Hubert Selby, Jr. | Biography

Hubert Selby, Jr. came into prominence in 1964 with the publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn, a collection of violent, interrelated stories depicting homosexuals, thugs, drunks, whores, and others engaged in acts of perverse brutality and blind self-destruction. Last Exit to Brooklyn was the subject of an obscenity trial in England, banned in Italy, and given a mixed reception in the United States. Selby, then 36, had drawn on his personal experience for the stories of life in the lower depths. Some critics found the work self-indulgent, obscene, and unliterary, while others rose to its defense. The reactions were strong on both sides, but the critics were in agreement on at least two points--that Selby knew his material and that his style was energetic and uninhibited.

Two novels have followed Last Exit to Brooklyn. The first of these, The Room (1971), about an imprisoned psychopath awaiting trial, extends the themes and actions of Last Exit to Brooklyn, though within a narrower compass. It was greeted enthusiastically by a number of reviewers. Selby's latest novel, The Demon (1976), was given very little attention. It is an effort to portray a man possessed by ambition, lust, and violence, but it is murky in its intentions and execution.

A largely self-taught writer with little formal education, Hubert Selby, Jr., was born on 23 July 1928 in Brooklyn. He attended Peter Stuyvesant High School there for one year before joining the merchant marine in 1944. Between 1946 and 1950, he was hospitalized for tuberculosis. Selby worked for six years on Last Exit to Brooklyn, holding in the meantime a variety of jobs and publishing in such journals as the Black Mountain Review , New Directions Annual, and the Provincetown Review. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his third wife and their children where he is at work on a novel, "A Pound of Pure" (described by Selby as focusing on the problems of addiction to drugs, food, television--"That is, the American way of life"). Selby also writes scripts for film and TV (a recent script for a television special on the Third Commandment was not used; he has said his next script will be "an investigation of faith").

Selby has said of Last Exit that he was attempting to "portray the horrors of a loveless world," "to overwhelm the reader with truth, like Beethoven, so that weeks, months, or any damn time after he has finished the book and whether he liked it or it disgusted him, he will be forced to think." Selby cites the composer as one of his two major influences; the other is Isaac Babel, whose writing he admires for its power. Relentless brutality and shock are characteristic devices in all three of Selby's works. Although his style is paratactic and full of energetic run-ons, it is tightly controlled in both Last Exit and The Room. His handling of form is equally rigorous in these novels; three of the stories in Last Exit have in common a spiralling structure which deserves close attention, and The Room, like "Landsend" which is the "Coda" of Last Exit, has a form very similar to that of a musical rondo.

Classifying Selby is a difficult matter. Having been on the fringes of the literary establishment has kept him, perhaps as much as the violence of his works, from being given much attention in formal academic journals, and so the number of serious critical studies devoted to him is small. It would seem most proper to regard him as a moralist--as a moralist primarily and a social critic only secondarily. He indicts his characters sternly for their grave and multiple failings, especially in Last Exit. He deserves to be compared with Flannery O'Connor, whose stories, like his, often engender in the reader an antipathy toward the characters and end with violent retributions. Selby takes his own Christianity very seriously, and in Last Exit it is expressed almost as harshly as Flannery O'Connor's Catholicism.

Of Selby's works so far, Last Exit is clearly the most exciting and most significant. It is both an obsessed and a deceptively variegated book, as much a whole, coherent novel as an aggregate of stories. Described in some reviews as being a journey into hell, it opens to the reader a world of tedium and depravity, of drug abuse and viciousness, of self-exploitation and abysmal ignorance that seems at once unbearable and all too real. What gives this work its power is less fidelity to fact than an unremitting energy. As Selby hoped, it overwhelms; it denies the reader the distance which usually goes with aesthetic pleasure, and it does so by detailing explicitly the thoughts and actions of its characters. Some reviewers responded with outrage or self-protective sarcasm. One critic noted that Last Exit is not a book for the fainthearted.

Although The Room is not as rich a book or quite as unerring as Last Exit, it, too, is dreadfully plausible. The protagonist is a bleak, unnamed prisoner who alternately has fantasies of reprisal against his captors and imagines himself as the spearhead of a judicial reform campaign. He is frightful and pathetic. He is made universal by the bewilderment he feels in trying to assess his actions and feelings, a bewilderment which fatally cripples his sense of responsibility as well as his self-esteem. His desire to be acceptable to himself is so desperate that he forcibly rejects the idea of his wrongdoings, and yet his guilt is a merciless weight. Like Harry Black in Last Exit, who is the epitome, perhaps, of Hubert Selby's suffering characters, this man is on the rack every second of his life. Vomiting, masturbating, pinching a deeply-rooted pimple-- these are the climactic actions that give his life shape. His dreams of revenge against the policemen who apprehended him are so savage as to risk seeming gratuitous at times. Selby manages, though, to make this material real and functional. He is not quite so convincing when his character is imagining himself as a reformer; the projected alter ego has a verbal tone and a cleverness which seem, at least in some ways, beyond the prisoner's imagination.

The failure of The Demon to measure up to Selby's other novels is a consequence of its scattering its energies broadly. Its hero, Harry White, is intended as a counterpart of some sort to Harry Black of "Strike". But the construction falters seriously. Selby seems unable to decide whether Harry is to be pitied or despised, and what results is a muddled portrait of a brilliant young executive whose larcenous, lecherous, and murderous pursuits do not achieve dramatic or psychological coherency. Nothing about this Harry ever quite comes into focus. His supposed business acumen is suggested, not portrayed; his marital relationship retains an implausible decency even during the period of his most degraded and sordid actions. Stylistically as well, The Demon is perplexing; the tone vacillates between the coarse, pungent crudity so proper to Last Exit and an embarrassing bland idiom which is incompatible with that crudity. The range of tone which is midway between these two extremes--uncliched but common-sounding--eludes Selby here, as does the bedrock credibility of his other works. The Demon is melodramatic, overlong, and arbitrary.

Selby has said, however, in response to this criticism, that The Demon is "a morality play rather than a novel about a man's success and failure.... Harry White fought his obsession with his ego, rather than surrendering his problems to God, and when he utters those famous last words in the hotel room, One wont hurt, his life becomes a shambles and his destruction is inevitable." Selby has also said that "the entire book is an extended cliche"--one whose stylistic mixture is intended, not accidental. Still, the reader finds it difficult to know from the text that his usual novelistic expectations are out of order here; and one cannot help feeling that the author's intentions are somehow overly intellectual. Last Exit and The Room are both written from the gut, and they more readily succeed because their "meanings" are less imposed upon the fabric of the action.