Oakley Hall essay

[Dave Monroe]

The gnomic, gun-toting code of the West

By Katherine A. Powers  |  August 13, 2006

I'll tell you what is a big mystery to me: the hero,
or anti-hero, as he is as often as not, of the genre
called "the Western." I seem to be missing the faculty
that allows the reader to grasp what is at stake when
the Western hero (or anti-hero) feels he's gotta do
(or not do) some deed (or misdeed). I can't help
comparing this baffling fellow with another literary
figure, the "gentleman" of Victorian novels, a
character whose code of conduct is just as inexplicit,
but whose every nuance I feel I detect. John Henry
Newman said, "It is almost a definition of a gentleman
to say he is one who never inflicts pain." Conversely,
it seems to me that it is almost a definition of a
Western hero to say he is one who is forever
inflicting pain, if not on someone else, then on
himself, and preferably on both at one and the same
time. The guy is just one big pain center, silently
pulsing with an inarticulate hurt that raw whiskey
can't ease. And as he claps his big old dusty hat on
his big old dusty head, and walks through the swinging
doors with an air of purpose, he leaves me staring at
the page with no idea where he's going.

Nonetheless, based on Robert Stone's compelling
introduction, I was prompted to take up Oakley Hall's
471-page "Warlock," a novel set in an Arizona mining
town in the early 1880s (New York Review Books,
paperback, $16.95 ). "I remember thinking," Stone
writes of his first reading of the novel, which was
first published in 1958 , "how wonderfully clear the
book was. Not only clear ... but full of light." And
rereading the book, he found that light again, "an
afternoon brightness, a clarity that is, I think now,
the essence of good realism. In an almost literal way
it illuminated the characters." Perhaps in "Warlock,"
I thought, I shall find the key to the Western code.

The first thing I found was rich, exhilarating prose,
Bible tinctured and redolent of the past. Clay
Blaisedell has come to town as marshal at the
invitation of the Citizens' Committee, there being no
real government as the town is not even incorporated.
His job is to bring an end, by killing if necessary,
to the murder and mayhem wrought by a gang of
obstreperous cowboys. But there are those who do not
approve of such an extralegal expedient, foremost
among them the town's provisional judge, a
whiskey-marinated veteran of the Civil War who lost a
leg at Shiloh and who speaks with the voice of
righteousness, a character who, like so many in these
hugely populated pages, deepens considerably
throughout the book. He rails against the hiring of
Blaisedell and holds forth on the nature of law to the
disgust of the town's deputy sheriff, who lets the old
man have it: "'The law is the law!' he panted. 'But
there isn't enough of it to go around out here. So
when we get a good man protecting this town from hell
with its door open I am not going to see him choused
and badgered and false-sworn and yawped at fit to
puke!'"

Continued...

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/08/13/the_gnomic_gun_toting_code_of_the_west/

--- Paul Di Filippo <pgdf at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Foax--I cut and pasted the entire article behind
> this URL and sent it in to the List, but it never
> arrived.  Perhaps bagged by a size filter....

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