‘True Grit’ writer shied away from publicity
NEW YORK — Novelist Charles Portis, a favorite among critics and writers for such shaggy dog stories as “Norwood” and “Gringos” and a bounty for Hollywood whose droll, bloody Western “True Grit” was a bestseller twice adapted into Oscar-nominated films, died Monday at age 86.
Portis, a former newspaper reporter who apparently learned enough to swear off talking to the media, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. His brother, Jonathan Portis, said he died in a hospice in Little Rock, Ark., his longtime residence.
Charles Portis was among the most admired authors to nearly vanish from public consciousness in his own lifetime. His fans included Tom Wolfe, Roy Blount Jr. and Larry McMurtry, and he was often compared to Mark Twain for his plainspoken humor and wry perspective. Portis saw the world from the ground up, from bars and shacks and trailer homes, and few spun wilder and funnier stories. In a Portis novel, usually set in the South and south of the border, characters embarked on journeys that took the most unpredictable detours.
In “Norwood,” an ex-Marine from Texas heads East in a suspicious car to collect a suspicious debt but winds up on a bus with a circus dwarf, a chicken and a girl he just met. In “Gringos,” an expatriate in Mexico with a taste for order finds himself amid hippies, end-of-theworld cultists and disappearing friends.
The public knew Portis best for “True Grit,” the quest of Arkansas teen Mattie Ross to avenge her father’s murder. The novel was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1968 and was soon adapted (and softened) as a film showcase for John Wayne, who starred as Rooster Cogburn, the drunken, one-eyed marshal Mattie enlists to find the killer.
In 2010, the Coen brothers worked up a less glossy, more faithful “True Grit,” featuring Jeff Bridges as Rooster and newcomer Hallie Steinfeld as Mattie.
“No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does,” Mississippi native Donna Tartt wrote in an afterword for a 2005 reissue of the novel.
Portis was born in 1933 in El Dorado, Ark., one of four children of a school superintendent and a housewife who Portis thought could have been a writer herself. As a kid, he loved comic books and movies and the stories he learned from his family. In a brief memoir written for The Atlantic Monthly, he recalled growing up in a community where the ratio was about “two Baptist churches or one Methodist church per gin. It usually took about three gins to support a Presbyterian church, and a community with, say, four before you found enough tepid idolators to form an Episcopal congregation.”
He was a natural raconteur who credited his stint in the Marines with giving him time to read. After leaving the service, he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1958 with a degree in journalism and for the next few years was a newspaper man, starting as a night police reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and finishing as London bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune.
His interview subjects included Malcolm X and J.D. Salinger, whom Portis encountered on an airplane. He was also a firsthand observer of the civil rights movement. In 1963, he covered a riot and the police beating of black people in Birmingham, Ala.
Eager to write novels, Portis left the Herald Tribune in 1964 and from Arkansas completed “Norwood,” published two years later and adapted for a 1970 movie of the same name starring Glen Campbell and Joe Namath.
Portis placed his stories in familiar territory. He knew his way around Texas and Mexico and worked enough with women stringers from the Ozarks in Arkansas to draw upon them for Mattie’s narrative voice in “True Grit.” He eventually settled in Little Rock, where he reportedly spent years working on a novel that was never released. “Gringos,” his fifth and last novel, came out in 1991.