Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

James Fenimore Cooper’s literary reputation has undergone striking vicissitudes over the years. Hailed in his lifetime ( 1789-1851 ) as America’s first great novelist and lionized throughout the Western world, he fell into the literary doldrums at the end of the nineteenth century (in his own country at least) and languished there for many years. So complete was his fall that he became almost an object of ridicule among critics and literary commissioners. Later generations found it hard to imagine that he had once been an icon in the American literary canon. More recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in Cooper and a reconsideration of his literary reputation.

His death in Cooperstown on September 14, 1851, and a memorial service held the next month in New York City brought tributes from Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Henry Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and other leading American men of letters. In Europe, Thackeray, Balzac, Goethe, Scott, Lafayette, Carlyle, Sand, and Sue were among the many admirers of Cooper’s writings. So were, later, Joseph Conrad, who paid tribute in particular to Cooper’s seafaring works, and D. H. Lawrence, who was so inspired by Cooper’s treatment of the frontier that he came to spend several years living in the American West. Cooper was probably even more popular in Europe than he was in his own country, and he earned much of the money he made as America’s first successful professional writer from overseas sales of his works.

A controversialist, Cooper provoked unease from his countrymen as well as veneration. His popularity waned after his return to America in 1833 from a seven-year absence spent traveling in Europe ; upon his return, he criticized the materialism and crassness he saw in America that had changed for the worse. He was not afraid to join in political fights and to hit back at enemies—he became something of a public scold in his later years, and he emulated his father’s recourse to the courts to redress wrongs. He stirred the ire of Whig newspaper publishers who had always distrusted him and disliked, in particular, his novels Homeward Bound ( 1838 ) and Home as Found ( 1838 ) . He was variously assailed at different times for being too Jacksonian and hostile to authority, and for being too aristocratic and class conscious. It is doubtful, however, whether Cooper really felt comfortable with any political party, and his political ideas certainly did not add up to a coherent political philosophy. He was nominally a Jackson Democrat but had a strong distrust of populist sentiments and of demagogues who stirred up the uneducated masses. Although a charming and gregarious man in his youth, Cooper came to be almost a recluse in later years and at times displayed a gift for making enemies. Many of the attacks on Cooper, though, were libelous, for he won the suits he instituted.

Cooper was wedded to his upstate New York region but was also a cosmopolitan who traveled widely; he was a romantic spinner of tales but also a realist who closely observed social mores, manners, and class status even in his novels set in the wilderness. Cooper was an optimist but one with a paranoid streak and a dark side. He lived mostly in the company of women but wrote mostly about men, male friendships, and heroes who broke free of or who never knew the bonds of domesticity. Cooper was as hard a man to understand for his contemporaries as he is for us now. Was he a reactionary or a man ahead of his times, an apologist for white America or a champion of Native Americans? Did he affirm the conquest of the wilderness or was he an early ecologist? As Robert Emmet Long comments, “Two centuries after his birth, he remains an American enigma” (James Fenimore Cooper, p. 13; see “For Further Reading”).

Yet for all of the controversy his life stirred, Cooper’s literary reputation remained largely intact until the end of the nineteenth century. He was, indeed, a cultural icon in a broad sense. His fiction redefined the past for the country, invented the idea of the Western frontier, and gave Americans a mythic sense of themselves and their destiny. He was a patron of the visual arts. Cooper’s writings stimulated interest in American history and fostered the professional writing of history, even though his novels often subordinated historical reality to archetype and myth. His interest in the Navy was genuine and was grounded in firsthand experience, and he was familiar with many of the personages he wrote about in The History of the Navy of the United States of America ( 1839) , which was a classic study of its kind. Cooper’s friend George Bancroft, the distinguished Harvard historian, interpreted the American Revolution in terms similar to the story lines and subtexts of Cooper’s novels dealing with the revolution, and he patterned his style of narrative history writing after Cooper’s narrative techniques. Moreover, Cooper did much to fashion and to expand the popular audience for his novels (and for the writers who followed him).
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His works were issued and reissued after his death.

The decline in Cooper’s literary reputation in America can be dated, ironically, from one such reissue of Cooper’s works; for it gave rise to the satirical 1895 Mark Twain assault on Cooper as a stylist and novelist, which was published in the North American Review under the title “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (the Appendix to this edition reprints Twain’s essay). Fulsome tributes from Professor Thomas Lounsbury of Yale and Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia had accompanied the publication of the handsome new edition (the 1895-1896 Mohawk edition) of Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales. This was too much for Mark Twain, and apparently helped to precipitate his famous critical assault on Cooper. There were, said Twain, “some people who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they’re all dead now.” And further: “Now I feel deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English in The Deerslayer is the very worst that even he ever wrote.”

Twain cited, with brilliant invective, a catalogue of Cooper’s of fenses, which to Twain included such matters as inflated diction, grammatical errors, inconsistencies, ridiculous feats of marksmanship displayed by his characters, unnatural dialogue, and habitual violations of eighteen out of nineteen rules for effective fiction. Twain claimed to have found 13 0 solecisms and misuses of words in a random perusal of The Deerslayer, a total lack of plot that in the end “accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air,” and wooden characters who do not develop. Twain makes particular fun of the portrayal in chapter IV of The Deerslayer of six incompetent Indians. While trying to attack Deerslayer and his companions riding in a slow-moving ark, they misjudge the jump from the tree branch and end up in the water as the ark sails away The reader is invited to peruse Twain’s parody, which we include as an appendix to the present edition.

As an example of satire, Twain’s essay is a masterpiece. But was the indictment in the comic tour de force actually fair and on target? Hardly. Twain, for one thing, had a notorious contempt for Native Americans; he considered that Cooper was responsible for presenting a falsely benevolent picture of the Indians.
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Remember also that Twain disliked Jane Austen’s novels, never read George Eliot, and could not abide Henry James. Though a few contemporary protests were leveled against Twain, he undeniably carried the day with his attack. The conventional wisdom among the literati and the scholars shifted to the view that Cooper was a fossil and that his writings were unreadable relics. Twain’s version of Cooper began to replace the historical figure and to alter the country’s collective memory of the acclaimed writer and literary icon. Twain’s myth of Cooper became for many years more widely read than Cooper’s own writings.

Part of the difficulty of defending Cooper is that his works are so many and so varied. He did not write a single great book that stands out like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Melville’s Moby-Dick; rather, he wrote many good books—more than any nineteenth-century American writer until Henry James. Cooper’s oeuvre consists of thirty-two mostly long novels and some dozen or more volumes of social criticism, none of which can be conveniently anthologized in short selections. Twain’s lively satire, on the other hand, lends itself to easy inclusion in college syllabi, and makes for lively classroom discussion. For Cooper, a man who dealt in romances, and whose own life and family history abound in legends, it is not surprising that his life should have become cocooned in a myth—in this case, unfortunately, a critic’s hostile myth.

In fact, Twain’s brilliant vitriol was exceedingly unfair and was a gross caricature of Cooper. That “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Of fenses” played so well requires explanation. The satire’s success, I think, was in part due to shifts in literary fashion and to the emergence of American literature from an earlier stage of strong cultural nationalism. By the late nineteenth century “realism” had come of age. The American novel was no longer monopolized by a uniquely American Gothic or romantic style. These forms, notably represented in the works of Brockton Brown, Poe, Irving, Cooper himself, and in some ways Hawthorne and Melville, were no longer the only or even the dominant forms of novelistic expression. New modes of writing and shifts in the tastes of the reading public and of critics were beginning to emerge. Hawthorne and Melville struck out in new directions, and such others as Lippard, Stowe, James, Howells, Twain, Norris, and Crane emerged as writers who were generally viewed or viewed themselves as realists rather than as romantics. The American literary canon became broader, or perhaps “looser” and more encompassing.
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There was no longer a need for an American literary exceptionalism, for American fiction to be caught up in the drive to achieve cultural independence from Europe.

The idea of a democratic art had been part of Cooper’s appeal to his countrymen, and some literary circles in Europe had heralded Cooper for paving the way to a new form of nonaristocratic art. Although Twain and the realists no doubt felt a need to rebel against what they saw as outmoded, we should perhaps not make too much of this sort of “anxiety of influence,” nor discern an inexorable Zeitgeist at work moving literature along some evolutionary path toward “higher” forms of expression. Twain, broke after the failure of his latest money-making scheme, could simply have wanted, for the fun of it, to drive another nail into the coffin of the “romancers.” Cooper was the ideal target for that purpose. Of course, nothing could disguise the fact that Twain and others incorporated many of Cooper’s techniques and plot devices into their own work. What comes readily to mind are the portrayals of socially marginal figures as the essential Americans, the flight-and-rescue situations, the common theme of male bonding, and the reliance on “sub-literary” myths, popular culture, and regional color in the narrative.

Twain’s effort to break the hold of romanticism through his attack on Cooper fell victim itself to changing literary and social fashions. Some critics, who agreed with him in seeing inflated diction and technical flaws in Cooper’s writing, nonetheless assailed Twain for being virulently anti—Native American.
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Others took note of Twain’s own borrowings of Cooper’s plot devices. In a point-by-point rebuttal, Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist demolished most of Twain’s main contentions.
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The charge of the hundreds of errors in random pages could not be substantiated because Twain never gave page numbers or any indication of the edition of Cooper’s novel he claimed to be using. It was notoriously difficult in Cooper’s time to avoid compositional errors, and Cooper always made numerous changes in his manuscripts. Twain’s ridicule of Cooper’s ark in The Deerslayer was based on his own assumptions of the size of a canal boat in his own era, not on Cooper’s assumptions in an era when such boats were smaller. Twain’s satire is best viewed as fiction rather than as criticism—a companion piece, perhaps, to A ConnecticutYankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

If Twain’s version of Cooper is now seen as hyperbolic and a caricature, what place do we assign to Cooper in the American literary canon? What do Cooper’s works offer to the contemporary reader? By what critical standards can we assess so varied a corpus of literary works? Is Cooper’s major interest and contribution to be viewed more usefully in the light of his broader role in nation building and cultural development in the early republic than in the strictly literary merits of his novels? And what is Cooper’s relationship to his own time and to his country, this man who seemed to his contemporaries, as he seems to us now, so complex and contradictory?

To approach such questions, we must first look at Cooper’s life. James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789. the fifth and youngest son and the twelfth of thirteen children of William and Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper.
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The family moved in the next year to Cooperstown in upstate New York, the town that had been founded by William Cooper in 1786 and named for him. William Cooper made a fortune in land speculation by acquiring the rights to a 40,000-acre land grant (known as the Croghan Patent) that adjoined Lake Otsego. Cooper became the first judge for the Court of Common Pleas for Otsego County. In 1795 and 1799 he was elected to Congress. Throughout the 1790s he was a formidable figure in Federalist politics in New York State, and was virtually the political boss of the western counties of the state.
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Judge Cooper, however, made a series of critical mistakes at the end of the decade in fighting his political adversaries, and these mistakes led to his retirement from politics and also contributed to the dramatic reversal of the Federalists’ fortunes in New York State. Judge Cooper thereafter turned his energies to new land ventures farther upstate that ultimately proved to be ruinous to his heirs. After the death of his beloved daughter Hannah in 1800, Judge Cooper became more and more absorbed in his ill-fated new land speculations and business ventures. The business activities increasingly consumed his time and made him less and less accessible to his family. He died in Albany in 1809 of pneumonia—not from being struck on the head from behind by a political opponent, as the legend has it.
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