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In the Coen Brothers' “True Grit,” Jeff Bridges is not playing the John Wayne role. He's playing the Jeff Bridges role — or, more properly, the role created in the enduring novel by Charles Portis , much of whose original dialogue can be heard in this film. Bridges doesn't have the archetypal stature of the Duke. Few ever have. But he has here, I believe, an equal screen presence. We always knew we were looking at John Wayne in the original “ True Grit ” (1969). When we see Rooster Cogburn in this version, we're not thinking about Jeff Bridges.

Wayne wanted his tombstone to read, Feo, Fuerte y Formal (Ugly, Strong and Dignified). He was a handsome, weathered man when I met him in the 1960s and '70s, but not above a certain understandable vanity. Roo­ster might be an ornery gunslinger with an eye patch, but Wayne played him wearing a hairpiece and a corset. Jeff Bridges occupies the character like a homeless squatter. I found myself wondering how young Mattie Ross ( Hailee Steinfeld ) could endure his body odor.

Bridges' interpretation is no doubt closer to the reality of a lawman in those years of the West. How savory can a man be when he lives in saloons and on horseback? Not all riders on the range carried a change of clothes. Of course he's a lawman with an office and a room somewhere in town, but for much of the movie, he is on a quest through inauspicious territory to find the man who murdered Mattie's father.

As told in the novel, Mattie is a plucky young teen with a gaze as level as her hat brim. She hires Marshal Cogburn to track down that villain Tom Chaney ( Josh Brolin ). She means to kill him for “what he done.” If Bridges comfortably wears the Duke's shoes, Hailee Steinfeld is more effective than Kim Darby in the earlier film, and she was pretty darn good. Steinfeld was 13 when she made the film, close to the right age. Darby was a little over 20. The story hinges on the steely resolve of a girl who has been raised in the eye-for-an eye Old West, seen some bad sights and picked up her values from the kind of old man who can go and get hisself shot.

What strikes me is that I'm describing the story and the film as if it were simply, if admirably, a good Western. That's a surprise to me, because this is a film by the Coen Brothers, and this is the first straight genre exercise in their career. It's a loving one. Their craftsmanship is a wonder. Their casting is always inspired and exact. The cinematography by Roger Deakins reminds us of the glory that was, and can still be, the Western.

But this isn't a Coen Brothers film in the sense that we usually use those words. It's not eccentric, quirky, wry or flaky. It's as if these two men, who have devised some of the most original films of our time, reached a point where they decided to coast on the sheer pleasure of good old straightforward artistry. This is like Iggy Pop singing “My Funny Valentine,” which he does very well. So let me praise it for what it is, a splendid Western. The Coens having demonstrated their mastery of many notes, including many not heard before, now show they can play in tune.

Besides, isn't Rooster Cogburn where Jeff Bridges started out 40 years ago? The first time I was aware of him was in “ The Last Picture Show ” (1971), where he and his friends went the local movie theater to see “ Red River ,” starring John Wayne. Since then, that clean-faced young man has lived and rowdied and worked his way into being able to play Rooster with a savory nastiness that Wayne could not have equaled.

All the same, the star of this show is Hailee Steinfeld, and that's appropriate. This is her story, set in motion by her, narrated by her. This is Steinfeld's first considerable role. She nails it. She sidesteps the opportunity to make Mattie adorable. Mattie doesn't live in an adorable world. Seeing the first “True Grit,” I got a little crush on Kim Darby. Seeing this one, few people would get a crush on Hailee Steinfeld. Maybe in another movie. But the way she plays it with the Coens, she's more the kind of person you'd want guarding your back.

Matt Damon , Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper have weight and resonance in supporting roles. Damon is LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger who comes along for a time to track Tom Chaney. Glen Campbell had the role earlier, and was right for the tone of that film. Damon plays it on a more ominous note. His LaBoeuf isn't sidekick material. He and Cogburn have long-standing issues. Nor, we discover, is LaBoeuf a man of simple loyalty.

As Tom Chaney, Brolin is a complete and unadulterated villain, a rattlesnake who would as soon shoot Mattie as Rooster. In the Western genre, evil can be less nuanced than in your modern movies with all their psychological insights. Barry Pepper plays Lucky Ned Pepper, leader of a gang Chaney ends up with, and part of the four-man charge across the meadow into Rooster's gunfire, a charge as lucky for them as the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The 1969 film, directed by Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway , had glorious landscapes. The meadow and several other scenes were set in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, near Telluride. This film's landscapes are all in Texas, and although some are beautiful, many are as harsh and threatening as the badlands described by Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry .

I expect Bridges and Stein­feld have good chances of winning Oscar nominations for this film. Steinfeld is good the whole way through, but the scene audiences love is the one where she bargains with a horse trader ( Dakin Matthews ) for the money she feels is owed her. Here the key is the dialogue by the Coens, which never strains, indeed remains flat and common sense, as Mattie reasons the thief out of his money by seeming to employ his own logic.

I'm surprised the Coens made this film, so unlike their other work, except in quality. Instead of saying that now I hope they get back to making “Coen Brothers films,” I'm inclined to speculate on what other genres they might approach in this spirit. What about the musical? “Oklahoma!” is ready to be remade.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

True Grit (2010)

Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of Western violence, including disturbing images

110 minutes

Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney

Barry Pepper as Lucky Ned

Matt Damon as LaBoeuf

Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn

Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross

Written and directed by

Based on the novel by.

• Charles Portis

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Talking About ‘True Grit’

February 8, 2011

Paramount Pictures

Jeff Bridges as Rooster and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie in a scene from True Grit (2010)

When invited by The New York Review to write about the very successful western (if it is a western; about which more follows) and Coen brothers movie adaptation of Charles Portis’s twice-filmed novel True Grit , we watched Henry Hathaway’s 1969 version starring John Wayne and Kim Darby, Joel’s and Ethan’s version, and also read Portis’s much-praised novel, on top of which we breezed through quite a few reviews, as well as portions of the production notes.

The story of True Grit is mainly a study of loyalty. Reluctant loyalty, it is true, but loyalty nonetheless. The reluctance that fuels the narrative belongs to the aging, cranky bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) who finds himself cornered one day by the extremely persistent Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a fourteen-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, who is determined to avenge the murder of her father by the renegade Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Not only does Mattie hammer at Rooster until he agrees to go catch the killer, he is unable to dissuade her from coming with him, even into the wilds of Indian Territory, where they are joined in their search by a Texas Ranger, La Boeuf (Matt Damon). In the wilderness of the Choctaw Nation, this quarrelsome threesome develop bonds that are tested in violent conflict of a sort common in frontier yarns.

So what do we learn about loyalty in True Grit ? That it doesn’t prevent disagreement, or out-and-out fights, but it is often the coat love wears—a tattered and ragged coat, as in this fine movie—but maybe, just maybe, the best thing we have. Following is our conversation about all of the above, which we hope some readers will enjoy.

Diana Ossana: I liked my second viewing of the Coen brothers’ True Grit much more than the first—and I did like the first viewing—and I know why: the sort of stilted, formal language took some getting used to. I was expecting it this time, so it wasn’t at all distracting.

Larry McMurtry: Well, it’s in a certain tradition. I didn’t mind the language too much, but I thought the book and the film were both prolix, the conversations ran on too long and could have been shortened by a few sentences. Example, the conversation between Mattie and the horse trader about the price of Texas ponies. I think the Coen brothers’ True Grit is a wonderful movie, though, and they know their craft, which they practice with a certain elegance.

D: But you said while we were watching their version that the dialogue was too formal at times.

Joel and Ethan Cohen

D: Contrary. But I agree, I loved the film, particularly Jeff Bridges’s performance as Rooster Cogburn, and the Carter Burwell soundtrack. The Coen brothers are smart and unsentimental, two of my favorite traits in men.

L: That’s why we get along to the extent that we do get along.

L: An example of their elegant filmmaking is the verse from Proverbs that they use as an epigraph on a black screen: “The wicked flee when none pursueth.”

D: Which is a perfect epigraph for Mattie and her journey, and Jeff’s character, too.

L: The Coens each read Portis’s True Grit to their children.

D: I found that it does read like a novel accessible to young people.

L: I think Donna Tartt, the critic who contributed the afterword to the paperback , was right to mention that it owes more to The Wizard of Oz than to Huck Finn …

D: … because of the relentlessness of the young heroine. Dorothy wants to get back home to Kansas; Mattie wants to avenge the murder of her father at the hands of Tom Chaney. The language might feel similar to Twain’s, though Portis’s dialogue is more formal. I loved reading Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn growing up, and in fact that’s where my belief that boys have more fun than girls originated. I enjoyed True Grit the novel because a girl was having the adventures for a change.

L: You would like that.

D: The late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century illustrator Howard Pyle was an influence on the Coens’ creative vision for True Grit . Pyle also wrote and illustrated a book on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, too. The illustrations are dramatic and memorable, especially for a ten-year-old girl who lived mostly in her imagination.

From Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates

L: I think it’s interesting that they drew their visual inspiration from illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth , who did young adult classics, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped and The Book of Pirates . I see that particularly in the Tom Chaney, La Boeuf, and the bear man. [Mattie and Rooster encounter a “bear man,” a mountain man wearing a bearskin, in Indian country.]

D: The bear man was a creation of the Coens. He reminds me of one of the characters in your western novels. Night of the Hunter , the Charles Laughton movie about innocents facing murder and mayhem, was their inspiration for some of the music. “Leaning on Everlasting Arms” which plays during Rooster’s anguished, redemptive ride with Mattie was used throughout that film , too.

L: Indicative of how the Coen brothers have arrived is that Steven Spielberg is an executive producer on True Grit , and the powerful Scott Rudin the producer. A controversy that just sprang up today is whether or not Hailee Steinfeld should have been nominated as Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress.

D: That’s a kind of Hollywood political thing, isn’t it?

D: Maybe Scott (Rudin) didn’t think she could win as a Best Actress nominee, she’s so young and an unknown. That’s just speculation on my part, but Scott is a brilliant producer.

L: I think what Scott Rudin said—that the story was about the redemption of Rooster Cogburn as the protagonist—isn’t true. I don’t think Rooster was redeemed. I know he saved Mattie’s life, but then he goes on to kill several people and to fight on the wrong side in the Johnson County War.

D: Which we made a movie about ourselves.

L: Yep, Johnson County War , based on the novel Riders of Judgment by Frederick Manfred.

D: But we don’t find out about Rooster’s future misdeeds in True Grit . The film is a different animal from the novel, a statement you’ve made yourself several times about your own adaptations. So … maybe, just maybe, saving Mattie’s life is enough redemption for Rooster in the Coen brothers’ version of the story. He rode with the scoundrel Quantrill, but that was before Mattie.

L: But it’s left hanging in the movie whether or not Rooster is redeemed.

D: I don’t necessarily agree with that. Maybe I’m not as stern a judge as you, Larry. Rooster said it himself when he said if he felt his life was in danger …

L: … he shot ’em.

D: Exactly. A person would be hard pressed to know how they’d react in the same situation. Do you think either Gus or Call redeemed themselves in Lonesome Dove ?

L: Gosh, I’ll have to think about that … not particularly, no.

D: Jeff Bridges said that the Coen brothers wore cowboy hats to the set every day.

L: Does this mean they thought they were making a western?

D: In their interview with the Guardian , Joel and Ethan gave the journalist the impression that, “To hear the Coens tell it, their True Grit may not even be a western.”

L: Yes, they likened it more to Alice in Wonderland . I think they’re right. Mattie goes across the river, to a place she’s never been before, where she sees all these things.

D: Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are pretty highfalutin company for True Grit . It’s likely thought of as a western because it’s a period piece with horses and guns, though it takes place in Arkansas. But they do drift across the river into Indian territory, which is part of the west, correct?

L: Just barely. The Oklahoma Panhandle may be part of the west, I suppose. There were borrowings from plenty of westerns, like the final shootout between Rooster and Ned Pepper.

D: And the landscape is more true to place in the Coen brothers version than in the 1969 film.

L: The terrain bothered me in the 1969 version. That landscape looked like Colorado.

D: No wonder it bothers you. It was shot in Colorado.

L: I wondered where all those mountains came from. The business about Rooster holding the reins between his teeth came from Quantrill. Quantrill did it.

D: I didn’t know that.

L: I didn’t know it until today when I read the afterword in the paperback.

D: I agree with Donna Tartt about the scene where Rooster pulls his gun on La Boeuf while the latter is spanking Mattie. That’s when I knew Rooster would always side with the girl.

L: I thought that scene was silly in both versions of the film. I didn’t believe it.

D: Silly? Why on earth would you think it silly?

L: Why would La Boeuf suddenly spank a fourteen-year-old girl?

D: Because he likes her. In the way that boys like girls. Fourteen was a marrying age back then. It’s a kind of flirtation.

L: I didn’t believe Rooster would shoot him.

D: Maybe, maybe not, but La Boeuf’s certainly getting a little too familiar with Mattie. Rooster doesn’t like it, pulls his gun, and La Boeuf backs off.

Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie and Matt Damon as La Boeuf in a scene from True Grit (2010)

L: I wish both films had left out the character that gobbled.

D: You mean the imbecile.

L: Yes, it’s a cliché. There are too many films where a character gobbles.

D: What films?

L: The most surprising performance in both films was Glen Campbell in the 1969 version. A better La Boeuf than Matt Damon, who seemed rather flat and stiff to me.

D: Glen Campbell was certainly livelier. What struck me was the physical resemblance between Matt Damon and Glen Campbell. We both laughed when we realized that, remember? Elvis was even offered the role of La Boeuf. Colonel Parker, Elvis’s manager, wanted him to have top billing over John Wayne, which would have never worked. Henry Hathaway said he hated Glen Campbell’s performance, which he described as wooden.

L: That shows how much Henry Hathaway knew. To my thinking, the original version of True Grit was flat as a corn cake until John Wayne showed up on the screen . And Glen Campbell’s performance was graceful.

D: I have to agree with you. He was incredibly charming.

John Wayne in True Grit (1969)

L: You said it yourself, “Here comes the Duke, now the movie’s alive.” The Duke knew how to sit on a horse.

D: Speaking of horses, I thought in both films that seeing Mattie’s beloved horse Little Blackie run to death was too painful.

L: I agree. No fun watching a fine horse run to death.

D: You know, John Wayne didn’t like the finished film. Didn’t he tell Richard Burton on Oscar night that Burton should have won the Oscar instead of him?

L: For Anne of a Thousand Days , yes.

D: What a difference between Jeff Bridges’s performance and John Wayne’s. Jeff’s was more thoughtful …

L: … and Wayne’s was more raw force. What I think of as a great western, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch , was released one week after the 1969 True Grit .

D: The Wild Bunch was like Sergio Leone with dialogue.

L: The music was Sergio Leone music.

D: Ennio Morricone-like .

L: There were certainly compelling performances. William Holden, for example.

D: And Warren Oates.

L: I seem to be one of the few people not wowed by True Grit the novel.

D: Very little fiction wows you anymore.

L: That’s true. It’s not Tolstoy. It’s not Faulkner.

D: It doesn’t claim to be. It’s just good old-fashioned storytelling. I enjoyed it. I felt like I was thirteen years old again reading that novel.

L: I liked how Mattie used a Sharps rifle to shoot Tom Chaney in the new movie.

D: The Sharps kick is much more believable than the pistol kick in the first fiim.

L: Did you know that the Coen brothers used the f-word 260 times in The Big Lebowski ? A shocking thing for two nice Jewish boys from Minnesota to have done.

D: No, and that sounds like something you’d remember. Actually, the success of their fourteen-film opus seems to shock the Coens a bit.

L: My favorite scene in the John Wayne version is when Rooster clobbers La Boeuf with his rifle.

D: You laughed out loud at that scene. In Hathaway’s version, Rooster certainly had the best lines. My two favorite lines in the Coen brothers were when Mattie says, “My mother’s indecisive and hobbled by grief,” and when Rooster says, “I’m a foolish old man who’s been drawn into a wild goose chase by a harpie in trousers and a nincompoop.”

L: My favorite lines in modern cinema are from The Big Lebowski : Tara Reid’s character says, “I’ll suck your cock for a thousand dollars.” And The Dude (Jeff Bridges) replies, “I’m just gonna go find a cash machine.”

D: Well, I love that quote attributed to John Wayne: “Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid.”

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Larry McMurtry’s novels include The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove (winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Folly and Glory and Rhino Ranch . His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise , Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West and Custer .

Diana Ossana is a novelist, screenwriter, and producer. She won an Academy Award with Larry McMurtry for their adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain .

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‘True Grit’ Film Analysis

The film True Grit, directed by the Coen Brothers in 2010, is a western film that can most certainly be portrayed as a revisionist western in that the general cinematography brings forth a darker feel, with more realistic elements, straying away from the typical romantic feel of classic westerns.

1. The general iconography in True Grit evokes a more realistic, rugged feeling from its audience. A classic western often portrays the protagonists as clean-cut individuals, as in Stagecoach, with all the bells and whistles to convey the nobility of their intentions. Though, the head marshal Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges, lies on the opposite side of the spectrum (much like Eastwood in Fistful): his general attire consists of tattered cloths and stained jackets. He wears an eye patch that pronounces his imperfections; his faults. In fact the directors first introduce the marshal in a court room where he appears to be being rightfully convicted of excessive authoritative force. Even in the formality of a court room, Roster wears a wrinkled–poorly assembled–suit and sits in a manner that implies disgust; his hair is contained by the grease that looks as though it has been accrued through weeks of neglect. Everything the marshal wears, implores a feeling of distrust and dishonesty, yet it is him, the audience must rely on to concur the greater evil.

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The main character, Mattie Ross is a figure of nobility–consistently questioning the marshal and his seemingly harsh methods. Though, rather than wearing warm, brightly colored dresses with complex patterns to perhaps suggest spiritual wealth, she is almost always wearing a head-to-toe austere collared dress that is almost disheartening in its blandness. Her hair does not flow lusciously down her back but rather it is always braided, and hangs lifelessly on either shoulder. Whereas her attire does in fact give the viewer the sense that she has an acute moral compass, as well as a “proper” way of pursuing her goals, it does so in a way that casts a more realistic perhaps even pessimistic veil over her heroic nature.

It is not just the costume choices that encompass the films revisionist intentions. It’s everything: The guns in the movie are unpolished and rusted by what seems to be years of overuse. The forests consist of bare trees, spaced out from one another, about as full of life as the desert that is host to the hero’s journey. The buildings are vaguely furnished and creak due to their poor construction. Any given shot is saturated with the reassurance that this is not a pleasant journey by any means.

2. The characters themselves are even more of a backbone to the revisionist aspects to the film. As stated before Rooster Cogburn is presented as someone who–at first glance–seems to be a villain: he is lethargic in manner, slurred speech, has a certain disregard to all things but his own state. Very similar to the style that Eastwood continually displays throughout all of his western movies. The trail itself seems to be a point/counter-point debate as to how justice ought to be served, his stand point being by whatever means necessary according to him.

His first significant encounter with Mattie is him in a bed suited for a small child, him below her, marinating in his own filth in the back of some sort of shaggy market. Everything he says or does begs for moral critique and ridicule. It is not until about a third of the way into the film that he resentfully exposes an element of decency: Texas Ranger Laboeuf, played by Matt Damon is mercilessly beating Mattie. With what has been given to the audience, it is nature to expect the marshal to watch emotionlessly, though their (the audiences) developing understanding as to who Rooster Cogburn is shaken, as he raises his revolver to LaBoeuf, silently demanding he stop.

Mattie Ross is well put together girl who seeks to avenge her father. The ambitious and ruthless manner in which she goes about this seems paradoxical to her precise and canty nature. She makes no mistakes. Her quick-witted responses to all that doubt her for her unintimidating stature seem premeditated; leaving her mouth with a fluidity that is laced with impeccable logic that leaves her confronters dumbfounded and awestruck. She is by no means helpless, and proves herself to be the needed brains for the journey further solidifying the revisionist-like aspects to this almost unorthodox western. Whereas the hero of traditional classic westerns often appears to have all that is needed to defeat injustice, it seems as though Rooster and Mattie together make up the hero.

With the exception of Mattie, all of the characters–both good and bad– in the film appear to be hardly distinguishable from one another. That meaning that although some may be “worse” than other, everyone seems to have some sort of underlying selfish intention. This to me screams out realism as it casts aside the romantics of having a pure character that pursues justice for its intrinsic good.

3.The technical elements of True Grit are most definitely the strongest indicators of a revisionist western. The high-key lighting is of the highest contrast whenever the opportunity presents itself. Every night when the heroes camp, the screen is almost black (low-key) with a vastness that leaves the audience lost in the midst of hopelessness and doubt with nothing in sight but the vague campfire glow casted on the fatigued faces of Roster Mattie and Laboeuf. The days are musty with soft pale colors that beg for a life-filled tree to present itself, though it never does leaving Rooster to fill the immense emptiness with contempt and cheap whiskey. Classic westerns fill the screen with light and unprecedented hope, letting the audience feel as if salvation is underway and that even in the darkness of night, the hero perseverance is present. As in Stagecoach, everyone always knew John Wayne would walk away unscathed.

The shots for the most part are at a straight-on angle, perhaps a sign of equality in that no single character is by any means greater than another. A low-angled shot on the protagonist characters may surface a feeling of nobility and power, though as mentioned before, everyone has their own selfish intentions. The music–if even present– is minimal and simplistic, as if to say that what there is to see on screen brings forth all the feelings that are supposed to be experienced by the viewer. The non-diegetic sounds added, in my opinion, either very little or very much varying from scene to scene. In short, rather than having consistent high-key lighting with low angle shots that look up at Rooster accompanied by triumphant stringed instruments as he defeats injustice, True Grit captures the journey from the standpoint of those who walk it, and the journey is dark, quiet and exhausting.

4.Rooster and Mattie are a team. Not a team in the sense of a quarterback and a wide receiver; both needed for the ultimate goal with one often depicted as “more essential”. But a team in the sense of Yin and Yang: two conflicting energies that seem to bash heads though could not make do without the other. Throughout the entire film, Mattie is questioning and often protesting Roosters methods. Rooster, resentful to acknowledge the undeniable benefit of having Mattie, lives by his own rules, and will not be governed by anything or anyone but himself. Though, Mattie insists that their ultimate goal be met not in the manner that she sees appropriate, but in a manner that can be deemed morally permissible. In addition, there are multiple instances where Rooster would not have been able to progress in his journey had it not been for Mattie. Likewise Mattie would not achieve anything had it not been for Rooster and yet both seem to be unappreciative, resentful even of the others presence. That being said, it is quite unorthodox to have the demise of a single foe to be contingent on the balance of two protagonist characters as opposed to the all-knowing, all powerful and noble hero.

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Grit and Success: Navigating the Intersection of Talent, Effort, and Opportunity

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The New York Times

Opinionator | narrative and the grace of god: the new ‘true grit’.

Narrative and the Grace of God: The New ‘True Grit’

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

Movie critic Dan Gagliasso doesn’t like the Coen brothers’ remake of the Henry Hathaway-John Wayne “True Grit.” He is especially upset because the moment he most treasures — when Wayne, on horseback, takes the reins in his teeth and yells to Lucky Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall), “Fill your hand you son-of-a-bitch” — is in the Coens’ hands just another scene. “The new film,” Gagliasso complains , “literally throws that great cinematic moment away.”

That’s right; there is an evenness to the new movie’s treatment of its events that frustrates Gagliasso’s desire for something climactic and defining. In the movie Gagliasso wanted to see — in fact the original “True Grit” — we are told something about the nature of heroism and virtue and the relationship between the two. In the movie we have just been gifted with, there is no relationship between the two; heroism, of a physical kind, is displayed by almost everyone, “good” and “bad” alike, and the universe seems at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, to its exercise. The springs of that universe are revealed to us by the narrator-heroine Mattie in words that appear both in Charles Portis’s novel and the two films, but with a difference. The words the book and films share are these: “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.” These two sentences suggest a world in which everything comes around, if not sooner then later. The accounting is strict; nothing is free, except the grace of God. But free can bear two readings — distributed freely, just come and pick it up; or distributed in a way that exhibits no discernible pattern. In one reading grace is given to anyone and everyone; in the other it is given only to those whom God chooses for reasons that remain mysterious.

A third sentence, left out of the film but implied by its dramaturgy, tells us that the latter reading is the right one: “You cannot earn that [grace] or deserve it.” In short, there is no relationship between the bestowing or withholding of grace and the actions of those to whom it is either accorded or denied. You can’t add up a person’s deeds — so many good one and so many bad ones — and on the basis of the column totals put him on the grace-receiving side (you can’t earn it); and you can’t reason from what happens to someone to how he stands in God’s eyes (you can’t deserve it).

What this means is that there are two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously.

It is, says Mattie in a reflection that does not make it into either movie, a “hard doctrine running contrary to the earthly ideals of fair play” (that’s putting it mildly), and she glosses that hard doctrine — heavenly favor does not depend on anything we do — with a reference to II Timothy 1:9, which celebrates the power of the God “Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.”

This and other pieces of scripture don’t emerge from the story as a moral kernel emerges from a parable; they hang over the narrative (Mattie just sprays them), never quite touching its events and certainly not generated by them. There are no easy homiletics here, no direct line drawing from the way things seem to have turned out to the way they ultimately are. While worldly outcomes and the universe’s moral structure no doubt come together in the perspective of eternity, in the eyes of mortals they are entirely disjunct.

Mattie gives a fine (if terrible) example early in the novel when she imagines someone asking why her father went out of his way to help the man who promptly turned around and shot him. “He was his brother’s keeper. Does that answer your question?” Yes it does, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the reward for behaving in accord with God’s command is violent death at the hands of your brother, a question posed by the Bible’s first and defining event, and unanswered to this day.

In the novel and in the Coens’ film it is always like that: things happen, usually bad things (people are hanged, robbed, cheated, shot, knifed, bashed over the head and bitten by snakes), but they don’t have any meaning, except the meaning that you had better not expect much in this life because the brute irrationality of it all is always waiting to smack you in the face. This is what happens to Mattie at the very instant of her apparent triumph as she shoots Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, in the head. The recoil of the gun propels her backwards and she falls into a snake-infested pit. Years later, as the narrator of the novel, she recalls the moment and says: “I had forgotten about the pit behind me.” There is always a pit behind you and in front of you and to the side of you. That’s just the way it is.

Reviewers have remarked that the new “True Grit” — bleak, violent, unrelenting — is just like “No Country for Old Men.” Yes it is, but not quite. “No Country for Old Men” is a movie I could barely stand seeing once. I watched “True Grit” twice in a single evening, not exactly happily (it’s hardly a barrel of fun), but not in revulsion, either.

The reason is that while the Coens deprive us of the heroism Gagliasso and others look for, they give us a better heroism in the person of Mattie, who maintains the confidence of her convictions even when the world continues to provide no support for them. In the end, when she is a spinster with one arm who arrives too late to see Rooster once more, she remains as judgmental, single-minded and resolute as ever. She goes forward not because she has faith in a better worldly future — her last words to us are “Time just gets away from us” — but because she has faith in the righteousness of her path, a path that is sure (because it is not hers) despite the absence of external guideposts. That is the message Iris Dement proclaims at the movie’s close when she sings “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms”: “Oh how sweet to walk in this pilgrim way / Leaning on the everlasting arms / Oh how bright the path goes from day to day / Leaning on the everlasting arms / What have I to dread what have I to fear / Leaning on the everlasting arms.”

The new “True Grit” is that rare thing — a truly religious movie. In the John Wayne version religiosity is just an occasional flourish not to be taken seriously. In this movie it is everything, not despite but because of its refusal to resolve or soften the dilemmas the narrative delivers up.

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• A stubborn teenager enlists the help of a tough U.S. Marshal to track down her father's murderer.
• Following the murder of her father by hired hand Tom Chaney, 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross sets out to capture the killer. To aid her, she hires the toughest U.S. marshal she can find, a man with "true grit," Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn. Mattie insists on accompanying Cogburn, whose drinking, sloth, and generally reprobate character do not augment her faith in him. Against his wishes, she joins him in his trek into the Indian Nations in search of Chaney. They are joined by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who wants Chaney for his own purposes. The unlikely trio find danger and surprises on the journey, and each has his or her "grit" tested. — Jim Beaver <[email protected]>
• Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross joins an aging U.S. marshal and another lawman in tracking her father's killer into hostile Indian territory in Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Charles Portis' original novel. Sticking more closely to the source material than the 1969 feature adaptation starring Western icon John Wayne, the Coens' True Grit tells the story from the young girl's perspective, and re-teams the celebrated filmmaking duo with their No Country for Old Men producing partner Scott Rudin. Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper co-star.
• 1870 Fort Smith, Arkansas. With nothing but revenge to keep her going after the murder of her father by a once-trusted, cowardly snake, plucky fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross entices the mean, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn with a reward to hunt down her father's killer. As the excellent sharpshooter, Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, joins in, the unlikely trio forms a reluctant team and embarks on a peril-laden quest deep into the heart of the hostile Indian Territory to track down the murderer. However, the rugged wilderness is no place for a girl, and the odds are against them. Now, only vengeance matters. Is true grit enough to see justice served? — Nick Riganas
• After an outlaw named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) murders her father, feisty 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a boozy, trigger-happy lawman, to help her find Chaney and avenge her father. The bickering duo are not alone in their quest, for a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) is also tracking Chaney for reasons of his own. Together the unlikely trio ventures into hostile territory to dispense some Old West justice. — FilmsNow
• In 1878, Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a fourteen-year-old from Yell County, Arkansas, is determined to avenge her murdered father. Frank Ross was killed by his hired hand, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), after trying to dissuade a drunken Chaney from shooting a fellow card player who had allegedly cheated him. Chaney stole Ross's horse and fled the town. Enraged that no one bothered to pursue or convict Chaney, Mattie takes the investigation into her own hands. Leaving her mother and two younger siblings at home, Mattie travels to Fort Smith where her father was killed. Despite her tender age, Mattie is clever, confident, and an unshakable bargainer. She sells her father's now useless string of ponies back to the reluctant seller, Col. Stonehill (Dakin Matthews), and acquires three hundred and twenty dollars from the sale. Renting a room at a Fort Smith boarding house, where her father had been staying before his death, Mattie resolves to hire a U.S. marshal to track down Tom Chaney. After consulting the local sheriff during a public hanging, she settles on the marshal described as the meanest and most fearless: Rueben "Rooster" Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). After trailing Cogburn to a saloon, she attempts to hire him but is rebuffed. Mattie makes a second attempt after a court hearing at which Cogburn gave testimony, but Cogburn turns her down again, doubting that she actually possesses the fifty dollars she offered him as a reward for Chaney's capture. At the boarding house, Mattie is approached by a Texas Ranger, LaBouef (Matt Damon), who is aware of her mission to bring Tom Chaney to justice. LaBouef had been tracking Chaney for several months after Chaney had murdered a Texas senator. He offers to combine his knowledge with Cogburn's to track Chaney down. Mattie, put off by LaBouef's cocky attitude, rejects his offer. The following day, Mattie buys back one of her father's ponies to use on her journey, naming him Little Blackie. She visits with Cogburn, who has decided to accept her offer, though he refuses to let Mattie accompany him as she had planned. After Mattie threatens to report Cogburn to the sheriff if he leaves with her fifty dollars, he seemingly gives in and instructs her to be ready for the journey the next morning. Armed with her father's pistol, Mattie rides her pony to Cogburn's lodgings in the morning, but discovers that he had joined forces with LaBouef, departed without her, and left her a train ticket back to Yell County. Furious and insulted, Mattie follows his trail to a nearby river, spying Cogburn and LaBouef on the opposite bank. After the ferryman refuses to take her across, Mattie rides Little Blackie into the water and the two swim to the other side. Cogburn seems impressed by Mattie's gumption, but LaBouef is clearly irritated by her domineering attitude. After an ensuing argument with Cogburn, whom he also dislikes, LaBouef abandons the mission, taunting Cogburn for being "hoo-rahed by a little girl." Mattie and Cogburn continue the journey, forming something of a kinship as they travel. Cogburn picks up the information that Tom Chaney is not too far ahead of them, and that he may have joined up with another outlaw, Lucky Ned Pepper, and his gang. Seeking shelter from the cold, the two discover a cabin at nightfall, but find that it is temporarily inhabited by two men whom Cogburn recognizes as Emmett Quincy (Paul Rae) and Moon (Domhnall Gleeson), outlaws tied in with the Ned Pepper gang. Moon has a bullet wound in his leg, and is clearly in great pain. Noticing the substantial amount of food being prepared, Cogburn suspects the rest of the Pepper gang will arrive at the cabin soon. He offers to take Moon to a doctor and to give them some escape time if they provide information. Moon, desperate for medical attention, begins to talk, but is mortally stabbed by Quincy, who is then shot dead by Cogburn. As he dies, Moon admits that Lucky Ned is expected at the cabin that very night. Cogburn and Mattie hide in the bushes near the cabin, waiting for the gang to arrive. They first see LaBouef approach the cabin, continuing the search alone. However, the Ned Pepper gang arrives moments later. One of them lassos LaBouef, dragging him off his horse. From cover, Cogburn shoots two of the gang members (inadvertently winging LeBouef in the arm), causing the others to flee. He and Mattie take the injured LaBouef into the cabin, though LaBouef is unhappy to be working with Cogburn again. Cogburn drinks heavily throughout the night and is incredibly intoxicated as they set out the next morning. He and LaBouef squabble over their marksmanship skills, but Mattie attempts to keep the two men on task. After setting up camp in the woods that night, Cogburn vents his frustration about their mission, claiming he has been "dragged into a wild goose chase by a harpy in trousers and a nincompoop." He bows out of the arrangement, and LaBouef departs again, though he has gained genuine respect for Mattie. Both men agree that Chaney's trail is cold, and that continuing the search would be useless. A dejected Mattie falls asleep. The next morning, Mattie goes to a nearby stream for water and notices a stranger there watering his horses. Shocked, she realizes it is none other than Tom Chaney himself. Chaney recognizes her as Frank Ross's daughter and seems merely bemused by her presence until Mattie brandishes her father's revolver and attempts to take him into custody. An angered Chaney approaches with his rifle and Mattie fires, but only grazes his arm. Chaney drags her to the opposite bank, where the rest of the Ned Pepper gang has set up camp. Cogburn, having slept in the woods through the night, hears the commotion but is too late to retrieve Mattie. Lucky Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper), familiar with Cogburn, shouts across the stream to him and bargains Mattie's life for ample escape time. Cogburn agrees to not pursue the gang if Mattie is not harmed, and appears to ride away over the hills. Pepper is impressed by Mattie's strength of will, and assures her that she will not be hurt. While Ned and the three other gang members leave to address finances, Chaney is ordered to stay with Mattie and to leave her somewhere safe. Chaney tries to get out of the assignment, but to no avail. Mattie, despite Lucky Ned's assurance otherwise, fears that Chaney will kill her once they are alone. After the gang departs, Mattie offers to give Chaney an affidavit if he sets her free. Chaney refuses, saying that all he needs is Mattie's silence. He attacks her and holds a knife to her throat, but is knocked unconscious by LaBouef, who had remained in the area and heard the earlier gunshots. He explains that he rode back to the woods, met with Cogburn, and outlined a plan for Mattie's rescue. He says that Cogburn himself has arranged a showdown with Lucky Ned. As Mattie and LaBouef watch from a hilltop, Cogburn comes face to face with Ned and the three other gang members. Having pursued Ned on and off for some time, Cogburn gives Ned the choice of being taken back to Fort Smith to be hanged, or to be killed on the spot. Ned taunts Cogburn, calling him a "one-eyed fat man," and Cogburn charges his horse. Holding the reins in his teeth, he fires revolvers with both hands, killing the three other men and mortally wounding Lucky Ned before his horse takes a fall, trapping Cogburn underneath. Ned, with his last moments of strength, prepares to kill Cogburn. From the hilltop, LaBouef proves his skill in marksmanship by making a 400-yard rifle shot, shooting Lucky Ned off his horse before the marshal is harmed. Moments later, LaBouef is knocked unconscious by a now-awakened Tom Chaney, who attempts to grab LaBouef's rifle. Mattie intercepts and seizes the gun herself. Ordering Chaney to stand, Mattie fires a fatal shot to his chest, fulfilling her goal of avenging her father. The recoil from the blast sends Mattie stumbling backwards into a deep pit. She calls for help, but LaBouef is still out cold. Cogburn appears and begins to scale the side of the pit with a rope to rescue her, but Mattie's left hand has already been bitten by a rattlesnake. Cogburn retrieves her and temporarily treats her wound, but knows he must get her medical attention quickly or she will die. A revived LaBouef hoists them out of the pit, and Cogburn and Mattie ride away on Little Blackie. After miles of running, Little Blackie begins to suffer from exhaustion and eventually collapses. Knowing they cannot stop their journey, Cogburn shoots the horse and continues on, carrying Mattie himself. They soon reach a general store and Mattie is taken inside. Nearly twenty-five years later, forty-year-old Mattie (Elizabeth Marvel) looks back on her adventures. Her arm had been severely damaged by the snake venom and was amputated. Cogburn had departed by the time she came back into consciousness. After returning home to her family in Arkansas, Mattie had written to Cogburn, inviting him to visit her and collect his fifty dollar reward, but he never responded or appeared. The adult Mattie learns that the elderly Cogburn is now a performer in a traveling wild west show, and finally exchanges letters with him, arranging to meet once again to swap stories. Arriving at the fairgrounds, Mattie is told that Cogburn had died three days earlier. Mattie has Cogburn's body moved to her family plot. She reflects on her life; she never married, and kept her no-nonsense attitude over the years. She never heard again from LaBouef, but holds him in her memory. Mattie laments that "time just gets away from us."

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2010 · Film

Following the murder of her father by hired hand Tom Chaney, 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross sets out to capture the killer. To aid her, she hires the toughest U.S. Marshal she can find, a man with "true grit," Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn. Mattie insists on accompanying Cogburn, whose drinking, sloth, and generally reprobate character do not augment her faith in him. Against his wishes, she joins him in his trek into the Indian Nations in search of Chaney. They are joined by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who wants Chaney for his own purposes. The unlikely trio find danger and adventure on the journey, and each has his or her "grit" tested.

Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

• Paramount Pictures

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Mattie Ross acknowledges that most people don’t believe a fourteen-year-old girl is capable of avenging her father’s death. Nonetheless, this is what she does after her father’s murder. Planning to buy a group of ponies from a man named Stonehill , her father traveled from Little Rock to Fort Smith, Arkansas to make the deal. While Mattie stayed at home with her mother and two younger siblings, Frank Ross took along Tom Chaney , a man from Louisiana who appeared one day and asked for work. Taking pity on Chaney—a seemingly luckless man—Frank agreed to give him a job. When they arrived in Fort Smith, though, Chaney acted wildly by gambling his money away. Afterwards, he flew into a rage, got drunk, and decided to go after the men who won his money. As he vowed to steal back his money, Frank tried to stop him. Chaney shot him and stole two gold pieces from him. He then ran to Stonehill’s stables, where he clubbed a watchman in the face and made off with Frank’s horse, Judy .

After her father’s death, Mattie travels to Fort Smith and talks to the sheriff, discovering that the police are hardly doing anything to catch Chaney, who has run off with a notorious bandit named Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang, a group that recently robbed a mail train. The police believe Chaney and the gang have escaped into Indian Territory, where they have no jurisdiction. As such, Mattie decides to hire Rooster Cogburn , a marshal the sheriff says is ruthless. He also tells her that Rooster will be in court the following morning. Mattie then tells Yarnell —her father’s employee who accompanied her to Fort Smith—to travel back to Little Rock with Frank’s body while she stays in Fort Smith.

That night, she stays at the same boarding house where her father and Chaney stayed. The next day, she visits Stonehill and asks him to buy back the ponies, but he refuses, saying the deal has already been made. Mattie threatens to bring him to court, but he doesn’t take her threat seriously. Eventually he realizes that she and her lawyer— Lawyer Daggett —will build a strong case, and after much haggling, Mattie convinces him to buy back the ponies and to pay for the horse that Chaney stole, since it was on Stonehill’s property when Chaney took it. Begrudgingly, Stonehill agrees to pay her $325 as soon as she produces a letter from Daggett outlining the terms of the deal.

Mattie goes to the “telegraph office” and sends a message to Daggett. Later, she goes to the courthouse and watches Rooster Cogburn testify against Odus Wharton , the last surviving man of criminal family. Rooster has killed so many Whartons that Odus’s lawyer portrays him as unnecessarily violent. While he’s on the stand, Rooster explains that he and his longtime partner, Potter , came upon the last three Wharton men shortly after the criminals murdered a man and robbed him. According to Rooster, he and Potter approached with their guns drawn, but the Whartons attacked, so they had to shoot. Potter was killed in the fight. As for the Whartons, Rooster killed two of them and brought Odus back to Fort Smith. Eventually, the judge decides to continue the hearing the next day, giving Mattie a chance to catch up to Rooster, and she asks him to hunt down Chaney. Before accepting the offer, Rooster invites her to have dinner.

Over dinner, Mattie explains the details of the case. Rooster is familiar with Lucky Ned Pepper and is tempted to take the case, but he remains hesitant, since he isn’t sure if Mattie really has money. Later that night, Mattie goes back to the boarding house, where she remains for several days because she falls ill. Just when she’s starting to feel better, a Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf moves into the boarding house and tells her that he too is looking for Chaney. He explains that Chaney is only a fake name for a criminal named Theron Chelmsford, whom LaBoeuf has been tracking ever since he killed a senator and his dog in Waco, Texas several months ago. Glad to hear that someone else wants to find Chaney, Mattie informs LaBoeuf that she’s hiring Rooster, and LaBoeuf considers joining forces. However, it soon becomes clear that LaBoeuf wants to bring Chaney back to Texas, which Mattie dislikes, since she wants her father’s killer to hang in Fort Smith. Their conversation ends in an argument.

Lawyer Daggett’s letter arrives, so Mattie closes the deal with Stonehill. She then visits Rooster, gives him a down payment, and informs him that she’ll be coming with him. He rejects this at first but soon sees she won’t be deterred. The next time Mattie sees him, though, he’s sitting with LaBoeuf, who says he can make more money if he helps bring Chaney to Texas, since the senator’s family has promised a large reward. Rooster switches sides, teaming up with LaBoeuf instead of helping Mattie.

Returning to Stonehill, Mattie buys back one of the ponies (whom she names Blackie ) and sets out early the next morning, knowing Rooster and LaBoeuf are planning on beginning their journey on a small ferry. When she boards the boat on Blackie, though, Rooster and LaBoeuf instruct a deckhand to escort her back onto shore, at which point the ferry pulls away. The deckhand leads her to the top of a hill, but she tricks him and rides away, steering her horse through a narrow part of the river and thrashing through the water until she’s on the other side. Seeing this, LaBoeuf and Rooster gallop away, but she chases them until they suddenly stop and take her off Blackie, at which point LaBoeuf whips her with a switch. After a while, Rooster takes pity and orders LaBoeuf to stop, but LaBoeuf doesn’t listen, so Rooster pulls out his gun, and the Texas Ranger finally relents.

As Rooster, LaBoeuf, and Mattie venture on, they learn that Lucky Ned Pepper and two other outlaws were seen at a store called McAlester’s three days before. After a day of hard riding and a night on the uncomfortable ground, the trio comes upon a manmade dugout the following evening, where they find two criminals acquainted with Ned Pepper. Their names are Quincy and Moon , and Rooster ends up shooting Moon in the leg in order to get the two to cooperate. As Moon slowly bleeds out, he tells the trio that they saw Ned and his partner Haze two days before. To quiet him, Quincy cuts off four of his fingers, at which point LaBoeuf shoots Quincy in the neck, killing him. Before Moon dies, he says that Ned and Haze are planning to come back to the dugout sometime that night to eat dinner and pick up a group of horses that Moon and Quincy stole, which are currently standing out in the woods. Moon dies, and Rooster instructs Mattie and LaBoeuf to tidy up the dugout and restoke the fire so that it looks like there are people inside. The trio then splits up, with LaBoeuf hiking up one ridge and Rooster and Mattie hiking up another, waiting for Ned and his group to return. The plan, Rooster explains, is to trap them in the dugout, which is set into a V-like formation between the ridges. When the outlaws finally arrive hours later, though, Ned shoots his gun in the air, and this startles LaBoeuf, who returns fire, missing Ned but hitting his horse. As the outlaws scatter, Rooster and LaBoeuf fire at them, killing Haze and a younger criminal while the others escape. LaBoeuf sustains a minor injury to the shoulder when one of the bandits shoots at him and shatters the stock of his rifle.

As the sun rises, the trio makes its way to McAlester’s store with the bandits’ horses and the two dead criminals. From there, they set out once again, riding for an incredibly long time as Rooster drunkenly leads them to where he thinks the bandits have gone. After the longest day of Mattie’s life, they finally go to sleep in an area Rooster claims is four miles from Ned Pepper’s gang. The next morning, though, Mattie finds herself face-to-face with Tom Chaney when she goes to get water from a stream. She confronts him but he doesn’t take her seriously, even after she turns her father’s old pistol on him. Just as he’s telling her to come with him, she shoots him in the stomach. Her next shot misfires, and Chaney manages to grab her and bring her up the other side of the stream before LaBoeuf and Rooster can save her. A shootout takes place between the two groups, but Rooster and LaBoeuf are forced to retreat, shouting to Ned that they’ll leave as long as he doesn’t hurt Mattie.

Ned takes Mattie to the bandits’ camp atop a small hill. Before long, they see Rooster and LaBoeuf riding away, and they begin to relax, even divvying up their shares from their most recent train robbery. Once this is done, Ned decides everybody will leave except for Chaney and Mattie, since Chaney’s horse got away when Mattie shot him. Although Chaney feels betrayed, Ned tells him to take Mattie to a certain place, where he can drop her off and secure a horse for himself. With this, he and his cronies ride away. After a moment, Mattie throws a pot of hot water on Chaney and starts to run, but Chaney catches her and hits her on the head with his pistol. Just then, LaBoeuf appears and holds Chaney at gun point, having snuck up the backside of the hill. Looking down, Mattie sees Ned Pepper and his gang riding on the plain, where Rooster suddenly appears and charges them at full speed, shooting while holding the reins with his teeth. He manages to best everyone but Ned himself before toppling over, his horse falling atop him. Ned approaches Rooster and prepares to kill him, but LaBoeuf takes aim from the hill and shoots Ned where he stands.

Mattie and LaBoeuf celebrate this fantastic shot, but Chaney clubs LaBoeuf over the head with a rock, sending him to the ground. Mattie grabs her gun and shoots Chaney in the head, but the force of the shot sends her toppling backward, and she falls into a large pit that Chaney previously claimed was full of rattlesnakes, though she doesn’t see any. Still, she discovers that her arm is broken and that the bottom half of her body is lodged in the mouth of a bat cave that extends even farther down. Just as she’s about to fall through completely, she hears Chaney’s voice and realizes he’s still alive, though his body comes flying down into the pit when Rooster appears several moments later. When Chaney’s body hits the ground, he crushes an old human skeleton lying nearby—a skeleton full of hibernating rattlesnakes, which suddenly slither all around Mattie, eventually biting her in the hand. Just before she’s about to lose consciousness, Rooster propels himself down and grabs her, and LaBoeuf hoists them out. From there, Rooster sets off with Mattie, riding Blackie back to Fort Smith while LaBoeuf stays with Chaney’s body. Before they reach safety, though, Blackie dies of exhaustion, and so Rooster takes Mattie in his arms and runs.

Mattie spends a week at the doctor’s, where they’re forced to amputate her arm because of the snake venom. In the years after this adventure, Mattie hopes to see Rooster again but never manages to catch up with him, as he travels around the nation taking up odd jobs. Finally, she hears decades later that he’s joined a traveling circus, but when she goes to see him, she learns that he died two days earlier.

• How Accurate was the Language in the 2010 Version of True Grit ?

by Marshall Trimble | Apr 17, 2019 | Ask the Marshall , Departments

How accurate was the language in the 2010 version of True Grit ?

Scott Bachtold Hudson, Illinois

You’re probably referring to the fact that many of the characters don’t use contractions in their speech. The movie’s dialogue is pretty true to the language used by author Charles Portis in the novel, but people during the frontier period often used contractions, especially in informal speech.

There’s little doubt that language in this version of True Grit sounds archaic, as if it came from an earlier period in history. That’s more of an artistic license device; it’s not authentic to the time and place.

Looking at it from the perspective of Mattie Ross, who is telling the story in the 1920s, she would be writing “won’t” instead of “will not” about a third of the time and “don’t” instead of “do not” about 60 percent of the time.

For many years contractions have been taboo in formal writing, but starting in the 1920s, some grammatical sacred cows are changing what most people find acceptable in writing.

Marshall Trimble  is Arizona’s official historian and vice president of the Wild West History Association. His latest book is  Arizona Outlaws and Lawmen;  The History Press, 2015.  If you have a question, write: Ask the Marshall, P.O. Box 8008, Cave Creek, AZ 85327 or email him at  [email protected] .

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The “True Grit” Novel by Charles Portis Essay

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Parallelism

Character development, opposing argument, works cited, annotated bibliography.

In his classical novel published in 1968 and titled True Grit , Charles Portis posits that true resolve and valor are critical factors for attaining desired goals. Justice and vengeance remain a dominant theme in the novel. Portis narrates the story of Mattie Ross, a teenage girl, who is determined to avenge Tom Chaney, her father’s murderer (Dirda Para 2). The author uses numerous literary features in order to advance the theme of justice and revenge throughout the book. The writer employs parallelism, humor, and character development in numerous accounts of narration to advance the theme of justice and revenge.

The author uses parallelism of revenge and crime in many instances in the book. Ross, the leading character in the novel, exhibits firm moral conviction and a high spirit for revenge to ensure Chaney is excruciatingly punished for slaying her father. The protagonist wishes to see him hanged or possibly execute the murderer herself. Marshal Cogburn Rooster, who Ross believes has grit and can help her locate Chaney seeks to have the gun. The action prompts Ross to reply, “It belonged to my father. I plan to kill Tom Chaney with it if the law fails to do so” (Portis 37). Her response to this request demonstrates the profound intention to get justice even if it means engaging in criminal act. Ross is a daring lady who is ready to persevere beyond limits and commits crime to do what she believes is right. The struggle between revenge and crime is endless throughout the novel.

Ross is a firm-willed teenage girl who applies her determination and intelligence to prosper in society where she is constantly underrated. When Ross negotiates payment for some of her late father’s property from Colonel Stonehill, she informs him of her plan to retaliate against the assassin. Stonehill warns her of the impending difficulty in executing such tactics. Ross quickly reacts by noting that, “The good Christian does not flinch from difficulties. Neither does he rashly court them. The good Christian is not willful or presumptuous” (Portis 59). Conceivably, her action portrays that she understands justice might not come straightforwardly. Perhaps at this stage, Ross lacks the knowledge of the high price she might pay from such actions. After finally shooting Chaney and believing that she killed him, she retreats into a cavernous hole that turns into a hell-like pit where she starts to suffer the consequence. The pony, Blackie, who assists her to safety following her injuries in a ditch is bitten by a snake and later dies when rushing to seek medical attention. Ross describes the incident that “Blackie fell to the ground and died, his brave heart burst and mine broken. There never lived a nobler pony” (Portis 149). Ross did not only lose her treasured friend but also had to individually pay the price by having her arm amputated in attempt to seek justice.

Another instance leading to character growth begins when Rooster acts extraordinarily when him alongside Ross encountered two colleagues of Ned Pepper’s criminal group. He closely interrogated them and Moon, a decent individual who had just accompanied a wrong assembly, is committed to talking. Quincy, the other accomplice in the team, viciously chops Moon’s fingers then proceeds to brutally stab him. Rooster speedily shoots and kills Quincy following the commencement of the attack on Moon. Rooster responds as Moon pleads for help, “I can do nothing for you, son. Your pard killed you and I have done for him” (Portis 90). It is evident that Rooster led a deceitful life and paid the cumbersome price where he even damaged his eye while doing what he believed was right. Despite all these happenings, Rooster later develops into a caring man who upkeeps both Ross and mule.

True Grit is a serious book full of humor in many instances. Imagine a teenage girl sets out to retaliate the killing of her father, especially in society full of mutilations, shoot-outs, and hangings (Tartt Para 5). In certain cases of pursuing justice and revenge, the wit channels the audience to a period of intense emotion and entertainment. Ross encounters LaBoeuf, a renowned Texas Ranger, who has been assisting her to track Chaney in her journey to pursuing justice. LaBoeuf’s sole mission is to transfer Chaney to Texas alive. While in Texas, he will be arraigned for killing the area senator. LaBoeuf says he will obtain compensation of amounts totaling five hundred U.S. dollars and a further reward of U.S. dollars one thousand five hundred from the deceased family. LaBoeuf offers his help to Ross in capturing Chaney to the promised benefits. Nonetheless, her interest fades when he says his motivations are not aligned with hers. Later, LaBoeuf discloses that the support of Rooster remains critical. He reveals this by saying the need of having, “…someone who knows the ground and can make an arrest out there that will stand up” (Portis 46). While LaBoeuf is inspired by the reward he anticipates obtaining, he remains willing to slash a portion of the money to Rooster to ensure pursuing Chaney does not consume much of his time.

Some individuals view and seek justice as a profession as demonstrated by LaBoeuf while others are inspired more by simply acting rightfully. Rooster represents the latter where he is willing to break the law when it comes to protecting the community and assisting the offended. When Ross initially hears of Rooster, she heads to the courtroom during a cross-examination in a case where he is a witness in the murder trial of Wharton Odus. Roosters promises the jury that executing the three Wharton members was the perfect thing to do in such a scenario. Rooster responds by noting, “Three murdering thieves might have got loose and gone to kill somebody else” (Portis 33). Moreover, he remains cognizant that society is substantially more prosperous without free-roaming criminal elements.

On the contrary, the struggles Ross undergoes in the story is represented from the perceptive of battling the corrupt societal systems rather than justice and revenge. First robbed of her father then later a family property, Ross remains dedicated to ensure the law takes its course and bring the perpetrators to justice. However, she rapidly learns that the authorities cannot fully help her to attain that mission and quickly changes tact to do whatever it takes to execute her plan to the end. The author notes, “Mattie takes on all manner of authority to right wrongs wrought by corruption and apathy” (Mathews 371). The argument symbolises the resolve that became identical with the extremism in America

In conclusion, the essay demonstrates a price to pay, especially for individuals determined to obtain justice irrespective of the level of motivation for retribution and the manner of its execution. While Ross was inspired by vengeance and later obtained the desired victory, it needed perpetual bravery, making her to suffer the consequence by losing an arm, her virtue, and honorable pony. LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger, pursued justice as a job although he was not emotionally attached, his plans to transfer Chaney to Texas alive never mattered when it was clear Ross’s life was in danger. Rooster had a prolonged history of searching for justice and acting rightfully was his underlying principle. He paid the price of losing his eye while engaging the gang. The novel successfully uses the three literary features to paint the theme of justice and revenge.

Dirda, Michael. “True Grit Is A Modern Classic, But It’s Not The Only Great Work By Charles Portis” The Washington Post , Web.

Matthews, Kristin L. “True Grit: A Radical Tale.” The Journal of American Culture , Vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, pp. 370-384.

Portis, Charles. True Grit . A&C Black, 1968. BooksVooks E-book , Web.

Tartt, Donna. “Donna Tartt On The Singular Voice, And Pungent Humor, Of Charles Portis” The New York Times , Web.

Chen, Jiye, et al. “A Reflection of American Spirit: The Analysis of Cowboy Images in American Movie True Grit.” 2021 International Conference on Social Development and Media Communication (SDMC 2021) . Atlantis Press, 2022.

In an article published in 2022 titled “A Reflection of American Spirit: The Analysis of Cowboy Images in American Movie True Grit”, Chen et al. imply that True Grit best reflects the general American culture. The authors appreciate the value of True Grit as a material worth viewing, especially for its Oscar honor coupled with its immersive depiction of a female character. The authors analyze cowboy spirits, which have been deeply impacted by American culture and history in order to give a clear depiction of values such as fearlessness, courage, and independence. Through the character’s escapade, the authors’ review not only results in a deeper comprehension of cowboys in the movie but also shows the American spirit linked to cowboys.

Dirda in his thought-proving article published in 2021 titled “True Grit Is A Modern Classic, But It’s Not The Only Great Work By Charles Portis” states that True Grit is one of Portis’s celebrated works. Dirda’s excerpt provides a comprehensive review of the novel while comparing it with his previous texts. The author mentions Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old woman, who enlists a grizzled Marshal called Rooster Cogburn to assist her to pursue her father’s killer. Dirda highlights Portis’s work in order to demonstrate his great writings that attracted many admirers ranging from great writers like George Pelecanos and Donna Tartt to Roy Blount Jr. Dirda provides a sincere review of Portis’s capability and influence in the literary world.

Gwynne, Edward. “Review: True Grit By Charles Portis” Grim Dark Magazine , 2020, Web.

In his fascinating article titled “Review: True Grit By Charles Portis”, published in 2020, Gwynne asserts that True Grit is a remarkable work branded by sincerely delightful characters that immediately connect with readers. Gwynne gives a brief account of True Grit where he mentions that a teenage girl with ‘grit’, embarks on a mission to revenge her father’s killer. Mattie Ross, the protagonist in the novel, is hunting Tom Chaney, the person who shot her father. Gwynne presents a detailed review in the article in order to give the lyrical and poetic style used in the novel, especially the dialogue that he considers close to genius. Gwynne shows that True Grit is feel-good to read novel written in the compelling language.

In his article titled “True Grit: A Radical Tale”, published in 2018, Mathews asserts that Portis’s novel wears a costume of a typical conservative Western tale that investigates the fight of marginalized against authority. Such a situation has always characterized America’s sweeping politics and literature since the country’s revolutionary beginning. The novel resonates with numerous anti-establishment notions circulating during the times of its composition and setting. Matthews’s work is provided in order to help explain why the book has yet to be incorporated into either the new or old Western Studies. It also assists in locating the work within the larger American radicalism tradition and moment, thereby expanding the understandings of western literature. The book exposes significant sociopolitical-related work, revealing the pervasive to any establishment and policies cementing dominant power structures. The novel resonates with the political situations across America and beyond.

In her detailed article published in 2020 titled “Donna Tartt On The Singular Voice, And Pungent Humor, Of Charles Portis”, Tartt argues that it is highly likely to find that readers who love Portis’s work are also delighted about him as an individual. Tartt proceeds to show that the amazement if anything, relates carefully to how his personality matched his effort. The article describes Portis as unpretentious and blunt, entirely without conceit. Nearly everything from Portis’s mouth and artwork was pungently funny. Tartt gives this comprehensive review in order to show that comedy is a critical ephemeral of the arts. True Grit is one of the few comic books that do not wane with time. The article depicts that Portis’s work is a serious novel by any measure. It is a book that can reliably switch on an individual when sad or sick.

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IvyPanda. (2023, January 5). The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-grit-novel-by-charles-portis/

"The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis." IvyPanda , 5 Jan. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-grit-novel-by-charles-portis/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis'. 5 January.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis." January 5, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-grit-novel-by-charles-portis/.

1. IvyPanda . "The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis." January 5, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-grit-novel-by-charles-portis/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The "True Grit" Novel by Charles Portis." January 5, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-true-grit-novel-by-charles-portis/.

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Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … 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 not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Here is what happened.

Reed: That’s author Donna Tartt reading True Grit by Charles Portis. Welcome to The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to unite communities through literature. I’m your host, Josephine Reed.

James Lee Burke: The author has pulled off what, to me, has always been one of the most difficult challenges for a male writer, which is to speak from a woman’s point of view.

Carter Burwell: Well, True Grit is written from the point of view of a woman, an older woman, who is looking back on experiences that happened to her when she was fourteen-years-old.

Jay Jennings: The girl is Mattie Ross. Her father has been shot by a hired man named Tom Chaney.

Katherine Powers: A man who had been working for her father, and the two had gone off to collect some ponies that her father had bought in Fort Smith. She goes with the farmhand to pick up the body.

Jennings: So she hires a down-at-heels federal Marshal named Rooster Cogburn…

Powers: An old one-eyed jasper, I believe she calls him.

Jennings: …to find her father’s killer, who’s escaped to the territory of Oklahoma.

Roy Blount, Jr.: She is determined to get justice for her father, and not any sort of abstract justice either. And she will have it so.

Tope Folarin: This novel in some ways reads like an Old Testament account of somebody who’s avenging someone else for something that’s happened to them. She’s the embodiment of eye for an eye, and that’s an Old Testament conceit, and she adheres to that quite strictly.

Reed: Like much of Charles Portis’ work, True Grit is difficult to characterize. On the face of it, the story has all the trappings of a Western; it has Marshals, outlaws, guns, horses, Indian territory, but as much as Portis seemingly embraces the genre, he also subtly subverts it – largely by putting 14-year-old Mattie Ross at the story’s center. Writer, Katherine A. Powers.

Powers: You can’t say that True Grit is really a parody of a Western. That’s too exaggerated. It has a strange, twisting torque that has put it somewhat off-kilter in a way that is a source of ineffable enjoyment to the reader.

Reed: Humorist, Roy Blount, Jr.

Blount: Charles Portis is the funniest writer I know. In his case, it has a lot to do with how straight a face he has, his narrators have, and he, standing behind the narrators, has.

Reed: Born in 1933 in El Dorado, Arkansas, Charles Portis grew up in a family of storytellers. That’s where he developed the sharp ear for dialogue and wry sense of humor that would become his signature. He began his writing career as a newspaperman – and there, added a keen sense of observation to his literary arsenal. Writer Jay Jennings edited the 2012 collection of Portis’ work called Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany.

Jennings: His career started as a journalist, and this was after he had served a stint in the Marines and served in Korea. He returned to Arkansas and entered the University of Arkansas, because he thought it might not be too hard, and compared it to barber college, although he did say that barbers probably perform a more useful service than journalists. After he got out of journalism school he got a job at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis as a general assignment reporter.

Reed: In time, Portis wound up at the legendary New York Herald-Tribune, a newspaper renowned for its excellent writing. Portis eventually found himself with Karl Marx’s old job in the paper’s London Office. Jay Jennings.

Jennings: He did about a year as the London bureau chief for the newspaper, and then one day just decided that—he decided to pack up his things, move back to Arkansas, and write novels. His first book was sort of whimsical, picaresque, and very brief novel called Norwood, and shortly after that, the Saturday Evening Post published, in two installments, what eventually became True Grit.

Reed: In 1968 True Grit was published to rave reviews, and eventually made into two hit movies. Not only were critics and readers captivated by Mattie and Rooster, they were also bowled over by Portis’ mastery of language and voice. Katherine Powers.

Powers: It’s not laugh-out-loud; it’s just a constant, undercurrent rivulet of joy that goes through me when I read his prose.

Blount: The language in True Grit is informed by the sorts of things that people read in that time…

Reed: Roy Blount, Jr.

Blount: …the Bible, and stilted newspaper language, and formal oratorical English.

Reed: A young Mattie Ross sets the action of the novel in motion, but she recounts this tale as an older woman with a distinctive voice: determined, assured, and without a trace of sentimentality. Editor and writer, Jay Jennings.

Jennings: Portis’s great accomplishment is in creating a voice for Mattie that seems utterly believable and yet is so complex. She’s somebody we can identify with, and yet she’s her own person.

Reed: Writer Tope Folarin.

Folarin: She has a matter-of-fact tone, and I think it’s the dissonance between her matter-of-fact tone that provides a lot of the humor in the novel.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well that is superstitious “clap-trap.” My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33.

Reed: Tope Folarin.

Folarin: Mattie is somebody who refuses to listen to her elders. She’s somebody who refuses to kind of adhere to convention. She’s somebody who does what she wants to do, and does whatever she needs to do in pursuit of her final goal.

Reed: Katherine Powers.

Powers: She’s beyond honest. Honest is not the right word for her. She’s just; and she’s punctilious; and she’s scrupulous; and she wants things right.

Blount: Calling Mattie spunky is like calling a bulldog spunky.

Reed: Composer, Carter Burwell.

Burwell: She’s precocious in many ways. Mattie did all the bookkeeping for her parents on the farm. She takes money very seriously, and she finds shortcoming with almost every grown-up she encounters.

Reed: Writer, James Lee Burke.

Burke: Mattie’s fourteen-years-old, and she obviously has a gift for both the law, dealing with finance, dealing with troublesome, problematic people.

Powers: Justice and truth are the same pretty much to her, and revenge is a form of accounting for her. She’s setting the book straight–the big ledger book.

Reed: Writer, Amanda Coplin.

Amanda Coplin: She is an extremely capable young person. You know, she has a really sharp tongue; she likes to negotiate with adults.

Reed: We see Mattie’s capability at work when she decides she has no need for the ponies her father had bought right before his death.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … I said, "I would like to sell those ponies back to you that my father bought. We don’t want the ponies. We don’t need them." "That hardly concerns me," he said. "Your father bought these ponies and paid for them and there is an end of it. I have the bill of sale." I said, "I want three hundred dollars for Papa’s saddle horse that was stolen." He said, "You will have to take that up with the man who has the horse." "Tom Chaney stole it while it was in your care," said I. "You are responsible." Stonehill laughed at that. He said, "I admire your sand, but I believe you will find I am not liable for such claims. Let me say too that your valuation of the horse is high by about two hundred dollars." "I will take it to law," said I. "We will see if a widow and her three small children can get fair treatment in the courts of this city." "You have no case." "Lawyer J. Noble Daggett of Dardanelle, Arkansas, may think otherwise. Also a jury."… "You are impudent." "I do not wish to be, sir, but I will not be pushed about when I am in the right."

Blount: She is trading hard in a way that real people, no doubt, traded hard. She’s using every advantage she has, including playing the widow and orphan card. I mean, she’ll use what she has to. She would never cry; you would never see her resort to tears. But she will pull out every card she needs to play other than that.

Folarin: She kind of bullies him into that position, and eventually he acquiesces and does what she wants him to do. And so for me it’s a pivotal scene in the book, because here is where we really get a full sense of Mattie’s persona, her character, the force of her will."

Reed: Carter Burwell wrote the music for the 2010 adaptation of True Grit, which was directed by the Coen brothers.

Burwell: Mattie’s in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which is where her father was killed, and she’s collecting information on the killer, and hoping to find that the law is doing something about it, but they are not. The law in Fort Smith—I suppose the sheriff—gives her a list of options in terms of who might be willing to go out into the Indian territory and find the murderer.

Powers: She wants a Marshal, because only a Marshal can go into Indian territory, where Tom Chaney has apparently escaped, and a marshal who’s really going to get the work done.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … "Who is the best marshal they have?" The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, "I would have to weigh that proposition. There’s near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He’s a half-breed Comanche and it’s something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now, L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes that even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He won’t plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is as straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have." I said, "Where can I find this Rooster?"

Reed: Welcome back to The Big Read. Today, we’re talking about True Grit by Charles Portis. Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old determined to avenge her father’s death, has decided that Marshal Rooster Cogburn has the grit to do the job. Roy Blount, Jr.

Blount: Rooster Cogburn is a one-eyed fat man who drinks too much and tends to shoot too many of the people that he goes out to capture.

Folarin: He’s a really kind of irascible, grumpy, domineering, and somewhat arrogant person, but I can see why somebody would place their trust in him, because he’s somebody who has a lot of confidence that he can do what he says he’s going to do.

Reed: Jay Jennings.

Jennings: Mattie chooses Cogburn over the recommendation of some other potential Marshals, or trackers, because the man that she consults about this tells her that Rooster is pitiless. She seems to know that once Rooster gets Tom Chaney cornered that he will show no mercy. It’s a bit strange coming from someone as proper as Mattie, but she has a strong moral code and wants someone to do the job that she wants done.

James Lee Burke: I think she senses early on that Rooster is the real thing. And the only skill he really has is with his firearms and his ability to survive in the wilderness. And when it comes to dealing with bad guys, he’s completely amoral. He has one charge and one charge only: He goes out and brings these guys face-down over a saddle, and he doesn’t care how he gets them on the saddle. They’re going to be dead when Rooster’s on the case, and she knows this is the guy for her.

Reed: Carter Burwell.

Burwell: Well, it turns out that there is another lawman who’s already after Tom Chaney. His name is LaBoeuf, and he’s a Texas Ranger.

Folarin: Because it turns out that Tom Chaney has been up to no good in Texas as well. He’s killed a senator. There’s a bounty on his head, and LaBoeuf has been chasing him for a very long time.

Burwell: And again, there will be money to be made in terms of a reward if he can bring him back to Texas.

Blount: The two lawmen are into this chase for the money, and they don’t care what Tom Chaney gets arrested for; they just want to bring him and get the reward. But Mattie is determined that Tom Chaney be tried for the death of her father. There are lots of little triangular tensions among the three characters who are on the right side.

Burwell: LaBoeuf and Rooster Cogburn have met without her knowledge and have agreed that they should join forces, and that makes perfect sense to anyone except Mattie.

Jennings: They ride off and leave her behind.

Reed: But Mattie sets off after rooster and Leboeuf on her new pony, Little Blackie. She catches up with them at the river as they’re crossing by ferry to the Choctaw Nation.

Coplin: LaBoeuf tells the ferry operator, you know, "This kid is a runaway. There’s a reward for her. You should take her back to town."

Reed: Amanda Coplin.

Coplin: When the ferry operator and Mattie are going up the hill, she gets his attention, and when he leans towards her, she sort of beats him around the face with her hat, which is enough to distract him to let go of Little Blackie, and they take off tearing down the hill.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … About fifty yards below the ferry slip the river narrowed and I aimed for the place, going like blazes across a sandbar. I popped Blackie all the way with my hat as I was afraid he might shy at the water and I did not want to give him a chance to think about it. We hit the river running and Blackie snorted and arched his back against the icy water, but once he was in he swam as though he was raised to it. I drew up my legs behind me and held to the saddle horn and gave Blackie his head with loose reins. When we were up and free I reined in and Little Blackie gave himself a good shaking. Rooster and LaBoeuf and the ferryman were looking at us from the boat. We had beaten them across.

Jennings: At that point Rooster has become convinced that Mattie has the grit to accompany them on this pursuit of Tom Chaney.

Powers: She manages to tag along, and then becomes an essential part of their party, and along the way several misfortunes occur.

Reed: Because state law has no jurisdiction in the Choctaw Nation, and tribal law has no jurisdiction over white men, Indian territory is an obvious destination for outlaws. Once they cross the river only U.S. Marshals can apprehend these bandits. Carter Burwell.

Burwell: Cogburn, because he operates in the Choctaw Nation all the time, he’s pretty familiar with all the outlaws that are based there. Turns out there’s a rumor that Tom Chaney has taken up with the gang of Lucky Ned Pepper. That’s how they hope to find Chaney, is to try to find Lucky Ned Pepper, because as an established working outlaw, he’s going to be pulling jobs here and there, and so there will be some, hopefully some trail to follow.

Jennings: At one point during their quest, Mattie is sent out to fetch water from a nearby river. When she comes to the river, she looks up to see Tom Chaney watering his horses in the river.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … You may readily imagine that I registered shock at the sight of that squat assassin… He said, "Well, now, I know you. Your name is Mattie. You are little Mattie the bookkeeper. Isn’t this something."… I said, "Yes, and I know you, Tom Chaney."… I reached into the bucket and brought out my dragoon revolver. I dropped the bucket and held the revolver in both hands. I said, "I am here to take you back to Fort Smith." Chaney laughed and said, "Well, I will not go. How do you like that?"… I said, "If you refuse to go, I will have to shoot you." He went on with his work and said, "Oh? Then you had better cock your piece." I had forgotten about that. I pulled the hammer back with both thumbs. "All the way back till it locks," said Chaney. "I know how to do it," said I.… I pointed the revolved at his belly and shot him down. The explosion kicked me backwards and caused me to lose my footing, and the pistol jumped from my hand. I lost no time in recovering it and getting to my feet. The ball had struck Chaney’s side and knocked him into a sitting position against a tree.…He was holding both hands down on his side. He said, "I did not think you would do it." I said, "What do you think now?"

Reed: James Lee Burke.

Burke: And here’s this 14-year-old holding this hog-leg revolver, and he’s mocking her. And then before he knows it, he’s eating a chunk of lead as big as his thumb (laughter).

Reed: Although injured, Chaney still has the strength to grab Mattie and take her to Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang. Carter Burwell.

Burwell: Ned Pepper has his own business to attend to, so he leaves Mattie and Chaney alone together. Pepper tells Chaney not to harm her, but as soon as he’s gone, Chaney wants to get rid of her, and he’s about to slit her throat when he is conked on the head by LaBoeuf, who comes out of nowhere. Of course we know that he’s been tracking Chaney, but we didn’t know that he had been following this action. The next scene is one in which Ned Pepper’s gang, the remainder of Ned Pepper’s gang, is facing Rooster Cogburn.

Folarin: There’s four people on one side of the valley, and there’s Rooster on the other side.

Folarin: And he comes charging with his horse, it seems impossible. And it’s one of these great visual sequences where you can see in your head as he’s approaching, and the folks that he’s facing are incredulous, like, "Is he actually going to do this?"

Burwell: As absurd as it is for him to be facing off against four, this is actually what Rooster Cogburn lives for.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … The bandits checked up and faced him from some seventy or eighty yards’ distance… Lucky Ned Pepper said, "Well, Rooster, will you give us the road? We have business elsewhere!"… Rooster said, "I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s convenience! Which will you have?" Lucky Ned Pepper laughed. He said, "I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!" Rooster said, "Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!" and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver, and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits.

Burwell: The scene stabilizes in a situation where Rooster is trapped under his horse…

Reed: Again, Carter Burwell

Burwell: …and Lucky Ned Pepper rides over to take Rooster Cogburn with him into the next world. And again we see all of this from the point of view of Mattie and La Boeuf who are up on this high point.

Reed: Ned Pepper’s luck finally runs out as Laboeuf—from his hilltop perch—shoots him dead in his saddle. But fortunes change almost immediately when a bleeding Tom Chaney blindsides Laboeuf with a rock and lunges for Mattie. But she’s got her father’s revolver at the ready.

Folarin: She shoots Tom Chaney, and the recoil on the gun is so powerful that she falls into a kind of crevice.

Folarin: She turns around, she sees a skeleton, and it turns out that there’s a ball of snakes that are living inside the abdomen, inside the skeleton. And we see the snakes begin to approach her. At this point your heart’s racing and one snake bites her on the hand.

Burwell: Mattie would seem to be completely alone. We don’t know what happened to LaBoeuf, how badly hurt he was. Last time we saw Rooster Cogburn he was caught under a dead horse.

Reed: Trapped in a pit with snakes writhing around her, Mattie is close to despair when she’s discovered by Rooster Cogburn. He lowers himself into the pit and, with the aid of a somewhat recovered Laboeuf, brings Mattie up by a rope fastened around Little Blackie. Tope Folarin.

Folarin: Rooster, who is now in full-on protect Mattie mode, gets on Little Blackie with Mattie and he rides Little Blackie, basically, to death trying to get medical care for Mattie.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … We galloped across the meadow where the smoky duel had lately occurred. My eyes were congested from nausea and through a tearful haze I saw the dead horses and the bodies of the bandits. The pain in my arm became intense and I commenced to cry and the tears were blown back in streams around my cheeks. Despite the load, Blackie held his head high and ran like the wind, perhaps sensing the urgency of the mission. Rooster spurred and whipped him without let. I soon passed away in a faint.

Coplin: Little Blackie saves her life…

Coplin: …and at the end when he’s, sort of, run into the ground, Mattie says “His heart burst and mine was broken.” You know, there’s that line, and I feel like the horse is so closely tied to her father, on a thematic level it just ties everything together. It’s not obvious but you feel it when you’re reading it which is so great.

Jennings: There’s a bit of melancholy about the whole enterprise, and even though Mattie’s quest ended up as she wanted, there was a pretty severe price to pay for her, for Rooster, for LaBoeuf, and certainly for Little Blackie, her pony. It does create this sense of the consequences of our quests, even as noble as they may be.

Powers: I think there is a cost to making the ledger book straight.

Powers: But that’s what she had to pay for having gone into Indian Territory, for having taken this on personally.

Burke: But she would do it all over again. The price she paid was not for shooting Tom Chaney, or ensuring that eventually he was trapped by these circumstances that caused his death. She paid the price for her principles.

Reed: Some 25 Years Pass. Carter Burwell.

Burwell: Mattie goes to, as an adult, to find Rooster Cogburn because he’s participating in a wild west show. And she has gone to see him and had not seen him since that time when he carried her back from having been bitten by a snake.

Reed: Roy Blount Jr.

Blount: By the time Mattie is telling the story the Wild West is over, it’s become a wild west show.

Powers: The Wild West Show shows how these great heroes of the west have come down, she says that herself. There’s one of the James brothers, one of the Younger brothers who had been famously involved with the Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery.

Burwell: It is a commentary, I think, on the fact that there isn’t any wild west left. But that she and Rooster did share the real west. She’s the least sentimental person in the world, but we imagine that she feels a connection to Rooster that maybe she has never had to anyone else.

Burke: Mattie realizes she saw the end of a very important historical era and one that would not come aborning again and she wanted to write it down.

Donna Tartt reads from True Grit … Time just gets away from us. This ends my true account of how I avenged Frank Ross’s blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.

Reed: Thanks for joining The Big Read. Today’s program was written and produced by Adam Kampe. Readings from True Grit were by Donna Tartt and used courtesy of Recorded Books. Excerpts of the following music used courtesy of Nonesuch Records: “The Wicked Flee,” “Your Headstrong Ways,” “The Hanging Man,” and “Ride to Death” composed and conducted by Carter Burwell, orchestrated by Carter Burwell with Sonny Kompanek. The hymn, “Leaning on the [Everlasting] Arms” performed by Iris Dement, all from the True Grit soundtrack. Excerpts of “Little Girl,” “Arkansas Part 2,” “Think,” “Natural Light,” “Lost, Night,” and “Pete Miller’s Discovery,” from the album Disfarmer, composed and performed by Bill Frisell.

Special thanks to our contributors: Roy Blount Jr., James Lee Burke, Amanda Coplin, Tope Folarin, Jay Jennings, Katherine A. Powers, and of course, Charles Portis.

To find out more about The Big Read, go to NEABigRead.org, that’s NEABigRead.org. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m your host and executive producer, Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Written by Adam Kampe and Josephine Reed. Produced by Adam Kampe at the National Endowment for the Arts, 2013.

Executive Producer: Josephine Reed.

Excerpts from TRUE GRIT © 1968 by Charles Portis. Published by The Overlook Press , Peter Mayer Publishers Inc., New York, NY. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Music Credits

Excerpts of True Grit read by Donna Tartt used courtesy of Recorded Books, LLC.

Excerpts of the following music used courtesy of Nonesuch Records:

"The Wicked Flee," "Your Headstrong Ways," "The Hanging Man," and "Ride to Death," composed and conducted by Carter Burwell, and orchestrated by Carter Burwell with Sonny Kompanek. "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," written by Elisha A. Hoffman and Anthony J. Showalter, performed by Iris DeMent. All songs from the True Grit soundtrack (2010), used by permission of Paramount Allegra Music c/o Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC (ASCAP).

"Little Girl," "Arkansas, Pt. 2," "Think," "Natural Light," "Lost, Night," and "Peter Miller's Discovery," composed and performed by Bill Frisell, from the album Disfarmer (2009). Used by permission of Friz Tone Music c/o Hans Wendl Produktion (BMI).

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True Grit: an Alternate Perspective

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Donna Tartt on the Singular Voice, and Pungent Humor, of Charles Portis

Portis, who died in February, occupied a unique place in American letters. His novels, written in the vernacular of his native Arkansas, beg to be read aloud.

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By Donna Tartt

It is likely no surprise to readers who love the novels of Charles Portis that everything delightful about his books was delightful about him as a person. The surprise, if anything, was how closely his personality tallied with his work. He was blunt and unpretentious, wholly without conceit. He was polite. He was kind. His puzzlement at the 21st-century world in which he found himself was deep and unfeigned. And yet almost everything out of his mouth was dry, new and pungently funny.

Portis died in February . I’ve loved his work all my life — “The Dog of the South” is a family favorite, as is “Masters of Atlantis” — though the work closest to me is “True Grit,” which I recorded as an audiobook a number of years ago. I’m often asked how I came to record another author’s book; most simply, the answer is voice. I grew up hearing “True Grit” read aloud to me by my mother and my grandmother and even my great-grandmother. This was a tremendous gift, as Portis caught better than any writer then alive the complex and highly inflected regional vernacular I heard spoken as a child — mannered and quaint, old-fashioned and highly constructed but also blunt, roughshod, lawless, inflected by Shakespeare and Tennyson and King James but also by agricultural gazetteers and frilly old Christian pamphlets, by archaic dictionaries of phrase and fable, by the voices of mule drivers and lady newspaper poets and hanging judges and hellfire preachers.

All readers who love Portis have lines they like to swap back and forth.

Then too, the books are so funny that they cry to be read aloud. Pick up any novel by Portis and open it to any page and you will find something so devastatingly strange and fresh and hilarious that you will want to run into the next room and read it aloud to somebody. His language is precise but whimsical, understated but anarchic, and as with Barbara Pym or P.G. Wodehouse, it’s tough to communicate the flavor of it without resorting to long quotes. All readers who love Portis have lines they like to swap back and forth; and a conversation among his admirers will mostly consist of such gems — committed to memory — exchanged and mutually admired. One thinks of Dr. Buddy Casey’s lecture on the Siege of Vicksburg, which Raymond Midge, the narrator of “The Dog of the South,” plays again and again on Sunday drives and at the shaving mirror, an action that, we are given to understand, has helped to drive away his wife, Norma. Ray explains: “I had heard the tape hundreds of times and yet each time I would be surprised and delighted anew by some bit of Casey genius, some description or insight or narrative passage or sound effect. The bird peals, for instance. Dr. Bud gives a couple of unexpected bird calls in the tense scene where Grant and Pemberton are discussing surrender terms under the oak tree. The call is a stylized one — tu-whit , tu-whee — and is not meant to represent that of any particular bird. It has never failed to catch me by surprise. But no one could hope to keep the whole of that lecture in his head at once, such are its riches.”

Such too are the riches of Portis. His characters, who like the characters of Samuel Beckett often find themselves thrown in with one another on long perplexing journeys, are single-minded and completely un-self-conscious innocents (veterans, pedants, failed schoolteachers and salesmen) whose speech startles and delights, on nearly every page. Though it’s often said of Portis that he’s the least known of great American novelists, I cannot think of another 20th-century writer — any writer, American or otherwise — whose works are beloved among quite so many differing age groups and literary tastes, from the most sophisticated to the simplest. Walker Percy was a fan; so was Roald Dahl. As Wells Tower pointed out in The New Yorker : “Portis’s diffident, modestly gallant characters were a world away from the marital bonfires and priapisms of other male writers of his crop — Roth, Updike, Yates. His male heroes practiced a masculinity that by the standards of the day was uniquely (and unfashionably) nontoxic.”

Comedy is the most ephemeral of the arts. There are very few comic novels that do not wither with time, and even fewer novels — comic or otherwise — that can be given to pretty much anyone, from an old person to a small child. Even more rare is a novel one can reliably turn to for cheer when one is sick or sad. But “True Grit” is this rare novel, and Mattie Ross, its narrator, is one of the greatest of Portis’s innocents: a Presbyterian spinster who in old age relates the story of how, as a child, she struck out in the 1870s to avenge her father’s murder. “People do not give it credence that a 14-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.” It’s a serious book by any measure; Mattie’s rage and grief are thunderous (“What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!”) and yet perhaps the greatest pleasure of the book is Mattie’s speaking voice: rambling, deadpan, didactic, sprinkled with oddball opinions and facts, obstinate in its views and acute in its observations. Of Chaney, the hired man who murdered her father (“He was a short man with cruel features. I will tell more about his face later”), she has this to say: “He had no gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you. He could have taken an old piece of harness and made a nice leather strap for it. That would have been too much trouble.”

It’s hard not to go on with the quotes; suffice it to say that I could hear my grandmother’s voice — and a bit of my own — very clearly in this. But though I knew how wonderful a book it was to read aloud, I also felt there was very little chance of interesting Portis in an audiobook recording. After abruptly quitting his job as London bureau chief of The New York Herald Tribune in the early 1960s, he had gone back to live in his native Arkansas, and no one in New York had seen him for years. People liked to use the word “recluse,” which, I suspected, spoke less to an abnormal way of life than to an ex-newspaperman’s natural distrust of the press. It seemed clear enough in any case that he didn’t enjoy dealing with inquiries about his novels. But I drummed up my courage and asked anyway, and much to my surprise his number was passed along to me with the message: Call him. He wants to talk to you.

How many times in life does one have the chance to speak to a writer revered from childhood?

How many times in life does one have the chance to speak to a writer revered from childhood? In 2004, around noon on a weekday, I found myself standing in my kitchen in Virginia with Portis’s telephone number in hand. I had been informed that he did not like to talk on the telephone and was bad about not picking up. But somewhat to my surprise he answered right away.

A slow, rich Southern voice, reminiscent of the actor Randy Quaid. “Mr. Portis?” I said, but instead of the introduction I was ready to make, there followed instead a leisurely and highly surreal exchange that I am at a loss to replicate — something to do with backfiring cars? and knocks on the door? — which continued at cross-purposes for some moments until, without missing a beat, he said pleasantly: “Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller.”

I held the line, not knowing what to say. There seemed no clear way to move forward. Had I offended him? “I’m sorry —”

“Oh no. It is just that I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”

“That must be a big nuisance.”

“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”

“I can get off the phone if you want me to,” I offered.

“No. There is no need to do that. He will call me back if he finds the line is busy.” Then: “Where are you calling from?”

“Virginia.”

“You don’t sound like a Virginian.”

“That’s a curious accent. The Virginia accent. A lot of Virginians sound more or less like Canadians to me. You sound like you are from around here.”

I explained that I was from across the river, in Mississippi, and how my family and I knew his books practically by heart and how I hoped he might permit me to make an audio recording of “True Grit” — I had his book beside me at the telephone, a reading prepared — but the actual purpose of my call did not seem to interest him. “Are your people still in Mississippi?” he asked, reverting bewilderingly to the only fact that had caught his attention.

“More or less. The ones not dead, anyway. But the dead ones too.”

“Then what are you doing up there? Whereabouts in Virginia are you?”

I told him. “That is near the town of Charlotte Court House,” he said. “And also along the line of Lee’s Retreat. Did you know that the town of Charlotte Court House was once called Marysville? That is what it must have been called when Patrick Henry gave a version of his ‘Liberty or Death’ speech there. At some point after the war they changed its name to Charlotte Court House. I don’t actually know why they did that. They loved to rename those towns in Virginia. For example, the little town of Courtland was once known as ‘Jerusalem.’”

I was impressed that he was able to pull all this stuff off the top of his head. A long, relaxed conversation ensued, which might as well have been taking place in 1890 between me and a veteran of the Civil War, for its utter lack of any reference whatsoever beyond the Reconstruction South: Appomattox, High Bridge, Gen. William “Billy” Mahone and his lively counterattack in the late-war siege of Petersburg. The cotton trade. Dogs. Guns. Dogs. I noted particularly the fixed hum on his end of the line — the same rotary-phone hum I always heard when I called my grandmother in Mississippi. Although I didn’t want the conversation to end, I still had my copy of “True Grit” by the phone, open to my place, and at some point, by way of Rooster Cogburn’s Civil War service (Charlie’s voice was not unlike what I imagined Rooster Cogburn’s might be), I managed to work back around to it. “Would you like for me to read a line or two from the book?” I asked. “I have it right here.”

“Naw,” he said, “you’re a good Mattie, you’ll do just fine,” and then kept talking, as if we were riding for the sixth hour on horseback together on some country road.

We corresponded after that, and spoke on the telephone — my thought being that if he welcomed annoyance callers so warmly, he might not mind sometimes hearing from me. He was modest about his achievements and uninterested in talking about his life as a novelist or indeed about novels, period; though the diction of his books — effortless as birdsong — pervaded his every spoken sentence, from his conversation one would never suspect that he’d written a novel at all, much less several great ones. His preferred subjects were local history, his boyhood in Arkansas, his time in the military (a postscript to a 2006 letter informs me: “This stamp shows your fellow Virginian and legendary Marine hero Chesty Puller. He was my commanding officer years ago at Camp Lejeune, N.C.”) and above all his life as a newspaperman (somewhat perplexingly to me, he regarded himself mainly as a former newspaperman instead of the major and singular American novelist he was). Thanks to his time on The Memphis Commercial Appeal, he knew very well the Memphis of my childhood, Memphis being the nearest city of any size to my little North Mississippi town. (Regarding Mississippi: “Why do you all like to write so much over there? The Arkansan novelist is a much rarer fowl.”) As a young reporter he had attended the funeral of Elvis’s mother — a story in itself — and we talked about the hysteria in Memphis after Elvis’s death, nearly 20 years later, when weeping businessmen had taken to the airwaves in lieu of their regular commercials, wailing: “Sleep warm, Elvis!”

We established that I was related to the fearsome Memphis judge Beverly Boushé, about whom Charlie had written when in 1958 Judge Beverly presided over a mock trial of a group of Indiana Jaycees, who for some unknown reason had chosen to re-enact a flatboat trip that Abe Lincoln made down the Mississippi River at age 19. (When the Jaycees were removed from the flatboat and hauled before him by other Jaycees costumed as Rebs, Judge Boushé let them off by pronouncing them honorary Confederates and granting them miniature keys to the city.) I told him that my great-grandfather, Judge Beverly’s uncle, had spoken proudly all his life about his meeting in Memphis with the elderly outlaw Frank James, where Mattie herself had met Frank James at likely round about the same time. (Mattie, in the book, was less impressed than my great-grandfather; though she is taken with “the courteous old outlaw” Cole Younger, when James rises to greet her she says: “Keep your seat, trash!”)

Then too there was my Boushé grandmother, who numbered among the many books she’d inherited from her father the works of 19th-century author Ignatius L. Donnelly (“Atlantis: The Antediluvian World”), whose colorful ideas informed those of Mr. Jimmerson and Austin Popper in “Masters of Atlantis.” These, like Mr. Jimmerson, she regarded as sound scientific fact, to the point of suggesting that I build a scale model of Atlantis for a ninth-grade science fair. (It speaks to the academic standards of my school that I got a good grade for this project, my science teacher failing to recognize that even a very carefully constructed scale model of Atlantis in no way constituted Science.) My grandmother was the one who’d given me “True Grit” to read at age 10. Like Mattie herself, she had also been an indefatigable writer of historical articles for our town newspaper.

“And I expect she was a pretty good writer herself, too,” Charlie said generously.

“Well, no,” I said.

“That may not have been her fault. A lot of those old birds got the starch knocked out of them by heavy-handed copy editors.”

“Not her. She would be writing about Grover Cleveland and go off on some rant about the danger of water fluoridization.”

“My point exactly. Those are just the kind of lively asides I enjoy.”

He was right, of course. If there’s a guiding style of Portis’s books, it’s those tangents and lively asides. (When I asked him about the origins of “True Grit,” he told me that after he left The Tribune and “didn’t have much to do” he liked nothing better than to go to the library and read rambling “local color” pieces in the archives of rural newspapers.) Those homely old American voices — by turns formal, tragicomic and haunting — are crystallized on every page of his work, with the immediacy one sometimes sees in a daguerreotype 150 years old. One would have to return to the 19th century, and Twain, to find another author who captured those particular cadences as well as he. More than this, he understood at the highest level those same voices filtered through advertisements and film of the mid-20th century; hence the hilarious, incisive and equally pure diction of “Norwood” and “The Dog of the South” and his other books set in the ’60s and ’70s.

After “True Grit” was reissued in England, with an afterword written by me, Charlie was distressed by the cover the publisher had chosen: a drawing of a handgun that he knew intimately in every historical, cultural and technical specific, down to the feet per second and the grain of bullet it took — a “gangster gat” all wrong for Mattie Ross or any character of the era. He had done the British publisher the favor of writing them an extremely detailed and informative letter setting them straight on American firearms of the period, and was pained when “some youngster in the art department” wrote back reassuring him that no one would know the difference. This cavalier attitude of our British cousins — “playing fast and loose with names, dates, facts, &c.” — he knew all too well from his time in London on The Tribune. “And,” he noted gloomily, “their ideas about America — mostly out of date folklore from movies, which was wrong to start with — are fixed and unchangeable.”

Not long after this, Charlie, true to form, really did stop answering his phone. Had I done something to annoy him? Or had the prankster grown to be too much? The letters, never very many, stopped as well. (The postscript of his final letter, which makes me laugh even though it’s the last line he ever wrote me: “When may we expect another lively Donna Tartt novel?”) He never called me, I always called him, and not until much later did I learn the real reason for the halt in our conversation: He had Alzheimer’s. This is hard to square with Charlie’s minute and highly specific knowledge of (among many other things) firearms, geography and American history, and even harder to square with the deadpan, playful, low-key wit that had seeped into my bloodstream via his novels long before I met him.

I’d give a lot right now to hear what he had to say about the flu epidemic of 1918. The flu epidemic makes a brief appearance in “True Grit,” and it’s exactly the sort of historical subject upon which he could converse with the fluency and anecdote of someone who’d survived it personally. More than that, I wish I’d gone to Arkansas to see him; he’d asked me to and was perplexed to learn I did not drive. (This will be amusing to any reader of his novels, particularly “Gringos” and “The Dog of the South,” in which automobiles and automotive maintenance form the basis of a stern and knightly code.)

His pitch was pure. There was no meanness in him. He understood, and conveyed, the grain of America.

As for the novels, they’ve gotten me through times of bleakness and uncertainty from fifth grade to now, and are a never-ending source of amazement, gratitude and joy. All writers who attempt to convey their magic eventually knock into the problem: How to describe the indescribable? Probably the best description I can give of “True Grit” is that I’ve never given it to any reader — male or female, of any age or sensibility — who didn’t enjoy it. As for the others, which I love just as much, they are if anything weirder and funnier, filled with some of the best and most particular American vernacular ever written, and even amid the scrape of Covid-driven anxiety they’ve convulsed me with laughter and given me some of the few moments of escape that I’ve found.

We never talked about publishing or the literary world; it was of no interest to him. The closest he ever came was a passing mention of “the quality lit game” (dutifully attributing the quote to Terry Southern) as if “quality lit” were a concern in which he himself had no part. But it was a game he played at the highest level, despite the fact that he had no inclination to play it in the conventional chest-beating, ego-driven way. His pitch was pure. There was no meanness in him. He understood, and conveyed, the grain of America, in ways that may prove valuable in future to historians trying to understand what was decent about us as a nation. And I can’t help thinking that the novels he left us will continue to provide refuge and comfort for readers, perhaps in times even darker than our own.

Donna Tartt is the author of three novels, most recently “The Goldfinch.”

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