Let's Build a Canon: True Grit
Popularity isn't always bad
Let’s Build a Canon: All canon building is stupid. And I love to do stupid things! Let’s Build a Canon will be a place to celebrate good books for no reason other than that they deserve praise. You can go ahead and call me Howard Bloom, Harold’s less-serious cousin. Today’s inductee: Charles Portis’s 1968 novel True Grit.
Popularity breeds resentment; the more you hear about something, the quicker you’ll get tired of hearing about it. Charles Portis’s True Grit was a bestseller in its day, and has been turned into not one but two pretty good movies starring legendary American actors. Combine that notoriety with Portis’s otherwise cult author status, alongside the contrarian’s impulse to pick lesser-known books, and True Grit has taken something of a reputational hit. Ron Rosenbaum, in an Esquire article meant to rehabilitate Portis’s reputation as an American great, called True Grit’s popularity “the barrier you literary sophisticates must be able to get past (or limbo beneath) if you are to show yourselves worthy of Portis’s genius.” True Grit is, to Rosenbaum, “too popular for its own good.” Rosenbaum and his ilk – what he calls the “Portis Society,” a “small but fanatic group of admirers … who consider him perhaps the least-known great writer alive in America” – prefer the later novels, The Dog of the South in particular; they have the cachet of the obscure, can only be discussed by those in the know. Let the dumbed down masses have their broad entertainment; we’ll be over here with the stuff that only true aesthetes can appreciate.
But sometimes the most popular choice really is the best; sometimes Sticky Fingers is just the best Stones album, Jaws the best Spielberg movie, and on a hot summer day a cold near-tasteless Budweiser is the only choice. (That triple hopped imperial double IPA doesn’t go down quite as smoothly.) We don’t have to pretend otherwise: True Grit is an incredible work, a deserved American classic that, if anything, doesn’t get enough due. It ought to be mentioned in the same breath as Twain in its sustained performance of the American idiom, in the same breath as Heller and O’Toole in its humor, alongside McCarthy in its revisioning of the myth of the American Wild West. Despite its broad appeal, it has all the idiosyncratic hallmarks of Portis’s other, more obscure works, their attending strangeness, oblique edges, and disarming humor; he just happened to wed these to the best possible yarn. It may be true that the best Portis work is the one you just read – they’re all great – but True Grit walks the tightrope between artistry and pure novelistic pleasure perfectly. If you’ve seen the movies, if you think you know it already, if you think you’re fine without reading it and focusing on the (also excellent) Norwood or Dog of the South or Gringos or Masters of Atlantis – no you’re not!
The broad outline of the book’s plot – and its further simplification in the movies – does it no favors, reception-wise: a fourteen year old girl, Mattie Ross, rides into the Wild West with a gruff old federal marshal, Rooster Cogburn, to get revenge on her father’s murderer, Tom Chaney. Before they can get out of town, a prissy Texas Ranger – LaBeouf (pronounced LaBeef) joins the posse, on Chaney’s tail for his own fiduciary reasons. The Mattie / Cogburn relationship at the center of the book has got a YA-ish sound to it, an odd-couple pairing that, admittedly, does make for a great movie. But no movie or plot skimming can match opening up and the book and getting the cold clear voice of Mattie Ross, all her tics and particularities in telling the story years after it happened. Portis uses this narrative voice – at once hard as hell but also inviting – to not only make the story believable, but also to ring the story with surreal humor and a deceptive darkness.
No matter how much the movies try to make Cogburn a morally grey character, it’s still John Wayne or Jeff Bridges on the screen; he’s someone to root for. The Cogburn of the book is a real killer, an ex-Confederate soldier who served under a particularly murderous captain, and in his ethos a precursor to our current police force: shoot first, keep shooting the dead body, never even consider a question, then make something up for the courts later. The law means nothing to him; all that matters is might. Mattie picks him for precisely that reason; she wants to see Chaney hanged, but dead any other way is just as good. When she first asks for Cogburn to take out Chaney, we see him drunk, losing at cards, fucking around with a pistol and pretending to serve a warrant to a rat:
He leaned forward and spoke at the rat in a low voice, saying ‘I have a writ here that says for you to stop eating Chen Lee’s cornmeal forthwith. It is a rat writ. It is a writ for a rat and this is the lawful service of said writ.’ Then he looked over at me and said, ‘Has he stopped?’ I gave no reply. I have never wasted any time encouraging drunkards or show-offs. He said to me, ‘It don’t look like to me he has stopped.’ He was holding Papa’s revolver down at his left side and he fired twice without aiming. The noise filled up that little room and made the curtains jump.
[…]
‘You can’t serve papers on a rat, baby sister.’
‘I never said you could.’
‘These shitpoke lawyers think you can but you can’t. They don’t care nothing about papers. […] Now they have got the judge down on me, and the marshal too. The rat catcher is too hard on the rats. That is what they say. Let up on the rats! Give them rats a fair show!’
Even as the law itself is being formed in the hazy post-Civil War American West, Cogburn feels set upon by restrictions, by the fact that he even has to try to serve papers before he has to shoot. He’s living proof that might makes right; the only reason he’s even employed by the federal government, as we glean as more and more of his backstory is revealed, is because he’s always been the last one standing.1 Over the course of one night on a stakeout, Cogburn’s logorrheic ramblings reveal a life lived on the permanent lam, a Confederate parolee become robber become failed restauranteur and husband become Buffalo hunter become road agent become cattle drover become deputy marshal. It’s the long way around on how the outlaw becomes state-sanctioned killer.
Nestled within just Rooster’s story are lines that any other writer would kill for; Portis just rattles ‘em off, switching seamlessly between Mattie’s narration and Cogburn’s story-within-the-story. Here he is talking about his wife leaving him for her ex-husband, a hardware store clerk:
She said, ‘Goodbye, Reuben, a love for decency does not abide in you.’ There is your divorced woman talking about decency. I told her, I said, ‘Goodbye, Nola, I hope that little nail-selling bastard will make you happy this time.’ She took my boy with her too. He never did like me anyhow. I guess I did speak awful rough to him but I didn’t mean nothing by it. You would not want to see a clumsier child than Horace. I bet he broke forty cups.
Nail-selling bastard! Forty cups! Describing his luck with the restaurant business, Cogburn says he “was like a man fighting bees.” When he gets in a fight with another member of a cattle droving crew and shoots him, he admits “It was not the thing to do but I was wore out and hadn’t had no coffee. It didn’t hurt him bad, the ball just skinned his head and he bit his pipe in two, yet nothing would do but he would have the law.”
Having one character’s voice be that strong would be an achievement for most other authors; for Portis it’s one of many in the symphony, Mattie keeping time at the front while the others get their solos. Mattie’s narration evokes the naïve melodies of Twain’s Huck Finn, but, as Donna Tartt notes in her afterword, she’s “a much harder customer than careless, sweet-tempered Huck … Mattie is a pure product of civilization as a Sunday school teacher in nineteenth-century Arkansas might define it; she is a straitlaced Presbyterian, prim as a poker.” Mattie’s religious background informs her tough view on the world and on earthly justice; discussing predestination and election, she confesses that
it is a hard doctrine, running contrary to our earthly ideas of fair play, but I can see no way around it. Read I Corinthians 6:13 and II Timothy 1: 9,10. Also I Peter 1:23, 19,20 and Romans 11:7. There you have it. It was good for Paul and Silas and it is good enough for me. It is good enough for you too.
Judge, jury, executioner, all backed up by the holy word. Her citing of the scripture also speaks to her other main character trait: persistence, backed by a knowledge of the rules, high and low, from biblical law to contract law. She’s a habitual hard bargain-driver, bending the world to her whim by never taking no for an answer. The book itself starts with a challenge, with Mattie in the familiar position of being doubted: “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.” From the first line you’re getting the mix of defiance and pride that deliriously drives Mattie towards revenge. That vindictive streak carries her through the book, all the way to the very end of the narrative, years after the events of her tale; she wins out as best a woman at that time might be able to, even if he she loses an arm along the way. She’s gotten her revenge, she’s got some money, she’s unmarried, in control, and still handling her doubters: “People love to talk. They love to slander you if you have any substance.”
Despite all the grim forebodings of how the West was really won – a procession of extrajudicial killings that eventually became ‘the law,’ backed by capital and the elected’s manifest destiny – Portis’s humor is never lost, or, more accurately, his attention the banal stupidities that make up the life of American Men is never lost. On a simple level, there are names like LaBoeuf, Lucky Ned Pepper or The Original Greaser Bob that have the perfect touch of silliness mixed with historical accuracy; there’s also Portisian character’s deep distrust of anything that comes from outside of Arkansas. America, being a great collection of distinct regions haphazardly thrown together, breeds distrust; everyone thinks that their region is the normal one, and that everyone else is a backwater freak or a hoity-toity dandy. Portis’s humor comes not only from the stinging microdifferences across the South, but also in the attendant strangenesses that get taken as normal depending where you are. LaBeouf, being a Texas Ranger, is the one who bears the brunt of the derision, getting into constant bickering matches with Mattie and Rooster; there’s also, among the rogue’s gallery of funny little people, the horse-trader who realizes he’s made an awful mistake in coming down to rougher country, lured by old-timey promises of prosperity: “I should never have come here. They told me this town was to be the Pittsburgh of the Southwest.”
The most bravura sequence of disarming stupidity comes deep into the book, as the crew gets closer and closer to Chaney’s hideout. Riding out into the wilderness, Cogburn promises that they’ll be doing some really intense traveling, but then gets caught up to by an old friend, Captain Finch, outside town. At that point, there’s an extended timeout while Cogburn, LaBeouf and Finch get wasted and shoot at stuff, an extended pissing contest at what should be the climax of the chase. But the best part of the scene is its antiheroic shading of the guys who are supposed to be tracking down a criminal: not only are they wasting time, they’re not even good at shooting. “[Rooster] drained off the whiskey in about three swallows and tapped the cork back in and tossed the bottle up in the air. He pulled his revolver and fired at it twice and missed. The bottle fell and rolled and Rooster shot at it two or three more times and it broke on the ground.” This spurs the three men to toss most of their provisions in the air and fire away. “They drank whiskey and used up about sixty corn dodgers like that.” What’s better than this: guys being dudes.2 Satisfied after they finally hit some targets, the men and a decidely less than pleased Mattie continue the chase, but Rooster's so drunk at this point that he accidentally sets up his camp about as close to the crooks' hideout as possible, leading to a perfectly anticlimactic meeting between Mattie and Chaney. There's no ambush, no standoff at high noon, just one drunkard bumbling into the path of a gang of idiots, leading, eventually, to a suicidal charge into certain death. Or, the good old days!
Even I, in trying to highlight the underlying serious themes of the book, have fallen into the aesthete’s trap, insisting on the intellectual complexity of the book instead of just how dang good it is. It’s a perfect old yarn, the ideal tale told on some dusty American porch, an all-time classic that, like all of Portis’s books, will never quite get its due. The most popular one, sure, but it’s good enough for me, and good enough for you too.
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Previous Canon Inductees:
LaBoeuf, by contrast, is the yin to Cogburn’s yang, an officer of paper laws and writ warrants; he barely served in the War and carries a long-range rifle, and he has no interest in Chaney besides getting as big a reward as possible for his capture. It’s in Cogburn and LaBeouf’s teaming up that we might see the formation of order in old-school violent ‘justice’ mixed with capitalist levers of power.
And a great echo of a scene in Norwood where Norwood hucks a sausage at his brother in law.
The canon returns! Is this also in the wacky western canon?