One of the first self-editing lessons I give my writing students is on sentence fluency and word count. I tell them that if all the sentences have an even number of words it’s like singing a song in monotone quarter notes. Variety is the spice of life. Right? Sentence length assists in the tone and rhythm of the writing. Short sentences can leave the reader breathless where as long, effusive, effluvial, winding, redundant sentences, which of course are an author’s privilege if s/he should so choose, can have a most off-putting, disturbing, or daunting impact on an otherwise enthusiastic reader. Now what was I talking about? Oh yeah, sentence fluency. I randomly selected a sentence from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and counted the words. Can you guess? Seventy-one! Now maybe he just wanted to show off his aptitude for semi-colons; I agree with Mark Twain, however, that an author shall “eschew surplusage,” “Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it,” and “employ a simple and straightforward style” (Twain 2). Instead of:
“I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren’t deny that I am genuine white,” the scout replied, surveying, with secret satisfaction, the faded colour of his bony and sinewy hand; “and I am willing to own that my people have many ways, of which, as an honest man, I can’t approve” (Cooper 487).
Cooper could have written, 'Hawk-eye responded, “I’m white, but I’m not prejudice.”' Although, Cooper’s convoluted journey to his point may be the deer path away from the real truth. Seems to me Hawk-eye is prejudice based on his “secret satisfaction” in his “genuine white” “sinewy hand.” Genuine implies pure, which implies the other (i.e. red skin Natives) as impure, thus insinuating a prejudicial racial hierarchy. Shades of Aryan? Although Hawk-eye has many Indian friends, he is opposed to interracial marriage and would just as soon kill an Iroquois who accused him of being bi-racial.
And what’s with “vaunts himself”? Clearly an offense to Twain’s rule number 13: “Use the right word, not its second cousin” (Twain 2). “I’m not one to brag,” Natty Bumppo remarked. This would be more in keeping with Twain’s rule number seven, which states that the characters must be consistent in their vernacular and diction. Four paragraphs previous to the offensive paragraph above, the white man speaks like an Indian in a Lone Ranger movie, “Your fathers came from the setting sun, crossed the big river…and mine came from the red sky of the morning.” You West/me East- Kemosabe! Meanwhile, his Indian friend speaks like a refined English gentleman, “Is there no difference, Hawk-eye, between the stone-headed arrow of the warrior, and the leaden bullet with which you kill?”(Cooper 487). Cooper wants us to know that Natty ain’t no bimbo bumpkin when it comes to the Native tongue, that he is more peachy-pink than white, which makes him closer to red, “…he said, speaking in the tongue which was known to all the natives who formerly inhabited the country between the Hudson and the Potomack, and of which we shall give a free translation for the benefit of the reader; endeavouring, at the same time , to preserve some of the peculiarities, both of the individual and of the language” [wordcount=59 or 69 if you add the beginning of that sentence] (Cooper 487). Eschew! By the way, I wonder, did Cooper know there were over 500 different languages spoken by tribes in the continental US at the time?
Cooper, James Fenimore. “The Last of the Mohicans.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton. 2013. 482-491. Print.
Twain, Mark. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Virginia.edu. Mark Twain in His Times, 2012. Web. 5 Sept. 2016. http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
