Mark Ford teaches in the English department at University College London.
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Vol. 30 No. 18 · 25 September 2008
pages 27-29 | 4341 words
Time of the Red-Man
Mark Ford
- BuyJames Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years by Wayne Franklin
Yale, 708 pp, £25.00, July 2008, ISBN 978 0 300 10805 7
It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in the arts. Resolutely unliterary, Cooper ‘disliked writing even a letter’, or so family legend has it. He’d spent his twenties as a midshipman in the navy, though to his chagrin he never saw action, and as a gentleman farmer, first on land bequeathed him by his father on the shores of Lake Otsego in upstate New York; and then on a 42-acre property in Scarsdale that belonged to his wife’s family, who owned much of Westchester County. He had enjoyed dabbling in politics, and had been a leading figure in a movement intended to improve American agricultural practices. In the wake of the crash in land prices of 1819, however, and the consequent unravelling of Judge Cooper’s complex, heavily mortgaged estate, he found himself at the mercy of a slew of ruthless creditors – rather as his heroines in novel after novel find themselves at the mercy of some ruthless tribe of Iroquois or Sioux. Noting the success of Sir Walter Scott, from whose life and writing he learned so much, Cooper found in fiction a means of restoring his family’s fortunes.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 20 · 23 October 2008
From David Callahan
Writing about James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Ford has recourse to entertaining, but clearly self-aggrandising comments by Mark Twain and D.H. Lawrence (LRB, 25 September). Lawrence’s ‘factual’ observations are often wildly wrong, while Twain’s attempt to push aside a powerful father invents and lies when it cannot find enough ‘evidence’, more of a tall tale than literary criticism.
The supposedly retrograde racial politics represented by Natty Bumppo has been subjected to exhaustive research by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) scholar Barbara Mann, who has presented the so far unrebutted argument that Natty’s desperate assertions as to his whiteness, and lack of children, arise from the likelihood that he is passing. In this reading, Cooper’s secretively mixed-race hero becomes less serviceable both to those who argue that Natty represents settler-invaders and to those who see his ‘rejection’ of women within a symbolic nexus connecting the so-called isolate hero and Nature as the American male’s womanly companion. But Mann’s work is only one of a number of strands in contemporary studies of Cooper in which such issues as masculinity, colonialism and Cooper’s inventiveness are being revised. Apart from the Leatherstocking saga, Cooper’s work includes a novel set in the Revolutionary War, in which the hero is a spy who can never publicly claim the new nation he has helped into being, and two novels with cross-dressing female hero/heroines: he is more of a restless metaphoriser of problematic identities than a failed realist or an apologist for land occupation.
David Callahan
University of Aveiro, Portugal
