Word: cooperatives
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...familiar "Innocents Abroad" theme. The other is Cooper's occasional misunderstanding of his own achievement. Most of his 32 novels were adventure stories about Indians and trappers or about the sea. But he also produced a handful of society novels, beginning with his first book, Precaution, written in 1820 on a dare by his wife, and there were times when Cooper seemed to regard these as his most exciting work. Though his own Natty Bumppo-the Deerslayer-eventually slew this illusion, Cooper could write: "Europe itself is a Romance, while all America is a matter of fact, humdrum, common...
Snobs & Tuft-Hunters. In America's future there was a Mark Twain, whose frontier lay almost a thousand miles to the west of Cooper's, and whose literary sights were set a great deal more truly than Natty Bumppo's. It was Mark Twain who pointed the double irony-that Cooper, who wrote badly of the society he knew, knew nothing of what he wrote best about-savages. When Cooper hit Paris in 1826, he was able to report complacently to his publisher: "'Mohicans is looking up famously in Europe." The resident intellectuals, including Jean Jacques...
There were moral and social problems for the good, clean-living, republican American, and Cooper was not always sure-footed in his pathfinding amid the tangled family trees that snarled the moneyed moccasins of the American traveler. Surrounded by aristocrats, he complained touchily that his own family "did not exactly come out of the gutter," but he never accepted the obvious fact that he was invited out for his redskins and not for his blue blood...
...Cooper did a lot of commuting between Paris and London, and he successfully tried the English game of snobbery; he decided, for instance, that the Bishop of Llandaff was not "the real thing," mainly because the cleric said "My Lady" to a lady, just like the servants. He never really felt right in England; for one thing, tips ($50 in 16 days) were excessive, and for another, he lacked either a British or American sense of humor. In the end, he came to feel guilty when he found that the creator of Leatherstocking had a reputation back home of "trying...
Bugs & Lace. When Cooper forgot the wounds suffered in such snob warfare, he was a remarkably sensible observer. "We are going up and England is coming down," he noted time and again. Within 50 years, he predicted in 1831, "the government of England will become exactly what Lafayette wished to make France-a nominal monarchy, but virtually a re-publick." He added: "The prestige of their detestable aristocracy will for a long time linger in the slavish minds of their people." When in France, he wrote that England "is a country which knows well how to handle a king." Straight...