narrator listens to a character rant about something. It can be anything, whether it’s their favorite book or the history of the Mayans or how they want to die or why a car won’t start. Often the character is blaming the narrator for some misfortune. Whatever it is, their argument doesn’t make sense. The narrator points out the lack of logic, to no avail. Either the character ignores the narrator or snipes at him and goes on believing whatever they already did.
The result: two people talking at odds past one another. Every response is treated as little but a digression from where the speaker is going to go, hell or highwater. At times, the respondent could say anything and the speaker would say the exact same thing next.
Here’s narrator Jimmy Burns in Gringos speaking to Wade, a UFO crackpot headed for some sort of apocalypse ceremony in Mayan ruins:
The City of Dawn. That was where Dan and his people were going. I asked Wade about it. “Is it a place or what?”
“Yes, a place, of course, but much more than that. Much more!”
“Where is it?”
“Where indeed.”
“You don’t know?”
“I see what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to trap me into an indiscretion.”
“Hardly a trap. I simply asked you where it was.”
“Aren’t we curious!”
No use to press him. Smirking and coy, he was like all the others of his breed. I would have to grab him by the throat to get any sense out of him and I couldn’t do that here.
Jimmy’s friends aren’t any more receptive. His pal Rudy, also a UFOlogist, gets awfully suspicious when Jimmy finds him with a broken-down camper:
He said, “Wait a minute. Who told you I was going to Tumbalá anyway?”
“It was all over town when I left. There must have been something in the papers.”
“Louise told you. Everybody wants to stick his nose into my business.”
“Nobody told me. I’m not going to Tumbalá.”
He thought that over as he spread meat paste on a survival cracker with his commando knife. “Well, it’s funny, you coming along like this, right behind me.”
“Yes, except I’m going to Ektún. This is not the road to Tumbalá.”
“Your map says it is.”
…
“No, you came too far, Rudy. You didn’t turn soon enough.”
“Your map is not drawn to scale.”
“Of course not. It’s just a simple diagram. But it’s easy enough to see where to turn off. You can’t drive to Tumbalá anyway. I told you that.”
“I was going as far as I could and then set up base camp.”
Nothing Rudy says sways him from his suspicion. Nothing Rudy says responds to any point Jimmy makes. Argument and logic go nowhere.
And because I love it so much, here is a Civil War/revolving restaurant conversation the narrator Midge has with the endlessly hectoring Dr. Symes during a too-long car ride in Dog of the South:
“Are you a student of the Civil War, Dr. Symes?”
“No, but my father was.”
“What was that about Bragg? You said you wouldn’t have Bragg walking around in your park.”
“My father had no time for Bragg or Joseph E. Johnston. He always said Bragg lost the war. What do you know about these revolving restaurants, Speed?”
“I don’t know anything about them but I can tell you that Braxton Bragg didn’t lose the war by himself.”
“I’m talking about these restaurants up on top of buildings that turn around and around while the people are in there eating.”
“I know what you’re talking about but I’ve never been in one. Look here, you can’t just go around saying Braxton Bragg lost the war.”
“My father said he lost it at Chickamauga.”
“I know what Bragg did at Chickamauga, or rather what he didn’t do. I can’t accept Joseph E. Johnston’s excuses either for not going to help Pemberton but I don’t go around saying he lost the war.”
“Well, my father believed it. Pollard was his man. A fellow named Pollard, he said, wrote the only fair account of the thing.”
“I’ve read Pollard. He calls Lincoln the Illinois ape.”
“Pollard was his man. I don’t read that old-timey stuff myself. That’s water over the dam. I’ve never wasted my time with that trash. What’s your personal opinion of these revolving restaurants?”
“I think they’re all right.”
“Leon Vurro’s wife said I should have a fifty-story tower right in the middle of the park with a revolving restaurant on top. What do you think?”
“I think it would be all right.”
Whether you find this hilarious or painful probably says a lot about your attitude toward life. Portis’s conversations have some of the lowest informational value in fiction.
This sort of noncommunication, so common in life, doesn’t show up all that much in fiction, not even very talky ones. When it does, like in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, it doesn’t stand out because the characters are crazy in so much more grotesque ways. When one landowner blatantly cheats at chess then insists he didn’t, or another keeps raising the price of the deeds of his dead serfs because of their superior skills (despite them being, y’know, dead), the characters are too eccentric to stand as representatives of humanity—at least to a non-Russian. There’s no such comfort in Portis. No one listens, even the normies.
The narrators aren’t immune to this either. They pay more attention, but they have their own obsessions, whether it’s Jimmy’s “secret plan” in Gringos or Midge’s fantasy account in Dog of the South of what his wife got up to when she ran off with her ex-husband. They miss a lot.
Portis’s explanation, I think, is the same one as for why Americans are losers. Americans in particular get very attached to simpleminded, inadequate dreams, fail to build up any sort of adequate rationale for why they’re even possible, and seal themselves off from any challenge to those dear dreams.
So those are two quintessential American traits in Portis’s novels. If it’s not obvious by this point why they’re so relevant at this point in time…I’m afraid I can’t help you. Portis would say that I’d have no chance of explaining it.