The Bravo by James Fenimore Cooper (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Bravo by James Fenimore Cooper
• Matthew Redmond (bio)

The Bravo
james fenimore cooper
SUNY Press, 2023 482 pp.

When was the last time James Fenimore Cooper had a moment? The answer might be 1992, when Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans gave us Daniel Day-Lewis as a smoldering young version of Cooper's wonderfully crusty character Natty Bumppo. If that's the case, it has been too long. Today even Cooper's most influential novels—The Spy (1821), The Pioneers (1823), The Red Rover (1827)—are more gestured at than rigorously read, while the lesser lights seldom attract even a passing glance. The Bravo, his 1831 novel about political corruption in eighteenth-century Venice, is among the unnoticed. It is also among the latest of Cooper's works to benefit from the SUNY Press treatment, as that publisher works to deliver "sound scholarly editions of Cooper's major works, based wherever possible on authorial manuscripts" (wjfc.org).

Granting that all of Cooper's works might merit a certain kind of interest just by being his, it seems reasonable to ask what specifically we gain by livening up The Bravo's afterlife with a new edition. Certainly, this novel marks a sea change in Cooper's career, as the first of only three novels that he set in Europe. Cooper had left the United States in 1826, and, like innumerable tourists before and since, he found in Italy's culture and history tinder for the imagination. The result is a novel that centers on Jacopo Frontoni, a young man pressed into serving the Venetian government that has unjustly imprisoned his father. In his search for liberty, Frontoni must navigate a power structure as fluid and murky as the canals' waters. His suffering serves as an indictment of the demagogue-infected republic whose bottoming out, the narrator assures us every so often, will come [End Page 513] not too many decades hence. In fact, the independent Venice of this novel would succumb to Napoleon in 1797 and to Austria in 1815.

For some people, the boon of travel is a clearer perspective on life back home. Getting out of the United States set Cooper's mind only more firmly on his country's problems, even as it widened his perspective on how some of those problems persist across both epochs and oceans. In his send-up of the Venetian government and its failure to represent the best interests of the citizenry, we observe a trenchant critique of Jacksonian democracy. But the novel also represents more deep-seated political concerns. First published in 1831, The Bravo can be situated in a swirl of US cultural productions from the 1830s that were grappling with the subject of the country's long-term prospects. The same question that painter Thomas Cole poses in his The Course of Empire series, Cooper implicitly asks with this novel, How can an American republic expect to remain both coherent and incorrupt into the far future, especially when the rubble of so many great republics, like Rome, litters history's pages? While it revels in the exoticism of its setting, The Bravo never ceases to sound like a kind of field experiment conducted for US eyes. Through the heavy fog of Cooper's Venice and behind its endless moldering columns, one glimpses the Capitol building still under construction.

The editors at SUNY Press have delivered a beautiful and imposing volume that wears its scholarly scruples on its sleeve. The introduction, contributed by eminent Americanist Kay Seymour House, reveals Cooper's values and priorities throughout the composition process, making incisive use of his correspondence and the testimony of his zigzagging course across Europe. Besides an extensive and fascinating "Textual Commentary" section, the novel boasts an appendix titled "The Manuscript and Its Transcription," which details some of the challenges of the editorial process, including Cooper's not-terribly-decipherable hand, his inconsistent use of Italian forms, and his inconvenient habit of gluing revised text on fresh paper over canceled passages. As for the overall presentation, one could perhaps take issue with the spoiler on the novel's dust jacket, but not remotely with the cover illustration...