Oakley Hall, RIP

[Michael Richard]

O my, a great loss. May he rest in peace.  I've been thinking 
about his western trilogy all day, out of the blue.  What a
lousy reason.   'Apaches' and 'Badlands' as well as 'Warlock'.


On Wed, 14 May 2008, Erik T. Burns wrote:

> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/14/MNIJ10LJ9V.DTL
> 
> Oakley Hall, author of 'Warlock,' dies at 87
> 
> Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
> 
> Wednesday, May 14, 2008
> 
> Oakley Hall, author of "Downhill Racers" Chronicle photo,...
> 
> Oakley Hall, a prolific author and influential writing teacher best
> known for the novels "The Downhill Racers" and "Warlock" - and as a
> founder of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers - died Monday night
> in Nevada City. He was 87.
> 
> His death was caused by cancer and kidney disease, said his daughter,
> Brett Hall Jones, executive director of the Community of Writers.
> 
> Mr. Hall was one of a handful of writers who helped to define and
> elevate California literature in the generation after John Steinbeck.
> 
> He was the author of more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction,
> including two books on the art of fiction writing and the libretto for
> an opera based on Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose." Among the many
> honors Mr. Hall received were lifetime achievement awards from the PEN
> Center USA and the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
> 
> "Oakley Hall was a master storyteller who loved the West," said
> California poet laureate Al Young, who has known Mr. Hall for nearly
> three decades.
> Pulitzer Prize finalist
> 
> Mr. Hall's novel "Warlock," a finalist for the 1958 Pulitzer Prize -
> and the first of a trilogy - was reissued in 2005 as part of the New
> York Review of Books Classics series with an introduction by Robert
> Stone.
> 
> Set in the fictional 19th century town of Warlock, it draws on the
> story of the OK Corral, said Edwin Frank, editor of the series.
> 
> "Oakley effectively rediscovered the Wild West for post-World War II
> America - not as the heroic proving ground of the nation, but as a
> weird dreamworld and tragically violent masquerade," Frank said. "It's
> a great book, and it blazed a path for fellow writers like Thomas
> Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy."
> 
> Author James D. Houston, a longtime friend and instructor at the Squaw
> Valley Community of Writers, cites Mr. Hall's 1997 novel,
> "Separations," as a favorite. "It is about the discovery of the
> Colorado River, coming down through that canyon country on rafts in
> the 19th century," Houston said. "It is some of the most remarkable
> writing about the Western landscape that you'll ever see."
> 
> Mr. Hall was born in 1920 in San Diego and grew up in that city's
> Mission Hills district and in Honolulu. After graduating from UC
> Berkeley, he joined the Marines, serving in the Pacific during World
> War II. After the war, Mr. Hall studied in Europe on the GI Bill and
> went on to earn a master's of fine arts in creative writing from the
> Iowa Writers' Workshop.
> 
> Mr. Hall's first book, published in 1949, was "Murder City," one of
> several mysteries he wrote in the early years. "His novels and stories
> reflect the landscapes that he inhabited most of his life," said
> Young, "the Pacific islands of his youth, the foothills and ski slopes
> of the Sierra and the streets and neighborhoods of San Francisco."
> 
> The skill for taut plotting and sharp characterizations, honed by
> mystery writing, never left him. And in 1998 he returned to the genre
> with a five-part series of historical mysteries with the legendary San
> Francisco newsman Ambrose Bierce as protagonist. In a 2001 review of
> "Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings," then Chronicle book critic
> David Kipen wrote: "Oakley Hall gives a master class every time he
> practices his craft."
> 
> For 20 years, Mr. Hall was director of the creative writing program at
> UC Irvine, which quickly became one of the best in the country. Among
> the writers who studied at Irvine and whose careers Mr. Hall helped to
> launch are Richard Ford and Michael Chabon.
> Founded writers' group
> 
> In 1969, Mr. Hall co-founded the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, an
> annual summer writers' conference in the Sierra Nevada, where emerging
> writers gain world-class instruction from famous authors and mingle
> with literary agents and publishers in a beautiful setting. Mr. Hall
> and his wife of 65 years, the photographer Barbara Hall, lived half of
> each year in Squaw Valley and half in San Francisco.
> 
> Amy Tan credits the Squaw Valley Community of Writers with guiding her
> from fledgling writer to published author. "Oakley was the reason that
> I found my confidence as a writer," said Tan, who calls herself one of
> his "literary offspring." And, she adds, "the Halls are a remarkable
> family. They are deep-hearted and stalwart, generous and kind and
> giving."
> 
> In January, Mr. Hall read from his most recent novel, "Love and War in
> California" - published last year by St. Martin's Press - at the
> Moffitt Library at UC Berkeley. His former student, Michael Chabon,
> introduced him.
> 
> "That book is a perfect bookend to his first literary novel, 'Corpus
> of Joe Bailey,' " Chabon said. Both books are set in San Diego in the
> years leading up to World War II and feature a young man with literary
> ambitions.
> 
> "It is so interesting to see a writer return at the end of his career
> to the same material he was working with in the beginning - and to see
> the different approach he takes," said Chabon. "He brings himself full
> circle."
> 
> Mr. Hall is survived by his wife; their son, Oakley Hall III; their
> daughters, Sands Hall, Tracy Hall and Brett Hall Jones; and seven
> grandchildren.
> 
> A memorial will be held in August at the Squaw Valley Community of
> Writers conference; another is planned for San Francisco in autumn. In
> lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Doctors
> Without Borders, 333 Seventh Ave., Second Floor, New York, NY
> 10001-5004 or to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, P.O. Box 1416,
> Nevada City CA 95959.
> Oakley Hall books
> 
> FICTION
> 
> "Murder City" (1949)
> 
> "So Many Doors" (1950)
> 
> "Corpus of Joe Bailey" (1953)
> 
> "Mardios Beach" (1955)
> 
> "Warlock" (1958, 2005)
> 
> "The Downhill Racers" (1963)
> 
> "The Pleasure Garden" (1966)
> 
> "A Game for Eagles" (1970)
> 
> "The Adelita" (1975)
> 
> "The Bad Lands" (1978)
> 
> "Lullaby' (1982)
> 
> "The Children of the Sun" (1983)
> 
> "The Coming of the Kid" (1985)
> 
> "Apaches" (1986)
> 
> "Separations" (1997)
> 
> "Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades" (1998)
> 
> "Ambrose Bierce and the Death of Kings" (2001)
> 
> "Ambrose Bierce and the One-Eyed Jacks" (2003)
> 
> "Ambrose Bierce and the Trey of Pearls" (2004)
> 
> "Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots" (2005)
> 
> "Love and War in California" (2007)
> 
> NONFICTION
> 
> "The Art and Craft of Novel Writing" (1994)
> 
> "Heroes Without Glory: Some Good Men of the Old West" (with Jack Schaefer, 1987)
> 
> "How Fiction Works" (2000)
> Sample of Hall's work
> 
> >From Oakley Hall's novel "Warlock" (New York Review Books):
> 
> It is four in the morning by my watch. Mine is the only light I can
> see, the scratching of my pen the only sound. Here astride the dull
> and rusty razor's edge between midnight and morning, I am sick to the
> bottom of my heart. Where is Buck Slavin's bright future of faith,
> hope and commerce? What is it even worth, after all? For if men have
> no worth, there is none anywhere. I feel very old and I have seen too
> many things in my years, which are not so many; no, not even in my
> years, but in a few months - in this day.
> 
> Outside there is only darkness, pitifully lit by the cold and
> disinterested stars, and there is silence through the town, in which
> some men sleep and clutch their bedclothes of hope and optimism to
> them for warmth. But those I love more do not sleep, and see no hope,
> and suffer for those brave ones who will fall in hopeless effort for
> us all, whose only gift to us will be that we will grieve for them a
> little while; those who see, as I have come to see, that life is only
> event and violence without reason or cause, and that there is no end
> but the corruption and the mock of courage and of hope.
> 
> Is not the history of the world no more than a record of violence and
> death, cut in stone? It is a terrible, lonely, loveless thing to know
> it, and see - as I realize now the doctor saw before me - that the
> only justification is in the attempt, not in the achievement, for
> there is no achievement; to know that each day may dawn fair or fairer
> than the last, and end as horribly wretched or more. Can those things
> that drive men to their ends be ever stilled, or will they only thrive
> and grow and yet more hideously clash one against the other so long as
> man himself is not stilled? Can I look out at these cold stars in this
> black sky and believe in my heart of hearts that it was this sky that
> hung over Bethlehem, and that a star such as these stars glittered
> there to raise men's hearts to false hopes forever? This is the sky of
> Gethsemane, and that of Bethlehem has vanished with its star.
> 
> E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson at sfchronicle.com.
>