First U.S. Novelist

First U. S. Novelist

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER--Henry Walcott Boynton--Century ($5).

There are signs that the critical market, more variable than the stock exchange, is beginning to raise James Fenimore Cooper, first great U. S. novelist, from the slump into which an unsympathetic generation let him slide. This biography, the first full length one in 50 years, is one of the signs.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) came of a good New Jersey family. His father acquired some land on Lake Otsego, N. Y., started a settlement there which became Cooperstown. James Fenimore had all the advantages a squire's son could hope to have. He went to Yale at 13, was expelled for some "obscure"' cause. At 17 he shipped as a foremast hand in a Down Easter, next year got a commission in the Navy. But he saw no service in the War of 1812, for by then he had met and married Susan De Lancey, who "did not care to become the wife of a naval officer." Biographer Boynton comments: "The short of it is, he was the type of male who holds the strictest views about the subordinate position of woman--and is quite at her mercy.'

Cooper moved to Westchester County so :hat his wife could be near her family. At 30 he was a successful trader in whale oil and cotton. One day, reading aloud to his wife, he flung aside the book in disgust, said he could do better himself. What he began as a joke she persuaded him to finish; to his surprise his first novel (Precaution) was taken seriously. Almost before he knew it Cooper was a literary man. Soon he was hailed (though he later resented it) as the Walter Scott of the U. S. Though no gentleman signed his name to a book in those days (Cooper's first signed publication was an open letter which he intended to be his valedictory, published 1834), Cooper's anonymity was an open secret.

When he wanted to take his family abroad, he was given the agreeable post of Consul at Lyons, with no duties, some privileges. The Coopers stayed abroad seven years, got back to the U. S. to find times had moved. Cooper became didactic, not to say cantankerous. "His view of the world . . . had ceased to be genial. He disliked many things, and disliked them more each year--reviewers, Yankees, newspapers, kings. Englishmen, mobs, national timidity and national complacency. And there steadily grew upon him a taste for laying down the law." Editors made libelous fun of him; he sued the editors, usually won. But his popularity slipped away fast.

"Burly, brusque and boisterous, like a bluff sailor, always bringing a breeze of quarrel with him," Cooper had warm friends: one of them was his wife. After 30 years of marriage he wrote to her: "I do not think I am a bad father, and yet I love my wife a little better than any child I have, good as all mine are. Can this be because the wife is so good, or because I am a fool?" He loved to play chess with her, Pepyshly noted in his diary who won. He was a good sport. Once he sent some logs to the mill to be cut into boards. "The miller claimed the 'slab' and the first board in each log as a perquisite of the mill. Cooper demurred, and finally they clinched and wrestled and both fell into the chute. As they climbed out, Cooper shook himself and said: 'The board is yours.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.