Pages: June 5-11, 2008
Oakley Hall (1920-2008)
Readers of fictions about the American West (such as those who may just have read the Drop Edge of Yonder review on this page), and anyone who admires a keen ear for language, will miss Oakley Hall, who passed away May 12 at age 87. Hall was a prolific author, penning over 20 novels, including Warlock, The Downhill Racers (considerably altered into the film Downhill Racer), and his five-novel historical mystery series featuring the legendarily scornful journalist, writer, and Devil’s Dictionary compiler Ambrose Bierce. He also wrote two books on fiction writing, The Art and Craft of Fiction Writing and How Fiction Works. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hall was a devoted teacher of writing, a director of the writing programs at UC Irvine for two decades and one of the co-founders in 1969 of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. He was an inspiration and mentor to such writers as Richard Ford, Kem Nunn, Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, and Glen David Gold. He even had a rock band named after him.
Hall’s masterpiece was the 1958 Warlock, a lyrical variation on the story of the showdown at the O.K. Corral that belongs on the shortlist of great Western novels. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Warlock was republished by New York Review Books in 2005. In his introduction to the NYRB edition, Robert Stone wrote: “Really excellent prose like Oakley Hall’s is the creation of sound, of songs, unheard, which, as they say, can be very sweet.” Another early champion of Warlock was Thomas Pynchon who called it “among the finest of American novels” and wrote in his introduction to Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me of the “micro-cult” he and Fariña established as undergraduates around the book, complete with requisite “Warlock talk.” I was reminded of Pynchon’s reminiscence last year at a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books when I heard Hall, there to talk about his new novel Love and War in Los Angeles, discuss the obscure phrases he and his childhood friends concocted when speaking to each other like “Don’t get igneous” for “Don’t get mad.”
To pay a proper tribute to this vigorous, inspiring, and important writer who made a critical contribution to the way we look at the mythology of the American West as well as to the way writers approach the craft of fiction, pick up Warlock and bask in its prose.
Published: 06/04/2008
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