The bandit chieftain made no reply. He brushed snow and dirt from my face and said, “Your life depends on their actions. I have never busted a cap on a woman or anybody much under sixteen years but I will do what I have to do.”
I said, “There is some mix-up here. I am Mattie Ross of near Dardanelle, Arkansas. My family has property and I don’t know why I am being treated like this.”
I was appalled to read, in Donna Tartt’s excellent Afterword to this edition of Charles Portis’ True Grit, that the book was out of print for a while. That was, apparently, due to the fact that its association with a John Wayne movie drove it beyond the pale for the kind of intellectuals who got a drubbing in last night’s election. Fortunately, that injustice was remedied in 2010.
True Grit, which I first read back in the 1970s, is – I almost need not say – a really wonderful book. It’s the kind of work that can be read on several levels – as a sheer, headlong adventure tale, or as a commentary on Victorian American culture, the Western genre, female empowerment, or even Christianity. There’s something for almost everybody here.
The story – for those few who haven’t at least seen one of the movies – involves Mattie Ross, a feisty, precociously hard-nosed 14-year-old Arkansas girl who hires US Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt for Tom Chaney, the man who murdered her father, in the Indian Territories in the 1870s. She insists on going along with him, to make sure she’s getting her money’s worth.
Surprisingly, I find the contrast between the two True Grit movies (John Wayne in 1969 and Jeff Bridges in 2010) illuminating in discussing the book as a literary work. It’s common to assert that the more recent movie is truer to the book. I would say that’s only right in a sense.
As stated above, the book can be taken on many levels. On the surface, it’s almost a perfect John Wayne vehicle, and I was unable to decouple his voice from Rooster’s character as I read. They softened the ending for the 1969 version, but that’s generally how a John Wayne movie works. By and large, it was quite a faithful adaptation.
The 2010 version has many excellent qualities. It has a more authentic look than its predecessor. The use of gospel music is especially evocative, and Mattie’s age is correct.
However, the Coen brothers made some alterations of their own. The sequence where Mattie and Rooster are separated from LaBoeuf, and they cut a hanged man down from a tall tree, does not appear in the book anywhere, and I’m not sure what purpose it serves.
But that version delves deeper into the subtext, into the layers of social commentary and religion. It’s a more profound movie.
They’re each True Grit in their own way, it seems to me.
Whichever approach you prefer, you’ll find it in the book. If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s not long. It’s just perfect.
Highly recommended.
(I might mention, as a footnote, that I believe that True Grit marked a watershed in the writing of Western movie dialogue. The somewhat stilted diction Portis uses in the book, meant to emulate the writing of a middle-aged woman in the early 20th Century, was lifted verbatim for the movie characters. It worked so well in evoking the period that writers have been copying it ever since.)
