I read some books to get ready for fishing in Arkansas. Two stood out, Norwood by Charles Portis and My Life by Bill Clinton. I was going to read something by Dave Whitlock, but then I found out that Dave Whitlock isn’t from Arkansas. He should be from Arkansas, he’s the best known fly fisher from that part of the world, but he’s from Oklahoma, and still lives in the Oklahoma Ozarks. It’s an easy mistake to make; Eastern Oklahoma is pretty much Western Arkansas, but there’s a line and I will not cross it. Plus that’ll make this post a bit shorter.
I can’t find any indication that the other two writers, Portis (author of True Grit) and Clinton (author of My Life), didn’t fish, or at least didn’t fish enough to write about it. Clinton was also the 42nd President of the United States, and the last President before the last President to be impeached by the House of Representatives. I don’t think he fly fished, and he wasn’t impeached for lying about fishing.
The Bushes fished, and Jimmie Carter famously fished and had a couple of exquisite cane rods built for him by Bill Oyster. Herbert Hoover wrote a book about fly fishing, in which he remarked that “Presidents have only two moments of personal seclusion. One is prayer; the other is fishing — and they cannot pray all the time!” He also said that fishing teaches an important lesson to Presidents, that the forces of nature discriminate for no man. President Trump played golf, and taught us that the rules of golf were more bendable than the forces of nature, but he did tell some extraordinary fish stories, only not about fishing.
President Obama fly fished and seemed to enjoy it. He certainly made an elegant presentation on the river. That’s one well-dressed fly fisherman.
Portis died in 2020, in Little Rock, so there’s another thing to blame on 2020. Portis is one of those authors who everyone is supposed to read, but who no one much ever actually reads. I’ve written before about my near-lifelong fixation with True Grit, and if you want to read Portis without cracking a book, just watch the Coen Brothers film version. The dialogue and narration seems almost word for word from the book.
Besides True Grit, Portis wrote four other novels for no one to read: Norwood (1966), Dogs of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringoes (1991). Except for True Grit, his novels were all out of print for a time. I’ve read Norwood and Dogs of the South, which lets me feel superior to those who haven’t read Norwood or Dogs of the South, but inferior to those who have also read Masters of Atlantis and Gringoes. I’m sure they’re excellent, and maybe one day.
Portis was not a recluse, though he has that reputation. He was apparently a regular in Little Rock beer joints and approachable for strangers, and at the climax of True South Paul Theroux finds Portis in a Little Rock bar–at least that’s how I remember it. Still, Portis wasn’t much shakes as a self-promoter, and while he began his novel-writing in a fishing cabin, and apparently had his own avocations (notably cars), there are no reports of Portis fishing. He may have fished all the time, but unlike yours truly he didn’t feel the need to tell people about it.
As for cars, all of the three Portis novels I’ve read were odysseys, road novels (even if True Grit exchanges a Buick for the Mattie’s horse, Little Blackie). The hero sets out and then returns home changed, except none of Portis’s heroes changes much. Part of what amuses is their immutability, regardless of what crazy weirdness they create. When she gets back to Yell County, Mattie Ross is still a Presbyterian avenging angel and tax accountant, though she is less one arm, and though she has developed familial loyalty for an old man who rode with Quantrill.
Norwood is a road novel too. Norwood goes to New York to collect $70 and to deliver a prostitute, who he doesn’t know is a prostitute, and some stolen cars, which he doesn’t know are stolen cars. When he returns he is still Norwood. Technically Norwood is from Texas, not Arkansas, but it’s just-across-the-border East Texas. Except for his Korean stint in the Marines, and an interlude working for the New York Herald-Tribunein New York and London, Portis lived in Arkansas. He always wrote about Arkansas, and leaving Arkansas, and coming back to Arkansas, even if it’s the Arkansas part of Texas. As the narrator says in Dogs of the South, “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”
The character Norwood is honest and marginal, but it is the delight of the novel that notwithstanding all of the bad things that could happen to Norwood–and really bad stuff could happen–nothing ever does. There is a Twainish insistence that things turn out all right, even when a Faulkneresque apocalypse may be more realistic. Norwood finds love on a Greyhound bus, rescues a chicken, and recovers his $70. When I read the novel, Norwood’s final fate made me immensely happy, as does the fate of the chicken. I guess this is a spoiler, but when you get to the end of Norwood and he’s home and the axe hasn’t fallen, it’s ok, it’s more than ok, it’s great. Norwood the character may be hidden away in the Arkansas part of Texas, but he’s authentic and honest, and authentic and honest shines.
The other Arkansas book I read, My Life by Bill Clinton, is also a road novel. Mr. Clinton is born in Hope (not far from El Dorado where Mr. Portis was born), then moves to sin city, Hot Springs (which really was sin city in its heyday), then to Georgetown and Yale (not to be confused with Yell County) and Fayetteville and Little Rock and onward and upward. The book did pretty well when it came out, selling 2.3 million copies, but I suspect that’s because everybody bought it for the sex scenes. There aren’t any, at least in the book. There is a detailed description of political maneuvering at Arkansas Boys’ State. At 1000+ pages, it’s a little long for most folks, but Clinton is a talkative guy talking about two of his favorite subjects, Bill Clinton and politics, and he’s a readable writer, with an eye for detail, then some more detail, then some more detail, then he’ll add in a little detail. He never does tell us what we really want to know. Like I said, there are no sex scenes.
Just like Portis, whenever now that I think of the Clintons, I think of Paul Theroux’s Deep South. Theroux is a bit obsessed with the Clintons. He finds them a basketful of deplorables, but for none of the reasons one might think. Theroux compares parts of the South, particularly the Delta, to Africa’s poorest places, Third World poor, devastatingly poor, irredeemably poor, and he’s right, they are. He was angry that the Clintons–at least one of whom had deep ties to Arkansas and the South–had abandoned Southern poverty after their road trip to Washington. He is angry that the Clintons achieved exit velocity. The Clintons became citizens of the wide world, but no longer citizens of Arkansas, and in Theroux’s mind Arkansas had as much need for them as anyone.
I do suspect that if I were going to cast Joe Namath in a movie, My Life would be a better choice than Norwood.
On the flip side, notwithstanding conspiracy theories, the Clintons didn’t kill anybody or have anybody killed, and I suspect that much of modern Arkansas, Trump’s Arkansas, would be decidedly hostile if the Clintons lived there. It’s notable that when one Southern President, Jimmie Carter, returned home and became a moral light, his state voted for President Biden. Nobody much argues that Mr. Clinton is a moral light, so maybe that sort of thing only goes so far, and maybe Mr. Carter and the recent Georgia elections are unrelated. It is odd that while Mr. Clinton arguably oversaw our longest period of sustained national economic growth and Mr. Carter’s presidency was an economic failure, it is President Carter who is most admired. It’s not all about the money.
I will say though that the part of My Life about the politics of Arkansas Boy’s State is a dilly.