by Jack Butler
(a brief remembrance of the early days of The Porter Fund)
Ben Kimpel died in 1983, at the age of 67. He was the greatest teacher I had ever known, and had become a dear friend as well—in company with Johnny Wink on a first trip, and after that with Johnny's wife (and brilliant scholar and lover of literature, grammarian, and teacher) Dr. Susan Wink, we traveled parts of the western United States on journeys which seemed to us, at the time, to have the heft and spirit of legend.
(Johnny was responsible for our friendship—I'd known and respected Dr. Kimpel, but Johnny was the one who made us friends. It was hard for either of us to conquer our awe and refer to him as “Ben” on that first trip, but Ben insisted, and rapidly set us at ease.)
Ben Drew Kimpel was widely known to have helped many a struggling undergraduate and graduate assistant, always quietly, without making a fuss and without seeking attention or repayment.
He was the ultimate wit. He had a fund of knowledge and a quickness of mind that allowed him to make an instant and crowning retort, no matter what the jest or conversation—Johnny called him “the man who was never at a loss.” He loved to eat and drink well, was a gourmet as well as a gourmand, and nothing was more enjoyable than sharing food and drink and talk with him. He taught me what a splendid thing it is to share a good meal and spirited conversation with lively friends. He seemed to carry all of literature in his mind, was reputed to have known as many as twelve languages (he taught himself at least a reading knowledge of 15th-century church Latin to help him decipher passages in Pound's Cantos), and was a chain-smoker of unfiltered camels.
He became, for a time, chair of the English Department, in spite of the fact that he didn't care for the demands of that sort of administration: the inevitable book-keeping and keeping of records, the necessity to sometimes make decisions which were as fair as possible but pleased no one.
Not surprisingly, he made a splendid chairman.
I had been one of his beneficiaries myself—financially and academically to begin with, and finally, with wisdom, companionship, and understanding. I wanted a way to give back, but how? Ben neither sought nor needed reimbursement. He wasn't wealthy, but having settled on the Buick Skylark as transportation (I'm sure he could have afforded a Lamborghini or at least a Lincoln), he bought a new one every year.
It finally occurred to me that since reading was one of his chief delights, and since he had helped so many writers, a fitting way to thank him might be to further his own generosities, to help writers along.
I broached the idea to him: an annual award to deserving and often unfairly neglected Arkansas writers. At length he agreed, but with one proviso: The fund mustn't bear his name. He had loved and admired his mother greatly. If we wanted to establish a fund to honor him (and since he found its purpose worthy) he would okay the project—but only if we gave it his mother's original surname.
Which is how a fund created in honor of Ben Kimpel came to be called The Porter Fund.
I'd had the idea but was a little as sea as to how to implement it. In Phillip McMath, I had a friend who'd had Ben for a teacher and revered him as much as I did. Phil gladly joined me as co-founder of the award, bringing badly needed intelligence, organizational skill, and (not least of all, a degree of financial solidity). We appointed ourselves President and Secretary of the nascent Fund (the titles were Phil's idea) and pooled what we could afford to fund the initial award (I'm pretty sure Phil's contribution, which I remember as somewhere around $3000, outweighed mine).
Early on, there was no board. I selected the winners (having the greater contact with writers), arranged for notable presenters, and found generous people willing to allow us to use their homes for the Porter Fund party, at which the awards were made. (In those days, the event was indeed a party, and typically a fairly rousing one, to which we would sell tickets. In fact the selling of tickets was initially our primary source of income.)
I played this dual role until, I think, 1988 or so.
The very first Porter Fund Award was made to Leon Stokesbury, a masterful poet who was a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas, and was held at the gracious home of Bill Pumphrey. Pumphrey was the cousin of Ray Thornton, then a member of the U. S. House of Representatives. He was suave and witty, urbane and well-tanned (He and I had first met on the roof of the downtown YMCA, where we and others would go at mid-day to catch a little sun after swimming in the YMCA's non-regulation pool—44 laps to the mile, as I remember). He was well-situated in Pulaski Heights, an elegant neighborhood near the Little Rock Country Club. He gave and attended enviable parties, and seemed to know almost everyone of note in the city.
I remember him wandering through our happy crowd, friendly but perhaps looking a little baffled as to what exactly we were up to. (At the time, there were no similar literary events in Little Rock. We had come up with a new concept that were trying to get across.)
The second award went to Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, the author of several collections of incredibly fine short stories (think southern gothic meets magic realism, and you may have a faint premonitory grasp of of his style). He was eventually most widely recognized for his 1993 novel, Wolf Whistle, a fictionalized rendering of the Emmet Till murder.
Buddy—he was a friend, and I just can't think of him as “Lewis”—was a native of Mississippi, but had made his home in Fayetteville for a number of years, even attending workshops in the Creative Writing Department.
This award was held in the impressive home of Arkansas natives Hamp and Nancy Roy. (Hamp was a well-known opthalmologist.) The third floor of their impressive home was entirely given over to a ballroom, a magnificent setting for the presentation of the second award.
The award ceremony I remember most vividly was the third, held in 1987 at Fred Darragh's splendid home (and on his spacious grounds). Mary Steenburgen presented the award to Donald Harington, hailed by many as Arkansas's greatest novelist and described by one reviewer as “the best undiscovered novelist in the country.”
I don't think I'm speaking too far out of school to observe that Fred was an old-style not-officially-out-of-the-closet gay man, and had founded the Arkansas chapter of the ACLU. He had flown the Burma Hump in WWII (perhaps the most dangerous run, if you're up on the war's history) and loved P-38s. I admired him boundlessly, as a true hero.
(Here I'm compelled to digress: Some time after moving to Santa Fe, I was back for a brief visit (perhaps on a book tour). Edmund White, who then lived with his wife June on River Ridge Road, had been the publisher/owner of the Pine Bluff Commercial during the integration of Central High in 1957, and (though he was a definite conservative) had come out strongly against Orville Faubus and truckling to racism. We had become friends, and he was like Dee Brown and Fred Darragh, another of my Little Rock heroes.
Ed, like Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was a graduate of the University of Chicago, and loved vigorous philosophical debate. Ed and June had a vacation villa in Santa Fe, not far off Canyon Road. When they were in town I would visit, and after one of June's excellent meals, settle in to a rip-roaring good time hashing over just about every high-flown conundrum known to humans.
Since I wasn't in Little Rock for long, I thought to get two of my heroes together for lunch. You probably see this coming, but somehow it hadn't even occurred to me: Ed and Fred were on totally opposite sides of the political spectrum. They bristled, eyeing each other like two tomcats deciding whether or not to fight. I was mortified.
And then these two great men saved the situation: It turned out they had both flown P-38s in the war, and both thought it the finest plane ever created. The rest of the conversation at that enthusiastic and highly enjoyable lunch dealt entirely with P-38s.
At that 1987 Porter Award (and yes, we were already joking around about “Porter-parties”), we held a special "Champagne Preview", primarily in Fred's house, with 60 tickets available at $50 each (we sold out); and then a larger celebration (with $15 tickets) on the grounds. The final attendance was somewhere around two hundred—we'd sold so many tickets that we had to arrange last-minute attendants to park the cars.
The last Porter Fund Award I remember being directly involved with was presented to Paul Lake (since deceased—as are, now that I come to think of it, all of these original awardees, as well as many of those who gave us so much initial and anonymous help). Paul was an excellent formal poet, especially with regard to well-constructed narrative, which was not, at the time, a particularly popular or prevalent poetic mode.
We had persuaded Dale Bumpers, a U. S. senator who was often mentioned as a potential presidential candidate (and was one of many true statesmen to have come from Arkansas) to present the award. We held the ceremony in the spacious, multi-story, and well-lit home of Michael and Mary Dan Eades, located (again) on River Ridge Road overlooking the Arkansas River. Michael and Mary Dan were both doctors (they called their business, wittily enough, Paradox). They owned and ran a weight-loss clinic featuring the protein-sparing low-carb diet, a diet which shortly became tremendously popular. (They maintained, accurately, that they had anticipated Atkins by several years.) Their first diet book became a best-seller, and they received a $2.3 million advance for their second.
At this point, I should note what is probably obvious enough already, that all of the original awards were held in private homes. We owe a great deal of thanks to those generous people who donated their homes, and in doing so, helped to make the Fund a viable undertaking.
We should also give thanks to the dozens who helped us with a long list details—menus, place-settings, invitations, seating, and a host of other practical matters that are necessary but all too easily overlooked.
In those days our double goal was to reward deserving writers who had a solid link to Arkansas, and to hit the society pages (in order to establish the fund in the minds of Arkansas citizens as a significant event, and thereby help raise general public awareness of good writing).
These initial awards were in the amount of $1000 each, a considerable amount at the time, but far smaller than the current $5000 award—yet another indication of how far the Fund has come in the last forty years.
In 1988, I moved to Conway, to take a position at Hendrix College, and then, five years later, to Santa Fe, to head the Creative Writing Program of the College of Santa Fe. Since Phil was more suited to the work, and I was increasingly at a distance, Phil pretty much took over. The idea for the board, constituted of former winners, was his, and he deserves all the credit for the Award's solid financial status, the concurrent growth of its endowment, the establishment of a Lifetime Achievement Award, and the widespread recognition of the award as an annual Arkansas institution.
My input continued to lessen, since I was increasingly far from Little Rock—first in Conway, then in Santa Fe, and then wandering Oklahoma and Arizona, finally and happily settling to stay in California (which is, I can't resist pointing out, primarily a forested and beautiful wilderness—I'd had, until I moved there, the typical image of the state as a crowded and unlovely place dominated by the likes of Los Angeles and San Francisco).
I retain the privilege, with every other member, of nominating recipients of the award—although since I'm no longer current on Arkansas writers, I feel I've had less to contribute in even that regard. Fortunately, Phil has proven to be a far more than competent manager.
I've described the current nature of the Fund as a bureaucracy of writers, but should probably enlarge on that comment, since so many of us have negative associations with the word “bureaucracy”.
I doubt the Fund could have survived long as the brainstorm of an itinerant writer, however well-meant. It seems to me that every institutional idea must become a bureaucracy. The United States itself began as an idea. In order to become real and vital, to implement that idea, it had to become a bureaucracy. How else could it administer its benefits? (All we need to do now as a nation is learn to live up to our own declared standards.)
The process is not only inevitable, but all for the best. The choice of writers who deserve the award must be put on a reasonable and balanced basis. If the presentation of the award is to be fair and meaningful, it cannot be subject to the whims and prejudices of any individual.
Writing can be a lonely and trying vocation. Some few writers do find themselves appealing to wider audiences, even becoming best-selling authors. More power to them—especially the mystery and detective writers, whom I love to read, and the best of whom seem to me the last refuge of well-wrought literature.
But what of the writers who find it necessary to follow the promptings of their own abilities and consciences, no matter where those promptings may lead them, whether into the light of recognition or into the shadows; those writers who are compelled to give voice to the unsaid, who contribute, as surely as any best-seller, to the health and understanding of the tribe?
Their honest labor keeps the whole literary enterprise afloat.
There are very few people who would not be immediately happier to find themselves the recipient of an unexpected $5000. It's a wonderful thought that the Porter Fund, having thrived now for forty years, is in a solid position to offer that happiness to deserving writers well into the future.
I hope everyone involved will continue to think of the awards ceremony as a party—not as a stiff bit of business like a corporate Christmas event, but as—after all the work, the planning, the thought, the effort—a happy-go-lucky celebration of the best in human nature—life celebrated and commemorated in that fine human invention, words.
I hope it will continue to be a lot of fun.
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Ben's life is probably best set forth in Susan Wink's book, Ben Kimpel (which was sponsored by the Porter Fund). It's heartening to know that the Fund has plans to offer the book from now on to those who attend the award ceremonies. It's tremendously heartening to imagine that a bit of the remarkable human who was Ben Kimpel will continue to offer sustenance, uplift, and happy approval to deserving writers.
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