Honor: James Gray Watson, 1939–2010

Abstract

Honor. James Gray Watson, 1939-2010 Photo from the Watson family collection. Jim Watson did not originally intend to be a university professor and a Faulknerian, but a combination of events during his undergraduate career at Bowdoin College led him away from the family path to medicine. He never got over it, and he never tired oftalking about it, but, as Faulkner said in the mother lode of self-commentary in the Jean Stein interview, Yoknapatawpha County enabled him “to use whatever talent [he] might have to the absolute top,” and Jim acted according to a similar proposition that the study of Faulkner brought out the best that was in him, and enabled him to use his own best talents as well (LG 255). Throughout his career, Jim sought the companionship of like­ minded students and colleagues. He found, over time, a myriad company of them, and he took his place among their myriad company. After Bowdoin, Jim earned an MA and PhD in English at his native city’s University of Pittsburgh, found his lifetime job at Tulsa University, and set­ tled in to teach and write. In Tulsa, he lived what became his retrospective motto—“one wife, one house, one job.” Early on, he published The Snopes Dilemma (1970) finding, in the fashion of the time, a moral and humanistic unity of subject in the trilogy. He taught a wide range of American literature courses, began to deliver papers and publish articles, and arrived at Ole Miss for the “Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha” conference, joining the storied class of 1979, a group of young scholars and teachers who have been productively and collegially associated with one another ever since. A few years later, responding to Evans Harrington’s call for essays on “New Directions” in Faulkner studies, Jim returned to the platform at Oxford, delivering an impressive essay on the largely unnoticed letters in The Sound and the Fury. This marked the beginning of a long-term project that included Letters and Fictions (1987) and new material from Faulkner’s unpublished 85 letters in Thinking ofHome: William Faulkner’s Letters to His Mother and Fa­ ther, 1918-1925 (1992), both of which contribute to our understanding of the interpenetration of Faulkner’s life and art. He meditated and discoursed on this vast subject even more ambitiously in his last book, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance (2000). In addition to writing books and articles, Jim presented papers at con­ ferences near and far, served his department and university in many exem­ plary ways, and played a competitive game of tennis. In the classroom, he was elegant, calm, and demanding, leading his students of all levels to take the work as seriously as he did, and to have a little fun with it along the way. He brought many of his Faulkner colleagues into his classes, giving his students direct experience with the wider scholarly world. At conferences, including regional South Central MLA meetings and international conferences in Ox­ ford, Rome, and beyond, Jim came first to stand and deliver his conclusions on the subject of the moment, and, afterward, to discuss and argue over a meal and a drink. Between scotch and nothing, he always chose scotch. Immediate expert treatment helped him to avoid most ofthe debilitating consequences of a stroke. In the end, it didn’t slow him down too much, but he took it as a sign to retire. So he organized one last Faulkner seminar for the Spring of 2010, proposing to investigate the larger shapes and textures of Faulkner’s career, beginning with the great novels, and again featuring guest appearances by several of his friends in Faulkner studies. A little way into the semester, however, he learned that he had inoperable cancer. He went on with the seminar as long as he could, and his colleagues finished the term for him. But that seminar is never over, those questions are never definitively answered, that “Last Lecture” he had hoped to deliver is never given, and, he knew those things too. Jim believed not only that each of his individual projects ought “to have a design,” but also that the whole sum and substance of...