It is difficult, if not impossible, to look at a writer’s first published book and predict what will come next, what territory lies ahead to be explored. Much of that will be dictated by chance and the exigencies of the publishing world – by editors’ whims as much as the fickle tastes of critics and readers alike. Who would have thought the slight pieces in Marcel Proust’s Les plaisirs et les jours would give rise to his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu two decades later? Writers must follow their muses if they are to fulfill their promise; what happens afterwards isn’t always up to them.
So it was with Richard Hall, who started off writing a piece of would-be pornography, The Butterscotch Prince, only to have it rejected for not being up to snuff. It was eventually published two years later, in 1975, as literary fiction. More would follow. Far easier, then, to look at a last work and sum up what has absorbed a writer’s attention. This too is true of Hall, a writer who always searched for the perfect form, and whose final work, The Spinner of Tales, is now published more than thirty years after he died, of AIDS, in 1992. Spinner, it turns out, tells us a great deal about where Hall had been.
Intriguingly, Hall wrote (or at least published) in threes: three short story collections (Couplings, Letter from a Great-Uncle, Fidelities), three plays (Happy Birthday, Daddy, Love Match, Prisoner of Love), three essays (The Elements of Gay Theater, Gay Theater: Notes from a Diary, The Transparent Closet: Gay Theater for Straight Audiences), and now, with The Spinner of Tales, three novels. It joins The Butterscotch Prince and his personal saga, Family Fictions.
Hall’s themes were shaped by his times. In 1926, the year of his birth, America was at the height of its post-war glory. But it had enjoyed scarcely a decade of that prosperity when it plunged into the Great Depression, and later another world war. Identities were erased wholesale, whether through genocide, the destruction of war, or a pervasive homophobia that discouraged people from being themselves.
Hall was touched by all of these: he was born a Jew, he served in the armed forces, and he was gay. While his early work deals primarily with forging a gay identity, later he dwells on identity more broadly. The dissociation started early. Hall was eight when his mother threw the family into convulsion by changing their name from Hirshfeld to Hall to defend them from growing anti-Semitism. Not satisfied with outward reform, she immersed them in a full religious conversion, from Jewish to Episcopalian, even going so far as to buy New England antiques to outfit their new, fictional heritage.
The experience would become the backbone of Family Fictions, a crie de coeur from a writer who spent a lifetime carving out his identity. Nevertheless, he ultimately came to view this second novel in broader terms. In a letter to his younger sister, Marny, in 1991, he wrote, “it is not about the trauma of a changed name or about secret Jewishness, but about ALL secrets … It is about the strenuous efforts at covering up truth that doesn’t fit the prevailing myths.”
The search for truth was at the heart of everything Hall wrote and was how he conducted his life as well. It propelled him to come out in the 1940s, when he’d be guaranteed censure, if not outright condemnation. Fortunately, he had a role model, a gay great-uncle with whom he felt a bond. In the Author’s Note to Letter from a Great-Uncle, he describes how a sex scandal had made the man flee Texas for “exile” in New York. Or perhaps not exile, exactly. In New York, his uncle became “an avid theatergoer” and a manager at Stern Brothers, a department store on 23rd Street, living and eventually dying in the tony Hotel Langwell just off Times Square.
Hall was always intrigued by identity – anyone’s. The Butterscotch Prince is about two men, one white and the other black, whom the narrator nonetheless considers twins. So, too, in his chilling cautionary tale “Colors”, inspired by Conrad’s “violently racist” Heart of Darkness. Hall was intrigued by Puerto Rico and the tensions in a culture that repressed nonconformist sexuality in some ways but celebrated it in others, as with the spectacle of las mujeres locas, men in drag who feature at public festivals for Catholic saints.
Puerto Rico figures in Hall’s work almost as much as the search for identity and truth, and it backgrounds many of his short stories. “Prisoner of Love” concerns an uptight PC New Yorker who learns to loosen his morals – at a friend’s expense. A fleshed-out stage version of “Prisoner” played at The Glines off-Broadway in 1978. Eric Bentley, writing in the New York Native, called Hall’s work in theater “outstanding.”
For Hall, Puerto Rico is a crucible, home to some but a prison to others, as well as a Shangri-La, leaving which means destruction. It is both a land of bright promise and dark despair and, sometimes, against all odds, a paradise regained. He knew the culture well, having taught at the island’s Inter American University, a private Christian college. Tellingly, he set his reimagining of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice there, titling it “Death in San Juan.” As with “Colors”, Hall ends the story with a twist that reclaims classic literature for queer readers in order to “undo some evasion or injustice in the original.”
His 1981 short story collection, Couplings, features three such works, along with a note that he had concluded the project. Nevertheless, a spectacular fourth, “Country People,” inspired by EM Forster’s “Doctor Woolacott”, appeared in his final collection, Fidelities, in 1992. Hall had reviewed Forster’s posthumous The Life to Come, calling some of its stories masterpieces. Clearly inspired by the work, “Country People” is not so much an updating of Forster as a reinvention that far surpasses it. It would win a posthumous Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2005. In 2021 it became an award-winning short film by writer and director David Bobrow.
Though he kept an eye on contemporary trends, Hall looked uneasily to posterity. In an essay commissioned by guest editor Ian Young for Little Caesar 12, Dennis Cooper’s anarcho-punk literary journal, Hall wrote a tribute to the Jewish-American author Edward Lewis Wallant, whose work disappeared from view soon after he died at 36. Listing reasons for Wallant’s neglect, Hall cited his early passing, his minimal output and the failure of his work to sustain critical interest after his death. He had “been buried in the ceaseless tide of newer writers, newer books.” Although Hall lived thirty years longer than Wallant, he might well have been writing his own epitaph. Despite ranking with the rising tide of gay writers of his generation, including the famed Violet Quill, he has suffered similar neglect.
A testament to Hall’s talent is that little in his work dates it. At his best he writes with an enviable precision and depth of feeling. His characters are fully alive. The prejudices and ills he tackles, even those we might have presumed dead and buried ages ago, are still with us. In the play Happy Birthday, Daddy, a man leaves his family for another man and finds himself at the opposite end of a teeter-totter from his scandalized teenage son. “Country People” reaches across generations to lay its ghostly hands on all plagues, past, present and future.
Hall’s endings often turn on a dime, with insights that dazzle and liberate his characters from the weight of the past. They open doors and mark exits where none seemed to be. The very best of his work, in particular the later short stories, stand with those of contemporaries like Ethan Canin and William Trevor, who also wrote about the search for truth and identity, though not from a gay perspective. Hall would have liked the comparison. While he defined and wrote for a gay audience, his aim was always to supersede whatever limitations categories imposed on writing.
Puerto Rico makes a final, spectacular comeback in The Spinner of Tales, about the murder of Miles Halloran, a dancer turned gothic-romance writer turned sculptor. Miles had drifted through life, but the one thing he excelled at was inventing stories, even if he sometimes found it hard to distinguish between fact and fantasy. His friend, Bruce Pittman, an HIV+ music teacher with his time running out, pushes for the truth, knowing in the end that truth is all we have. Spinner is very much a novel of its time, yet one that reaches out to ours as well.
As with The Butterscotch Prince, this last novel is a mystery, the two titles tidily bookending Hall’s career. While outwardly similar, they are decidedly different in scope and technique. Each searches for gay identity via a bond formed between two men and each culminates in an historic LGBTQ event – in the first an early Pride march, in the second an early AIDS march – that tracks the turn from optimism to despair and eventually to rage. Otherwise, they are worlds apart. While The Butterscotch Prince seems to have been written as a Look-What-I-Can-Do lark, The Spinner of Tales is serious fiction. Here, the tentative groping for identity in the first book is replaced by an ardent, hard-won acceptance of that identity. Spinner doesn’t rival Hall’s earlier achievements so much as it neatly sums them up.
Toward the end of his life, when his sister Marny complained that she wasn’t really gifted like him, Hall commiserated, saying everyone felt that way about someone else. In his case, it was Forster. Both writers, having achieved prominence in their lifetime, left behind unpublished works. But where Forster suppressed one of his best novels, Maurice, fearing in early days that its themes might damage his reputation then later concluding it wasn’t worth publishing, Hall had no desire to hold anything back. He had always stood for truth.
In 1992, as he struggled to put all his talent into a final, frenzied send-off, Marny warned him the effort would kill him. She was right. The day her beloved brother typed THE END on the manuscript of The Spinner of Tales, he unplugged his feeding tube and entered hospice, where he died a week later. He had instructed her to give the finished manuscript to his agent – who was already sick himself and could not take it on.
The Spinner of Tales sat with Marny Hall for more than thirty years. She has now placed her brother’s last words in the right hands, those of ReQueered Tales and posterity as well. Let this not be the last brick on Richard Hall’s tomb, however. Rather, let it be a crowning achievement that signals his long-overdue return from the shadows. Together let us celebrate this remarkable conclusion to his life and rediscover the wonders of his work.
Jeffrey Round
Toronto,
February, 2023
Jeffrey Round is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and songwriter. His breakout novel, A Cage of Bones, was listed on AfterElton’s 50 Best Gay Books. Lake on the Mountain, first of the seven Dan Sharp mysteries, won a Lambda Award in 2013. His latest book is the poetry collection Threads (2022) from Beautiful Dreamer Press.