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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Peter Matthiessen is a naturalist, political activist, travel writer and novelist whose thirty-plus books and broadsides range from Shore Birds of North America (1967) to his defense of Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983); from his spiritual quest in The Snow Leopard (1978) to the portrait of commercial ocean haul seiners in Men's Lives (1986). A cofounder of the Paris Review with Harold Hume, he is the author of nearly two hundred articles and essays, two dozen short stories and eight novels, the last three of which--Killing Mister Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999)--imaginatively reconstruct the life and times of the nineteenth-century pioneer farmer and desperado Edgar J. Watson, born in 1855 in Edgefield County, South Carolina, and shot to death by a posse of his neighbors at Chokoloskee in Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, October 24, 1910. (1) Killing Mister Watson opens with a poetic Prologue set on the day Watson is killed, and closes with a diary entry describing his burial a week later. Forty-two chapters narrated in the first person by people who knew or knew of E.J. Watson form the body of the book with fifteen contrapuntal excerpts from a letter about him by a purportedly objective Florida historian. The second volume, Lost Man's River, tells the story of Watson's son Lucius, himself a historian and would-be biographer, who journeys back to the Watson Place at Chatham Bend in 1962 to find the truth about his father's life and death. Bone by Bone is Watson's own account of his life and the loss of it in which he expands upon, corrects, and occasionally contradicts the first two books. At 1,300 published pages the Watson Trilogy is the most extended of Matthiessen's fictions and the most accomplished. Given his long-time obsession with E.J. Watson, and the twenty-year period of its composition, it may also be artistically the most personal.
Peter Matthiessen is the persistently self-presenting protagonist of much of his nature writing, a "celebrant in mourning" (2) describing the creatures and peoples encountered on his travels and speaking out against devastation of the disappearing wilderness. In many ways, the Matthiessen Collection reveals that he is a manifest presence in the trilogy, as well. He heard the story of the killing as a boy from his father, and of the forsaken Watson Place on the Chatham River. The novels he so broadly conceived from that story were a long time in coming. As the writing a writer knows best is his own, so the evolution of the trilogy during the 1980s and 1990s was influenced by the recurring subjects and themes of previous and ongoing work, most of it nonfiction, and by the forms of expression he found suited to narratives in which he had described the slaughter of plover and curlew, the dispossession of traditional peoples, and the workaday privations of Long Island surf- and bay-fishermen. (3) It was shaped, as well, of course, by his knowledge of southwest Florida and by the experience of researching E. J. Watson's life there--not alone by the facts and legends he uncovered in his travels but by the very doing of the research, and in the doing the discovery of the form such a story might (and might not) take. Manuscripts and other records now in the Peter Matthiessen Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center document in considerable detail his dedication to the project during its long coming into being. The Preliminary Inventory of the collection lists "numerous typescript drafts, galleys, page proofs, holograph notebooks, scrapbooks, correspondence, articles, reviews, slides and photographs" from 1958 to 1997. Of the seventy-nine archive boxes, twenty-five are devoted to the trilogy and more is to come. In these materials we can read Matthiessen's developing realization of Watson as a mythical figure on the last American frontier and his interrogation and rejection of "history" as an unsuitable mode for representing him. "I don't want this confused with a 'historical novel,'" he insists, "with its simulated 'reality'." (4) The imaginative forms he adopted in its place better suit what he called his "reimagining" such a man in and through his own place and time and across generations; the extensive rewriting and revision this work necessitated are evidence of the demanding standards he set. The Matthiessen Collection maps this composition history and the complex creative process by which the three books came to be. It traces, as well, the ways and the extent to which Peter Matthiessen came literally to be in them. Asked if the trilogy is his magnum opus, he told the Paris Review interviewer Howard Norman in 1999, "You said that, not me. But certainly it draws together in one work the themes that have absorbed me all my life--the pollution of land and air and oceans, the obliteration of wilderness and the wild creatures, not to mention the more defenseless members of our own species, in particular the traditional peoples left stranded by the long-term cruelty and stupidity of what passes for progress and democracy, especially among businessmen and politicians." (5)
I. The Collection
The first challenge of the Matthiessen Collection is to reconstruct both the paths by which Peter Matthiessen came to know E.J. Watson--the man and the character--and the means by which he came to portray him. This is complicated, at present, by the paucity of dated materials and the accordant difficulty of establishing a chronological sequence from the large number of manuscripts and photocopies: the collection is as yet uncatalogued and is arranged in the order received. (6) The archive of the initial, 1996 accession from which Killing Mister Watson emerged and Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone were drafted comprises one hundred separate files of materials compiled and written between 1984 and 1994 (Boxes 21-37). These include, notably, two holograph notebooks, many typed pages of early interviews, impressions and queries, and outlines and drafts of the eight- and then ten-part novel Matthiessen originally conceived. Of the numerous outlines in the collection, a fully detailed one dated September 1, 1989, is the first in which Killing Mister Watson is a complete and separate book. It is followed by the heavily revised setting copy of Killing Mister Watson and two successive galleys, likewise revised, the last dated 1990. An "Uncorrected First Draft of Book II" titled "Killing Mister Watson / [Lost Man's River] / Book II" is dated January 1, 1990; later trial manuscripts in which Books II and III are combined in various ways include a late 1994 typescript of a contrapuntal novel consisting of ten alternating chapters in which Book II is printed on white and Book III on blue paper. The first one hundred files of material on the trilogy contain some 14,000 sheets of typescript, much of it bearing penciled revisions in Matthiessen's hand. Nine other boxes from the second accession in 2000 contain four more complete drafts of Lost Man's River written from 1994 to 1997, each with significant revisions. This mass of interrelated manuscript gives the clearest possible evidence of Matthiessen's obsession with Mr. Watson and of the problems he encountered in the fictional representation of an actual man in his historic time and place. "A man still known in his community as E.J. Watson," he writes in the Author's Note to the trilogy, "has been 'reimagined' from the few hard 'facts'--census and marriage records, dates on gravestones, and the like. All the rest of the popular record is a mix of rumor, tale, and legend that has evolved over eight decades into myth." From the outset he was concerned to distinguish fiction from history. "The book is in no way 'historical,'" he says in the Author's Note," since almost nothing here is history. On the other hand, there is nothing that could not have happened--nothing inconsistent, that is, with the very little that is actually on record." (7)
Manuscript drafts repeatedly turn to this issue, often in passages that are recognizably personal. Matthiessen essentially is musing on his own experience and practice, for example, in a fictional letter dated April 10, 1971. Written for an early version of Lost Man's River, the draft letter addresses a Mr. Watkins: "I have been intrigued, almost obsessed, by this strange man for thirty years," the unnamed historian writes, "and very nearly took time out from my dry studies to write a book about him. But I discovered that the 'truth' about someone now a half-century dead is not easy to come by.... Watson remains a mythic figure to this day." (8) According to a manuscript note (Box 21.1b), the letter writer originally was modeled on historian Dr. Charlton W. Tebeau, who accompanied the novelist to interviews in southwest Florida and whose published histories are cited in the dedication to Killing Mister Watson. In the archive the unnamed Tebeau evolved through a series of named and anonymous characters into Watson's son Lucius. A fisherman in actual life, the Lucius of Lost Man's River is a seventy-three year old historian, author of the invented History of Southwest Florida that Matthiessen cites as a source and quotes at length in Killing Mister Watson (KMW, 21; 110-13). Here fiction validates fiction. Such reflexivity is characteristic of the Watson Trilogy, which in many ways is about the processes of its own creation and composition. At one point in the collection, the historian of the letters Matthiessen called "BIOs" cautions that "As soon as one ventures beyond the meager record, one is no longer an historian but a story-teller" (Box 27.1d). In such passages he not only was interrogating the traditional limits of historical writing but investigating the elasticity of the legendary "histories" that his novel incorporates and aims to transcend.
The ongoing dialogue with himself became in the course of the writing a working aesthetic. The historian laments in the BIO-letters that "our journalists and amateur historians, with their horror of original research, have been all too content to recycle the old myths every few years (see bibliography attached), being too incurious and lazy and penurious to verify the facts, far less research their subject's critical years in South Carolina, northern Florida, and the Indian Territory of Oklahoma" (Box 21.1a). Matthiessen's own original research took him to each of these places and he developed his own reliable bibliography of works about them. The historian likewise complains of the "great difficulty of locating old records in a region which in Mr. Watson's day was little more than frontier wilderness, with meager literacy" (Box 21.1a); of the manifestly romantic representations of Watson in contemporary books such as Hell on the Border, where he is identified as the man who killed Belle Starr; and of "the stubborn reluctance to correct the record on the part of the subject's descendants" (Box 21.1a)--all of which freed the storyteller to reimagine Watson on his own terms from the historical "live man of blood and brain who took up a real place 'getting and spending' in the world" (Box 21.1a). As his reading and interviews...
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