TOM WOLFE: Charlie Portis wrote True Grit and The Dog of the South. Before all that, he was a reporter on the New York Herald Tribune. We worked [there] at the same time [the early-1960s], and I remember Charlie telling me he was sent up to New Hampshire, to Concord, on some political story. He was heading back to New York on one of these little commuter flights. This was a propeller plane, and two men sitting right in front of him, one on one side of the aisle on the outside seat, one on the outside seat of the other side of the aisle, realized they know each other. They had to shout almost, because of the noise of the airplane. The one on one side said, “Well, I’ll be damned. Jerry! I haven’t seen you in so long! What the hell have you been up to?”
It dawned on Charlie Portis that this was J. D. Salinger. He was filling in almost the last ten years of his life for his friend, and Charlie, like any good newspaperman, is taking this down, a mile a minute.
When they landed, he went up to Salinger partly just to make absolutely dead sure this was J. D. Salinger. He said, “Mr. Salinger,” and this guy turned around. Charlie said, “Hi, my name is Charles Portis. I’m from the New York Herald Tribune. I just happened to be sitting behind you.” He said he got no further than that when Salinger turned white.
Salinger said, “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.”
Charlie said to me, “You know? I wouldn’t. That guy looked so awful.”