Short Story Wednesday: "The Altruist" by Charles Portis, TRUMPET #1, February 1965, edited by Tom Reamy; Portis celebration online tonight

Late addition: Jonathan Lethem on the five novels of Portis, from The New York Review of Books, 20 June 2024 (courtesy Gordon Van Gelder)

Library of America, to hype their new omnibus of Portis novels, a few short stories and other writing, are offering an online event live today, 17 May 2023, at 6-7pm ET, and now archived in video and audio-only versions here, to which they've invited Roy Blount, Jr., Roz Chast, Ian Frazier, Mary Roach, Paul Theroux, Ed Park, Calvin Trillin, "and other special guests" (including recurring Portis anthology editor Jay Jennings)...how much anyone gets to say in an hour is anyone's guess, but that's a good bunch to hear from. Registration here. They'll post it online at their site after the recording, barring the flood...their self-congratulatory title for the event is "‘The Best American Writer You’ve Never Heard Of’: A Tribute to Charles Portis", which is an odd claim, given True Grit alone and its lasting impressions on the culture. "The Altruist" is the earliest piece of fiction per se cited in the FictionMags Index that Portis saw published, and as far as I can tell it hasn't ever been reprinted.

The illustration, by Hollis Williford, very much in the style of those in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine at that time.

Trumpet's first issue can be read at the highlighted link.

Trumpet was a relatively elaborate fanzine (a relatively low-budget magazine published for distribution mostly to fellow fantastic-fiction fans), begun in 1965 by editor and publisher Tom Reamy, who had published an earlier fanzine and decided to try something a bit more adventurous with this title, which he would publish sporadically for a decade (and win two Hugo Awards for Best Fanzine with, in 1967 and '69) and then move on to a more elaborate magazine with some, if limited, newsstand circulation, Nickelodeon, which had a much shorter run due to Reamy's early death, from a heart attack in 1977. Reamy had by the mid '70s begun to write increasingly warmly-received fiction, most of it fantasy, and won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1976. Reamy was one of the earlier "openly" gay fantastica writers in the fantasy/sf community, and his continuing interest in film had led to some work in that industry. 

"The Altruist" is set in the last days of the Korean War, and is an interesting and (truly!) gritty, if anecdotal, account of the less than rewarding experiences of some frontline troops, notably Corporal Hesse, already a veteran of too much combat, and the more problematic Private Rhylick, who alternately inspires sympathy and irritation in Hesse; the rest of his unit also have mixed reviews of his service so far. The story as a story has a rather And Then This Happened feel to it, as if Portis wasn't quite sure how best to approach the narrative, and if to write it more like a combat bulletin (Portis was a professional reporter before he began a primarily fiction-writing career) or a more-traditional short story; I wonder if it had been a been a trunk story for a while before Portis had offered it to Reamy, or if Portis had been involved in any way with speculative-fiction fandom before this story's publication (there's no information on how Portis and Reamy knew of each other in the issue, unless my quick skim beyond reading the story missed it). So, a curio, and it would be interesting to know more about how the story arrived at its publication site and how long before publication it had been written. Also, it seems like that at least one or two typos might've been introduced in the text during layout (I believe most of the text of the magazine was shot from typewritten pages, rather than typeset). 

Interesting that at least two notable and innovative US writers who came to fiction-writing after journalism careers (among other work), not primarily associated with fantasy or sf per se, got their (possibly) first fiction published in fantastica "markets" (if Trumpet paid at all at the time, which is unlikely) in the '60s: Portis and David Ely, best remembered these days for his heavily metaphorical sf novel Seconds (and the film made from it) but also notably active in crime fiction and other work, whose first published fiction seems to have been in Cele Goldsmith's fantasy and sf magazines at Ziff-Davis Publications, Fantastic and Amazing Stories: Fact and Science Fiction, in 1961.

So, please consider checking in on the hour (or slightly more) celebrating Portis, and please do see the other Short Story Wednesday entries at Patti Abbott's blog.