Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  He sat up in the bed. “Wait,” he said. “Hold up. You are not going.”

  “That is part of it,” said I.

  “It cannot be done.”

  “And why not? You have misjudged me if you think I am silly enough to give you a hundred dollars and watch you ride away. No, I will see the thing done myself.”

  Mattie is not the only party after Tom Chaney; so is a vain, good-looking Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf who has already tracked Chaney over several states. LaBoeuf (whose name is pronounced “La Beef,” and who is some what overly proud of his membership in the Rangers) wants to team up with Rooster to bring Chaney back alive and collect the bounty. But the dandy LaBoeuf, clanking along in his “great brutal spurs” and “Texas trappings,” is no more interested than Rooster in allowing a fourteen-year-old girl to tag along on a manhunt; moreover, LaBoeuf’s intent is to bring Chaney back to Texas to hang for shooting a Texas state senator in a dispute over a bird dog, a claim which Mattie hotly disputes:

  “Haw, haw,” said LaBoeuf. “It is not important where he hangs, is it?”

  “It is to me. Is it to you?”

  “It means a good deal of money to me. Would not a hanging in Texas serve as well as a hanging in Arkansas?”

  “No. You said yourself they might turn him loose down there. This judge will do his duty.”

  “If they don’t hang him we will shoot him. I can give you my word as a Ranger on that.”

  “I want Chaney to pay for killing my father and not some Texas bird dog.”

  “It will not be for the dog, it will be for the senator, and your father too. He will be just as dead that way, you see, and pay for all his crimes at once.”

  “No, I do not see. That is not the way I look at it.”

  Not surprisingly, Rooster and LaBoeuf contrive to slip away from Fort Smith without Mattie. But she strikes out after them; and as hard as they ride, they cannot lose her. (“What a foolish plan, pitting horses so heavily loaded with men and hardware against a pony so lightly burdened as Blackie!”) Finally, when they cannot get Mattie to turn back, they accept her: first, in anger, as a worrisome tag-along; then, grudgingly, as a mascot and equal of sorts; and at last—as she stands among them and proves herself—a relentless force in her own right.

  Like Huckleberry Finn (or The Catcher in the Rye, or even the Bertie and Jeeves stories for that matter) True Grit is a monologue, and the great, abiding pleasure of it that compels the reader to return to it again and again is Mattie’s voice. No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does; but though in all his novels (including those set in the current day) Portis shows his deep understanding of place, True Grit also masters the more complicated subtleties of time. Mattie, having survived her youthful adventure, is recounting her story as an old woman, and Portis is such a genius of a literary mimic that the book reads less like a novel than a firsthand account: the Wild West of the 1870s, as recollected in a spinster’s memory and filtered through the sedate sepia tones of the early 1900s. Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hardheaded, and completely lacking in self-consciousness—and, at times, unintentionally hilarious, rather in the manner of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters. And like The Young Visiters (which is largely delightful because it views the most absurd Victorian crotchets as obvious common sense), a great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters—lawmen and outlaws alike—to richly comic effect, as when Rooster remarks austerely of a young prisoner he has brought back alive to stand trial: “I should have put a ball in that boy’s head instead of his collarbone. I was thinking about my fee. You will sometimes let money interfere with your notion of what is right.”

  Mattie is often compared to her literary ancestor, Huckleberry Finn; but though the two of them share some obvious similarities, in most respects Mattie is a much harder customer than careless, sweet-tempered Huck. Where Huck is barefoot and “uncivilized,” living happily in his hogshead barrel, Mattie is a pure product of civilization as a Sunday school teacher in nineteenth-century Arkansas might define it; she is a straitlaced Presbyterian, prim as a poker. “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains,” she says coolly to the drunken Rooster; tidy, industrious, frugal, with a head for figures and a shrewd business sense. Her deadpan manner is reminiscent of Buster Keaton: Mattie, too, is a Great Stone Face; she never cracks a smile when recounting the undignified and ridiculous situations in which she finds herself; and even predicaments of great danger fail to draw violent emotion from her. But this deadpan flatness serves a double purpose in the novel, for if Mattie is humorless, she is also completely lacking in qualities like pity and self-doubt, and her implacable stoniness—while very, very funny—is formidable, too, in a manner reminiscent of old tintypes and cartes des visites of Confederate soldier boys: dead-eye killers with rumpled hair and serious angel faces. One cannot picture Huckleberry Finn in the same light; for while Huck is an adventuresome spirit, duty and discipline are wholly foreign to him; conscripted by any army, any cause, he would desert in short order, slipping away the first chance he got to his easy riverbank life. Mattie on the other hand is the perfect soldier, despite her sex. She is as tireless as a gun dog; and while we laugh at her single-mindedness, we also stand in awe of it. In her Old Testament morality, in her legalistic and exacting turn of mind, in the thunderous blackness of her wrath—“What a waste!…I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!”—she is less Huck Finn’s little sister than Captain Ahab’s.

  True Grit is an adventure story, and though the two books in most respects could not be more different, Mattie’s quest in some ways reflects Dorothy Gale’s in The Wizard of Oz. Practical Dorothy, throughout all her trials, is really only working her way back home to Kansas; while practical Mattie, with her own mission and her own brace of unlikely travelling companions, is riding in the historical shadow of a very different Kansas: the mythical outlaw territory of Quantrill and his Confederate raiders. While Quantrill—a brilliant tactician—was romanticized in some quarters as an outlaw chieftain á la Alexandre Dumas, the massacre he led at the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, is considered the worst atrocity of the American civil war, and history has tended to view Quantrill as a cold-blooded killer. One man—shot five times when he tried to surrender—was left for dead by his assailant with the parting advice: “Tell old God that the last man you saw on earth was Quantrill.” Rooster, presumably, has come by some of his famous meanness under Quantrill’s tutelage; the incident with Odus Wharton and the bodies in the fire does seem to have some parallels with unpleasant incidents in historical accounts of raids at Lawrence and Centralia; and certainly he has picked up Quantrill’s reputed habit of riding against his enemy with the reins of his horse between his teeth and a revolver in each hand. And yet it is scoundrelly old Rooster who—like Huck Finn, revolting instinctively against the accepted brutality of his day—rises unexpectedly to True Grit’s moments of justice and nobility. He does this in a number of minor comical respects (as in his satisfying encounter with the two “wicked boys” who are tormenting the mule on the riverbank) not to mention the novel’s extraordinary climax. But perhaps the most gratifying moment in the entire book is when Rooster is jolted from his ambivalence about Mattie by the sight of LaBoeuf falling upon her with a switch:

  I began to cry, I could not help it, but more from anger and embarrassment than pain. I said to Rooster, “Are you going to let him do this?”

  He dropped his cig
arette to the ground and said, “No, I don’t believe I will. Put your switch away, LaBoeuf. She has got the best of us.”

  “She has not got the best of me,” replied the Ranger.

  Rooster said, “That will do, I said.”

  LaBoeuf paid him no heed.

  Rooster raised his voice and said, “Put that switch down, LaBoeuf! Do you hear me talking to you?”

  LaBoeuf stopped and looked at him. Then he said, “I am going ahead with what I started.”

  Rooster pulled his cedar-handled revolver and cocked it with his thumb and threw down on LaBoeuf. He said, “It will be the biggest mistake you ever made, you Texas brush-popper.”

  True Grit, in short, begins where chivalry meets the frontier—where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West. And without giving anything away, I can say that the book ends at a travelling Wild West show in Memphis in the early 1900s: which is to say, at once in the twentieth century and firmly enshrined in myth and legend.

  True Grit was first published in 1968. When it came out, Roald Dahl wrote that it was the best novel to come his way in a long time. “I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since…Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty?” Certainly when I was growing up in the 1970s, True Grit was widely thought to be a classic; when I was about fourteen years old, it was read along with Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe in the Honors English classes at my school. Yet (because, I believe, of the John Wayne film, which is good enough but which doesn’t do the book justice), True Grit vanished from the public eye, and my mother and I, along with many other Portis fans, were reduced to scouring used bookstores and buying up whatever stock we could find because the copies we lent out so evangelically were never returned. (In one particularly dark moment, when my mother’s last copy had disappeared and a new one was nowhere to be had, she borrowed the library’s copy and then pretended that she had lost it.) Now—thankfully—the book is back in print, and I am delighted to have the honor of introducing Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn to a new generation of readers.

  The Book That Changed My Life: Gringos

  By Wells Tower

  Wells Tower is the author of the short-story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009). This appreciation appeared in the June 2011 issue of GQ magazine as part of a feature in which he and other authors wrote about books that were important to them.

  Sometime after my fifth reading of Charles Portis’s Gringos, I stopped worrying so much about death, politics, and getting fat, and I started worrying about my car.

  Gringos is a compact, hilarious meander in the life of Jimmy Burns, an amateur archaeologist, junk trader, and shade-tree mechanic eking out a transcendently unexamined life in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Burns’s anxieties are more automotive than existential, a stacking of priorities that, as the book proceeds, begins to resemble a quietly heroic state of grace. These are the sorts of unassailable proverbs you get from Jimmy Burns: “You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck.” Repeat this line a few times. It sticks in your head like the answer to a Buddhist koan.

  I put Burnsisms into practice all the time. The other day, I was driving around with my lady friend when, out of nowhere, she yelled, “Look, dammit, there are some things going on between us we seriously need to discuss.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but right now I need to listen to that thumping sound, which I think is a blown sway-bar bushing.” I don’t know what a sway-bar bushing is, but saying these words made everything get calm and quiet so that all I could hear was the soothing drone of the engine and the tranquil grinding of my sweetheart’s molars.

  Over the course of the novel, Burns’s heroics range past the everyday and into more swashbuckling territory. At one point, he’s compelled to blow out the brains of a homicidal hippie guru, but he doesn’t let the killing ruffle his composure. “Shotgun blast or not at close range, I was still surprised at how fast and clean Dan had gone down,” Burns reflects. “I wasn’t used to seeing my will so little resisted, having been in sales for so long.”

  Most people know Charles Portis only as the author of True Grit (whose comic brilliance both the recent Coen brothers adaptation and the 1969 John Wayne film failed to fulfill), but for my money Gringos is his subtlest, funniest, and most valuable for its depth of inarguable wisdom: If your clutch plate doesn’t rust to your flywheel and you get a fair price on that set of used tires, you’ve tasted as much of life’s sweet fullness as anyone deserves.

  Sources

  I. SELECTED NEWSPAPER REPORTING AND WRITING

  The stories on pages 3–8 are reprinted by permission of the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee.

  The stories from the Arkansas Gazette on pages 10–18 are reprinted by permission of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  The stories on pages 19–66 from the New York Herald Tribune are reprinted by permission. © 1960–1964 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  II. TRAVELS

  “That New Sound from Nashville,” Saturday Evening Post, February 12, 1966. © 1966 SEPS by Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, Indiana. All rights reserved.

  The following song lyrics quoted in the story are used by permission:

  Page 72: “Mule Skinner Blues,” by Jimmie Rodgers and Vaughn Horton © 1931, 1950 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Page 73: “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” words and music by Marty Robbins © 1957 (renewed 1985) Mariposa Music, Inc. (BMI). Rights for Mariposa Music, Inc., administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC in the U.S. only. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Page 78: “Do Wacka Do” © 1964 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, Tennessee 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Page 81: “Detour,” words and music by Paul Westmoreland © 1945 (renewed) Unichappell Music Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Page 83: “Cigarettes, Whiskey and Wild Wild Women,” by Tim Spencer © 1947 (renewed 1975) Tim Spencer Music Company, Inc./BMI (administered by ClearBox Rights). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “An Auto Odyssey through Darkest Baja.” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, February 26, 1967.

  “The Forgotten River.” Arkansas Times, September 1991.

  “Motel Life, Lower Reaches.” Oxford American, January/February 2003.

  III. SHORT STORIES

  “Damn!” Nugget, October 1957.

  “Your Action Line.” The New Yorker, December 12, 1977.

  “Nights Can Turn Cool in Viborra.” The Atlantic, December 1992.

  “I Don’t Talk Service No More.” The Atlantic, May 1996.

  “The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth.” Oxford American, Winter 2005.

  IV. MEMOIR

  “Combinations of Jacksons.” The Atlantic, May 1999.

  V. DRAMA

  Delray’s New Moon. Previously unpublished. First performed by the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, April 18, 1996.

  EPILOGUE

  “Gazette Project Interview with Charles Portis,” conducted by Roy Reed on May 31, 2001, in Little Rock, Arkansas, for the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The interview has been previously available online at http://pryorcenter.uark.edu/projects/arkansasgazette/CPortis.pdf (accessed June 18, 2012). Reprinted here courtesy of Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, and the Pryor Center for Arka
nsas Oral and Visual History.

  APPENDIX

  “Comedy in Earnest,” by Roy Blount Jr., was adapted for this collection from two essays that were originally published in the Oxford American (“True Lit,” March–May 1999; later reprinted in his collection Long Time Leaving) and Arkansas Life (“Charles Portis,” December 2010). Used here by permission of the author.

  “Like Cormac McCarthy, but Funny,” by Ed Park, originally appeared in The Believer, March 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Our Least-Known Great Novelist,” by Ron Rosenbaum, originally appeared in Esquire, January 1998. The essay was reprinted in his collection The Secret Parts of Fortune (Random House, 2000) as “Charles Portis and the Locked Trunk Secret” and as an afterword to The Dog of the South (Overlook, 1999). Reprinted here by permission of the author.

  “On True Grit,” by Donna Tartt, originally appeared as the introduction to a paperback edition of the book published in the U.K. by Bloomsbury in 2005. It was reprinted as the introduction to a paperback published by Overlook in 2007. Reprinted here by permission of International Creative Management, Inc. © 2004 by Donna Tartt.