15 September: Boreham on Fenimore Cooper

Enter the Red Indian!
One cannot mark the birthday of Fenimore Cooper, as we do today, without recalling the fact that, a century ago the vogue of his Leather Stocking novels was absolutely phenomenal. His works were translated into every European language as well as into those of many Asiatic peoples. Samuel Morse, the pioneer of the electric telegraph, claimed that, having toured the whole world, he had found Fenimore Cooper everywhere.

The singular thing is that Cooper was not by nature a bookish man. He read practically nothing. Expelled from Yale University at the age of 17, he shook the dust of academies, seminaries, and libraries from his feet and ran away to sea. He soon became a midshipman in the United States Navy; but, coming of age and falling in love simultaneously, he lost his wanderlust, turned his back on ships and sailors, and settled down to life ashore. And it was his bride who made an author of him.

Appalled at her young husband's abysmal ignorance of books, she coaxed him to read. But the volumes bored him beyond endurance. At length she hit upon one that specially intrigued her. Gritting his teeth, he waded through it, tossed it aside in disgust, and assured his disappointed wife that he could write a better story himself! She dared him to do it, and, nothing daunted, he set to work. He wrote a novel; published it; and it fell as flat as the proverbial pancake.

On Cooper's proud, imperious spirit, failure acted as a goad. Was he to confess to his wife that he was wrong and that she was right? Not he! Rather than writhe for the rest of his life under this mortifying consciousness of defeat, he would try again and would persist until he did eventually succeed. He had not to wait long; and nobody was more proud than his bewildered little wife of the plaudits that were soon ringing in his ears. And, by the time that he had received the felicitations of his friends, he had conceived the germinal idea of that fascinating series of stories that a few years later took the whole world by storm.

Literature Discovers A New World
Fenimore Cooper took it into his head that the picturesque life and colourful history of the Red Indians would make a vivid background for the pages of romance. It was a field of virgin freshness. Fenimore Cooper's successors and imitators have made that realm of things almost tedious to us; but it was then excitingly and delightfully new.

It took people's breath away. Everybody wanted to know more and more about the braves and the squaws, the wigwams and the moccasins, the frayed leggings and the feathered headgear, the bow and the quiver, the tomahawk and the scalping-knife, the canoe and the peace-pipe, and all the other distinctive and alluring features of Indian life among the woods, the rapids and the rolling prairies of the West. It is not too much to say that the advent of the Red Indian into the realm of English fiction represents one of the outstanding landmarks of our literary history.

Generally speaking, Fenimore Cooper does not excel in the delineation of individual character. The canvas as a whole is skilfully painted, but the separate personalities are seldom convincing. A caustic critic said of Dickens that he never grasped the difference between a man and his clothes. He was always giving us the barrister's wig in mistake for the barrister and the beadle's cocked hat instead of the beadle.

The charge lies less justly against Dickens than against Fenimore Cooper. We feel that we are among shadows and wardrobes most of the time. It is difficult to become intimate with the characters; it is almost impossible to love them.

The Creation Of A Massive Original
Yet, so perverse a thing is genius, there is to all this one notable and shining exception. For it is the abiding glory of Fenimore Cooper that he has contributed to our literature one of its really Homeric and most magnificent figures. He deserves some measure of immortality if only for the creation of Hawkeye, the sturdy and captivating Pathfinder, who, under one name or another, stands as the central personality in all the Leather Stocking novels.

Robust, audacious, gentle, inflexible, lovable, fearless, abounding in woodlore and in commonsense, he stands as one of the really outstanding types in English letters. Neither Falstaff nor Mr. Pickwick, nor Robinson Crusoe nor Uncle Tom, is more essentially or exclusively himself.

Turning from the novels to the man himself, we find ourselves confronting a particularly intricate problem. Fenimore Cooper's success turned his head. He was inordinately vain, and, like most men who develop a frailty of that kind, he became painfully sensitive to criticism. He quarrelled with reviewers, editors, publishers, and even with the public itself. Exhibiting a penchant for litigation, he became a familiar figure in the law courts and generally contrived to win the day. His extreme irritability, however, made it difficult for him to enjoy his triumphs; each case left him fuming over something that had been said in the course of its procedure.

But, after a hundred years, we can forget all this. We prefer to think of him as a writer who won the unstinted admiration of men like Balzac and who led Victor Hugo to place his name above that of Sir Walter Scott. His works have a permanent historical value. In his pages we behold the vivid pageant of American beginnings; and his story of the westward march of the new civilisation is told in a way that makes the eyes of youth to sparkle and the ears of the aged to be strained in fascinated attention. Appealing to a worldwide constituency, he exercised a wholesome and uplifting influence, the value of which it would be very difficult to compute.

F W Boreham

Image: Fenimore Cooper