The Redneck Riviera
Patrick Skene Catling
LOST MAN'S RIVER by Peter Matthiessen Harvill, £16.99, pp. 539 Peter Matthiessen is a distinguished American septuagenarian literary ecologist, a lot genuinely tougher and more earnest than Hemingway, yet able to perceive humour in the direst inconveniences and discomforts. Matthiessen's muscular and sensitive novels have long lamented 'despo- liation of the New World' and its original proletarian natives.
A sophisticated internationalist, educat- ed at Yale and the Sorbonne, he co-found- ed the Paris Review. Then, for three years, he worked in trawlers off Long Island, observing the evils of over-fishing and pol- lution, which he chronicled dramatically in Men's Lives (1986). Now, with Lost Man's River, he is past the middle of an elegiac trilogy set in the vanishing wilder- ness of the Florida Everglades. He has undertaken to construct a massive memori- al. The work is going very well.
He first expounded his theme in a short- er novel called Killing Mister Watson (1990), amounting to a mere 372 pages in a new paperback edition just published here. He tells the story of the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands off Florida's south- west coast in terms of the fictionalised case-history of a legendary sugarcane planter, known locally as Edgar Watson, E. Jack Watson, Colonel Watson and even Emperor Watson, whose reputation grew from that of 'cold-blooded killer' to 'folk hero'.
Early this century, the sparse population of that remote area included descendants of Indians, runaway black slaves, criminal fugitives of various colours and mulatto mixtures of all of these.' "Them boys sure appreciate their privacy," someone had said.' After a mysteriously scandalous career in South Carolina, Georgia and Oklahoma, Watson settled, more or less, on a small Florida plantation 'surrounded on three sides and more by a mangrove tangle a greased Injun couldn't slip through'.
The book begins with an account of his lynching by vigilantes and goes on with attempts to explain why his neighbours dis- approved of him. The author notes that several years of research disclosed few hard facts about Watson's life and death; however,
It is my hope and strong belief that this reimagined life contains much more of the truth of Mister Watson than the lurid and popularly accepted 'facts' of the Watson legend.
He exemplified to extremes the men of that time and place, when it was 'the Red- neck Riviera', with wilder fauna (alligators, panthers, snakes) and even more violent lawlessness than in the Far West. Though Matthiessen is nostalgic for nature in its primaeval state, he is not at all sentimental about the drifters, drunkards and murder- ers who infested it. It seems certain that Watson did some killing in his day; nobody is sure how much or with what justification, if any.
Rumours still proliferate. It has been said that when a cane-cutter, one of Watson's employees, complained at the dinner table about the way some peas were cooked, Watson took him outside, not to upset the housekeeper with a mess on the floor, and cut his throat. It has also been said that at the end of the cane-cutting season Watson was inclined to economise on pay-day by shooting the casual labour- ers. And 'when Ed Watson shot something, it stayed shot'. On the other hand, he was admired as an industrious and efficient planter and builder and an affectionate family man who always treated his wives well — the three who were legitimate and the two who weren't.
In Lost Man's River, Matthiessen follows the obsessive quest of Watson's loyal son, Lucius, to find out what his father did, what really happened to him, and why. Many years after the events in question, Lucius, in old age, travels all over the state, interrogating countless reluctant witnesses and surviving kin. The resulting portrait is realistically ambiguous.
Peter Matthiessen has achieved perfect mastery of the local redneck vernacular. The dialogue is marvellously convincing. He practises understatement against which descriptions of horrors stand out in stark relief. There are passages of quiet lyricism; and, incidentally, with sharp relevance all along the way, he preaches miniature ser- mons against the massacre of fish and game, the poisoning of the waters of the Everglades with nitrates and pesticides, and the clearances of forest for Golden Years Estates, golf courses and shopping malls. Hallelujah!
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