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George Dekker
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE AMERICAN SCOTT (1967) Reviewed by Patrick Killough for http://www.amazon.com Reviewer's rating of THE AMERICAN SCOTT * * * * * FIVE STARS Title of this review: James Fenimore Cooper Adapts Sir Walter Scott to North America's Past and Future Professor George Dekker, of Essex University in England, finds Fenimore Cooper a hard sell even to undergraduate and graduate students who are English majors. So who am I to help you decide what to read of a largely forgotten classic author, "the American Scott" -- if indeed you choose to read anything by him at all? But assuming that you have already decided to give Cooper a try, then Dekker's survey of Fenimore Cooper's fiction is a splendid road map. Work by work Dekker ably, lucidly, arguably if not always convincingly, summarizes and analyzes Cooper's novels and sets them in biographical and historical context. He comes to his points quickly. His text is a joy to read. Dekker's JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE AMERICAN SCOTT succeeds at what it strives to be: "a critical survey of Cooper's fiction" (INTRODUCTION, xi). This book is also an extended, straightforward and clearly narrated meditation on influences of Sir Walter Scott on "the American Scott," James Fenimore Cooper. Furthermore THE AMERICAN SCOTT gives examples down the decades of how the American student went beyond his older Scottish master in adapting themes and plot treatments to the unique environment of French and British North America. Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper's older contemporary, with happily acknowledged help fom the much admired Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, had pioneered the historical novel -- beginning with WAVERLEY in 1814. Sir Walter built the new genre around the country he knew best: Scotland. But he later expanded to areas he knew mainly through reading, not personal experience: England, Continental Europe and the Near Eastern lands of the Crusades. Scott also boldly experimented with and varied his evolving techniques. So did Fenimore Cooper. Cooper was the first to write historical novels about his native North America. Where Scott had a notable soft spot for aristocrats and long pedigrees, Cooper was at his contrasting best with two heroes: Harvey Birch in THE SPY and Natty Bumppo, the young, then mature, finally ancient Leatherstocking in THE PIONEERS, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE PRAIRIE, THE PATHFINDER and THE DEERSLAYER. George Dekker makes a plausible case that Cooper found all he needed in Scott's first seven Scottish novels from WAVERLEY through THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR. They gave Cooper everything necessary for THE SPY and the LEATHERSTOCKING TALES to transplant Scott convincingly onto American soil. In a nutshell, "Cooper's debt to Scott was immense" (INTRODUCTION, xi). As Scott had adapted Maria Edgeworth's Ireland novels to Scotland, so Cooper did likewise with Scott's Scottish romances in transplanting their themes and approaches to colonial and post-Independence North America. Edgeworth, Scott and Cooper all wrote about provincial or border cultures within English hegemony or influence. "What
Scott did in WAVERLEY was to show how a comparatively bad cause could
win the support of greatly talented and honourable men while a
comparatively good cause often depended on the support of selfish,
mainly vulgar interests" (Ch II, 23).
Cooper made the same points about the American Revolution in THE SPY and LEATHERSTOCKING. Where did Fenimore Cooper find Natty Bumppo, that illiterate, quintessential American common man and loner? Was it Daniel Boone before his eyes? Some say Cooper found the Deerslayer in Walter Scott, e.g. THE ANTIQUARY's independent old beggar Edie Ochiltree. For both Ochiltree and Bumppo led lives "curiously free of the normal constraints of society" (p. 24) Dekker argues, on the other hand, that James Fenimore's creative center was his own father, Judge William Cooper, land speculator, Federalist politician of New York and founder of the Cooperstown fictionalized as Templeton in THE PIONEERS. Judge Cooper was a man not only bringing a raw frontier under the yoke of conventional law and order but a published author on how he had done it. The SPY's Harvey Birch and LEATHERSTOCKING TALES' Natty Bumppo were created as stark contrasts to Judge Cooper, Professor Dekker argues. The Judge's thought-out-in-advance, commercial world would prove to be America's future. The world of Natty Bumppo was doomed to go away -- as had the colorful, chivalrous, doomed Camelot of Walter Scott's Highlanders. Professor Dekker finds important echoes in Cooper's novels of several of Scott's, including ROB ROY, THE HEART OF MIDLOTHIAN and THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR. New, however, in Cooper is the role of race in North America's past and future. The interracial male bonding of Natty Bumppo and the Mohican, spanning all five LEATHERSTOCKING tales, is one of the great such instances in world literature. But what about white women and Indian men? Could they mate and be accepted in North America? Yes, but only if the white woman was black and the woman's white father would fight for her honor! At least so went Cooper's most popular novel, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Dark Cora loved and was loved by the goregeous young English-speaking chief Uncas, son of Chingachgook. Now Cora had a black ancestress generations back in the West Indies. Her Scottish army officer father Colonel Munro vowed to thrash any man who made little of her because of her undetectable blackness. At the same time the tunnel-visioned good Colonel saw no good in the growing political, linguistic and cultural amalgamation of Scots and English. According to Dekker, Fenimore Cooper leaves open the question whether Red-White miscegenation will be a viable technique for knitting together the future United States. Although in fact racial mixing would someday work to some extent in Brazil, it proved almost unthinkable in the USA. My ruminations above sample the flavor of the fresh, provocative questions and answers in George Dekker's great book, JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE AMERICAN SCOTT. Professor Dekker confirms an old suspicion of mine: it is sometimes easier to grasp two authors comparatively than either one in isolation: witness, in this instance, Scott and Cooper, as well as Plato and Aristotle, Lincoln and Douglas and on and on. Plutarch was on to something in his PARALLEL LIVES. -OOO- Your Tags: sir walter scott, james fenimore cooper, george dekker, american literature, natty bumppo, harvey birch, chingachgook, uncas. ===-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Black Mountain 02/13/2008 |