Wood and wave
DENIS BROGAN
Contemplating the American literary scene in his old age, James Fenimore Cooper showed a good deal of republican, if not democratic, complacency, and gave the palm among the geniuses of the young nation to William Cullen Bryant. How few today remember the epony- mous hero of Bryant Park, or readers, passing into the New York Public Library, remember anything of the writer and editor except vague memories of his once famous romantic poem 'Thanatopsis.' No; the real leader of American letters was Mr Cooper of Cooperstown and, if he is no longer a best-seller, he is the inventor of the great American myth, that matiere d'Anterique that has been the biggest literary money-spinner of modern times. Inevit- ably, Cooper did not rate as his best book The Last of the Mohicans (that made me weep before the First World War), but that is the natural taste of genius. Did not Mark Twain (who despised Cooper) rate some of his own bad historical novels above Huckleberry Finn?
This most admirably edited collection of Cooper's Letters and Journals shows us fir author retired to his equivalent of Abbotsford (and his Otsego Hall and its dependencies were a lot more genuine than Abbotsford), where he kept an eye on the productions of other writers, giving praise and blame to English and American authors now forgotten. He does tell us that 'Something Eyre is much talked of'
but gives no sign be has read the work of Currer Bell, that forward young woman. (He
did not live long enough to read the dangerous tract, Uncle Tom's Cabin, of an even more alarming woman.)
But the journals also show the political' pole- micist and bitter historical controversialist. Like
Scott, Cooper saw things going from bad to worse. Though politically a Democrat, Cooper was never a democrat and he was involved, on the losing side, in the great agrarian upheavals of the 'Anti-Rent' war in `upstate' New York. As firmly as Palmerston, he held that `tenant right is landlord's wrong' and a world in which
disorder paid off, politically and economically, was not the ideal Republic he had for a moment believed in. Nor did he find the for- mally `conservative' Whigs any better than the Jacksonian Democrats.
If it was possible, he disliked the New England (and New York) reformers and abolitionists even more. Slavery was an estab- lished legal system. A man could be owned as well as a horse and, if Cooper disliked `the effete monarchies of Europe,' he had no faith in European republics. Thus he rightly mis- trusted the Second French Republic. He expected that it would be followed by a highly authoritarian monarchy—and he was right. But he chose an odd candidate for the vacant throne, the Due de Bordeaux (better known as the Comte de Chambord). But Henri V was not to reign and Cooper never thought of the pretender who was to be Napoleon III.
It was characteristic of Cooper's indepen- dence of judgment that, although he despised the abolitionists, he resented equally the im- pudent claims of the south and the absurd doctrine that the territories' were the property of the several states. He saw the Union in danger and he was an old-fashioned American patriot—the type of man who, in 1861, became a `War Democrat' and so helped to ruin the hopes of the South and make ruinous the belief that `Yankees wouldn't fight.'
It was as much the militant nationalism of this head of a recently Quaker family that accounted for his devotion to the United States navy. We remember Cooper's Indians but not his sailors, yet he ranked his sailors at least on the same plane as his hunters and Indians. This naval devotion involved him in a very long and bitter quarrel with the great naval dynasty of the Perrys. And this meant that Cooper, remembering the alleged behaviour of Oliver Hazard Perry in the war of 1812, carried on the feud against Matthew Calbraith Perry, most famous after Cooper's death as the Com- modore Perry who forced open the locked gates of japan. It is not the fault of that most ad- mirable editor, Dr Beard, that Admiral Mori- son's life of `Old Bruin' came out too late to be included in the elaborate and nearly perfect notes.
But Cooper 'of the wood and wave,' as sis called him, was above all a man of letters with all the traditional irritability of the genus. It is to be noted that most of his quarrels were either with that type of brash young man called, then, `puppies'—like the egregious N. P. Willis (who also pestered Sir Walter)— or with publishers. His chief English pub- lisher was Richard Bentley, and Cooper became convinced (as so many authors easily become convinced) that if he was no longer a best- seller, the fault lay not only with the bad taste of the public but also with the rascality of thn publisher who was cooking the books.
Cooper, anxious to leave an adequate for- tune to his family, was one to try to drive... a hard bargain—try, for as Dr Beard shows, Cooper had far less business sense than the bland Washington Irving and, while Irving did very well indeed out of the collected edition of his Works, Cooper mismanaged his. It was only after his death that his copyrights became really valuable.
Part of his trouble with Bentley was due to the very unsatisfactory state of copyright. The United States proudly refused to pay tribute to greedy British authors, its poli- ticians often using the arguments we get today from `underdeveloped countries' who want to make authors give an involuntary contribution to their progress. But the situation in England was not much better, for the English courts dithered and swithered over what rights a . foreign writer had in England—if any. This affected Bentley's power to pay Cooper ade- quately, for Bentley had, for some of the time, to buy a pig in a poke. As Professor Haight. has, shown in his admirable life of George Eliot, the finances of Victorian authors can make very good, if envious, reading for today's writers, who are recommended to read the lively . correspondence printed here.
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