Literary Offenses

I’ve read Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” many times. Laughed at it, too. Hard. I had read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans when I was a teenager, and every hilarious invective of Twain’s seemed justified when cast toward the author who had his hero Hawkeye crawl into an Indian camp wearing a bear skin as a disguise without raising suspicion.

But when putting together my reading plan for this third decade, I just felt I had to read some more Cooper, if only because he was such an important figure in the history of American literature. His books established the genre of adventure on the American frontier and enjoyed huge popularity at home and in Europe. So I scheduled The Pathfinder for year 6.

And I’m glad I did! Oh, the book had its problems. The pacing, for instance, seemed strange to my twenty-first-century sensibilities. The first group of main characters takes about 20% of the whole book to get down a river to a settlement. One set of rapids and one Indian ambush would have been enough for me. Later on, the heroine hides in a fort for about 30% of the book.

But the action was exciting (you know, the first one or two times each challenge occurred). The romance was interesting, with Mabel Dunham having a choice between two and possibly three virtuous men of varying personalities. And the Natives were portrayed surprisingly fairly. Some are devious, others are trustworthy. All have a set of mental, ethical, and religious principles distinctly non-European, and the hero – Hawkeye again, although here known only as “The Pathfinder” – repeatedly describes these principles as the Indians’ proper gifts. Mark Twain’s review seemed grossly unjust to me while I was reading The Pathfinder.

But then there was that scene with the bullets in the tree.