Story of the Week: Tom Wolfe

Sunday, May 7, 2023

The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

Charles Portis (1933–2020)
From Charles Portis: Collected Works

Interesting Links

“Notes on Charles Portis’s Notes” (Jay Jennings, Library of America)

“What Charles Portis Taught Us” (Wells Tower, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Moxon’s Master,” Ambrose Bierce
• “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,” Mark Twain
• “The Angel of the Odd,” Edgar Allan Poe

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“Chimpanzee at typewriter. New York Zoological Park.” Postcard printed by American Colortype Co., 1907. Courtesy Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York.

“In 1964, in the midst of so-called Swinging London, Charles McColl Portis had Karl Marx’s old job,” begins editor Ed Park in his appreciation of the author. The previous November, shortly after Sir Alec Douglas-Home became prime minister and weeks before President Kennedy was assassinated, Portis became head of the London bureau of the New York Herald Tribune. Four decades later, in 2001, he joked during an interview about how “Marx was the London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in the 1850s. Dick Wald was my New York boss, and I told him once that the Tribune might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better. Dick didn’t take the hint.”

After a year in London, Portis surprised everyone in the business. Tom Wolfe, one of his colleagues in the Herald Tribune’s New York office, later recalled:

One day he suddenly quit as London correspondent for the Herald Tribune. That was generally regarded as a very choice job in the newspaper business. Portis quit cold one day; just like that, without a warning. He returned to the United States and moved into a fishing shack in Arkansas. In six months he wrote a beautiful little novel called Norwood. Then he wrote True Grit, which was a best seller. The reviews were terrific . . . He sold both books to the movies . . . He made a fortune . . . A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.

“At this late date,” Wolfe wrote, “it’s hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever.” Many a feature writer dreamed of one day becoming a fiction writer; “by the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament.”

Portis himself never fully explained why he up and quit his “choice job.” In 2013, when the essayist Aaron Gilbreath tried to get a definitive response from the author, Portis sent him a note with a single sentence: ‘‘I simply wanted to try my hand at fiction, and if it hadn’t worked out I would have gone back to journalism.’’ Yet he occasionally hinted at a mild, self-deprecating disdain for newspaper work, beginning with how he entered the field in college. “You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism,” he said during the interview in 2001. “I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college. Not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service.” He also suggested that the standards of newspaper editing tended to bleach the color out of writing, as he learned when he worked the copy desk at the Northwest Arkansas Times:

I edited the country correspondence from these lady stringers in Goshen and Elkins, those places. I had to type it up. . . . My job was to edit out all the life and charm from these homely reports. Some fine old country expression, or a nice turn of phrase—out they went. We probably thought we were doing the readers a favor.

For whatever reason, Portis left the newspaper industry and gave the world five novels entirely unlike the fiction by any of the journalists who preceded or followed him, including Ernest Hemingway, Ann Petry, John Hersey, Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, and Tom Wolfe. (Like Wolfe, Breslin worked alongside Portis at the Herald Tribune, Ephron at Newsweek.) In a tribute written for The Paris Review the year after Portis died, Rosa Lyster described this literary distinctiveness, how “reading him for the first time required a significant adjustment to all my previously gathered knowledge of what a person can or should put in a novel if they want it to be good. He is unbeatable at the non sequitur, so that every paragraph contains the possibility of crazed escalation.”

Portis also excels in the creation of zany and unconventional minor characters, including such animals as Tommy the harmonica-playing fox terrier and “Joann the Wonder Hen, the College Educated Chicken,” both in Norwood; Squanto the talking blue jay in Master of Atlantis; and Ramos, “son of the late Chino, bravest dog in all Mexico,” in Gringos. So it should come as no surprise that Portis’s last published work features Red Kilgore the mandrill, one of hundreds of monkeys pecking away at electric typewriters in a billionaire-funded project that generates volumes of mass-produced text to supersede the “old elitist notion of writing as some sort of algebra.” One could say it was Portis’s last word on the ever-changing field of journalism.

Notes: The title of the story is from John 3:8: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” The infinite monkey theorem, which metaphorically posits that a monkey hitting keys at random for an infinite amount of time will eventually type any given text, was enunciated by French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913 and popularized by, among others, physicist Arthur Eddington in 1928. American bandmaster and composer John Philip Sousa, whose compositions include the march “Stars and Stripes Forever” (1896), was known as “The March King.”

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The editors are spiking most of my copy now, unread. One has described it as “hopeless crap.” My master’s degree means nothing to this pack of half-wits at the Blade. My job is hanging by a thread. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Sunday, January 9, 2022

After Henry

Joan Didion (1934–2021)
From Joan Didion: The 1980s & 90s

Interesting Links
Video: Joan Didion: The Art of Storytelling, a conversation with David L. Ulin, Laila Lalami, and Steph Cha, with appearances by Griffin Dunne and Mia Barron (LOA Live)

“Joan Didion and the Voice of America” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Joan Didion
• “Quiet Days in Malibu”
• “L. A. Noir”

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Joan Didion in Berkeley, California, April 1981. Photograph by Janet Fries/Getty Images.

When Joan Didion delivered the commencement address at the University of California, Riverside, in 1975, she urged upon the graduates a worldview that could just as well summarize her attitude toward writing:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.* Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

You wouldn’t guess from the confident tone of her speech that, less than ten years earlier, she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were freelance magazine writers evicted from their home in Rancho Palos Verdes. They had just adopted their infant daughter and had earned $300 between them over the previous three months when Henry Robbins flew in from New York and took them to dinner in June 1966.

A senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Robbins was on the West Coast looking for new writers. He had been impressed with Dunne’s and Didion’s magazine articles and hoped to persuade them to develop book-length projects. He was also in California to encourage labor activist Cesar Chavez to write a memoir but, when that didn’t pan out (Chavez was too busy), he convinced Dunne to write a book-length journalistic essay about the California grape workers’ strike. In February 1967 Robbins sent a contract to Dunne for his debut book, Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike, and added in the cover letter, “And now that you’re with FSG—how about bringing your charming wife along?”

The following month Dunne wrote to Robbins and asked if it were true that Tom Wolfe (one of Robbins’s writers at FSG) was at work on a book about the “acidheads.” His response, whatever it may have been, didn’t prevent Didion from heading off to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco to do her own report on the counterculture. Although her essays for magazines paid the bills, she still hoped to be a novelist; three years earlier she had published Run River, “a novel that nobody read” (as she later put it), and she was at work on a new novel, “Maria Talking,” which would end up with the title Play It As It Lays. So, in July, Robbins sent her a contract for her second novel and for a book about “the LSD life in California,” with an advance of $6,000 each.

Her essay on the Haight-Ashbury hippies, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” appeared as the cover story in the September 23, 1967, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Didion couldn’t imagine how she might turn the piece into a book-length work, so Robbins convinced her to make it the centerpiece of a collection. “Henry functions mainly as a sounding board,” Dunne told New York Times reporter Tom Buckley. “He lets you talk your way through your problems. ‘How do you propose to fix this?’ he’ll ask. He won’t impose himself on you. Joan says he thinks like a writer in terms of structure. Slouching Towards Bethlehem was completely his idea. Joan had no intention of publishing a book of pieces.” The collection, with its famous title essay, was published in May 1968 and although sales were modest at first, many of the reviews were rhapsodic. If there had been any lingering competitiveness between Didion and Tom Wolfe for covering each other’s beat, it was certainly laid to rest a few months later, when she and her husband opened their home for a party to celebrate the publication of Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Hundreds of people showed up, including Janis Joplin who, fresh from a concert, downed tumblers of brandy and (according to Wolfe) passed out on their couch.

During the following decade both Dunne and Didion became two of Robbins’s numerous celebrity authors. “I can’t say that I’m surprised by my success,” Henry Robbins told Buckley in June 1979. “With more and more publishing houses becoming parts of conglomerates, personal publishing might seem to have become an anachronism. I don’t think it has. The essential ingredient of good publishing is still strong and competent editors who have good relationships with their authors.” Two months later, Robbins was dead of a heart attack.

A few weeks later, Didion eulogized her editor and friend in an essay titled “A Death in the Family,” which details their initial meeting and the special relationship that launched her career. In 1992, when she gathered for a new book some of the articles she had written in the thirteen years since Robbins’s death, she included her remembrance as the introduction, renaming the essay with the title she gave to the collection: After Henry.

* “The Grave’s a fine and private place, / But none I think do there embrace,” is a couplet from Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” (c. 1650).

A few of the details in the above introduction, including the quote from Robbins’s letter to Dunne, are from Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion (2015).

Notes for the essay: The Daisy was a members-only Los Angeles nightclub, established in 1962. “In the Midnight Hour” was a hit for Wilson Pickett in 1965; “Softly As I Leave You,” for Frank Sinatra in 1963. Didion quotes two poems: “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” by Edna St. Vincent Millay and “Time’s Declaration” by Delmore Schwartz.

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In the summer of 1966 I was living in a borrowed house in Brentwood, and had a new baby. I had published one book, three years before. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission. To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.