True Grit—Charles Portis

A big mission for a little missy

Still from the 2010 film

This novel, Charles Portis’s second, came out in 1968. The very next year, Henry Hathaway made it into a movie starring John Wayne; the Coen brothers then remade it in 2010. Portis, while best known for this novel, wrote other novels, short stories, essays, and a play, all of which prompted literary critic Ron Rosenbaum to call him “the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.”

I get the feeling Portis wrote the climactic moment of True Grit first, and then wrote the rest of the novel to explain how it came about. Whether he wrote the climax first or last, he probably asked himself, “How many phobias can I trigger in one scene?” If you’ve watched the Coen brothers’ movie, you know the scene I mean, but I really loved the written account of how Mattie’s situation in the cave slid from bad to worse to horrific. In the 1969 movie version, everything came out all right in the end, of course. But Portis didn’t write a dime-store Western, and the 2010 version captured the novel’s grit much more truly.

Mattie Ross, a spinster, narrates the story of how, in the 1870s, when only fourteen years old, she avenged her father’s murder. In part, she wants to honor her father’s memory by sharing this story, but clearly she wants even more to honor the memory of Rooster Cogburn, the U.S. Marshall who helped her get vengeance and who saved her life. Mattie’s prim style (she never uses contractions) could be that of an old woman controverting rumors about her past or of a child trying to act all grownup. Either description works for me, but the last haunting line rings of masterful literary understatement: “This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.”

Mattie’s father, Frank Ross, tried to stop Tom Chaney, one of his ranch hands, from arguing with someone he thought had cheated him. Chaney, drunk and belligerent, kills Frank for his interference, robs his corpse, and flees. Mattie hears about the incident and comes to take care of Frank’s unfinished business and then track down his killer. Her useful assets include a pistol, a modest sum of money, a lot of spunk, and a supreme trust in her family’s lawyers if not in the local law enforcement. Of course the law couldn’t do much, since Chaney fled into the Choctaw Nation, outside of state or federal jurisdiction. Hence the need to bring him back, one way or another.

Throughout the novel everyone underestimates her—her sex, her age, and her diminutive size play into all the usual stereotypes, so everyone ignores her or tries to cheat her. She won’t let anyone get away with any of that. You might think that simple brute force would work, but she has money and lawyers and no fear of brandishing them. For example, she gets into it with Mr. Stonehill, the auctioneer who had sold some ponies to her dad. She wants to sell them back, and he refuses. After going around and around he gets exasperated.

“Where is your mother?”

“She is at home in Yell County looking after my sister Victoria and my brother Little Frank.”

“You must fetch her then. I do not like to deal with children.”

“You will not like it any better when Lawyer Daggett gets hold of you. He is a grown man.”

“You are impudent.”

“I do not wish to be, sir, but I will not be pushed about when I am in the right.”

“I will take it up with my attorney.”

“And I will take it up with mine. I will send him a message by telegraph and he will be here on the evening train. He will make money and I will make money and your lawyer will make money and you, Mr. Licensed Auctioneer, will foot the bill.”

How could we not love a plucky kid like that?

At one point, she consults with a sheriff about hiring someone to help her bring back Chaney. Although insisting she wants him to face justice in a court of law, Mattie tips her hand. She has a wide range to choose from, and the sheriff has a clear preference. But Mattie, does, too.

“[…] I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. […] The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L. T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.”

I said, “Where can I find this Rooster?”

Every vengeance quest story needs a complication or two. Not only does Mattie have to manage a grouchy, sometimes drunken Rooster, but another character arrives, also looking to bring Chaney to justice. LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger and something of a dandy, shows up looking for Chaney on account of a different murder (Portis originally wanted to cast Elvis Presley in the role for the 1969 movie). Mattie wants Chaney brought to Arkansas and tried for her father’s death, but LeBoeuf wants him brought to Texas for trial there. Rooster thinks it all the same which state hangs him so long as he hangs. And despite her insistence on a trial in Arkansas instead of Texas, Mattie’s choice of marshals to hire shows that she doesn’t particularly care whether he gets tried or not.

After a lot of preliminaries in town, the chase finally gets under way and the action doesn’t slack up. The quest itself could have been the plot of almost any Western, except for some significant elements that set it apart. Most genre Westerns would develop the whole novel around the figure of Rooster Cogburn, painting him as larger than life. Even if narrated by another character, Rooster’s personality and actions would dominate every scene. But Portis makes the story entirely about a fatherless teenage girl. He depends on the readers having absorbed the standard old-West mythos from other works and then pokes fun at it. One scene struck me as particularly funny. After a botched ambush, Rooster and LaBoeuf start belittling each other’s shooting prowess, so Rooster tosses an empty whiskey bottle in the air and shoots at it twice, missing both times. In a typical Western, he would have rattled off three shots, reducing the bottle to tiny shards. But in the novel, when it falls unharmed to the ground, he shoots at it two or three more times before finally hitting it. Then the two of them get into a contest, throwing corn dodgers in the air and shooting at them. As Mattie dryly reports it, “They drank whiskey and used up about sixty corn dodgers like that. None of them ever hit two at one throw […] It was entertaining for a while, but there was nothing educational about it.”

None of the characters quite fit the Western image, but they all seem to know about it and adopt one stereotype or another as their own. They seem like three-dimensional characters trying to squeeze into two-dimensional personas. But, unlike in most Westerns, these three—Rooster, LaBoeuf, and Mattie—have all matured by the end of the story, as have their attitudes toward each other.

I wish the Decade Project contained more works by Portis, such as The Dog of the South, or Masters of Atlantis. I find it easier to appreciate any single work of an author when I compare it to others. Of course, any reading list can only include so much, so I’ll probably have to look into other works of his in my “spare time.”

Next up: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

True Grit by Charles Portis

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (in collected works)

Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis (in collected works)

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

True Grit (1969 movie, DVD)

True Grit (2010 movie, DVD)

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