I have been exploring caves in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky for over fifty years. The Mammoth Cave System is now more than 365 miles long, and will probably reach 500 miles.
THE LONGEST CAVE (written with Roger W. Brucker, published in 1976 by Alfred A. Knopf) has never been out of print. Roger and I fancy that it never will be out of print as long as there are people who read adventure books.
My novels and, as far as that goes, all my books, are grounded in obsessions. UNDER PLOWMAN'S FLOOR is about caving; THE RUNNER running; and NIAGARA the passion to do something no one else has ever done: to be the first to walk across Niagara Falls on a high wire, and the first to go over the Falls in a barrel. These are philosophical novels, but they are absolutely non-didactic.
The translation of NIAGARA into French led to my being invited to the Saint-Malo Etonnants Voyageurs Festival International du Livre in 1997, where an award was given to its French translator, Jacques Chabert. That was year the Montana writers were invited to the festival, and I rode on the train from Paris to Saint-Malo in a seat beside William Kittredge, who told me what a fine place Missoula, Montana is for writers. The result of that conversation is that Pat and I now live and write in a passive solar earth house bordering the Lolo National Forest on a mountain slope above Missoula.--Richard "Red" Watson, "Autobiography"
Eric Brown informed me that Red Watson died September 19, 2019.
Red Watson taught me to write. In the Summer of 2003, I arrived, with a freshly minted PhD, in St. Louis after a glorious year at Wesleyan. I was struggling on the job market and with journal editors and their referees. I spent two unhappy years in St. Louis.
While there, I learned from Larry May that it might help to 'situate' my papers 'in the literature' in the first footnote(s). I learned from Red to cut 30% of the word-count and improve clarity. I arrived in town with one publication. I left with eight acceptances, and a tenure track job in a wonderful department (Syracuse). Red insisted I should keep sending him my draft papers. He would use his pencil simply deleting sentences and sentence fragments, revealing, like a sculptor chipping away marble, the underlying thought to my astonished eyes.
Once, he felt I needed an extra scolding:
Remind me to attack you for your picking up contemporary misuse of the word 'share'. A share is like a piece of pie. Keep this story in mind. A woman of my acquaintance was asked if she would like to share her telephone number. "Why I'd be delighted," she said. "Which digit would you like to have?"
At one point, long after we stopped expecting to see each other again, he complained that I had stopped sending him draft chapters. (By that time I was a father and a research professor.) I explained I had stopped because he had made such a point of complaining about the email connection in the library. (This was 2010.) He responded by sending me his (snail) mail address in Missoula.
Red was proud of his wife (Patty Jo Watson, a world class scientist) and daughter, his writing (fiction and philosophical), and his students--in that order. He was the first professional philosopher I met who presented himself as a writer. For many years, he tried to enlist me as an agent to get his quirky Descartes biography translated and published into Dutch. No professional failure has weighted more on me.
When he was not talking about spelunking or his better half, Red understood himself as a student of Popkin, and he belonged to that pioneering group of historians of philosophy who used archives to help shape philosophical understanding. I didn't think of him of as analytic philosopher, although at times I thought of him as the last living logical positivist. He helped contribute to the polemical atmosphere in the WashU department.
In 2005, Red authored (with Harry Bracken) a "few paragraphs" which "are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him." In 463 words they were able to convey the significance of Richard Popkin's life and scholarship.
One of our last exchanges (in 2010) was about the title of a book manuscript, Descartes and Pascal: Faith And Reason. I expressed surprise at the coupling. He explained:
Descartes is the man of faith (so unworried) and Pascal is the man of reason (so worried to death).
Thanks for this. I never met Prof. Watson but found his little book Writing Philosophy: a guide to professional writing and publishing enormously helpful when I was a graduate student. Among other things, he provides a paragraph by paragraph analysis and critique of one of his own published papers. He gives himself an A-minus/B-plus and concludes "It is a good paper, but it is very repetitive, and lacks careful consideration of the question of knowledge of general ideas as compared with knowledge of particular things." His personality shines throughout all his writing advice.
Posted by: Chris Stephens | 09/30/2019 at 10:33 PM