Hall

[Mathew Jacobson, Green Mountain Forest Watch]

Brian Stonehill <BSTONEHILL at POMONA.EDU> writes:


>
>You mention
>
>>Pynchon's own oft proclaimed favorite novel, "Warlock"
>
>and omission of same from the home page.  Could you please give me a reference
>to one of these proclamations?


Hey Brian
Here're Pynchon's mentions of Warlock by Oakley Hall.  Warlock is now
available from the University of Nebraska Press.

"The pursuit of trusth, not of facts, is the business of fiction"  Oakley Hall

Warlock References
>From the into to BDSLISLUTM:

Sometimes at college we also succeeded in getting on the same literary
wavelength. We showed uponce at a party, not a masquerade party, in
disguise--he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the
other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author. I
suppose by then I was learning from Farina how to be amused at some of my
obsessions. Also in
'59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest
of American novels,
Warlock, by Oakley Hall. We set about getting others to read it too, and
for a while had a
micro-cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue, a
kind of thoughtful,
stylized, Victorian Wild West diction. This may have appealed to Farina
partly as another method
of maintaining Cool.


The first time I read Been Down. . . was in manuscript, an early drafts in
the summer of 1963. I
remember giving him a lot of free advice, though I've forgotten what it was
exactly. But fortunately he didn't take any of it. He must have wondered if
I thought we were still back in writing class. Later, having rewritten it,
ten pages from the end of the final draft, his hand went out on him. "Did
you hear about my Paralyzed Hand?" he wrote in a letter. "Why Tom old
boy"-- Warlock talk-- "I woke up this here otherwise promising morning with
a clump of inert floppy for a hand. Lentils. Lentils and some kind of
exhaustion known only to nits in sedentary occupations. Me, the once hunter
after restless game gone to seed in a J. C. Penney armchair covered by a
baby blanket.... But the hand came back by pins and needles after a month
and I got done...."

A-and- from Holiday Magazine "A Gift of Books"


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.

Holiday vol. 38, #6

December 1965, pp. 164-5





Mathew Jacobson
Green Mountain Forest Watch
48 Elliot St *Brattleboro, VT 05301 * (802) 257-4878 * (FAX) 257-8529

A few keep going over to the titans every day...