The Original NYT Review of Delta Wedding

April 14, 1946

A Fine Novel of the Deep South

By CHARLES POORE

DELTA WEDDING By Eudora Welty.

hen Eudora Welty's short stories about the South began to appear--was it as long as eight or nine years ago?--they seemed to be pretty close to perfection in their contemporary field. They had a wry, precise shine to them that was like nothing anyone else was writing, or, for that matter, has written since. What you might call the O-O-group of annual anthologies named for Mr. O'Brien and Mr. O. Henry--soon began to laurel them, and there were amiable arguments between critics as to just who had discovered Miss Welty, overlooking the fairly obvious fact that Miss Welty had discovered herself, emerging as a skillful and sensitive writer without the assiduous, if not always relevant, help of critical counsel.

What was apparent was that here was a new talent, sparkling and deep, combining the sensibility of Virginia Woolf's moody brilliance with an uncommon sense of the American realistic tradition. Miss Welty's stories go deep into the motives and moods and compulsions that move her characters--but you never doubt that they live and have their being not far from the streets of Jackson and the bayous and cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta country or Natchez country.

It is not William Faulkner's Gothic South she writes about any more than it is the South of Caroline Gordon or Erskine Caldwell or Ellen Glasgow or the ancestor-haunted writers who come and go with the wind. It is her own South, true and recognizable--yet a South no one else could write about as she does, because no one else can see it through her distinctly individual perception. She gives its commonplaces of life and death the point and savor of her unmistakable style. To go further and say that the same point and savor would appear if she were writing about people in the Puget Sound country or Barsetshire would be an oversimplification, ignoring the heritage and environment that go into the making of a writer's style.

In discussions of Miss Welty's stories there have always, of course, been lurking comparisons to the technique of Katherine Mansfield and the method of Katherine Anne Porter or any other talented short-story writer who happened also to he a woman--though when it was clear that her ballad-like tales were not designed to solve the more durable problems of her place and time there was, as well, an opportunity to compare her with Henry James.

It generally seemed unreasonable, however, to ask Miss Welty to write even better than she was already writing about the South she knew. Instead, then, people began to ask her to write novels. This is a venerable literary custom which, if transferred to painting, would harass good easel- artists with demands that they go in for wall-wide murals; if transferred to sports, would urge champion hundred-yard runners to concentrate on the mile or the marathon.

But it sometimes produces fine results. It certainly has in Miss Welty's case. Her full-length novel, "Delta Wedding," has all the excellencies of her short stories with all the advantages of a wider pattern. It gives her a chance to tell us more about her people and their ways of life; it gives us the pleasure of seeing a full drama rather than a one-act play. And, beyond that, it is true to human life as you will find it at a considerable distance from the Mississippi Delta.

Nothing could be simpler than the outline of the story Miss Welty tells in "Delta Wedding"; nothing could be more complex than the novel's pattern of relationships and reactions. Yet the complexities of individual lives are never blurred in the cheery bedlam of life among the Fairchilds at Shellmound--the rustically feudal cotton barony they all move through with so much personal feeling and general exuberance.

The Fairchild clan has gathered for the wedding of Dabney, the second daughter of the family--in her particular generation--and Troy Flavin, who is the overseer, a man as ruddy-haired as a miller out of Chaucer and as unsuitable in the eyes of various members of the family. But they seldom say so, out loud. They express it through their attitudes, through apparent irrelevancies, through the way they live and treat each other.

For the light comes obliquely in Miss Welty's writing, but it comes from every direction, so that in the end everything has been illuminated and you know the Fairchild's world inside and out. Miss Welty does not tell you, she takes you and shows you; she does not lecture you, she lets her characters do all the talking, all the doing. The chance remark of one of the children (there are children of all ages in "Delta Wedding," each sharply defined); the soliloquy of one of the older relatives, people living in a twilight between Shiloh and Calvin Coolidge's America; the serene and affectionate (yet really lethal) maneuvers for place and power forever going on, mean more than pages of exposition.

The time is 1923, in the late summer when the semi-tropical heat hung over river and bayou and field and played its own part in affecting characters and tempers. We see the scene sometimes through the eyes of a girl of 9 whose mother has died and who has come to Shellmound on a kind of trial visit that will decide whether she is to become a permanent member of the family or be sent back to her non-Fairchild father in Jackson; sometimes through the eyes of one of the older members of the family; sometimes through the pages of the eldest daughter's diary; sometimes through the eyes of outsiders or relatives-by-marriage who, however close they may approach the gaieties and mysteries 

of the impulsively warm-hearted clan, know there will for them always be ultimate barriers.

The interplay of family life, with a dozen different people saying and doing a dozen different things all at the same time, is wonderfully handled by Miss Welty so that no detail is lost, every detail had its place in the pattern of the whole. The transitions are so smoothly made that you seem to be all over the place at once, knowing the living members of three generations and all the skeletons and ghosts.

And gradually you see that this is not so much a late-blooming family feudalism as it is a perpetual matriarchy, that, though the men may think they rule, it is the women who really rule: holding on to the land, holding the family together, while the men go to seed or ruin or to die in Civil War battles or the Argonne.

In a single episode Miss Welty illuminates the whole world of the Fairchilds. The episode was a near tragedy. One of the older Fairchilds, the admired and bedeviled George, had of his own free will stayed on a railway trestle, with a dimwitted young relative whose foot was caught between the ties. They had no business there in the first place. Fortunately, the oncoming train stopped in time. (Perhaps no train would presume to run over a Fairchild.) But it was the gesture that mattered. To the Fairchilds who told the story--over and over again--it was an amusing episode; to outsiders it was a piece of reckless quixotry typical of the Fairchilds, the essence of Fairchildism. And Fairchildism, with all its admirable qualities and all its faults, is not, perhaps, confined to the people who represent it in the pages of "Delta Wedding."

The Missionaries of Civility

Death Comes for the Archbishop

By Mitchell Kalpakgian

Originally printed in Crisis Magazine, March 20, 2014

“Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers”—the telltale signs of civilized life.

In Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop two French Jesuit missionaries arrive in the American Southwest to revive the Catholic faith and evangelize the Mexicans and Indians, Catholics who were once taught but have lapsed and do not live their faith seriously. As the priests bring the Sacraments to the small villages, baptize the children, and sanctify the marriages of couples who have lived together and founded families without the blessing of the Church, the Jesuits realize that their missionary work requires other forms of education besides religious instruction. Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant as Catholic missionaries to the New World also bring culture and civilization to a primitive world. Wherever the Catholic faith flourishes, the quality of life also improves, and people learn the art of living well rather than merely surviving. In the minds of the two Jesuits, “Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers”—the telltale signs of civilized life, indeed.

Discovering a hundred-year-old bell in the basement of a church, Father Vaillant finds men to build a scaffold and to raise the bell to swing on beams. He introduces the bell to order the day with the regular tolling of its music. To an unstructured world lacking basic organization, the priests bring order, discipline, and regularity. When the Mexicans insist that the priest baptize the children first because “The men are all in the field,” Bishop Latour insists, “A man can stop work to be married.” He refuses to grant this unorthodox request out of a love for the moral order: “the marriages first, the baptisms afterward; that order is Christian. I will baptize the children tomorrow morning, and their parents will at least have been married over night.” The presence of the tolling bell likewise introduces the proper time and place for prayers throughout the day. The productive use of the hours of the day for work and prayer, a time and place for everything, and the logical succession and priority of events elevates the lives of these simple people who do not know how to govern their lives productively.

The priests lament the lack of olive oil in the Southwest (“here ‘oil’ means something to grease the wheels of wagons!”) and complain of the scarcity of green vegetables and the absence of lettuce. In their minds there is no such thing as “a proper soup without leeks,” and the art of living requires more than the daily fare of beans and roots: “Surely we must time to make a garden,” Father Vaillant observes, and he hopes also to plant vineyards. The Bishop’s own garden provides him the most enjoyable recreation, and he grows fruit that surpasses the delicious produce of California: cherries, apricots, apples, pears, and quinces: “He urged the new priests to plant fruit trees wherever they went, and to encourage the Mexicans to add fruit to their starchy diet.” The priests’ interest in gardens, orchards, and vineyards reveals the Church’s concern for all the human needs of man, both body and soul. The Church’s missionary work teaches not only the truths that lead to eternal life but also the truths that offer the “abundant” life that Christ promised. Fruitfulness, abundance, and multiplication distinguish Christian culture that makes life beautiful as well as good and adorns life with what the bishop calls “la poesie.”

Despite living in primitive conditions amid poor people, the two Jesuits bring beauty and art to the stark, sparse world that surrounds them. Riding through the Rio Grande valley and gazing at a yellow hill, Bishop Latour admires a particular golden color of “the chip of a yellow rock that lay in his hand” and then announces to Father Vaillant, “That hill, Blanchet, is my cathedral.” He already has in mind the style of architecture he recalls from the old palace of the popes in Avignon—a cathedral in the tradition of the Romanesque rather than “one of those horrible structures they are putting up in the Ohio cities.” The bishop will hire the best stone cutters in France to build the edifice, and he cannot imagine another ugly church on American soil when the Church’s great architectural tradition offers its treasures for models. The Church cultivates the art of the beautiful and acknowledges the power of symbolism as a road that leads to God, fully aware, in St. Paul’s words, that “the invisible things of God are known by the things that are visible.”

The Church also enriches life by its schools and its love of learning. Bishop Latour brings to the New World an order of teaching nuns to bless the young with the gift of education and the life of the mind. Noticing the great infant mortality rate in the village of Pecos, the bishop learns of the dark superstitions of these Indians who worship serpents and sacrifice infants to their false god. Bishop Latour knows that the Church must bring the light of reason to primitive people in addition to the light of faith to conquer the darkness of ignorance, their belief in ancient superstitions that “their minds will go round and round in the same old ruts till Judgment Day.” The Church also combats the heresies that have evolved in the course of time like the false doctrine of Father Martinez that claims the American Catholic Church is autonomous with its own native customs and traditions: “We have a living Church here, not a dead arm of the European Church…. We pay a filial respect to the person of the Holy Father, but Rome has no authority here.”

The Jesuits, then, bring to the New World what the Church always brings with the Gospel—a human way of life that raises man from the primitive to the refined, from the ignorant and superstitious to the rational and educated, from the meager and the dreary to the abundant and the beautiful. The Church concerns herself with the whole man, body and soul, and performs both the spiritual and corporal works of mercy in its evangelization. As Bishop Latour reviews his whole life in the Southwest as Bishop of Santa Fe, he sees gardens, schools, a great cathedral, and a living faith revived by two priests whose experience in the Southwest taught them that “The faith, in that wild frontier, is alike a buried treasure…. A word, a prayer, a service, is all that is needed to set free those souls in bondage.” The barren land they found devoid of fruit, vegetables, and vineyards not only produced peaches and grapes but also a great harvest of souls.

By Mitchell Kalpakgian

Dr. Mitchell A. Kalpakgian is a native of New England, the son of Armenian immigrants. He was Professor of English at Simpson College (Iowa) for 31 years. During his academic career, Dr. Kalpakgian received many academic honors, among them the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar Fellowship (Brown University, 1981); the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (University of Kansas, 1985); and an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Children s Literature.

The Bee's Knees!

59 Quick Slang Phrases From The 1920's We Should Start Using Again

By Nico Lang of Thought Catalog, September, 2013

Get ready to “know your onions,” readers. If you’ve ever wanted to talk like characters from an old movie or the folks from The Great Gatsby, now’s your chance. For the twenties lovers among us, here are 59 of the era’s best slang phrases. Now you just have to practice talking really, really fast.

1. Ankle: to walk

2. “Applesauce!”: “Horsefeathers!”

3. “Bank’s closed!”: what you tell someone to stop making out

4. Bearcat: a lively, spirited woman, possibly with a fiery streak

5. Berries: like “bee’s knees,” denotes that something is good, desirable or pleasing. “That sounds like berries to me!”

6. Bimbo: refers to a macho man

7. Bluenose: term for a prude or individual deemed to be a killjoy

9. “Bushwa!”: “Bullshit!”

10. “Butt me!”: “I would like a cigarette.”

11. Cancelled stamp: a shy, lonely female, the type one would describe as a “wallflower”

12. Cash: a smooch

13. Cake-eater: in the 1920’s refers to a “ladies’ man”; later, slang for homosexual

14. Cheaters: Glasses or bifocals

15. Choice bit of calico: a desirable woman

16. Darb: something deemed wonderful or splendid, similar to “berries”

17. Dewdropper: like lollygagger, a slacker who sits around all day and does nothing, often unemployed

18. “Don’t take any wooden nickels!”: “Don’t do anything dumb!”

19. Dumb Dora: an unintelligent woman

20. Egg: a person who leads an absurdly wealthy, extravagant lifestyle (see: Gatsby’s “West Egg”)

21. Four-flusher: someone who mooches off the money of others in order to feign wealth

22. Gasper: cigarette, “fag” (also of the 1920s)

23. Giggle water: liquor, alcoholic beverage

24. “Go chase yourself!”: “Get out of here!”

25. Handcuff: engagement ring

26. Half-seas over: drunk

27. Hayburner: a car with poor gas-mileage, a guzzler

28. Hotsy-totsy: attractive, pleasing to the eye

29. Icy mitt: rejection from the object of one’s affection, as in: “He got the icy mitt.”

30. Iron one’s shoelaces: to excuse oneself for the restroom

31. Jake: okay, fine, as in “Don’t worry, everything’s jake.”

32. Jorum of skee: a swig of alcohol, particularly hard liquor

33. Know your onions: to know what’s up or what’s going on

34. “Let’s blouse!”: “Let’s blow this popsicle stand!”

35. Manacle: Wedding ring

36. Mazuma: Dollar bills, cash, money

260 Years Ago: The French and Indian War

William Fowler, the director of the Massachusetts Historical Society, tells us why we should care about the French and Indian War.

Reading the Novel as a Catholic

In our club, not only do we read novels as intelligent, informed young people, but we are also attempting to read them as Catholics.  What exactly does this mean?

We are people who know that we are not just quirks of chance, but created by God to know, love and serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next.  We celebrate this in our families and in our Catholic community.  God created us as creatures with human natures, totally unlike the rest of the "natures" that you find on this planet.  Our natures are like the blueprints for being fully and happily human.  If we do what our natures require, we thrive.  If we act against our natures, we languish.

So, this awareness of the divine is an extra layer of meaning that Catholics find in the interpretation of works of the imagination.   We do not impose our worldview upon a novel, but we understand more deeply a dimension of the way things really are, and works of literature help us identify it.   

So, how do we identify this deep dimension of human living in the novel?  We can ask ourselves five basic questions to get us started as we read:

1. What is the moral universe that the characters inhabit?  Their culture may be atheistic or Christian, hostile or helpful to being fully human.  It may be difficult or easy to have a good ethical life, given the habits and prejudices of the novel's moral universe.
2. What is the author's view of human nature? Our characters may see themselves as bound to the ethical rules of our nature, or not.   The author may approve of his characters or not, especially when they make moral choices to do good and avoid evil (or the opposite).  
3. What is the author's view of God?  God may be openly discussed, ridiculed, or simply ignored.  Clergy may be praised or mocked.  Religious people may be genuine or false, true servants of God or devils in disguise.  Religious symbols may be woven throughout, or noticeably absent.
4. Is there some hope of redemption in the novel?  Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest says of her novel, "The good ended happily and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means."  This is meant to be a joke, or course, because life, and the novels that reflect life, are never so perfectly just.  However, as Catholics, we have faith and hope that the human story has a happy ending.  Not a pat ending, or a simplistic one, but one in which evil is eventually overcome, pain has a purpose, and grace operates in every life.  Look for these qualities even in the darkest dystopian novel, because the way an author conveys the darkness of life may not be to approve of it, but to warn of it.
5. What is the standard in the novel for something being bad or good?  Julia, in Brideshead Revisited described her husband as "A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole."  This is not a flattering description!  What makes a good person, or a bad person?  What are the moral rules that make us whole, or make us a person who is missing a vital part of what its like to be human?  When we find these rules, are they consistent?  Do they strike you as authentic and universal?  Are they arbitrary or hypocritical?  Simplistic or naive?  These are the rules of the fictional moral universe, and they can be assessed according to our Catholic ideals of what is Good, Beautiful, and True.  These ideals are not so very complicated, but have been distilled for us very simply by Jesus:

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Happy reading!

Mrs. S.

Our 2015-16 Book List

Fresh off the presses, ladies and gents, I bring to you our survey of Great American Novels!

October:      True Grit, Charles Portis  (Irlbecks)
November:  The Last of the Mohicans,  James Fennimore Cooper (Hammonds)
December:   The Great Gatsby,  F. Scott Fitzgerald (Williams) 
January:       Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather (Spurgins)
February:     Delta Wedding, Eudora Welty (Parmenters)
April:           The Europeans, Henry James (Skinners)
May:            To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (Stirlings)

These seven great books are a thoughtful sampling of American literature, both in the way they reflect regional culture and cover a wide variety of time periods.  The Great Gatsby is well placed, because the Roaring 20's will be the theme of our Christmas Party this year.  So, be on the lookout for jazz-age flapper fashions and bowler hats!  It will be the cat's pajamas.  Or the bee's knees!

You will note that we are skipping March as a meeting month this year to allow for Spring Break and Easter Week following directly upon it.  Also, Pirates of Penzance will be performed during that time.  All meetings are on the third Friday of the month.

Please pass this list to old or occasional members so that they can drop in on a favorite book!  We'll see you on October 16 when we head to Arkansas to discuss True Grit.

Happy Reading!
Mrs. S.
www.snacksbookclub.blogspot.com

The Very Shy Charles Portis

True Grit, Odd Wit: And Fame? No, Thanks

By CHARLES McGRATH ,DEC. 19, 2010, in the New York Times

The arrival of the Coen brothers’ movie “True Grit” on Wednesday is likely to bring Charles Portis a new surge of attention he has no use for. Mr. Portis, the author of the 1968 novel on which the new film is based (as was the 1969 John Wayne version) is allergic to fame.

He’s not a Pynchonesque recluse, exactly. He is occasionally spotted in Little Rock, Ark., where he has lived for 50-odd years; he even went to a gala sponsored there recently by the Oxford American, a literary magazine, and consented to receive a lifetime achievement award, though he sat in the 14th row, or as far from the stage as he could. But Mr. Portis doesn’t use e-mail, has an unlisted phone number, declines interview requests, including one for this article, and shuns photographs with the ardor of a fugitive in the witness protection program. He hasn’t published a novel in nearly 20 years.

 

The writer and filmmaker Nora Ephron, who got to know Mr. Portis in the early ’60s, when he was a reporter for The New York Herald Tribune, recalled that back then he was more sociable. “Charlie was just charming, the life of the party almost,” she said. “But he was a newspaper reporter who didn’t have a phone. The Trib had to make him get one. So even back then the pattern was there.”

   

A photograph of the camera-shy Charles Portis, left, with John Wayne during the filming of the first “True Grit” (1969). Credit Paramount Pictures

His elusiveness has only enhanced his status as a cult writer’s cult writer, cherished by a small but devoted following. He has published four novels besides “True Grit” (all five have recently been reissued in paperback by the Overlook Press), and for years those in the sect have been pressing them on new readers like Masons teaching the secret handshake. The journalist Ron Rosenbaum, the unofficial grand vizier and first hierophant of Portis admirers, has called him “perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.”

“True Grit,” Mr. Portis’s second novel, which was serialized by The Saturday Evening Post and appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for 22 weeks, is actually a divisive matter among Portis admirers. There are some, like the novelist Donna Tartt, who consider it his masterpiece, a work comparable to “Huckleberry Finn.” Others, like Mr. Rosenbaum, resent “True Grit” a little for detracting attention from Mr. Portis’s lesser-known but arguably funnier books: “Norwood” (1966), “The Dog of the South” (1979), “Masters of Atlantis” (1985) and “Gringos” (1991). The writer Roy Blount Jr., an old friend of Mr. Portis’s, suggested recently that Mr. Portis himself was a little embarrassed by the success of “True Grit.”

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“I think that’s why in his next book, ‘Dog of the South,’ he set himself the challenge of a funny book written by a boring narrator,” Mr. Blount said. “That’s why other writers love him so much.”

“True Grit,” the story of the 14-year-old Mattie Ross, from Yell County, Ark., who with the help of the one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn sets out to avenge the murder of her father by a drunken hired man named Tom Chaney, is not unfunny. It’s simultaneously a thoroughly satisfying western and a parody of one. But unlike Mr. Portis’s other books “True Grit” is a period piece — the story takes place in 1873 but is recounted decades later, when Mattie is by her own description a cranky old spinster — and the narrative voice is a feat of historical ventriloquism.

Mattie’s prose is stiff, formal (a quality lovingly captured by the Cohen brothers), a little pious and platitudinous, given to scriptural quotation and fussy quotation marks: “I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well, that is superstitious ‘claptrap.’ My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33.”

Mattie is lovable in her way, and though grit is what she admires in Rooster, she is hardly lacking in that department herself. But she is also humorless, righteous and utterly without either self-doubt or self-consciousness. She has no idea how she or her words come across on the page, nor would she care if she did.

“The Dog of the South” and “Gringos” are also written in the first person, and the two others might as well be. The voice in all them is loose and informal, even a little digressive, with a noticeable Southern quality. Mr. Portis’s friends say he talks much the same way, and to judge from “Combinations of Jacksons,” a memoir he published in The Atlantic in 1999, his nonfictional style isn’t much different from his fictional one: in both he is a great noticer, always alert to the odd but telling detail.

What the other novels have in common with “True Grit” is their deadpan quality. Most comic novels — think of anything by P. G. Wodehouse, say, or Ring Lardner — are fairly transparent: they unabashedly try to be funny and let the reader in on the joke. The trick of Mr. Portis’s books, especially the ones told in the first person, is that they pretend to be serious. They’re full of odd events and odd people with names like Norwood Pratt, Raymond Midge and Dr. Reo Symes, inventor of the underappreciated Brewster Method, a miracle cure for arthritis. But these are presented without a wink or a nudge, or any sense that slapstick touches like smooth-talking midgets, bread-fondling deliverymen or elderly gents wearing conical goatskin caps are at all unusual.

   

Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges in Joel and Ethan Coen’s version of “True Grit,” which opens on Wednesday. Credit Lorey Sebastian/Paramount Pictures, via Associated Press

Mr. Portis evokes an eccentric, absurd world with a completely straight face. As a result there are not a lot of laugh-out-loud moments or explosive set pieces here. Instead of shooting off fireworks the books shimmer with a continuous comic glow.

Unlike the tightly plotted “True Grit,” the other books are all shaggy-dog stories of a sort. In “Norwood” (which was made into a 1970 movie starring Glen Campbell) Norwood Pratt travels all the way to New York from his home in Ralph, Tex., to collect a $70 debt and winds up engaged to a girl he meets on a Trailways bus. In “The Dog of the South” Ray Midge drives to Mexico from Little Rock in search of his wife, who has run off with her first husband and Ray’s Ford Torino. “Masters of Atlantis” is about two guys who create the Gnomon Society, an esoteric, Rosicrucian-like sect based on wisdom from the lost city of Atlantis. And in “Gringos” an American expat in Mexico falls in with some U.F.O. nuts and archeologists searching for a lost Mayan city.

But in one way or another the subtext of all these novels is the great Melvillean theme of the American weakness for secret conspiracies and arcane knowledge, and our embrace of con men, scam artists and flimflammers of every sort. In Mr. Portis’s pantheon of tricksters, moreover, writers rank pretty high. There’s John Selmer Dix, author of “With Wings as Eagles,” an inspirational manual for salesmen, whose admirers rank him higher than Shakespeare; the hack writer Dub Polton, author of “Hoosier Wizard,” a political biography that pretty much makes everything up; and Lamar Jimmerson, compiler of the Codex Pappus, the sacred Gnomon text, which deliberately includes a lot of obfuscation to “weary and disgust the reader” and put him off the track.

All these texts, you can’t help noticing, are in their way not unlike Mr. Portis’s books in the degree of devotion and enthusiasm they evoke in their readers. They’re not self-parodies but, rather, warnings about the dubiousness of reputation and about the dangers of taking the cult of authorship too seriously.

“Talking about himself is something that would feel false and strange to him,” William Whitworth, the former editor of The Atlantic and his old friend, said of Mr. Portis. “It would be like asking him to stand up and sing like Frank Sinatra, or be on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ ”