From the Shadows, a Legend Reappears : Mainstream Recognition Catches Up With ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ Author Selby Once Again

No one who has read “Last Exit to Brooklyn” can easily forget Georgette, the “hip queer” whose penchant for a cruel ex-con culminates in drug-fueled abasement, or Tralala, the greedy prostitute who dies as brutally as she lived.

First published in 1964, “Last Exit” exploded onto the American psyche like a 10-megaton nuclear bomb and set off a searing controversy among critics, who called it an extraordinary literary achievement while praising and panning its dark vision and violent prose.

The book sold 750,000 copies, was translated into a dozen languages, including Finnish, Japanese and Serbo-Croatian, and, at different times, directors Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick hoped to bring it to the screen.

But their plans fizzled and so, over time, did author Hubert Selby Jr.’s newly won fame.

Drugs and Drink

Flush with money and celebrity, he plunged headfirst into a dark oblivion of alcoholism and drug addiction rivaling that of his most tortured characters.

Today, the 59-year-old writer lives alone, scratching out a meager existence from teaching part time and spinning a new novel in his one-bedroom West Hollywood apartment.

But mainstream recognition is catching up with him once again.

Almost a quarter century after it was first published, “Last Exit” is slouching toward celluloid thanks to West German producer Bernd Eichinger, who calls Selby’s novel “an enormous piece of literature; the most powerful, powerful book I have read from a living author.”

The producer, whose credits include Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” and “The Never Ending Story,” says the photo-realist imagery of “Last Exit” haunted him for 20 years, but that until recently, he lacked the credits and financial backing to tackle such a complex, controversial film. He plans to film “Last Exit” in New York this summer.

Other events are also conspiring to propel Selby back into the public eye.

Jean-Jacques Beineix, who directed the movies “Diva” and “Betty Blue,” has optioned his 1976 novel “The Demon.” Grove Press, the literary-minded house that first published Selby--as well as highly charged works by Jean Genet, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller--plans to re-release “Last Exit” this year. And Thunder’s Mouth Press, a small, quirky New York publisher, in May will reissue Selby’s 1978 novel, “Requiem For A Dream.”

Along with all that, Selby has linked up with some young, avant-garde writers who see him as a kindred spirit, one whose alienated, Angst -ridden prose echoes their own.

Entranced by his message, Lydia Lunch, the New York writer/performer and Henry Rollins, formerly of the Los Angeles hard-core band Black Flag, invited Selby to read with them at recent spoken-word performances in Hollywood and San Francisco.

On stage at Hollywood’s Lhasa Club and The Roxy, it is eerie to watch the literary flame pass between performers separated by generations but alike in soul. Time seems to fold back onto itself as Selby reads his finger-popping tales forged in the hipster jazz tradition to audiences who weren’t even born when “Last Exit” first hit the street.

The crowds listen in spellbound silence while Rollins, whose intensity evokes images of a youthful, more centered Selby, calls the author his inspiration and all-time hero.

“He recombines your DNA . . . . After I read ‘Requiem,’ I wanted to stop writing,” Rollins says.

In person, Selby--whom friends call by his childhood nickname “Cubby”--is a tall, alarmingly frail man whose lifelong battle with private demons is etched onto a face that’s kind and intelligent.

There is an ethereal quality about him, as if his long--and mostly self-imposed--suffering had purged him of flesh and ego until what remained was more spirit than body. His eyes--two incandescent blue orbs--threaten to overtake his gaunt face.

Especially when he talks about writing. The cool detachment of minimalism has no place in his heart.

“What I attempt to do is put the reader through an emotional experience. I want them to experience the pain. If I can shake them up, I can effect some change,” Selby says.

“So many people think that the purpose of an artist is to take something ugly and make it pretty. Well, the majority of people on this Earth scratch to stay alive and they have to watch their kids die a little bit every day from starvation. That’s not genteel. It’s not lunch at ’21.’ But it’s reality.”

Not much remains of the bristling young man who wrote in such relentless, gut-wrenching detail about a vicious, loveless, godless world. Time has melted much of the corrosive anger, the silent, screaming anguish, the self-destructive impulses that once sent him reeling into heroin addiction and alcoholism.

“I started dying 36 hours before I was born,” Selby says. “I was never comfortable in my own body. I was always afraid. I couldn’t find a way to live.”

So he courted death instead.

At 15, standing 6 feet and weighing 170 pounds, the Brooklyn-born only child of an engineer and a housewife ran off to join the Merchant Marine. At 18, he was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis and had 10 ribs removed so doctors could collapse his left lung and snip out part of the diseased right one. Confined to bed so he could recuperate, he sneaked out for nights of drinking and would pass out in snowbanks, only to be rescued by neighborhood friends.

Later, the feverish, gnawing demands of a $100 a day heroin habit sent him crawling to the city’s rankest dens. Toward the end of this period, he recalls, there was a 90-day, drug-related prison stint and a four-month stay in solitary confinement at Bellevue Hospital for attempting suicide.

Back in the late 1940s, before he learned to turn a phrase, Selby hung out with the characters who would form the nexus of “Last Exit” and lived their lives. In the bars and greasy spoons near the old Brooklyn Army Base and the Gowanus Parkway, Selby met Vinny, Harry, Freddy, Tralala and dozens like them.

“I liked the life style--stay up all night, sleep all day,” he recalls. “Most of them were ex-cons. They were always hustling. Money or drugs . . . or sex. Guys who’ve spent time in jail, it’s no big deal for them.”

It was here he met Georgette, whose life is recounted with such object compassion in “Last Exit.”

“I had a deep affection for Georgie,” Selby says. “We both felt alienated from the world. When I heard he had been found dead on the street, apparently from an overdose, it moved me very much. I loved Georgie.”

Selby says people assumed he was gay after reading “Last Exit.” They assumed he was black after reading “Requiem for a Dream.” (One of the characters is a black junkie from the Bronx.) Not a bad compliment for a straight white guy just trying to get inside his characters’ heads.

“I’ve never been a homosexual and I’ve never had a lot of these experiences that I write about,” Selby says. “But I understand alienation, I understand fear and I understand a lot of these things. I was just trying to write the best story I could.”

Today, Selby says he is clean. Sober. And sane, if that word can be applied to someone who every day of his life wrestles with alienation that “makes you want to jump out of your skin” and fear that “gnaws at the marrow of your bones.” And he is at peace in a way he couldn’t even fathom in the days when anger was his main motivation for living.

He rises at 6 each morning, to sip hot tea and meditate. Then he spends several hours writing, on a portable electric typewriter at a desk near his neatly made single bed. There is time enough for that since his job as unit manager for a video production company ended late in December when his show folded. At 59 he is in poor health--he has asthma, has troubles with his one lung, is very weak and hypoglycemic.

So he putters around the 1950s style apartment building with his reading glasses dangling from a string, cooing to his two cockateels to “be cool.” Selby has no TV, but keeps several bookshelves stocked with works by Thomas Merton, Lawrence Durrell, William Kennedy and books about Beethoven--whom he calls his muse and inspiration.

The old anger returns only when he defends himself against critics’ words that still draw blood after 25 years. He professes sadness that so many failed to understand his characters were trapped in a brutish, warped world where society offered few alternatives. Their fates hinged on an Old Testament morality, he says. That’s why he prefaced his tales of drag queens, whores and junkies with biblical quotations.

“I’ve always been a frustrated teacher and preacher,” he muses.

Fred Jordan, editor-in-chief of Grove Press, goes further. He calls Selby “one of the great writers in post-war American literature” and says his books should be required reading in all college lit classes.

“‘Last Exit’ is a classic. It’s one of the extraordinary books that’s been written about the insulted and the injured,” Jordan says.

Why then, has Selby received so little recognition from his peers? From academia? From the mass market?

Jordan believes it’s because Selby doesn’t allow readers the pleasure of a catharsis.

“We live in an age in which unpleasantness is not sought out,” Jordan says. “We try to shut our eyes to it. And Selby doesn’t make it easy on the reader. You’re stuck with it, you have to make up your own mind. . . . People resent that. They would like to shed a little tear and be cleansed.”

Author John Rechy, who wrote the landmark book “City of Night,” calls Selby “A writer of the first rank who has not gotten his due” and adds that “it’s saddening to see a writer like Selby shoved aside.”

Rechy, who teaches at USC’s School of Professional Writing, was surprised several years ago to learn that the author was living quietly in Hollywood. He helped arrange for Selby to read at USC, which two years ago led the university to offer Selby a part-time teaching position in its program.

But the former Brooklyn street kid is no Iowa Writer’s Workshop alum. A ninth-grade graduate, he didn’t even read seriously until his 20s, when he began hanging out in Greenwich Village’s Cedar Street bar with writers like his old childhood friend, Gilbert Sorrentino, and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter. They would drink and discuss Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams, he recalls.

He also felt a nagging urge to write, but it wasn’t until the mid 1950s, when he had a spiritual experience in which his life flashed before his eyes--revealing a broken old man who had squandered his life--that Selby took up his pen.

At the time, Selby and his first wife--he has four children from three marriages and is separated from his third wife--were living in Brooklyn, behind a barber shop. He was on disability with asthma, so he bought a $75 typewriter and began pecking away at it. After he recovered, Selby worked in clerical jobs at an insurance company by day and wrote like a man obsessed each night, honing his dialogue to paint the syncopation of the American streets.

In 1956, he sent part of Georgette’s tale--called “The Queen is Dead”--to poet William Carlos Williams, whom he knew through friends and who wrote back that he was absolutely knocked out by the story. The vignette was eventually published in The Black Mountain Review, a literary publication of the alternative Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Encouraged, Selby screwed up the courage to call Sterling Lord, who had been Jack Kerouac’s literary agent. Lord read the stories and according to Selby, told him, “I think we can make money together.”

And they did. Selby’s life changed after “Last Exit” came out in 1964.

“It got worse,” he recalls. “I had some money coming in and I had time on my hands. I got myself into a lot of trouble.”

In 1967, Selby was arrested for possession of heroin and quit cold turkey, strapped to a cot in the county jail. Kicking alcohol took two more years, he says.

In the process, the writer says he found his own religion, but not in any organized way. His creed is simple. “I try to live according to spiritual principles,” he says.

Letting go of his anger wasn’t easy. He was still exorcising it in 1971, when he wrote “The Room.” It poured out of him in thick torrents over six months, he says. Critics likened the book, which contains one of the more perverse scenes of torture and retaliation in American literature, to a French existentialist novel.

Selby himself, with detached awe, calls it “the most disturbing book I’ve ever read.” He found it so disturbing, in fact, that he says he couldn’t bring himself to read it again for 12 years.

But he defends its strong prose, bridling at the suggestion that it might be too gruesome. “No one wants to look at the reality of life, and especially, the failure of the American Dream,” he maintains.

Selby says he has never received any prize and has been turned down repeatedly for prestigious writing grants.

There are still times when he feels “very inadequate, very overwhelmed.” But that hasn’t quelled his need to write. He is 150 pages into the new novel, which he calls his first optimistic work.

“It’s about a 50-year-old man,” Selby says. “He’s looking back on his life, trying to find his childhood and in the process, coming to terms with his father, and God.”

Last year, Selby himself came to terms with Brooklyn, when he went back there for the first time in many years. Ironically, the man who wrote so aptly about the losers and misfits who oozed along the borough’s underbelly returned in style.

He was there with Eichinger to scout location sites for “Last Exit.”

“We cruised around the old neighborhood in a stretch limo,” Selby says, shaking his head in amazement and breaking into his trademark, toothy grin that approaches a grimace.

“Can ya believe that?”