A friend's email mentioned James Fenimore Cooper. Solemn in all things, I mentioned the views of D.H. Lawrence and Yvor Winters, but confessed that mostly I agreed with Mark Twain. It turned out that she had not been reading Lawrence or Winters, but thinking back to Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. Even so, this reminded me that I had not read all of the Leatherstocking novels: I had to look at the Library of America entry to see that the one remaining was The Pathfinder. Over the fortnight just ended, I have read it.
I still agree with Twain, and still think Cooper wrote inferior Scott. However, I now suspect what I had not for fifty years, that Twain in middle age reacted against the interest and confidence with which he read Cooper when young. He might in another time and mood have written of the books in the manner of S.J. Perelman's "Cloudland Revisited" pieces. But Twain, I think, considered that he had been fooled, and took his revenge. The Pathfinder has a couple of the items that Twain complained about--the shooting match at Oswego, and the anchoring of a ship in undertow off ta lees shore along Lake Ontario.
Twain was probably ten or twelve when he first read Cooper. That seems to me about the best age for Cooper, when a boy has not developed a sense of the probable, or much interest in women. That is the age to identify with the Pathfinder, hiking off into the wilderness with Chingachook, and not with Jasper Western settled down with Mabel Dunham. That is also the age not to roll the eyes at the courting scenes.
Did what doesn't work now work then? There was little enough time between Cooper and Twain. Stendhal had some rather cool things to say about Sir Walter Scott, whom I take to have been Cooper's model.
ReplyDeleteI don't see why one shouldn't dive into Cooper. One can get wholly through one of the novels on a rainy weekend. And if having dived into Cooper you disagree with me, then blog about and let me know what I missed.