About Hubert Selby Jr. (Part two)
The dreaded sequel—or prequel, really, given we return to Last Exit to Brooklyn and Selby's life leading up to it.
Part One of this short jaunt into the work of Hubert Selby Jr. covers Requiem for a Dream and its author’s unique but immensely effective writing style. If you’ve made your way here after reading that then welcome back. (Hugs.) But if you haven’t read Part One, I want to briefly reiterate that while I and many others hold Selby’s work in the highest of high regard, I’m sure we’d all be quick to insist his work isn’t for everybody. These aren’t stories you read your children at bedtime. Hell, I’d caution anyone who prefers untroubled sleep from reading Selby before bed. And if for any reason you are liable to be negatively affected by frank depictions of violence and worse, then there’s no shame in ducking out. Honestly, it’s not so much a trigger as a landmine warning needed when it comes to Selby.
Despite this, and despite Selby in seven books having committed to print some of the most harrowing, traumatic and uncomfortable scenes I’ve ever read, I do not believe any of them to be gratuitous.
His books leave me with a pain in my heart but not a bad taste in my mouth.
One of the things I have become aware of through the years is how much I love the people I write about.
- Hubert Selby Jr.
Back to Last
Last Exit to Brooklyn is a gut punch. It changed me, that book. Forever changed the way I viewed literature and art more broadly. I cannot overstate the effect it had. It was the first book that made me realise fiction could have this sort of impact—could shape us—the way firsthand experiences do. It’s the book by which I valuate all others, not so much for its subject matter or style but for its unflinching commitment to itself.
With death at bay
But before reading Last Exit I read its introduction, which left an indelible impression of its own. In it we discover how improbable it was that any of these books came to be. Here’s Selby:
I had gone to sea when I was 15, as a merchant seaman, and at the age of 18 I was taken off a ship in Germany and the doctors said I couldnt live more than a few months. I had TB and both lungs were extremely diseased.
He’d contracted the tuberculosis from infected cattle that his ship was carrying, which had to be jettisoned overboard1. Selby returned to the US and was placed in a sanatorium. His entire tuberculosis ward died. Selby’s mother had got hold of streptomycin, an experimental drug that frizzled and destroyed his mind, turned him wacko but kept him alive:
By the time I got out of the hospitals I had spent 3 years in bed, had 10 ribs removed, one lung had been permanently collapsed and a section had been cut out of the other one. And then things got worse.
Having miraculously survived his treatments and surgeries, Selby came down with asthma 5 or 6 years later and was back in hospital with doctors issuing similarly bleak prognoses. Selby lived. Again. But for much of his life, death was always looming. And having faced his mortality many times at such a young age, Selby came to this realisation:
I experienced the fact that some day I was going to die, not almost, as had been happening, and managing to survive, but I was really going to die, and just before I died two things would happen: One, I would regret my entire life; Two, I would want to live my life over again, and then I would die. This experience terrified me. The thought that I would live whatever number of years and look back on it and see I hadnt done anything with my life, had wasted it, was something I just could not live with. So I decided to write.2
The “absent” author
Last Exit to Brooklyn took six years to write. Selby first had to learn how to write but, more crucially, how to get out of the way.
Get out of the way?—I remember this notion stumped me when I first read it. How could he get out of the way—the book didn’t write itself, did it? (I recall being rather indignant on this point.) And when Selby expanded on what he meant by this, I still couldn’t grasp what he was saying:
. . . The primary responsibility of the artist is to get free of the human ego. I have no right to impose myself, in any way, between the reader and the people in the story.
About midway into The Queen Is Dead, the second part of Last Exit, I finally understood.
The Queen Is Dead
Last Exit to Brooklyn is an unconventional novel. Instead of a single narrative thread, it is split into six parts (or five parts and a lengthy coda): I. Another Day Another Dollar, II. The Queen Is Dead3, III. And Baby Makes Three, IV. Tralala, V. Strike, Coda. Landsend. While each part is self-contained, many of the cast reappear throughout.
Another Day Another Dollar is short, ten pages long. It takes place at an all-night diner, a regular haunt for local thugs and off-duty soldiers stopping in from the nearby base. It’s here we meet, among others, Vinnie and Harry, and it’s here we dive headlong into the book’s piquant prose and discover violence to be a routine solution to boredom for many of its denizens, whether it be friendly roughhousing between the gang or savage beatings handed to foes.
The Queen is Dead introduces us to a new character. Georgette was a hip queer, it begins:
Georgette was a hip queer. She (he) didn’t try to disguise or conceal it with marriage and mans talk, satisfying her homosexuality with the keeping of a secret scrapbook of pictures of favourite male actors or athletes or by supervising the activities of young boys or visiting turkish baths or mens locker rooms, leering sidely while seeking protection behind a carefully guarded guise of virility (fearing that moment at a cocktail party or in a bar when this front may start crumbling from alcohol and be completely disintegrated with an attempted kiss or groping of an attractive young man and being repelled with a punch and - rotten fairy - followed with hysteria and incoherent apologies and excuses and running from the room), but took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who werent gay . . .
We soon learn Georgette is in love with Vinnie. It is a desperate, yearning love, one she knows deep down could never be reciprocated by him, but one that feels so potent and vital she must hold onto the thinnest thread of benzidine-fuelled hope. She follows Vinnie everywhere (when he’s not in jail), showers him with affection, tries to get him alone, away from the others, pleading with him to succumb to her advances. He would refuse and tell her theres plenty of time sweetheart. Maybe later. Vinnie, it should be said, enjoys this adoration and even lets Georgette buy him coffee, sit on his lap and play with his earlobes.
It wasnt fear of being rebuked or hit by him (that could be developed in her mind into a lovers quarrel ending in a beautiful reconciliation) that restrained her, but she knew if done in the presence of his friends (who tolerated more than accepted her, or used her as a means to get high when broke or for amusement when bored) his pride would force him to abjure her completely and then there would not only be no hope, but, perhaps no dream.
While Vinnie remains chaste, Harry is quick to show he’s amenable. But when Georgette dismisses Harry (who happens to be married and has a child), he turns vicious:
I wont charge ya nothin Georgie, grabbing one of her ears. Dont touch me Harry, you big freak, pushing his hand away and slapping at it. Im not about to have sex with you. Harry took his pushbutton knife from his pocket, opened it, locked the blade in the open position, felt the blade and tip and walked toward Georgette as she backed away shaking limp wristed hands at him. Stand still and I/ll make you a real woman without goin ta Denmark. He and Vinnie laughed as Georgette continued to back away, her hands limply extended.
This leads to a cruel game—Harry and Vinnie take turns throwing the knife at Georgette’s feet, yelling think fast, watching her leap and dance out of harm’s way and screaming at them to stop—before the inevitable happens, the blade is found sticking in her calf. Vinnie fixes her up, fetching a bottle of iodine from the diner, pouring it over the wound and securing a handkerchief around her leg.
She wants to be taken to the hospital, but this is out of the question for Vinnie:
Ya cant go to the hospital. When they see that leg of yours theyll wanna know what happened and the next thing yaknow the lawll be knockin on my door and I/ll be back in the can.
They call a cab to take her home. She pleads and pleads to instead go to the hospital, promising she won’t tell them anything.
Please! My brothers home. I cant go home now!
At home, we’ll soon learn her brother Arthur isn’t so accepting of Georgette’s lifestyle. But I’ll leave it there for recounting story beats in hopes that, if you’ve made it this far, you’re sufficiently tempted to track down the story and read it yourself and will now shift back to the impression it made on this—at the time very green—reader.
On Exit
The greatest lesson I’ve learnt from this story and the book as a whole is that fiction offers prime terrain for empathy and honesty, provided the author is willing to not only tread that ground but abandon themselves to it. Selby clearly was. He takes us places we wouldn’t dare go alone, where we meet people who say and do things that scare us witless. But I feel the true power of his work is that no matter how hellish things get, humanity remains. It may get ravaged, beaten or torn up, but humanity is still there, a little flickering light, and somehow extra alive in our minds, seeing how vulnerable it is to being snuffed out at any moment. Selby’s work exists on that humanity. When humanity comes to an end, so does the story.
Before Last Exit, I’d mostly read gargantuan genre novels—you know the type, heavy in pages, light in any residual thought once closed—and perhaps this is why Selby’s work appeared so different, why it affected me so. The style, of course, was exciting, new, but beyond that was the rawness of the experience. There is a confessional aspect about it—a sense that you’ve tapped into the most impermissible thoughts of its characters, and these have been presented to you unobstructed, undiluted, uncensored. This, I realised, was what Selby had meant by getting out the way. He didn’t sanitise the language or foist any message or stance, and he didn’t contrive the plot towards some redemptive arc or justice people might find palatable. And for that, Last Exit to Brooklyn truly is a pound of pure.
Postscript
What a delight it has been to revisit Selby, reread parts of Last Exit and others and find they're still as I remember them. This has been equally easy and difficult to write. Easy because Selby’s books feel so foundational to my reading and writing4 that I can recall with decent clarity not only the events of his books but how I felt when I first read them. Difficult because his novels and short stories are filled with unpleasantries, so it’s easy to come off like a loon praising them so. By those who knew him, Selby seemed to be a loveable curmudgeon. It’s interesting isn’t it, how sometimes artists whose work features the most disturbing, abhorrent material turn out to be endlessly endearing while those whose work is of the more family-friendly variety are the ones often found to be monsters in real life5—exceptions, of course, but certainly odd.
I didn’t have any goal for wanting to write this beyond sharing my gratitude for the writer and his work, and I allowed it to unfurl as it has, drifting between books, style and the man himself. It’s for this reason I haven’t covered The Room, The Demon, Song of the Silent Snow, The Willow Tree and Waiting Period—not because I’m not willing, I just figured two parts are plenty for now.
I may return to writing about Selby again here. But for now, I’m simply wanting to reread his back catalogue—just to read it. And if that is the grand result of this blog, I for one am happy with that.
The Hubert Selby Jr. documentary, It/ll Be Better Tomorrow, provided additional context here. You can watch it for free on YouTube, courtesy of its director.
The Manic Street Preachers track Of Walking Abortion, from their album The Holy Bible, opens with Hubert Selby Jr.’s voice reciting an abridged version of this same sentiment.
Famously, The Smiths borrowed The Queen Is Dead for the title of their 1986 album and its opening track.
Entirely different in style, but my story titled Requiem For A Home-Cooked Meal is a little nod towards my love of Selby’s work.
A list, I’m sure, would be redundant here. You know.