P'.s _Warlock_ Musings--Corrected Text

[Steve Maas]

Corrected from the text at:

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/gift.html
and
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_gift.html

Steve Maas

----------------

_Holiday_ (Magazine), December 1965, pp. 164-5

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 an 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_, I think, 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.

-- Thomas Pynchon

_________________________________________________________________
Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee® 
Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963