Patent Leatherstocking

THE LETTERS AND JOURNALS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (2 vols., 444 pp. & 420 pp.)--edited by James Franklin Beard--Belknap Press of Harvard University ($20).

The first American novelist to enjoy literary success in Europe was an ex-naval officer from upstate New York named James Fenimore Cooper. His father, a rich landowner, founded Cooperstown, N.Y., where Abner Doubleday was to invent baseball, but where Cooper made an even greater invention--the noble red man and the heroic myth of the American frontier. On Cooper's novels of the New York wilderness--The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer--rests the somewhat guarded claim of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he is "the most important man of letters ever connected with Yale,"* and the more generous assertion that "he created an American literature out of American materials."

Cooper's letters and journals deal largely with the seven years (1826-33) during which he lived it up in England and on the Continent. The mountainous, two-volume compilation--a bluestocking's tribute to Leatherstocking as well as an impressive research feat--is the work of Clark University's James Franklin Beard, whose 15-year trail took him from the archives of Warsaw to New England bookstores (in one of which he found a Cooper fragment addressed to an Ojibway Indian). The nonscholar is advised to read by the strip-mining method of ignoring the gritty substratum of footnotes, which run as high as 28 for one letter, and following two thin but constant veins of comic paydirt.

One is the familiar "Innocents Abroad" theme. The other is Cooper's occasional misunderstanding of his own achievement. Most of his 32 novels were adventure stories about Indians and trappers or about the sea. But he also produced a handful of society novels, beginning with his first book, Precaution, written in 1820 on a dare by his wife, and there were times when Cooper seemed to regard these as his most exciting work. Though his own Natty Bumppo--the Deerslayer--eventually slew this illusion, Cooper could write: "Europe itself is a Romance, while all America is a matter of fact, humdrum, common sense region from Quoddy to Cape Florida."

Snobs & Tuft-Hunters. In America's future there was a Mark Twain, whose frontier lay almost a thousand miles to the west of Cooper's, and whose literary sights were set a great deal more truly than Natty Bumppo's. It was Mark Twain who pointed the double irony--that Cooper, who wrote badly of the society he knew, knew nothing of what he wrote best about--savages. When Cooper hit Paris in 1826, he was able to report complacently to his publisher: "'Mohicans is looking up famously in Europe." The resident intellectuals, including Jean Jacques Rousseau with his ideals about the "noble savage," had softened up the civilized world for Cooper and his admirable aborigines. He was as much a social lion as Benjamin Franklin in his fur cap.

There were moral and social problems for the good, clean-living, republican American, and Cooper was not always sure-footed in his pathfinding amid the tangled family trees that snarled the moneyed moccasins of the American traveler. Surrounded by aristocrats, he complained touchily that his own family "did not exactly come out of the gutter," but he never accepted the obvious fact that he was invited out for his redskins and not for his blue blood.

Cooper did a lot of commuting between Paris and London, and he successfully tried the English game of snobbery; he decided, for instance, that the Bishop of Llandaff was not "the real thing," mainly because the cleric said "My Lady" to a lady, just like the servants. He never really felt right in England; for one thing, tips ($50 in 16 days) were excessive, and for another, he lacked either a British or American sense of humor. In the end, he came to feel guilty when he found that the creator of Leatherstocking had a reputation back home of "trying night and day to live with dukes and duchesses." He and his family were not really "tuft-hunters," he protested, adding that he had no desire to marry his four daughters to Europeans.*

Bugs & Lace. When Cooper forgot the wounds suffered in such snob warfare, he was a remarkably sensible observer. "We are going up and England is coming down," he noted time and again. Within 50 years, he predicted in 1831, "the government of England will become exactly what Lafayette wished to make France--a nominal monarchy, but virtually a re-publick." He added: "The prestige of their detestable aristocracy will for a long time linger in the slavish minds of their people." When in France, he wrote that England "is a country which knows well how to handle a king." Straight Bourbon was too much for his republican stomach, and there were other unpleasant things about France--"a strange country made up of dirt and gilding, good cheer and soupe maigre, bedbugs and laces."

A great deal of Cooper's time, passion and talent was squandered on remote or nonliterary causes. There are pages on the wrongs of Poland, and a lot of fascinating stuff written in an art form that modern communications have destroyed--the epistolary description of family life and public events and personages. Toward the end of his stay in Europe, Cooper grew increasingly restless. He sensed, he wrote, "a disposition to drive me back again into my own hemisphere."

Libel & Vampires. Cooper became bitter about critics who complained of both his style of writing and of living. His letters rumble with snarls against such "jackals" and "vampires"--back home he sued several of them for libel, and won. Perhaps he had stayed in Europe too long; on his return he seemed out of step with Jacksonian America, and though he wrote many more novels--including several highly popular Leatherstocking tales--he could not really regain the favor of critics or public.

Despite occasional critical attempts to rescue him from the juvenile field, Cooper has never really recovered his reputation. For all the journals' odd historical interest, Compiler Beard seems to have performed his scholastic labors in defiance of the Clerihew:

Once it was a social blooper

Not to have read some Fenimore Cooper.

But no one now reads any Fenimore

Cooper any more.

* In an article by Yaleman William Lyon Phelps.

* Two of his daughters never married. Caroline became the wife of a Cooperstown publisher, and Maria Frances married her cousin, a widower with seven children.

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