Some of James' New York stories were written around the time in which Hall set his Warlock, the early 1880s, others precede this period, and yet others were not written by James until 1908. Warlock is set in 1880s California, a seeming world away from James' New York. Their subject matter is as unlike as gold is to lead, yet 19^th century New York and California are in our minds what early America is all about. Both authors have captured this imagined world in their compelling imagery that is at once exaggerated, yet ultimately true.

James left his native New York as a nine-year-old, when his family moved to Europe. There he lived in various places, receiving a haphazard education through tutors in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna and Bonn. At 19, he returned to the USA to study law at Harvard, but his interest in literature took over and he gave up his law studies for writing two years later. He lived in Paris for a while but moved to England permanently in 1876, first to London, then to Rye, where he died in 1916. He became a British citizen in 1915, partly to show his disappointment in the USA's refusal to enter the First World War.

Some of his New York stories reflect the image James held of the city from his childhood, and others show his later sense of being let down by the changes the once small town underwent as it grew into the polyglot society for which we now celebrate it. He hated the arrival of the skyscrapers, and he felt that the demolition of his birthplace at Washington Place had the effect, "of having amputated half of my history." The non-English speaking immigrant to him "resembles for the time the dog who sniffs round the freshly-acquired bone, giving it a push and a lick, betraying a sense of its possibilities, but not—and quite as from a positive deep tremor of consciousness—directly attacking it."

James, like so many people who visit the place of their birth after many years of absence, had discovered that one cannot go back. Yet he really did not want to accept this simple law of nature. In his case he produced some richly textured stories about the place of his birth, even if at times his disappointment created images that are not just blurred, but wholly unjust to what he actually experienced there. From these tales we can see the battle that raged within him, the images of the past to which he held fast and the reality of modernity with which he could not cope.

The story that perhaps expresses this duality of his unresolved emotions most aptly is The Jolly Corner. In it a man returns to New York after some thirty years. The house he still owned and had left empty during his absence seems to be haunted by his double, the one that never left the city, or the house. A battle takes place between these two personalities that must end with either one or the other destroyed. Which one, it is best left untold here.

The book contains an excellent introduction by Colm Tóibín that provides considerable insight into James and into his New York stories. He obviously understood his subject well, which is reflected in the success of his novel, The Master.

What strikes me about James is that he, having grown up in an upperclass New York environment, believed in a myth of the gentle, Plymouth brethren, founding fathers America. He did not see that New York, that the USA, always was a frontier in one form or another, which carried with it ruthlessness, crudeness, disregard for the weak who could not cope with the frontier spirit. It still is, even today, as new immigrants pour into the nation. This pushing and pulsing are the true nature of New York, which makes it so exciting. I find it interesting that Tóibín did not touch on this. At the same time, it has to be said that we Canadians tend to be smug about this frontier mentality, yet we, too, have it within us. We cannot help it because we also pushed aside those whom we found in our way as we forced ever westward and northward. Ours was a different kind of ruthlessness, yet ruthless it was. And now we resent those who come from strange places to make their way in a manner we often find incompatible with what we do and believe in. I am sure, the native population felt no different when we started out to reshape this country.

I bring this up because Warlock, Oakley Hall's great novel about the last frontier takes up that theme of the ruthlessness that is needed to create a new country and the myths it creates. The Americas, North and South, all have inherently in them this mentality that James could not accept in the New York that he came across in 1906. It is ironic that only the USA is branded with the negative image of frontier mentality. All of South America is as bad or worse than the States ever were, yet no one dislikes them for it across the globe. Strange.

Writer Robert Stone wrote the introduction to Warlock. Like Hall, he has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for one of his works, a collection of short stories. He is also the author of seven novels, the latest of which is Bay of Souls. Stone recalls after first reading Warlock in the early 1960s, "I remember thinking how wonderfully clear the book was. Not only clear, as I remember, but full of light." Reading it again, he felt the same thing, "an afternoon brightness, a clarity that is, I think now, the essence of good realism."

Reading Warlock now, I found myself responding to that light as well, the light of the desert, the light of California, as it was before smog became a constant companion—and I do remember that California from decades ago—hence I can understand why Hall has chosen San Francisco as his home base. He was born in San Diego and grew up there and in Honolulu. They, too, allow you to think of light and it is amazing how, in as dark a novel as Warlock, Hall has infused this natural light into the story through his extraordinary language.

It is a dark tale because it splits open another of the myths of America, the Western hero, the gunman, both desired and despised. Warlock is a small silver mining town on the edge of nowhere, not far from San Pablo. It is a place where ruthless cattle ranchers feel they can kill whomever is in their way and rustle cattle across the Mexican border, where the Apache still kill and die, where the Mexicans kill the gringo cowboys and then are killed by them. Where the mine owners exploit the miners and are surprised when they revolt.

Into the world of this town of Warlock a gunfighter by the name of Clay Blaisedell is called to become the local Marshal. He had held the post in Fort James, Texas, and cleaned the place up of its undesirable elements. But, as it so often happens, first we want to clean up a place by any means possible, and then we resent the person who has done the chore for us. True Westerns are that way, both in our mythological perception and in reality.

Hall, in a brief preface, tells us that he used actual events interwoven with invented ones. " . . . by combining what did happen and what might have happened, I have tried to show what should have happened." While he admits that some people may complain that he used familiar elements to create "fanciful design," he wants to stress that he has written not a history but a novel. But, there is a caveat. "The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction." And so we have the imaginary town of Warlock with all of its sundry inhabitants, some of whom want order and some of whom do not. Its citizens have hopes for it that are not borne out of reality, and while it eventually reaches its goal of becoming a county seat, it didn't last. Once the silver mines could no longer be mined, the place returned to the dust of the desert as so many towns have all across this continent.