Requiem for a dreamer

"Sometimes we have the absolute certainty that there’s something inside us that’s so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won’t be able to stand looking at it. But it’s when we’re willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.”

Hubert Selby Junior met his demon-angel on April 26, at home in his Los Angeles apartment in the company of his ex-wife Suzanne, his children and his dog. He was 75 years old. According to his son Bill, the writer died of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.
For many, the sadness of his passing was tempered by the miracle that was his old age, for Selby – Cubby to his friends – spent most of his existence living on time that was not so much borrowed as snatched from the mouth of the doctor who erroneously bespoke his fate. Like Anthony Burgess, who became an ally in the infamous court case brought against the writer’s most famous book Last Exit To Brooklyn in Britain in 1966, misdiagnosis made him a writer.
In 1946 Selby was admitted to hospital suffering from advanced tuberculosis, the legacy of a stint as an underage merchant mariner. He came out three and a half years later with 10 ribs extracted, one lung collapsed, a piece of the other lung removed, complications from an experimental drug called streptomycin (“it impaired my vision, destroyed most of my inner ear and fried my brain,” Selby said), and a morphine habit. Several times he had been given up for dead, and on one occasion was informed that he simply didn’t have enough lung capacity to live and should go home to sit quietly and wait for it all to be over.
In an article written for LA Weekly in 1999 (with studied disdain for the laws of punctuation, but strict observance upon those of gut truth), Selby recalled his reaction:
“I am blessed with a rotten attitude, and my response to statements of this nature is, Fuck you, no one tells me what to do! Anyway, I was sitting at home and had a profound experience. I experienced, in all of my Being, that someday I was going to die, and it wouldn’t be like it had been happening, almost dying but somehow staying alive, but I would just die! And two things would happen right before I died: I would regret my entire life; I would want to live it over again. This terrified me. The thought that I would live my entire life, look at it and realize I blew it forced me to do something with my life.”
That something was a devotion to the craft of words. With characteristic humility, Selby later said, “I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer.” He married and began hanging around with young writers such as LeRoi Hones and Gilbert Sorrentino. Possessing no formal training, he wrought mastery out hard graft; for the next six years he came home each night from his job as an insurance analyst in Manhattan to labour over a manuscript he called ‘The Queen Is Dead’ which later evolved into Last Exit To Brooklyn.
That book, published by Grove Press in 1964, was a sequence of five intertwined tales set in a brutal Red Hook waterfront area populated by wide boys, gang members, drag queens, longshoremen, prostitutes, and in the case of Harry, a striking union man revolted by his wife and tortured by his own latent homosexuality. In rubber-bullet prose that often approached stream-of-consciousness, Selby applied an anthropologist’s eye to the patrons of The Greeks, reproducing verbatim their expletive-riddled vernacular. Allen Ginsberg prophesied that the book would “explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.”
The poet’s judgement proved sound. Last Exit To Brooklyn became as essential an artefact of the American literary subculture as ‘Howl’, On The Road, Naked Lunch, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. In a wider context, it anticipated much of Lou Reed’s canon – from the Velvets’ garage fetishism to the transvestite catwalk of ‘Walk On The Wild Side’, from the squalid vignettes of Berlin to the downtown symphony of ‘Street Hassle’, from the hard-boiled pulp of New York to ‘Rock Minuet’. More latterly, Selby’s mark can be seen in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son and JT LeRoy’s Sarah.
Last Exit’s unflinching descriptions of gang rape and street violence resulted in its British publishers Calder and Boyars being prosecuted for obscenity in 1966 by an aggregation of the “old lady judges/limited in sex” of whom Bob Dylan had crowed the year before – a couple of members of Parliament whose ire extended beyond disapproval of the demimonde depicted in Selby’s book and into indignation at its characters’ very existence. Selby always remained puzzled by the attack on his work. As far as he was concerned, his subjects were not literary characters; these were real people, a point stressed by his publishers’ legal counsel, who proposed that Last Exit was merely a modern day successor to writings by Zola or Dickens – albeit in extremis. Anthony Burgess, a witness for the defence, wrote that the book’s “collocation of misfits, perverts and predators snarls in a symbiosis that makes Dante’s hell seem paradisal. This society is not (which our amateur censors appear to think) Selby’s tortuous invention. It actually exists, and Selby’s presentation of it is undoubtedly the first step in the direction of remedying it.”
After a long and protracted legal wrangle Calder and Boyars won their case on appeal. Last Exit ensured that Selby rapidly became regarded as inheritor to Celine, Dostoyevsky and Miller and writer of choice for the disaffected, or those affecting a disaffected stance. Selby professed to be somewhat overwhelmed by the sudden notoriety and acclaim (before the novel he’d earned a grand total of $100 from his writing), and after he was arrested for possession of heroin in1967, he kicked the drink and the junk, remarried and moved to Los Angeles.
Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, a new generation of writers, musicians and performance artists discovered his work, including Lydia Lunch (for whose 1997 book Paradoxia he wrote the foreword) Henry Rollins, Don Bajema and others.
“I had never read any kind of writing like that,” Rollins says of his first encounter with Last Exit. “It was just so stripped down and impactful, even the punctuation, no apostrophes, just the back-slash, ‘god’ in a lower case. I wondered where had I been all this time, how come I hadn’t seen this before.”
Rollins oversaw the release of a number of spoken word Selby CDs, including Tough Guys Talk Dirty, Our Fathers Who Aren’t In Heaven, Live In Europe 1989 and more recently, a full-length reading of Last Exit. When his friend Joe Cole was murdered (an ordeal chronicled in Rollins’ Now Watch Him Die), Selby was a supportive presence.
The release of German filmmaker Uli Edel’s excellent Last Exit adaptation in 1989 (featuring a cameo from the author) not only put Selby’s work back on the map, but also established Jennifer Jason Leigh – in the role of Tra La La – as a character actress. Selby continued working, although his progress was increasingly hindered by the deterioration of his health. In 1998 came his first novel in 20 years, The Willow Tree.
Yet, despite his infirmity, Selby’s last years were marked by a flurry of projects. In 2000, Pi director Darren Aronofsky adapted Requiem For A Dream for the screen, and the result was one of the most controversial and confrontational films of recent times, a feverish depiction of narcotic horrors that earned Ellen Burstyn an Oscar nomination. His last novel Waiting Period, another tale of a homicidal loner who plots a series of murders while waiting for his gun license to come through, appeared in 2002. At the time of his death, Selby was said to be working on an autobiographical novel with the working title Seeds Of Pain, Seeds Of Love and remained enthusiastic about several screenwriting projects (Fear X, a characteristic work of psychological hardcore co-written with and directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and starring John Torturro, is about to open in cinemas).
Says Henry Rollins: “He always used to say, ‘I’m a fucking pariah,’ and I’m like, ‘Aw come on, no you’re not!’ and I’d have to run home and look up ‘pariah’.” I knew him 18 years or something; that’s a long time. That’s why when I hear someone go, ‘Oooh, Selby died,’ I’m like, ‘Come on. 75 years old in that wreck of a body?’ Which was what he called it. The guy was such a bright light. He was probably one of the most loving people I ever met, and he had it on tap for anybody. And he got it back. It’s an interesting reaction. You say Hubert Selby, and if people know the guy it’s always the same, this huge smile and they call him by his nickname and they just go, ‘Cubby!’ like they’re talking about a puppy or something. The same thing every time since I was young. Love. People loved that guy ’cos he gave it out in great abundance.”

Last words for Cubby:

Lou Reed (via email)
"One of the highlights of my life was when I first met Cubby. I’d been a fan of his for many years and Last Exit To Brooklyn affected my writing style immensely. Every time I saw him was a learning experience for me and I was always in awe of him. He told me something once regarding his writing. He said essentially – who am I to censor this or to impede it or get in its way? That would be wrong. I have always kept that in mind and I continue and forever will admire Cubby and the books he wrote and the courage it took to write them. He is – typically – more admired in Europe then here. Perhaps with his passing he’ll get some of the honor he deserves."
NYC, 4/28/04

Helen Walsh (author of Brass)
"Last Exit To Brooklyn smashed my adolescent world wide open. Although I lived five thousand miles and thirty years away from the stomping ground of Selby’s characters, it was the first book I read that I felt spoke to my generation, even much more so than Trainspotting. For the whole five days I spent reading that book and for a long time after I could think of nothing else but the prostitutes, opportunists and bad men that occupied his world. It’s fair to say that my whole fascination with red light districts came as a direct result of reading Selby! Almost a decade later, I find myself in New York on the Red Hook waterfront, the sky savage and full bellied, dragging a storm cross-river. I’d gone over to sign my first US publishing deal and thought it only right that I should pay homage to the landscape that had inspired Selby, and in turn inspired me. I boarded a plane early next morning and learned from the guy sitting next to me that Selby had passed away. I was glad that Selby died fully aware of his genius and what his books meant to people. I can think of no other of his contemporaries that could capture the gut wrenching heartache of a splintered generation in one simple sentence, the way he could. Sleep safe, now . ."

Henry Rollins (via email)
"“To me, Last Exit is the least interesting of the work, it’s just the warm-up – I think he just got better and better as he went. The Demon to me is just pulverising, it makes you want to stop reading it but you can’t, it just gets right into you. Those books paint a horrible picture, and there’s a lot of stuff in Requiem that I don’t think you can write unless you have first hand experience with junk. After I read Requiem I met him, it was 1986, I just called him up and hung out with him in the same apartment he had up until last week. And I said, ‘How did you write so vividly about heroin?’ I was like, 25, I was very young, and he goes, ‘Whaddya mean? I wuz a fuckin’ junkie!’ And I was like, ‘Oh!’ What he’s went through in his life is just unbelievable."