Rosa Lyster’s great piece on Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South sold me on the guy, and so I’ve just started my readthrough of all five of Charles Portis’s novels.
Well, first, I decided to just pick up The Dog of the South, True Grit, and Masters of Atlantis, having heard very good things about all of them. I tweeted at Lyster and asked her what else I should get, and she said Norwood and Gringos. Upon looking them up, I realized that these five novels comprise the entire Portis corpus, and I had asked a very silly question. Ah well. The dangers of Twitter.
Portis’s second novel, True Grit, is a masterpiece: funny, sharp, violent, profound. It also kinda hates defense lawyers and due process, and since I am a public defender and a fan of due process, I read much of it with a sardonic smirk on my face. I’m used to this kind of thing, granted. When you tell someone that you’re a public defender, you generally receive one of three reactions: effulgent, uncomfortable praise; a disapproving stare, since you make your living defending evil people; or a shifting sense that you have fallen in the esteem of the person you are speaking to, since only people who have failed at being real lawyers become PDs. Of these, only the third one really annoys me (probably partly because I did fail at being a corporate lawyer, granted; but that’s not why I’m a PD, honest). The first makes me nervous, but the second just makes me laugh. I am happy to play the heel to such reactions, but also, my job is in the Constitution, jackass, what about yours?
I will provide two examples of this reaction. First, at my good friend’s bachelor party, a relative of the groom does not quite understand what a public defender is and tells me that his house was recently robbed, and the thief prosecuted. Who would I represent in that situation? “The man accused of the robbery,” I tell him, and he pauses for several beats before just asking me “Why?” What followed was a drunken attempt to explain how due process and Gideon v. Wainwright work, but I fear I was not equal to the task, and he left the party unconvinced of the importance of the Sixth Amendment.
Another time, at the liquor store, I strike up a conversation with the clerk, who asks me what I do for a living. When I tell him, he wryly shakes his head and says, word for word, “I don’t think I could do that, working with scumbags all day.” What I actually say is “well, I don’t think of my clients as scumbags,” but what I open my mouth to start saying is “well, yes, but enough about the cops.” I manage to catch myself in time. I am a bastion of poise, diplomacy, and restraint.
Anyway, True Grit. Its point-of-view character, Mattie Ross, does not take a strong position on these things, but Rooster Cogburn, the drunken federal marshal (played in film by John Wayne and Jeff Bridges) doesn’t like me very much. As he says to Mattie after a court appearance when he is cross-examined1 by a defense attorney (who has, to my eye, made it pretty clear that Rooster ambushed and killed several wanted murderers and their father without announcing himself or making any effort to arrest them):
“You can’t serve papers on a rat, baby sister . . . these shitepoke lawyers think you can but you can’t. All you can do with a rat is kill him or let him be. They don't care nothing about papers. What is your thinking on it?”
“Are you going to drink all that?”2
“Judge Parker knows. He is a old carpetbagger but he knows his rats. We had a good court here till the pettifogging lawyers moved in on it. You might think [the defense attorney] is a fine gentleman to look at his clothes, but he is the sorriest son of a bitch that God ever let breathe. I know him well. Now they have got the judge down on me, and the marshal too. The rat-catcher is too hard on the rats. That is what they say. Let up on them rats! Give them rats a fair show!”
When Mattie asks the sheriff which marshal she should hire to track down her father’s killer, she is told about several people, including Rooster (“He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.”), who he contrasts with another marshal, L.T. Quinn, who
“brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes 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 will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.”
To which Mattie replies “Where can I find this Rooster?”
It’s probably not fair to say that True Grit as a whole actually hates defense attorneys and due process, as I did above, and I’m certainly not staking a position on Charles Portis’s personal opinion about such things. True Grit is a novel for grown-ups, and thus doesn’t have to append a “and that is good/bad!” tag after every line of dialogue, the way certain Tumblr Teens want it to. The characters in True Grit are people living in a particular place and time, and Portis can tell us about them without endorsing everything (or anything!) they say.3
But the point of the novel is not really to examine the appropriate way for law enforcement to deal with suspected murderers. The point of the novel is, first, to tell a great story (which it does), and, second, to ask questions about what “true grit” really is.
The text shows a 13-page trial transcript of both the direct and cross-examination of Rooster, and it’s great, not only as art, but as a trial transcript. There are two different hearsay objections, each handled correctly! It’s always a joy to see a court proceeding in a book or a movie that indicates its author had some idea how court proceedings actually go down.
I love Mattie so much.
Also, everybody in the novel, living, as they do in the immediate post-Civil War South, is pro-Confederate. My unswerving loyalty to General Grant remained thankfully untested by the text. I can forgive vitriol towards my profession, but slander towards Unconditional Surrender Grant would test my patience to its limit.