Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. celebrates the environmental vision of his ancestorJames Fenimore Cooper

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.’s tribute to his great-great-grandfather James Fenimore Cooper. Mr. Cooper is the author of numerous books on space exploration and was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker. His remarks were delivered by his daughter, film producer Molly Cooper, joined on stage by her cousin Sage Mehta, who offered a reading from one of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels.

Molly Cooper,
with Sage Mehta in the background
Photograph by Tatiana Breslow

My father once told me that people who talked too much about their ancestors were like potatoes: The best part of them is underground. I always try to remember that, but it may be a tough piece of advice to follow tonight.

My father, when my brother and sisters and I were young, used to read The Leatherstocking Tales to us out loud. We would lie on the floor, put our heads under the couch, and go to sleep. It was a great many years before I finally came around and learned to appreciate the books in their own right.

One of the important things about Cooper is that, as a novelist, he has chalked up a great many “firsts.” This may not have been as difficult for America’s first well-known novelist as it would be for writers today; back then, the field of “firsts” was fairly open. For example, he wrote our first international blockbusters. He wrote the first Westerns. He wrote the first novels of the sea by someone who had actually been to sea. He was the first American novelist to make a living from his writing. And, of course, he was, in The Leatherstocking Tales, the first novelist to bring the American wilderness, and the American Indian, to a national, and then an international, audience.

Cooper’s love of the wilderness led to his being a very early, and major, source of the conservation movement in this country. He came by his love of the wilderness naturally. He grew up in Cooperstown, a village founded in 1789 by his father. It is at the foot of a large lake—the Glimmerglass of The Deerslayer. It was, and is, surrounded by woods. Cooper, and his next older brother, William, grew up in these woods and on the lake. “They are quite wild,” their older sister Hannah wrote of them. When their father was elected to Congress in 1797 in Philadelphia, his wife, who hated the wilderness, wanted to move the family with him; but her two youngest children put their collective feet down and refused to go. She remained. Cooper wrote in the introduction to The Pioneers, published in 1823, that it was his childhood in Cooperstown that gave him his strong feelings about nature; it was these feelings that later in his writings he broadcast across the country and around the world.

He was also an early source in this country of the environmental movement. Environmentalism, of course, goes a step beyond conservation, because by conserving nature, you preserve that which sustains you. The whole succession of the five Leatherstocking Tales is a steady progression westward, as Leatherstocking and his friend Chingachgook keep moving on in order to stay ahead of the settlers with their axes, chopping down the forests that Leatherstocking and his friend depend upon for a living. In The Pioneers, much is made of the “wasty ways” of the settlers. They cut down trees indiscriminately, including the sugar maple, which uniquely supplied them with the makings of maple sugar, a major product of the woodlands. They haul in fish by the net-full, leaving most of them to rot on the shore. One of the great scenes in The Pioneers is the migratory flight of the passenger pigeons over the Lake, darkening the sky. The settlers run out with their shotguns, peppering the sky with shot and bringing down the birds by the thousands; Leatherstocking shoots just one, leading to a homily about never killing more birds or fish than you actually need, lest you destroy that which sustains you. As you know, the last passenger pigeon died early in the last century.

In a sense, Cooper still lives. For one thing, his books have not been out of print since the early 1820s, not true of any other American novelist. And environmentalists in Cooperstown, which include some members of my family, are very apt to quote him in their never-ending battles against local unplanned developers. Cooper’s descendants are still in Cooperstown; indeed, the story of Cooper children compelling their mother to stay there has been repeated at least once. Cooper is at his best when he is writing about nature, whether it be the wilderness or the sea. Melville and Conrad have acknowledged their debt to him. Cooper’s writing can at times be turgid—if two old pioneers, or two old salts, are cracking jokes, it is time to turn the page. But give him a break. He was writing before almost any American novelist you ever heard of. When he is in the woods or at sea, he is unbeatable; at its best, his writing is powerful and lyrical. He was the most prominent literary pioneer of this country. I am very happy that The Empire State Center for the Book and The New York Library Association have selected him for the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Now I will stop, lest you think I really am a potato.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

A recent Story of the Week selection:
“Storm and Shipwreck,” from James Fenimore Cooper’s Ned Myers

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen
Dan Barry on Alice McDermott
Daniel Gallant on Miguel Piñero
Paul O. Zelinsky on Maurice Sendak

James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse, “constantly together” in Paris in the 1830s

In his bestselling new group biography, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough devotes an entire chapter to the remarkable friendship between the writer James Fenimore Cooper and the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. The two first met in Washington during Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphal Grand Tour of the United States in 1824–25. Renewing their acquaintance in New York, they became fast friends and traveling companions soon thereafter in Italy and France.

When Cooper brought his family to Europe in 1826, he found he was already an international sensation, as America’s most famous author, with The Last of the Mohicans on display in every Parisian bookshop. During his seven years abroad, Cooper continued to write novels set in America, publishing The Prairie, The Red Rover, and The Water-Witch during this period. By 1832, when Morse began his grand project—a giant interior view of the Louvre that would recreate in miniature thirty-eight European masterworks—the two had become inseparable, as Cooper reveals in his description of his daily routine in a letter that March:

I get up at eight, read the papers, breakfast at ten, sit down to the quill at ½ past ten, work till one, throw off my morning gown, draw on my boots and gloves, take a cane . . . and go to the Louvre, where I find Morse stuck up on a high working stand, perch myself astraddle of one of the seats, and bore him.

Reviewers often praised Cooper’s “painterly” descriptions, which may explain the many helpful suggestions he records offering his friend while he watched:

Lay it on here, Samuel–more yellow–the nose is too short–the eye too small–damn it, if I had been a painter what a picture I should have painted.

In Gallery of the Louvre, the masterpiece that would establish Morse’s reputation as a painter, we can recognize Cooper and his wife Susan in the lefthand corner, watching their daughter Sue, a student of Morse’s, as she paints. The painter offering instruction in the center is Morse himself.

Nathaniel Parker Willis, whom Adam Gopnik has said “invented the casual voice in American journalism,” was also in Paris at the time as a correspondent for the New York Mirror and McCullough often draws on his firsthand observations. Here he is sketching the two friends as they tour the Tuileries:

Here come two of our countrymen who are to be seen constantly together—Cooper and Morse. That is Cooper with the blue surtout buttoned up to his throat and his hat over his eyes. What a contrast between the faces of the two men! Morse with his kind, open, gentle countenance, the very picture of goodness and sincerity; and Cooper, dark and corsair-looking, with his brows down over his eyes, and his strongly lined mouth fixed in an expression of moodiness and reserve. The two faces, however, are not equally just to their owners—Morse is all that he looks to be, but Cooper’s features do him decided injustice. I take pride in the reputation which this distinguished countryman of ours has for humanity and generous sympathy . . . the untiring liberality of Mr. Cooper particularly, is a fact of common admission and praise.

Cooper had commissioned some paintings from Morse, and Morse hoped he would buy Gallery of the Louvre. But Morse was back in New York when he finished it, more than a year later, and Cooper’s offer never came. Morse hoped the painting would bring $2,500; it sold for $1,300. In 1982, the Terra Foundation for American Art, a museum in Chicago, bought it for $3,250,000, at the time the highest sum ever paid for a work by an American artist.

Also of interest:

• James Fenimore Cooper, John James Audubon, Gene Stratton-Porter on the Passenger Pigeon, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• The American Literary Blog wrote about Cooper’s concern about pirated European editions in “Cooper and his last Mohican”
• David McCullough talks about The Greater Journey at the Dallas-Fort Worth World Affairs Council on June 8 (audio; 52 minutes)
• George Dillon has created a key to the masterworks in Gallery of the Louvre at this University of Washington website

Related LOA works: James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales, Volume One; Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology (includes selections from Nathaniel Parker Willis’s 1830s dispatches and James Fenimore Cooper’s vivid account of attending six parties in one night)

New on the LOA website: Boxing in literature, James Fenimore Cooper

• Recently listed by the popular blog The Millions as one of the most anticipated titles for 2011, At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing has just arrived from the printer. The contents of the 500-page volume have been posted and can be found here. This new anthology is available now for immediate shipment from the LOA Web Store and will be available in bookstores on March 3.
• We’ve just posted a PDF version of Winter 2010-2011 Library of America Newsletter. The issue recaps the LOA’s fall list and recent reviews of last year’s titles and notes some major donations recently granted to The Library of America to support its mission.
• For reasons known only to the mysterious overlords of publishing, recent sales of The Library of America's two-volume edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales (The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, and three other novels) have spiked dramatically, and we've had to go back to press for a rush reprint. Although the first volume is currently out of stock at most retailers until next month, you can still get the set at the LOA Web Store for 25% off.

James Fenimore Cooper, John James Audubon, Gene Stratton-Porter on the Passenger Pigeon

Right: John James Audubon, "Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius"

Born on this date in 1789, James Fenimore Cooper was not only America’s first professional novelist but the creator, in The Pioneers (1823), his first of five Leatherstocking novels, of what Matthew Wynn Sivils calls [PDF] “one of the first works of environmental American literature.” Thirteen years before Emerson’s Nature and thirty-one years before Thoreau’s Walden, The Pioneers broke sales records by selling 3,500 copies before noon on the day of publication.

In one of the novel’s most memorable passages Natty Bumppo—the main character who will also go by the names Leatherstocking, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, and Hawkeye over the five novels—witnesses the entire town of Templeton gathering to assault an incoming flock of passenger pigeons:

So prodigious was the number of the birds that the scattering fire of the guns, with the hurling of missiles and the cries of the boys, had no other effect than to break off small flocks from the immense masses that continued to dart along the valley, as if the whole of the feathered tribe were pouring through that one pass. None pretended to collect the game, which lay scattered over the fields in such profusion as to cover the very ground with fluttering victims.

Leatherstocking was a silent but uneasy spectator of all these proceedings, but was able to keep his sentiments to himself until he saw the introduction of the swivel [a cannon filled with buckshot] into the sports.

“This comes of settling a country!” he said—“here have I known the pigeon to fly for forty long years, and, till you made your clearings, there was nobody to skeart or to hurt them. I loved to see them come into the woods, for they were company to a body, hurting nothing—being, as it was, as harmless as a garter-snake. But now it gives me some thoughts when I hear the frighty things whizzing through the air, for I know it’s only a motion to bring out all the brats of the village.”

Bumppo warns that the townsfolks’ “wasty ways” will have consequences—and his prediction will come true; within a century the passenger pigeon will become extinct, mostly because of overhunting.

The size of the flocks of passenger pigeons in the nineteenth century was a continual source of wonder. In his entry on the bird in Ornithological Biography (1831–39) John James Aububon marvels at a flock passing overhead:

The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.

Audubon’s account of a hunting party’s ambush of passenger pigeons returning to their roost trees in Kentucky in 1813 bears an eerie likeness to Cooper’s scene:

As the birds arrived and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me. Thousands were knocked down by the pole men. The birds continued to pour in. The fires were lighted, and a magnificent, as well as wonderful, almost terrifying sight presented itself.

The last passenger pigeon in captivity, “Martha,” died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. In “The Last Passenger Pigeon” the novelist and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter encounters a lone rare wild passenger pigeon outside Cincinnati in 1910:

Its eyes were big and liquid and it constantly turned its head in all direction. As it struck the wire it uttered a queer cry. It was not in the least like the notes of doves or pigeons. It was in a high key and it was a questioning note. As nearly as I could translate it into words it cried “See? See? See?” in hurried utterance. . . The bird might very well have been crying “See? See? See what you have done to me? . . . Where a few years ago I homed over your land in uncounted thousands, today I am alone. See me searching for a mate! See me hunting for a flock of any kind! See what you have done to me? See! See! See!”

Because of its sudden change from ubiquitous to extinct, the passenger pigeon is a frequent topic for environmental blog posts. Tina Bay writes about the pigeon’s possible connection to Lyme disease, Mark Gelbart weighs in on the controversy over possible previous fluctuations in passenger pigeon populations, and Delmar Dustpan’s recent post quotes Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Passenger Pigeons.”

Related LOA works: James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales (in two volumes); John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings; American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (includes “The Last Passenger Pigeon”)

The House of Walworth, American Gothic, and Gilded Age Literature

The Fall of the
House of Walworth
by Geoffrey O’Brien
(Henry Holt, 2010)

Geoffrey O’Brien, editor-in-chief of The Library of America, recently published his latest book, The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America (Henry Holt). As the book’s title itself makes clear, the literature available to him during his day job influenced his writing, and we asked him to list those works that were particularly on his mind while he wrote this slice of American history.

In my book The Fall of the House of Walworth, I sought to reconstruct the inner and outer worlds of a distinguished but remarkably ill-fated nineteenth-century family whose lives were caught up in various kinds of mania and one spectacular murder. Although the book is non-fiction, the literary antecedents I bore in mind as I worked tended to be fictional. These were six that helped particularly in setting my course:

Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of the Usher.” Poe was favorite reading matter for several of the Walworths, and the neurasthenic Roderick Usher might have served them as a perverse role model. My book’s title pays unavoidable homage to Poe’s long lingering influence.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables. The ancestral curse of the Pyncheons, symbolized by their elaborate dwelling-place, rhymed nicely with the 55-room Walworth Mansion and its gloomy heritage.

Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland. The ancestor of American Gothic, Brown sounded themes of trance, madness, and religiously inspired murder in this dreamlike concoction.

Herman Melville: Pierre, or The Ambiguities. The early chapters of this often grotesque successor to Moby-Dick powerfully evoke the world of upstate New York that Melville knew well.

James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers. Cooper’s fictionalized version of Cooperstown, founded by his father, informed my sense of the earlier period in which Chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth established his family’s power and prosperity.

Dashiell Hammett: The Dain Curse. A more modern version of Gothic from the 1920s, Hammett’s thriller, tinged with opium and cultishness, was a model of storytelling.

On its Paper Cuts blog, The New York Times has posted a copy of its June 4, 1873, article about the murder at the center of O’Brien’s book.

Laura Miller notes in her Salon review that “O'Brien was fortunate: The Walworths were prodigious writers—of letters, journals, poetry, monographs and, yes, novels.” But, Thomas Mallon adds in his review for The New York Times, “however central the novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth (1830–73) may be to O’Brien’s crackerjack new history of one family’s mayhem, it seems safe to say that he will not soon be joining Welty, Wharton and Whitman at the right-hand reaches of The Library of America’s long, august shelf.” Or, as Geoffrey himself writes in the book, Walworth’s fiction displayed a “staggering slovenliness.” In at least one of the novels, “once Mansfield became embroiled in cataloging women’s clothing, it was difficult for him to get back to the story.”