True Grit by Charles Portis

First published: 1968

Type of plot: Western

Time of work: 1878-1903 (narrated in the 1920’s)

Locale: Arkansas and Choctaw Nation territory in Oklahoma

Principal Characters:

• Mattie Ross, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Frank Ross, whose murder by Tom Chaney she sets out to avenge
• Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn, a deputy U.S. marshall who, both in his official capacity and in Mattie’s pay, assists her in the pursuit of Chaney
• Sergeant LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger who, in pursuit of Chaney for the murder of a Texas state senator, accompanies Cogburn and Mattie
• Tom Chaney, alias
• Chambers, a robber and murderer whose real name is
• Theron Chelmsford.
• Lucky Ned Pepper, the leader of the robber gang that Chaney joins
• Yarnell Poindexter, a freeborn black man hired by Frank Ross and devoted to the Ross family
• Colonel G. Stonehill, an auctioneer
• J. Noble Daggett, Mattie’s lawyer
• Mrs. Floyd, a boardinghouse landlady from whom Mattie rents a room

The Novel

True Grit is a study of the indomitable spirit of three representative Americans: a hard-living, heavy-drinking lawman, Rooster Cogburn; young Mattie Ross, who hires Cogburn because of his reputation for grit and who proves herself to possess the same quality; and Sergeant LaBoeuf, a disciplined, clean-living lawman who is mercenary enough to contemplate maximum reward money. In varying degrees, all the characters in the novel, including the outlaws, either have “true grit” or show respect for it.

In seven unnumbered chapters, this short novel re-creates the idiom, melodrama, and morality of nineteenth century adventure fiction, particularly the dime-novel Western adventure stories. The events are related by Mattie Ross, who, in her late fifties or early sixties, looks back from her current situation as an unmarried, one-armed banker caring for her invalid mother, to the second year of the Rutherford B. Hayes Administration. Back then, her father, Frank Ross, had ridden from his home near Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas, to Fort Smith to purchase horses and had been shot to death and robbed by his companion, Tom Chaney. She recalls the details of her determined and ultimately successful mission, as a fourteen-year-old, to make Chaney pay for his crime.

She is first accompanied, traveling from her home to Fort Smith, by Yarnell Poindexter, a freeborn black man from Illinois, whom her father had hired to look after the Ross family and farm until his return from Fort Smith. Mattie shows her spunk early by winning a battle of wills with Colonel Stonehill, the fort’s auctioneer: He is intimidated by her threat of legal action and repurchases horses he had sold to her father. As she sets out in pursuit of Chaney, her companions are the fortyish Cogburn, for whose services she has agreed to pay one hundred dollars, and a thirtyish Texas Ranger sergeant with the gender-bent name of LaBoeuf who, intent upon both justice and a large reward, is pursuing Chaney for a murder that Chaney had committed in Texas.

Cogburn and LaBoeuf constitute an odd couple. Although they are separated in age by only a decade, LaBoeuf is of a new order and Cogburn is of the old. LaBoeuf is well-groomed, wears large shining spurs, goes by the book, and has acquired skills and judgment from training and discipline. Cogburn, resembling President Grover Cleveland in mien, girth, and moustache, is something of an outlaw turned lawman. He has only one eye, is slovenly in dress, drinks self-indulgently, and makes more errors in judgment than he cares to acknowledge.

Much of the narrative develops the respect that each of the three pursuers comes to have for the other two. Mattie holds her own in the rigors of outdoor living and keeps up with the two seasoned lawmen; Cogburn and LaBoeuf grow to respect and, often grudgingly, to rely upon each other.

There is mutual respect also between the lawmen and their outlaw quarry. Lucky Ned Pepper is admired for his leadership quality and his fortuitous elusiveness, his cohorts for their unwillingness to betray their kind, and even Chaney for the consistency and durability of his deceitfulness. The lawmen and outlaws address one another sometimes as equals to whom matters of law are divisive incidentals, but more often as competitors in a contest that provides life with meaning.

The climactic showdown is filled with rough-riding, exchanges of pistol and rifle fire, wounds, fatalities, falls, snakebites, and the triumph of justice. Lucky Ned Pepper and Tom Chaney are killed by, respectively, LaBoeuf and Cogburn. Mattie falls into a cavern pit and breaks her left arm, which is then bitten by a rattlesnake. The wounded Cogburn descends into the pit to rescue her, and both must be extricated by LaBoeuf, who engineers the feat by tying the rescue rope to Mattie’s indomitably spirited pony, Blackie. Blackie will be ridden to death, carrying both Mattie and Cogburn at an unrelentingly furious gallop toward medical aid. Mattie’s life is saved, but her arm must be amputated just above the elbow.

In the epilogue to the revenge story, LaBoeuf, who carried the corpse of Theron Chelmsford, alias Tom Chaney, back to Texas in fulfillment of his mission, is not heard from again. Cogburn reverts to activities that will cost him his marshalship and will lead him, as part of the evidentiary legend of the Old West, into “Wild West” shows, where he appears on exhibit with Frank James and Cole Younger. After Cogburn’s death in 1903, Mattie transfers his remains to her family burial plot. Mattie herself permits her younger siblings, Victoria and Little Frank, to live their lives away from home while she commits herself to the care of their mother and to spinsterhood. She brings her proven ability in money matters into a successful banking career.

Although they enter into no formal marriage, Mattie and Cogburn become married in spirit, that indomitable spirit that is true grit. Mattie makes no effort to maintain contact with LaBoeuf after his return to Texas, but she diligently follows the subsequent doings, both actual and legendary, of Rooster Cogburn. Little Frank will often tease his sister Mattie about Cogburn’s being her “secret sweetheart”; and Mattie’s satisfaction in living with the memory and near the remains of her hired protector bear out the substance of the epithet.

The Characters

Mattie Ross is a devout Presbyterian who supports her sincere beliefs and principles with pertinent references to the New Testament. She is honest and will not persist in a falsehood even in an effort to deceive the murderer Tom Chaney. She is as forthright with outlaws as she is with law-abiding citizens. Her strength is shown in her ability both to get men to act in accordance with her wishes and to resist the commands of men. Her political persuasion is that of postbellum Southerners: She is a confirmed Democrat. She is outspoken and does not mince or waste words. Her narration shows that she clearly adheres in later life to the principles and values that she presents herself as having adhered to during her fourteenth year.

Rooster Cogburn is an embodiment of the Old West, with its code of personal, as opposed to legislative, justice. When he is enlisted by Mattie at the age of forty-three, his way of life is already on the way out. He participates in the advent of legal justice by becoming a marshal, after the manner of Wyatt Earp, and he does his best to help the new order, embodied in LaBoeuf, to displace his own. As a Southerner, he had seen his civilization collapse in the Civil War, during which he had served not in the regulation Confederate Army but with William Quantrill and his outlaw raiders. The end of his age is commemorated by his becoming a living exhibition piece.

Sergeant LaBoeuf is duty bound and dedicated to his job as a Texas Ranger. Some of his orthodox methods of police work test the patience of Cogburn and strike the reader as verging on the comic; in almost every instance, however, they happen to be more effective than the old ways of enforcing the law. Well-trained, trim, and with a youthful cowlick, he is in dramatic contrast to the overweight, heavy-drinking Cogburn, who once falls off his horse in drunkenness and at another time is pinned under his horse; he is then spared death at the hands of Lucky Ned only by the crack shooting of LaBoeuf.

As a freeborn black man, Yarnell Poindexter is also representative of a new order. The status of blacks had changed with the defeat of the Confederacy, but the contempt that many whites had for them would linger. Yarnell, dignified and intelligent in his services as Mattie’s protector, must on one occasion settle for Mattie’s scolding of a train conductor she calls “nigger.”

Lucky Ned Pepper is a small, agile, and opportunistic outlaw. Cogburn not quite grudgingly admires his talents in crime and his practicality, which in one incident strikes Mattie as cruel and incomprehensible; Ned deserts a dying young gang member who has saved his life. The understanding and respect that Cogburn and Lucky Ned have for each other lends dimension to the novel.

Tom Chaney, also known as Chambers, born Theron Chelmsford, is the closest of the characters to pure villainy. Despite his lack of talents and dignity, however, he is, in his self-pitying whining and his clumsy criminality, not inhuman and not incomprehensible to the reader. As LaBoeuf is Cogburn’s antithesis, so Chaney is Ned Pepper’s.

Critical Context

That True Grit is Portis’s masterpiece is the result at least in part of its celebratory scope and its thematic depth. It surpassed his exceptionally well-received first novel, Norwood (1966), in critical praise, which continues to identify it as a classic. None of his later novels—The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991)—matched his second novel in reception and acclaim. Initial comparisons of Mattie Ross to Huckleberry Finn came to be recognized as superficial and strained. What invites True Grit into the company of American regionalist classics is not coincidental and partial resemblances, but the genuine regionalist’s deeply subjective identification of self with his or her regional roots in a stylistic objectification of that identity.

The style of Portis, a career journalist, is understandably journalistic, but only in that it effects a translation of the merits of good journalism—brevity, concision, lucid exposition, and rapid pace—into fictional narrative. The journalistic element does not account for Portis’s humor, which informs each of his novels from Norwood through Gringos and which neither veers toward the bitter or the sardonic, as Mark Twain’s can, nor intimates social protest, as Erskine Caldwell’s often does. Portis’s humor is usually an appeal, not against injustice, but in favor of the good sense and pragmatic morality that promote justice.

Bibliography

Garfield, Brian. “Song and Swagger of the Old West.” Saturday Review 51 (June 29, 1968): 25-26. Garfield differentiates the quality and scholarly accuracy of True Grit from those of hackwork Western novels. He sees Portis’s novel as one that raises the standards of the Western genre and as one that is imbued with truth instead of being rife with cliché and half-truth. He neglects, however, to mention the element of Southern honor that complements the integrity of the Old West.

Rosenbaum, Ron. “Our Least-known Great Novelist.” Esquire 129 (January, 1998): 30-32. An admiring profile of Portis that discusses his stature in modern American literture, as well as some of his books. Useful as an introduction to Portis’s work.

Shuman, R. Baird. “Portis’ True Grit: Adventure Story or Entwicklungsroman.” English Journal 59 (March, 1970): 367-370. Shuman argues that True Grit is a “developmental novel” that traces the coming of age and psychological maturation of Mattie Ross and that its Western trappings are merely its format. Shuman insists that the most moving and important passage in the novel is not the achievement of revenge with the death of Chaney, but the description of Mattie’s falling into the “cave” and being rescued therefrom. With going so far as to see in this a version of the classical journey to the underworld, symbolic of conversion or rebirth to maturity, Shuman classifies it as an event of initiation.

Wolfe, Tom. “The Feature Game.” In The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973: This chapter concludes with reference to Portis as a feature writer who realized the dream of achieving literary status. Wolfe surmises that the success of journalists as novelists may presage novelistic journalism’s superseding the novel as literature’s “main event.”