February 4: James
Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the
Mohicans, the second and most popular of his "Leatherstocking Tales,"
was published on this day in 1826. Later that year Cooper moved to Europe,
where he lived for the next seven years. This fondness for cultured European
living, balanced against a reputation based on a glorification of the American
frontier, caused some to raise eyebrows. In D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classical American Literature
(published in 1923, just as Lawrence was enjoying his own first taste of
frontier living in New Mexico), Cooper is described as one who "did so
love seeing pretty-pretty, with the thrill of a red scalp now and then":
…Fenimore, lying in his Louis Quatorze hotel in Paris,
passionately musing about Natty Bumppo and the pathless forest, and mixing his
imagination with the Cupids and Butterflies on the painted ceiling, while Mrs
Cooper was struggling with her latest gown in the next room, and the d'jeuner was with the Countess at
eleven....
Men live by lies.
In actuality, Fenimore loved the genteel continent of
Europe, and waited gasping for the newspapers to praise his WORK.
In another actuality he loved the tomahawking continent of
America, and imagined himself Natty Bumppo.
His actual desire was to be: Monsieur Fenimore Cooper, le grand ecrivain americain. His
innermost wish was to be: Natty Bumppo.
Now Natty and Fenimore, arm-in-arm, are an odd couple....
Granting that "perhaps my taste is childish,"
Lawrence goes on to praise the Leatherstocking books for "some of the
loveliest, most glamorous pictures in all literature":
The raw village street, with woodfires blinking through the
unglazed window-chinks, on a winter's night. The inn, with the rough woodsman
and the drunken Indian John; the church, with the snowy congregation crowding
to the fire. Then the lavish abundance of Christmas cheer, and turkey-shooting
in the snow. Spring coming, forests all green, maple sugar taken from the
trees: and clouds of pigeons flying from the south, myriads of pigeons shot in
heaps; and night-fishing on the teeming, virgin lake; and
deer-hunting.
Pictures
Alas, without the cruel iron of
reality....
But Lawrence is on the side of the frontier: "One day
America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper. Not yet, however.
When the factories have fallen down again."
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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