"Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses" by D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence pulls out the strangeness in the writers he covers in Studies in Classic American Literature, even in writers not commonly considered to be strange, like James Fenimore Cooper.

Five years – can that be right? – five years ago I spent a week writing* about The Deerslayer, launching off of Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” into a treatment of Deerslayer as a heroic fantasy novel, albeit one which ends in genocide.  At one point, just as an example, a lady in the lake gives the hero a magic rifle.  The novel is fascinating, although Cooper’s actual literary flaws, not the amusing ones invented by Twain, are real enough that I have not quite been inspired to try another Cooper novel.

Lawrence does what I did, but at greater length and depth.  He read all of Cooper as a child, so he goes as far as devoting a tangled chapter to “Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels” (The Spy and Eve Effingham and so on), before turning to the Leatherstocking novels, Cooper's attempt to use the new-fangled novel to create myth, a big new American myth.

How often in his own novels is Lawrence working on a similar problem?  He was doing it in The Rainbow (1915), with his earth mothers and archetypes and so on, I can see that now even at the distance of 25 years.  I sure did not see it then.

Lawrence sees Cooper groping towards this idea, with the five novels moving in “a decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of beauty” (55), although he still calls the first one, The Pioneers, “[a] very lovely book.”  “The most fascinating Leatherstocking book is the last, Deerslayer” (65).  I just wrote that up above.  Lawrence is always ahead of me.

It is a gem of a book.  Or a bit of perfect paste.  And myself, I like a bit of perfect paste in a perfect setting, so long as I am not fooled by pretence of reality.  And the setting of Deerslayer could not be more exquisite.  Lake Champlain again.  (66)

Lawrence is way off there.  Lake Otsego.

Of course it never rains: it is never cold and muddy and dreary: no one has wet feet or toothache: no one feels filthy, when they can’t wash for a week.  God knows what the women would have really looked like, for they fled through the wilds without soap, comb, or towel  They breakfasted off a chunk of meat, or nothing, lunched the same and supped the same.

Yet at every moment they are elegant, perfect ladies, in correct toilet.

Which isn’t quite fair.  You need only go camping for a week, and you’ll see.

But it is a myth, not a realistic tale.  Read it as a lovely myth.  Lake Glimmerglass.  (66)

*  The link is included as a reference, and is not really meant to be followed.

Cooper - we live in a world of transgressions and selfishness

Poking around on the internet, I found a really good article by Hugh MacDougall, actually an address to the James Fenimore Cooper Society (membership is only $10 per year!),* that makes the case for The Deerslayer better than I ever could. Just a few points:

1. Rousseau's ideas about the Noble Savage are ridiculous, we can all agree about that. Cooper puts them to the test. Not with actual savages (although his characters use the word often enough). The Huron are the enemy in the novel, but they're not dehumanized (at least not by Cooper, or Deerslayer). The Iroquois have their own culture, their own ideas about honor and religion and warfare. They're savage in some ways, but so are the white settlers. Some people blend the worst aspect of both cultures and become real savages (scalping for money is the novel's example). The Deerslayer tries to blend the best of both cultures, which strangely makes him the real Rousseauvian ideal. All of that business about natural religion fits in here.

2. Even though The Deerslayer is the novel about the beginning of Hawkeye's career, it is suffused with loss. The whole series must feel this way. Settlers destroy the forests and the passenger pigeons, warfare and disease and resettlement destroy the Native Americans. Although Hawkeye himself is a tough survivor (he dies in The Prairie at age 80), everything he really cares for is lost. The genuinely tragic aspect is that he is complicit in the destruction - as a woodsman, he prepares the frontier for settlement, and he fights in the Indian wars. At the end of The Deerslayer, Hawkeye is rescued from torture and death at the hands of the Huron by a genocidal massacre. The horror of this event is not emphasized in the way we would expect from a modern writer. But it's not dismissed, either. As a happy-go-lucky adventure novel, The Deerslayer has some defects.

3. All of the Leatherstocking Tales are in print, published as Signet Classics. This usually means that the novels are used in high schools. Those poor kids! The overstuffed prose, the draggy (mostly) pace, the absurd incidents - I'm going to guess there are 20 young'uns who swear off old books forever to every one who falls in love. I myself am not in an enormous hurry to read more Cooper. But I did not expect to write about him all week. He's pretty interesting. I'm a lot more curious than I was before.

* You can email your Cooper questions to "Ask Fenimore".

Cooper and Deerslayer - all is concord in the woods

Cooper, in The Deerslayer, and presumably in the other Leatherstocking novels, is able to solve a problem that Walter Scott fought with his whole life. Cooper's hero, Hawkeye/ Natty Bumppo/ Deerslayer, is an interesting character. As good as Scott's novels can be, and as good as he is with creating supporting characters, his heroes are always pale, flavorless fellows.* Hawkeye is naive, idealized, and sometimes downright odd, but he has flavor.

I'm having trouble finding excerptable bits to prove my case. Deerslayer is, let's say, voluble. For a stoic man of the woods, he sure talks a lot.

Early on (Ch. VII), Deerslayer kills a man for the first time, a Huron chief. It's wartime, it's in self-defense, and Deerslayer does everything he can to avoid violence. So it's all right, then! Anyway, this is where he earns the name Hawkeye, bestowed on him by the dying Indian. As his victim dies, and after, and also before, Deerslayer talks, and then talks, and then talks some more. It sounds ridiculous, and Cooper even becomes embarrassed that his character talks to himself so much ("As was his practice, however, a habit gained by living so much alone in the forest, he then began again to give utterance to his thoughts and feelings aloud.") But in fact the entire encounter with his first enemy is written with a degree of tension rarely found in the novel, and Deerslayer's soliloquies and sermons lend the event substantial dignity.

Deerslayer is good-humored (although never funny) but intense. He's illiterate, but full of theories about religion and culture and the "gifts" of different races. Brought up among the Delaware, he's sort of a radical multiculturalist, accepting behavior by Indians that he condemns among whites, and vice versa. In between the two cultures, he of course combines the noblest aspects of both. He'll gleefully shoot an eagle to show off his new rifle, but then feel bad that he did it. ("The sight of a dyin' and distressed creatur', even though it be only a bird, brings wholesome thoughts to a man who don't know how soon his own time may come...") He's long-winded, but he says surprising things.

Deerslayer is given to speechifying, not a characteristic I find endearing, mostly, but which here gives him some charm. He's uneducated, maybe even foolish, but he's always thinking, generally out loud. Cut from a longer speech in Chapter XV:

"Then as to churches, they are good, I suppose, else wouldn't good men uphold 'em. But they are not altogether necessary. They call 'em the temples of the Lord; but, Judith, the whole 'arth is a temple of the Lord to such as have the right mind. Neither forts nor churches make people happier of themselves. Moreover, all is contradiction in the settlements, while all is concord in the woods. Forts and churches almost always go together, and yet they're downright contradictions; churches being for peace, and forts for war. No, no - give me the strong places of the wilderness, which is the trees, and the churches, too, which are arbors raised by the hand of natur'."

Hints of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau here.

Also, a terrible irony, that "concord in the woods", only seen in this novel after a genocidal massacre. That's for tomorrow.

* The one exception I know is The Heart of Midlothian, where the protagonist is not coincidentally female.

Cooper the realist, Cooper the Romantic*

Every writer creates his own world. The relationship between the writer's world and the real one can be tricky. Cooper set The Deerslayer on Lake Otsego, a real place, at the beginning of a real war between England and France in 1745. He spends a lot of time telling us exactly how various canoes are situated on the lake, how people are dressed, the direction of the currents. This is a realistic novel, right?

Well, sometimes. But when pious, "feeble-minded" Hetty falls asleep in the woods, and is awakened by a pair of bear cubs, who, with their mother, accompany her as she walks along the shore, the novel has moved somewhere else - to Tasso's Arcadia, or The Faerie Queen.

Or how about when the Lady in the Lake gives Deerslayer his famous magic rifle Killdeer? Yes, the (or a) Lady in the Lake. Yes, the rifle has a name, just like Roland's sword Durandal, or Excalibur. We're a lot closer to Morte d'Arthur and Orlando Furioso than to Lewis and Clark's Journals. The Deerslayer is Natty Bumppo's "origin" story, written last but telling readers who already know his adventures how he got the name Hawkeye, how he got his reputation, and his rifle. It's all suitably heroic.

Perhaps this sounds dismissive. I don't mean that. I think it helps to know what a person is reading. Twain's complaints about violations of realism are funny but irrelevant. Cooper's world is fundamentally unreal. His American frontier is closer to the real world than that of, for example, Chateaubriand's Atala, with its hermit priests and Kentucky crocodiles. But as in Atala, the semi-real setting is used to emphasize other concerns. I'll try to pin those down tomorrow.

There's been a revival of scholarly interest in Cooper lately. This article from an the NEH Humanities journal is a good place to learn about that. Cooper more or less invented the spy novel, the sailing novel, and the Western. So Cooper gives scholars interested in genre and reception a lot to work with. He's also been picked up by people interested in early environmentalism, interested in, for example, the scene in The Pioneers where a flock of passenger pigeons are slaughtered. I think this is all pretty interesting, but the there are limits to how far the non-scholarly Amateur Reader can go with this sort of thing.

* Careful, son. "Romantic" is a tangled term. The Deerslayer is Romantic in that it has the qualities of the old Romance genre (Boiardo, Malory, Ariosto). It's also Romantic in that it explores or advocates post-Enlightenment ideas associated with Romanticisim. But these two definitions are only barely related. I seem to only mean the first one here.

Cooper - without encumbering themselves with details

Many writers, innovators, especially, include instructions on how to read their work, hidden somewhere in their actual novels. This is quite common. Here is a character in The Deerslayer, reading letters containing the secrets of her family history:

"As she obtained the clue to their import, her impatience could not admit of delay, and she soon got to glancing her eyes over a page, by way of coming at the truth in the briefest manner possible. By adopting this expedient, one to which all who are eager to arrive at results without encumbering themselves with details, are so apt to resort, Judith made a rapid progress in this melancholy revelation of her mother's failings and punishment." (Ch. XXIV)

I am not normally one to suggest readers skim novels and not "encumber themselves with details" - quite the contrary, the more encumbering the better - but Cooper seems to be giving explicit permission here, just at a point when many readers are probably thinking "Forget Judith, how is Deerslayer going to escape from the Hurons."

About those details. The Deerslayer is set at Lake Otsego in upstate New York, about 40 years before Cooper's own father founded Cooperstown at the south end of the lake. So this is Cooper's home territory. The novel has a plot involving elephant-headed chess pieces, not worth explaining, that gives us this (Ch. XIV):

"Little did either of them imagine at the time that long ere a century had elapsed, the progress of civilization would bring even much more extraordinary and rare animals into that region, as curiosities to be gazed at by the curious, and that the particular beast about which the disputants contended would be seen laying its sides and swimming in the very sheet of water on which they had met."

What? Cooper helps us out with this footnote:

"The Otsego is a favorite place for the caravan keepers to let their elephants bathe. The writer has seen two at a time, since the publication of this book, swimming about in company."

This is not yet a defense of Cooper, but that's pretty great.

Cooper's art has some defects.

Is James Fenimore Cooper a terrible writer? The reader of The Deerslayer (1841) should be forgiven for asking, whether or not he is familiar with Mark Twain's brilliant hatchet job "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895):

"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."

This is obviously not meant to be fair, exactly, but Twain does score some real hits. The Deerslayer includes the scene (Chapter IV) where six Hurons are lurking over a river on a "sapling", ready to drop onto the "ark" and attack the Deerslayer and his friends. Five of the six attackers miss the ark, splash splash splash, while the sixth is pushed off the boat by the plucky heroine. The whole scene is not as bad as Twain makes it out to be, but it's pretty stupid.

When characters are speaking in Huron or Delaware, Cooper can't just tell us that. He needs some sort of preface, every time, to let us know that he's translating, "for the reader's convenience only." Thanks.

There's a "feeble-minded" character. I don't want to guess how many times the word "feeble-minded" is used. Cooper is always worried that we are going to forget, through the entire 500 pages. "Yes, that was it; my mind was feeble - what people call half-witted..." This is on page 491 of the Bantam Classic. I got it.

Twain again: "A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

Over the next couple of days I'll set Twain aside and see if I can make some sort of defense of The Deerslayer.