1968 Simon & Shuster. (Bloomsbury edition) Spoiler alerts.
The first Western selected as a Vinyl Tap reading choice.
Book Club choice, and one I, like some of the other attendees, was familiar with from the two film versions, though I hadn’t read the novel before.
That the book was an immediate success commercially on release is clear from the first film version, starring John Wayne, Glen Campbell (a rare acting role for the singer), & Kim Derby, coming out just a year after its release.
The Coen Brothers 2010 remake starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Hailee Stenfeld is closer in spirit to the novel, though both films centre on Rooster Cogburn as the primary character where the book puts Maddie Ross, the narrator of the story, much more to the foreground. She is clearly a powerful, imposing, stubborn character. Donna Tartt’s superb introduction to the edition I read compares her to Melville’s Ahab, from Moby Dick and that is extremely accurate Maddie’s drive for revenge is relentless and merciless. She is passionately Christian, and both sympathetic and forgiving to the three men she sees repenting their sins right before they are hanged, but Tom Chaney killed her dad, so she has zero mercy for him. Her pursuit is as single minded and almost as destructive as Ahab’s.
She hires Cogburn for his grit, only to doubt him at various points for his drunken mistakes even though he comes through for her in the end. The true Grit is her own. Both Cogburn and vain, narcissistic Texas Ranger LaBouefe (the remake missed the fun idea of having LaBouefe played by Shia La Bouffe), are professionals, but given to macho shooting contests. I like the avoidance of the Western movie cliché of being able to score a hit with every bullet as the men try shooting bottles thrown in the air and miss more than they hit. It’s a great foreshadow of their later mistakes which end up endangering Mattie.
Mattie insists on riding with them despite her zero experience. It isn’t so much a lack of trust that they won’t steal her money, but a desire to see Chaney die first hand that drives her relentlessly on. The men try to leave her behind and lose her but her dangerous fording of the river alongside the ferry the men ride, shows her obsessive determination.
The first third of the book has Mattie holding her own against horse and pony traders, successfully negotiating fair deals to men intent on ripping her off, taking her as a naive teenager rather than a girl driven to a maturity before her time. The middle section is the bonding of Maddie, Rooster & LaBouefe, with the boastful latter proving the least efficient in firing his rifle too soon and almost letting the outlaws pursued escape. LaBouefe’s cruel efforts to whip Maddie with a switch softens Rooster’s heart to her and shows the real beginning of the bonds of affection and trust between him and Maddy.
The tragic deaths of the outlaws in the shack is impressively, sensitively handled. Cogburn just flat out tells one of them he will die of his wounds and gets information on Chaney’s course.
The lovely scene in which Rooster & Mattie talk about his past while awaiting the gang arriving is terrific, with Rooster swinging from admission to his own criminal escapades as a train robber, to his failed marriages and doomed attempt to settle down to running a restaurant, a career he has no skills or aptitude for. This is a story about people out of their depth, taking on activities and missions beyond them, especially Mattie who is clearly not a bounty hunter by nature.
The final third gets extremely tense. Mattie, fetching water, runs right into Chaney and realises that Cogburn’s tracking skills are not too great as they still expected to be a few days behind their quarry. Also, Mattie’s gun, which she was warned is too strong for her to handle easily, misfires after she initially wounds Chaney, and she convinces herself that Cogburn betrayed her, robbing her of her kill, and therefore has no grit. That her first bullet fired well shows that is not the case.
Captured by Chaney, Mattie is rather too free with information about her companions, practically freely telling the gang all about them. I found myself reading this thinking, ‘shut up, Mattie’.
Her signing of the cheques and bank notes for men who ought to just ride away and sort all that out later is funny. It slows down their escape and makes it easier for Cogburn to intercept them. That Mattie not only sees Cogburn confront the fleeing gang on the meadow below but also hears all the conversation from quite a distance is the one unconvincing passage. It does provide the line best remembered from the Henry Hathaway directed Wayne film though, “Fill your hand you son of a bitch’. I remember the cheering of the audience in the cinema when Bridges says it in the remake. Great to see it was drawn right from the source novel.
The snake pit scene is incredible, and the point at which the two film versions most completely part company, though the book makes it even more intense than the 2010 visual version. With Mattie trapped in the pit, sinking deeper, attacked by possibly rabid bats, realising her arm is broken, finding the skeleton of a previous poor soul who fell in the pit, and finding his ribs are full of rattlesnakes that start brushing over her and ultimately biting her, and barely alive Chaney twice shot already on the brink of shooting her, in rapid but brilliantly measured out succession, this was probably an inspiration for the famous Raiders Of The Lost Ark snake pit trap scene.
Cogburn’s desperate ride to save Mattie, and her having to helplessly witness Blackie, the pony she hoped throughout the book to recover having to be raced to its death to save her so soon after she sees it is heart-breaking, as is the finale as she learns of Cogburn’s death just as they were due to reunite. This is a masterpiece, and a true classic western.
My favourite line is Mattie at her most puritanical and firebrand, refusing a taste of hard liquor, expressing her revulsion for Cogburn’s drinking habits. “I will not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.”
I particularly love how Portis shoves actual historic events and legends of the west into the background to elevate Mattie & Cogburn’s status. We are told Cogburn took part in battles and robberies that actually happened, and even met the James Gang. In the closing pages, as the 20th century is dawning and the Wild West is seen as a fading memory, the now aging spinster Mattie attends one of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West circus shows and meets Frank James but he is treated without awe or impact at all. That Mattie is learning about Cogburn’s death casually pushes the real life figure right out of the picture. as she has seen and lived the real thing. Mattie is uninterested in the absurd fakery of the Wild West Shows as she lived it all herself. The sudden ageing of her and sense of the end of the era depicted is startling. The narrative has long madeMattie seem more mature than she was as a teenager with a gun and obsessive purpose, but the ending explains it by showing the whole narrative came with the benefit of hindsight.
Vinyl Tap, Adelphi Street, Preston, Lancashire PR1 7BE.
My reviews of both of the films are on my Letterbox’d pages.
True Grit (1969) https://letterboxd.com/arthurchappell/film/true-grit/
True Grit (2010) https://letterboxd.com/arthurchappell/film/true-grit-2010/
The November read is an October horror special, with the reading period straddling Halloween. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House (1959) which I have read before.
Huge thanks to Millie Angel, Vinyl Tap and everyone in the Beer & Books Club.
Arthur Chappell
###
If you like my writings and you would like to see more, you can help fund my activity with a modest donation or two to my new Buymeacoffee Donations Page https://buymeacoffee.com/arthurchappell?new=1