University of Virginia Library

Conclusion: What Cooper Intended His Collaborators To Do

The answer to the first question posed early in this paper should be fairly
clear: "How and where did Cooper and his collaborators (licensed and otherwise)
succeed—or fail—in realizing Cooper's final intentions for his works?"
From Goodrich to Fagan, Cooper expected those professionals in printing

and proofreading, with whom inescapably he had to collaborate, to distinguish
between his errors and oversights (which they were to set right) while preserving
faithfully what he told John Murray was "one mans style" (clearly his
own) which "seldom agrees with anothers" (L&J, 1.86). Cooper pressed into
collaboration even artistic friends like Horace Greenough, to whom on 17
February 1830 he sent a manuscript letter (to the Edinburgh Review, never
published) with the injunction "to read, for typographical and grammatical
errors, and when these are corrected, I shall want to see a proof myself" (L&J, 1.404). Typographical and grammatical errors—or, as indicated elsewhere,
inconsistencies in proper names or even (to the trusted Fagan) anything "unintelligible"—he
expected his collaborators to correct. But concerning substance
and style, he was firm. From Precaution on (when he distinguished
between British and American conventions in using articles) he brooked no
interference with his final intentions with respect to substantives. Even suggestions
for "improvements" from the trusted Fagan the Philbricks have
shown in Afloat and Ashore often met with peremptory rejection.[13]

In short, he intended his collaborators to perform the services of copy-editors,
but no more. As he specified on 18 June 1839 to Richard Bentley, he
preferred his English publisher to print from corrected American proofs, not
the manuscript British copyright law required Bentley to have: "So many
improvements in style &c are made in going through the press, that I greatly
prefer sending the sheets [along with the manuscript]" (L&J, 3.393). He required
typesetters and proofreaders to correct any minor errors, but also to
capture his final intentions for style and substance as he inscribed them. As
he wrote to wife Susan on 22 May 1850 when attending to business in New
York, including proudly seeing daughter Susan's Rural Hours through Putnam's
press, "I . . . hav[e] got the printer cornered, so that he must do his
duty" (L&J, 6.80). No where in his extant correspondence is there evidence
he entertained collaborative suggestions of any more substance, except perhaps
for dutiful references to accepting the advice of his "female Mentor,"
wife Susan, in general ways in his early fiction.[14] After he was established
as an author, he rarely changed his mind about the shape of his projects. (At
least one example of altering his original intentions does exist: after cajoling
Bentley for several years about a pet experiment, to write a novel with ships—

not humans—as characters, he backed off from this radical project in The Two
Admirals by introducing human actors as well as the fleets they command.[15]

The second question raised in this essay was: "For editorial purposes,
when manuscripts of Cooper's work in his own hand are extant, should CE
scholars use as copy-texts such holograph witnesses? Or should they turn for
copy-texts to first editions for which Cooper is known to have read proof and
which may benefit from the improvements of his collaborators?" This question
is crucial for framing the debate about recovering authorial intention.
Using the holograph where extant as copy-text grants final authority to the
author alone, at the expense of losing any improvements the author may have
desired and expected from professional collaborators. Using as copy-text any
authorial version (subsequent to the extant holograph) upon which collaborators
have made sanctioned or unlicensed revisions potentially captures those
collaborators' improvements but at the price of introducing non-authorial
variants.

To establish a text that most fully represents Cooper's intentions at all
stages of his engagement with his text, CE editors exercise critical judgment
to identify those post-copy-text variants certain or likely to be authorial
and incorporate them into the copy-text (always the holograph if available),
rejecting variants not believed to have authorial sanction. To use again
Cooper's words to Aaron Vail when forwarding the manuscript for Princess
Victoria, the CE critical editors have "take[n] the trouble to compare them"
(the manuscripts with subsequent authoritative witnesses) and have thus
seized the "opportunity of getting an insight into the secrets of authorship."
These "secrets" enable the CE to identify Cooper's final holograph intentions,
as disclosed by the extant witnesses closest to his hand, while also preserving
those variants in subsequent witnesses which the editors deem likely to be
authorial.[16]

With respect to editorial policy for authorial final intentions, one other
issue needs to be discussed. Authors may well revise a text for audiences different
from the original one and with a different intention in mind. In such
cases, the revision could well be considered a new work whose variants should
not be conflated with the text of the first edition.

The question for Cooper thus is: when he revised earlier texts, did he
consider himself to be perfecting his initial intentions? Or was he creating
a new work as well as a new text? The best evidence on this issue is the text
he revised most in his life, The Spy. His two revisions accomplished within
months of the December 1821 first edition for the most part correct egregious
errors, which (as with Precaution) doubtless resulted from both his and the
printers' lapses. When the author returned to the work in 1831, he not only
provided much more extensive rewrites of many passages, but (as he did for
all the Bentley Standard Novels texts) he added footnotes identifying specific
historical references. His immediate audience for these notes was obviously
British, and one might argue that because of this new audience and context,
the Bentley text thus is a sufficiently different work such that its variants
should not be conflated with the text of the first edition.

However, in writing to Bentley on 14 March 1831 (L&J, 2.60-61) about
the project for the new texts for the Bentley series, Cooper emphasized continuity—rather
than an esthetic disjuncture—with the earlier texts. He called
Bentley's attention to his earlier attempts in "revising the books," which he
had already done in "[a]ll the American editions" which were "cursorily revised
down to Pilot." For Spy he looked forward in a new Preface to putting
down the claims of "an impudent rogue in America, who pretends to be the
original of the Spy . . . I should not dislike an opportunity of stating what
gave rise to the conception of the character—." Cooper's emphasis falls on
making the Bentley revisions the embodiment of his final intentions coincident
with those original objectives that failed in execution because of earlier
editions "full of errors." Arguing that "it is harder work to read these things
than it is to write them," Cooper somewhat disingenuously asked "Do the
public care enough about these things? How much will you give a volume,
or rather a book, for new prefaces, notes and hints explanatory." But Cooper
immediately added that the "new prefaces, notes and hints explanatory" must
be shared with his American audiences: "In every case, I must condition for
the privilege of giving the same notes and prefaces simultaneously to Messrs
Carey and Lea, for with me, it is a point of honor to continue rigidly as
American author."

As I have argued elsewhere,[17] Cooper's intention with the notes here is
to open up the historicity of The Spy, which was part of his initial conception.
("The task of making American Manners and American scenes is an
arduous one," but clearly one he accepted with energy as he wrote to Goodrich
when Spy was draining his imaginative energy away from Precaution;
see L&J, 1.44). In each text of Spy he revised after the first, he realized these
intentions with language of increasing precision as well as with notes explicating
his original intentions because of what, for his readers, increasingly
was becoming American recollection rather than immediate experience. But
the record shows he viewed his labors as progressively refining and clarifying

his original aims, rather than creating (as Byron clearly did) variant texts reimagined
for new audiences.

One letter from late in Cooper's life nicely captures Cooper's recognition
of his need for collaborators in the process of getting his words before his
public. Often the extant letters of Cooper's last several years disclose an
author more willing than earlier to let his guard down. These letters show
Cooper communicating with chatty, human affection to family members and
with conversational warmth to those colleagues—principally John Fagan
and, in more guarded ways, Richard Bentley—with whom years of collaboration
had yielded a measure of trust. Let me conclude with one of the
happiest examples of such letters, a mock-humorous, tongue-in-cheek but revealing
letter to the New York Typographical Society, a professional organization
that literally embodied Cooper's dependence on collaborators from the
printing shop. Writing on 5 January 1850, twenty months before his death on
14 September 1851, Cooper made his last recorded comment on his collaboration
with those professionals who saw his various inscribed final intentions
into print. Declining with regret an invitation to the annual dinner in January
1850 of the printers' society to celebrate the first career of Benjamin
Franklin, Cooper wrote:

After a long paragraph celebrating "the increasing list of American
writers"—who owe their existence in part to their collaborations with the
sponsors of the printers' dinner—Cooper assured the members of the New
York Typographical Society that

After a long career as recorded in the letters presented here of being bedeviled
by links between the author and the printer that often failed to "return

with every error corrected," Cooper's jovial salutation recognized at
last that, with respect to communicating his final intentions, author and
printer were, of necessity, "mutually necessary to each other, and the circumstance
should produce and perpetuate good feeling between us." Given the
difficulties Cooper's crabbed manuscripts and exigent but often vague demands
imposed on the society of typographers for three decades, his final
acknowledgment of mutual need was not only just but also generous.