The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis

Author:Charles Portis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

FOR ALL his jaunty prose, W.W. Polton was a glum little man. Everything he saw seemed to let him down in some way. He was so small that he wore boys’ clothes, little suits of a skimpy juvenile cut, the coats chopped off very short. He had the wizened walnut face of a jockey. He was rude. Time after time he cut Mr. Jimmerson short in his reminiscence. He had bad table manners and he scratched the parquet floors with the metal taps on his zippered, high-heel ankle bootlets. He drank one Pepsi-Cola after another, leaving behind him a trail of wet bottles atop fine pieces of furniture.

Mr. Jimmerson, informed by Popper that the artist could not be held to ordinary standards of civility, tried to make every allowance for the fellow. He talked openly to Polton about the Gnomon Society, revealing all that he could reveal to a Perfect Stranger, except on the subject of membership figures. In that area he was evasive. He described the workings of the Jimmerson Spiral and he talked of the high points in his life, of his dramatic meeting with Pletho Pappus in France, of the winning of Fanny Hen, of the flowering of the Society in the 1930s, of the Sydney Hen scandal and subsequent schism.

Polton, however, had his own ideas about the shape and content of the book. He had his own vision to impose and he arrived at the Temple with his own title for the biography—His Word Is Law!—before he had even met Mr. Jimmerson. He proceeded to fashion the work accordingly.

His methods of inquiry were odd, or so they seemed to Mr. Jimmerson. He rejected all suggestions from the subject of the biography and he refused to read any of the Gnomonic texts. Whenever Mr. Jimmerson ventured onto that ground, Polton cut him short. “Nobody wants to hear about those triangles, Jimmerson. Do I have to keep saying it?” Such structural matter as he needed in the way of names, dates and places, he gleaned from old scrapbooks and from direct interrogation of the Master.

Mr. Jimmerson felt that the questions were all wrong. For one thing, Polton seemed to have the idea that Gnomonism had come out of the Andes. He kept asking about “your curious beacons and landing strips in Peru” and “the pre-Incan race of giants” and “the sacred plaza of Cuzco.” He pressed the Master about his “prophecies” and his “harsh discipline” and his “uncanny power to pick up signals from outer space,” a power which Mr. Jimmerson had never claimed to possess. At the same time Mr. Jimmerson had to admire the man’s virtuosity as a reporter, for in all these hours of grilling Polton took not a single note.

Popper, meanwhile, as chairman of the Citizens Committee to Elect Mr. Jimmerson, had prepared a long statement for the press, announcing the candidacy. The statement ran to six sheets. WHY NOT MR. JIMMERSON FOR A CHANGE? was the heading. Directly beneath, in slightly smaller type, were two more questions: WHO IS MR.

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