Twain Journal 1

By Jessica Granse
February 26, 2009

"A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail…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," (Page 296).

In his criticism of Cooper’s work, Twain says that he is very repetitive in his use of the same types of tricks. One of his favorite stage tricks is making sure there is always a dry twig for someone to step on, thus giving away that person’s hiding place. Another is when he has one person follow another both in moccasins, so the follower’s tracks are then hidden in the other person’s moccasin tracks. Also, not included in this quote, but included in his criticism, Twain shows that Cooper often has one saved at the end by some miraculous event.

On his online weblog, golf writer and entertainment lawyer Jay Flemma writes a sort of critique on Twain’s "Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses", where after summarizing and commenting on it, he relates it to golf course architecture. In commenting on Twain’s criticism, he says that Twain is as well guilty of the above issues he accuses Cooper of. Now, it’s hard to be able to really tell whether this is true or not, just using the work we’ve read of Twain, so far since all we’ve read was his criticism of Cooper, his biography, and one chapter of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". This is why I’ve also done some additional research to find out what else happens in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". The way Jim is saved later in the book is because Tom Sawyer comes and reveals that his owner left him to freedom in her will and she died 2 months earlier. This is definitely not something impossible and miraculous. It’s pure luck and coincidence. Huck’s father’s death is the same thing: pure luck and coincidence. This is why I don’t believe he follows the theory set forth by Flemma that he uses miraculous events to save a character. The conclusion in this story is not at all similar to the miraculous event he mentions by Cooper where the people that shoot cover the previous person’s bullet and that he’s able to see it from so far away. In relation to the moccasins type of trip and the twig, I see evidence to back this. When Huck tries to escape the duke in chapter 31, he just waits for a good opportunity and runs for it. Later, when they try to free Jim, Huck, Tom, and Jim just run for it. There doesn’t seem to be any similar tricks to the dry twig or the mocassins. The instance in chapter 31, Huck is unnoticed as he runs away, but Jim is gone. In the later instance, they are all noticed because the farmers were already trying to catch the slave stealers, although their identities weren’t yet revealed. There doesn’t seem to be any relation between the reasons they were caught. I don’t seem to see Twain at fault for any of the issues he accuses Cooper of. His characters talk how they are expected to sound consistently, there are no miraculous events really, no repeated tricks, and none of the other issues Cooper had. This does show why Twain was such an important writer of his time. He seemed almost flawless. His dialect was good, his stories believable, and he had a wonderful way with words. Nothing like Cooper.