Oakley Hall: OK Corral meets Arthurian joust

Oakley Hall, novelist and professor, died yesterday, Monday May 12 at his home in Nevada City, California. Rebel Girl studied with him way back when in the program he founded, the MFA fiction program at UC Irvine, and then came to work with him at the Community of Writers conference at Squaw Valley. He was dear to her in many ways.

His novel, Warlock, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 and was recently reissued by the New York Review of Books with a foreword by Robert Stone. It's a western, yes, but a western written by a man who fought in WWII and came home and saw the rise of McCarthyism and began to write this book. Oakley and Rebel Girl would often talk about which era was worse for America: McCarthy or Bush. Oakley would say that he couldn't imagine anything worse than McCarthy - but had to sadly concede that recent times under Bush had surpassed that. Here's an excerpt:

From Warlock, chapter 67: Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture:

It is four in the morning by my watch. Mine is the only light I can see, the scratching of my pen the only sound. Here astride the dull and rusty razor's edge between midnight and morning, I am sick to the bottom of my heart. Where is Buck Slavin's bright future of faith, hope and commerce? What is it even worth, after all? For if men have no worth, there is none anywhere. I feel very old and I have seen too many things in my years, which are not so many; no, not even in my years, but in a few months – in this day.

Outside there is only darkness, pitifully lit by the cold and disinterested stars, and there is silence through the town, in which some men sleep and clutch their bedclothes of hope and optimism to them for warmth. But those I love more do not sleep, and see no hope, and suffer for those brave ones who will fall in hopeless effort for us all, whose only gift to us will be that we will grieve for them a little while; those who see, as I have come to see, that life is only event and violence without reason or cause, and that there is no end but the corruption and the mock of courage and hope.

Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and death, cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know it, and see – as I realize now the doctor saw before me – that the only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things that drive men to their ends ever be stilled, or will they only thrive and grow and yet more hideously clash against the other so long as man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered there to raise men's hearts to false hopes forever?

This is the sky of Gethsemane, and that of Bethlehem has vanished with its star.

Thomas Pynchon on Warlock:

"Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880's is, in ways, our national Camelot: a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity...It is the deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall's to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall."