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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 120 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 92

Deerslayer Helped Define Us All


By Richard Brookhiser


    James Fenimore Cooper is one of those 19th century writers
you find in complete and undisturbed sets in the locked
bookcases of old inns. Boys read him, American-studies majors
are forced to read him, and a movie of The Last of the Mohicans
has been dredged up from the sunken Atlantis of his reputation.
But his adult audience is long gone.

    It's easy to see why. His humor is torture, and his style
is as fussy and clumsy as an awkward hostess. But beneath the
musty packaging is a moral universe we still inhabit. Though the
Mohicans have vanished with the first-growth forests, Cooper's
coordinates are still familiar to us.

    Cooper, the son of a rich landowner, was expelled from
college, spent some years in the Navy, then discovered, in his
early 30s, that he could write. Though he never lived in the
wilderness, the Leatherstocking tales -- The Last of the
Mohicans and four companion volumes -- cover 60 years of
frontier life, from the French and Indian Wars to the settling
of the Great Plains.

    One of the virtues of the books, surprisingly, is a keen
sense of how men and women lived in early American society, or
on its margins. The Pioneers describes the growing pains of a
frontier town in upstate New York in the 1790s, in which
religious sects jockey for advantage and the law turns bully.
The Prairie depicts a pioneer clan named Bush, whose family
values include squatting and kidnapping. The new nation may have
been led by paragons like George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson; Cooper's characters were the nation they led. It is
our first group self-portrait, and not an altogether flattering
one. The man whose knack for heroics made realistic fiction in
America all but impossible also showed how it could be done.

    Readers went to Cooper not for his sociology but for his
hero, Natty Bumppo, better known by his nicknames: Deerslayer,
Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Leatherstocking. Here was a new myth for
a new world, a character whose prowess would suit him for Homer
or the Round Table, scouting the shores of the Hudson River. His
particular fascination is that however many unnecessary words
Cooper may stuff in his mouth, Natty is laconic in action. He
never fails to act when he must, and never acts when he doesn't
need to. He is a man without anxiety -- "what Adam might have
been . . . before the fall," as Cooper puts it. In five fat
books Natty swerves from his nature once, by falling in love,
but a younger and lesser man gets the girl. Down those mean
forest paths Natty must walk alone, except for his Indian
comrade, Chingachgook.

    On his walks, Natty encounters two cultures, white and
red. Modern multiculturalists might profit by pondering the
combination of tolerance and sternness with which he views them.
Cooper does not demonize Indians; when whole tribes are
presented as villainous, this is a plot device, not a racial
judgment (the French get the same treatment). Nor does Cooper
worship Indians, in the manner of Dances with Wolves. Up to a
point, he is a relativist. Good white men go to heaven when they
die, while good Indians head for the happy hunting ground. Natty
refuses to send either on their way minus scalps, because it
goes against the grain of his "gifts," though he thinks it
proper for Chingachgook to do so. But he recognizes a moral
bottom line below which there is only one standard and one
eternal judge. It is never proper to kill a man who is not
trying to kill you, whatever you do with his hair afterward.
Beyond human laws is natural law.

    There is also human nature, which, as Cooper's tales
present it, is a sorry thing. Sophistication doesn't improve it:
the bloodiest deed in the Leatherstocking tales, a frontier My
Lai, is the responsibility of a French aristocrat. Nor does the
simple life guarantee innocence. Cooper's blackest villain is
an Indian, his second blackest a hermit trapper who hunts scalps
for bounty. The scene in which the trapper, scalped himself and
dying, fears he may go to hell, is one of the most powerful
Cooper ever wrote, and it owes its power to ethical earnestness
as much as to gore and panic. "We live in a world of
transgressions and selfishness," says Cooper in the homestretch
of The Deerslayer, "and no pictures that represent us otherwise
can be true."

    After an initial taste of bestsellerdom, Cooper's career
wore itself out in feuds and lawsuits. But his vision, so
bright in its highlights, so somber in its shadows, is not the
product of mid-life crises. He had it all along.

    America has had it all along too. We believe in freedom --
at the extreme, as passionately as Leatherstocking, who moves
halfway across a continent in his 70s because he cannot bear the
sound of axes felling trees. But do we believe in it because we
are too good for anything less, second Adams who should not be
trammeled by rules and regulations? Or do we believe in it
because none of us is good enough to wield the power that
accumulates in more regimented societies? In the prose of law,
the tension between these polarities crackles over the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are
"created equal," with "certain unalienable rights," among which
is "the pursuit of happiness," no less. We also have a
government so designed that "rage" for "improper or wicked
project[s]," as James Madison put it, may not easily sweep
through it. In the poetry of action, that tension of the soul
between the hero each of us aspires to be and the transgressors
we too often are is captured in the Leatherstocking tales. Boys
and college students don't know how good the saga they
monopolize by default is.