Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Judge Cooper was unquestionably the patriarch of his family, and he sought to rule Cooperstown in much the same way that he ran his family. He provided generous and benevolent, if slightly dictatorial, leadership and expected deference in return. It appears that James Cooper’s relations with his father were somewhat strained, though the issue has not been completely resolved. William Cooper was a remote figure to his youngest son, and he apparently had not placed his highest hopes on James for bettering the family’s fortunes. Yet all of his children, including James, were given the benefit of private tutoring and educational opportunities. Judge Cooper, although not well-educated himself, had bettered himself by marrying an heiress, and believed strongly in raising his children to be genteel in the fashion of his wife’s well-to-do family and in the tradition of the privileged British landed gentry.

Although young James spent much of his childhood roaming the woods with his favorite brother William, he received private tutoring from the local schoolmaster his father hired to run the village school. At age ten he was sent to Albany to live with his father’s friend, the Reverend Thomas Ellison, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, to study the classics and to attend school. Among the small number of other pupils were the sons of wealthy Federalists—a Jay, a Livingston, and two Van Rensselaers. William Jay, the son of John Jay, was James’s roommate and became a lifelong friend. James Cooper loved Virgil and became highly proficient in Latin. After the death of Reverend Ellison, James went to New Haven to prepare for matriculation at Yale. When he entered Yale at the age of thirteen, he was far ahead of most of his classmates in his knowledge of Latin and the classics. This may help account for the boredom he felt at college. Cooper was expelled in his junior year in 1805 after blowing off a classmate’s door with gunpowder. The classmate had earlier assaulted Cooper (and Cooper won a judgment against him in court) . Several boys implicated with Cooper in the door escapade were later allowed to reenter Yale and complete their studies. But Cooper did not seek readmission, possibly because the Yale authorities were aware of the troubles that James’s brother William had experienced at Princeton. William had been expelled from Princeton after being suspected, probably falsely, of involvement in the setting of two fires, one that burned down Nassau Hall and another that destroyed a local tavern.

James’s mother was a lover of music and an avid reader, mostly of novels and romances, and often read aloud to James the latest books she was able to get from England. James’s tastes, no doubt influenced by his mother, ran to literature and history. After being expelled from Yale, James was tutored at home for a time. His tutors reported that he was resistant to mathematics, the law, and the more analytical subjects in general. The Reverend William Neill recalled that James “was rather wayward, cordially disliked hard study, especially of the abstract sciences [and] was extravagantly fond of reading novels and amusing tales” (quoted in Long, James Fenimore Cooper, p. 15).

How James Cooper actually felt about his father is not known, but hints can be inferred from The Pioneers (1823), Cooper’s third novel and the first of the five Leatherstocking novels (that is, those in which Natty Bumppo appears, the woodsman hero known, variously, as the Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer, or Hawkeye). This novel tells the story, in a softened and rosy-hued version, of the founding of Cooperstown (called Templeton in the novel) and the events of its early history. Judge Marmaduke Temple, the town founder and a thinly disguised version of Cooper’s father, is pictured as a remote figure whose ways clash with the republicanism of the new America. Part of the Cooper mythology is that young James ran away to sea as a common sailor in 1806 in defiance of his father’s wishes. The truth is less romantic. Though James’s father may have had some misgivings about his son’s interest in a naval career, William Cooper arranged for the sea journey to prepare James for taking up a career as a naval officer (see Taylor, William Cooper’s Town, pp. 338-345). Cooper spent a year sailing to England and the Mediterranean on the merchant ship Stirling, being chased at one stage by a pirate ship. On January 1, 1808, Cooper received his midshipman’s warrant signed by President Thomas Jefferson, and was first sent to Lake Ontario and subsequently stationed in New York City

When James’s father died in October 1809, he inherited $50,000 in cash and a share in Judge Cooper’s extensive estate, initially valued at $750,000. At eighteen, Cooper was a rich, handsome, and energetic young man and a highly desirable marriage prospect. In the following year he met Susan De Lancey at a ball in New York City; he married her on January 1, 1811. She was an heiress and the daughter of socially prominent parents with a distinguished family lineage, and Cooper thus repeated the experience of his father in marrying into a higher social class. In this case, however, the match seemed to offer advantages to both sides. The De Lanceys, a Loyalist family, had lost much of their property under the New York State Confiscation Act of October 22, 1779. Cooper’s wealth put him among the very well off and brought advantages to his in-laws. Susan had inherited wealth of her own from her mother’s side of the family, so the couple seemed doubly assured of a comfortable future. She evidently extracted a promise from him to give up his naval career.

Extravagant spending of his own cash inheritance and the mismanagement of his father’s affairs by his elder brothers, plus the impact of the War of 1812 on real estate values, brought an unraveling of Cooper’s financial situation and the beginnings of the money problems that dogged him for years. But the financial decline was a slow process, and the family continued to live in a genteel style. The couple moved back and forth between Westchester County and Cooperstown, with Cooper acting as a gentleman farmer. He founded a bible and an agricultural society, and also served as an aide-de-camp to his friend Governor DeWitt Clinton with the rank of colonel. Later he became quartermaster and then paymaster of the Fourth Infantry Division of New York State, where he was resplendent at reviews in a blue and buff uniform, astride his charger Bullhead, wearing a cocked hat. It is likely that, but for the mounting financial problems, Cooper would have lived out his life as a country gentleman, surrounded by his loving wife and family, and benevolently engaged in civic activities and in the public life of his county and state.

Financial pressures caused an estrangement from the De Lancey family in 1818 when Susan’s brothers, afraid Cooper might mortgage or sell the property, changed the legal status of their sister’s Scarsdale farm, where Susan and James and their children were then living, to remove it from Cooper’s control. Cooper broke off relations with the De Lanceys as a result and moved his family to New York City. He tried a number of business ventures, including buying a whaling ship and sending it off on a South American voyage to harvest whale oil. Through this venture he gained an intimate knowledge of the whaling business that showed up in his seafaring novels. All of Cooper’s business ventures, however, proved to be fruitless, and probably worsened his financial situation. He was not a good businessman.

The story of how Cooper turned to writing, his strangest and most unlikely entrepreneurial venture, has been told many times but most authoritatively by his daughter Susan:

The resulting novel, Precaution (1820), Cooper’s first, is a “novel of manners” set in England with a plot that closely resembles Jane Austen’s Persuasion, but it also bears heavy doses of the didactic style characteristic of British author Amelia Opie. Cooper read the draft of the novel one evening to the John Jay family under the pretense that it was the work of a young author he had discovered. Encouraged by his friends’ reactions, he proceeded to publish the novel, anonymously, in both America and England. The work did poorly in America but enjoyed modest sales in England where it was taken to be the work of an Englishwoman. Cooper threw himself immediately into the work on his second novel, The Spy, with the characteristic creative energy that was to be his trademark, finishing the first sixty pages in three days. But it proved harder to do an original rather than an imitative work, and it took him six months to complete the novel. The Spy was published in 1821 and brought him instant fame. It tells the story of a patriot who masquerades as a Loyalist but who is actually working for independence. In the end the hero shows his nobility by refusing to accept payment for his spying services. The subtext of the novel is the unity of the American gentry around the ideals of patriotism, independence from Britain, the preservation of the existing social order, and the rejection of radical ideas proposed by groups seeking to overthrow current institutions. Following the publication of The Spy were The Pioneers (1823), the first of the Leatherstocking series ; The Pilot ( 1823 ) , the first of what would be eleven seafaring novels ; Lionel Lincoln (1825); and, before Cooper’s departure for Europe with his family, The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Mohicans was published to great acclaim and became an immediate bestseller. It became his most widely read and successful work. The Prairie, the last part of which Cooper finished while in Europe, and The Red Rover both appeared in 1827, consolidating his reputation as a world-renowned author. He settled in Paris, where he was sought out and feted in Parisian literary circles.

Cooper gave various reasons in letters to friends to explain his departure for Europe: educational opportunities for his children (the family diligently studied French for a year prior to departure), the chance to relax, his desire to see something of the world, and others. He did not mention what was surely another major motivation: his desire to solidify his finances. Although Cooper was widely read in Europe, international copyright laws were so lax that pirated editions of his works flooded the European markets. At the time of his departure for Europe, he had realized few financial gains despite his fame. In every country he visited, Cooper met with publishers and arranged for authoritative editions of his works and/or new translations. To induce readers to buy these editions, they often included a new commentary or preface by the author. Cooper was always fascinated with and closely attentive to the details of publishing. He appeared to have a shrewd business sense in this area, and struck favorable bargains with his publishers (while always being loyal, conscientious, and scrupulous in his dealings with them). Meanwhile, he continued to work hard, producing a substantial body of new work that included three novels and travel volumes on England, France, and Italy based on his copious notes. By the end of his stay in Europe he had achieved the financial security for his family that he had long sought.

In 1834, back in America and shocked by what he saw as changes for the worse in his country, Cooper published the pamphlet A Letter to His Countrymen, in which he announced his retirement as a novelist, criticized excessive American deference to foreign opinions and tastes, and defended the policies of President Andrew Jackson against his Whig opponents. Cooper was subjected to a torrent of abuse from the Whig press as a result. This was not a happy period for the embattled Cooper. He sank into what we would now call a depression but continued to work at a furious pace, turning out a travel book, The Monikins (1835), and five subsequent travel volumes. None of these proved to be a success, however. After 1836 he became virtually a recluse, seeing only his family and a very few close friends, and spending his time at his old ancestral home in Cooperstown. The repurchase of his family mansion used up a large part of the savings he had painstakingly accumulated and, along with the recession of 1837 , which caused real estate values to plummet, helped to bring about a new cycle of financial strain for Cooper. It was during this period that he began the many lawsuits that were to occupy his attention for the next decade.

Cooper’s declaration that he would abandon novel writing proved to be incorrect, however, for he could no more give up writing novels than Natty Bumppo could abandon scouting. But the novels he produced in 1838, Homeward Bound and Home as Found, were neither commercial nor critical successes. The lawsuits, the financial pressures from the recession, which deepened into a depression, and his various unwise business speculations did not seem to interfere with Cooper’s ability to work during this period, however. Rather, he appeared to gather new zest. It was in this period, battling his neighbors and engaged in lawsuits against the Whig publishers, that he decided to bring back Natty Bumppo (who had been laid to rest as an octogenarian in The Prairie) . Cooper went on to produce two of his best novels, The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841), the final two of the Leatherstocking series.

It has always been hard for critics to find unity in Cooper’s diverse body of work, and this is true even for the five Leatherstocking novels. While most Cooper critics have considered these to be his best works, they have not found a coherence or sense of wholeness, or a unity of style or outlook, in the five novels.
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The Pioneers is a fictionalized version of the historical founding of Cooperstown and events of the mid-1790s and is probably Cooper’s most “radical” work, in the sense of depicting the environmental costs of settling the wilderness. Natty Bumppo appears there as a seventy-year-old man and plays a relatively minor role. His belief that there should be no private property rights to wilderness land puts Natty at odds with society.