I once read a book by a Polish winner of the Nobel Prize. According to his Nobel certificate as I recall it he was being awarded the prize for his descriptive writing. As much of the book as I read dealt with a wake. The author wrote in great, truly fine, descriptive detail of the Polish customs of the time, the subtle perfuming of the death room, fine makeup touches applied to cover spots on the corpse; I remember a repeated description of a candle, the golden flame, the taper, and so forth. I didn't think much of the story and did not finish although I recognized the descriptive writing as truly fine. There was a sense of the fine descriptive writing as a parlour trick--like the miraculous detail in the paintings of the Dutch Golden Age; there was a sense with the Polish author that that was all that he did really well.
The trick is having a photographic memory. Hemingway had it, knew that he had it, admitted that he had it, not that he had to admit it, it is so obviously in play in his novels, and James Fenimore Cooper had it. As the undersigned was copying the outstanding examples of Cooper's descriptive writing for Part I in this series he was conscious of how long those excerpts were. Perhaps the reader noticed. Cooper on this measure of writerly greatness is unsurpassed, in my limited exposure to literature, unequaled, and Cooper is conscious of his genius. He misses no opportunity to show it off. Creates opportunities to show it off. Creates opportunities to be a descriptive writer at the expense of being storyteller, social commentator, most of all, of enchanter.
"Our tale begins..." writes Cooper on the second page of Chapter I of The Pioneers, with Elizabeth's re-introduction into Templeton/Cooperstown in the sleigh over the mountain pass leading to the valley. The tale is interrupted however by three full pages given over to description of the sleigh and the mountains, the trees and the sky, before continuing with the encounter with the Leatherstocking, Natty Bumpo. The undersigned was not conscious of the duration of this interruption on previous readings and even on this reading initially considered it necessary scene-setting, extraordinarily well done. Until he began copying it. The undersigned still felt that it was necessary and that it was well done, but now admixed with those complimentary feelings was a feeling that it was a bit over done. Like the death chamber description of the Polish Nobel laureate. I do not remember what the Pole's story was that the juniper berries and tallow were complement to, and the story is the thing unless the book were how-to manual for Polish peasant undertakers. Similarly, the complementary detail at the beginning of The Pioneers has nothing whatsoever to do with Cooper's story but becomes the thing because that is the thing that Cooper does so extraordinarily well. It distracts from the story because, Cooper does not know how to tell a story. And since the story is the thing...
When the Leatherstocking is introduced in Chapter I the reader, when the reader gets past the three page interruption of scene description, is further disabused of the notion she was forming that a Homer had been discovered among the Catskills in 1823. The undersigned was conscious even at first reading of grave literary offense* committed by Fenimore Cooper on the introduction of the Leatherstocking, a child of the wilderness, in his eighth decade of life in The Pioneers, with a lone yellow tusk for a tooth in his mouth, for out of that mouth came an abundance of verbiage matching the abundance of foliage described by Cooper in the mountains where the dialogue takes place. And this is the thing: Natty Bumpo did not say all of that; Natty Bumpo did not talk like that; Natty Bumpo would have been a man of few words. Cooper felt the need to introduce the moral of the story at this juncture and stuffed it all in there at once in stilted, inauthentic dialogue. It is done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer not the scalpel of the literary surgeon.
Chapter II is its own interruption, seven pages of Marmaduke Temple's genealogy--necessary to the story that follows! if Cooper can ever get there. This is quite rich criticism of an author whose storytelling enchanted the world and which enchants this reader to the present day. Making no apology for that it takes Cooper forty-three pages to get Elizabeth down that goddamned mountain and into her father's house and the undersigned makes no excuse for Cooper for that either.
In the opinion of the undersigned Fenimore Cooper had a real, completely charming, story to tell just from his family's history in Cooperstown but he defaced that real story by the literary conventions of the age, that a novel must not be too true to real life, that it must be more a product of the writer's imagination; that the plot must be imaginatively, unrealistically thick and circuitous; that there must always be a "moral" to the story; that, as a romance, there must always be some of that too and that it, both the romance and the novel, must end happily, the former of course in happy marriage between a frequently unlikely couple, the latter on some like cheery note or at least not in utter tragedy. Not for anything is a novel of this period by any novelist going to end in the death of the mother and baby in childbirth and the man walking back up the hill from the hospital alone. The Pioneers is the literary equivalent of "the composite order" in the architecture of Marmaduke Temple's mansion, classically structured, after Scott, and borrowing elements from the various templates of the day. In writing a la mode Cooper does not disappoint and in that he disappoints. He is mediocre--at best--as storyteller, on that measure of writerly greatness the undersigned and the vast majority of the reading public disagree; he is inconstant as moralist. But, in The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper does indeed enchant. Me. On this too I am in a decided minority. The Pioneers is the least popular of The Leatherstocking Tales. So be it.
The undersigned has returned so frequently to The Pioneers in the last sixteen years, not for the story, not for moral instruction, but for enchantment. The Pioneers is thick with humour, covert and overt, wonderfully written humorous vignettes taken from Cooper's real life or the lives of those he knew. Like Pilgrim's Way The Pioneers provides a feel-good salve to my soul. Fenimore Cooper had a happy life growing up in Cooperstown. He was a cantankerous old bastard who earned the enmity of much of the literary world but he had a delightful life growing up. I like that. I return for his descriptive writing. I gape at those hyper-realistic scenes like I do at a van Eyck painting. I return for the honest realism of an infant America that is nowhere else available.
James Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers is an enchanter. That is Vladimir Nabokov's sine qua non of a writer's greatness. Therefore, Cooper was a great writer.
*Conscious borrowing here from Mark Twain's indictment after Cooper's death, "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper."
The trick is having a photographic memory. Hemingway had it, knew that he had it, admitted that he had it, not that he had to admit it, it is so obviously in play in his novels, and James Fenimore Cooper had it. As the undersigned was copying the outstanding examples of Cooper's descriptive writing for Part I in this series he was conscious of how long those excerpts were. Perhaps the reader noticed. Cooper on this measure of writerly greatness is unsurpassed, in my limited exposure to literature, unequaled, and Cooper is conscious of his genius. He misses no opportunity to show it off. Creates opportunities to show it off. Creates opportunities to be a descriptive writer at the expense of being storyteller, social commentator, most of all, of enchanter.
"Our tale begins..." writes Cooper on the second page of Chapter I of The Pioneers, with Elizabeth's re-introduction into Templeton/Cooperstown in the sleigh over the mountain pass leading to the valley. The tale is interrupted however by three full pages given over to description of the sleigh and the mountains, the trees and the sky, before continuing with the encounter with the Leatherstocking, Natty Bumpo. The undersigned was not conscious of the duration of this interruption on previous readings and even on this reading initially considered it necessary scene-setting, extraordinarily well done. Until he began copying it. The undersigned still felt that it was necessary and that it was well done, but now admixed with those complimentary feelings was a feeling that it was a bit over done. Like the death chamber description of the Polish Nobel laureate. I do not remember what the Pole's story was that the juniper berries and tallow were complement to, and the story is the thing unless the book were how-to manual for Polish peasant undertakers. Similarly, the complementary detail at the beginning of The Pioneers has nothing whatsoever to do with Cooper's story but becomes the thing because that is the thing that Cooper does so extraordinarily well. It distracts from the story because, Cooper does not know how to tell a story. And since the story is the thing...
When the Leatherstocking is introduced in Chapter I the reader, when the reader gets past the three page interruption of scene description, is further disabused of the notion she was forming that a Homer had been discovered among the Catskills in 1823. The undersigned was conscious even at first reading of grave literary offense* committed by Fenimore Cooper on the introduction of the Leatherstocking, a child of the wilderness, in his eighth decade of life in The Pioneers, with a lone yellow tusk for a tooth in his mouth, for out of that mouth came an abundance of verbiage matching the abundance of foliage described by Cooper in the mountains where the dialogue takes place. And this is the thing: Natty Bumpo did not say all of that; Natty Bumpo did not talk like that; Natty Bumpo would have been a man of few words. Cooper felt the need to introduce the moral of the story at this juncture and stuffed it all in there at once in stilted, inauthentic dialogue. It is done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer not the scalpel of the literary surgeon.
Chapter II is its own interruption, seven pages of Marmaduke Temple's genealogy--necessary to the story that follows! if Cooper can ever get there. This is quite rich criticism of an author whose storytelling enchanted the world and which enchants this reader to the present day. Making no apology for that it takes Cooper forty-three pages to get Elizabeth down that goddamned mountain and into her father's house and the undersigned makes no excuse for Cooper for that either.
In the opinion of the undersigned Fenimore Cooper had a real, completely charming, story to tell just from his family's history in Cooperstown but he defaced that real story by the literary conventions of the age, that a novel must not be too true to real life, that it must be more a product of the writer's imagination; that the plot must be imaginatively, unrealistically thick and circuitous; that there must always be a "moral" to the story; that, as a romance, there must always be some of that too and that it, both the romance and the novel, must end happily, the former of course in happy marriage between a frequently unlikely couple, the latter on some like cheery note or at least not in utter tragedy. Not for anything is a novel of this period by any novelist going to end in the death of the mother and baby in childbirth and the man walking back up the hill from the hospital alone. The Pioneers is the literary equivalent of "the composite order" in the architecture of Marmaduke Temple's mansion, classically structured, after Scott, and borrowing elements from the various templates of the day. In writing a la mode Cooper does not disappoint and in that he disappoints. He is mediocre--at best--as storyteller, on that measure of writerly greatness the undersigned and the vast majority of the reading public disagree; he is inconstant as moralist. But, in The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper does indeed enchant. Me. On this too I am in a decided minority. The Pioneers is the least popular of The Leatherstocking Tales. So be it.
The undersigned has returned so frequently to The Pioneers in the last sixteen years, not for the story, not for moral instruction, but for enchantment. The Pioneers is thick with humour, covert and overt, wonderfully written humorous vignettes taken from Cooper's real life or the lives of those he knew. Like Pilgrim's Way The Pioneers provides a feel-good salve to my soul. Fenimore Cooper had a happy life growing up in Cooperstown. He was a cantankerous old bastard who earned the enmity of much of the literary world but he had a delightful life growing up. I like that. I return for his descriptive writing. I gape at those hyper-realistic scenes like I do at a van Eyck painting. I return for the honest realism of an infant America that is nowhere else available.
James Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers is an enchanter. That is Vladimir Nabokov's sine qua non of a writer's greatness. Therefore, Cooper was a great writer.
*Conscious borrowing here from Mark Twain's indictment after Cooper's death, "The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper."
