Christians Reading Classics
Christians Reading Classics
James Fenimore Cooper with Dr. Wayne Franklin
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James Fenimore Cooper gets filed away as “important” long before many of us actually read him, and that gap is the problem we wanted to solve. I’m joined by Dr. Wayne Franklin, one of the leading Cooper scholars and the author of major biographies of Cooper, to talk about what makes a classic live past its own pages. His definition sticks with me: a classic is a book that, once you start it, you realize you already know, because it has permeated the culture and taught later writers what stories can look like.
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Cooper’s America In His Own Words
SPEAKER_01And flowing from the limpet lakes and thousand springs of this region, the numerous sources of the Susquehanna meander through the valleys until, uniting their streams, they form one of the proudest rivers of the United States. The mountains are generally arable to the tops, although instances are not wanting where the sides are jutted with rocks that aid greatly in giving to the country that romantic and picturesque character which it so eminently possesses. The vales are narrow, rich, and cultivated, with a stream uniformly winding through each. Beautiful and thriving villages are found interspersed along the margins of the small lakes, or situated at those points of the streams which are favorable for manufacturing. And neat and comfortable farms, with every indication of wealth about them, are scattered profusely through the vales and even to the mountaintops. Roads diverge in every direction from the even and graceful bottoms of the valleys to the most rugged and intricate passes of the hills. Academies and minor edifices of learning meet the eye of the stranger at every few miles as he winds his way through this uneven territory, and places for the worship of God abound, with that frequency which characterize a moral and reflecting people, and with that variety of exterior and canonical government which flows from unfettered liberty of conscience. In short, the whole district is hourly exhibiting how much can be done in even a rugged country and with a severe climate under the dominion of mild laws, and where every man feels a direct interest in the prosperity of a commonwealth, of which he knows himself to form a part. The expedients of the pioneers who first broke ground in the settlement of this country are succeeded by the permanent improvements of the yeoman, who intends to leave his remains to molder under the sod which he tills, or perhaps of the son, who, born in the land, piously wishes to linger around the grave of his father. Only 40 years have passed since this territory was a wilderness. So wrote James Venomer Cooper in opening his novel, The Pioneers, published in 1823, but set at its opening in 1793. This became the first of a series of five novels Cooper would write, The Leather Stalking Tales. Although, in a chronology of these tales, it will become the fourth.
What Makes A Book A Classic
SPEAKER_01Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Neo Orthodoxy. I'm Nadia Williams, the book's editor at Near Orthodoxy. And today I'm excited to be speaking with Dr. Wayne Franklin, who I think may be the foremost expert in the world right now on the work of James Fenimer Cooper. He is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, and among his many, many books is a two-volume sequence of biographies on James Fenimer Cooper. So you can pick up James Fenimer Cooper, The Early Years, published by Yale University Press in 2007, and James Fenimer Cooper, The Later Years, published also by Yale University Press in 2017. So, Wayne, thank you so much for joining me.
SPEAKER_02Happy to be here.
SPEAKER_01So as we dive in, the first question I always ask is: what is a classic?
SPEAKER_02So I think a classic um is a book which once you start reading it, you realize you already know something about it. It's sort of permeated the culture. It's expressed things about the culture that have diffused outside the book. I think of D.H. Lawrence, who who loved The Pioneers, the you know, the British novelist and sort of not a Cooper uh person in terms of what he wrote about, but he he loved the Pioneers and he he spoke about its pictures, uh uh uh the pictures it creates as uh almost around the corner from memory. As if as if they're familiar to you. And I I think that's true of Cooper. Cooper created the Western that that's what the Pioneers is, it's that this sort of long live, still living um genre about people confronting a new land and trying to make the best of it while doing some things that aren't the best often. Um, so it's a complicated story. And and he wrote, as you point out, he wrote five books centered on this figure of Natty Bumpo, the leather stocking. Um that in itself is an accomplishment. It's classic and it creates this sort of series that nobody else had. I mean, the Waverly novels, yes, but they're not all uh the same characters. So there are a series of books by Scott, which influenced Cooper, but uh Cooper came back to the same figure again and again. He also uh, and speaking about classics, he invented the espionage novel. The the year before, the book before the Pioneers was called The Spy, set in the Hudson Valley during the revolution. Uh and it's the first espionage novel. And think of the legacy of that form, which were also still like the Westerns, still reading and seeing on screen. Uh, furthermore, he he took the something, you know, sort of moribund form of the sea novel or the sea tale and and and recreated it, uh made ships dynamic, almost characters in themselves. Um, and he wrote 17 sea novels among his 32 books. So he he's influential even today. I think of Master and Commander, you know, the the uh uh uh Patrick O'Brien's story that became a famous uh movie. Um we wouldn't have that if it weren't for Cooper, in the same way that we wouldn't have this the uh the spy novels that proliferate, the espionage tales. So a classic is is something that endures not only in itself, but in the culture. Uh think of Robinson Crusoe. You don't have to read Defoe's novel to absorb the gist of it. It's in the culture. Um and and it it's in fact one of Cooper's favorite novels. So uh there you go.
SPEAKER_01I love it. So the idea of just influencing literary culture, but really beyond that. Um because you're um you're listing genres that have become what we think of as American literature.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
Cooper’s Life From Sea To Fiction
SPEAKER_02And and uh, you know, Cooper didn't set out to be a a novelist. He his first career was, well, he went to Yale. One reason I wanted Yale to publish the biography was he got kicked out of Yale for for blowing up a dormant that's what so this of course his his later descendants went there and graduated and did better in that regard. But um then he went to sea uh and and he was uh you know sailor before the mast. He went on a merchant cruise to England, and then he joined the Navy, and and he was a naval midshipman. But then he met the woman he was to marry, and um her family had been much disrupted by wars, and she made him promise he would not stay in the Navy. So he he left the Navy and they moved to um Cooperstown, in fact, back to Cooperstown, where they started a farm and a family. But then when he wrote the words you began with, he hadn't been back to Cooperstown in seven years. Uh, and the reason he hadn't been back to Cooperstown in seven years is that his family's finances collapsed in the wake of the War of 1812. Most of their money was in land, uh, and the War of 1812 um upset a lot of things, including frontier land prices. Um so uh Cooper found himself without a house. He never finished his big mansion in Cooperstown. Um, and and he had to move back to Westchester County, you know, the Lower Hudson Valley, where his wife's family was living. They lived in rented quarters there. Then they had to go to Manhattan, where they lived in an apartment. Uh and and he started writing, I think because he realized that many members of his family had that kind of gift of storytelling. And he had a friend who was a a British-born um banker in New York who knew intimately the details of Walter Scott's finances. Scott made a lot of money on Waverly novels, and he needed it because he'd gone bankrupt. Uh and and uh Cooper got the notion, I think, with the encouragement of his banker friend, that he might be able to tell stories. And and it was improbable, uh, but it worked. The first one was a kind of knockoff of Jane Austen, but the second one was The Spy. He created the espionage novel. The third was The Pioneers when he created um The Western, but also created this character, Natty Bumpo, who who lurks in the memories of uh uh American readers, even if they've never read the books. He's he's there. He's that frontiersman with the rifle in the woods.
SPEAKER_01He's so relatable.
SPEAKER_02Yes, yes. And and you know, Natty Bumpo is is not um a kind of chest beating proponent of American progress. He's he's he's he's of two minds about this. Um he lived on the frontier, but he loves nature and he sees nature as at risk. You know, the pioneers ends with a forest fire set by um people trying to hunt Natty down for untrumped up charges. And they just carelessly throw their torches in the woods and set the mountain on fire. And and that's sort of that's not that's not civilization or progress, so Cooper's on both sides of this issue, I think. Partly because his his own sense of loss through the family's failures made him susceptible to empathy for the the losses of others, other people, but also the environment. Uh and and uh I think that's why he he bec he becomes a kind of spokesperson for the Native American lament. He he he doesn't just uh treat Native Americans as obstructions to white progress, he treats them as displaced, dispossessed, like the Cooper. Uh so uh Chingach Guk is the figure in the Pioneers, of course, uh Natty's companion over forty years of life. Uh and Chingachgook is uh uh depressed, treated with liquor by um the local settlers, but defended by Natty and befriended by Natty. Uh and um he dies with a kind of resurrection of his native dignity. He dies in that fire, actually, on the mountain. Um so Cooper's a complicated guy, and and it's interesting if you you you read that opening which talks about uh religion and and law and institutions and all the things we associate with civilization, and and those are true to Cooper, but it's interesting that Cooper's a Quaker by by background. His father was a Quaker. Most of his um ancestors and relatives didn't fight in the revolution. He had one uncle, James, after whom he's named, who did fight in the Navy uh uh in the in the revolution, and and Cooper learned from him. But um Cooper wasn't uh you know uh a weekly go-to-meeting type of Quaker. He was a kind of secular Quaker, and ultimately uh uh uh the summer he died, he joined the Episcopal Church, which was his wife's church. And I think to put her mind at ease, not that he was irreligious or secular or anti-religious, not at all. He was kind of inside and outside of institutions at the same time. He thought the values mattered mattered more than the institutions. So I think of it in those terms. And and his wife, Susan Delancey, her family were Huguenot refugees from France, who made it to New York and became so enamored of um life in New York in the colonial period, they they became quite wealthy and well-to-do. Unfortunately, then the revolution did them in because they sided with the king. Because they liked the English so much for having given them refuge. And and they became uh Anglicans. That this is where the change happened because of their sense that the British crown had provided refuge for these displaced Protestants.
SPEAKER_01So here's Cooper at this intersection of so many um changes happening in his lifetime and trying to process it
Natty Bumppo And An Environmental Vision
SPEAKER_01all. So I'd like to take a little detour and ask you to talk about your own career because here you are living and teaching about Cooper, um, essentially as like his sort of neighbor, you're New England, like the region where he was rooted, even if you're not quite in, you know, New York State.
SPEAKER_02Well, and and I grew up in upstate New York. Okay. My mom's family was from the Cooperstown area, uh, you know, there and nearby, uh in in uh Otsego and Worcester counties, um, and uh or in Worcester, uh East Worcester, Worcester. These are uh towns in the lower Otsego and adjoining Skahari County, where my mom's family was from. So I've known about Cooperstown for a long time. But it's interesting, I didn't read Cooper. You know, you know him. I I'm sure I read classics illustrated versions of Cooper, you know, the comic book versions as a kid, because my brother and I read those uh avidly. But I didn't read Cooper till I was a senior in college, at Union College in Schenectady. And Tom Filbrick, who was a had just arrived as a professor and had done a book on Cooper sea fiction, um he he taught The Pioneers. So The Pioneers was in fact the first book I read. And you know, I knew Cooperstown uh from my travels and my family stories and so forth. So it touched me. Um uh and and I liked uh Cooper well enough to have included him uh among the figures I worked on in my dissertation. I Tom Philbrick went back to Pittsburgh, where he'd been on leave for a year, um, and the University of Pittsburgh, and I went there and did my PhD there uh under his direction. So uh he's responsible to some extent, but uh I found the the echoes significant uh in in Cooperstown and that area. Uh and then yeah, so my second book was about Cooper. Uh and and then uh James Beard, who long taught at uh Clark University in Worcester Mass, and was designated as a sort of literary executor of the Cooper Family papers by the Cooper family. They had been in private hands. Nobody had done a biography of Cooper based on the family archive, and Jim Beard had access to that that archive, edited Cooper's letters and journals, a magnificent piece of scholarship, started a new edition of Cooper through the State University of New York Press, uh, and was long um working on his own biography, but alas he died, uh, and the biography was never really finished, hardly started. There were a couple chapters I I saw drafts of at the Antiquarian Society in Worcester when I was doing my work. So um I I published an article on Last of Mohicans, and Tom Filbrook read it and said, you know, you ought to really think about doing that biography. So I did think about it, and I wrote Cooper's uh great-great-grandson Henry Cooper, longtime New Yorker writer, a Yale graduate, uh, with a home in Cooperstown and an apartment in the city. Uh, and Henry gave me the go-ahead to use the papers. So the papers were then at the Antiquarian Society in Worcester, they'd been transferred from Cooperstown. The Cooper family had a bank vault in its one of its houses in Cooperstown where they kept all these materials. Uh and they had organized them, put them in archival folders and quite impressive. Yeah. Um, and and I got, I was at that time at the University of Iowa, which is a bit of a stretch to go to Worcester Mass for the weekend or the week. So I uh tried to get a job closer to the east, got a job in Boston, uh, taught at Northeastern University for 10 years, and and uh worked on those papers not only in Worcester, but also at Yale in New Haven, which which had a significant collection of Cooper materials. So uh took me a long time. I started that work in 1994, finished the first volume in like uh 2004 or five, got it published, working on the second one. I wanted to call it something other than the later years, I wanted to call it absence and return, but Yale thought early years, later years, I said, Well, what about the middle years? Well, they're in there. They're in there. So uh, and I finished that one in 2015, and then it takes a time, of course, to be reviewed and printed and edited. Um and and there it is. But my my larger interest in is in is in literature and the environment. And Cooper's important for that. I think Pioneers, I I describe, I think rightly as the first environmental novel anybody ever wrote. It's about nature having a claim over itself. Um and and that fire at the end is is a not only a good event, cataclysmic event to end a story, it's also a reminder of human destruction, the cutting down of things. So Cooper, Cooper's sense of family loss, which he regains by writing that book and others, is also extended to his sense that nature is somehow dispossessed. That there's there's that that sense of uh, you know, yes, we gained, yes, we love it where we are. Um we're proud of what we did, but look at the mess we also tended to make of the Native Americans of the environment. Um and and think about those, particularly that latter issue in modern terms about environmental degradation. So Cooper is a uh sort of a prophetic voice in that regard. Um and uh I I think that's owing in part to the fact that he was born in New Jersey and was taken at the year of uh at his first year, almost at his first birthday in September of 1790, he was taken to Cooperstown by his father, who had originally just acquired the land um and thought to develop it, but then decided to live there, built a house for his family, moved his wife against her instincts there. Um and and James, Jem. As they called him, grew up on that lake and in those woods and fell in love with them. They're part of him, deeply, you know, like any kid playing in nature. But uh yeah, so I I I take a wider view of this issue of environmental writing. And in fact, my first book was about uh how early American writers um portray nature and and how they uh work toward changes in nature and then how they assess the results of those changes. And that came out of the my dissertation, as did the Cooper book. So the Cooper book is kind of how Cooper grappled with those issues. And now I'm working on um the fur trade landscape of the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest and how how land gets treated. Um and the fur trade's interesting because it's it's it's not part of a settlement frontier originally, anyway. It's a it's a commercial frontier where exchange matters and the health of the native uh gatherers of the furs matters to the companies like the Hudson Bay Company in Canada, because without the the people gathering the furs, there's no fur trade. So you don't want to civilize them, so-called, as as uh white people talked about it. Um you want to keep them intact if possible. So it's it's an extension of that work.
SPEAKER_01Like Nati Bumpo, you're going west.
SPEAKER_02I guess I am. Well, I lived in Iowa for 20 years. So uh and uh and uh enjoyed that. Uh and you know, talk about the prairie. That there's the prairie for you. Um but uh yeah, and and there is something to that. I'm I'm interested in that that aspect.
Wayne Franklin’s Path To Cooper
SPEAKER_02And one of the things that interested me about Cooper is, you know, when he comes. So he goes to Europe in 1826 with his family. He's written six novels. Um, the most recent one is Lasts of the Mohicans, which is of course the one everybody knows. The title, the film, the book, the story. Uh uh, and and he goes and lives in France and then Italy with his family. Um, and and he gets involved in French politics. This is the sort of post-Napoleonic era, when Lafayette, whom he's met briefly in New York, Lafayette, who fought with Washington in in the revolution, was wounded uh in in Brandywine in Pennsylvania, and and now is in France in the post-Napoleonic years, trying to make a French Republic, modeled in part on the American Republic. And Cooper gets drawn into French politics and European politics, uh, to the extent that um when he comes home to New York in 1833, 34, and then to Cooperstown, where he where he eventually comes back, um he gives up writing fiction because he's embittered um and he's become so political. Uh that's partly what I meant by absence in my my wannabe title. Absence isn't just being a way, it's leaving, it's absenting yourself from who you were and what you were. But he can't, he can't not write. It's it's become second nature to him. So he does write. Uh and in fact, in his last decade, he writes 17 novels. It's a lot of books in one decade. Yeah. Right. I mean, one of the things he he basically creates in addition to those genres of literature is the career of the American novelist. He demands money for his works. He doesn't have to pay to get he pays to have the first one published. He sells the second. Um, by the time Lassonikens comes out in 1826, he's gotten $6,000 for it, which is like a phenomenal sum for a mere story. Uh but when he comes back, he he recovers his interest in Cooperstown. He takes, he buys back the auctioned-off and vacant and ruinous Cooper Mansion and restores it. And and he makes that's where he lives, that's where he dies at the end of his life in 1851. But he also rehabilitates Natty Bumpo. So in the 1820s, he he wrote Pioneers, Last of the Mohicans and Prairie. In Prairie, set in Nebraska. Natty is, of course, ancient and dies on the prairie. But then uh Cooper in 1840 writes The Pathfinder, which is sort of set at the same time as Last of the Mohicans, the 1750s. Natty's a 40-ish uh warrior fighter in the in the French and Indian War. And then in 1841, Cooper writes The Deer Slayer. Natty's 18. And and he's called the Deer Slayer by the Indians because he's never killed a person. He's a mere deer slayer. Um, and and he comes out of the woods onto the shore of Lake Atsigo, and this is his first uh vision of it, but it's of course uh primal for him, and and it and Cooper recovers that sense of his own wonder. Um at the same time, Cooper discovers that the term leather stocking, which he had invented, later stumpf in German, uh, is the translation. It says leather stockings, stockings? It's like leather leggings, maybe, but it's a funny term, leather stocking. But it people take to it. And if you look in the press, there's all kinds of references to real hermits and woodsmen living here, there, and everywhere. North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, of course, New York, New England, who are known as the leather stocking of their region. And Cooper's kind of tickled by that, the fact that here's here's how something becomes a classic. It's how it gets out to the culture. People who've never read um any of those books knew what a leather stocking was. So uh that's partly why he reclaims the story for himself and he writes those last
The Leatherstocking Timeline And Return Home
SPEAKER_02two. And uh Dage Lawrence says it's the story of America, starts old and gets younger. That's that's telling. That's insightful, I think, because of course Deer Slayer, he's 18. Uh, and it's the last of the stories.
SPEAKER_01I'd love to hear a little bit more about this kind of progression because it sounds like Natty Bumpo started almost like an experiment with the pioneers, and then he just kept coming back to him over and over, stretching the story every which way.
SPEAKER_02I think it I think he wasn't just um an experiment. I think he was an accessory to the story that was it really about the Templeton settlers. So Templeton is Cooper's town, Judge Temple is Judge Cooper, uh, and and for the most part, the story is in the village. But Natty enters as a kind of uh, you know, exotic, lives at the edge, he's a hunter. He he lives with old Jingatchgook. He's also got a um a veteran of the Revolutionary War period who's hanging out in his cabin uh under the mountain. But then uh as the story progressed, I think he be he stole Cooper's heart because Natty was expressing that part of Cooper that didn't fit at Yale or in the market economy or uh in you know mainline Christianity because he's a Quaker and he's sort of we know what Quakers are viewed as uh by uh churchmen. You know, they're they're of course um kicked out of England, they're burned in Boston and so forth. So Natty uh touches something in Cooper first, and then um uh Cooper from the beginning of Last of the Mohicans, there's no question that this is going to be Natty's story and Chingetchko's story. Um and he cross introduces Uncas and the the Cora and Alice Munro and all of that story. But um the one thing that um is a hole in that sequence, if you if you think about them. So the Deer Slayer is uh set in like the 1740s, Last Mohicans and Pathfinder set in the 1750s, Pioneers is set 1793, four, as you point out, and then the prairie is like 1805, 6. In fact, Lewis and Clark are on their way to the west, to the Pacific Northwest at that time. But the one place, the one, the one period that Cooper avoided writing uh Natty into was the Revolution. And that's really interesting because this is the guy that created the Revolutionary War novel, as well as the spy novel in The Spy. And prior to Cooper's The Spy, it had been very hard for American writers to write about the revolution. This was a civil war, and it didn't yet become a kind of national uh iconic event until the 1820s, by which point only like 10% of the population had personal memories of the revolution. So by that point, it could be, you know, uh played with by Washington Irving and Rip Van Winkle or Legend of Sleepy Hollow or soon Cooper and the Spy. So I I became really interested in what he would have done with the revolution. He he thought about writing it. And it in the late 1840s, he's selling off his literary properties to uh different uh uh publishers, commercial publishers in New York City. Um, and and he he goes and speaks to one of them, and and he's he's been writing a general preface for the leather stocking tales, which are gonna come out in a set. For the most part, his books hadn't been collected. They're they'd been reprinted, but there weren't editions of all of his works, and this was exciting to him. Think of it, he was gonna have works, you know. Uh, and he tells this New York publisher, uh, a guy by the name of Townsend, uh, by the way, when I was working on this general preface, it struck me that I might write a sixth novel during the revolution. And and Townsend says, Oh, no, no, we don't, we don't want that, we don't want that. And the reason he didn't want it is he, you know, he thought the literary value, the market value of the five as as existing, was secure. He paid money for them. He bought them, he was putting money into banking, a very nice new edition, beautiful, with uh illustrations. So he turned Cooper away from it, and Cooper lost heart and never wrote it. It long occurred to me that somebody else might write it. So I thought, well, maybe the somebody else would be me. So how would you go about imagine, you know, how would where would you find the Hutzba to do this? Number one, sort of right, oh, you know, uh Ishmael's afterlife, once the voyage with Ahab is done, uh, what how do you do this? How do you undertake to do it? How do you dare do this? And and yet Cooper provided some hints. So in the prairie, when he's out in the prairie, he has a few reminiscences about the means by which he got to this place geographically and personally. So at the end of the Pioneers, he leaves uh Cooperstown or Templeton, uh, and young Elizabeth Temple, to whom he served as a kind of knight in in waiting, uh, and and her husband uh Oliver Edwards, who's been hiding out in Natty's cabin too, have married and they want him to stay. And he says, No, it's you know, the the ground's hot under my feet or whatever. Uh so he goes off. And in The Prairie, four years later, he kind of gives an update and and he talks about how he tarried in Ohio and took part in the Battle of Fallen Timbers. So Battle of Fallen Timbers, he couldn't have. The chronology's wrong. I've figured that out. But Cooper's touching something important. That's a a battle in which um the U.S. Army under uh Anthony Wayne uh fought against the the aggregated tribes of Northeast Ohio and Michigan and reached a sort of means by which territorial expansion occurred. Well, Anthony Wayne is an interesting guy. Anthony Wayne was um a revolutionary war gentleman. He figures in Cooper's Revolutionary War stories. Um, and I think uh Cooper is kind of trying out there a notion of a link between Natty and and General Wayne that would lead to obviously Natty serving on the American side during the revolution, not as a loyalist, despite um the sort of implications of those five stories, five existing stories. So I I think Cooper was planning that, which would have made a difference in the sequence. It would have filled in that one gap that's significant, and it would have filled it out in a way to uh enrich our sense of what Natty means. He he means both support for the idea of America and and some entitlement to criticize it when it's wrong, which I think is anybody's duty, right? I mean, if if you're uh Natty isn't particularly uh religious in the in the institutional sense, but he's the guy that when he looked over the Hudson Valley from the the uh parapet of the Catskills and was asked by Oliver Edwards, what'd you see? And and Natty says, All creation, all that God had done or man could do. And that's kind of uh Cooper's natural religion, uh, but it's also Natty's, and Natty Natty is remarkably upright as a man. Um, he he um he has values, he he has a moral code. Um, and that's against some portrayals of frontiersmen in Cooper's period as uh cutthroats. Cooper didn't fear the frontier the way other writers did because he'd lived on it, you know. So he he understood what it was about. Um whereas, say, Charles Bracton Brown, an earlier writer whom I I like a lot, a Quaker from Philadelphia, wrote uh a novel called Edgar Huntley, 1798, I think it is, or 1800, um, in which uh, you know, basically the only good Indians are dead Indians, you know, that that stupid saying. Um uh there's one old Deb, who's a uh a female figure of some power who has a little bit more depth to her. But Cooper from the beginning of his works uh portrays Native Americans as part of the story, having a claim on us as well as on the land. Um and and he he grew up knowing uh uh Native Americans in his vicinity. His father did, of course, even more. Um, but but we know he, I think it was in 1841, maybe or 42, he writes the president uh that he's picked up rumors of the British intent to uh launch new war in the upper Midwest. How did he know this? Because his native informants had told him, which is which is kind of interesting. And these were people who had migrated from the Cooperstown area and came back once in a while and and he met with them. And his daughter Susan, Susan Fenmore Cooper, tells this part of this story about their coming to the house, knocking on the door, and asking to see him. And and him. So uh Cooper is rich and varied. Um, and and I think um he gets misunderstood politically and aesthetically. On the aesthetic part, he's he's you know, he's no Henry James. But without him, there wouldn't have been a Henry James, is my would be my argument, because Cooper creates the institution of the novel. He makes it a successful thing to be a novelist. Whoever heard of that? Charles Bructon Brown didn't hear of that in the 1790s. And you know, so there were from from 1770 to 1820, there were published about a hundred novels that we can call American. That's like uh two a year. So you you you'd kind of get bored waiting for the next one to come out if you were an avid reader of American novels. In the 1820s, there's another hundred. So, uh, and Cooper writes ten of those himself. Six of them are bestsellers. In the 1830s, there's 300, the 1840s, there's 500, the 1850s, there's 800. Uh, and and and that's you know, that's partly things beyond Cooper's control or Ken. But it's also the fact that he he thought work demanded pay, and writing was work. And he had paid for the first one himself, and then he had the scrounge to kind of put together resources to publish the others, but by the time last of the Mohicans came out, he sold it for 6,000 bucks. Uh, and he sold his backlist because he was going to Europe. Um, and and uh he sold them to Carrie and Lee of Philadelphia, who remain his publishers going forward till the 1820s, till he tangles with this Townsend company. So uh he's no Henry James, but without Cooper, there wouldn't have been a Henry James. Henry James is of course the epitome of the suave, stylistically nuanced, aesthetically deep writer. Um but uh first-time experiments tend to be kind of awkward. You know, when you're inventing something, yeah, you you you are uh uh probably not gonna uh have the best outcome. The invention itself, the inventing the Western, inventing the spy novel, and updating the sea story. These are these are all major things in themselves. And and a character as to Nati Bumpo is this great character who who is uh memorable. He he enters as a kind of uh you know oaf in the pioneers and becomes a hero. And and we're sad to see him leave at the end of that book. So uh Cooper found something, found gold, I think, and then he came back to him. Um and and you know, this other thing is he's the first person to write a family saga in in fiction. That's not just American, that's English, too. Uh so uh think of Faulkner writing about the Thompsons. And that's that's uh one of the ways in which Cooper matters as background, if not for as an influence for for William Faulkner.
Why Natty Never Settles Down
SPEAKER_01Bieson Divinity School, an evangelical seminary at Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama, offers a robust Master of Divinity, forming students in person in a community-oriented model of theological education. Thanks to a generous gift, Beson continues to offer full tuition scholarships for students beginning their studies in fall 2026, making its flagship degree more affordable than ever before. These scholarships cover the costs of tuition and fees for three years, the average time it takes to finish the MDiv. Apply today at BesendDivinity.com. One question that um keeps eating at me about Natty Bumpo and the decisions that Cooper made in the development of this character. He never gets married, he never has a family. He's always like the lone wolf. Well, together with Chincach Cook, but yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_02Well, Chinkach Cook, though, has a son.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he does. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh and Uncas wants to marry Cora, but they they they die in Las. Yeah, so um he's beloved in uh Pathfinder, uh, and falls in love in Deer Slayer, but uh neither of those relationships works out. So Leslie Fiedler, the great uh novelist and critic of the American novel, used to teach at Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo, um in a book called Love and Death in the American Novel. Two great teams, of course, in literature, love and death, often paired, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_01Unfortunately. Well, like in The Last of the Mohicans. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, there you go, exactly. Um, he he he claims that there's a kind of homosexual element to Natty Bumpo. I think it's more complicated than that. I think it's like uh it's about uh uh a relationship with Jingach Guk that's outside white culture or Indian culture. It's about crossing boundaries and and forming relationships beyond the ordinary. Um and and you know, uh Natty's a hunter. I mean, what woman wants to marry a guy that's gonna go off in the woods? For six months. Well, maybe somebody. But uh it it just doesn't work out. Uh and and for various reasons, it doesn't work out in the two stories. But but I think it's also Cooper, in a deeper sense, it's Cooper's acknowledgement that there's no offspring to this figure. It's a figure of loss. Uh he doesn't have, he's not one of 12 kids like like Cooper, you know. Uh and and uh and and Cooper had seen family collapse, but that wasn't the issue. It was there's no future to this way of life. That's that's part of the cost of becoming America, is turning your back on that that epoch or that era. Um and and Cooper faces forward, you know, the the thing about I I mentioned Charles Bracknell Brown. For Charles Bracken Brown, the it's not so much the frontier, it's the backwoods, you know, and and Edwin Fossil's a great book called Frontier, uh, the American West is a myth and symbol or something like that. Anyway, frontier. Um and he and he talks about how if you if you think of the wilderness as the backwoods, it means you're facing Europe. If you think of it as the frontier, it means you're fronting it, you're facing it. It's your future. It's not it's not something that's destroying your past. Um so Cooper is a frontier person. Um he's he's not a backwoods kind of guy because he knows the frontier. He he he lived it. Um he was also, by the way, in when he was in the Navy, he was stationed on Lake Ontario, went to as far west as uh Niagara. Later he went to Michigan um because one of his nieces, all of his brothers died young before he had five, there were five boys that lived to adulthood. And James was the only one, he was the youngest one, who lived beyond 39. All the others died, and they had they left, I think, 19 nieces and nephews in whose fate Cooper took an avuncular interest. He really tried to provide for them and their kids. He got um some of the kids slots and jobs and and uh had one go with him and and be a kind of a manuensis in in various ways. But um he he goes to Michigan because one of his nieces has married a guy named Horace Comstock from New York, and they've moved to Michigan and founded the town of Comstock, Michigan. It's real, it's there, it's still there, uh, by Kalamazoo on the way to Kalamazoo. And Cooper invests money in the venture and then goes out to uh he doesn't get paid money back, he gets some 18 town lots, so he goes west to to tend to them. And it's it's a sad story for a Cooper to be peddling town lots in Michigan, but he does. And then he gets a novel out of it called The Oak Openings, um, one of his 1840s books. So uh yeah, Cooper faces the frontier. He he doesn't look away, even though he spent seven years in Europe and is, you know, uh celebrated there uh and and very much at home there, loved Italy particularly, uh, but but also thrived in France, uh, spent time in Switzerland, liked Switzerland very much too, but Italy really stole his heart. Um so yeah, uh Natty doesn't live that kind of life that Cooper lived. He he's he's kind of a dead end. That's part of his tragedy. And if he had kids, then we'd have to have the kids' story.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Uh and and that would that would mean that he'd somehow been socialized to the point of his own self-destruction rather than standing for himself and dying on the prairie under the sky. Um, you know, with Native Americans around him and uh the buffalo nearby. Cooper had never seen the prairie yet, but he but he read enough about it to he read some of that stuff about the upper Mississippi, like Stephen Long's expedition that I've been working on. Um and and the word itself, prairie, of course, was new. Cooper popularizes it. He doesn't import it, but it's French for meadow, you know. If anybody that's ever spent time as I did in Iowa, uh surrounded by these seas of grass, even now, they're seas of grass, knows that uh the prairie is not a meadow. The prairie is a landscape of immense size. Um and uh Cooper helps familiarize Americans with that place as well as with the woods, the grasslands, and so forth. But yeah, Natty couldn't have uh a love interest, I think, because that would that would be like, oh yeah, I used to be a trapper, but now I'm I'm selling hardware uh down the street, and my kids are in school. And how would that work for Natty's end? It's he needs to have a tragic end, love and death, or love versus death. So he dies, and his his his heritage dies with him, except symbolically in the stories.
SPEAKER_01There's also something really saintly about him. I was thinking, like, um reminds me, you know, the desert saints. You go into the middle of nowhere where no civilization goes, but you love the desert.
SPEAKER_02Yes, and he and he does, he loves the woods. So he'd say, so when he talks about what he saw from um, you know, this is now a state park in the in the Catskills, and you can go there and it's an 800-foot cliff down to woodlands, and then you see the Hudson River, and you look to the left, and you can see the Green Mountains, and you look to the right, and on a really clear day, you think you can see the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Why did he go there? Because once in a while he felt a little lonely, so he wanted to go and see what people were up to. But uh Natty wasn't afraid of solitude. Maybe that's a good lesson. We shouldn't be afraid to just be by ourselves. Don't we have all we need spiritually in ourselves? Um we may need other people for various things, but self-sufficiency, self-reliance, as as Ralph Waldo Emerson famously called it in the 1840s. Um Natty. Um and and I think actually Cooper uses that term for it. I I I'd have to double check, but I'm pretty sure I've found that word, uh, self-reliant. Um so uh yeah, Natty's comfortable in his own skin, gets a little lonely once in a while, who doesn't? Uh, but uh yeah, and Cooper's when he comes back to write about Natty in um in the Deer Slayer uh particularly, he's irked in part by these urban types that are writing about the frontier uh and stealing his stuff. Charles Fenno Hoffman's a famous one as a a New Yorker, um, who wrote about the Midwest and then also wrote kind of Cooper knockoff novels set in the Mohawk Valley and elsewhere. Or uh Robert Montgomery Byrd, the Philadelphia Quaker, who who wrote uh uh a novel in which the the main character is a guy named Nathan Slaughter. So Matty Nathan um and uh Slaughter's family was wiped out by Indians when he was a boy. So he wanders the countryside killing Indians and slaughter. And and Cooper, I think Cooper was really offended by the way those two um tried to take over his franchise, so to speak, and and rewrite American history. So he writes The Deer Slayer, uh in in particular, uh as a as a consequence, Pathfinder, and then Deer Slayer.
SPEAKER_01I guess that's another way you know you're a classic if people are doing knockoffs.
SPEAKER_02Exactly, exactly, yes. I mean that's it. And and and I guess Cooper would have said, no, you didn't read them all right.
SPEAKER_05That's right.
SPEAKER_02Here, read this. There's a kind of smug insistence on his own property, literary property, but also his imagination and and his values. And and no, it's Nat Natty's a deer slayer, not Nathan Slaughter.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's partly, I think, what's going on there. So Berg's a Quaker, as I say. I mean, he's you know, the Quakers are pacifists. Cooper knows what Quakers are supposed to be, he was one. Um and uh Charles Fenno Hoffman uh is part of the the hunter elite. They write about hunting in the Adirondacks, and they're it's it's actually interesting. Uh this is uh Feno Hoffman writes at the time when the the old guide, the old Adirondack guide is being replaced by a new version who's who's up for hire by the city gentlemen that go hunting in the woods. So it's the death of Natty Bumpo in some ways that's that uh uh uh in in literal terms, in economic terms, that uh that Hoffman's involved with, not just in literary terms, but in literal. Um and you know, Cooper liked fine things. He he redid the family mansion. Uh but uh I think there's always a part of him inside that's in the woods. Um he's like Henry Thoreau, you know. Henry Thoreau doesn't live in the main woods, he goes and visits them, travels through them. He lives in a kind of natty bump cabin at the edge of the woods overlooking a lake. Does that sound familiar, or is it just me? A mile from Cooper's, I'm sorry, Concord. Could be a mile from Cooperstown. So I think that that too is tribute to Cooper. I we know that Emerson and Thoreau read Cooper in their earlier years. Uh and and I think um Thoreau, whom I deeply respect, I I like what he's up to in his in his work and his life. Um, he's also ritualized Natty Bumpo. He's internalized him. And we all have a little bit of a Natty Bumpo in us. You know, we're all skydivers, basically. In our dreams, at least. Yes, in our dreams, exactly. Even even though we're actually on the commuter rail.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So what would you tell part of us? What's
Where To Start Reading Cooper
SPEAKER_02that?
SPEAKER_01So what would you tell someone who's listening to this and has never read Cooper? Maybe heard of him, obviously, but never read him. What would you say? Where would you start as a first-time reader?
SPEAKER_02So I I first a general caution. Um, there was no TV in the 1820s, there was no internet. Life could be slow, and that was delightful. Okay. I mean, you savor things when you have time for them. So, Cooper, and that the the paragraphs you read at the opening are are indicative of this. Cooper is something of a leisurely writer, or you could say a slow writer, but boy, he can build. I mean, the story that opens with this sort of overview, geographical overview of the Cooperstown region ends with this fire and death in the fire, and Natty under arrest, and then Natty leaving. So give him time. Don't expect him to be a soundbite. He's not. Uh, remember that hundred novels published in the 1820s by American writers, that's like 10 a year. You you could spend a month and a few days reading each one of them. And people did. So they liked the languorous entertainment. It wasn't all about channel surfing or whatever. Are we on the internet? There we are. We're on the internet. But, you know, there's there's great virtue to that, but I think you need to give him time. And then um read him uh as if you'd never read Henry James in a sense. Try to try to get into the moment. I try to tell my students uh that empathy is a very important part of a good reader's equipment. You're not read, you know, when you read a Cooper novel, it's not Cooper's life story, but you're you are paying attention to another person's voice. And it's good, I like the way you began with his words. It's good to pay attention to another person's voice, give them credit, give them time, give them your time, and see what comes of it. And if you don't like it, fine, but give it time. So, where would I start? I might start with the pioneers. Maybe that's just me because that's where I started, Cooper. Blast the Mohicans is great too, as a start. I think the spy is great because it's this espionage story with this character, Harvey Birch, who's based on a real spy that Cooper learned about from John Jay. A guy had worked for John Jay when John Jay ran American Espionage. Or you could take um a sea story. Um so Cooper's early sea stories are uh tend to be more romantic and set in earlier periods. He kind of avoids um some of the nautical details that he might have been able to supply from his own experience at sea. But in the 1840s, he writes more realistic stories of the sea set in his own time. A really favorite one of mine is the sea lions, which is about a pair of vessels that kind of uh they're both called the sea lion, and they're crewed by different kinds of people, and they both wind up in the South Atlantic near Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and so forth, in pursuit of seals. And it becomes a kind of moral allegory because um it's clear that the people stranded in the Antarctic winter are tested during their time there. Um, and it's a good story. And Cooper had read uh a good deal of contemporary Antarctic stories. This is a time when uh the Antarctic is just being discovered. He sets it at 1820, which is just at the time when the continent is first discovered. Um, so that would be a good one, the sea lions. Um as to the other ones, so so there's a a pair of uh quasi-autobiographical sea stories and land stories called Afloat and Ashore, uh, told by a man named called Miles Wallingford, who runs off to sea early in his life, escaping his boredom with his farm life in the Hudson Valley, but comes back to that farm life uh after shipwreck and so forth, uh, and tells the story in his own words. So Cooper's experimenting then with first person, which he hadn't done much before. So that's good. That's a good one. A floating ashore. And it's and it and you get to be twice as patient because there's two volumes. But it's a little more sprightly because it's told in somebody's real voice. So I I suggest those.
SPEAKER_01Oh, thank you so much. Well, our final question.
Moby-Dick, Gardening, And Final Reflections
SPEAKER_02Uh-oh.
SPEAKER_01Uh-oh. What classic book do you wish you had written and why?
SPEAKER_02Oh Moby Dick. That's a great book.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02That's a great book. So uh I grew up in Albany, New York, and and I I went to a small rural elementary school that my mom had helped design, and and she was on the board. Uh, there were 14 kids in my eighth grade class. The village, which is just outside Albany, uh, didn't have a high school, so we all had to kind of scramble and find a high school to go to. And I went to the Albany Academy, which is a a military prep school founded in 1813. Uh, and it's a school that Melville had gone to as a boy when he lived in Albany. Um his mother was Dutch. I have Dutch ancestry. I grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church, the same one he and his mother attended. He he lived in um an apartment or rooming lodgings with his mother. His father died young. That's a tragic story for Melville. Um, uh about three doors or four doors from that church, a place where now the first floor of that building is occupied by Moby Dick Tavern. Okay. Good place to uh drown your sorrows, I guess.
SPEAKER_01Or write your next novel.
SPEAKER_02So I I feel like I grew up with Melville. We read Moby Dick when I was in uh I think uh 11th grade at Albany Academy, with a guy that uh Frank Nash, who was a wonderful teacher, um, who was intense, to say the least, and and could have been a character in Moby Dick. And he loved the story. So I I grew up uh reading it. So Moby Dick, why not? And you know, Melville started writing that book, and he writes it one way up to the 22nd chapter, and then it becomes a very different story, a very much deeper story. And he never went back, took the time to go back and rewrite the first 22 chapters. Uh again, Henry James would be aghast, but you know, that's the way that's the way life happens. So Moby Deck, no question.
SPEAKER_04Thanks for watching.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Sure. Well, you've lived you've lived your life very much with these writers whom you research. Yes.
SPEAKER_02That's well, thank you so much. And I uh, you know, there are other things than books. I'm an avid gardener. I uh my wife and I have 12 acres of land. We're growing out doing things uh in our yard and in our woods. Uh and uh and yet reading is fundamental for me. It's it's again, it's about empathy and sort of exploring other worlds and other times and other people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I remember your uh your email when I first contacted you. I think the answer involved asparagus. It's like, forgive my late response.
SPEAKER_02I was tending my asparagus beds. Asparagus beds need tending. They do. By the way, it's it's tended. Tended, sorry. It's in better shape. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think Wendell Berry would agree.
SPEAKER_02I uh Wendell Berry is a uh favorite writer of mine. Yes, I like Wendell Berry. The gift of good land and so forth.
SPEAKER_01Well, and the idea that writing and reading and tending the land go together.
SPEAKER_02Yes, they are not disjunctive, they they merge. Yeah. Cooper would agree with that.
SPEAKER_01A perfect place to stop.
SPEAKER_02Gotta go tend my uh lettuce.
SPEAKER_01Oh, now there we go.
SPEAKER_02There you go. There's always something coming up, so to speak. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for reaching out to me.