A Gift Of Books
Thomas Pynchon
December 1965, Holiday
Review of Oakley Hall's '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 (Viking)
has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity.
Wyatt Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly
because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes
he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee
of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at
last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him, but also,
we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the image to
exist. It is Blaisdell's private abyss, and not too different from the
town's public one. Before the agonized epic of Warlock is
over with —the rebellion of the proto-Wobblies working in the mines,
the struggling for political control of the area, the gunfighting, mob
violence, the personal crises of those in power— the collective awareness
that is Warlock must face its own inescapable Horror: that what is called
society, with its law and order, is as frail, as precarious, as flesh and
can be snuffed out and assimilated back into the desert as easily as a
corpse can. 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.