Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper and parallels with golf course architecture

Some cerebral literature today (it’s been that kind of week – first archaeology and golf, now literature and golf).

When you live in NYC and ride the subway for half an hour a day, you devour two books a week. I read a wide variety to help hone my writing, frequently reading what good writers have to say about other writers. Try this, you pick up great tips by osmosis.

Being a colonial history major at Trinity College in CT, on an impulse, I bought James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. It’s a fun, if clunky read, as 1826 prose will be.

At the end of the book, lo! and behold! (the punctuation there is correct by the way) there is a critique of Cooper written in 1895 by no less a personage than Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain (or is that Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, I never can remember…for those of you scoring at home it’s the former. Just let me have my little Shackelfordesque joke…) It’s in a piece he wrote called Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses. It has great tips about writing, but it could also apply to modern day golf course architecture.

Twain writes:

Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some sweet things
with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifaces for his Indians and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other…and was never so happy as when he was working these….A favorite was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a mocassined enemy and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of mocassins working that trick.

Author’s note – note the excellent joke: “Cooper wore out barrels and barrels…” A “cooper” is a barrel maker, so Twain has this barrel maker wearing out barrels! Anyway, Twain continues:

He prized the broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the enemy Indians or White Men for two hundred yards….Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute [Author’s Note: A thousand dollars given modern currency] he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

Another editors interruption:  Twain has a lotta nerve saying that because he’s just as guilty.  Almost every Twain novel has some version of characters getting into disguises and then getting into trouble; they look as though their goose is cooked until they are saved at the last minute in some valorous rescue.  Two kids switch places with each other, the King and the Yankee disguise themselves as peasants, the prince and the pauper, he wears out a barrel full of moccasins just like Cooper, so either the pot is calling the kettle black, Twain had some quirky dislike of Cooper that we’ll never know, or Twain was simply trying to sell more books.  Nevertheless, as my mom would say “he’s one to talk…”
Anyway, Twain ends the review with this scathing, but important observation:

Cooper’s word sense was singularly dull….When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is [like music sung or played off key] a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he does not say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word musician. his ear was satisfied with the approximate words.

ON WRITING

Ignoring that Twain belittled a man who was the bedrock foundation of frontier adventure, Twain notes what Ernest Hemingway later quoted of him about word choice: “The right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” To that end, the late, great sportswriter Grantland Rice always carried a pocket Thesaurus wherever he went so that he never used the same adjective in the same piece. The “granite grey” sky at the beginning of one of his gripping stories was a “leaden slate” at the end.

ON GOLF COURSE ARCHITECTURE

Now re-read Twain’s piece and substitute the name of any one of a number of golf course architects for Cooper’s and substitute their typical design features for Cooper’s literary motifs (that’s what the story line tricks are called).

One prominent and excellent architect once told me he only had between 24 and 27 golf holes. Another said he looked at the land, then ran for a book of great holes to see what could be re-created. Charles Blair Macdonald’s masterpiece at National Golf Links of America could technically be called a pastiche (albeit the best ever) as it was an encyclopaedia of the best holes he saw in the UK. The Cape, Redan, Alps, Short, Eden, Long and others lay the template for many of the holes of Dye, Doak, Silva and our other revered great modern architects.

Here’s why I bring it up. Several people have criticized Jim Engh for repeated variations on a theme – for example punchbowls, sidewalls and muscle bunkers. Yes, you could put his name and tricks in there,but you could insert Jones (runway tees, cloverleaf bunkers and forced carries), Nicklaus (high fade shots, aerial attack), Coore and Crenshaw (minimalist features), Doak, Fazio or any architect.

That’s a trap for an architect. They use what works and what what resonates with the person who hires them next. Yet so long as a) the client is happy; b) the holes are based on solid design principles; and c) the course is interesting, challenging and reveals new secrets every time it’s played, let’s not nit-pick.

Twain was brilliant – one for the ages. Yet here he was hypercritical. Not everybody is trying to be Shakespeare. As time showed, Cooper was certainly not lowest common denominator and although his mastery of words was short of Twain’s, he made up for it by painting history for us. The same is true of golf courses. Their true test is whether they resonate across the decades. There is room for wondrous variety and room for a man to find his niche and pursue it to the highest form it can reach.

Pic: Heroes Hawkeye and Chingachgook battle the bloodthirsty and traitorous Indian renegade Magua and his Huron allies to see their charges to safety of a British fort.