Into the Wild and Woolly

NAKED IN THE WOODS

Joseph Knowles and the Legacy of Frontier Fakery

By Jim Motavalli

Da Capo. 352 pp. $26.95

When you review a book every week for more than a couple of decades, you're bound to run into a wacky one or two, but "Naked in the Woods" stands in a class by itself. The subject matter is wacky -- no other word for it; the scholarship, though extensive, is deeply uneven and strange; and the structure and organization make the book seem put together in a funhouse hall of mirrors.

It's hard to know how to approach this nonfiction account of Joe Knowles, Maine hunter, trapper and all-around woodsman, who, as part of a publicity stunt sponsored by the Boston Post in 1913, decided to go into Maine's Dead River wilderness clad only in an athletic supporter. With no tools or supplies of any kind, he promised to stay there for two solid months and then emerge "sufficiently clothed to walk the city streets." He was 43, out-of-shape, chubby. He planned to send the paper progress reports written with charcoal on birch bark. There is a photo of him, white, plump and madly naked, shaking hands with a group of journalists, woodsmen and well-wishers just before he goes in, looking as peculiar as can be.

Knowles stayed in the woods two months and came out on the Canadian side of the border wearing a bearskin shirt and deerskin leggings. He'd lost 30 pounds, he was tan and reeking, and for some reason America went wild about the man. He'd killed the bear, he said, by trapping it in a pit and clubbing it to death. He'd wrestled the deer in hand-to-hoof combat. He'd lived off berries and bugs and fish. He'd proven that a naked man could exist in the wilderness by his wits and skills.

This happened at about the time of Tarzan and Teddy Roosevelt and manly men everywhere, but the author suggests that the driving force behind the national celebration of Knowles was America's anxiety about the loss of the frontier, and who's to say no to that?

Knowles went on a national vaudeville tour afterward. He made fire onstage by rubbing two sticks together. But soon a reporter from a rival newspaper interviewed everyone he could get his hands on in the Maine wilderness and revealed that Knowles was a fraud, that he'd lived on baked beans and other canned goods and slept in a cozy cabin. Knowles hotly denied all this!

Then he was over on the other coast, on the Oregon-Washington border, bound and determined to go into the woods again. This time he would be sponsored by the San Francisco Examiner and supervised by Thomas Waterman of the University of California, an associate of Alfred Kroeber, the academic sponsor of an American Indian named Ishi, the last of his tribe, who would be written about by Theodora Kroeber, wife of Alfred and mother of distinguished fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin. (And if you think I digress, this is only a pinpoint compared with the massive digressions that occur in this book -- lengthy, luxurious discussions of Ishi, Frederick Jackson Turner, Buffalo Bill, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and the extended family of Oscar Hammerstein, and that's not the half of it.)

While 200,000 people had gathered in Boston to greet Knowles when he returned from his first expedition, his western jaunt (which lasted only a month) was relegated to the middle pages of the newspaper, because the world had the bad taste to be gearing up for World War I. The public just wasn't interested in the story of a man surviving naked in the woods, although Waterman and other experts guaranteed he was the real thing. Motavalli tells us that Knowles appeared for one performance on the vaudeville stage with Ishi, who was more successful than he at making fire. Then come more digressions -- into subjects such as eugenics and a lady who claimed to be 160 years old.

Knowles kept on wanting to return to the woods. He wrote a screen treatment about going into the wilderness on an island off the coast of Mazatl¿n and proposed a film based on it to an "S. Lesser," who, the author says, "seems to have vanished into the mists of history," although Sol Lesser was making scores of Tarzan films about that time and his family survives as Hollywood aristocracy today. Motavalli also rather meanly critiques the screen treatment, complaining, for instance, "What's with those deer breaking out of a thicket?" In fact, deer were and probably still are plentiful in the jungle around Mazatl¿n.

By this point, the narrative is so uneven that when Motavalli (still on the subject of the movies) writes that "the name Ince doesn't mean all that much today," you want to snarl back, "Maybe not in the Maine woods, pal!" Then Knowles gets involved in another cinematic attempt to go into the woods, this time with starlet Elaine Hammerstein, relative of Oscar, a project that lasts about two minutes because Elaine has the good sense to drop out, but the author's off and running with the Hammersteins -- pages and pages on them -- and he adds long footnotes on whom Elaine married and how she died on a road south of Tijuana and was buried in a Catholic cemetery, suggesting that she had converted to that faith.

Knowles lived the rest of his life in a driftwood cabin by the Pacific, pontificating about the virtues of the wilds and becoming a good regional artist. But you have to wonder about the point of "Naked in the Woods." This is one of those times when a writer's most dreaded question, "Who cares?," would seem to pertain.

Sunday in Book World

* Manil Suri's "The Age of Shiva."

* James McBride's "Song Yet Sung."

* "The Invention of Everything Else."

* The world goes bananas.

* And Lincoln celebrates a birthday.