Cooper's Literary Offences: Mark Twain in Wonderland

Abstract

T HE author of Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences is the cantankerous Mark Twain of critical legend, the curmudgeon that we all know him for, or at least that we think we do. Since the Cooper he describes is somewhat more and somewhat less than the novelist we know him for, Twain's Cooper seems equally legendary. We have read about Cooper's incredible defiance of the eternal laws of Nature only to rub our eyes at the boners we had missed, and at the incredible oddity of Twain's belaboring them. But first impressions of either man can be deceptive. The sulphurous grumbling over Cooper is hardly the work of a judicious person, of a responsible citizen like Samuel Clemens who after the debacle of 1892 had made it a point of honor to pay his creditors one hundred cents on the dollar; rather it belongs to a hoodwinking persona who puts up a good front but is not always entitled to the horror he sports, and is neither the empiricist nor the unsuspecting reader he pretends to be. Actually, he is an unabashable hack and in his bacchanal of sophistry latches on to just enough fact to silence doubt. Thus, over the long