A fine Western novel
I have just read Warlock, the 1958 Pulitzer-shortlisted source novel for Fox’s 1959
movie Warlock, as recommended by readers Boppa and Walter S. It’s a
superb book.
Fine novel
It is by Oakley Hall, “considered the dean of West Coast writers” according to Wikipedia, whose
name sounds like that of a Victorian stage actor but who only died in 2008. He wrote
six Western novels as well as a series of five featuring Ambrose Bierce.
Oakley Hall (1920 - 2008)
Warlock
definitely belongs to the tradition of literary, rather than pulp Westerns. It
is stylishly written and thoughtful. It makes a particularly interesting read
to those who know the Western movie well. The film, directed by Edward Dmytryk,
used Robert Alan Aurthur (1922–1978) to adapt the
novel for the screen. I must say, though Aurthur eliminated whole strands of
the plot – necessarily – and wrote no other Westerns, he did respect the
integrity of the novel and managed to transfer Hall’s characters of Blaisedell
and Morgan (Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn) marvelously well. In both book and
movie the spirit of the classic (i.e. mythological) West shines through.
What I said about the movie in my review is also true of the book:
We get a lot of gunplay and some traditional showdowns in the street
and saloon. A stage hold-up too. The marshal stands down a lynch mob,
Earpishly. It’s a classic Western in that regard with many of the tropes and in
fact it seems to have been an attempt to comment on the Western archetype and
the hollowness of the myth. It also has a whiff of end-of-the-West about it as
Blaisedell is already a dinosaur. Civilization is coming to the frontier and
there are only a few wide-open towns still to clean up. Warlock is a psychological Western which is also full of action.
In his introduction to the novel, Robert Stone, himself a Pulitzer-nominated novelist and short-story writer, says:
I
remember thinking how wonderfully clear the book was. Not only clear, as I
remember, but full of light.
He refers to Richard Slotkin’s book Gunfighter Nation (part of a work that seems longer to me than ten bibles but which I might review one day, if I ever finish it before dying of old age). Are works like Hall’s “the country in its cowboy suit”? Are they “infantile self-deception enhanced by cheap theatrics”? Ouch! I suppose he has a point. Certainly Hall’s town of Warlock is close to the fictional Tombstone of Hollywood legend. But then Stone suggests that Hall’s work is closer to the famous remark by New Mexico resident DH Lawrence:
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.
Can that be true, do you think? Stone says
that “no one realizes this better than Oakley Hall.”
Slotkin's magnum opus
Stone remarks, “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.”
Yes, that’s the Wild West, real or no, that
fascinates us, and that’s the West we get in Warlock.
It’s worth quoting Hall’s own short ‘prefatory note’ in full:
This book is a novel. The town of Warlock and the territory 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 events to
construct a fanciful design, and that I have re-arranged 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.
Well, e-pards, I reckon we are “devotees of
Western legend” and we inhabit that “frontier between history and legend”. So
it’s not surprising that we find Oakley Hall’s work a cracking read.
We start in 1880 with the journal of a Warlock
storekeeper, Henry Holmes Goodpasture (a key commentator and narrator who,
however, does not appear in the movie). We learn how the local lawman, Deputy
Canning, “a good man, a decent man”, is having difficulty controlling the wild
element in nearby San Pablo, the Cowboys. This of course immediately puts us in
mind of the rustlers who infested the area outside Tombstone, Arizona, and
their leader, Abe McQuown, has something of Ike Clanton about him, and his
aged, bitter and violent father, Old Man Clanton. Red-bearded Abe does at least
have “a certain charm” but Dad McQuown is “a mean and ugly old brute.” Cowboys
hurrahing the town, and thus the population needing a tough lawman, well, that is
a classic Western trope.
McQuown is a Clantonish figure
It’s a silver-mining town and the miners and
mine-owners will play a key part in the story, a whole strand of the narrative
that will be excised in the movie version. Fair enough: the movie script is necessarily
much shorter, and something had to go. The book is nearly 500 pages long.
Goodpasture says that the Cowboys may be disreputable,
unruly and not law-abiding but several are decent types deep down, especially
Curley Burne, and “only Cade is truly bad”. Cade does indeed show himself the
most evil of them all, a backshooter who will eventually… But no, you must read
it!
Canning has buffaloed a young cowboy, who subsequently
was thrown from his horse and died. The San Pabloites blame the deputy. They run
the lawman out of town (a scene done better in the film, I think). One of the
Cowboys, Pony Benner, shoots the barber for nicking his cheek with a razor
(another scene very powerfully staged by Dmytryk). It is this which finally
prompts some of the townsfolk, including Goodpasture, to form a Citizens
Committee and send for a tough gunman to clean up the town.
Clay Blaidesell, from Fort James, is the one -
“a tall, broad man with long arms and a way of carrying himself that was
halfway between proud and arrogant.” We are told that he has “intensely blue eyes”, so
of course we think immediately of Henry Fonda, and indeed, it is hard not to ‘see’
Fonda and Quinn throughout in the novel when Blaisedell and Morgan appear. I
suppose that’s what happens when you know a film so well before reading the
book. Blaisedell shot Texas badman Big Ben Nicholson in Fort James and the
writer Caleb Bane presented him with a brace of gold-handled Colt’s Frontier
models. This Bane is clearly a reference to dime novelist Ned Buntline and his
supposed gift of long-barreled Colt’s Buntline Specials to Wyatt Earp and other
Dodge City peace officers.
The Blaisedell and Morgan of the movie
Blaisedell’s arrival in Warlock is preceded by
that of his friend, the saloon owner and professional gambler Tom Morgan, “a
handsome, prematurely gray fellow of a sardonic aspect and reserved nature.” I
don’t know why the film makers gave him a gammy leg and had people call him a
cripple; there’s no mention of this in the book. Morgan, a very Doc
Holliday-ish figure, is much less respectable than Blaisedell (as Hollywood
Hollidays were by comparison with the Wyatt Earps). He sets up shop in The
Glass Slipper and speedily wins a reputation as a dangerous foe and unreliable
friend. He cheerfully murders several people. He will earn the dime-novelish soubriquet
of the Black Rattlesnake of Warlock.
Footnotes give the novel a quasi-historical
feel and we learn much about the backstory of various characters from them, and
indeed the origin of the name Warlock, which I was wondering about when
reviewing the movie. It concerns the Warlock mine which was named for a half-crazed
prospector named Richelin who miraculously escaped the marauding Apaches of the
region so that some said that he must have flown away, riding the handle of his
shovel like a witch. Here of course we have a version of the naming of
Tombstone, with Richelin taking the part of Ed Schieffelin.
The character
of Bud Gannon, one of McQuown’s men who is revolted by the dishonorable conduct
of the San Pabloites, especially in the matter of the massacre of Mexicans they
carried out (a deed attributed in Western mythology to the Clantons and their
crew), has a higher profile than the part (played by Richard Widmark) in the
film. In fact he is in many ways key. He stays in town, deserting San Pablo,
and will eventually wear the official deputy’s star.
I would say that the characters of the women -
Jessie, “the Angel of Warlock” who falls for Blaisedell, and Kate Dollar,
Morgan’s ex, a “tall woman, black hair, a fair-sized nose”, who dallies with Bud
Gannon – play a more important part in the story than they do in the movie. Blaisedell
consorts with Jessie but does not love her, it seems, and he will eventually
depart without giving her a second glance, while Kate (modeled on the Big Nose
Kate of myth, Doc Holliday’s woman) only dallies with Gannon and she will leave
him (she half-heartedly invites him to leave with her but he will not, for a
man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, etc.) So the relationships are far from
deep.
Jessie’s great ally, especially in support of
the shamefully exploited miners, is the doc, Dr. Wagner, a character given much
less to do in the movie (played by Don Beddoe).
Judge Holloway (the excellent Wallace Ford in
the film) is a great character in the book, an alcoholic depressive who is
irascible as he is noble, in his way. He is “a sagging mixture of pride and
shame, dread and grief”. He is only a judge “on acceptance”, as he often says, and
everyone knows he pockets the fines he imposes, but he is still a force to be
reckoned with in Warlock.
The county seat of Bright’s City (Tucson?),
which is riddled with corruption, is presided over by the gigantic and
practically senile General Peach (after whom Jessie’s boarding house, where
Blaisedell lodges and which becomes the headquarters of the miners’ strike, is
named). Peach is a huge figure metaphorically too. The ‘hero’ of the defeat of
the Apaches (Goodpasture says that he had “the capacity throughout his career
for giving miserable and inexcusable fiasco the semblance of thrilling victory”),
he is not persuaded that the struggle is over, and he single-mindedly seeks to
hunt down and capture old Espirato, the Apache leader, who is probably dead
long ago. This inexorable pursuit will eventually save the miners, in fact, and
be the death of Peach.
When we come to the “Fight in the Acme Corral”
(no prizes for guessing the reference here) we get an almost verbatim quotation
from the Earp/Holliday exchange of legend:
“I am always one for a shooting match,” says
Morgan.
“It is none of your fight, Morg,” says
Blaisedell.
“That is a hell of a thing to say to me, Clay!”
There are other Tombstone similarities. Curley
Burne does a border roll on Deputy Carl Schroeder just as Curly Bill did on
Marshal Fred White in Tombstone in October 1880. Blaisedell stands down a lynch
mob as the Earps did in defense of Johnny-behind-the-deuce.
Another good thing about the book is the high
derringer quotient. The judge always puts a derringer and a bible on the table
in front of him when presiding. Morgan’s saloon lookout Murch uses one to kill
a miner who is about to beat his boss in a brutal fight. Kate Dollar has one
(unsurprisingly; they were classic weapons for saloon women) and Jessie is
pretty handy with one too: she even backs Blaisedell standing off the US Cavalry
with one. So that’s good. Morgan himself, however, whom you might expect to
have one, being a silk-vested saloon owner and all, eschews the derringer in
favor of the Banker’s Special. This is a bit odd as Colt’s Banker’s Special
didn’t appear until 1926. Still, perhaps Hall used it as a generic term for any
very short-barreled handgun. Gamblers liked them – Luke Short had a special
snub-nosed Colt .45 with a very short barrel.
High DQ
The early death of Abe McQuown out at San
Pablo, probably murdered by Morgan to protect Blaisedell, is perhaps a dramatic
weakness. The film, which reserves McQuown’s demise for a showdown in Warlock, is
a more classic Western trope. While Abe’s henchman Cade survives and presents
the necessary threat, it is not quite the same thing.
While the homoerotic subtext of the
Blaisedell/Morgan relationship is less pronounced in the book than in the film, it
is still very clear that they are more than close friends. Hall says of Morgan
that “His friendship for Clay had become all that there was.” To the point
where the ending, when Morgan does everything possible to be “posted” by
Blaisedell, i.e. run out of town, and he eventually lays down his life to this end,
seems bizarre at best. It’s a curious bond the men have, far stronger than the
male friendship we are used to in Westerns, and is not easy to understand.
I wonder too if Oakley Hall had not seen The Tin Star, Paramount’s Western of the
year before Warlock was published,
because there are a couple of passages where Blaisedell seems to mentor Deputy
Gannon, teaching him how to draw and how to shoot just as Morg Hickman had to
the young Sheriff Ben Owens in that movie. Of course, the fact that The Tin Star’s Hickman was played by Henry
Fonda may have contributed to that impression, whereas Hall was not to know
that Fonda would be Blaisedell in the film version of his book.
Similarities
The language of the book is saltier than in
the movie, but then what you could get away with in a book for adults in 1958
was more than you could on the screen, 50s Hollywood bourgeois values and
self-censorship being what they were.
The whole Army/miners clash, which dominates
the last part of the novel and which simply doesn’t appear in the film, is very
well done. I think Warlock the book
would make an excellent Deadwood-style
TV series these days, which would give scope for a full treatment of the themes
of the book, as well as some very strong characters. And by the way, Ian
McShane would make a great Morgan. But having canceled Deadwood so peremptorily, HBO probably won’t want to do that. Come
on, Netflix, get busy!
An afterword, a letter from Goodpasture to his
grandson dated 1924, ties up some loose ends for us and tells us what happened
to certain key characters. Dr. Wagner and Jessie go to Nome (as Wyatt and Sadie
Earp did). Other happenings I shall not reveal!
It’s a fine book, a, excellent Western novel
and an excellent American novel (no wonder it was Pulitzer-shortlisted) because
it deals with the myth of the American frontier in a classic way.
At one point Goodpasture reads a pulp
dime-novel account of the events he has been writing about in his journal and
is disappointed, even angry:
"Will not this cheap and fabulous account in
this poor excuse for a magazine become, on its 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 the originals, rest upon Truth, and how
much upon some dark and impenetrable design within Man himself?"
There Goodpasture, and Hall, of course,
encapsulate the myth of the Wild West, a world where the fiction has almost
become the fact. What people ‘know’ about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday is far
more deeply-rooted and widespread than what actually happened. Luckily.