James Fenimore Cooper: hack literary prophet (featuring Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

*

Apropos of nothing, my good pal Highly Osmotic Salami recently sent me the link to a rollicking 1895 critique, penned by Mark Twain, regarding the literary contributions of James Fenimore Cooper. You can read Twain's highly informative and entertaining essay here. Even if 19th century criticism is not your cup of tea or it runs too long for your tastes, I highly recommend that you scan the first few sentences, at least, and then sample some of the text after the numbered list, or else try the five paragraphs starting at the sentence that begins, "If Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty...." Not only is Twain's use of humor devastating, as usual, but his application of language is at once both princely and accessible. There's barely a hint of old-fashioned rhetoric or vocabulary; mainly just the power of plainly written English, authored with craft and intent. I would be honored and amazed if I were able to roughly approximate Twain's elegant economy with words and discipline of tone. His late-life essays, which I devoured over 30 years ago but haven't much revisited, are never far from from the back of my mind.

That said, I think Twain was indulging in a bit of blood sport with the legacy of the late Cooper, who was considered a literary giant throughout 19th century America and also overseas. For example, although the point about Cooper's "singularly dull" word sense may be well taken, Twain's extensive catalog of the author's specific transgressions seems somewhat petty and academic, especially to postmodern citizens who have been forced to accept some unlovely aspects of rapidly evolving vocabulary and usage.

Having only once tried to read Cooper as 4th grader and becoming bored stupid within about 21 pages of The Last of the Mohicans, I can't claim any first-hand knowledge of Cooper's work or his career. But the absurd heroics that Twain amusingly deconstructs, such as the forest shoot-off where bullets hit bulls-eyes and then other bullets hit the earlier bullets, may have been intended less to withstand critical analysis and more to excite the minds and imaginations of young boys whose families were building new towns at the edges of frontier territories. If Cooper was a hack, then maybe he knew it and didn't care. Or maybe he even relished his role as a hack popular entertainer, endowing his canny woodmen and noble savages with the prowess of Olympians for pure diversion value just like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did in the 1960s with their own lovable and highly significant hack creations like Spider-Man, The Thing, the X-Men, and even the mythology-inspired Thor. Perhaps Cooper became a literary force mostly because the cultural elites said he was rather than by his own pretense. You know: just like John Irving.

Anyway, I'll probably never read Fenimore Cooper, in large part because of Twain's critique, which I can't help but to honor even given the churlish* undertone of it. But one of Twain's most devastating observations about Cooper's incompetence at writing dialog attracted my own postmodern interest, not only as the literary insult intended but also as a possible hint that Cooper may at the same time have been 150 years ahead of his peers in this regard. Says Twain:

The conversations in the Cooper books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

In the bemused mind of Twain, who presumably had not traveled a century into the future and attended various Lynn Street happy hours, Cooper's dialog was surreal and insufferable. But if Twain's characterization is accurate, then Fenimore Cooper's dialog may have amounted to literary prophecy. Sometime soon, sit unobtrusively in a bar or coffee shop sometime, or maybe your own neighborhood gathering, and listen. Try the break room at work, or the weekly staff meeting. Or the Sunday morning infotainment shows. Listen intently for the "relevancy with an embarrassed look."
______________
* I learned the term churl in 1965 when Lee-and-Kirby creation Dr. Doom back-knuckled a hapless lackey with his iron gauntlet as punishment for some offense, real or imagined by the supreme despot of Latveria, and publicly denounced the poor sap as a "WITLESS CHURL!"