On the bummery with Charles Portis and the Masters of Atlantis

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Last week I promised (threatened?) more selections from Charles Portis's wonderfully strange Masters of Atlantis, and today I deliver!

The following exchange is from a grilling that Gnomon society aide-de-camp Austin Popper endures before the Texas State Legislature, which is worried about the recent arrival in the state of a handful of Gnomons, whom they fear are insurrectionists, malcontents, Communists, etc. I'm going to quote at greater length than I ordinarily would, simply because a lot of the comedy in this scene comes from the twists and turns of the questioning, which are as emphatic as they are ridiculous:

"But you did not always travel in such style, did you? With attendants and a briefcase. I'm thinking now of your years on the road as a bum."

"I was a tramp, yes, sir. I was down and out. I've never tried to conceal that."

"A drunken bum?"

"Yes, sir."

"Calling yourself Wally Wilson?"

"I believe I did use that name at one time."

"Sleeping in haystacks? Stealing laundry off clotheslines and hot pies from the windowsills of isolated farmhouses? Leaving cryptic hobo marks scrawled on fence posts and the trunks of trees?"

"No, sir, I was very much an urban tramp. No haystacks or barns for me. Mostly I walked the city streets wearing cast-off clothes, with overcoat sleeves hanging down to my knuckles. I did live in a box once for about a week. I went from a Temple to a box, so steep was my fall."

"A big crate? A packing case of some kind?"

"A pasteboard box."

"Under a viaduct in the warehouse district of Chicago?"

"No, sir, it was in a downtown park in one of our eastern cities."

"A long box you could stretch out in?"

"A short one. Mr. Moaler lives in what I would call a long box. Mine was very compact. When it snowed I had to squat in it all night with my head between my knees like a yogi or a magician's assistant. Then when morning came I had to hail a policeman or some other early riser to help get my numb legs straightened out again. "

"More a stiff garment than a house?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hunkered down there in your box, slapping at imaginary insects on your body. Your only comfort a bottle of cheap wine in a paper sack. Supporting yourself with petty thievery, always on the run, with Dobermans snapping at your buttocks. Not a pretty picture."

"It was cheap rum."

"The clear kind?"

"The dark kind."

"As an urban bum, Mr. Popper, did you often stagger into the middle of busy intersections with your gummy eyes and make comical, drunken attempts to direct traffic?"

"No, sir. In my worst delirium I never interfered with the flow of traffic. I never drank any hair tonic either."

Now, I know I'm unusually susceptible to this sort of thing--a friend's son once arrived at the ballpark armed with questions about hobos he'd been saving up until he saw me again--but is it possible to read that exchange without laughing? Without wanting to read the whole book? And--here I know I'm edging ever farther onto that limb--without wishing that this were the way the whole world was all the time?

"I love nothing better than to laugh but my life it is not a joke. Or it is a joke if you like but not a good one."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Almost exactly a year ago, I read my first Charles Portis novel, The Dog of the South, and I wrote that it was

crammed from start to finish with oddballs, dropouts, and failures, all of whom cling to this world all the more intensely for the fact that they can't quite figure out what to do with it.

I followed that with True Grit, which is also a wonderful book, if a bit less unhinged: whereas True Grit locates the reader so squarely in Mattie's point of view that we feel as if her own off-kilter worldview colors everything she sees (and, in the case of the book's strange cadences and vocabulary, everything she hears), in The Dog of the South, the crazy is general, manifest in everyone and everything found in our too-busy, too-atomistic, too-stimulated world. Being a fan of oddity, I preferred (and laughed more at) the latter.

Well, The Dog of the South has nothing on Masters of Atlantis (1985). Technically about the members of a secret society and the tribulations they face in trying to gain esoteric knowledge, recruit new members, and keep the organization afloat through most of the twentieth century, what it really is is a long succession of one oddball after another offering his own cracked interpretation of the world, nearly all of them incompatible with nearly all the others. In my description of The Dog of the South, I wrote that one character

seems to regard all the world's facts as equally important; though paring them down or assigning importance might reveal hints of a pattern, it's as if he feels an obligation not to discriminate, as if each and every detail deserves his full care

In Masters of Atlantis, it's as if every character is that character, and Portis has taken all the world's facts (and most of its non-facts), spun them around in one of those old wire baskets that were used to select bingo numbers,and drawn them out one by one.

Having already rambled a long time here, I'll give you just the briefest of samples today; expect more later in the week (that can serve as a warning to those whose taste for weirdness is easily sated). Here's Lamar Jimmerson, leader of the Gnomon Society, reflecting on a woman who has recently moved into the temple in the role of housekeeper/landlady, with the aim of bringing in boarders:

All this, with the best yet to come, the roomers. Soon there would be a pack of coughing drifters bumping around upstairs, alcoholic house painters and clarinet painters, tramping to the bathroom at all hours of the night. Still, to give the woman her due, she had been very decent in offering to mend his clothes and in putting her tiny car at his disposal. She had brought no cats along with her and no miniature dogs. She did not whinny or titter and had not, so far, tried to embrace him.

Portis has a particular genius for allowing trains of thought to thunder along to their eventual destinations, however side-shunted and off-topic those may be. In their extravagance and detail, the pointless ruminations of his characters bring to mind the elongated, distracting quality of Homeric similes, image that get so caught up in their own terms and concerns that their point of origin is quickly lost.

The next passage is a perfect demonstration. Jimmerson, in addition to leading the Gnomon Society, is in the middle of a quixotic run for the governorship of Indiana:

What could he, Governor Lamar Jimmerson, Master of Gnomons, do for his fellow citizens? One service came immediately to mind. As his first official act he would order the Parks Department to install a guardrail all around the base of Rainbow Falls, with plenty of warning signs. Such an inviting place and yet so treacherous. At this very moment white-haired judges and rumpled old family attorneys were down there losing their footing and crying out as they fell and bruised their buttocks on those cruel green rocks, first slick and now hard. But then downstream a bit, below the cascade, all violence spent, wouldn't there be a limpid pool where older men in prickly blue wool bathing briefs could paddle about unobserved with swim bladders under their arms?

I suspect that many of you are now making an expression like the one rocketlass presented when I read her a passage, something my constant laughter left me barely able to do: an eyebrow cocked at an angle perfectly calibrated to express skepticism, bewilderment, and doubts about my sanity in equal measure. And I do understand: I have trouble believing these novels were ever published, let alone that they're still in print; they're just so weird. But for the initiates (and here I am beginning to sound a bit like a Master of Atlantis myself), the pleasures offered by Portis are countless.