Literary legends

The 3rd Porter Prize lifetime achievement award ceremony April 6 at the Governor’s Mansion brought out a handful of past Porter Prize winners and young writers who must have imagined a day when their contributions to the Natural State’s canon would be recognized on such a night.

This year is the 30th anniversary of the prize, begun by Jack Butler and Phillip McMath. It began as a $500 award at a small party. Today it’s $2,000 and the kind of gathering recognized by the social intelligentsia.

Now, within this honor there is a still greater honor - the lifetime achievement award, presented every five years. There had been but two previous winners: Donald Harington, also a Porter Prize winner, and Miller Williams.

Add to that short list Charles Portis, who since the last lifetime award in 2009 has seen his popularity nationally and internationally rise considerably with the Coen brothers’ 2010 remake of the 1969 movie True Grit, based on Portis’ serialized novel first published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1968.

Because of declining health, Jonathan Portis accepted the prize on his brother’s behalf.

The Great Hall, the most amenable if not popular setting for state chauvinism, was graced by another whopper, this one from Phillip McMath, who asked the audience to imagine that some particularly “literary martians” landed and were given the full canon of American novels. These interstellar wonks no doubt would arrive at “a split decision” over who was finest, Portis and Mark Twain.

The Porter Fund last year created two $4,000 scholarships for young Arkansas writers. One, in conjunction with the Thea Foundation, was awarded to Annika Miller of Conway High School. The other, to be awarded to a graduate student seeking a master’s in fine arts degree through the Arkansas Writers MFA Program, was accepted by Terry Wright, University of Central Arkansas writing professor and interim dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication.

The night’s keynote speaker was writer and humorist Roy Blount Jr., who said he “considered this a great tribute to me to pay honor to Charles Portis,” whom he and others call “Buddy.” In his lifetime, Blount said, he’d only maintained two considerable correspondences. One was with a high school English teacher named Ann, and the other was with Buddy Portis.

Blount spent much of his time reading from the scene near the very end of True Grit when Mattie Ross falls into a sinkhole roiling with rattlesnakes.