Oakley Hall on the Thin Crust

My travel book for the last few weeks has been Oakley Hall’s Warlock, lately revived in the uneven-but-still-interesting NYRB Classics series (link). It seems there is a genre of post-modern westerns—Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the most important example; perhaps it extends all the way to Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.

Warlock, published in 1958, is perhaps the first of the line. It arrives with an appreciative introduction from Robert Stone (Who’ll Stop the Rain, the movie version of Stone’s Dog Soldiers, remains one of my favorite movies (link)). It’s a happy choice: it’s hard to think of any other American writer so well equipped to share Hall’s feel for the thin crust of civility that lies atop the bubbling social stew.

Warlock has indisputable virtues. Hall has a fine sense of incident; I can’t remember anyone who describes hand-to-hand conflict more convincingly. He has a great ear for dialog—probably more art than life, but you want it to be real:

“Shut up!” Carl yelled. “You don’t know what assault and battery is yet, and by God I want witness to what I am saying. Because that’s the word with the bark on it---if you have got him turned against us here with your law’s-the-law bellywash, I swear to God people will walk ten miles out of their way around what happened to you, so as not to see the mess!”

Oakley Hall, Warlock 151-2 (NYRB Classics ed. 2006)

As a novel, at the end of the day I’d say it doesn’t quite work. It’s a bit too studied or mannered; it smells a bit too much of the seminar room, where Hall spent most of his professional career.

The way it works better, perhaps, is as political theory. If there’s too much message here for the good of art, still Hall puts his message well. Clearly, he wants to show—and does show—just how unpleasant the frontier could be: how desperate and marginal, how peopled with men (sic—not many women) clinging together in a kind of desperate animosity, almost completely devoid of resources wherewith to build a good society. In this respect, it brings to mind Russell Hoban's (even darker) Riddley Walker, published just a couple of years later (link). If you want the true meaning of “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” this might not be a bad place to begin.