Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen’s obsessions continue.

Though the Sagaponack, New York-based writer this year published Bone by Bone, the third in a trilogy of novels exploring the life and death of legendary Florida badman E. J. Watson, he confessed recently that he is still not quite finished with the story — and the man — he has wrestled with through two decades of research and writing.

This sort of prolonged focus might seem odd in a writer of Matthiessen’s restless agility and grace. A co-founder of The Paris Review in 1951, he has since then explored the roughest country on five continents, worked as a commercial fisherman and charter boat captain, and won a purse-net full of literary prizes for his novels, short stories, and essays. Known primarily for his intelligent nonfiction chronicling the increasing fragility of the natural world and the plights of indigenous peoples (The Snow Leopard, winner of a 1979 National Book Award; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse; The Tree Where Man Was Born), Matthiessen has also produced several uncommonly evocative novels — including the first and second installments of the Watson saga, Killing Mister Watson and Lost Man’s River, published in 1990 and 1997, respectively.

E. J. Watson was a real if paradoxical person, an Everglades farmer, family man, and reputed mass murderer whose identity has been subsumed by myth. Bone by Bone ends where any account of him must. It is historical fact that E. J. Watson died on a Florida beach in October of 1910, killed by gunfire from at least a dozen of his neighbors and former friends. As one of the murderers in Killing Mister Watson recollects: “His coat and shirt jumped, buffeted by lead, the whack of a man’s life being knocked out of him. His gun stock splintered, his revolver spun away. I seen his mouth yank, saw red jump out where his left eye burst, and still he fell.”

The Watson trilogy is Matthiessen’s best work not only for its scope and sustained inquiry but also because it deals simultaneously with most of his favorite themes: the dynamic of man and environment, the sad quadrille of racial conflict, the potential of each of us for sudden, sickening violence. Given these recurrent ideas, maybe it’s not so strange that he has recently declared he’s not quite through with the story even yet, that he longs to see the series published in what he calls its “true form,” as a single, somewhat shorter novel.

Matthiessen is no stranger to the city. A longtime amateur naturalist, he has guided trips for local ornithological impresario Victor Emanuel and has lectured at the University of Texas. In addition, some 67 boxes of his letters and manuscripts are held by the University’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Happy to return to Texas, Matthiessen was especially pleased to learn that the Legislature has created an annual César Chavez Day; the author knew Chavez well, wrote about him in Sal Si Puedes: César Chavez and the New American Revolution early in his career, and still calls him the “greatest Californian of our time.”

Despite the violence that flashes through much of his fiction, Matthiessen in person is doggedly constructive, eminently rational. He speaks tirelessly on environmental matters (most recently on a BBC-produced program at London’s Royal Festival Hall), and over the summer completed the text for Tigers in the Snow, a nonfiction book focusing on the Siberian tiger, to be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux next February. Only occasionally does exasperation with what he calls humanity’s “extraordinary apathy” in the face of problems like global warming seep into his voice. “We’re so busy being consumers that we don’t have time to be citizens,” he says.

This article appears in November 5 • 1999.