WORLD-OBITS-L Archives

From: "Peter_McCrae" <>
Subject: SELBY: Hubert Selby--d.app.04/2004>USA
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 17:58:48 -0000

Hubert Selby Jr
(Filed: 28/04/2004)
The Daily Telegraph and the telgraph.co.uk


Hubert Selby Jr, the author who died on Monday aged 75, attracted praise and
revulsion in almost equal measure for the frank, detailed and obsessive
treatment of brutality, rape, perversion and drug addiction in his books;
his best known work, Last Exit to Brooklyn, was the subject of an obscenity
trial when it was first published in Britain in 1966.



A collection of five loosely-connected short stories centred around a seedy
urban neighbourhood in 1950s New York, Last Exit to Brooklyn was peopled by
prostitutes, gangs, addicts and transvestites. Its publication in America in
1964 had excited a degree of controversy, but struck a chord with young
radicals. In Britain, critics greeted it with grudging admiration. "I have
never been in Brooklyn," wrote Francis King in The Sunday Telegraph, "but
having read these accounts of theft, violence, corruption, male and female
prostitution and squalor, I do not think that I wish to go there." He went
on, however, to praise its "sinewy and supple prose" and its "dialogue that
can uncannily create a whole character in merely a phrase".

But the book, which appeared six years after the Lady Chatterly case,
shocked and angered an establishment in the final throes of a battle with
literary liberalism. In July 1966, after the book had been described as
"filthy and disgusting" in the Commons, the Conservative MP Sir Cyril Black
initiated a private prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. Robert
Maxwell, then Labour MP for Buckingham, added his voice to the clamour,
describing the book as "muck". The following year Last Exit was committed to
a trial at the Old Bailey.

For nine days an all-male jury heard witnesses such as Sir Basil Blackwell
describe the book as "depraved" while, in its defence, Professor Frank
Kermode compared Selby to Dickens; on the final day, having deliberated for
almost six hours, the jury found against the publishers, Calder and Boyars,
and the book was banned. But the verdict was overturned in the appeal courts
when, with a defence led by John Mortimer, the judge was found to have given
the jury insufficient guidance.

Selby was hailed as the new voice of the "underground" and his admirers
compared the anguished rage and despair of his writing to that of
Dostoevsky. He himself staunchly defended his choice of subject matter. "The
events that take place are the way people are," he said of the horrors
contained within the book. "These are not literary characters; these are
real people. I knew these people. How can anybody look inside themselves and
be surprised at the hatred and violence in this world? It's inside all of
us."

Hubert Selby Jr was born on July 27 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a
merchant seaman. Young Hubert was known as "Cubby" to his friends. "When you
have a name like Hubert," he later explained, "and you are growing up in the
streets of Brooklyn and everybody's called Mikey, Vinnie and Tony, I had to
come up with something."

He attended high school for one year before dropping out at the age of 15 to
become a merchant seaman. But after three years at sea he contracted
tuberculosis and was told that he had only months to live. He spent the next
year at the Marine Hospital in New York where his condition was treated with
streptomycin, an experimental drug which alleviated his symptoms. "It was a
really toxic drug," Selby later explained, "and I'm still paying the price.
It impaired my vision, destroyed most of my inner ear and fried my brain."
He was dogged by breathing problems for the rest of his life.

In 1949 he married, but with no qualifications and poor health he "wasn't
equipped to do anything" and for a time stayed at home looking after his
daughter while his wife worked in a department store. Several odd jobs and a
period as an insurance analyst followed.

In the early 1950s, despite being a heavy drinker with an addiction to
morphine (a habit he had acquired during his time in hospital), Selby
decided to become a writer. Although he had read practically nothing, he set
about educating himself, initially by spending time with a group of young
writers, including LeRoi Hones and Gilbert Sorrentino. He did not, however,
abandon his roots and continued to frequent the seedier bars of Brooklyn,
where he met many of the characters who inspired Last Exit to Brooklyn.

In 1967, following his arrest for possession of heroin, Selby managed to
conquer his addictions and two years later he moved to California. He
published The Room, a relentlessly nasty tale of a psychopath and his
sadistic fantasies, in 1971. It received, Selby said later, "the greatest
reviews I've ever read in my life", although he confessed that he thought it
"the most disturbing book ever written by a human being".

This was followed by The Demon (1976) the horrifying depiction of a man
obsessed by lust and violence. "There is only one source of energy for my
hate," he said, "and that's me. And there's only one ultimate destination
for my hate and that's me." His next book, Requiem for a Dream (1978),
contained Selby's favourite opening line: "Harry locked his mother in a
closet." He later adapted this depiction of the depressing existence of a
heroin addict into a film of the same name.

Following the publication of a collection of short stories, Song of the
Silent Snow (1986), in 1998, he published The Willow Tree, a slightly more
optimistic tale of a badly beaten young black boy who is taken in by a
Holocaust survivor. In 1989 a film of Last Exit to Brooklyn was released to
critical acclaim and relatively little controversy. His most recent
publication, Waiting Period (2002) is the tale of a man who gives up suicide
for murder, while Fear X, a horror-thriller film scripted by Selby, was
released this year.

For many years Selby taught at the University of Southern California where
he ran a fiction workshop. He was regarded by his third wife as a kind and
generous husband, although in recent years he had suffered from depression
and would occasionally launch into rages. "He screamed, he yelled, he broke
things," she explained. "I've been struggling to stay alive so long," he
said recently, "I don't know which way is which, to tell you the truth." He
was still teaching and working on a new novel at the time of his death.
"Most of the time," he said in 1989, "I'm very, very happy."

Hubert Selby married three times. He is survived by his third wife, Suzanne,
and by his two sons and two daughters.













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