Mattie, Huck and Buddy
They say you shouldn’t want to meet your heroes, for they will surely disappoint you. Maybe that’s so; celebrity can act as a corrosive on character, and some of the traits that make one a top-level performer are not conducive to happy marriages or long-term maintenance of generosity of spirit. Nice guys may not invariably finish last, but you don’t separate yourself from the second tier by being a good mentor.
I seldom seek out people I admire. My work sometimes puts me in the way of people of accomplishment, and I take a small amount of pride in never behaving like a fan while on the clock.
My particular combination of shyness and what I suppose could be called hauteur keeps me from, for instance, stopping Nick Lowe on the street in downtown Denver to tell him what his music has meant to me over the years.
It almost stopped me from ever talking with Roger Ebert.
This is not a good way to be, but it is how I am.
So I never met Charles “Buddy” Portis, though over the years we were occasionally in the same bar. I’ve heard the same sort of testimonies you have this past week. He was a kind and funny man who wasn’t nearly as famous as he deserved to be.
While I saw the John Wayne version of True Grit as a child, my first exposure to Portis’ writing might have been his 1985 novel Masters of
Atlantis. A review copy landed on my desk, and I read it. And didn’t like it. Sorry.
My gateway drug into the Portisverse came a couple of years later, when a friend recommended The
Dog of the South, a 1979 novel about a young person on a quixotic quest, which is also what True Grit and Norwood are about. Gringos, too, though Jimmy Burns is no kid. (You could even fit Masters of Atlantis in there, though Lamar Jimmerson’s quest lasts for decades.)
Among Portis fans—there are enough of us to qualify as a fullblown cult—it’s fashionable to nominate some novel other than True Grit as Portis’ best work. True Grit is like your favorite indie band’s major label debut—too much in the world to certify deep fanship, so you discount it as something compromised and popular. I used to do this, because back before the Coen Brothers released their remake of True Grit a decade ago, I always told people my favorite Portis book was The Dog of the South.
But the hubbub around the Coens’ movie led me to reread True Grit. It is one of the five best novels ever written by an American.
Buddy Portis probably didn’t set out to write the great American novel. He likely set out to tell us a funny, violent story about a world both recent and remote (both familiar and strange) that he could sell for money.
One of the things about art is that sometimes the best work is accomplished by women and men who are trying to do something straightforward and relatively modest, like telling a story they could sell.
The critic and painter Manny Farber had a name for this kind of art; he called it “termite art.” We don’t have time to get into much theory now, but sometimes when people say
something is unpretentious, this is what they mean. The reason more good movies are made from pulpy (unpretentious) novels than from great ones is because a lot is lost in the translation from book to screen. All the thinking bits get blue-penciled; Hamlet becomes an action hero.
But just because two decent movies have been made of True
Grit does not mean the novel isn’t a good one; both movie versions succeed when they keep faith with Portis’ vision. The 1969 John Wayne film, directed by Henry Hathaway, denatures Portis’ dark ending and feels anachronistic and corny today, just one of the Duke’s better outings.
The Coens did a better job with the ending; they understood the key to the story is the storyteller, a bitter and brittle 64-year-old one-armed spinster named Mattie Ross who is recounting the signal episode of her life, which occurred 50 years before.
It is not 14-year-old Mattie who is telling this story.
This Mattie is a cranky old maid, but we can love her for the creaky humanity that leaks through her Scotchgarded facade—her affection for her game pony Little Blackie, her affecting (and affected) rhetorical habits which include the seemingly random use of “quotation marks” to preserve the authenticity of the story she tells. Mattie’s dryly musical voice is a miracle of vernacular precision and authorial intent—she reveals only and exactly what is necessary.
The key to that voice may be found in Portis’ personal history. After a stint in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, he enrolled in the University of Arkansas and worked for Fayetteville’s Northwest Arkansas Times. where he edited the correspondence columns written by little old Mattie-type ladies who lived in the hinterlands. He confessed he edited all the character out of their copy; perhaps he saved it up for Mattie.
The Coen brothers, who remade the film in 2010, likened Mattie to Alice in Wonderland. Donna Tartt compared her to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—gone through the looking glass, having left the relatively civilized environs of Dardanelle for the Oklahoma Indian Territory.
While Mattie has a relentlessness similar to that of Dorothy, she doesn’t want to go home until she’s had her vengeance. She’s a civilizer, a law reader, an organizing principal—as much a symbol of imposed order as a piano in a homestead parlor, an unforgiving moralist, an Old Testament raver like John Brown, an imperial tamer of chaos who’s perpetually suspicious of others’ motives. She lights out for the wilderness not for the freedom that it promises, but to extend her Scots Presbyterian notions of justice.
Huck Finn left to escape the civilizing influence of Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly. Mattie is Aunt Polly, eager to impose her sensibilities on the savages and outlaws rambling through the Choctaw Nation. She is not at all excited by the possibilities promised by the frontier. She means to see the heathens hanged.
Mattie is the mirror image of Huck.
And True Grit is not a comingof-age story. Mattie arrives fully formed and never changes. She gets what she wants and pays severely for it.
Which makes True Grit a tragedy—or just a sad story. And a Great American Novel.
And Buddy Portis a hero I never met.