Comments
Hugh Egan, Professor of English, Ithaca College
James P. Elliott, Professor of English, Clark University
Wayne Franklin, Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Keat Murray, Associate Professor of English, California University of Pennsylvania
Anna Scannavini, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of L’Aquila
Lance Schachterle, Professor, Humanities and Arts, WPI
Matthew W. Sivils, Associate Professor of English, Iowa State University
Jeffrey Walker, Professor of English, Oklahoma State University
The Cooper Edition represents a multi-generational commitment to the works of James Fenimore Cooper, dating back to the “godfather” of Cooper studies, James Franklin Beard, and continued by a series of dedicated academics. While the city of Worcester—with Cooper scholars at Clark University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and with the wonderful collection of materials at the American Antiquarian Society—serves as a central locus of Cooper activity, the effort is also distinctively decentralized. It has drawn participants from a wide range of institutions and locales, and in the process a collegial community of scholars has been established. My own current participation (as editor of Cooper’s novel The Redskins) was prompted by just this sense of cooperation. A neophyte in the world of scholarly editions, I have been aided enormously by the current editorial board, from broad matters of literary interpretation to the minutiae of decoding Cooper’s handwriting and punctuation.
Hugh Egan, Professor of English, Ithaca College
When I arrived at Clark University in the fall of 1971 as a mint-new assistant professor hired to extend my graduate training in textual editing to the prospective Cooper Edition, one of the first things Jim Beard did was bring me to AAS in order to review the fledgling Cooper collection that, with the cheerful cooperation of Marcus McCorison, he planned to augment. I was gobsmacked, to say the least, and for almost two decades more, Jim continued to watch over this ever-growing collection that you see profiled here. He and Marcus established it with the specific purpose of providing as many editions of Cooper’s works as possible for collation—for sight collation but especially for machine collation on the alien-spaceship-looking, flashing-light Hinman collating machine that AAS generously purchased primarily for the Edition’s use. I have always thought of the AAS collection—which now includes Jim’s personal library of Cooper volumes—as a monument to his foresight and energy; the Cooper Edition has continued to benefit greatly from his perseverance and collecting talent. Just after his death in 1989, I wrote, in a “Dedication” to a special issue of Canadian Review of American Studies featuring articles on Cooper from many of the primary and textual editors of the Edition, that his Letters and Journals and subsequent work on Cooper served “as the basis for many historical, thematic and cultural suggestions that have found their way into . . . the introductions to the Cooper volumes.” “None could ask for a more sympathetic, involved and exacting mentor,” I concluded, “and because of that, his influence remains . . . in the work and attitudes of all those he has touched.” To which I would now add: His influence still abides—in all the material displayed in this exhibition.
James P. Elliott, Professor of English, Clark University
While the spirit of invention thrives in every new prospectus and new monograph in literary studies, the prospects for discovery might seem exhausted. Rather than harbor dreams of shaking the literary world with a discovery of an invaluable manuscript on a dusty backroom shelf, I joined the Cooper Edition and have been more than delighted with the small but not inconsequential discoveries of textual scholarship. Now in its fifth decade, The Cooper Edition has established clear texts, and the requisite dense apparatus, of about two-thirds of Cooper’s thirty-two novels, all the while sustained by the goal of discovering, documenting, and evaluating all substantive variants in the author’s large oeuvre. Compiling, collating, and sifting through extant Cooper manuscripts and editions to construct a clear text can be a bit wearisome and tedious at times, but seeing the finished volume put to use in scholarship and pedagogy is invigorating, to say the least, especially in textual sites where emendations make an interpretive difference in reading and discussing Cooper’s work. Though textual scholarship might seem a solitary task, the vital activities of Cooper editors in numerous archives, libraries, and academic forums have fostered a rich, supportive group of scholars, curators, archivists, and publishers who make each discovery a community event worth celebrating.
Keat Murray, Associate Professor of English, California University of Pennsylvania
I first arrived at AAS upon the indication of Hugh MacDougall, then the secretary of the Fenimore Cooper Society. Hugh had told me that the most significant collection of Cooper’s books and papers was at the Antiquarian Society. I followed suit and the library turned out to be the incredible collection of volumes that all Cooper scholars know. For me as an Italian, it was particularly elating that, in some cases, the Antiquarians possessed not only most editions of Cooper’s books and novels, but also Italian translations that were not easy to find even in Italy.
While browsing the library catalogue, I had the luck of getting into friendly (I hope) terms with Lance Schachterle then the general editor of the Cooper Edition (CE). I knew of the CE not only from libraries’ catalogues, but also from the three volumes published by the Library of America between 1985 and 1991 and based on the established texts of the CE. The volumes were, and still are, a treasure for students like myself, working away from the United States. They did not deploy, however, the wealth of textual apparatus that makes the Edition so valuable to all serious research into the work of Cooper.
Getting in touch with the project opened up new spaces for study and reflection. At the time, Lance, James Sappenfield and Kay House were working on the edition of The Bravo, and Lance was interested in what the Italian insertions of the book suggested to my ear. Perusal of the scrawly manuscripts of the novel prompted us to furtherly look into the Cooper papers. My curiosity was moved by the fact that the manuscripts often left blanks where an Italian name or word would inserted in print. That made me wonder whether Mrs. Cooper was not behind some of Cooper’s staged Italian. The papers were not—could not be—conclusive, but the family recordings also entered the final text as a piece of evidence. In other words, scratching beneath the surface produced new knowledge and, what is more important, more reflection. And scratching beneath the surface is what the CE must necessarily do.
Working on The Bravo soon led to the rest of Cooper’s Italian writings. On one hand, the accepted readings of Gleanings provided a source of comparison to reflect on Italian expressions. On the other hand, the political untold undercurrent of that book forced me to push my way into a context that was, in a sense, completely novel. I renewed contact with notions of the Italian Risorgimento long left behind in my studies. Cooper visited Italy when the second and decisive part of the Risorgimento was taking shape and, believe it or not, it turned out that the sources underwriting The Bravo opened up more potential dilemmas. The rejected chapters found at AAS by Schachterle, for instance, create an interesting connection with the Mediterranean that somehow reverberates on Gleanings and on the writing of The Wing-and-Wing, now under investigation for the Edition. The introduction to that text will take advantage of the work done in the past for The Bravo, as well as for all CE texts. Each text seems to me to complement the others.
Maybe the most interesting part of working for the CE is to see how readily scratching the surface of the texts reveals that Cooper absorbed vastly from his contemporary scene both by reading and by listening. For better or worse, he was a literary sponge, able to inscribe whatever he came across. And scratching the surface is, it seems to me, the major contribution the CE adds to Cooper studies. In this sense, the work done so far by scholars who took part in the enterprise is particularly noteworthy because the historical introductions, explanatory notes, textual notes and apparatus never go beyond what a trustworthy scholarly edition should be: a solid informed basis for an informed work of interpretation. Is that not what we all need?
Anna Scannavini, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of L’Aquila
When James Fenimore Cooper died in 1851, he was considered “the national novelist”; virtually every major contemporary author, even those in the younger generation such as Herman Melville, attended or contributed to his 1852 memorial celebration. But in the second half of the century, many mature readers came to prefer the new social realism over the old forest and nautical romances. Thus in 1895 Mark Twain satirized Cooper for his plots and language (a task made easier by Twain’s boldly inventing most of the “errors” he blithely attributed to Cooper.)
But Twain had a point. Cooper’s long, florid, exciting novels, designed for reading aloud in family gatherings, had their share of infelicities—some Cooper’s, but many the printers’. Cooper, especially early in his career, had often made multiple revisions to correct those errors he detected, but he missed others. And few readers were aware of the authority of the texts they read, as revised, unrevised, and pirated editions circulated widely. Thus in 1966, James Franklin Beard, author of the magisterial six-volume edition of Cooper’s letters, set out to provide scholarly editions of Cooper’s works, by going back to the least corrupted texts: the manuscripts—or in their absence, the first edition—and then correcting and documenting all subsequent changes likely to be authorial.
To date, The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper has published twenty-four scholarly texts of his novels and travel and social writings. Four of the novels are based on the author’s manuscripts generously donated by Cooper’s descendants to the American Antiquarian Society: Satanstoe (1990), The Red Rover (1991), The Bravo (2011), and The Chainbearer (in press). An example of the kinds of errors these volumes correct is distinguishing properly (in Cooper’s small, crabbed hand) between “glassy eyes” (of the dead) and “glaring eyes” (of the living.) In three instances, all editions before “The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper” failed to distinguish the living from the dead.
Lance Schachterle, Professor, Humanities and Arts, WPI (Editor-in-Chief of The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper)
The American Antiquarian Society boasts an impressive collection of James Fenimore Cooper manuscripts and first editions, and anyone researching Cooper’s substantial body of work appearing in magazines and newspapers would be wise to spend time with its collection of periodicals as well. It was this last resource that I found so helpful when working on my recent edition of Cooper’s 1842 serial novella, The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief (which I co-edited with James P. Elliott). AAS was not only able to provide access to multiple copies of the Graham’s Magazineserialization of this novella but also had copies of the pirated Brother Jonathan edition and the British first edition as well. Simply put, the American Antiquarian Society, with its invaluable collections and excellent staff, has proved a vital resource for my research on Cooper.
Matthew W. Sivils, Associate Professor of English, Iowa State University
When I applied for promotion to professor of English earlier this decade, my learned Personnel Committee colleagues asked me a very pointed question. What specific pages of The Spy did you edit? They had seen the title page list “Text Established by James P. Elliott, Lance Schachterle and Jeffrey Walker,” and they assumed we each edited individual pages. They clearly failed to understand the meaning and the importance of collaboration in textual editing, and without collaboration between and among scholars and the AAS staff, none of the texts of the Cooper Edition would exist today.
The late Jim Beard first asked me to help Lance and Jay finish editing The Spy during the biannual Cooper Conference in Oneonta in July, 1986. I agreed, and later that November I flew to Worcester to meet with Lance and Jay for training and instructions. When I returned to Oklahoma State, I used NEH money Lance had earmarked for the Cooper Edition and assembled a team of my best graduate students as editorial assistants to work assiduously in the early collation of the eight various states of the text, reading editions against each other to establish an accurate text. When the final text was completed in the early 1990s, collateral materials added, and the package prepared for submission to the State University of New York Press, the press suddenly announced it no longer intended to publish the remaining volumes of the Cooper Edition. Hence, the search for a new press began. Through the efforts of Kay Seymour House, then editor-in-chief, AMS Press in New York City stepped up and agreed to publish the remainder of the edition. This, alas, meant a change in editorial procedures. We now had to prepare an electronic copy of The Spy to meet the publication requirements of AMS.
So in the last years of the 1990s, I assembled a new editorial team, assigned several of them to type the text of The Spy into digital form as per AMS instructions, and once again used my editorial assistants “to work assiduously in the early collation of the eight various states of the text, reading editions against each other to establish an accurate text.” When we completed this version, I sent it to the Cooper Edition, and after revisions, final checks, and CSE inspection, The Spy went to AMS Press for printing in 2001.
Without the collaboration of Cooper editors, AAS staff, and my own university editorial assistants, The Spy would not have been published. It was a long and difficult editorial project, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, learning once again the value of working in tandem with valued and enthusiastic colleagues.
Jeffrey Walker, Professor of English, Oklahoma State University