“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 prefaced 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.

He returned with ‘The Room’ in 1971, a series of misanthropic and sadistic inner space meditations from an incarcerated man so extreme as to make his first novel appear almost conventional. Its author couldn’t bring himself to read it for 20 years after publication. It received what Selby called “the most incredible reviews I’ve ever read in my life” but did little in commercial terms. Over the next decade, his reputation became that of a one-title cult writer, although in actuality, his next two works ‘The Demon’ (1976) and ‘Requiem For A Dream’ (1978) were if anything technically superior, without compromising on molten fury (the latter began with Selby’s favourite line of his own making: “Harry locked his mother in the closet”).

Constant infirmity meant that Selby’s frail body could not always satisfy his mind’s appetite for work, and it was to be eight years before his next book ‘Song Of The Silent Snow,’ a collection of 15 short stories that spanned 20 years. By now, Selby, who never finished high school, was teaching a graduate writing class at the University of Southern California. However, a whole new slew of writers, musicians and performance artists were discovering his work, including Lydia Lunch (for whose 1997 book ‘Paradoxia’ he wrote the foreword) Henry Rollins, Don Bajema and others. Rollins, who had just left Black Flag and was establishing himself as a writer, solo artist and publisher with his 2.13.61 imprint, met with Selby, and the two became friends and co-conspirators, frequently sharing a stage at spoken word shows.

“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.

“He gave me this thing that he wrote for basically me and Joe’s mother Sally,” he says. “And a line from it, Joe’s mother liked it so much she put it on Joe’s headstone. I thought that was pretty huge. He was very helpful to me in that time ’cos he knew how close Joe and I were. And he and Joe really liked each other, they had a very funny relationship, they were great together. But after Joe died I was pretty messed up and he called me up one night: ‘I’m comin’ over, I’m taking you out to dinner, I’m takin’ you to a movie.’ I said, ‘Naw, naw, I have to just kind sit here,’ and he says, ‘Nope! We’re getting’ outta the house!’ And he came over and threw me in his car and he took me out to dinner, we saw ‘JFK’ at the writer’s Guild, he was a screenwriter so we saw it at this cool theatre with Oscar statues everywhere. That was the most striking part about him: he always seemed to be in struggling health but he was always happier to see you than anything and he made you feel quite special. I went to a few of his AA meetings to watch him speak. I’d never been to AA, I don’t drink, but his effect on the people at these things was just unbelievable, people loved that guy.”

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.’ “He used to mention, ‘I don’t have long’ or ‘I don’t know how many more years I got,’” recalls Rollins. “I remember in 1989 we were in Switzerland and at breakfast one day he outlined the entire story for ‘The Willow Tree,’ it took like, an hour, it was fascinating. He took me from Auschwitz to the end, and then he goes, ‘Well, I’m gonna try and write it before I die, this is gonna be the last book I write, I’m gonna see if I have enough energy left.’

As it happened, 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).

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.”

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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

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© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.