Hubert Selby Jr.

Hubert Selby, Jr. (July 23, 1928 – April 26, 2004) was one of America's most acclaimed postwar writers. His work ranks as some of the most powerful literature written by an American author in the twentieth century.^[1] His best known work, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) is recognized today as a classic.

Wrong Entrance

Hubert's father, Hubert Selby Sr., was a merchant seaman and a former coal miner from Kentucky. He married Adalin, and they both settled in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn. Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in 1928, in Brooklyn, New York City. He attended various New York state schools, including Peter Stuyvesant High. His childhood nickname "Cubby" stuck with him his entire life.

In 1943, Hubert Sr. returned to the merchant marine. His son, Hubert Jr., dropped out of school, and at the age of 15 was able to persuade the recruiters to allow him to join the merchant marine. The life of a teenager, who followed his father, quickly took a wrong turn.

In 1947, while at sea, Selby was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. The doctors predicted that he would live for less than a year. He was taken off the ship in Bremen, Germany, and sent back home to America. The next three and a half years, the 18 year old spent in and out of the Marine Hospital in New York.

Selby went through an experimental drug treatment, streptomycin, that later caused some severe complications. The doctors relied on surgery. During the operation, in order for the surgeons to operate on his lungs, they removed ten ribs^[2]. One of the lungs collapsed, and the doctors removed part of the other. The surgery saved him, but left him with a year-long recuperation, and acute pulmonary problems for the rest of his life. Those years brought on an addiction to painkillers and heroin that lasted for a couple of decades.

One Way

In 1949, Selby married for the first time. But after the marines, with no qualifications, no work experience and bad health, he had trouble landing a job. He spent most of the time at home, raising his daughter while his wife worked in a department store.

For the next ten years, Selby remained bed-ridden and frequently hospitalized with a variety of lung related ailments. The doctors continued to issue bleak prognosis on Selby's life, telling him repeatedly that he could not possibly survive, because he "just didn't have enough lung capacity". But Selby refused to give up. A childhood friend, writer Gilbert Sorrentino^[3], encouraged Selby to spend his time on fiction. Unable to make a living due to health concerns, Selby decided, "I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer."

On discovering the incentive for being a writer, Selby writes:

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.

With no formal training, Selby used his raw language to narrate the bleak and violent world that was part of his youth. He stated "I write, in part, by ear. I hear, as well as feel and see, what I am writing. I have always been enamoured with the music of the speech in New York."^[4] In style, Selby also differed from other writers. He did not care about proper grammar, punctuation, or diction. He indented his paragraphs with alternating lengths, often by simply dropping down one line when he was finished with a paragraph. Like Jack Kerouac's "spontaneous prose", Selby's writing was often done in a fast, stream of consciousness style, and to facilitate this he replaced his apostrophes with forward slashes "/" due to their closer proximity on his typewriter, thus allowing uninterrupted typing. He did not use quotation marks, and dialogue may consist of a complete paragraph, with no denotion among alternating speakers. His prose was stripped down, bare, and blunt.

His experience with longshoremen, homeless, thugs, pimps, transvestites, prostitutes, queers, addicts and the overall poverty-stricken community, is best expressed in his most praised work, Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Last Exit

In 1958, Selby started working on his first piece, The Queen Is Dead. At the time, Selby had a succession of jobs. Yet he continued to work on his fiction every night after his day job as a secretary, a gas station attendant, and a freelance copywriter. The short story slowly evolved for the next six years before it saw the light of publication.

In 1961, a short story Tralala was published in a literary journal, The Provincetown Review. It also appeared in Black Mountain Review and New Directions. With his unstructured style and coarse descriptions, Selby examined the life, the gang rape, and murder of a prostitute. He quickly drew negative attention from a number of critics. The editor was arrested for selling pornographic literature to a minor. The publication was in an obscenity trial, but the case was later dismissed on appeal.

As Selby continued to work on his writing, Amiri Baraka, Selby's long time friend, encouraged Selby to contact Sterling Lord, who at the time was Jack Kerouac's agent. In 1964, Tralala along with The Queen is Dead, and four other loosely linked short stories, appeared in his first novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The novel was accepted and published by Grove Press, which has already released works by William S. Burroughs.

The novel was praised by many, including Allen Ginsberg, who predicted that it would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years". But as with any controversial work, not everyone was happy. Because of the detailed depictions of homosexuality, drug addiction, gang rape, and other human brutality and cruelty, the novel was prosecuted for obscenity in Great Britain in 1967. Anthony Burgess was among a number of writers who appeared as witnesses for the defence of the novel. The all-male jury's conviction was later reversed on appeal. Italy had the novel banned. For more details on the British trial of Last Exit to Brooklyn see the entry Last Exit to Brooklyn#Trial.

In 1967, Selby moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to escape his own addiction. That same year, Selby met his future wife, Suzanne, at a bar in West Hollywood. The couple moved in together two days later. Two years after, in 1969, they were married. For the next decade, they traveled back and forth, between their home in Southern California and East Coast, settling down permanently in Los Angeles area in 1983.

Even though all of his work was written while he was sober, Selby continued to battle his drug addiction. In 1967 heroin eventually landed him in Los Angeles county jail, where he spent two months for possession of heroin. After his release from jail, he kicked his habit and stayed clean of drugs and alcohol through to his death. He refused morphine on his death bed, even though he was in pain.

Dead End

In 1971, Selby published his second novel, The Room. The novel received the greatest reviews, and was considered to be another masterpiece. Selby himself described the book to be "the most disturbing book ever written", a book that he himself could not read again for decades after writing it.

Selby continued to write short fiction, screenplays and teleplays at his apartment in West Hollywood. His work appeared in many journals, including Yugen, Black Mountain Review, Evergreen Review, Provincetown Review, Kulchur, New Directions Annual, Swank and Open City. For the last 20 years of his life, Selby taught creative writing as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. Selby often noted that the New York Times would not review his books when they were published, but he predicted that they'd print his obituary.

During the last years of his life, Selby suffered from depression, and fits of rage. The last month of his life, Selby spent in and out of the hospital. Selby died in Highland Park, Los Angeles, CA on April 26, 2004 of chronic obstructive pulmonary lung disease. Selby is survived by his wife of 35 years, Suzanne Selby (b. 1946); four children, Kyle Mack of New York; Claudia Selby of Kentucky; and Rachel Selby and William Selby, both of Southern California; and 11 grandchildren^[5].

Works

Fiction

(in chronological order)

• Last Exit to Brooklyn. Novel. (1964)
• The Room. Novel. (1971)
• The Demon. Novel. (1976) ^[6]
• Requiem for a Dream. Novel. (1978)
• Song of the Silent Snow. Collection of short fiction. (1986) ^[7]
• The Willow Tree. Novel. (1998)
• Waiting Period. Novel. (2002)

Spoken Word

(in chronological order)

• Our Fathers Who Aren't in Heaven. Compilation by Henry Rollins. 2xCD set (1990)
• Live in Europe 1989. Spoken word with Henry Rollins. CD. (1995)
• Blue Eyes And Exit Wounds. Spoken word with Nick Tosches. CD. (1998)

Filmography

(in chronological order)

• Jour et Nuit. Screenwriter. France / Switzerland (1986)
• Last Exit to Brooklyn. Writer. USA / Germany (1989) ^[8]
• Scotch and Milk. Actor (Cubby). USA (1998)
• Requiem for a Dream. Screenwriter. USA (2000) ^[9]
• Fear X. Screenwriter. Denmark / UK / Canada (2003)

Documentaries

(in chronological order)

• Memories, Dreams & Addictions. Interview with Ellen Burstyn. Special feature on Requem for a Dream Director's Cut DVD release. (2001)
• Hubert Selby, Jr.: 2 Ou 3 Choses... (A Couple of Things About Hubert Selby, Jr.) Documentary film by Ludovic Cantais, France (2000)
• HUBERT SELBY JR: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow Documentary film. (2005)^[10]

Quotes

• "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, Jr.
• "His art is his ability to humanize the seemingly inhuman, and by extension to humanize the reader." - Richard Price, novelist.
• "To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish of America" - New York Times.
• "[Last Exit to Brooklyn] was a seminal piece of work. It broke so many traditions. [. . . ]. [Selby was] one of the last of that generation, of some of the greatest writers in this country." - Jim Ragan, head of the master's of professional writing program at the USC.
• "[Selby] had the extraordinary capability of using language that is not normally thought of as a literary language, to make literature out of it." - Gilbert Sorrentino, novelist and childhood friend.
• "[When writing, Selby] always left one line partially unfinished at night to have a place to start the next morning." - Suzanne Selby, wife.
• "What Moby Dick was to Melville's century, Last Exit to Brooklyn is to ours, and between the two, Selby's is the better book. If that be called heresy, know that it be called so only by those of the same dead mind as they who allowed Melville to die unknown. " - Nick Tosches
• "When college came around I wasn't very prepared. I hit the library and tried to learn. But Selby fucked everything up. From sentence one I was done, and so were my finals." - Darren Aronofsky, director of Requem for a Dream film release.
• "Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission." - Hubert Selby, Jr.

Notes

1. ^ Selby was ranked as one of America's best writers by New York Times. The paper also compared his work to that of Dostoyevsky.
2. ^ In the obituary, Selby's wife, Suzanne Selby, states that during the treatment the doctors removed a whole lung along with eleven ribs.
3. ^ Selby dedicated his first work, Last Exit to Brooklyn, to Gilbert Sorrentino, with whom he grew up in Brooklyn.
4. ^ "Guardian Unlimited Film : Features : Hubert Selby Jr and near-death experience". 2005-12-23.
5. ^ Selby was married three times and had four children.
6. ^ The rights to The Demon have been purchased by director Jean-Jacques Beineix
7. ^ Song of the Silent Snow is a collection of fifteen stories that span the writing of more than two decades.
8. ^ Film Last Exit to Brooklyn. Directed by Uli Edel. Screenplay by Desmond Nakano. Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Burt Young and Jerry Orbach. Selby has a cameo appearance in the film as a taxi driver.
9. ^ Film Requiem for a Dream. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Screenplay by Hubert Selby, Jr. Starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans. Selby has a cameo appearance in the film as a Laughing Guard.
10. ^ The title of this documentary is taken from page 103 of Selby's novel The Demon. The slash is included in Selby's typography.

• ^ Selby's first work "The Queen Is Dead" (appearing as a chapter in Last Exit) inspired the name of an album by Manchester pop group The Smiths, and became their most highly regarded LP.

References

• www.exitwounds.com Official website of Hubert Selby, Jr. and Nick Tosches. Accessed June 15, 2005.
• Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica. Selby, Hubert, Jr. Accessed June 14, 2005.
• Cinema.com. Hubert Selby, Jr. Biography. Accessed June 14, 2005.
• Obituary of Hubert Selby, Jr. Ryan Pearson, Associated Press. April 26, 2004. Accessed June 15, 2005.
• IMDb. The Internet Movie Database. Hubert Selby Jr. filmography. Accessed June 15, 2005.
• Why I Continue To Write. Thirty-five years after Last Exit to Brooklyn. Hubert Selby Jr. LA Weekly. February 26 - March 4, 1999. Accessed June 15, 2005.

External links

• Interview with Hubert Selby, Jr. NPR, April 28, 2004. (This interview was originally broadcast on May 4, 1990.)
• "HUBERT SELBY JR: It/ll Be Better Tomorrow" (2005) Documentary on Hubert Selby, Jr.
• Defining The Sacred Hubert Selby, Jr. on Spirituality, the Creative Will, & Love. Interview by Robert Courteau. Rain Taxi. Winter 1999/2000.
• Official Website of Hubert Selby Jr.
• Interview with Spike Magazine