Literary Admiration - And Fistfights

I just enjoyed a slideshow wherein famous authors talk about other authors who've inspired them.  This is interesting enough...and gives plenty of suggestions for reading. But what I find most amusing: the same authors who are being cited for the inspiration they give are often the same ones that people hate, as well! This article, Literary takedowns, proves the point.

One of the funniest commentaries is Mark Twain's review of the "romantic fiction" of James Fenimore Cooper, author and creator of The Deerslayer, The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans. I never read these books, but knew his face well from the "Authors" card game.

Mr. Cooper, from a photograph by Matthew Brady. Looks tired, poor guy. (Wikipedia)

Cooper's characters were knee-deep in woodsmanship, creeping silently through the forest, or full of bravado, sailing on the ocean. Twain just thought it was all a bunch of hooey. Cooper's people did things that didn't make sense, considering their 'expertise.'  Case in point:
    "Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one."

Also, they tended to change radically through the book:
     “When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the 'Deerslayer' tale."

    Twain devised a long set of  "rules governing literary art in romantic fiction," and listed all the ways Cooper broke them, including this one:
    " They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the 'Deerslayer' tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together."

His essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, is very funny. In fact, it makes me want to go read The Deerslayer, just to see what Twain is fussing about!

Didn't work, Mark. Nice try. (Wikipedia)

 I liked the movie Last of the Mohicans very much, in spite of the bloody parts - and there are many. I'm guessing, though, that had a lot to do with Daniel Day-Lewis and his skill in running uphill, carrying a rifle. Or two. (Yow.)

 But the name of the hero in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales series, Natty Bumppo, has got to be one of the stupidest in literature.

Might make for good reading on a hot summer's day, though.