Letter from a Great-Uncle and Other Stories

by Richard Walter Hall

A short fiction collection from a highly praised author. The title story is based in part on the life of Richard Hall's own great-uncle. The cover photo is his great-uncle's high school graduation photo.

There are a total of eight short stories in this collection: "Letter from a Great-Uncle," "The Purple Prince," "The Night Visitors," "The Piano," "Backwards," "The Lost Chord," "A Rose in Murcia," and "The Lesson of the Master."

Richard Walter Hall died in 1992.

Genres: Fiction

163 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discovered this 1985 collection tucked away on a shelf. Don't remember where I originally picked it up (San Francisco?) but it is stamped "From the Library of Dale E. Andrews" and inscribed "To Dale, from Les, May 1987".

Every copy of every book has a story and most back stories remain invisible. People too shoot through our lives and we learn little about them before they are gone forever.

In the title story of this collection, Richard Hall unearths and re-imagines the history of his great-uncle who, following a scandal, left his family in Texas and fled to New York City where he lived the rest of his life. To his young great-nephew, the cosmopolitan bachelor uncle who lived in New York was an exotic creature and excited the imagination. The uncle's reality, however, involved being forcibly institutionalized in an insane asylum (to be "cured"). It wasn't called "conversion therapy" in those days, and the treatment was brutal and horrible, more akin to torture than therapy. (That's a photo of the author's great-uncle, there on the cover.)

This is a strong, varied collection from a mature writer (Hall was born in 1926). The closing story, "The Lesson of the Master," a parable/exposé/satire of academia, was another favourite. The first time I read these stories, I remember finding them a little sedate, a little too old-fashioned and restrained; but now, I guess, I have caught up to them and can appreciate them more for their distance and perspective.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read again my reviews for Hall's earlier collections of stories 'Couplings' and 'Fidelities' and what I said in my review for either collection could be said again about this one. Richard Hall was a pioneer of 'gay' writing (see his New York Times obituary at https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/05/ob...) but although his characters may have been 'gay' his stories, and novels, were not 'gay', there was nothing campaigning about them - he wrote about people who had been ignored, excluded, pathologised as people first. One of the most extraordinary strengths of his stories in this collection, and others, was that he explored convincingly and well the lives of older gay men - not surprising as he was born in 1926 and thus old enough to be the father of the luminaries of the post Stonewall generation like Edmund White and Andrew Holleran.

There are so many good stories in this collection but I can't help mentioning the eponymous story in which Hall looks back on 'gay' history via his great-uncle and how in the post WWI world identities and places of safety were forged and you can't help feeling Hall is describing his 'gay' generations post WWII journey. Further more in 'The Night Visitors' he has written one of the finest stories about hate and homophobia and how it can frighten and strangle lives without any violence - it is portrait of the powerless facing those who believe they have right and power on their side.

Of course times have changed (although that the permanence of those changes has proved, in Trump's America, to be less secure they I would dreamt) and whether Hall is as great as I proposed in my earlier reviews only time will tell. He may not in the end be one of the very great but he is very, very good.