Colby Quarterly Volume 7 Issue 10 June Article 3 June 1967 Richard Matthews Hallet: Architect of the Dream Richard Cary Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Library Quarterly, series 7, no.10, June 1967, p.416-452 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Cary: Richard Matthews Hallet: Architect of the Dream For the of Born in Bath, Maine July 21,1887 We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, A nd sitting by desolate streams. ARTHUR O'SHAUGHNESSY Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1967 1 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 7, Iss. 10 [1967], Art. 3 https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol7/iss10/3 2 Cary: Richard Matthews Hallet: Architect of the Dream Colby Library Quarterly Series VII June 1967 No. 10 RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET: ARCHITECT OF THE DREAM By RICHARD CARY T ROAD'S END on Spruce Point in the morn­ A ing of a spring day, white light deflects off the blue waters of Boothbay Harbor and picks out the equally blue eyes of a large man slumped in a deep chair, deep in the room. Books in long files dominate the walls, and tables are stacked with reading matter of many descriptions. Out of this deceptively passive atmosphere rises a voice with the quality of a subdued gale, rich and easy and glad, the voice of a born yarner. Remember­ ing seas and heights and horizons of yesterday, and the lives of sailor, sheep shearer, line rider, stone breaker, oil drillman, hobo, gold miner, copper mucker, policeman, stoker, trapper, naval officer, author, andwar correspondent he has lived. Fair Harvard On July 20, 1887, Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., Maine author of The Gunmaker of Moscow and some thirteen hundred other fictions, died. On the next day, in Bath, Maine, Richard Hallet was born. From this congruence of mortal events Richard's father adopted the notion that Cobb's disembodied soul and his dint for literature had transmigrated into the body of his brawny new offspring. At the other end of the stick, his fabled Uncle Will Jackson wrote to inquire how much Richard weighed and whether he had the makings of a sailor. Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1967 3 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 7, Iss. 10 [1967], Art. 3 418 Colby Library Quarterly Five years later, the Hallets were living in Cambridge, Massa­ chusetts. Here Richard attended the Cambridge Latin School, absorbing the heavy curriculum of classics and developing the tendency to allusiveness that was to mark his style thereafter. From the first, his father nudged him toward reading and writ­ mg. "I had to write ... the old rascal ... gave me stuff to read when I was a kid that stirred up what was already in my head. Stevenson and Henty, Kipling and Fenimore Cooper, Tomlinson, Trowbridge, Stanley Weyman, William Stearns Davis and, of course, Westward Ho." Chuckling, he adds: "I read incessantly, but not the best - Horatio Alger through and through, and Captain Mayne Reid's stories of the sea." I-lis Certificate of Admission to Harvard in 1904 indicates that "he passed with credit in Elementary Latin, History, Alge­ bra, Chemistry, and Advanced Greek." With these credentials, and an enabling scholarship, he took his place in the class of 1908. The bulk of his courses were in history and economics, he audited philosophy, but most memorable to him was fresh­ man composition with its required daily theme. In a registra­ tion of eight hundred he received one of only three A grades awarded. This he attributes to his job as guide in the Venetian palazzo on the Fenway which housed the art treasures of flam­ boyant, iconoclastic Isabella Stewart Gardner, known over the world as Mrs. Jack. Hallet will not verify that she kept lions in the basement or that she greeted her guests from the branches of a ceiling-high potted mimosa tree, but he pays tribute to her critiques of paintings for his lofty stance in English A. He went frequently to Copey's famous Wednesday night readings and says they "fired" him to emulate the authors of the selections so appealingly rendered. Within Harvard's halls he also heard Jack London indict the softening effects of civilization and was stirred by his call for literary roughage. To layaway some money for college expenses, Hallet took a summer job as policeman at Mayflo\ver Grove, an amusement p,ark in Bryantville, Massachusetts, which comprised a pine­ board hotel, a lake, a theater al fresco, and a carousel, largely patronized by shoe operatives from Brockton and cordage work­ ers from Plymouth. Here the Harvard innocent, whos,e toughest problem up to this point had been to contend with Wendell's English Composition and Taussig's Principles of Economics, https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol7/iss10/3 4 Cary: Richard Matthews Hallet: Architect of the Dream Colby Library Quarterly 419 underwent some eye-widening experiences among the "worldly" chorus girls who embellished the syncopated musical comedies and vaudeville acts. Here too he met John L. Sullivan, thence­ forth one of his heroes and a prime source of literary provender. The Boston Strong Boy, now retired from the prize ring and weighing in excess of three hundred pounds, often wandered into the park from his nearby farm. When Sullivan first spot­ ted Hallet the policeman, he seized his biceps in massive fingers and roared: "What's this for a muscle? It's an oysther on a broomstick!" On an idle Sunday afternoon during his sophomore year, Hallet was moved to write a short story which he called "The Handkerchief." With the intrepidity of his nineteen years, he dispatched it to the Cosmopolitan and expectantly checked re­ sults in the return mail. He was destined to wait considerably longer. On November 17, 1908, an assistant editor of the maga­ zine wrote: "We must apologize for the length we have retained 'The Handkerchief,' but it was held up for further consideration. We shall be glad to make use of it if $60.00 is a satisfactory price for the manuscript." Satisfactory! Hallet turned half a dozen somersaults and began reckoning the size of his future fortune. All he need do of a Sunday afternoon from now on was to pound out a story and earn $60, which would carry him through college handsomely and over any other conceivable eco­ nomic shoals. It was an illusion that served him well. In the face of rejection after rejection in following years, he mumbled stubbornly to himself, "By God, I did it once and I can again." Hallet does not have a copy of "The Handkerchief" about, nor can he in fact recall anything about it except that it was "a pretty wild sort of mystery story." Cosmopolitan promised its readers "a little masterpiece of a short story - the kind that made DeMaupassant famous." It does display an element of Maupassant in the reflexive denouement, but Hallet goes one tum the better, swiftly transposing a sudden access of horror (a corpse) into a romantic symbol of impotence (the handker­ chief). In the first lunge of a youth unsure one expects further excesses, and finds them: a superfluous frame, an autobio­ graphical lawyer-narrator who dashes off poems in the absence of clients, needlessly bizarre names, mechanical dialogue, rain­ bow rhetoric, mummery. Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1967 5 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 7, Iss. 10 [1967], Art. 3 420 Colby Library Quarterly While still at Harvard, Hallet had another unusual fling at professional writing. The Arena, once a robust monthly under the direction of Benjamin O. Flower, had come on sallow days. For several issues before it ceased publication, Hallet ground out most of the editorials and non-fictional content. He thinks now that this may well have hastened the end. The Law, Learned Hand, and the Sea Hallet disclaims high rank in his class, but there is ample testimony in print that his colleagues and the administration rated him "an exceptionally bright student." Bright enough, assuredly, to be accepted in the Harvard Law School, to attain his degree in 1910, and to b,e chosen as secretary by Judge Learned Hand, then thirty-eight years old and rising through the hierarchy of the Federal District Court for Southern New York. Hand impressed Hallet, physically and mentally. "He had the jaw of a lion, the eye of a gazelle, and a memory of iron." Their talks would start with law and invariably digress into literature, philosophy, politics. In those metropolitan days Hallet's dinner often consisted of a five-cent beer and cuts of ham and hard­ boiled eggs from the free lunch counter of the Gaiety Bar on Broadway. "There I would spear an egg as nonchalantly as if I had no need of eggs at all, as if I were a successful business man eating an egg in a fit of absentmindedness, or just because it happened to be there." He felt that there must be some mystic point at which free eggs ceased to be free, and he lived in terror of the barman's hand descending upon his shoulder. But he was young and ate heartily despite his dread. He had embraced law "because a man's got to have some profession," yet the urge to write would not be quelled. He sub­ mitted stories and ruefully read editors' comments linking him with Meredith and Conrad - and declining the manuscripts.