Valetudinarians United Against Hypochondria!

Last night I was talking to T, and somehow the topic of James Fennimore Cooper came up yet again. Our obsession with this topic started when I read an essay by Mark Twain called "The Literary Crimes of James Fennimore Cooper," which has to be one of the five funniest things I have ever read in my life. I shared it with T and we laughed heartily, then last year for a joke she gave me an enormous tome for my birthday: the collected works of James Fennimore Cooper, which she found for almost nothing. One night when she called, I was all embarrassed when she asked, "So what's up?" I finally admitted that I was actually reading Cooper, and he was every bit as gawdawful as Twain had said.

I foolishly started reading the books in the order of Natty Bumppo Delicatessen Ephraim's Daughter Longstocking's life, not in the order in which they were actually written, so that I nearly abandoned this project, having started with the atrocious Deerslayer when Natty is a youth. Next I read The Last of the Mohicans, written when Cooper was much younger, and found it much more enjoyable, so then I launched into The Pathfinder only to discover it is one of the worst pieces of tripe ever committed to paper. In his old age, Cooper showed a strange predilection for multisyllabic words nobody ever uses (like "valetudinarian," when "hypochondriac" just isn't highfalutin' enough), and he was less into action and more into emotions. Why Natty Bumppo should have any need for an interior life is beyond me. He was perfectly fine as one of many characters in Mohicans, including an insane choir director, an extremely sensible mulatta girl and her horribly whiny younger blonde half-sister [spoiler alert: the COOL sister gets killed and - worse yet - the annoying one survives!], and the Indian Chicago and his son Johnny Unitas, or something like that. [Spoiler alert: Johnny Unitas gets it in the end too, but he's almost as annoying as the blonde sister, so that's fine.] The plot of this book reads like Cooper was smoking a crack pipe, and it moves along at a reasonable pace, and Natty Bumppo is so over-the-top that he comes across like a frontiersman version of James Bond, able to solve any problem. Like James Bond, he has no emotional issues.

The later books, however, feature this character as the protagonist, and he is not the kind of guy you want to make a main character. Worse, they delve into his emotions for no apparent reason, because Natty Bumppo may come across as cool when he's dressed in a bear costume to rescue fair damsels, but he just comes across as creepy when he's pining for said damsels. Ew! And of course, even though he is no looker to begin with and is, you know, kind of rough around the edges from decades of living outside, the babes are all attracted to his inner decency. Yeesh! Who wants a protagonist oozing with inner decency? He's much more endearing when he's pretending to be a bear. When you have to keep talking about how good and decent and generous and honest your character is, at best you bore your readers and at worst you make them begin to doubt it. (Methinks the writer doth protest too much!) I don't know why Cooper couldn't leave well enough alone (but I can guess: money), but he wouldn't be the only one to ruin a perfectly good character by "delving into what makes him tick." Why? Do we care why Natty Bumppo lives outside and never got married? I felt the same way about Darth Vader when George Lucas had to go and show us his childhood as the worst child actor ever, and the Force wasn't something spiritual but just how many mitochondria were in his blood. Huh??? Way to ruin a perfectly enjoyable villain! Sometimes the less you know about a character's motives, the more enjoyable he is. Why does everything have to be explained?

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