Creating a Killer Who’s Larger Than Life

If ever anyone has totally and thoroughly had his say about a subject, it’s Peter Matthiessen on his semi-fictional character Edgar J. Watson. Twenty years, three novels, 1,295 pages has Matthiessen devoted to the creation and deconstruction of Mr. Watson, real-life denizen of the Everglades, cane planter and farmer, hired gun, father of many, murderer of more, a man of certain charm and quick temper, an often cruel alcoholic, shot down by a gathering of friends, neighbors and sheer inevitability. But was he shot in self-defense or cold blood? From this central mystery, and his contradictory nature, rises the ectoplasm of myth.

In the first book of his trilogy, “Killing Mr. Watson,” Matthiessen conjured a man from a few bare facts, the perilous beauty of the Florida landscape and the fictitious voices of his neighbors, including those who formed the fateful posse. “Lost Man’s River” follows Watson’s son, Lucius, as he attempts to reconcile the father he loved if little knew with the coldblooded killer. In “Bone by Bone,” Matthiessen gives his creation voice--Watson narrates the story of his own life from early childhood to the final blinkings of a dying man.

It is difficult to think of another character who has received such devotion, such utter absorption from a single writer. And surely that writer, after examining this man and the forces that fed and scarred him, from every possible angle, from every possible perspective, surely he would rather do just about anything than talk about it.

Ah, but now comes the book tour. And here is Peter Matthiessen, dutifully ensconced in the Beverly Hills Four Seasons for a day and a half. Such is the love he feels for Mr. Watson. This is only his second tour, the first being for the previous book, “Lost Man’s River.” An amazing feat of abstinence, or orneriness, for the author of nine novels, including “At Play in the Fields of the Lord,” and “Far Tortuga,” and 27 nonfiction titles, including “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” and “The Snow Leopard,” which won National and American Book Awards.

“I just had a breakfast I think they’ll have to sell 10 books to justify,” he says, settling into a wrought iron chair on one of the hotel’s back patios. It is not an easy fit; Matthiessen is a big man, tall with a substantial torso and loosely strung limbs, the type of frame that one does not think capable of moving quickly until it does.

Themes of Nature, Evil,

Power, Love Explored

None of his previous works resembles in scope or detail or ambition the Watson trilogy. The nature of evil, of power, of love; the dawn of the machine age and the effect of man on environment; the dynamics of race and social status; the roots and seedlings of violence, these are just a few of the themes from which Matthiessen has woven his powerful master tapestry.

From the outside in he worked, for at the heart of it is the final book, the accounting of Watson by Watson--the furious bewilderment of the abused child, the self-fearing brutality of the emerging youth, the frustrated ambitions of the violent man grown and, finally, the jaded patience of an antihero awaiting his downfall.

“He is a legend even outside the South,” says Matthiessen, who caught wind of the tale more than 25 years ago. “My daughter-in-law, who grew up in New York, absolutely no connection to the South, when she was a little girl and wouldn’t go to bed, her parents would say to her ‘get in bed or Mr. Watson will get you.’ I’m absolutely convinced it was the same Mr. Watson. But even his son cannot believe he is guilty of the things he’s accused of.”

Legend has it that Watson killed 57 people, including Belle Starr. “Bone by Bone” is the answer to those questions raised by the first books, the most important being, why? Brutalized by his father, raised amid the ritualized barbarianism of the newly reconstructing South, Watson is unjustly branded an outlaw while still a child. And although as he matures he is aware that he is fulfilling a destiny hostile forces have willed upon him, he is unable to stop himself, unable to move beyond the stage of recognition to transformation.

Like the previous books in the trilogy, the life of “Bone by Bone,” its miraculous sensate reality, is the fruit of scrupulous, attentive research. The three books were originally written as one enormous work, which Matthiessen later broke apart and reframed. But the gathering of material, the years interviewing ancient Floridians, of watching and prowling the rivers and plains and swamps, that is work that has little to do with chapters and page numbers and story arc. Before the telling must come the knowing, and Matthiessen, like any good writer, only writes what he knows.

And he knows Mr. Watson.

“It was a challenge for me to take a man who wasn’t stupid but who was nonetheless sociopathic, and to get in his head and make him sympathetic,” says Matthiessen. “So that even if you don’t like him, you recognize the shared human condition. And he is amusing,” he adds, with almost parental indulgence, “which made the writing a bit easier.”

Like the father of a wayward child, Matthiessen clearly wants readers to like Watson, which is an ambitious desire. E.J. Watson is not only a murderer, but also a racist, a womanizer, an abusive and absentee father and a raging, often self-pitying, alcoholic. The skill with which Matthiessen gives him life, the lyrical use of dialogue and description, the overwhelming enormity of the thing draws the reader in. But like him?

“I was very pleased that in the Christian Science Monitor the reviewer used the word endearing,” Matthiessen says, “because he does never let up on himself, he is trying to understand himself. He is an unwilling murderer, he has some truly hateful sides, including a cruel streak that he is aware of.”

“He was a violent man, he was a killer. But you read about that frontier and, boy, oh, boy, taking life was extremely simple.”

Current Culture No

More or Less Violent

Not that Watson is by any means obsolete. As the term “culture of violence” dominates recent discourse, Matthiessen is of the mind that civilization has not done much to cure, or even curb, the often cruel tendencies of the human animal.

“I think this culture is just as violent as it was, but it’s gone underground,” he says. “We’re not blowing each other away in the streets as often. Even very good people, if you push their buttons, are capable of anything. And until we face that about ourselves, we’re not going to make much progress. We haven’t made any. This century’s the worst on record as far as genocide goes.”

Brutality, he says, is pervasive--Watson, he argues, could have easily been simply one more successful capitalist, if it had not been for the fatal flaw of his terrible drunken temper.

“He was who he was,” he says. “It was his nature. You do not judge the lion for acting as it does.”

The sentiment is at odds with the voice. Matthiessen has a voice of privilege, invoking the more famous sound of his friend-since-childhood, George Plimpton. Although Matthiessen has the socioeconomic pedigree to match the voice, so too can he claim a panoply of credentials more suited to wisdom: naturalist, environmentalist, human rights activist, Zen Buddhist.

It’s a lot of baggage for a man who has traveled much and light, who must come to the mangrove swamps of Florida or the peaks of the Himalayas empty-handed in order to carry away all that he finds.

“People don’t change, do they?” he says. “Society may take away some of the edges, may send some things underground but the beast is always in there somewhere.”

The beauty of Mr. Watson, is that, in defiance of legend and myth and other limitations of the timid human mind, for a few hundred pages, the beast was safe, and he was real.

Mary McNamara can be reached via e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.