Classic Book: True Grit by Charles Portis

True Talent, True Entertainment, True Grit
by Abigail Beck

When my writing professor at college gave me a copy of True Grit as a graduation gift, I had no idea what I was getting into. For years I’d been telling myself that I didn’t like to read, but I was already on the path to reform, and here was a golden opportunity to make another step of progress.

And what a step! Soon I was immersed in the world of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn, a shoot-first-ask-questions-later world where the bad guys are bad and the good guys aren’t much better.

True Grit takes place not far from where its author spent much of his young life. Charles McColl Portis (b. 1933) started life in the south of Arkansas in Union County and later moved to Ashley County, where he stayed until he completed high school. When the conflict in Korea erupted in the 1950s, Portis served three years in the U.S. Marines. In 1958, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Arkansas. When asked why he settled on journalism for his career, Portis said, “You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism. I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college — not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service.”

Portis put his writing skills to use even before he earned his degree by working at the Arkansas Traveler (UA’s student newspaper) and the Northwest Arkansas Times. During the next six years after his graduation, he reported for the Arkansas Gazette and the New York Herald Tribune. At the Tribune, he worked alongside contemporaries Tom Wolfe and Lewis Lapham.

At the age of 31, Portis ended his journalism career and turned his attention toward fiction. Although he wrote several other novels (Norwood, 1966; The Dog of the South, 1979; Masters of Atlantis, 1985; Gringos, 1991), he’s best known for his New York Times bestseller, True Grit (1968).

The indomitable Mattie Ross acts as both the narrator and heroine of the story. It’s her personal account of how she avenged her father’s murder, told nearly a half century later:

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

“Here is what happened …”

After receiving news of her father’s death, Mattie leaves her home near Dardanelle, Yell County, and heads to Fort Smith to settle Frank Ross’ effects. While there, she learns that hardly anything is being done to bring Chaney to justice, so she undertakes to have her own revenge. She hires U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, “the meanest one,” according to the sheriff, to track Chaney down so that the outlaw will hang in Fort Smith for his crime. Another law officer joins the hunt (much to Mattie’s chagrin): a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (pronounced LaBeef) who’s already on Chaney’s trail for a different murder.

By her own willfulness and tenacity, Mattie manages to convince Rooster and LaBoeuf, to take her along (though their efforts to keep her in Fort Smith produce some comical scenes and reveal a tender spot in Rooster’s ‘pitiless’ heart). On somewhat less disagreeable terms, the three continue westward into Choctaw territory (southeastern Oklahoma) where they finally encounter the gang of bandits that Chaney has joined up with. Bullets fly, men fall, and hard hearts soften as Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf see their mission to its end.

Portis casts his story in an engaging style that’s concrete, detailed, and easy to read. One of the first things I noticed about it was the lack of contractions – the characters take pains to separate words that most people tend to run together: “You answer me, Rooster! I will kill this girl! You know I will do it!” (Ned Pepper); “It will not take long. I will feel easier” (Greaser Bob); “My thought was: This will not do” (Mattie).

There are plenty of instances where the characters do contract their words, but the regularity of overly-correct English is enough to catch the reader’s attention. I don’t know whether that stiffness reflects nineteenth-century Southern dialect or not (a quick Internet search seems to indicate that it doesn’t), but I suspect that Portis did it for the sake of voice rather than historicity. For Mattie at least, the meticulous vocalization accentuates her haughty piety and stubbornness, and since she narrates the story, we would expect her to report much of the dialogue in her own voice. Portis himself commented on this:

“The hard part was getting the voice of the narrator right, and sustaining it. An old lady, remember, is telling the story. She relates these rather squalid events in what she takes to be a proper, formal way. And she shows herself, unconsciously, perhaps, to be just as hard in her own way as these hard customers she disapproves of, and has to deal with. Again, as I recall, it was all largely a matter of getting the voice right.”

Aside from contributing to vocal style, the odd quality of contraction-less speech reminds readers that True Grit is fiction, giving us just one more reason to lose ourselves in the adventure.

The characters of True Grit are Portis’s biggest trophies. He gives each primary character (and some of the lesser characters, too) a deepness that enables readers to connect with them. Much of this depth comes from the rich (and very human) dialogue that blankets so many of the pages, opening windows into the personalities of the speakers. But Portis is also a wizard of human detail and, without painful exposition, he acquaints readers with his characters further by using concrete beats, descriptions, and actions.

Two of my favorite scenes come on occasions when Mattie visits Rooster at his room — once to coax him into working for her, and a second time to follow up their first meeting. You can tell a lot about someone from their living quarters, and Portis capitalizes on that ability.

“I went to the Chinaman’s store and bought an apple and asked Lee if Rooster was in. He said he was still in bed. I had never seen anyone in bed at 10 o’clock in the morning who was not sick but that was where he was.

“He stirred as I came through the curtain. His weight was such that the bunk was bowed in the middle almost to the floor. It looked like he was in a hammock. He was fully clothed under the covers. The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed. Rooster coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”

A simple description, yet vivid and telling.

Some people think that Portis based Rooster’s character on a real-life person, but the author denied any such connection:

“I’ve had letters from people of that name [Cogburn], claiming to see a likeness to some relative or other of the period, but to me he was just a representative figure of those hardy deputy marshals who worked for Judge Parker’s court.”

Rooster makes an interesting character because he’s lovable, hateable, and laughable all at the same time. Though a law officer, he has no qualms about breaking the very law he serves, allowing his ends to justify his dishonorable means. He drinks, he lies, he steals, he kills, yet somehow Mattie trusts him.

This relationship between Mattie and the marshal sweetens the story as it progresses. Portis contrasts Rooster’s character at the beginning and end of the story, showing us that although he never fully reforms, he’s not static. In Fort Smith, Mattie gets sick with a croup-like illness. Rooster responds apathetically:

“‘Where have you been, baby sister? I looked for you to come back, then give up on you. I figured you went on home.’

‘No, I have been at the Monarch boardinghouse right along. I have been down with something very nearly like the croup.’

‘Have you now? The General and me will thank you not to pass it on.’

‘I have about got it whipped. I thought you might inquire about me or look in on me while I was laid up.’

‘What made you think that?’

‘I had no reason except I did not know anybody else in town.’

‘Maybe you thought I was a preacher that goes around paying calls on all the sick people?’”

However, by the story’s end, Rooster has changed dramatically. Without spoiling the climax with details, I’ll say that Rooster exerts himself to the limits for Mattie’s sake – arguably the most honorable thing he’s ever done or will ever do in his life. In that moment above all others, he deserves his reputation: “They tell me you are a man with true grit.”

Mattie stands in marked contrast to Rooster as a tough nut with a girl-sized body in a man-sized coat. She haggles every deal (except where her father’s body is concerned) and is accustomed to having her way. Confident in her own opinions, she’s unafraid to speak her mind, and that coupled with her Presbyterian upbringing results in plenty of theological comments and references to the Bible. She addresses everything from demons to predestination, yet in her fondness for quoting Scripture, I wonder that she never stumbled over another verse: “Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19, KJV).

Mattie also is not afraid to let others know what she thinks of them, whether good or bad. In an early encounter with LaBoeuf, the girl insults him: “Well, if in four months I could not find Tom Chaney with a mark on his face like banished Cain I would not undertake to advise others how to do it.”

She shows similar regard for Rooster:

“How do you propose to [slap my face] from that hog wallow you are sunk in? I would be ashamed of myself living in this filth. If I smelled as bad as you I would not live in a city, I would go live on top of Magazine Mountain where I would offend no one but rabbits and salamanders.”

Yet in these low opinions there is a certain ironic charm, for Mattie changes her mind about the two men by the end of the book as drastically as they change theirs about her.

By the time I reached the end of the novel, I’d become fond of Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf, despite their failings. During that brief time when their lives intersected, they formed a bond, and they pulled me right in with them. (FYI: The Coen brothers did a fine job developing this connection in their 2010 film adaptation.) I’m surprised that, liking the characters as I did, I wasn’t dissatisfied with how Portis chose to end his story.

There’s nothing particularly triumphant in the last few pages. The characters quietly slip into history, and it feels right. It feels like real life. (It also goes to show that revenge yields no lasting benefits.) Most of us don’t exit this world on the sound of trumpets or gunfire – from the pinnacle of any adventure we have, we slip back into the hum of everyday life without a sound, cherishing memories of more exciting times.

When I closed True Grit, my adventure with Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf had ended. The time had come for me to return to reality, but I didn’t return empty. I carried away memories of the journey we had made together in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground. And if I ever want to relive those memories with my three friends, all I need to do is turn to the first page ….