by Oakley Hall
OAKLEY HALL (1920–2008) was born in San Diego and grew up there and in Honolulu, where his mother moved after his parents’ divorce. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, Hall joined the Marine Corps and was stationed in the Pacific during the Second World War. Following the war, and with the aid of the GI Bill, he continued his studies in France, Switzerland, and England, returning to the US to receive an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Hall published his first book, Murder City, in 1949 and his last, Ambrose Bierce and the Ace of Shoots, in 2005. In between he wrote more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Downhill Racers, Separations, and Warlock, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1958; a libretto for the opera based on Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose; and two guides to writing fiction. Hall was director of the writing program at the University of California, Irvine for twenty years and, in 1969, co-founded the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, an annual writers’ conference. Among his many honors are lifetime achievement awards from the PEN Center USA and the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
ROBERT STONE was born in Brooklyn in 1937. He is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, the National Book Award-winning Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. He has also written short stories, essays, and screenplays, and published a short story collection, Bear and His Daughter, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in New York City and in Key West, Florida.
WARLOCK
OAKLEY HALL
Introduction by
ROBERT STONE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1958 by Oakley Hall
Introduction copyright © 2006 by Robert Stone
All rights reserved.
Cover image: © Sigmar Polke, Do the World a Favor and Eat a Bullet, 2002; courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Cologne
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Hall, Oakley M.
Warlock / Oakley Hall ; introduction by Robert Stone.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 1-59017-161-6 (alk. paper)
1. Shooters of firearms—Fiction. 2. Social conflict—Fiction. 3. Social control—Fiction. 4. Violence—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PS3558.A373W3 2005
813'.54—dc22
2005023653
ISBN: 978-1-59017-823-2
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
WARLOCK
Prefatory Note
BOOK ONE: THE FIGHT IN THE ACME CORRAL
1. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
2. Gannon Comes Back
3. The Jail
4. Morgan and Friend
5. Gannon Sees a Showdown
6. The Doctor and Miss Jessie
7. Curley Burne Plays His Mouth Organ
8. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
9. Gannon Calls the Turn
10. Morgan Doubles His Bets
11. Main Street
12. Gannon Meets Kate Dollar
13. Morgan Has Callers
14. Gannon Watches a Man among Men
15. Boot Hill
16. Curley Burne Tries to Mediate
17. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
18. The Doctor Arranges Matters
19. A Warning
20. Gannon Has a Nightmare
21. The Acme Corral
22. Morgan Sees It Pass
23. Gannon Witnesses an Assault
24. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
25. Gannon Goes to a Housewarming
26. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
27. Curley Burne and the Dog Killer
28. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
BOOK TWO: THE REGULATORS
29. Gannon Looks for Trouble
30. The Doctor Considers the Ends of Men
31. Morgan Uses His Knife
32. Gannon Takes a Trick
33. A Buggy Ride
34. Gannon Puts Down His Name
35. Curley Burne Loses His Mouth Organ
36. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
37. Gannon Answers a Question
38. The Doctor Attends a Meeting
39. Morgan Looks at the Deadwood
40. Bright’s City
41. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
42. Morgan Is Dealt Out
43. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
44. The New Sign
45. Gannon Visits San Pablo
46. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
47. Dad McQuown
48. Gannon Takes a Walk
BOOK THREE: THE ANTAGONISTS
49. Gannon Walks on the Right
50. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
51. The Doctor Hears Threats and Gunfire
52. Gannon Backs Off
53. At the General Peach
54. Morgan Makes a Bargain
55. Judge Holloway
56. Morgan Looks at the Cards
57. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
58. Gannon Speaks of Love
59. Morgan Shows His Hand
60. Gannon Sits It Out
61. General Peach
62. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
63. The Doctor Chooses His Potion
64. Morgan Cashes His Chips
65. The Wake at the Lucky Dollar
66. Gannon Takes Off His Star
67. Journals of Henry Holmes Goodpasture
68. Gannon Sees the Gold Handles
Afterword: A Letter from Henry Holmes Goodpasture
INTRODUCTION
ONE YEAR in the early Sixties, shortly after I met my literary agent Candida Donadio for the first time, she gave me a novel to read. To my surprise it was a western, by Oakley Hall, a writer of whom I had heard good things. The last western I had read was a book of Zane Grey’s about hunting mountain lion somewhere around the Grand Canyon. I had no idea what I would think.
I remember thinking how wonderfully clear the book was. Not only clear, as I remember, but full of light. The sensation of reading back into time was very strong because the style made itself invisible as good style will when it is accomplishing its purpose.
Rereading Warlock I found again the light I remembered, an afternoon brightness, a clarity that is, I think now, the essence of good realism. In an almost literal way it illuminated the characters. When it focused on individual lives it seemed to vary its distance from each character as though there existed a different extension of sympathy or a withholding of it for different individuals in the narrative. The light I guess I had recognized the first time as western light. Big Sky light. Realism, I had thought at that time. This is good realism. And I became aware of the skill, the strategy of placing one line upon the other.
Now I know—I think I know—that modalities like realism, magic, hyper, or otherwise, have only the vaguest application. Nothing is real; life is life and language is language. Really excellent prose like Oakley Hall’s is the creation of sound, of songs, unheard, which, as they say, can be very sweet. Overall I felt the artistry at work, or maybe I should say a
t play. But at the core of Warlock was something stronger and more mysterious.
Years ago Richard Slotkin wrote the third, concluding volume of his work on the mythology of the American frontier. Published in 1973, the final section bore a title intensely evoking the era of the trilogy’s composition—the Vietnam War and its inglorious concluding years. The title is Gunfighter Nation.
Slotkin’s books on the frontier are very wise and insightful. They are particularly relevant to the work of Oakley Hall and, of course, to Warlock. If I had read the title presenting America as a “gunfighter nation” a few years ago I would have believed that it bore the ugly mark of the domestic conflict over the Vietnam War. Perhaps too deeply. The country in its cowboy suit—a double disguise behind which lurks a posture of innocence and of menace, infantile self-deception enhanced by cheap theatrics. The contemptuousness is very nearly savage.
In fact, though, the professor’s arraignment by nomenclature is far less facile, trivial, or even sarcastic than it seems. Slotkin’s work is scholarly, and it sets out to untangle the strands of myth and mytho-poetics in America’s perception of itself. Much of the energy of the study goes into examining American mythmaking and defining different kinds of myth. At one point Slotkin quotes the great master and observer of myth D. H. Lawrence, a stranger in a strange land:
But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust are a sort of by play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.
Slotkin uses this citation to distinguish between the kinds of created mythologies America characteristically requires to “do what it has to do.” The good sheriff, a strong peaceful man; this is pop myth. The killer-stoic who lurks just below the surface of an essential collective consciousness is the real thing. No one realizes this better than Oakley Hall.
Warlock recounts a series of violent events in and around a town of the same name set in a southwestern territory during the 1880s. The account, placed partly in a fictional character’s journal, is an examination of the deeper portending of these events. Goodpasture, the diarist, reflects on the balance of justice in the light of which the first series of killings might be viewed. A deputy has “buffaloed” a local cowboy on a drunken spree, beaten him and inadvertently caused his death. Eventually avengers come and succeed in settling the score. Things like this happen, Goodpasture writes, “in this rough-and-tumble corner of creation . . . happen . . . and are usually considered no more than too bad.”
The “rough-and-tumble corner of creation” referred to is the American frontier in the last decade of its formal delineation, for the frontier will be officially terminated by the Department of the Interior in 1890. In fact, as the diarist knows but denies, nothing in this last resort of misfits, opportunists, professional killers, and impossibly long odds gamblers is ever accepted in fact as “no more than too bad.” An overriding and thoroughly hopeless necessity to come out ahead, to come out ahead “of the next strong man” or of precarious things themselves, drives everyone as they put one more day of frontier existence on top of the last.
The stories of the Old West that Americans have grown up on render aspects of the frontier experience mythical, while reflecting the central American myth that Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence.” These stories are not myths themselves, though; they are the substance of America’s mythopoesis. For Warlock Oakley Hall uses bits of the gunfight at the OK Corral, the Lincoln County War, the Johnson, Wyoming, cattle fight, and a few others. As Slotkin writes and Oakley Hall subtly demonstrates:
In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who (to paraphrase Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) tore violently a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness—the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness . . .
In the evocatively named town of Warlock (shades of Young Goodman Brown) the Apaches kill and die and are followed by the Mexicans who slaughter the gringo cowboys and are killed by them. The US Cavalry having helped decimate the Indians and Mexicans are now used against white labor by mine owners. The murderous cattle barons who made their own law in the Rattlesnake Valley are driven down and out. America, aspiring toward her self-generated pseudo-myths, remains a prisoner of her deepest true ones.
—ROBERT STONE
This book is for my son Tad
PREFATORY NOTE
This book is a novel. The town of Warlock and the territory in which it is located are fabrications. But any relation of the characters to real persons, living or dead, is not always coincidental, for many are composites of figures who live still on a frontier between history and legend.
The fabric of the story, too, is made up of actual events interwoven with invented ones; by combining what did happen with what might have happened, I have tried to show what should have happened. Devotees of Western legend may consequently complain that I have used familiar elements to construct a fanciful design, and that I have rearranged or ignored the accepted facts. So I will reiterate that this work is a novel. The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.
—OAKLEY HALL
1. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE
August 25, 1880
DEPUTY CANNING had been Warlock’s hope. During his regime we had come to think, in man’s eternal optimism, that progress was being made toward at least some mild form of Law & Order in Warlock. Certainly he was by far the best of the motley flow of deputies who have manned our jail.
Canning was a good man, a decent man, an understandably prudent man, but an honorable one. He coped with our daily and nightly problems, with brawling, drunken miners, and with Cowboys who have an especial craving to ride a horse into a saloon, a Cyprian’s cubicle, or the billiard parlor, and shoot the chimneys out of the chandeliers.
Writing of Canning now, I wonder again how we manage to obtain deputies at all, who must occupy a dangerous and frequently fatal position for miserly pay. We do not manage to keep them long. They collect their pittance for a month or two, and die, or depart, or do not remain long enough even to collect it at all. One, indeed, fled upon the first day of his employment, leaving his star of office awaiting his successor on the table in the jail. We have had bad ones, too; Brown, the man before Canning, was an insolent, drunken bully, and Billy-the-kid Gannon gained a measure of fame and gratitude by ventilating him in a saloon brawl down valley in San Pablo.
Canning, too, must have known that some day he would be thrown up against one of that San Pablo crew, incur, prudent as he was, the enmity, or merely displeasure, of Curley Burne or Billy Gannon, of Jack Cade or Calhoun or Pony Benner, of one of the Haggin brothers, or even of Abe McQuown himself. I wonder if, in his worst dreams, it ever occurred to him that the whole down valley gang of badmen would come in against him at once.
There is no unanimity of opinion even now amongst those of us who believe them at least to be a regrettable element in Warlock. There are those who will say that of the lot only Cade is truly “bad,” and possibly Calhoun when in his cups; who will say that Luke Friendly may be something of a bully, and Pony Benner scratchy at times, but that Billy Gannon is, if you know him, a fine boy, Curley Burne a happy-go-lucky, loyal friend, and McQuown not actually an outlaw, since his forays after stock into Mexico are not really rustling.
However many good men die at their hands, or are driven out for fear of them, there will, it seems, always be their defenders to say they are only high-spirited, mischievous, fun-loving, perhaps a little careless—and even I will admit that there are likeable young fellows among them. Yet however many Saturday evenings are turned into wild carnivals of violence and bloodshed, however many cattle are rustled and stages held up, there will always be their champions to claim that th
ey steal very little from their neighbors (I must admit, too, that Matt Burbage, whose range adjoins McQuown’s, does not blame McQuown for depredations upon his stock); that they confine their rustling raids to below the border; that the stages are robbed not by them, but by lonesomers hiding out here from true-bills further east; that, indeed, matters would be much worse if it were not for Abe McQuown to keep the San Pablo hardcases in hand, and so forth and so forth. And it may be so, in part.
McQuown is an enigmatic figure, certainly. He and his father possess a range as large and fertile as that of Matt Burbage, and, it would seem, could be ranchers as eminent and respected. Certainly they seem no more prosperous, in their lawlessness. Abe McQuown is a red-bearded, lean, brooding fellow, who has about him an explosive aura of power and directionless determination. He has protruding green eyes, which, it is said, can spit fire, or freeze a man at fifty feet; is of medium height, almost slight, with long arms, and walks with a curious, backward-leaning gait, like a young cadet, with hands resting upon his concho belt, his beard tipped down against his chest, and his green eyes darting glances right and left. Yet there is about him a certain paradoxical shyness, and a certain charm, and in conversation with the man it is difficult not to think him a fine fellow. His father, old Ike, was shot through the hips six months or so ago on a rustling expedition, is paralyzed from the hips down, and is, reportedly, a dying man. Good riddance it will be; he is unequivocably a mean and ugly old brute.
I say, Deputy Canning must have known the clash would come. In retrospect I suffer for him, and at the same time I wonder what went on in McQuown’s cunning and ruthless mind. What kind of challenge to himself did he see in Canning? Merely that of one strong man as a threat to the supremacy of another? The two were, to all appearances, friendly. Certainly Canning never interfered with McQuown, or with McQuown’s. He was too prudent for that. Canning was widely liked and respected, and a man as intelligent as McQuown must have had to take that into consideration, for is there a man of stature anywhere who does not wish to be the more admired? And will any such man commit a despicable act without attempting to color it in his own favor?
