Deerslayer Helped Define Us All

By Richard Brookhiser

James Fenimore Cooper is one of those 19th century writers you find in complete and undisturbed sets in the locked bookcases of old inns. Boys read him, American-studies majors are forced to read him, and a movie of The Last of the Mohicans has been dredged up from the sunken Atlantis of his reputation. But his adult audience is long gone.

It's easy to see why. His humor is torture, and his style is as fussy and clumsy as an awkward hostess. But beneath the musty packaging is a moral universe we still inhabit. Though the Mohicans have vanished with the first- growth forests, Cooper's coordinates are still familiar to us.

Cooper, the son of a rich landowner, was expelled from college, spent some years in the Navy, then discovered, in his early 30s, that he could write. Though he never lived in the wilderness, the Leatherstocking tales -- The Last of the Mohicans and four companion volumes -- cover 60 years of frontier life, from the French and Indian Wars to the settling of the Great Plains.

One of the virtues of the books, surprisingly, is a keen sense of how men and women lived in early American society, or on its margins. The Pioneers describes the growing pains of a frontier town in upstate New York in the 1790s, in which religious sects jockey for advantage and the law turns bully. The Prairie depicts a pioneer clan named Bush, whose family values include squatting and kidnapping. The new nation may have been led by paragons like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; Cooper's characters were the nation they led. It is our first group self-portrait, and not an altogether flattering one. The man whose knack for heroics made realistic fiction in America all but impossible also showed how it could be done.

Readers went to Cooper not for his sociology but for his hero, Natty Bumppo, better known by his nicknames: Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Leatherstocking. Here was a new myth for a new world, a character whose prowess would suit him for Homer or the Round Table, scouting the shores of the Hudson River. His particular fascination is that however many unnecessary words Cooper may stuff in his mouth, Natty is laconic in action. He never fails to act when he must, and never acts when he doesn't need to. He is a man without anxiety -- "what Adam might have been . . . before the fall," as Cooper puts it. In five fat books Natty swerves from his nature once, by falling in love, but a younger and lesser man gets the girl. Down those mean forest paths Natty must walk alone, except for his Indian comrade, Chingachgook.

On his walks, Natty encounters two cultures, white and red. Modern multiculturalists might profit by pondering the combination of tolerance and sternness with which he views them. Cooper does not demonize Indians; when whole tribes are presented as villainous, this is a plot device, not a racial judgment (the French get the same treatment). Nor does Cooper worship Indians, in the manner of Dances with Wolves. Up to a point, he is a relativist. Good white men go to heaven when they die, while good Indians head for the happy hunting ground. Natty refuses to send either on their way minus scalps, because it goes against the grain of his "gifts," though he thinks it proper for Chingachgook to do so. But he recognizes a moral bottom line below which there is only one standard and one eternal judge. It is never proper to kill a man who is not trying to kill you, whatever you do with his hair afterward. Beyond human laws is natural law.

There is also human nature, which, as Cooper's tales present it, is a sorry thing. Sophistication doesn't improve it: the bloodiest deed in the Leatherstocking tales, a frontier My Lai, is the responsibility of a French aristocrat. Nor does the simple life guarantee innocence. Cooper's blackest villain is an Indian, his second blackest a hermit trapper who hunts scalps for bounty. The scene in which the trapper, scalped himself and dying, fears he may go to hell, is one of the most powerful Cooper ever wrote, and it owes its power to ethical earnestness as much as to gore and panic. "We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness," says Cooper in the homestretch of The Deerslayer, "and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true."

After an initial taste of bestsellerdom, Cooper's career wore itself out in feuds and lawsuits. But his vision, so bright in its highlights, so somber in its shadows, is not the product of mid-life crises. He had it all along.

America has had it all along too. We believe in freedom -- at the extreme, as passionately as Leatherstocking, who moves halfway across a continent in his 70s because he cannot bear the sound of axes felling trees. But do we believe in it because we are too good for anything less, second Adams who should not be trammeled by rules and regulations? Or do we believe in it because none of us is good enough to wield the power that accumulates in more regimented societies? In the prose of law, the tension between these polarities crackles over the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We are "created equal," with "certain unalienable rights," among which is "the pursuit of happiness," no less. We also have a government so designed that "rage" for "improper or wicked project((s))," as James Madison put it, may not easily sweep through it. In the poetry of action, that tension of the soul between the hero each of us aspires to be and the transgressors we too often are is captured in the Leatherstocking tales. Boys and college students don't know how good the saga they monopolize by default is.