Venue: North American Literary Review. CLXI (1895): 1-12
Reviewer: Mark Twain
Title/Author: THE DEERSLAYER, by James Fenimore Cooper
Link: http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.
"There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now..."
Mark Twain's slam of The Deerslayer has many such glib barbs. This is verbose supersnark, starting with the title: Fenimore Cooper`s Literary Offenses. Twain
not only hates the novel, but also claims that Cooper is illiterate.
Twain's dislike is singular, but repeated ad nauseum. He lists 18 "rules" of fiction Cooper violates. Then he cites factual errors in the plot. Then he rips on Coopers dialogue. Then he fixates on Cooper's word-sense with a list of "improper" words (compared to words Twain deems acceptable). In the world of blogs, such minute, mean dissection is called fisking. Twain is fisking on steroids.
Golly Mark, didn't enjoy the book? Fine. Take a deep breath and move on.
Cooper might use lazy language, but maybe Twain should change his notions of accessible or possible.
The 30-something Twain is taking the tack of many a literary climber - trashing an established author. Cooper can't defend himself - he's an acceptable target for backlash. Twain's hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt produces gleeful blanket dismissals: "...in truth, it seems to me that Deerslayer is just simply a literary delirium tremens." It's more advertisement of Twain's wit than serious critique.
Twain lacks a sense a fairness and rigor or service to the readers; he's a hitman, not a critic. That the NALR is willing to indulge such snark fests is a sign of how degraded literary criticism these days. Here's hoping Twain drops the anti-intellectual snark and uses his words in better ways.
