Warlock by Oakley Hall

For are we not, perhaps, here in Warlock, sitting in upon the childbed of a Legend?  Are we watching such a momentous birth all unknowingly, and, unknowingly, too, this one or that one of us helping it along, acting as midwife, boiling the water, holding the swaddling clothes, etc.?  As time goes on and if the infant does not die (literally!) and continues to grow, will not this cheap and fabulous account in this poor excuse for a magazine become, on its own terms, a version much more acceptable than ours, the true one?  It is a curious thought, how much do these legends, as they outstrip and supersede their originals, rest upon Truth, and how much upon some dark and impenetrable design within Man himself?

The town of Warlock, somewhere in the Southwestern United States in the late 19th century, has a problem with road agents and cattle rustlers.  Petty crime carries with it the constant threat and reality of violence.  Warlock's political situation contributes to the unease: the sheriff in the larger nearby town considers Warlock not a part of his jurisdiction, but a senile old governor drags his feet on incorporating Warlock as the seat of a new county.  There is no peace in Warlock because there is no law in Warlock, literally.  A committee of businessman hires a famed gunman named Clay Blaisedell as marshal to defend the town against the cowboys, led by the notorious red-headed Abe McQuown.

Warlock begins this way, with a classic Western setup.  Blaisedell is the whitehat, McQuown is the blackhat, and the novel is a speeding train running toward their final confrontation.  The truth is that Westerns have been picking apart the myths and legends of the Wild West since the west really was wild, but Warlock does it with incredible subtlety and narrative force.  Blaisedell is a good man, and he believes in the work he's doing, but no man can be quite as good as the myth that a man like Blaisedell carries with him.  All the characters in Warlock, except the very vilest of McQuown's cowboys, are are committed to a kind of stringent code: no "backshooting," no firing until you're drawn upon, etc.  Blaisedell is the avatar of this code, and it's no surprise that he quit marshaling and takes it back up several times over the course of the novel; he's constantly being made to face the limitations of his own ability to be such an avatar.

"We do not break so simply as some think into the two camps of townsmen and Cowboys," writes the storeowner Henry Goodpasture, whose diaries are interspersed throughout the narrative.  "We break into the camps of those wildly inclined, and those soberly, those irresponsible and those responsible, those peace-loving and those outlaw and riotous by nature."  But McQuown's cowboys see themselves on the side of the "responsible" and "peace-loving" as much as Blaisedell does.  In fact, they object that Blaisdell's tactic of "posting" a man out of town under penalty of death is a miscarriage of justice, perpetrated out of sheer animus or dislike.  When a strikebreaking mine owner hires McQuown's cowboys as a group of Regulators to threaten and cajole the miners, it gives them the same kind of specious authority, given by moneyed interests in the absence of real political law, enjoyed by Blaisedell.  It's no surprise when McQuown posts Blaisedell out himself.  Warlock never goes so far as to suggest that McQuown and Blaisedell are on equal footing, legally or morally, but it does just enough to trouble the conditions of Blaisedell's employment to muddy the waters.  The mythmaking that Goodpasture sees occurring in real time conceals those moral complexities utterly.

It isn't really McQuown who is Blaisedell's antithesis, but the town's nominal sheriff's deputy, John Gannon.  Gannon's power comes from the absentee sheriff, not the business owners, and if there's any legal power at all in Warlock, it's his.  He's also an old associate of McQuown's, grown disgusted by the cowboys' behavior, and that makes him a kind of liminal figure in Warlock.  The townspeople, by and large, think that he's working subterfuge for McQuown, and McQuown's men consider him a traitor.  It's not a comfortable place to be.  And yet it's a lack of partisanship that allows Gannon to do the work of peacekeeping with moral clarity.  Gannon leaves his brother to die at Blaisedell's hand when his brother is in the wrong; Blaisedell, on the other hand, has his authority challenged and nearly undone by his personal affection for his violent friend, Tom Morgan.  Blaisedell is the myth, but is bound to collapse under it; Gannon is the image, or perhaps the omen, of the law in the West, beholden to no one and nothing but its own principles, and likely to be forgotten in the shadow of mythical figures like Blaisedell.  McQuown is a red(-headed) herring; the final confrontation is, as it has to be, Blaisdell and Gannon, myth against reality.

Even that's more clearly put than Hall suggests.  For one, the law doesn't look so great when it comes in at the end of the novel in the figure of the territorial government intervening on behalf of the mine owners against the strikers.  But Warlock describes in fine detail the difficult choices involved in building a civilization up out of the inhospitable desert of the American frontier.  And it's a page-turner, too: I finished the nearly 500-page book in three days because I just couldn't put it down.  Even though it picks apart the myths of the American West with ruthlessness, it still offers incredibly satisfying variations on the classic moments of Western novels and films: the duel, the stage robbery, the gambling hall dust-up, the cowboy riding off into the sunset.

Warlock by Oakley Hall

"Bitter?" he heard Kate say. above the humming in his ears. "Why yes I am bitter! Because men have found a way to crucify every decent man, starting with Our Lord. No, it is not even bitter--it is just common sense. They will admire him because he killed a man they wouldn't've had the guts to go against. But they will hate him for it, because of that."

I cut my grown-up reading teeth on Westerns, mostly Louis L'Amour and numerous knock-offs. I can recite the structure of those books now. It's a bonding ritual amongst those who've read many. A loner comes to town, usually with a dark past. The town is run by the seemingly benevolent but actually malevolent "largest rancher in the valley". There's a grudging gunfight as a cowboy who's had too much to drink can't help but throw iron on the stranger. There's at least one fistfight that usually ends with the stranger taking his bruises, and then a final gunfight against overwhelming odds. And there's usually a girl there to help pick up the pieces. Within this framework, there's a lot of fun stuff that can happen, but the structure is sacrosanct.

Warlock, one of the numerous award winners that NYRB has rescused from obscurity, has a full-length blurb from the rarely terse Thomas Pynchon on the back cover, and that might lead you to believe that it's the sort of book that would wildly buck those conventions--an ambiguous ending, perhaps? Historical characters behaving anachronisitically? Or, at a minimum, a modernistic nihilism like Unforgiven. But you'd be wrong, because in many ways, Warlock follows the aforementioned structure to a T. The way it follows it is sometimes surprising, sometimes moving, sometimes predictable, but after finishing and taking a step back, it's not hard to see the contours of L'Amour and John Wayne.

Where it bests most Westerns though, is the thoroughness with which it examines the mining town of Warlock and its denizens. Although most of the book focuses on hired-gun sheriff Clay Blaisdell, black-sheep former outlaw John Gannon, amoral drifter Morgan, and the mysterious Kate, plenty of other citizens get moments of focus to make them more than the cardboard cutouts that tertiary characters in these sorts of books tend to be. We get a side-plot about the organizers of a miner's strike, a look at the politics in the little big Bright's City and their uncaring--and half crazy--beauracracy, and about 1/4 of the book is told through the diary entries of Henry Holmes-Goodpasture, a put-upon store owner who, in a clever bit of metacommentary on the genre, keeps getting his front window smashed.

But Gannon and Blaisedell form the beating heart of Warlock. Blaisdell has killed so many men that he can't seem to stop, in spite of the wear on his spirit. And Gannon reluctantly but unwaveringly takes up the office of deputy after Blaisedell steps down early in the novel, after killing Gannon's brother. Though the gunman-stranger is usually--and even here, is--the magnetic center that holds everything together, Gannon gets the most character work, starting the book regretting a massacre he participated in and ending it... well, there's a fistfight and a gunfight, but anything more would be telling.

Warlock is able to sustain its tight-broad paradoxical focus because Hall recognizes that the town itself is too small for anyone or anything to really be a sideplot. Often we learn about events after the fact second-hand, and while there's no real unreliable narrator here, that level of remove is engaging in a way that a straightforward telling might not be. There are plenty of frontier ruminations on the nature of society, and of man, but in the end, it comes down to guns and fists because the land, the people, the government, the mines, they are brutal. It takes a certain constitution to make it through with both life and soul intact, and Hall expertly breaks down his archtypical characters until they feel like real people. Then, in an epilogue, he tells what ultimately became of them all, bringing the archetypes to the foreground and showing us that the cycle never really ends. It's only the geography that's different.

To my mind, Blaisdell is only a small and temporary blight on the body politic; with all else healthy and aright he will automatically disappear. Like the rest of us, but perhaps for different reasons, he too is no longer interested in the Citizens Committee. I am apathetic of his ambitions; I am contemptuous of his optimism. The old, corrupt, and careless god has been replaced in his Heaven, and so, he feels, all will be well with the world, which is, after all, the best of all possible ones. It is a touching faith. But I am more drawn to those who wander the night not with excitement but with dread for it.

I see many of them through my window, unable to sleep now that the fire is out. For what fire is out, and what is newly lighted and what will burn forever and consume us all? How can men live, and know that in the end they will merely die?