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LARGER THAN LIFE, DEADER THAN DEAD

Date: June 24, 1990, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Section 7; Page 7, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By RON HANSEN; Ron Hansen is the author of the novel ''The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.'' His most recent book is ''Nebraska,'' a collection of short stories.
Lead: LEAD:
KILLING MISTER WATSON
By Peter Matthiessen.
372 pp. New York:
Random House. $21.95.
Text:

KILLING MISTER WATSON
By Peter Matthiessen.
372 pp. New York:
Random House. $21.95.

Ever since ''Wildlife in America'' appeared in 1959, and especially since ''The Snow Leopard'' won a 1978 National Book Award, Peter Matthiessen has been building up, book by book, a formidable reputation as one of the 20th century's most important wilderness writers. Whether recounting a five-month expedition to hidden parts of South America (''The Cloud Forest''), the fate of the archaic Kurelu tribe in central New Guinea (''Under the Mountain Wall''), the mysteries of East African nature and culture (''The Tree Where Man Was Born''), America's treacheries against its native peoples (''In the Spirit of Crazy Horse'' and ''Indian Country'') or the plight of Long Island commercial fishermen (''Men's Lives''), Mr. Matthiessen's persistent themes have been the honesty and beauty of the natural world, the honor of old and traditional cultures and the horrible consequences of human avarice and waste.

''At Play in the Fields of the Lord,'' his wonderful fourth novel, was the first work of fiction to inherit Mr. Matthiessen's humanitarian and wilderness concerns, setting them in a surreal fiction about the corruption of a simple tribe of Amazon Indians by hectoring missionaries and American soldiers of fortune. And in ''Far Tortuga,'' his technically innovative and haunting fifth novel, Mr. Matthiessen used the form of a book-length tone poem to commemorate the doomed traditions and hard livelihood of green-turtle fishermen in the Caribbean.

''Killing Mister Watson'' is Peter Matthiessen's sixth and most impressive novel, a fiction in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, as fiercely incisive as the work of Sinclair Lewis, a virtuoso performance that powerfully indicts the heedlessness and hidden criminality that are part and parcel of America's devotion to the pursuit of wealth, to its cult of financial success.

The book is based on the historical Edgar J. Watson (1855-1910), a hard-working, ill-educated, jolly and jingoistic American farmer and entrepreneur who lived on the western coast of the Florida Everglades roughly a hundred years ago. He talked drunkenly now and then of having killed 57 men, but was arraigned just once, in Fort Smith, Ark., in 1889, for the murder of Belle Starr, the ballyhooed ''Queen of the Outlaws.'' She'd quarreled with Edgar Watson about a land lease and, lo and behold, afterward turned up dead beside her horse with a load of turkey shot in her face. Peter Matthiessen's Watson tells his hired hand, Henry Thompson, that he escaped further prosecution because ''I had a good reputation with the merchants, quiet church-going man who paid his bills, and so the local papers took my side.''

''Here's the lesson I learned,'' Watson adds, ''and I learned it well, and it's stood me in good stead all my life: No decent American is going to believe that a man who pays his bills is a common criminal, no matter what!''

In hasty flight from the West, Edgar Watson headed southeast to the lost paradise of the Everglades, where he raised pigs, became famous for his Island Pride cane syrup and, as Henry puts it, ''sold some salt fish, took turtle eggs in season, shot gators and egrets when they was handy.'' He was, in other words, the kind of hearty community booster who, generations later, might joke at the mike at the noontime meeting of Kiwanis or the Rotary Club.

And yet, one week after the great hurricane of October 1910 wreaked havoc in the Ten Thousand Islands region of the southwestern Florida coast, Edgar J. Watson returned to his home on Chokoloskee Bay at the helm of the first motorboat ever seen in those parts and was greeted by a crowd of 20 or more island men holding shotguns and rifles. Words were exchanged, and then gunfire, and Watson ''was pretty well shot to pieces.'' ''Killing Mister Watson'' is not about what happened but why. Twelve fascinatingly different and beautifully idiomatic voices tell this tale, some inspired by Peter Matthiessen's own interviews with people who had childhood memories of the historical Watson or had heard of him from their relatives. Everything else in this skillful novel is based, as Mr. Matthiessen explains in an author's note, on a ''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, gossip, tale, and legend that has evolved over eight decades into myth.''

Henry Thompson, the hired hand who became Watson's faithful foreman, begins the history at Half Way Creek in 1892. ''We never had no trouble from Mister Watson,'' he tells us, ''and from what we seen, he never caused none, not amongst his neighbors. All the trouble come to him from the outside.'' Next to talk about Watson are Richard Hamilton, a Calusa Indian, and Bill House, a hunting guide, both of whom harvested skins and plumes for a French ornithologist named Jean Chevelier, who may have been killed by E. J. Watson and was the first to nickname him ''the Emperor . . . because of his big ambitions for the Islands.''

Little by little, the hard daily life in the Florida wilderness is filled in, and increasingly Edgar Watson comes to dominate both the Everglades landscape and the islanders' tales: slitting a rich man's throat over quitclaim rights to some high land, shooting half the handlebar off a deputy's mustache, bullying his debtors, intimidating his field hands, orating in praise of ''Free Enterprise and Progress'' and America ''bringing light to the benighted, yessirree, expanding our commerce all over the world, same way them Europeans done in Darkest Africa!'' At last, when it seems that Watson is killing his field workers just to avoid paying them, his Chokoloskee neighbors, who have been both fascinated and frightened by him, try to halt his terrorism and the violence is turned on Watson himself.

What a marvel of invention this novel is. Whether writing from the perspective of a historian, a sheriff or a postmaster's wife, Peter Matthiessen's ear is perfectly attuned to the vocabulary and cadences that give age and personality to human speech. Here, for example, is Carrie Watson, a child of Watson's second marriage, as the family is reunited after a long separation:

''I couldn't stand one bit more suspense, someone had to do something or dumb little Carrie would bust into tears! I let out a yip and darted forward, threw my arms around our Papa and hung on for dear life, hoping for the best.''

And Carrie three years later, writing in her diary from Fort Myers, just before her marriage to Walter Langford, son of T. E. Langford, one of the town's most influential businessmen: ''Before heading south, Papa took me for a walk, nodding in his courtly way to everyone we met. He is such a strong vigorous mettlesome man with his snapping blue eyes and bristling beard, stepping out smartly down Riverside Avenue with his adoring daughter on his arm, as handsomely tailored and well-groomed as any man in town.''

And 12 years later, just afterher father has been killed: ''Dear Lord, I knew this day of woe must come, and now it's here. My heart is torn by a sharp pain, this awful ache of loss and sorrow, never to be assuaged here on this earth.''

At one point, Mamie Smallwood, wife of the postmaster at Chokoloskee, remarks, ''Say what you like about Mister Watson, he looked and acted like our idea of a hero.'' And if he was hot-tempered and paranoid and seemed, at times, a psychopath, that was only to be expected, claims the fictional historian whose research intersects these pages, ''in a period when making one's own law was the custom in backcountry America - and even, one might well observe, a philosophical foundation of the national policy that condoned high-handed seizure of the Spanish colonies and other territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.''

Aggressive and gregarious, without ethics or introspection, both hugely talented and dangerously addicted to untamed power, Edgar Watson finally seems to represent great potential gone awry, or America at its worst. Exploratory and exciting, handsomely researched and written, attuned to the necessary preservation of the heart and soul of the world, ''Killing Mister Watson'' represents Peter Matthiessen at his best.

SHOTS IN THE SWAMP

Seen through the broken branches, in the onshore wind, the launch coasts down on Smallwood's landing. . . . Ted's heart pounds so that the boatman must surely feel it and take warning, must sense the islanders in the dark trees. . . .

A suck and wash as the bow wave slaps ashore. Time stops, spun upward in a vortex. . . . The boat stem crunches old dead mollusks. Silence. . . . A quiet greeting, an exchange of voices. The men drift forward, spreading out along the water. Smallwood gasps for breath. With the day of reckoning unbearably deferred, the postmaster's relief is mixed, without elation.

Soon Mamie and her friend venture outside. They talk and smile to ease their nerves, starting down the little slope toward the water.

A twig snaps and the twilight stiffens. A hard shift, the whip crack of a shot, two shots together. There is time for an echo, time for a high shriek, before the last evening of the old days in the Islands flies apart in a volley of wild fire.

From ''Killing Mr. Watson.''