“[James Fenimore] Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”--Mark Twain, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895)Mark Twain is hardly out of his corner, and already he’s delivered a staggering blow. I can report that he doesn’t let up from here, folks, as he takes after The Leatherstocking Saga (termed here “The Broken-Twig Series,” for its author’s propensity to add a plot development with a twig snapping in the forest) for its decided lack of realism and clumsy writing.
I doubt you’ll find a more delicious barbeque of a literary sacred cow anywhere. But here’s the thing: James Fenimore Cooper, who died on this date in 1851, a day short of his 62nd birthday, still manages to be read.
If you want an attack far more deadly and effective than Twain’s on Cooper, then consider the fate of James Gould Cozzens. What, you haven’t read him (let alone heard of him)? That has an awful lot to do with critic Dwight Macdonald, who laid waste to this Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who had scaled the top of the bestseller lists and even been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. By the time Macdonald had disposed of him in a 1957 review, “By Cozzens Possessed,” the novelist’s reputation lay in ruins. Search for him now on postwar American literature reading lists in colleges--I dare you.
In contrast, Cooper has endured quite well, thank you. The strength of that position was underscored for me by a comment made over two decades ago by Alfred Kazin. At a question-and-answer period following a lecture at my local library, I asked the late eminent critic, regarding literary reputations, why James Fenimore Cooper continued to be assigned in colleges but Washington Irving wasn’t.
“When was the last time you read Irving?” he responded.
Had the asperity of the remark not caught me off guard, I might have answered, “About the same time I read Cooper.” I might then have followed it up with, “How many young readers would bother with Cooper at all if they weren’t made to read him?”
A rather less crass, more thoughtful response might have been that, for all his marvelously droll style (see my post from the other day on his A History of New York), Irving did not fashion a uniquely American style or genre. Cooper, on the other hand, created the western--or, as I like to think of it, the closing-of-the-frontier novel. It was the subject of the very first book he wrote in the Leatherstocking Saga, The Pioneers, and another title in the same series makes the point even more explicit: The Last of the Mohicans.
English professors inevitably end up tracing the development of genres rather than simply raising students’ appreciation for great literature. Consequently, Cooper gets a pass from academe for the same reason that Samuel Richardson does: i.e., he created a literary form that, for all intents and purposes in his native country, hadn’t existed before.
And then there’s Hollywood. When was it ever consumed by fidelity to works being adapted, let alone the things that mattered to Twain--verisimilitude in characterization and action?
And so, directors and producers don’t care a twig (sorry, Mr. Twain!) about plot. They’re going to change that, anyway. The important things for them are images, such as the one here, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe as the lovers in Michael Mann’s thrilling The Last of the Mohicans.
Mr. Twain would undoubtedly have wished that Hollywood had done equally well by him.
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