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.2 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. 3 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.4 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.5 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.6 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. 7
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.8
Judge Cooper was unquestionably the patriarch of his family, and he sought to rule Cooperstown in much the same way that he ran his family. He provided generous and benevolent, if slightly dictatorial, leadership and expected deference in return. It appears that James Cooper’s relations with his father were somewhat strained, though the issue has not been completely resolved. William Cooper was a remote figure to his youngest son, and he apparently had not placed his highest hopes on James for bettering the family’s fortunes. Yet all of his children, including James, were given the benefit of private tutoring and educational opportunities. Judge Cooper, although not well-educated himself, had bettered himself by marrying an heiress, and believed strongly in raising his children to be genteel in the fashion of his wife’s well-to-do family and in the tradition of the privileged British landed gentry.
Although young James spent much of his childhood roaming the woods with his favorite brother William, he received p
rivate tutoring from the local schoolmaster his father hired to run the village school. At age ten he was sent to Albany to live with his father’s friend, the Reverend Thomas Ellison, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, to study the classics and to attend school. Among the small number of other pupils were the sons of wealthy Federalists—a Jay, a Livingston, and two Van Rensselaers. William Jay, the son of John Jay, was James’s roommate and became a lifelong friend. James Cooper loved Virgil and became highly proficient in Latin. After the death of Reverend Ellison, James went to New Haven to prepare for matriculation at Yale. When he entered Yale at the age of thirteen, he was far ahead of most of his classmates in his knowledge of Latin and the classics. This may help account for the boredom he felt at college. Cooper was expelled in his junior year in 1805 after blowing off a classmate’s door with gunpowder. The classmate had earlier assaulted Cooper (and Cooper won a judgment against him in court) . Several boys implicated with Cooper in the door escapade were later allowed to reenter Yale and complete their studies. But Cooper did not seek readmission, possibly because the Yale authorities were aware of the troubles that James’s brother William had experienced at Princeton. William had been expelled from Princeton after being suspected, probably falsely, of involvement in the setting of two fires, one that burned down Nassau Hall and another that destroyed a local tavern.
James’s mother was a lover of music and an avid reader, mostly of novels and romances, and often read aloud to James the latest books she was able to get from England. James’s tastes, no doubt influenced by his mother, ran to literature and history. After being expelled from Yale, James was tutored at home for a time. His tutors reported that he was resistant to mathematics, the law, and the more analytical subjects in general. The Reverend William Neill recalled that James “was rather wayward, cordially disliked hard study, especially of the abstract sciences [and] was extravagantly fond of reading novels and amusing tales” (quoted in Long, James Fenimore Cooper, p. 15).
How James Cooper actually felt about his father is not known, but hints can be inferred from The Pioneers (1823), Cooper’s third novel and the first of the five Leatherstocking novels (that is, those in which Natty Bumppo appears, the woodsman hero known, variously, as the Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer, or Hawkeye). This novel tells the story, in a softened and rosy-hued version, of the founding of Cooperstown (called Templeton in the novel) and the events of its early history. Judge Marmaduke Temple, the town founder and a thinly disguised version of Cooper’s father, is pictured as a remote figure whose ways clash with the republicanism of the new America. Part of the Cooper mythology is that young James ran away to sea as a common sailor in 1806 in defiance of his father’s wishes. The truth is less romantic. Though James’s father may have had some misgivings about his son’s interest in a naval career, William Cooper arranged for the sea journey to prepare James for taking up a career as a naval officer (see Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, pp. 338-345). Cooper spent a year sailing to England and the Mediterranean on the merchant ship Stirling, being chased at one stage by a pirate ship. On January 1, 1808, Cooper received his midshipman’s warrant signed by President Thomas Jefferson, and was first sent to Lake Ontario and subsequently stationed in New York City
When James’s father died in October 1809, he inherited $50,000 in cash and a share in Judge Cooper’s extensive estate, initially valued at $750,000. At eighteen, Cooper was a rich, handsome, and energetic young man and a highly desirable marriage prospect. In the following year he met Susan De Lancey at a ball in New York City; he married her on January 1, 1811. She was an heiress and the daughter of socially prominent parents with a distinguished family lineage, and Cooper thus repeated the experience of his father in marrying into a higher social class. In this case, however, the match seemed to offer advantages to both sides. The De Lanceys, a Loyalist family, had lost much of their property under the New York State Confiscation Act of October 22, 1779. Cooper’s wealth put him among the very well off and brought advantages to his in-laws. Susan had inherited wealth of her own from her mother’s side of the family, so the couple seemed doubly assured of a comfortable future. She evidently extracted a promise from him to give up his naval career.
Extravagant spending of his own cash inheritance and the mismanagement of his father’s affairs by his elder brothers, plus the impact of the War of 1812 on real estate values, brought an unraveling of Cooper’s financial situation and the beginnings of the money problems that dogged him for years. But the financial decline was a slow process, and the family continued to live in a genteel style. The couple moved back and forth between Westchester County and Cooperstown, with Cooper acting as a gentleman farmer. He founded a bible and an agricultural society, and also served as an aide-de-camp to his friend Governor DeWitt Clinton with the rank of colonel. Later he became quartermaster and then paymaster of the Fourth Infantry Division of New York State, where he was resplendent at reviews in a blue and buff uniform, astride his charger Bullhead, wearing a cocked hat. It is likely that, but for the mounting financial problems, Cooper would have lived out his life as a country gentleman, surrounded by his loving wife and family, and benevolently engaged in civic activities and in the public life of his county and state.
Financial pressures caused an estrangement from the De Lancey family in 1818 when Susan’s brothers, afraid Cooper might mortgage or sell the property, changed the legal status of their sister’s Scarsdale farm, where Susan and James and their children were then living, to remove it from Cooper’s control. Cooper broke off relations with the De Lanceys as a result and moved his family to New York City. He tried a number of business ventures, including buying a whaling ship and sending it off on a South American voyage to harvest whale oil. Through this venture he gained an intimate knowledge of the whaling business that showed up in his seafaring novels. All of Cooper’s business ventures, however, proved to be fruitless, and probably worsened his financial situation. He was not a good businessman.
The story of how Cooper turned to writing, his strangest and most unlikely entrepreneurial venture, has been told many times but most authoritatively by his daughter Susan:
A new novel had been brought from England in the last monthly packet; it was, I think, one of Mrs. Opie’s, or one of that school.... It must have been very trashy; after a chapter or two he threw it aside, exclaiming, “I could write a better book than that myself.” Our mother laughed at the idea, as the height of absurdity—he who disliked writing even a letter, that he should write a book!! He persisted in his declaration, however, and almost immediately wrote the first pages of a tale, not yet named, the same laid in England, as a matter of course (Susan Cooper, “Small Family Memoir,” p. 38).
The resulting novel, Precaution (1820), Cooper’s first, is a “novel of manners” set in England with a plot that closely resembles Jane Austen’s Persuasion, but it also bears heavy doses of the didactic style characteristic of British author Amelia Opie. Cooper read the draft of the novel one evening to the John Jay family under the pretense that it was the work of a young author he had discovered. Encouraged by his friends’ reactions, he proceeded to publish the novel, anonymously, in both America and England. The work did poorly in America but enjoyed modest sales in England where it was taken to be the work of an Englishwoman. Cooper threw himself immediately into the work on his second novel, The Spy, with the characteristic creative energy that was to be his trademark, finishing the first sixty pages in three days. But it proved harder to do an original rather than an imitative work, and it took him six months to complete the novel. The Spy was published in 1821 and brought him instant fame. It tells the story of a patriot who masquerades as a Loyalist but who is actually working for independence. In the end the hero shows his nobility by refusing to accept payment for his spying services. The subtext of the novel is the unity of the American gentry around the ideals of patriotism, independence from Britain, the preservation of the existing social order, and the rejection of radic
al ideas proposed by groups seeking to overthrow current institutions. Following the publication of The Spy were The Pioneers (1823), the first of the Leatherstocking series ; The Pilot ( 1823 ) , the first of what would be eleven seafaring novels ; Lionel Lincoln (1825); and, before Cooper’s departure for Europe with his family, The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Mohicans was published to great acclaim and became an immediate bestseller. It became his most widely read and successful work. The Prairie, the last part of which Cooper finished while in Europe, and The Red Rover both appeared in 1827, consolidating his reputation as a world-renowned author. He settled in Paris, where he was sought out and feted in Parisian literary circles.
Cooper gave various reasons in letters to friends to explain his departure for Europe: educational opportunities for his children (the family diligently studied French for a year prior to departure), the chance to relax, his desire to see something of the world, and others. He did not mention what was surely another major motivation: his desire to solidify his finances. Although Cooper was widely read in Europe, international copyright laws were so lax that pirated editions of his works flooded the European markets. At the time of his departure for Europe, he had realized few financial gains despite his fame. In every country he visited, Cooper met with publishers and arranged for authoritative editions of his works and/or new translations. To induce readers to buy these editions, they often included a new commentary or preface by the author. Cooper was always fascinated with and closely attentive to the details of publishing. He appeared to have a shrewd business sense in this area, and struck favorable bargains with his publishers (while always being loyal, conscientious, and scrupulous in his dealings with them). Meanwhile, he continued to work hard, producing a substantial body of new work that included three novels and travel volumes on England, France, and Italy based on his copious notes. By the end of his stay in Europe he had achieved the financial security for his family that he had long sought.
Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 2
