Western Classic Essay
“True Grit” Turns Forty
By Jenny Shank, 2-11-08
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True Grit
By Charles Portis
The Overlook Press
224 pages, $14.95
The Overlook Press recently reissued Charles Portis’s classic novel, True Grit, in honor of its fortieth anniversary, and the irresistible voice of Mattie Ross rings as clear today as it must have in 1968. “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,” the book begins.
Although the novel was hailed when it first came out, it has gone in and out of print over the years. In her afterward, Donna Tartt attributes the novel’s vanishing “from the public eye” to “the John Wayne film, which is good enough but which doesn’t do the book justice.” In an astute recent essay about True Grit for Salon.com, Allen Barra wrote that he doesn’t think the movie is necessarily to blame, and writes that it “probably has more to do with a reluctance to take the western seriously as literature.”
Tartt is one of many contemporary novelists who count True Grit among their literary influences. The great crime writer George Pelecanos has cited it as a favorite in an interview with NPR, saying, “Mattie’s voice, wry and sure, is one of the great creations of modern American fiction. I put it up there with Huck Finn’s, and that is not hyperbole.” Although Tartt doesn’t mention it in her essay, it seems clear that True Grit influenced her most recent novel, 2002’s The Little Friend, which features a intrepid young female protagonist and a climactic scene filled with snakes, just as Portis’s novel does.
I was born after the heyday of True Grit had subsided and so I’d never read it before. Now I am kicking myself for not finding it sooner. Mattie Ross has immediately elbowed her way into my personal pantheon of favorite fictional characters. She is a scripture-quoting, vengeance-seeking, straight-talking girl from Arkansas who leaves her grief-stricken mother behind with two younger siblings when her father is shot and killed by “a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney,” who “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.”
We learn that Mattie is narrating the story of these events when she is in her 70’s, trying to set the record straight about her history—she has never married, and we can gather that she’s considered eccentric. After her father’s killing, Mattie Ross heads into town to see to his body and clear up some his business affairs. Mattie takes everything into her own hands in part because, as she explains, “Mama was never any good at sums and she could hardly spell cat.” Mattie begins to ask around to find the roughest outlaw-tracking marshal available for hire, and the sheriff tells her, “The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking.” This description appeals to Mattie because she seeks to hire a man with “true grit.”
After Mattie gets the better of a horse dealer from whom her father had recently purchased some ponies, she seeks out Cogburn in his squalid lodgings ("Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone"), and for a hundred dollars, he agrees to track Tom Chaney and either kill him or capture him. Before he embarks, Mattie runs into a dandified Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf ("He called it LaBeef") who also seeks Tom Chaney for the reward offered in Texas by the family of a state senator he killed. Mattie’s desire for vengeance is so pure, however, that she wants Chaney to hang for killing her father only. Despite her protests, LaBoeuf strikes a deal with Cogburn to join the hunt. Mattie has planned all along to accompany them, but they of course disallow it. “You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away,” she says.
She is not dissuaded when they try to slip out of town without her. She chases them down on her swift pony, Blackie. “What a foolish plan, pitting horses so heavily loaded with men and hardware against a pony so lightly burdened as Blackie!” She eventually catches up to the men, and gradually earns their respect as they set out into Choctaw territory to track Chaney.
The humor, action, and nuanced personal dramas never let up as they pursue their quarry. Despite its violence, True Grit is a book that many parents enjoy sharing with their kids, daughters especially, because Mattie displays so much confidence, pluck, and wit.
Refreshingly, Mattie doesn’t care what she looks like (one character suggests she’s had a run in with “the ugly stick"). The measure of a man, and a woman, in her view, are the actions that they accomplish. And although those seeking a moral in True Grit should probably be shot, there is one that will go down easily, thanks to the novel’s sheer entertainment value. If you missed out on True Grit the first time around, there’s no time like the present to make the acquaintance of the formidable Mattie Ross.
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Comments
And in any case, Western writers can't be all that good because they all didn't go to Harvard. We see the same arrogance in those who can't believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, or Melville Melville, or Faulkner Faulkner.
The best literature, whether ancient or contemporary, and surely True Grit fits in that mold, doesn't conform to the ideological absurdities of the moment. Homo sapiens as a species is violent and barbaric, and ineluctably so; we see it everywhere else (e.g., beheadings in Iraq, something that has a long, long history in the conflict between the West and Islam--one event of the Crusades saw 3000 Christian crusaders beheaded on the field in one day) and it scares us to death.
By delegating such violence to Hollywood, we can treat it as if it isn't important, as if it's just entertainment, as if it isn't truly nherent to human beings.
The West is still awaiting its Homer, or Shakespeare, or Faulkner, it's acceptance of tragedy, perhaps because people want to believe that the future will be different from the past. Only when who we truly are sinks into our bones, and when we accept that our past is our future, will our literature be taken seriously.
The lonesome cowboys Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, or those of Andy Warhol were more in vogue when it came to fringed buckskin.
Movie versions of good books always pale in comparison to the printed version. Its just the nature of the medium. Movies have been the ruination of many good writers.
I was unaware that "western" literature wasn't taken seriously by the so called literary ''establishment". I thought that old argument was played out. Haven't you heard, the West is best.