Charles Portis, the man who wrote True Grit

The enigmatic and reclusive ex-marine who created Rooster Cogburn:

Rooster Cogburn, the charismatic rogue played by Jeff Bridges in the Coen brothers’ entertaining new film, True Grit, is fearsome enough – a one-eyed, whiskey-guzzling, trigger-happy US marshal. But his creator, Charles Portis, the reclusive and largely forgotten American novelist who wrote the 1968 book on which the film is based, wasn’t someone to mess with either.

“A reporter from The Times wanted to arm-wrestle, and as I recall, he kept challenging me,” Portis once revealed in a rare interview with Roy Reed for the Little Rock Gazette. “So we went at it and there was a pop. His arm broke. Very strange. He went into a kind of swoon.”
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Roald Dahl – who rarely reviewed books – wrote in praise for the American first edition dust jacket: “True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very 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 20? I do not know. I expect some have, but I cannot recall them right now. Marvellous it is. He hasn’t put a foot wrong anywhere. What a writer!”

The book is written as a world-weary spinster’s account of the events of 1873, when, as a sassy 14 year-old, she avenged her father’s murder. Portis’s language is blunt but poetic. The murderer, Tom Chaney, was “a short man with cruel features”. Rooster Cogburn, the flawed hero, “a pitiless man who loves to pull a cork”.
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The first film adaptation, starring John Wayne, was made in 1969 and when Portis visited the set he marvelled at the way Wayne and Robert Duvall blew up and stormed off – only to return as though nothing had happened.

The film, though, lacks the book’s charm and power – something the Coen brothers capture far more successfully, a success reflected in the 10 Oscar nominations the new film received this week.
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Despite the enormous success of True Grit, decades would pass before Portis’s next, The Dog of the South, hit the shelves. Before long the writer, now 77, would all but disappear from the public eye. Portis has not published a book since Gringos in 1991.