Mattie Ross's True Account 
By Richar Rhodes
[
A review of True Grit, by Charles Portis,
Transcribed by Alex T. Moore from The New York Times (July 7, 1968), 
for non-commercial use on The Unofficial Charles Portis Website 
(http://charlesportis.cjb.net).
]

The past is alien.  Fracis Parkman rode out to hunt buffalo on the 
Oregon Trail in 1843 while so weakened by malaria he could not even 
stand.  He didn't have to join the hunt; he merely wanted to.  Mollie 
Dorsey Sanford, a Nebraska frontierswoman, prepared for burial the 
body of a neighbor, a stranger, hoping someone would do the same for 
her when her time came.  It is for us to imagine either act.

In his second novel, Charles Portis almost imagines what it was like 
to be a 14-year-old Arkansas girl in the 1880's.  "True Grit" is 
Mattie Ross's "true account of how I avenged Frank Ross's [her 
father's] blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the 
ground."

Action, milled fine through Mattie's edged, ironic voice, makes the 
story.  Mattie is the soul of pragmatism.  She subscribes to the oldest 
American faith:  "If yo uwant anything done right you will have to see 
to it for yourself every time."  To make sure her father's murder is 
avenged, she hires a U.S. Marshal named Rooster Cgoburn, she decides, 
has "true grit," and despite his liking for whisky he lives up to her 
evaluation.  Riding along for a share of Chaney's hide is LaBoeuf, a 
Texas Ranger turned bounty hunter.  The men don't want a scraggly 
14-year-old along when the light out through Indian Territory.  Mattie 
won't be halted, though she will lose an arm from rattlesnake bite for 
her doggedness.

This novel twangs with authentic detail.  Killer Chaney gets himself 
mixed up with lucky Ned Pepper and his mail-robber gang after killing 
Frank Ross.  Marshal Rooster Cogburn knows the Territory and Lucky 
Ned's habits; he guides the trio.  Living on corn dodgers and salt 
pork, sleeping out in the snow, they track Ned's gang to a sod dugout, 
only to lose them when LaBoeuf fires off his big .50 Sharps rifle too 
soon.  They encounter the gang again outside a cave a day's ride away.  
This time Mattie wings Chaney with her Daddy's old pistol and gets 
caught.  Chaney comes close to dropping her into a snake pit before 
Rooster and LaBoeuf can regroup and overwhelm the gang.  She falls in 
anyway, gets bitten, and survives only because Rooster carries her on 
his back all the way into town, a chaw of tobacco bound to the bite to 
draw the poison.

Years later, a wealthy old spinster, Mattie awards Rooster a good grave 
and a proud headstone in her family plot.  She may have secretly loved 
him all her life, the only man she ever knew who had grit true enough 
to match her own - and a wit as sharp.

"True Grit" avoids the anachronisms which weaken most historical 
novels.  It is skillfully constructed, a comic tour de force.  But it 
lacks the puzzling displacements found in authentic "true accounts," 
where events don't happen the way they should but the way they did, 
and where the character of the narrator again and again disappears 
behind a screen of opaque motivations.

An aging lady bibliographer once told me that publications don't make 
facsimile editions the way they used to.  They leave out the worm 
holes.  She wanted more than a facsimile can deliver, and perhaps I 
do too.  "True Grit" has worm holes enough to thread a lively and 
entertaining story through.  It only has not got them all.  "Time just 
gets away from us," sighs Mattie at the end of her tale.