"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895)

Mark Twain’s full-throated takedown of the US novelist James Fenimore Cooper is often funny, but nearly as often lame. Full disclosure, I have never read any Cooper. Notable victims of Twain’s attack are The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder, from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series of five novels. I think I share Twain’s sense of Cooper and other early American writers as soporific and a little ridiculous. But mocking old books for being stupid is not a good look and it is a well you can go to only so often. In many ways, certainly by the 1890s, it was running dry for Twain as his stock in trade. He gave the treatment to Walter Scott (many times), Jane Austen, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few. This spittle-flecked Daffy Duck indictment of Cooper is funny and bracing, anticipating the rip-roaring style of New Journalists and rock critics, making a lot of hay from the splenetic rant. The piece lurches into a list of 18 points that doesn’t hold up under its own weight. It is fatally lazy in the section criticizing word choice, by never giving us the full sentences where these words live. Giving us 20 or 30 isolated word pairs didn’t strike me as that funny. But compare the section just before that, on Cooper’s exaggerations, which worked well because it did include passages by Cooper. My favorite riff was on twig-snapping in the woods because I remember it as a common recurring element in frontier tales I read when I was a kid. Maybe I have read Cooper! “It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around,” Twain writes. “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig.” There’s more to this rant, which hits the howling high note of anyone writing at top speed—the nice throwaway “worth four dollars a minute” is the tell in this case. But too often he stumbles again and wallows too long in some bog. His jokes miss at least as often as they hit. Still, I did laugh pretty hard more than once so “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” is probably worth checking out. You just have to put up with the mockery of someone whose own bare ass is sticking out there a lot of the time.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)
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