James Fenimore Cooper

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Hermetic America: Our Critical Heritage
(James Fenimore Cooper, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Adams, Mark Twain)
Presentation 1 of 13

James Fenimore Cooper: Leather Stocking Saga; Education of the First White Indian
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, April 4, 1985

Transcript:

This series is the most difficult of all the series that we've done. Some of you have been following this for some time and recognize that we're attempting to describe shapes of understanding; the largest forms of the shapes of understanding, and in our various series we have discovered that the contemporary assessment of man's past is faulty, at best. And seems to be purposely flawed, not through conspiracy or design, but through ignorance, as is usual, and through reluctance to address oneself to the overriding consideration of life that there have been other human beings before us, and they have left a legacy. And we live in that legacy.

It is difficult to be free without knowing the legacy, or the heritage, of the past, and technically the past exists right up until this present moment. We ourselves, by our own actions, extend the past ever further on. Well we have been at this a long time and we have schooled ourselves to realize that the present moment has its voracity, not as a cross-section of reality, but as the entire shell, and thus, what seems to be the past, is actually a current legacy, still alive. And our liveliness and our freedom depend upon our ability to recognize this, to cognize it, and to recognize it. To include ourselves in this living tapestry of the whole, in less universal terms, in this country at this time, we have bulldozed just about all of the forests that have supported us. We have ignored just about all of the tradition. If one goes to universities now for an education one finds current events, one finds buckshot selections, but there is no continuity. There is no picture of the whole. There are no forms of understanding.

It is particularly poignant in terms of the United States, for the United States is the most difficult of all creations to understand, and the most esoteric of all forms to participate in. We have seen, in the last series, that Franklin and Jefferson, in tandem, produced a matrix for spiritual freedom. That in fact, the political structures were somewhat less-than-tentative sketches constantly occurring within an unbounded matrix of possibility, and that their genius addressed itself to the possibilities of man, and not to those simpler structures that we call governments, doctrines, congresses. And so the United States initially was made to be extraordinarily of a different kind of environment, a spiritual environment, an unideational environment. Nor was it to be a political environment.

And thus it came as a shock to us to realize that that most spiritual of all barometers, Henry David Thoreau, paid absolutely no attention to the Franklin Jefferson heritage. That Thoreau, who was nine years old when Jefferson passed on, only once in passing and in semi-derision mentions the stuffy Jefferson and pays almost no attention whatsoever to Franklin. How can this be, we ask? Where is that discontinuity to reside in our conceptions of ourselves? This Series will answer that question, and we had to make the gap apparent before we could address ourselves to the intricacies of the 19th Century development of the American experiment. For it was during the 19th Century that the American experiment was relegated to the garbage heap, to the junkyard. And, in fact, it is most symbolic that the apex of the experience of the 19th Century should have resulted in Civil War in this Country. When we speak of apex here, do not think of a balance point so much in the center, but think of the balance point in a dynamic mode which puts it most correctly in the 1860s, rather than in the 1850s. But in terms of centering, it was in the 1850s that the most poignant recognition of the American character came to be expressed, and the term that F.O. Matthiessen used, American Renaissance, is quite apt.

We have, for the first three Thursday evenings, James Fenimore Cooper, and it is Cooper who is the key. It is Cooper's career, his personality, that allows us to see what happened to the United States, how the tradition was lost, in what ways it was partially recovered, and those who recovered it suffered public, massive attacks of derision during their lifetime - Cooper more than almost any individual in our history. The theories will then go to Abraham Lincoln, whose purity of thought, whose capacity for vision, reformulated the unity of the spiritual matrix. And saw to bring it back into manifestation, and the tragic death of Lincoln will catapult, as we will see, the nation into a cultural madness called, ironically enough, reconstruction.

It is during this period that the most sensitive individual in American history will be born into the oldest political family, Henry Adams, whose grandfather was a president, whose great-grandfather was a president, and whose father was the Ambassador to England during the Civil War. And Adams will attempt to go back to the administrations of Madison and Jefferson to try to understand what has happened to us. And then we'll close this Series out with Mark Twain. You know most of the American genius is relegated to the children's shelves and Twain is remembered as a children's author, much like Cooper is remembered as a children's author, much like Lincoln is remembered as just a prototype of a good man who became president; never mind what he really said, what he really stood for.

All of these figureheads, this reducing down of great figures who were living intelligences to stereotypic cardboard images, is symptomatic of the psychosis that has gripped this Country for 150 years now, and threatens to carry this madness into a worldwide arena.

I usually don't editorialize, but I'll make this statement: It has become apparent to those who follow patterns of power that this year, 1985, that the United States has finally pulled ahead irrevocably in the cold war. And that the technological capacity of the United States is simply outstripping the Soviet capacity to keep up, and that by the early 1990s, when we have an operating space station, the Soviet Union will be much a second class military power. It's incumbent upon us to recall our tradition, to reinstate the spiritual essence of our humanity at this time, in the rest of the 80s and in the beginning of the 90s. We are not at the end of a Roman Empire phase, but we are rather at that period very reminiscent of the time of Julius Caesar and we should more than ever guard ourselves. There is no power or concentration of powers that can defeat us, for we have a sacred task, and momentum has been dispensed quite conscientiously. It is up to us to bring back the sanity of our tradition, with the emphasis on the spiritual elements and it is this that the previous Series and this Series, and the next two following, seek to at least raise the central issue. The issue is this: We do have a tradition. It is shining and sparkling with promise and it still operates for the few. It simply has been bulldozed like the massive primal forests so that it doesn't occur in most places.

Cooper is the first individual, the first 20th Century man to recognize this. We think of him as a children's author. We think of him as a naive, perhaps cantankerous individual. It's difficult to conceive of him as one of the most sophisticated men of his time; one of the most international of all men, of his time. Now Cooper was born in 1789, so when Jefferson died in 1826, Cooper was already 37 years of age. In other words he was a mature individual. He forms a real link, unbroken, with the tradition of Franklin and Jefferson. More than this, Cooper is from New York. New York State, New York City, is the center of his life and his operation. The early revolutionary period of this Country was formed largely in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. It was those three areas that were the Republic.

During the Revolutionary War, New York City was in British hands during the entire War. It never was an American city. It not only was not an American city during the Revolutionary War, it was not an American city in the colonial sense. For the State of New York has its origins, not in religious groups seeking to have freedom of worship, or in political groups seeking to have freedom of political structure, but New York State was originally a Dutch colony, on the basis of the Dutch Patroon System. And the East side of the Hudson River had all of the vast manorial structures that were appropriate to the 13th Century feudal stage of Europe. And New York City is a feudal kingdom amplified through industry and technology to a worldwide threat. It is a consumer of people, a grinder-up of human lives, for its own aggregate power. Cooper comes from this tradition. And so he has this tremendous proclivity in himself for power or control for a tory outlook upon the world.

But balancing New York City is upper state New York and the Adirondacks. It's ironic that Cooperstown, where the Baseball Hall of Fame is, now is James Fenimore Cooper's family heritage. It was their plantation, named Cooperstown for his father. The Baseball Hall of Fame Museum is within walking distance of Oswego Hall, Cooper's ancestral family home. The national pastime has its hall of fame there, at the foot of what the lake that Cooper called Glimmer Glass. The reason that Cooperstown is in that location was that it was the place where all the Indian tribes came together to meet. It was from time immemorial a sacred ground that was not owned by any tribe, but was a ground where all tribes may come together to speak to each other openly and thus the earliest notions of confederation among the Indian peoples, even before the Iroquois league, was this meeting place there at the foot of the lake.

Cooper's father, William Cooper, an ambitious young man, looked up the land grants and found that this particular area had been taken away rather by hook and crook from several Indian individuals who were obviously not authorized at all to sell this land. Anyone who understands the American Indian knows that they do not sell land, so that the deeds that had been made up for the first Dutch settlers who came into that region in the late 17th Century were actually phony land titles. And because of the wildness of the Adirondacks in the 1780s/1790s, when the Dutch power play was x'd out by the British concerns and when the British fortified Montreal and New York as power bases for themselves and then the British was supplanted by the victorious colonies in the Revolutionary War, all of these vast land tracks fell in disuse. No one would claim them. They were available for pittances. Coopers father had the dream of building a community from scratch and attempting, in his way, to set up a small utopian-style community.

So James Fenimore Cooper is born in the sacred Indian conference ground in 1789, about the time that the Constitution is finally brought into being. He is the representative, he is the phantom voice of the Indian consciousness which is in the land and not in the people. That is to say it was in the people because it is in the land; that we speak not from our pedestrian standpoint, but that we speak from our grounded, spiritual manifestation. And Cooper, in his very real way, is like an Arthurian knight hero come to be the champion and the jousts of international and interpersonal realization for the Indian way of taking care of a wilderness, being at home in a wilderness, not to develop it for some abstract ideal, not to portion it out in terms of some ideology, but to care for it in terms of its wholeness, its unity, its life-giving capacity.

And it is this central life and message that Cooper discovered he was born to. It did not occur to him right away. As a youngster, for the first eight or nine years, he played wild in the environs of Oswego Hall. The unbroken forest was just a paradise for himself and for his sisters and his other brothers, and young Cooper paid no more attention to it than any child would for his environment. He didn't realize that he was imbibing the situation, taking into his bones, into his psyche, the patterns of spiritual redemption which the wilderness was calling out to him to deliver.

He was sent, when maturing (10, 11 years of age) away to school and eventually, at the age of 15 was sent to the newly-founded Yale at University, New Haven, Connecticut, where he was wild and mischievous. And was in fact thrown out of Yale after about a year and went back to Oswego Hall and bided his time there; literally daydreamed several years away. For you see it was the, what we call today so naively, the unconscious energies that he was drinking at, that he was learning from, unknowing to himself at that time. And, at the age of 17 joined the U.S. Navy, which was not very much in those days (Roger chuckles). In fact, it was the Navy that Jefferson was holding in check through the embargo, which eventually led to the War of 1812.

But Cooper managed in 1806 to get himself across the Atlantic Ocean. He went to the Mediterranean, he went to London, and as a young man he saw these places and then came back and spent some time on the Great Lakes, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The U.S. Navy also had to patrol these lakes, which were at that time referred to as the American Mediterranean. And, this was at a time, 1810 or 1811, where it was just being rooted in advanced minds that if we could connect by canal and waterway, the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean, that we could indeed open up the Great Lakes as the Mediterranean, and that all of the power and capacity that had come around the Mediterranean Sea would also develop around the Great Lakes. And of course, that canal would be the Erie Canal and it would open in 1825, about 15 years down the line, and would change the capacity of the United States. In one fell stroke, it almost doubled the operative coastline of the United States, and exponentially opened up the power of trade.

But Cooper, in 1811, became interested in something else. He became interested in a girl and her name was Susan Delancey, and the Delancey's were old Patritians; they were French Huguenot ancestry and they owned a tremendous portion of that part of New York State that is contiguous to the State of Connecticut. They owned what is Scarsdale in Westchester County all the way down to the coast, to Long Island South, which is a pretty good piece of land to have. Cooper fell in love with Susan and finally got up courage to ask her father for permission to marry her, and her father being Irish replied to him: I'll give you permission to marry my daughter if you can get permission from your mother to marry my daughter. If you can follow that, he said, she'll speak for herself, which she did. (Roger chuckles) And they were married and they began living on the coast there. Is it called Marinette, New York? They were on a hill. Cooper always tried to live on a hill, within view of a body of water. In fact, he lived maybe a dozen different places in his life that fits this description.

It wasn't realized until about 25 years ago that this is an archetypal setting, as it would be said. To be on a hill with a view of a distant body of water is the perfect kind of visionary focus for someone to draw out what we might call 'active fantasies.' It's a bridging of the solid world of the land raised up to a point of vision and the mobile prospect of distant water. It's conscious and unconscious being bridged by vision, by capacity; vision that tutors perspective, perspective that radiates out and creates a spiritual space and that when it is put into motion, rotates and creates the timelessness of the great tradition. (We're speaking Hermetically for a moment, with your permission.)

Cooper then decided that he would, since he had a wife and children were on the way, to become a landed aristocrat. He decided to operate in New York City [and], which was about 25 miles away, and began having investments in New York City, and he founded there a men's club called the Bread and Cheese Club. This was the first bread and cheese and wine (they had Madeira wine) clique in New York City. In fact, it eventually drew a population of somewhere between 40 and 50 individuals and all of the young intelligencia in New York City at this time joined the Bread and Cheese Club. It took shape in 1824 and one time, when there was a huge parade for the opening of the Erie Canal, as they came by Cooper's office and residence down in Greenwich Village, all of the top members of the parade raised their canes and the little bits of cheese and bread dangling from it and Cooper saluted them. He was the king lion of the Bread and Cheese Club. He was the cultural fire in New York City of the mid-1820s.

He was a dazzling speaker, a fantastic personality. Cooper also had the capacity of telling sailor's tales, which he learned when he was in the Navy and, combined with this frontiersman-like background, Cooper was a great raconteur. He was always able to dazzle audiences. This is what made him so popular in France. Cooper became the first great American author, internationally, because his stories are worth retelling. Little episodes and vignettes from his works are phenomenally good when they're retold personally. It's rather like Edgar Allen Poe's poetry, which is not quite so good in English as it is when it's translated into French, where it sounds spectacular. And especially, with a Frenchman reciting it with great passion, Poe seems like he must be the world's greatest author. Cooper is this way. He's this way in terms of the structure, the content of his tales. And it is in fact this quality that began to rise up by itself in Cooper, unbidden, all of this constellation (those of us who have had this happen in our lives recognize it right away), his calling, his mission, at a point of maturity evoked forth these talents that were given to him in The Leatherstocking Saga. Cooper would have Natty Bumppo call these gifts, these are the gifts, that all human beings have gifts and these are given by God and these gifts are our capacities which are ours to exercise, and that morality must be founded upon the exercising of our gifts, whatever that may entail.

And so these gifts for storytelling began to bubble up in Cooper, who paid absolutely no attention to this sort of thing. He was a business man, he was successfully married, he was running huge estates, he had a been a tough young man in the Navy, he'd been thrown out of Yale, he was now prosperous. He couldn't help himself. And he wrote a first novel called Precaution, which was not based on Jane Austin, as is so often stated. It was based on a rather third or fourth- rate novel that somebody had written in England, whose name and the author had been long forgotten. But Cooper used a lot of the stylistic techniques that authors like Jane Austin used, and he used it so perfectly, that when he finished writing Precaution he would take it around with his wife and his children to various friends. And he would read excerpts out loud to them and have them try and guess which famous author had written this. And after several months of playing cat and mouse like this, he got up enough courage to have the thing published.

Well, it was badly printed, a lot of errors crept into the text. The book was a real printer's nightmare and Cooper rose to the occasion. Instead of being disappointed by this, he was advised not to correct it and have a second edition, it really wasn't that interesting, so he decided that he would just write a new novel and he would do it right, he would publish it right, have it/oversee the printing of it, so he sat down to think of what he should write and he couldn't think of what to write and so he asked a friend: "What would you like to read about?" And the man said "well I'd like to read, uh, I'd like to read an adventure story about the Revolutionary War." And Cooper said, "well, I'll see if I can find one for you." And he went back to his place and in a series of about two months, Cooper had written The Spy, which is one of the great adventure novels of all time, it's still in print, still sells many copies. Sub-entitled A Tale of the Neutral Ground. The neutral ground. Harvey Birch in The Spy, he is a spy but the whole story takes place on the neutral ground in between the battle lines. We recognize that neutral ground from the Bhagavad Gita. This is where Krishna and Arjuna have that spiritual conversation that resolves itself finally in enlightenment.

And in Cooper, and The Spy, we find for the first time his great powers, his gifts coming out and describing for us an intriguing story about a neutral ground within the Revolutionary War. Half of his background was Tory, half of his background was Revolutionary, and it seemed to Cooper that this was the best of all possible worlds. When The Spy was published, it was immediately a success and people were clamoring to have it reprinted in England and Cooper, thinking to himself that this was quite, uh, an interesting, uh, occupation, decided to sit down and write another story.

And this time he asked one of his relatives, "What would you like to read about?" And she said, "I'd like to read a story about the, about the sea. Nobody, nobody's done a good story about the sea since Homer, since The Odyssey. And uh, Cooper thought about it and thought, 'well it's true you know all of these novels that come out, they just mention second-rate and third-hand about the sea, but I know about the sea.' So his next novel was called The Pilot, "Long" Tom Coffin, one of the great literary figures. And The Pilot was an enormous success. And still is, it still is in print, is a fabulous story. And "Long" Tom Coffin was the first of the Wise Sea Dogs, whose salty fence of tenacity get man through the crisis of the sea, and the crisis of oneself, and sees to the integrity of the ship in the storm and the safety of the people in face of his ability to straddle the powers of nature and hold through his integrity the whole choreography of what might be a disaster long enough until ... the storm is abated. And so The Pilot, the pilot, he who sees the ship through the harbor out into the vastness, he who taking that which comes in from the vastness, brings it back safely into harbor.

And so entranced was Cooper, by the images coming up in him, that he bought two-thirds of an interest in a ship, which harbored itself in Sag Harbor, out on Long Island, way out towards the end, towards Montauk Point. And he would go out there, and he would spend whole days just daydreaming there in Sag Harbor and The Pilot wrote itself, just like The Spy had written itself. And Cooper was on his way. And he felt this tremendous elation when he was writing, the sense that he describes is that he seemed to be having the kind of fun that he had when he was a boy playing in the wilderness. But of course, that's exactly the feeling tone because that was the source of it. And so Cooper, then, wrote another work, called The Pioneers, and it was a tremendous success and he couldn't help himself and he began writing another novel and it was The Last of the Mohicans, and Cooper began to be lionized as the first great American author. And it seemed to him that fortune and fame were on its way and so he decided to take himself and his family to Europe for a grand tour. I mean, after all, this is what one should do - go on the grand tour - expose oneself to the education as a continent. And he told a friend that he would be gone for five years, and the friend said "you'll never be back." And Cooper said "but Jefferson has admonished us that if we stay away from this Country more than five years we'll not be able to catch up with it, it moves so fast."

It's interesting about Jefferson because Cooper actually paid very little attention to Jefferson. In a letter of 1823, when Cooper was 34 years of age, he writes:

"Two or three of the intelligent men that I found here spoke so confidently of the merits of a picture they had of Jefferson by Sully, that I thought I would relieve both Matthews and myself by a visit to the library. Well, you know my antipathies, as you are pleased to call them to Mr. Jefferson, I was brought up in that school where his image seldom appeared unless it was clad in red britches, and where it was always associated with the idea of infidelity and political heresy."

You know they still associate Benjamin Franklin as a ladies man, in a derisive sense. The stereotypes are archetypal, they always hold. So here's proper Cooper saying:

"Jefferson. Consequently I would have gone twice as far to see the picture of almost any other man. The moment I entered the library and cast my eyes on the picture, I desired the gentleman with me to wait. "Stay right there" he said, and he rushed off, ran off, for his friend Matthews. I am no judge of paintings, though I have seen hundreds of celebrated ones both here and in Europe, and Matthews is a collector, however, I determined he should rouse himself and see the picture of Jefferson. After some difficulty, I succeeded and persuaded him to follow me to the library. He pronounced it one of the finest portraits he'd ever beheld, and that he would never have forgiven me if I had let it escape his notice. But you will smile when I tell you its effects on myself."

For you see he was training himself to let these spiritual images bubble up to the surface where he could experience them, and when he saw Jefferson (Sully's painting of Jefferson shows him standing full, scroll in one hand and the head lifted in great dignity, balanced, rather like the Greek statue of Zeus that was pulled out of the sea only instead of the hands up like this for the dynamic, it's poised like this not with a spear, but with a writing: "I bring you the news: Man is Free." (Roger very emotional.) Cooper saw this.

"You will smile when I tell you it's affect on myself. There was a dignity, a repose. I will go further. I will say... a loveliness about this painting that I have never seen in any other portrait. With respect to its merit as a painting, it seemed to me more easy and natural by far. They said something about a mistake in the perspective, which could be easily altered, etcetera. I saw none of it." (You see his sense of perspective had been honed.) "In short, I saw nothing but Jefferson standing before me, not in red britches or slovenly attire, but a gentleman appearing in all Republican simplicity." (Emphasis added.)

This is very difficult to hear. It's very difficult to take in because spiritual epiphanies bounce off us in our time. We turn off just at the moments when it begins to occur to us. This is part of the addiction to the profane world. We will not hear that which will break the hypnotic entanglement, which we ourselves generate. It is our entanglement: how dare you penetrate to my heart.

Cooper was transfixed by the portrait because it was no longer just a painting, it was Jefferson who was there. Cooper's great affinities to manifest and materialize these qualities suddenly found himself realizing what the man stood for. Man is Free. You are Free. What will you do? He said there was "a grace and an ease that seemed to me unrivaled. It really had shaken my opinion of Jefferson as a man, if not as a politician, and when his image occurs to me now, it is always in those simple robes of the Republic." This was in 1823 and he began to sense, once having experienced Jefferson in this metaphysical way, that there was a sourness, a bitterness, underneath the surface of what was going on in contemporary United States. He became aware, for the first time, of a discrepancy between the massive integrity that stands behind it, just below the surface, invisible as the hands that really guarantee its reality, and the kind of play, sandbox mock play, cardboard imagery, that takes place waterbug-like on the surface. And that it's only the speed and freneticness of the surface pattern that keeps vision from penetrating through the stones to see the real form.

END OF SIDE 1

While this was happening to Cooper, the most archetypal of all possible people came to the United States. The old General Lafayette came back to the United States; back to raise a monument, Bunker Hill for the 50th anniversary of that great victory - Bunker Hill being the first American victory.

If you recall, the battle of Bunker Hill was won by the tenacity of the American spirit. No one retreated. The British had superior arms, superior numbers, superior training, everything. But no one retreated. That was the overwhelming revelation of the battle of Bunker Hill. They were beaten, they should have left. They were outgunned and outmanned, they should have gone. It was against military rules to stay. No one left. And when the smoke cleared, the British were shaken so that the Revolutionary War was won on that spot because they realized they would have to kill them all; they were not going to leave.

It was the victory of the American spirit, and Lafayette, alive all this time, came back, and Cooper was amazed to feel the affinity with Lafayette the man when he came. And when he saw him in New York City, Cooper was astounded by the powerful voracity that these makers of the New Age had, and there in person he could see with Lafayette. And he was to establish a lifelong friendship with the General and we'll see that after we take a little coffee break.

(I forgot to let you see during the break the wonderful program here, on Lafayette. This is in commemoration of a 100th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument by Lafayette. This was 1925 and maybe some of you can look at it later. There's Lafayette in old age. When I say Lafayette in old age, don't think of an old man. In fact, we've got to get to this story because it's incredible.)

Cooper's description for the New York American of the Lafayette ceremonies:

"At the castle garden in New York City, in the West Battlery (sp?) region, at the bridge leading to the castle, a pyramid 75 feet high illuminated at the top with colored lamps supported a large and brilliant star, beneath which the company passed in. The bridge in its whole length was covered over the canvas and on each side planted the pine trees and other evergreens, amongst which were suspended lamps designed only to afford light sufficient to ensure order, with the view that the effect of the blaze, which was to dazzle the eye in the interior of the castle, might be unbroken by any previous preparation. This comparative darkness was preserved until having passed the massive portals, the scene burst at once upon the eye. Of that scene, some general idea may be formed from the fact that the vast tent, for such was its shape, into which you entered was 70 feet in height and 200 in diameter, with ranges of seats of which the first was elevated about 15 feet from the floor, rising in ampitheatre to the height of 30 feet, the a vault decorated with flags of all nations. You see, the vision was worldwide. There were about 5,000 people at this celebration. They started coming at 8:00, and by 10:00 when Lafayette came, it was crowded, so entwined and bound together as to show up the courser material of the canvas covering."

In other words, the flags of all the nations were tied together in an unbroken strip of unity. They meant to say what they saw, and this is what they saw.

As Cooper goes on and describes the tremendous arrangements and then, when Lafayette came in, the band played the march which bears his name. Immediately on seating himself and looking towards the entrance, the allegorical painting over it of the Genius of our country (this is Genius with a spiritual "G", it's like a spiritual guide) was slowly rolled up and exhibited to the General and the company, a very beautiful transparency representing a fateful view of La Grange, his patriarchal residence, with these simple words "His Home." And at this first view, Lafayette burst into tears of gratitude. What they had managed to convey was that the vision of the unity of the world through a New Age, a revolution, a new world order, was guaranteed by the living presence of Lafayette, who all this time had maintained himself at his home La Grange. And when Cooper went to Europe in 1826, just a year and some months later, he received a little note at his hotel room in Paris. The letter is dated July 24, 1826:

"With much pleasure, I hear that Mr. and Mrs. Cooper and their family are expected last night in Paris. How long they intend to remain there before they take the road to the South I do not know, but I hope it will not be out of their line of arrangements to grant some time to the inhabitants of La Grange. My daughters, granddaughters, and son join in the request _die?___ (0:07:55 sp?) who, although Mr. Cooper was one of the first New York friends I had the gratification to take by the hand, I have much regretted not to have more opportunities to enjoy his company."
Signed, Lafayette.

For seven years Cooper learned from Lafayette. He learned what it was to stand in battle against seeming implacable forces. He learned the truth of the revolution. He learned of the incredible qualities that were there in men like Franklin and Washington and Jefferson. And slowly, Cooper, whose tremendous capacities were bubbling up to the surface, was taken in more and more into this vision, and more and more the age of revolution became for him a palpable experience. He understood what had happened.

But it went further than this. Because time and space are responsive to man's spirit. It doesn't much care about his mind, but responsible to his spirit. And for the next two or three years, as Lafayette and Cooper enjoined themselves and developed the political events of external reality, a so-called history began to change and at the great parade for Charles the 10th, the National Guard shouted down with the ministers and they were disbanded. And the throne, the French throne again, was brought into jeopardy by revolutionary rioters who approached Lafayette to take over the kingdom of France, to reinstate the republic, to bring the French Revolution back again. And Lafayette, telling them that Napoleon had ruined French psyche for this time of freedom for a long while, that they would have to prepare themselves over a long while; that in fact the only possible way was for the French people to learn what the American people had learned; that you have to work to prepare yourself for liberty; that in their ignorant state, human beings can't stand liberty. They misuse it automatically. It's the very quality of freedom that terrorizes them. It is the light of the spirit that blinds them. As Plato said "it sends them rushing back to the cave, where they gladly sit down again and drape the chains over themselves, and are thankful to be secure again in their ignorance" that people have to prepare themselves. In fact, La Grange was a mandala of the transition that Lafayette said was necessary for the French people.

The East façade of La Grange was left in its medieval order with a moat, with a drawbridge, with the turrets and bastions. On the two sides, the moats were filled in, and on the back and the West facade, it was completely redone so that all of the medieval elements were taken out and cell (0:12:11?) architecture of Monticello was there, so that La Grange was a very peculiar thing, because the parklands which Lafayette opened up to the public., picnickers could bring their children right up to the walls of La Grange. And the drawbridge was always kept over the moat so that it was this Janus face of the past which needs to be grabbed hold of by man. ["?]We are not digging moats and building bastions to protect ourselves against each other any longer.["?] We have to learn to get along, together. It is the only possible path. We have to fill in the moats. Our homes need to be open to each other. This is called community. It is the only way. The feudal orders are going to electrocute us, they're going to kill us, because that's the only way they can operate; by sucking power evermore into themselves. We have to transform might into right, and this can be shared.

And so every time he would go out to La Grange, Cooper would understand this and see this, and it began to occur to him that he needed a home like this, an ancestral home. That's why when he came back to the United States, he immediately wanted to go to Cooperstown. He wanted to go and see old Oswego Hall. He hadn't seen it for about 17 years. It was completely rundown and he refurbished the whole thing, and he brought it all the way back, and made sure that the lands around Oswego Hall ran right up to the house. The public could come to the house. He learned from Lafayette, like Lafayette had learned with Jefferson that you have to open yourself up in this age to other people. They have to have that public concourse. It does not detract. What is esoteric is not lost. What is hermetically sealed is not protected against anything, but is the guaranteed unity of all things, together. That is sealed. That is unbroken. What can break that seal? Only man's ignorance. Only his insistence that his little share, grabbing what he can as fast as it can before anybody else, is his and his alone and must be protected. That's why there were moats.

Lafayette raised carp in the moats. Everybody ate these fish and it was free to come in and fish there. He began also to understand Jefferson. Lafayette began to give him (Cooper) insights and tidbits and pretty soon he was reading the letters, Jefferson's letters. And the more he read Jefferson's letters, the more it occurred to him that there was a depth of mind that he had not seen, had not understood. But the revolution in France preceded a pace, and pretty soon Lafayette had to enter into the arena again. And Lafayette, in order to help the French understand liberty, told Cooper that "I need a first class American mind, which is naturally freed now, to write some articles, some letters for the French people. They have to be told and who better than you?" Cooper by now was one of the world's most famous novelists. Cooper and Sir Walter Scott were the two great popular novelists of their day, and so Lafayette finally convinced Cooper to put down his pen from fiction. But wait a minute, he's not writing fiction. He's bringing up spiritual energy in the form of timeless images of man's archetypal nature. That's what his novels are about, all of them. So when Cooper began to write political tracks for Lafayette for the French people in 1831, pouring over Jefferson's letters and pouring over Lafayette's person and coming out of himself, Cooper began to be extraordinarily effective; so effective that the French opposition began to focus on Cooper, and not on anybody else. Oh yes! When you really pull their plug, they lash out at you. And Cooper touched all of the sore points.

But curious enough, it wasn't only the French public that began to hate Cooper, the English public also began to hate him and, interestingly enough, the American public began to think of Cooper as a troublemaker. Why he's trying to do what that son-of-a-gun Jefferson was trying to do. He's trying to change our lives and here we are having a good time buying property and making money and he's reminding us that there are other purposes. And Cooper was extraordinarily good, he was a very good writer, and his political tracks began to be extraordinarily poignant. And all through 1831, Cooper writing these letters began to realize that he had tremendous capacity in political writing. What we would call political writing, what we would call here "visionary lances against the real demons." By 1832, in the Spring, Cooper was almost forced out of Paris, crowds, mobs of people. He stayed long enough so that he could finish up for Lafayette a great comparison. Cooper hit them where it hurt the most. He showed by an incredibly complex document of dozens of pages, over a hundred pages, that it was in fact cheaper to have a free country than it was to have any other kind of political structure. It was cheaper to run. In terms of income, everybody made more money. The gross national product was larger and this offended everybody. Not only to be told that you are wrong in spiritual basis, but to be shown that on the basis of your own selfishness, you've been foolish. This is too much.

Cooper finally brought his family back to the United States. He touched down in New York on the 5th of November 1833 and by the 9th of November he realized that the United States that he had left was no longer there. Like Thomas Wilkes said "you can't go home again." He went to a celebration where there were over 200 people, half of whom that he knew and almost nobody would talk to him. They wouldn't have anything to do with him. Cooper was hurt. Not insulted, but injured. What is going on here? They are crazy. I'm a sane individual, I'm socially acceptable, I'm intellectually acceptable, if anything I have more value. What's this snubbing by all the people that I knew? So he thought it over for month after month and finally, in the Summer of 1834, he published a letter to the citizens of the United States, which offended everyone. They didn't like to be told, just like the French people did not like to be told, that everything was wrong. Nothing was right. Nothing was going to be right. That this urge for things that you could stuff in your portfolio was a disease. That the values of man are not in things, but the values of man are in relational realities which you have to participate in. That there is a real ground called the Earth for those realities, and that land is not to be bought and sold to make a profit, but is the seam where life transpires and community is able to engender itself.

And the more Cooper thought about this, the more he realized that it was the American Indian who had understood this truth better than anyone. The Greeks had not understood this with that poignancy. The Romans had not understood it. The Europeans had not understood it. It was the American Indians that had understood this basic truthfulness. And so Cooper's sense of the United States began to mature more and more. And he took himself out of New York City and moved back to Cooperstown, more or less permanently, with his family. He began at Cooperstown to moot to himself the need to write a political document that would reinstate the vision.

And we'll see in a couple weeks that this document actually was written and it was called The American Democrat, which has been something put on the blacklist of power-mongers ever since it was written, 1838. But he also began to moot in himself that he had written a series of three novels about an old man Nattie Bumppo, Nathaniel Bumppo, who had died in his early 80s way out in Missouri, beyond the Mississippi River, had chosen to die with the Pawnee Indians. And that this old man in fact, when he was dying, at the end of The Leatherstocking Saga, Cooper describes the death of Nattie Bumppo:

?? "There's one white man -- a captain -- who is there, but mostly it's the Pawnee Indians around him. That's where he was at home. He's in his 80s and he's scrawny and he has his long rifle still. And he's talking about how when he was a young boy he had buried his father and put a stone, had a stone put there and had some beautiful words carved on it. The captain says: "And such a stone would you have at your grave?" And Nattie says, "I? No, no, I have no son. No son but Hard Heart, and it is little that an Indian knows of white fashions and usages. Besides, I am his debtor already, seeing it is so little I have done since I have lived in his tribe. The rifle might bring the value of such a thing, but then I know it will give the boy pleasure to hang the piece in his home, though many is the deer and bird that he has seen it destroy. No, no, the gun must be sent to him, whose name is now, engravened on the lock." (0:25:26?)

"But there is one who would gladly prove his affection the way you wish. He owes you not only his own deliverance from so many dangers, but who inherits a heavy debt of gratitude from his ancestors. The stone shall be put at the head of your grave." The old man extended his emaciated hand, gave the other a squeeze of thanks. "I thought you might be willing to do it, but I was backward in asking the favor," he said, "seeing as you are not of my kin. Put no boastful words on the same, but just the name, the age, the time of death, and something from the holy book. No more, no more. My name will not then be altogether lost on Earth, I need no more." And so for two hours then he sits very calmly, quietly, only his eyes showing from time to time light, as if he is thinking. Not so much thinking, but as if he were experiencing. Not so much experience even, but that the spirit welling up like the great swells that the ocean has. What is seemingly calm is not static, but it's like a great breathing as Cooper says in one of his episodes in The Pilot. It's as if the seaward being, breathing, a man has to learn to ride that rhythm of life.

From time to time he spoke uttering some brief sentence in the way of advice, where I ask him some simple questions concerning those in whose fortunes he still took a friendly interest. During the whole of that solemn anxious period, each individual of the tribe kept his place in the most self-restrained patience. The whole Pawnee Nation was there. When the old man spoke, all bent their heads to listen, and when his words were uttered, they seemed to ponder on his wisdom and their usefulness. As the flame drew nearer to the socket, his voice was hushed and there were moments when his attendance doubted whether he still belonged to the living. Middleton, who watched each waving expression of his weather-beaten visage with the interest of a keen observer of human nature softened by the tenderness of personal regard, fancied he could read the workings of the old man's soul, and the strong luminance of his countenance. Perhaps what the enlightened soldier took for the delusion of mistaken opinion did actually occur, for who has returned from the unknown world to explain by what forms, and in what manner, he was introduced into its oasal (sp? 0:28:21) precincts."

Without pretending to explain what must ever be a mystery to the quick, we shall simply relate facts as they occured.

"The trapper had remained nearly motionless for an hour. His eyes alone had occasionally opened and shut. When opened, his gazed seemed fastened on the clouds, which hung on the Western horizon, reflecting the bright colors and giving form and loveliness to the glorious tints of an American sunset. The hour, the calm beauty of the season, the occasion all conspired to fill the spectators with solemn awe. Suddenly, while musing on the remarkable position in which he was placed, Middleton felt the hand which he held grasp his own with incredible power. And the old man stood up and rose to his feet. For a moment he looked about him as if to invite all in presence to listen, the lingering remnant of human frailty. And then, with a fine military elevation of the head (remember the portrait of Jefferson), and with a voice that could be heard in every part of the numerous assembly, he pronounced the word "Here." A movement so entirely unexpected in the air of grandeur and humility, which was so remarkably united. And the mane (?0:30:00) of the trapper, together with the clear and uncommon force of his utterance, produced a short period of confusion in the faculties of all present. And when Middleton and Hard Heart, each of whom had involuntarily extended a hand to support the form of the old man, turned to him again, they found that the subject of their interest was removed forever beyond the necessity of their care.

And so passes the last of his kind. The last of the heroes who had understood what the American experience was. That the transformation of man was completed here and that somehow that must be preserved."

We'll go into The Leatherstocking Tales more next week when we look at it. Cooper wrote this particular section of The Leatherstocking Saga [Tales] when he was in Paris, when he was with Lafayette, and while he went back to Oswego Hall in Cooperstown, he mooted upon the origins of this individual. He began to sink back in his memory and let well up in his spirit so that the two interpenetrated, the two fields of concern interpenetrated and out of that interpenetration, which takes the form of a vesica piscis (sp? 0:31:55) in the geometric vision, from memory none was seen (? 00:32:00). And vision, spiritual capacity, came the opening gap of understanding that the early manhood of this figure, Hawkeye Leatherstocking, the old trapper as he was called at the end, that that was what needed to be brought forth and so he realized that the man had been called as a young man Hawkeye. And so Cooper wrote The Pathfinder. The path finder. The one who is able to find the way in the unbroken, virgin forest. And then, having finished The Pathfinder, he furthered the vision. He realized before he was Hawkeye, he was called Deer Slayer. And then it occurred to him, and in fact the vision for Deer Slayer, which was the final novel, written 1841, but the first beginning of this whole mythopoetic revelation of the American Christ archetype came to him.

As daughter Susan said, they were "riding out in a carriage and he was looking over the lake that he called mythically Glimmerglass (it was like his divining crystal), and she said they sat there for the whole afternoon and she said "are we ready to go?" and his response was "there's one more that needs to be written." And that was the origin of The Deer Slayer. And in The Deer Slayer, Cooper creates the arc of understanding by putting in the missing keystone. It is the coming into man-hood of that individual that was most important. It was his learning of who he was as a human being, not intellectually, but spiritually. It was the revelation of the unsaid to himself that made him Deer Slayer, and Cooper then completed that series; completed what D.H. Lawrence called the most beautiful of all the American views of reality. He writes in the studies of classic American literature:
"in Cooper's Leatherstocking series, we broach another world of reality. Here are mystery and passion, and the further progress into the unknown. We are not involved in the mechanical workings of the will, as it works itself into automatic self-determination. In the search for his own consummation for the mystical next step which Cooper records in The Leatherstocking books, this tremendous vision takes place. The Odyssey of the human soul as it vanishes into the new unknown."

Lawrence himself is able to see this, and he records it in his collected work called Phoenix, the experience that he had with the Apache Indians. And it was the first time that he realized - he said that he felt ineffectual as a European. He felt irrelevant as a European. That the only thing that counted was his reality as a human being, before this vision through a doorway of an old Apache man, his mouth opened and the chant coming through, and some young Indian had said this is for Indians only, not for white people. And then had gone on, and left Lawrence there, and Lawrence had this epiphany, as Joyce (? 0:36:00) would say, that it wasn't the understanding of the words, it was the poignancy of the reality of the moment that struck him. And he realized that he belonged there, and yet did not belong there. He belonged there as a man, as a human being, that this was the true ground, but that he could not return to that ground, that the evolution of consciousness had taken him away, and had taken the ground away also. But he could empathize with the Apache medicine man singing to the Great Spirit, but that he could not sing with him. He had to sing in other ways, in his own way. And Lawrence says that it was because of reading Cooper as a youngster that he was able to have this recognition. Because Cooper, one of the world's great mytho-poetic authors, creating not literature so much but a mythological cycle of wholeness, where an experience of the unknown can be brought into our human personality so that the form of the personality becomes mobile, because it is augmented by the mysteriousness and not frozen into some mechanical form.

Cooper was to spend the rest of his life writing political works and literary works, and he died in 1851. And almost everybody in the United States was relieved that Cooper was gone, because he had been a thorn and a burr under their side.

And next week we'll see just how much of a poignant thorn he was, because Cooper brings back the spiritual experience of the American landscape before it was carved up. He translates real estate back into a horizon of being, and it's there that we actually occur. And through Cooper's works, we can return not back to the childhood of the world, but back to the future of the world, which as Lawrence says, "must happen again." That in the cycle of things, the red man's time will come again, and the Earth will be returned to it's primortalness (sp? 0:39:28)."? I hope some of you can make that next week.

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