Famously Obscure

True Grit a novel by Charles Portis.  From Charles Portis: Collected Works.  Library of America. pp. 111-261.  $45.00.  *****

One of the most wonderful things about True Grit is the voice of its narrator, whom we take to be the fourteen-old-girl who is going through this adventure, but who is actually much older, “a woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for,” by her own description.  She obviously wants to tell exactly what happened, as it happened, but she also has a kind of literary sensibility and tries to tell the story in a cultivated, literary way.  It’s an odd combination for an author whose usual narrator was a sarcastic cynical male.  True Grit is Portis’ most famous novel, but in some ways it’s his least characteristic.

The story—which virtually everyone must now by now, since it was made into not one, but two major Hollywood movies—concerns a girl named Mattie Ross whose father was murdered by a man who worked for him.  Mattie hails from Yell County, Arkansas, and heads off by herself ostensibly to manage her father’s affairs—he had purchased some ponies at the time he was killed—but really to seek revenge for his death.  She knows the man who killed him and vows to find him and bring him to justice.  If Mattie seems a tad too knowing and sophisticated to be believed—she even throws around some legal jargon at one point—that might be the older narrator projecting things back.  We like her so much that we want her to be that smart.

The story also rings true because the author behind it all speaks with such authority.  Portis is a former reporter, fascinated by the history of his part of the country (as we can see from other pieces in this Library of America volume, like the memoir “Combination of Jacksons,” which includes remembrances of a great grandfather who fought for the Confederacy and died at the age of 99).  When he writes about 1870’s Arkansas and the Indian territory beyond it (which would eventually become Oklahoma), he seems to know whereof he speaks.  Mattie and the men she has found to help her walk through a landscape that Portis seems to have walked himself.  His descriptions are brief but vivid.

The final thing that makes the story convincing is that nobody, but nobody, is all good or all bad.  In fact, everybody’s pretty bad.  When Mattie finally confronts the man who killed her father, in an extremely satisfying but hair-raising scene toward the end, he admits that he killed her father but also deeply regrets it, as he regrets other crimes he committed.  His constant lament, when we finally meet him, is that the whole world is against him.  I honestly felt sorry for the guy.  And the men Mattie finds to track and apprehend Cheney, Rooster Cogburn and a man named LeBoeuf (who pronounces his name LeBeef) are hardly a pair of angels.  LeBoeuf is really just a bounty hunter, who will do whatever he must to get his man, and who is often opposed to Mattie, because he wants to take Cheney (whom he knows by another name) to Texas, where he can get a substantial reward for him, while Mattie wants to return him to Arkansas.  And Rooster Cogburn, whom Mattie chooses because he has grit, is in many ways more lawless than Cheney.

I suppose people love this novel because of Mattie Ross, but Cogburn—played in successive movies by John Wayne and Jeff Bridges—runs away with the story.  He was so successful in the first movie that Portis wrote a second script just for him, and thereby made his fortune (he also maintained a weird kind of obscurity.  Portis was known for not giving interviews, not promoting his work, not even putting an author photo on his novels, but he wasn’t opposed to commercial success; his first two novels were made into movies, and he wrote the script for the sequel to True Grit.  He thereby made the money that I assume he lived on for the rest of his life, and what I regard as his best work, his final three novels, is weirdly neglected.  The man has a strong following among literary readers.  But two of his novels didn’t even appear in paperback—though I would say they were made for paperback—until Overlook Press picked them up long after the hardbacks came out).  Cogburn is a fat one-eyed alcoholic who happens to be a US Marshall, and he is working for the good guys at this point, but he has not always been on the right side of the law by any means, and is so effective at catching outlaws because he’s walked both sides of the street.  He knows how the criminal mind thinks, what he’s likely to do, where he hangs out.

He’s doing this job for Mattie because she’s paying him; she managed to resolve her father’s business deals in a way that left her with some money.  But he is an equal opportunity law maker and law breaker, and when he finds the band of outlaws he’s looking for (having heard that Cheney is among them) he doesn’t just shoot first and ask questions later; he skips the questions altogether.  He’ll take his man dead or alive, but he seems to prefer dead.  Mattie is right about one thing, proving her to be an astute judge of character: the man has grit; in fact he’s  utterly fearless.  In the novel’s climactic scene he does things that are not just brave but downright foolhardy.  We have to wonder if he’s been hitting the bottle a little early in the day.  That scene could have gone either way.

I’ve seen both movies and remember liking them both, but nothing, no movie anywhere, could compare with the final hair-raising scenes of this novel.  They seem to be both completely realistic and the tallest of tall tales.  But Portis keeps his story moving (as he does in all his novels).  It’s over before we know it, almost too soon, and we’re left with nothing to do—when we want to stay with these characters—but read it again.  Portis has told a classic story here.  He’s one of those writers who managed to be both classic and idiosyncratic, successful and obscure, all in the same lifetime.