As of February 18th, 2020, we note the passing of the novelist Charles Portis. The writing I have seen on Mr. Portis’s novels seems to me to completely miss the point. For example, the scholarly obituary by Roy Reed in the New York Times quotes another “Times” reviewer as saying Portis’s major them was “the American weakness for secret conspiracies and arcane knowledge,.” “con men. scam artists, and flimflammers of every sort.” This is nonsense. Charles Portis did not give up a promising career in journalism to write trash about flimflammers. His books are about America’s moral heritage. They are about the fact that America used to be a Biblical country. Take Portis’s masterpiece, “True Grit” (1968). There are no flimflammers in “True Grit.” The novel is about courage and its punishments — in short, moral values, as focused through the mind of 19th Century America. In the novel, the heroine, Mattie Ross, displays extraordinary courage, does battle with deadly criminals, and is cast down into a snake-filled cave. Her fighting companion, Marshall Rooster Cogburn, rescues her in extremis and saves her life. The theme here is deeply Christian. Mattie’s courage casts her down into Sheol. Love lifts her up.
As I said, Portis’s novels are about America’s Biblical heritage, which even today runs very deep. Set against the literary backdrop of more effete fiction being produced at that time, Portis’s works ask the question, What has been America’s moral education since the passing of its Biblical era? In moral terms, are we going upward or downward? This is a profound question, which probably could only have come from a southerner.