Whipped Cream Difficulties

Charles Portis, author (True Grit, Norwood, The Dog of the South).

A lot of people I know (especially in the SF community) praise Portis. He’s on my list, but so far I’ve only read parts of True Grit. I need to go back and read the whole thing: the use of voice in this novel is fascinating.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned.

I think more to the point that this is a book written from the point of view of a determined older woman, recounting a formative experience of her youth, and Portis manages to capture both the teen and the adult.

Mr. Portis shrank from the attention his more celebrated novels attracted. He steadfastly refused to be interviewed, although he made himself available to talk about his life for this obituary. When drawn into public gatherings, he dodged photographers. But he didn’t like to be called a recluse or compared to the likes of J.D. Salinger. He pointed out that his name was in the Little Rock phone book.

…

Mr. Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”

(Interestingly, this is another NYT obit where the subject outlived the obit writer.)

It may be kind of a cliche, but this section is quoted in the NYT obit. I’m also a sucker for John Wayne, and this is one of my favorite Wayne moments.

(“Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch!” Such a useful phrase.)

Kellye Nakahara Wallett. As Kellye Nakahara, she was perhaps best known as “Lt. Kellye Yamato” on M*A*S*H, a character who was mostly a bit player (though the character was featured in one episode near the end of the run). M*A*S*H Wiki entry.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 18th, 2020 at 11:58 am and is filed under 1970s, Books, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.