Novelist Oakley Hall

Oakley Hall was back in town (from Virginia City, where he now lives) promoting his 26th book, Love and War in California. The war is his own one, Word War II. Born in 1920, he was a Berkeley senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked and he became a Marine captain, though the protagonist of the book in a passage he read is a Marine sergeant who is busted all the way  back to PFC after refusing to back down from having arrested a rapist instead of looking the other way.

He said that he remembered the San Diego in which he grew up before the war in vivid detail. (He was born in Mission Hills.) In answer to a question about convincingly writing about past times (most of his novels are set in the 19th century), he stressed that the telling detail is necessary—convincing, not necessarily authentic detail. Speaking a few yards "south of the slot" (as San Francisco’s Market Street was known when it had cable cars running on it), he took for an example that no one alive knows what it smelled like 120 years ago—certainly different. The historical novelist has to provide something that fits with what readers now think it must—or at least might—have smelled like then.

Asked why he has only now published a novel based on his World War II experiences by someone whom I think was expecting the Iraq adventure to be the answer, he said that he tried to write it 20+ years ago, but didn’t know how to end it. He said that he is at an age where he wants happy endings, and especially wanted one for this book…which is autobiographical only in the stateside (San Diego) part (the protagonist was obviously not an officer).

He said that he did not plan to write any more novels, but wanted to write about books that inspired him, such as Jane Eyre and Knights of the Round Table books. He recalled that when he was young he copied passages he thought were particularly effective. (He is not the first writer I’ve heard recall such exercise in making the sentences of admired writers pass through their fingers as a way of accustoming them to writing well. I don’t see why it would not work for those writing on computers as well as it did on those working on typewriters!)

His wife Barbara has had a stroke and was missed by several of those in attendance. He said that his first girlfriend was also named Barbara and has appeared in various guises (good and bad) throughout his oeuvre, so that the dedication of his last novel to Barbara is dual.

Asked about the rewards of teaching (he founded and headed the MFA writing program at the University of California, Irvine for two decades), he said they were very great, that it was very gratifying to help (or at least provide the opportunity  for) someone to write a first novel and surpass the teacher—albeit preferably not by too much. He mentioned Richard Ford and Michael Chabon. He recalled that the latter was so good (writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) that he made his classmates write better, and that as a result all of them produced novels that were published.

There were no questions about the movies based on his novels (Warlock and Downill Racer), but two about the libretto he wrote based on his friend Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose (with music by Andrew Imbrie, a composer whose work I loathe). He recalled that someone else had worked on the adaptation but did not satisfy the potentate of the San Francisco Opera then, Kurt Herbert Adler. At the time, Hall did not realize that Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel had appropriated (expropriated in the view of many) the writings (particularly letters) of Mary Hallock Foote. He is now in the "expropriated" camp, though retaining great esteem for Stegner, whose Beyond the Hundredth Meridian he said (in answer to a question about his own 1997 novel Separations) he proclaimed the best book about the West ever written. (IMO,Stegner’s biography of Major John Wesley Powell focuses on the central question, the aridity of the west—of which the now vastly oversubscribed waters of the Colorado River are only one instance).