Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (15 page)

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel’, bringest an assuaging balm.

What kind of career, in fantasy-literature-land, would Thomas De Quincey have had if he’d been subjected to a twenty-first-century legal system? As a juvenile runaway, living rough on the streets of London, he would have been put into what is laughably called ‘care’. As a grown man with a predilection for underage girls (‘nympholepsy’ he termed it), he might have found himself in prison. As a lifelong abuser of Class A drugs he would have been in and out of court and – in his more raving spells with imaginary crocodiles chasing him through endless Piranesi architecture – he might well have been sectioned. In our enlightened regime, would Thomas De Quincey have left to posterity his acknowledged masterpieces –
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
or ‘On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’? Probably not. He would have been too preoccupied keeping ahead of the long arm of the law and the crossed arms of a straitjacket.

Thomas Quincey (the ‘De’ was a snobbish affectation) was born in Manchester, the son of a prosperous linen merchant who died early, leaving the care of the family to a terrifyingly evangelical mother. Young Thomas was set up for life by the wise provisions of his father’s will. One of his missions in life was to waste that money so deliberately that his last decades would be passed in destitute literary hackery. Sent to a good boarding school, he ran away to shack up in Soho with a fifteen-year-old
prostitute. He later spent some time at the University of Oxford – but walked out when he discovered that the oral examination was not, as promised, in Greek but English. He learned early that drugs and drop-out alliterate in life, as well as on the page.

While debauching his constitution with opium tablets, washed down with copious draughts of wine, he was stocking his mind. He wrote nothing of significance until he was in his mid-thirties and his mind full to overflowing and boiling with toxins. One toxin in particular has never been so lovingly described: ‘eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged.’ Even more than opium, he was addicted to Wordsworth. When he was able, he migrated to the Lake District, to be near his literary god. He helped Coleridge with money and Wordsworth himself with child-minding, proof-reading and points of punctuation. He was renowned for his conversation – although after 4 p.m., as J. G. Lockhart observed, it did get rather slurred.

After a decade living among the ‘Lakers’, and having married his young housekeeper, De Quincey drifted back to London. By now he had run through his patrimony and was getting by with grudging handouts from his mother and what he could earn by his pen. It was at this period (around 1822) that he produced the
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
. It caused a sensation. ‘Better, a thousand times better,
die
than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!’ expostulated Thomas Carlyle, whose notion of angelic medication was something to ease his chronic constipation. Doctors reported an epidemic of deaths from copy-cat overdoses (murder De Quincey-style), in the same way that Goethe’s Werther had inspired mass suicide among susceptibly adolescent readers.

Writers from Edgar Allan Poe, through Aleister Crowley (the ‘Great Beast’ and author of a
hommage, Diary of a Drug Fiend
) to W. S. Burroughs and Timothy Leary, have taken their inspiration from De Quincey and his contention that the devil’s own drugs give the imagination wings. The
Confessions
made him notorious but not, alas, rich. Despite wretched health, and his own poisonous self-medications, he lived to a great age, latterly in Edinburgh, writing all the time, flitting from one lodging to another – filthy ‘even by Scottish standards’, as one visitor tartly recorded.

Is that slippery masterpiece a memoir, an extended ‘essay’ or a novel? It is, whatever the Dewey Decimal system says, the last. If we categorise
CEOE
properly, it is a
Bildungsroman
(a self-portrait novel); indeed, a pioneer text in the genre. The point can be made by isolating one of the central episodes in the
Confessions.

When, as a seventeen-year-old, Thomas washes up in Oxford Street, ‘squatting’
(as later teenagers would say), he finds companionship with an even younger streetwalker, ‘Ann’. They cuddle at night for warmth and, we apprehend, sex. It is a powerful element in the narrative: but is it ‘chronicle’ or ‘plot’? Just prior to his return to decent society, the hero loses contact with her:

Meantime, what had become of poor Ann? For her I have reserved my concluding words. According to our agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her every night, so long as I stayed in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street … The street where she had lodged I knew, but not the house … If she lived, doubtless we must have been some time in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other – a barrier no wider than a London street often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!

If she lived, indeed. De Quincey’s most recent biographer is inclined to think Ann as fictional as Keats’s
Belle Dame
. To think so, of course, is to transmute the fabric of De Quincey’s narrative: De Quincey should be reshelved as one of our great novelists.

One day America will be as beautiful in actuality as it is in Cooper. Not yet, however. When the factories have fallen down again.
D. H. Lawrence

James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey. His father was a Federalist congressman, the family background Quaker. Soon after James’s birth the Coopers (along with their thirteen children) moved to Cooperstown, New York, a village owned, founded and – given the size of his brood – largely populated by Cooper Sr. The family home was surrounded by a vast estate whose wilderness was, by this date (1790), cleared of Indians. But the memory of them remained – not least in the name of Cooperstown’s neighbouring Lake Otsego.

James went to Yale aged thirteen (normal at the time) and was dismissed for some innocuous horseplay in 1805. His most serious offence is recorded to have been training a donkey to sit in a professor’s chair. Donkeyplay. In 1806, the wild student was sent to sea by his father, with a view to making a man of him. A long
career in the US Navy was foreseen. He rose to the rank of midshipman before resigning in 1811. He married in the same year. The couple would have seven children and for the rest of his life Cooper would be a landlubber.

For several years, Cooper was able to live as a gentleman farmer with the $50,000 he inherited from his father on his death in 1809. He allegedly began his career in bestselling fiction in disgust after reading one of Mrs Amelia Opie’s homiletic tales aloud to his wife in 1820. Maintaining that he could do better himself, he turned out the Opie-ish
Precaution
(1820), a moral tale instructing parents how to take better care of their offspring. The work was put out as supposedly by an English author, with an English setting. It flopped. However, it is more likely that Cooper was persuaded to turn his hand to fiction by financial need. He had, by 1820, run through his considerable patrimony.

Cooper hit his stride with his second work,
The Spy
(1821), a story with an ultra-American theme. It sold 10,000 copies within the year and was hailed in some quarters as the most successful American novel hitherto produced in the young Republic. There was a general feeling that America needed its Walter Scott.
The Spy
was the first of nine novels dealing with the American past in the crucial years before, during and after the Revolution. Cooper was creating a popular history for the nation – as Scott had done for his nation.
The Spy
drew on American chauvinism following the 1812 naval victory over Britain. Set in the period of Revolution, it is played out on the so-called ‘neutral ground’ between the British and American forces in New York state. The debt to
Waverley
is manifest.

The Pilot
(1824) was initially devised as an old salt’s yarn, to correct landlubberly errors in Scott’s
The Pirate
(1822) – errors which Scott candidly confessed. Cooper was a great corrector of other novelists’ work. He was also a great innovator and
The Pilot
was the progenitor of the line of nautical fiction subsequently exploited by ‘Captain’ Marryat in England and by Herman Melville in the US – neither of whom needed any correction from James Fenimore Cooper on maritime matters. The novel’s titular hero was the country’s greatest sailor (and victor over the British at sea), John Paul Jones.

Cooper’s most influential ‘national tales’ were the sequence novels which began with
The Pioneers
(1823). This tale introduces the series hero, Leatherstocking, and chronicles the nation-building forces that drive him, as a ‘pioneer’, ever westward with the receding ‘frontier’, bringing destruction and civilisation in his wake. The name is taken from the deerskin leggings worn by the frontiersman hero – variously (and confusingly) called Leatherstocking, Natty Bumppo, Pathfinder, Trapper and Deerslayer. A ‘scout’, he has the skills of the redskin and the superior intellect of the paleface. He can merge with both peoples – even when they are at war.

In 1826, Cooper published the second of the Leatherstocking novels,
The Last of the Mohicans
. Subtitled ‘A Narrative of 1757’, it was designed to cash in on the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. The novel is a lament for the indigenous inhabitants of New York State and publication coincided with the decisive phase of the Indian Removal Policy. Rarely has racial extinction been portrayed more beautifully than in the
Liebestod
of Uncas and Cora. The popularity of the Leatherstocking romances triggered a ‘Coopermania’ in Europe and Britain. The novelist crossed the Atlantic to exploit his popularity, settling there with his family from July 1826 to September 1833. On his return, Cooper produced numerous volumes of travel, historical writing and novels, prominent among which was
The Prairie
(1827), the third Leatherstocking instalment. The frontier has now reached the Western Plains, and the early nineteenth century.

In 1837 Cooper, always quarrelsome, embarked on a ‘war’ with the local Whig press, firing off a barrage of libel suits and raising some useful money for himself in the process.
The Pathfinder
(1840) was the fourth in the now epic Leatherstocking series.
Mercedes of Castile
, produced in the same year, a story of Columbus’s epic voyage of discovery, is generally regarded as Cooper’s worst effort in fiction – although there are other candidates for that title.
The Deerslayer
(1841) brought the Leatherstocking saga to a conclusion. However, the series was not chronologically sequential and it is in
The Prairie
that Natty, now eighty (but still a dead-shot with his fearsome long carbine, Killdeer) finally exits. It is not the least of Cooper’s achievements that he inspired the funniest critique in American literature, Mark Twain’s ‘Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses’.

Another stage-property that [Cooper] pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. 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. 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 may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

True critical words are often spoken in jest. Cooper’s fiction is homespun, but it created the underlay for some of the richest themes in American life and literature. It is not fanciful – to take two extreme examples – to see Clint Eastwood and Neil Armstrong (‘one small step for man’) as progeny of Natty. Cooper spent his last years and died where he had been brought up, alongside Lake Otsego.