http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/sep/16/treasuring-hubert-selby-jr
The author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream was a
compassionate writer who truly understood addiction
by John Lucas
16 September 2010
For many non-academic readers, Frank Kermode, who died aged 90 last
month, is perhaps best known for his spirited defence of Hubert Selby
Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn, at the obscenity trial surrounding it in
1966. According to the Daily Mail, observers described his appearance
as "more [like] a Reith lecture than an investigation into alleged
obscenity". In the foreword to the book's post-trial edition, written
by the original publishers, John Calder and Marion Boyars, we are
told that Kermode analysed the novel chapter by chapter, placing it
firmly in "the tradition of American naturalistic literature, which
... had developed from writers like Zola and Dickens". Selby died in
2004, having suffered from ill health for most of his life. Although
he wrote six novels and a collection of short stories, he is widely
known only for Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream (made
into a film by Darren Aronofsky in 2000). Since his death, and in
spite of plaudits from Kermode, Anthony Burgess and Lou Reed, among
many others, there has so far been little popular or critical
reappraisal of his work. This is a shame. Selby should be regarded
alongside Philip Roth and Norman Mailer as one of the great American
novelists, and one who has helped us to understand the nature of
addiction and the human condition better, perhaps, than any other.
It's ironic that Last Exit's varied portrait of soldiers,
transvestites, prostitutes and factory workers in 50s Brooklyn is
atypical of Selby's output. While the novel, which can comfortably be
read as a collection of interlinked short stories, is written in
Selby's familiar, informal street-style (minimal punctuation, the
FREQUENT USE OF SHOUTY CAPITAL LETTERS and stream-of-consciousness
passages) it is a broader, more socially concerned book than those
that followed, and explores the author's literary obsession:
addictive behaviour, its manifestation and causes.
Falling ill with tuberculosis while at sea in 1947 and treated in New
York, Selby became dependent on painkillers and later heroin.
Although an addict, he was sober for much of his life (his 1976 novel
The Demon is dedicated to Bill Wilson, one of the founders of
Alcoholics Anonymous). Nevertheless, his experiences doubtless
fuelled his project.
Selby's second novel, published in 1971, was The Room, the almost
unreadably dark story of a criminal locked in a remand cell,
imagining the horrific vengeance he will mete out on his captors once
released. It is a study in resentment, a phenomenon that, for
Alcoholics Anonymous (the central text of the fellowship of the same
name) "destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stems all
forms of spiritual disease."
The Demon charts a successful young executive's descent into sex
addiction and the darkness beyond it. Requiem for a Dream (1978) saw
a return of the compassion that made the final sections of Last Exit
so moving. Selby's portrayal of the devastation of drug dependence as
it rips through the lives of a widow, her son, his girlfriend and his
best friend is perhaps one of the most moving in literature. Written
in an unadorned style akin to blank verse, one can only marvel at the
depth of Selby's understanding. A book of short stories charting
similar compulsions, The Song of Silent Snow, followed in 1986, and
then two late novels, the last of which, Waiting Period, appeared in 2002.
A successor to Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, John Fante and Charles
Bukowski, Selby's influence can be detected in the work of modern
writers including Richard Price, Irvine Welsh, James Frey and more
recently Tony O'Neill and Richard Millward. In tracing Selby's
lineage, Kermode highlighted the deep compassion of this remarkable
writer. Able to humanise addiction and to demonstrate how it is
exacerbated by the consumerist motors of television and advertising,
Selby is a novelist whose insight and humanity we should treasure for
a long time to come.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment