Twain's library offered surprises!
Four copies of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" were intact!
When you’ve grown up reading, teaching, admiring the extraordinary body of work of Samuel Clemens, better known to us all as “Mark Twain,” it’s one thing to actually be able to walk inside his house. It’s another to actually look at the seemingly endless array of books in his personal library and those in just about in every other room in his luxurious, opulent, exotic mansion in downtown Hartford and look for his favorite texts. There were so many books, almost more than you could imagine one person ever reading in a lifetime.
(It’s still ANOTHER to have YOUR OWN BOOK available in the Twain House bookstore - but I’ll get back to that later.)
And there they were, on the second shelf in the picture below, the books that you might have expected to be ripped to shreds, cover torn, pages sticking out, maybe even steaming…
Instead, there they were, four immaculately bound deep brown leather volumes. I almost gasped when I saw the gold lettering on the side. Sure enough, they were James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales”: “The Deerslayer,” “The Pathfinder,” “Last Of The Mohicans" and “The Pioneers.” (I think there was one more book in the series but Twain did well NOT to burn these. So one was missing. The guy had his limits.)
If you’re not catching on to WHY I was stunned, perhaps the single-most famous bit of literary criticism in the history of American Literature is Twain’s absolutely hilarious, brutal, stunning, merciless (pick one, though all apply) dissection of “Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” an article/review/literary assassination which appeared in the North American Review in July of 1895.
That Cooper’s books seemed to sit calmly, quietly, respectfully even on the second shelf of that personal library, a room just overflowing with other volumes, you’d think they might at least blush. Or show SOME wear, other than age. (The last, “The Deerslayer” was published in 1841)
But no. They seemed fine, stood up straight and tall. Which, if you’ve actually read Twain’s furious article, is impressive. Cooper died the day before his 62nd birthday in 1841 (No, I don’t know if writing “The Deerslayer” did him in) which was just as well, considering the hilarity and fire that would pour from Twain’s pen 44 years later.
Of course, I included a lengthy excerpt from the article in my “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” book; there are several Twain pieces included that I was able to use in class. There’s also a wonderful Introduction - “The United States Of Huck”, written by the great novelist George Saunders, (who let me reprint it for free!).
Let me share a little of what I wrote:
“CHAPTER FOUR: COOPER’S LITERARY OFFENSES
By 1895, Mark Twain was an American institution. He was popular, wealthy, his books were famous all over the world. But the one thing he didn’t have was much support from the American literati… if there were any critics or professors around who considered Twain as one of America’s greatest living writers, well, they kept it pretty darn quiet.
“Cooper was an early American writer, just a few years ahead of Twain, who was famous for his Leatherstocking Series, featuring the adventures of Natty Bumppo, a mythical American woodsman, Indian fighter and all around hero.
“This article was written just about 10 years after Twain (real name: Samuel Clemens) had written “Huckleberry Finn,” his not-quite-yet-acknowledged masterpiece. Nowadays, “Huck Finn” is recognized not only as Twain’s finest work, some call it the best American novel. But at that time, Huck didn’t have that sort of a literary reputation. Which might have angered Twain. (Especially when he read what the “experts” had to say about Cooper’s work.)
MARK TWAIN’S ORIGINAL:
Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses
“The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art."--Prof. Lounsbury.
"The five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention. . . . One of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty Bumppo . . . ." ”The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his youth up."--Prof. Brander Matthews.
"Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America."--Wilkie Collins.
It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper. Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in Deerslayer, and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.”
And now, Mark Twain, perhaps America’s greatest author, decides to talk a little bit of what HE thinks about literature. His RULES for WRITING.
Twain writes: “There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These require:
That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.
They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.”
You can see Twain is having fun with this. Here are a few more “rules.”
“3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.”
I think my favorite “rule” has to be No. 6, which I wish I’d have thought of. I bet a lot of writers think that. (Maybe not Cooper.)
“6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.”
Flung down and danced upon. Hahahaha. Twain goes on quite a bit but his finish, well, it sounds like something you might have heard on The Daily Show. But remember, Twain was there first. He wraps it up this way:
“I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Deerslayer is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens. A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are--oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.
“Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.”
So after we’d had a great laugh in class - and noted HOW Twain wrote this, the road map he laid out at the beginning - I asked my students to write a brief Rhetorical Analysis of what Twain did. In other words, HOW did he do it?
While they were writing, I did the assignment, too. Wonder if Twain would have liked it? What if he took MY words apart the way he did Cooper’s? But I had to be brave. Like Natty Bumppo (wink).
Imagine, if you will, the collected literary work of American novelist James Fenimore Cooper as some sort of strange castle; ill-conceived, oddly constructed with bad landscaping, rotten plumbing and an overpowering odor.
In his relentless essay “Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” Mark Twain not only sacks Cooper’s castle, but critiques its architecture, drains its moat, breaks all the windows, throws a cherry bomb into center court and suggests that even its ghosts have lisps. A more vigorous, comprehensive dismissal of a literary figure is difficult to imagine.
Twain doesn’t miss a thing, blasting Cooper’s implausible characters, their halting, unbelievable dialogues, his creaky, barely credible plot lines, Twain dissects Cooper’s prose under such an unrelenting microscope, questioning all the way down to his very word choice, if there had been a way to criticize the size of the periods in Cooper’s punctuation, you get the sense Twain would have had at that, too.
Cooper’s work is not all that comes within range of Twain’s invective. He begins his essay with four quotes from literary experts of the time, pinning them under their verbal bouquets like a Monarch butterfly struggling under a pair of straight house pins. “Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America,” Twain says, quoting Wilkie Collins. “The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest..” claims Professor Brander Matthews – words that Twain will use against Matthews, Cooper and the entire literary establishment and their misguided (and to Twain) wholly inexplicable praise for this literary disaster case. As Twain suggests in his down-to-earth opening sentence – “It seems to me far from right for Professor(s)…to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it.” And the laughs begin.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” in 2018, when I was still teaching at Gadsden County High. That it’s still in print - available on Amazon if you’re interested - is really cool. What’s even COOLER is they have it in Mark Twain’s House. Could there be a better honor for a writer?
Great post and photos!