Long Lunches with Dick Hall

I was standing alone pretending to be interested in a painting of what was either a mutilated seagull or a used tampon when the question came, spoken in a gentleman’s club voice.

“Have you got a light, comrade?”

His round, pink-cheeked face was topped with grizzled hair, tufts of which also sprouted liberally from his ears. Then there was the short, squat body, small hands and a beach-ball stomach, at that moment almost touching my waist.

“It’s a chat-up line, comrade. But you go ahead and smoke if you like.”

This was my first encounter with Sydney’s literary world and the start of my friendship with Dick Hall (Richard Victor Hall, 1937–2003). His smile appearing to charmingly tilt at his koala-suit looks, I found myself a little in love.

The request for a light wasn’t really a chat-up line, Dick went on to explain after introducing himself. Rather, he had observed my lost air and thought someone should come to my rescue. It was true, though, that Dick didn’t mind others smoking. He greatly enjoyed it. Not because he was one of those gasping ex-smokers, but because smoking was the only vice he didn’t have—this Dick, with hinted-at fantasies of trussed flesh, punishing nuns, scatology and lesbian sado-masochism, I was wont to shy from, to Dick’s sometimes poorly disguised disappointment. As for the “comrade”, well, that was to do with his esteem for Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory. If there was one book every Australian should read, according to Dick, it was Power. Typical of his genius at adapting his lexicon to his listener, however, as told to Les Murray, “comrade” was a salute to a little old lady living in a rented room who, having lost the power to go to the lav, used the bottom drawer of her dresser.

No need to spell it out, though, Dick was old Labor, his politics rooted in the time when Labor represented the workers and keeping the top end of town under control was the main job of its office. When education meant learning and the ideal of the common good had life. When ideals were not on the brink of extinction.

At Dick’s suggestion we began meeting for lunch every few weeks in Newtown, close to where I worked and Dick lived. We would meet up at one of the Asian restaurants along King Street, sitting always by the window. A beer at his elbow, Dick would be waiting, one eye on whatever book he was reading and the other watching out for me. When I entered the restaurant he would rise, kiss my cheek, wave at me to sit then push the menu across the table while suggesting dishes I might enjoy. This ritual observed, he would courteously summon the waiter or waitress and just as courteously deliver our order. When we were again alone came the question, “What are you reading, comrade?” Our respective reading discussed and headway made on a bottle of white, like an able dancer Dick would steer the conversation to politics, art, and then, when the bottle was empty and our glasses down to the lees, we would share gossip and a few small intimacies before parting.

The course of this agreeable hour or so was interrupted by the coming and going of dishes and Dick’s insightful or lewd comments about any of the passing street parade that caught his attention. Encouraging my opinion on subjects I often knew little about, Dick would expand my meagre holding from his own great store, sometimes pushing aside all niceties with an outpouring of words that, like the waters of a swift, full river, tumbled with muscular vigour. At such times Dick’s voice would become even more gravelly, the pink of his face deepening and his hairy caterpillar eyebrows assuming a life of their own. I would lean back in my chair and follow as best I could.

His hallowing of the Australian worker, however, didn’t stop Dick enjoying good wine, the rare kilim, fine cotton shirts. His sporadic income always stretched to a cleaner, even if at times he had to borrow from me to pay her, and his weekly gathering of intellectuals and artists, which occasionally included his old boss, Gough, or his equally beaky son, Nick, took place at one of Glebe’s more expensive watering holes. On the occasions I was able to make it to one of these lunches the riches of the conversation went far beyond anything offered by the menu or the wine list.

Such was the custom of our friendship. As the years passed, small traded intimacies revealed the landscape of the other’s heart. Our histories and memories gently became known to each other. I passed thirty, then forty. I was allowed his soft chest, clothed in smelly wool or crisp cotton depending on the season, for the shedding of my bitter tears when I needed. When the pattern of our lunching was disturbed, the disruptions themselves also become part of the weave of our friendship.

Awarded the inaugural Suspended Sentence Award for his 3000 words of Joycean fiction, Dick spent two months in Europe and Ireland, enjoying the Joyce summer school in Dublin and visiting Joyce’s haunts in Paris, Zurich and Trieste. On the day America invaded the Gulf, we left the restaurant to take up a table at a nearby pub, the Marlborough, from where we sat glued to the bar television and considered the possibility that these were the last days and hours of civilisation. Then there was the dinner in Glebe, where, against a background of beating rain, Dick revealed that, in case I thought he didn’t find me attractive, the reason he had never made a pass at me was the great value he placed on our friendship. Such was the charm of Richard Victor Hall.