TPPM _The Gift_: Whole text, wrapped per: "wt -m . -w 40"

[Glenn Scheper]

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/gift.html

 The Gift

 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

 Copyright | 1995-97 San Narciso Community College

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.