James  Grossman

JAMES  FENIMORE  COOPER


  
    Stanford University Press. 1949. 292pp. Paperback
   
    ISBN: 0804703213

Reviewed by Patrick Killough

(1) biblio.com

Would you recommend this book to other readers?  yes

review:

I first read a little way into James Grossman's JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789 - 1851) two years ago. At that point, though already continuously immersed in Cooper's writings, I had read only about 20% of that New Yorker's daunting output. Author Grossman in his biography referred to too many books that I had not yet read. This made his biography of Cooper temporarily too unprofitable for me.   

In the interim I have read perhaps 75% of Fenimore Cooper's published output and am still slogging away. I thought, therefore, that it might be time to return to Grossman. And I was right. MORAL: don't read too soon the biography of any writer, when the biographer takes it for granted that you have read most of his subject's output!  

That said, Grossman's 1949 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, though now six decades old, is a very instructive read for the James Fenimore Cooper devotee. Its merit is to relate Cooper's writings: novels, histories, magazine serials, controversies, etc., tightly to the novelist's evolving life. Cooper comes across as a somewhat unhumorous, unyielding man of principle. Thus he can fault his model as an historical novelist, Sir Walter Scott, for being too indulgent of the foibles of a "worthless" King George IV. Cooper can also reject just about everything New Englanders ever created -- those hypocritical Puritans!  

Naturally, he made a lot of enemies among his American readers -- often for the wrong reasons. For Cooper loved America, held its ideals high; but he was not shy in taking his mother country to task when it became money-grubbing or too deferential to "public opinion." And he fought his foes tooth and nail in the courts, often over petty issues, but usually successfully. 

You feel in a long by-gone musty era when reading Cooper's three novels of the Anti-Rent controversy in New York and elsewhere: SATANSTOE, THE CHAINBEARER and THE REDSKINS. How can this long dead controversy over property rights and deference to landowners gain readers in late 2010 who have cut their teeth on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on "don't ask, don't tell" or the political rise and fall of Nancy Pelosi?

But, with a good guide like James Grossman, a reader can fit all this Cooper-specific raw material into the 19th Century America of Andrew Jackson, Federalists, Whigs, the Trail of Tears and western migration -- all of them important to James Fenimore Cooper. 

I liked Grossman's Cooper very much -- once I had read enough Cooper. But it is not, I think, the best biography for beginners. 

-OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/books/51507113.html
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(2) lunch.com  11/07/2010  James Fenimore Cooper - Crusader for "a man's right to be different from one's neighbors"



Six decades ago (1949) James Grossman gave to the world JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789 - 1851). His book is an unhurried but not excessively detailed stroll through the life, times and written works of "the American (i. e., Sir Walter) Scott," of Cooperstown, New York. 

We follow young James Cooper's life from his birth in New Jersey to removal with parents at age 14 months to the pioneer settlement of Cooperstown (named for Judge William Cooper, his father), his being tutored in Philadelphia by an Episcopalian priest, his three years at Yale, his time as a boy merchant seaman before the mast, including his first visit to England. Next Cooper is three years a junior officer in the young U. S. Navy. He marries a young woman of the famously New York Tory De Lancey family. Ere long James is launched on his 30-year career as a writer. He,wife Susan, and their chldren, after studying French for a year, sail off to France in 1826. Fresh from publishing his most famous work, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, Cooper then spent over seven years in Europe, including England, Switzerland, Italy and above all France. There he continued writing novels about America, but also issued his first (of several to come) "novel of ideas," THE BRAVO," (1831) about 18th Century Venice. Returned to the United States in 1833, living at times in Manhattan, at times in Cooperstown, Cooper was shocked at the decline in public morality and the rise in feverish greed for land, other assets and cash in his homeland. 

Much of the rest of his life was given to defense of his ideas as to what a perfect USA should be and criticizing what the real USA had in fact become. He fought his critics through  law suits for libel or slander (which he usually won) but saw his popularity sink among readers. Fame was, however, partially redeemed by his final two (of five) Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo: THE PATHFINDER and THE DEERSLAYER. Cooper wrote  stories of adventure by land and by sea (he had invented the sea adventure tale -- in THE PILOT, about John Paul Jones). He also wrote five books of his travels in Europe, a history of the United States Navy and much controversy in magazines and newspapers.  

Cooper's ideas were often well worth pondering, but more often than not ponderously expressed. According to James Grossman, the underlying theme of Cooper's life and his novels is that every man has the right to be different from his neighbors. We see this in fictitious Natty Bumppo, always being driven by dominant, judgmental, prejudiced white society to seek salvation in forests and prairies. We also see it in Fenimore Cooper himself: starting with his insistence on his inherited property rights in the face of the dislike of his contemporary neighbors in Cooperstown. Cooper hated both public opinion and demagogic practitioners of public relations like newspaper editor Steadfast Dodge in the novel HOMEWARD BOUND and its sequel HOME AS FOUND.

Grossman's COOPER is easy or difficult to read depending on how much you already know of James Fenimore Cooper's books. I quickly bounced off a first reading of Grossman two years ago when I had already read eight Cooper's books. Grossman referred to another 30 works which I had not yet read and his summaries of their contents clearly assumed that I already knew them -- which, obviously, I did not. I have now read 80% or more of Cooper's published works and Grossman's COOPER now makes very good sense. It is like one long book review of books I have already read. If you  have read only one or two books of "the American Scott," you will not, however, enjoy, I suspect, James Grossman's JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.  -OOO-

http://www.lunch.com/EditReview?id=1664175
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(3) bn.com  11/07/2010

title of review:  James Fenimore Cooper: "if he was to lose his audience, how was he to enlighten it?"

rating: * * * *

review:


In 1826James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851), with family in tow, sailed for 7 1/2 years roaming about in Europe. His work which is still most read in 2010, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, had just been published. In the next quarter century, Cooper would add three more LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, a score more novels of adventure by land and by sea, novels of manners, five books of travel, stories and articles for magazines and much more. While in Europe, Cooper met and befriended Sir Walter Scott and became intimate with the Marquis de Lafayette, and made a habit of lecturing Europeans about various points in which the upstart former colonial Americans were the equals or even betters of Europeans. Upon his return from abroad in 1833 he returned the favor to his fellow countrymen, arguing that America was no longer as great as it had begun.

Fenimore Cooper also quarreled at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River with his fellow citizens of Cooperstown, New York, a town founded by his father, the Federalist politician, judge and Congressman. For citizens had assumed, falsely, that Judge Cooper had given the town as a park property he had willed to his heirs. Cooper also thundered against a widespread "Anti-Rent" movement of sometimes violent civil disobeience in New York State in which renters rebelled against terms of their leases established in Dutch Colonial times. Incorruptible himself, Cooper has no pretense for scoundrels, ignorant johnny-come-latelies, lying demagogues of the press or, indeed, of public opinion in general. 

Having been lionized as an American patriot before he sailed across the Atlantic in 1826, after 1833, the repatriated Cooper antagonized American readers and his Whig political enemies mightily. He was too European, too aristocratic, too anti-democratic, they said. In fact, truth was otherwise, as literary biographer James Grossman demonstrates at length in his 1949 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. For Cooper thought deeply and soundly on many subjects: political, moral, religious; on manners, history and international relations. But though a deep thinker, he expressed his conservative thoughts clumsily in words.  Increasingly, Fenimore Cooper wrote as a prophet of doom: foreseeing evils to come as Americans became increasingly imperialistic (as in the 1846 - 48 war with Mexico, treated in the novel JACK TIER), selfish and clay in the hands of immoral demagogues.

Had readers still loved Cooper as of yore for his LEATHERSTOCKING TALES of forest and prairie, of battles, chases, escapes and rescues, then they might have made the  effort required to plumb Cooper's rich, albeit sometimes difficult, thought. To convert Americans, he had to keep their trust and love. But "if he was to lose his audience, how was he to enlighten it?" asks author Grossman. And, hammered by a hostile Whig press, lose readers Cooper did.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER was written for scholars and for readers who have digested 15 or 20 books by Cooper. For those who have read fewer, this literary biography and its typical mere two-page sketch of a Cooper book's contents, can be tantalizing but unsatisfying. At some point in their reading Cooper lovers will, however, turn to Grossman for a genial, impressive, rounded portrait of "the American Scott," who won a worldwide readership for things American, who created three or four genres of the novel, especially the sea adventure tale. It was quite a grand life. 

 -OOO-


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(4) amazon.com 11/08/2010

title of review: James Fenimore Cooper: "human history is a department of Providence"

rating: * * * *

review:

James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851) grows on you. I, for one, am in my third year in which he is the single author whom I read and review most frequently. He seemed to spin off a new literary genre every four or five years: the sea adventure tale, the wilderness/prairie adventure, the passenger vessel as microcosm of society, and on and on. He wrote five books about travel in Europe. Cooper also penned an early history of his beloved U.S. Navy and biographies of naval officers. He explained 19th Century Americans to Europeans and Europeans to Americans. He engaged in controversy, sometimes over such seemingly ephemeral issues as the anti-rent clashes in New York State and elsewhere. His literary output over a mere three decades was staggering. Yet Cooper is popularly remembered for only one novel, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826). Or at most MOHICANS plus the other four stories of eccentric backwoodsman Natty Bumppo that together make up THE LEATHERSTOCKING TALES.

James Fenimore Cooper wrote sympathetically of American Indians when Andrew Jackson and others wanted nothing so much as to separate them from their ancestral lands and wealth and ship them westward across the Mississippi River along the Trail of Tears. He had his thoughts on social mores, religion, theology and, especially, the invisible hand of God in human affairs (much as did Abraham Lincoln in a famous fragment meditated on during the Civil War). Scholars have probed Cooper's emerging theories of human history: is it cyclical? Does it move forward in a straight line? Can its direction be foreseen, managed?

In a 1949 literary biography, JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, James Grossman serenely and fairly succinctly surveys the six decades of Cooper's living upon this earth and tying that life tightly to the words it spun off. Most striking: Grossman shows Cooper as a man with deep thoughts who had trouble putting them into words. A representative passage:

"Over the years, as Cooper's faith in his countrymen's virtue was dissipated, a faith in Providence took its place. He recognized the logical force of the doctrine that if human history is a department of Providence, man, while he has every right ot hope for the best, has none to predict what that unknown best will be. But it was a difficult doctrine for Cooper to adhere to strictly, for he had very positive views on the conduct of human affairs and at times uses religion chiefly as an additional sanction to enforce them" (Ch. IX).

James Fenimore Cooper is a long, hard read. But I find him increasingly worth the effort. 

-OOO-

http://www.amazon.com/James-Fenimore-Cooper
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(5) epinions.com draft completed11/08/2010 SAP requested 11/06/2010


 Review Title: "the American Sir Walter Scott" began his career as "the American Jane Austen"

Product Rating: * * * *

PROS: Surveys Cooper's six decades thoroughly but not too lengthily. Shows unity between living and writing.

CONS: Six decades old. Assumes you have read more of Cooper than most probably readers have.

BOTTOM LINE: This book is not "Cooper for Beginners." Read it after digesting a dozen Cooper books. Its strength: linking Cooper's  living with his writing, meditating, arguing and fighting for his ideals.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: 

Answer me this, please.  How does AOHCAPABLANCA's review of James Grossman differ from Grossman's review of James Fenimore Cooper?

First of all, my review is for epinions.com. My understanding is, therefore, that I am to pitch all my reviews of any product or service toward readers who have not yet used the product or read the book. Or, if they have, are not yet sure in their minds what to make of it.

By contrast, in 1949, when James Grossman issued his JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, he clearly expected readers of his biography (isn't a biography a kind of review?) already to have read a very great deal of the works of the great New York novelist. Familiarity with THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE PATHFINDER, THE DEERSLAYER and even the the other two LEATHERSTOCKING TALES does not, alas, prepare you to read and profit as you should Grossman's study.

Have you read EXCURSIONS IN SWITZERLAND or Cooper's other four travel books about Western Europe? Or Cooper's additional 30 novels? His history of the U. S. Navy and biographic sketches of naval officers? Have you perused his sketches of his home, Cooperstown, or the Introduction to his unfinished and now lost (in a fire) THE TOWNS OF MANHATTAN?  If so, then you will thoroughly enjoy Grossman'sJAMES FENIMORE COOPER. It is pitched to readers who already know and probably love the author in question. The more you know by Cooper and about Cooper already, the more you will profit from Grossman's Cooper.

And what if you have not drunk deep from Cooper's "Pierian Spring?" Over a year ago I myself was in that position. I found myself "first looking into Grossman's Cooper." And I was soon at sea. I had read perhaps only 20% of Cooper's major works. And it was not enough. What good was it for me to learn that the nautical nonsense-babbling Admiral's widow in Cooper's THE RED ROVER (1828) serves as the model for the Captain's nautical nonsense-babbling widow in his JACK TIER (1848) when I had read neither? So I laid Grossman aside until a week ago, when I sailed through it passing from one Cooper book to another as one among old friends.

The general drift of Fenimore Cooper's life I already knew well enough from other biographers and writers of prefaces and notes to individual works. What was not so clear to me, and where James Grossman excels, was how directly Cooper's works flowed from his life as he was busily living it.  Thus:

-- A dare from his wife Susan provoked Fenimore Cooper to write his first book, PRECAUTION (1820), a novel of English manners drawing unabashedly from Jane Austen's PERSUASION and a bit of her PRIDE AND PREJUDICE as well. Grossman knew that Cooper's narrative genius lay more with adventures in forest, prairies, on the sea, in Venice, in the Alps and on the Hudson river. Unsurprisingly, therefore, he commented:

"Although we shy away from the notion of accident in history, nothing can adequately explain how the American Scott made the mistake of beginning his career as the American Austen. In his forthright handling of the theme of the managed marriage, Cooper is as clumsy as Achilles among the women" (Ch. 2).

And yet in novels and travelogues Cooper would show himself again and again as minutely accurate an observer of other people's rules of etiquette, protocol, snuff taking and the like as Sir Walter Scott was of the details of body armor and horsemanship.

If Cooper was to imitate established authors in English, he could have done worse, first,  than Jane Austen and, next, (in his 1821 THE SPY) Sir Walter Scott.
-- THE BRAVO, a political criticism of an evil oligarchy posing as a republic, 18th Century Venice, was written after a visit to that city.

-- Cooper hurled three novels, SATANSTOE, THE CHAINBEAR and THE REDSKINS against tenants refusing to pay their rents to semi-feudal New York landlords under contracts dating back to Dutch colonial days. Those tenants usually lost in the contract-upholding courts, after sometimes tarring and feathering sheriffs trying to collect what they owed. But public opinion was with the little man and against Cooper, and the laws were eventually changed to favor the tenant farmers.

Another strength of Grossman's Cooper is its proving that Cooper's ideas were deep and sound, while, unfortunately, his manner of expressing them was not up to persuading reading publics to accept them. Cooper was an honorable, incorruptible prophet without honor in his own country, starting with property disputes in Cooperstown and moving on to over a dozen lawsuits  for slander that he filed (and won) against his political foes, the Whig politicians and press.

Cooper was an apostle of Americans to Europe and of Europeans to America. He praised what was best on both sides of the Atlantic and condemned harshly any departures from the ideal by English, French, Italians and Americans. The latter habit did anything but endear him to readers.

Cooper disliked enthusiasm in religion (his ancestors were Quakers, he himself was Episcopalian), demagoguery in politics or American tendencies to exalt ignorance and public knowledge over professional expertise, especially in the law. Thus he skewers, in two connected novels, HOMEWARD BOUND and HOME AS FOUND, ignorant but public relations savvy, newspaper editor and owner Steadfast Dodge. Dodge repeatedly tried to persuade crusty old sea dog Captain Truck, to steer his ship, the Montauk, on the basis of frequent polls of the passengers.

James Grossman's JAMES FENIMORE COOPER is a fine piece of work. Every work of Cooper's mentioned gets at least a page and sometimes two or three of outline and commentary. The book COOPER ends with

--a useful Bibliographical Note, including the differing American and UK titles of some of Cooper's works

-- and an Index of names, books and characters in the novels.

When you think you are ready, that will be the proper time to begin reading.

-OOO-

Recommended: YES. * * * *


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http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/grossman_cooper.html