Portis says he’ll see the new movie, but he won’t have anything to do with publicizing it, and he has never taken any part in adapting his novels for the screen. He’s not trying to affect a reclusive literary persona, nor does he resent the popularity of film adaptations. Rather, he seems to have the old-fashioned notion that he said what he had to say on the page.

In November, I met him in a bar beside the Arkansas River in Little Rock. Portis, a hardy-looking fellow of 76, wearing jeans and a tan Members Only jacket, seemed ill at ease — not his normal state, especially in a saloon. A veteran of the Korean War and the newspaper trade in Arkansas, New York and London, he has long enjoyed a reputation in newsrooms and barrooms as a world-class raconteur and collector of characters, and he was described by Tom Wolfe (who worked with him at The New York Herald-Tribune in the 1960s) as “the original laconic cutup,” but this time he appeared to be torn between the wish to be present and the wish to be elsewhere. It occurred to me that he did not want to turn into one of his own characters, making himself ridiculous by trying to perform the role of Big-Deal Southern Littérateur.

Portis kept his eyes on the river or the college football game on TV as he told stories about visiting the set of the first film adaptation of “True Grit.” He marveled at the way that Wayne and Robert Duvall blew up and stormed off, only to return a few hours later as if nothing had happened. But actors are like that, he supposed; always making scenes.

Sometime between the first and second beers, Portis took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket. He kept it in his hand for another half-hour as we talked, then finally dropped the bill on the table and declared that his health wasn’t what it had been and he had to be getting home. I’d had a taste of his voice in person, but he had mostly withheld it. (He had stipulated that our meeting was not an interview and I could not quote him directly, and he confessed to the mutual friend who put us in touch that it pained him to impose such conditions, because he didn’t want to be the kind of guy who imposes conditions.)

He has not published a book since 1991, and since then only a handful of short stories and bits of memoir. It would be a shame to hear no more from him in print. Among his many accomplishments, Portis is the author of the most perfect chapter opening I know of, in “Gringos”: “You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say — today I will change the oil in my truck.”