CHAPTER 11

Unmanifesto: Selby and the Christing of the Miserable Self

Picking Last Exit to Brooklyn up again after all these years I notice that it has little quotations from the Bible before each chapter. I didn’t really remember much about this book, but I must have enjoyed it enough to read two more books by Selby — The Demon and The Room — before finally stopping: those two were simply too much, too extreme and violent for me, and perhaps too lacking in redemption. Also, Darren Aronofsky’s film adaption of Requiem for a Dream further alienated me from Selby. To me it glamorized drugs, and yes I know it ends badly for the characters, especially the one who has his arm chopped off, but in the meantime it creates a very fascinating and glamorous life for them. A glamour of misery and squalor. This is the world that Selby creates, alluring because the possibility of shocking, sexualized violence and human animal brutality is always hovering nearby.

In the introduction to the 1987 edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Anthony Burgess discusses the 1966 obscenity trial and wonders how anyone could consider the book obscene, in that it can’t be obscene because it’s not built for titillation, and that Selby rather “presents social horrors out of reformist zeal, not out of a desire to titillate or corrupt” (xvii). But I disagree: there is clearly pleasure in the reading of the book, even if that pleasure is a pleasure of horror and terror and fear. The reader is given glimpses of the characters’ depravity and violence and then is constantly on edge that something violent is going to happen — extreme and tragic violence is always around the corner.

Selby gives you characters from the beginning that are immoral or morally dubious, protagonists who do horrible or nasty or mean or suspect things. He then leaves you with these protagonists, so you fear for their safety, because justice must surely come to them. Inevitably, the characters encounter grisly ends (Tralala and Harry), which are compounded by the reader not really knowing what happens to them next: it is unclear if these two die, but in any case they have been wounded physically, socially and psychologically beyond repair. The effect is a kind of ritual sacrifice of the outcast, but the outcast is not some pure Jesus-like figure, but rather a compromised, morally bankrupt human being, the product of a social system which is a mess, but also their own sorry choices and human weakness. As Burgess says in the introduction, the feeling the reader has for them is compassion, you want to build a world that does not produce these victims.

Both chapters “The Queen Is Dead” and “Strike” have possible bearings on The Holy Bible, and in particular its treatments of gendered violence and masculinity. Selby’s novel is in various ways an indictment of patriarchal masculinities, perpetrators of and subject to all kinds of violence. The ever present threat of violence comes especially from the gang of hoodlums that congregates at “The Greeks,” led by Vinnie. In “Tralala” the focus is on a young woman, the eponymous protagonist, who in a memorably disturbing scene beats and stomps a sailor who she has robbed, crushing his face, nose and eyes. We later learn that he needs surgery and may be blind in one eye. Her anger at men, at needing them to rob as a livelihood, is palpable: anger and contempt at their sexual needs, their insect-like sameness wells up in her. Her story then ends with her being gang raped: her body violated in graphic and horrifically violent ways and abandoned as her companions pass by and laugh. There is no redemption here, but instead a portrait of unredeemable, crushing violence from which any attempt to extract meaning will be met with jeers and more violence. Selby depicts a world gone mad, but it is our world. From this perspective it cannot be obscene, because these events are true, and happen all the time. We’d like to feel that these events happen off-stage (the etymological meaning of “obscene”): Selby’s sin is that he forces us to confront them directly.

In “The Queen Is Dead” we follow transvestite Georgette, who is in love with Vinnie, and who gets stabbed by Harry and Vinnie, who are throwing a knife at her for fun. The bulk of the story is set at a party hosted by drag queens who invite over the hoodlums; they are attracted to the roughness of the men; the threat of violence and rape hangs over the scene, and in the end it happens. Intercut with this are Georgette’s feelings of romantic love toward Vinnie, who treats her for the most part with contempt and humiliation. Romantic love is kind of a dream that is used to obscure the violence of her everyday life. The agonizingly long party scene draws out the feeling of dread, almost lulling you into a false sense of security that maybe, just maybe, the men will somehow not revert to violence. Georgette reads aloud Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” to steer the evening in the direction of poetry and beauty, yet the feeling cannot be sustained, and the scene ends with Harry and Vinnie raping Lee, one of the drag queens, and then with Georgette going down on Vinnie and tasting and smelling shit and not wanting to accept it, and still clinging to the romantic dream in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Selby uses this story to observe how femininity and romanticism are illusions employed to paper over masculine violence yet unable to alter or transform its hate into love. The men act as if under individual and group pressure to live up to the worst expectations anyone could have of them, and disappointingly confirm the inevitability of masculinity as a living embodiment and performance of real-life horror.

“Strike” tells the story of Harry Black (many of Selby’s stand-ins are called Harry: his generic white male), who is a factory worker and union man struggling with his repressed homosexuality: he suffers intense anguish, hates and assaults his wife, and whilst bigging himself up as an important organizer of the strike, reaches out to discover his homosexual side in the company of drag queens. The story opens and ends with paedophilic acts by Harry, touching his own baby’s penis, and at the end, drunkenly sexually assaulting a ten-year-old boy. Vinnie and the gang then come and brutally beat him, breaking his arm in a final scene in which he is crucified by the men on an advert railing, hearing the words GOD GOD and YOU SUCK COCK in his head as he passes out of consciousness, or dies.

Harry leads a double life: as a worker he initiates fights with his bosses, prides himself on his courage to stand up to “the man,” sees himself as “one of the guys,” does a lot of back-slapping and homosocial grandstanding, inviting men to drink the beer that he offers, acting the local patriarch, bragging about his encounters with women, hitting his wife. He thinks he is popular, but actually nobody can really stand him, seeing him as a creep. In his double-life he hangs out with gay men and drag queens, and is characterized by being naïve and somewhat innocent: he doesn’t quite know who he is, he is discovering it, and there is a kind of tenderness there. He is an awful character, but somehow the reader is directed to feel tenderly toward him, in spite of his failings. That he is crushed mercilessly by the avenging mob that is led by Vinnie — representative of thug masculinity — but incurs the pity of the reader, can be understood as Selby’s reading of Christianity. Like Cormac McCarthy’s serial killer Lester Ballard, Harry Black is a “Child of God,” a human being of this world that sins but is ultimately crushed and crucified by the violence of the world. The reader holds out hope that he will be saved somehow, that he will find redemption, but this is not to be and he will not be saved. In a larger sense, one of Selby’s messages here is that there is not necessarily any salvation in this world or any other.

The masculinity of Last Exit to Brooklyn is one that is in process of becoming-woman, investigating avenues of renouncing patriarchal heterosexuality connected to violence and rape. Yet transgender does not for Selby indicate a category that somehow permits transcending violent maleness. Masculinity, for Selby, is a system of violence, an ideology and culture of violence that is not necessarily tied to any one gender. There is a memorable scene in which the “fairy” Ginger — both gay men and drag queens are gendered “she” in the book — flirts with Harry as a form of sadistic game, having utter contempt for him, dancing with him, and crushing his hand in her elbow: Harry is hurt, and confused by the interaction, puzzled as to what just happened. Opening himself up to his homosexuality does not inure Harry from being more violent, but actually the contrary: it encourages him to hate his wife and start physically hitting her. In general, it encourages the idea of himself as a man: he wants his partners frail and weak in his arms, and builds up even further this idea of himself as a patriarchal protector. This is partly why he finds his return to work after the strike has been resolved, in which he is once again in a submissive position in a menial alienating assembly-line job, so humiliating, so he walks out, gets drunk, and tries to reassert himself by sexually assaulting the ten-year-old boy, Joey. Once the strike is over and he doesn’t have a free flow of money from the union strike expense funds, he realizes with alacrity that the drag queens’ interest in him depended on his money, and once he can’t lavish it on them anymore, they shut him out, and he finds himself loose, hanging, with nothing to lose, plummeting towards a disaster of his own making.

In the stories of Last Exit to Brooklyn there is a yearning to exit from heteropatriarchal paradigms. In The Demon the protagonist is consumed by his violent sexuality that culminates in him pushing someone into the subway in a very gruesome and brutal scene; in The Room the reader is privy to the thoughts of an imprisoned man, and one fantasy of a particularly violent rape scene by the cops who framed him stands out. In the end, Harry is crucified for his sins: pathological patriarchal masculinity crushes and humiliates the most deviant version of it. Harry and Georgette yearn for other ways of being, of tenderness, and the realm of femininity, but in an idealized way which is cut off from them. Vinnie is the avenging angel that through violence brings them back or punishes them for deviating from the heteropatriarchal norm, policing the boundaries of masculinity, first and foremost in himself, as he is constantly worried about what he can and cannot do with his lads (drinking from the same glass as a “fag” is unacceptable to him).

As a whole, The Holy Bible replicates Selby’s vision of the male body, broken, martyred, and feminized: a Christian core, though in Richey’s version largely devoid of any possibility of redemption. “Yes” is the song that most visibly draws from Selby’s world, reflecting both its literary style — a stream of consciousness that allows for infrequent paragraph breaks, uses sparing punctuation, rejects speech marks and apostrophes — and its content, offering a portrait of bruised, feminized masculinity in an urban location of degradation and abject commerce, masculinity trafficking in and debasing femininity, violent feminization, human relations reduced to the cash nexus (“Another Day Another Dollar” is the subtitle of Last Exit’s Part I), pity and suffering and degradation in an endlessly violent city world, sentiment, romance, and hope crushed by the physical materiality of misery. The song kicks off the album on a note of shimmering melancholic melodicism, yet subtly riddled with a growing rock energy, offering a shifting first-person perspective which blurringly moves between prostitute and pimp, alternating between muttered offstage abject inner monologue and the outwardlooking face fronting it and offering anything you want, including that violent sexual fantasy of castration and forced feminization that so shocked and thrilled my adolescent ears. The lyrics, of whorephobic and transphobic violence channelled through self-disgust, repeat Selby’s dance with obscenity: in inhabiting the degraded street level underworld, the authorial I, the writer who is describing fictional and female characters from his comfortable chair, willingly obliterates itself in an erotic act of abject self-destruction. And this is only the beginning.

Selby also gazes on middle-class life, and is no less forgiving in his analysis of uncontrolled animal rage and murder-lust festering under the thin veneer of polite society. Selby’s “Song of the Silent Snow” (1986), a story which comes at the end of a collection of the same name, belongs to a later period in which he has begun to depict redemption. Another Harry, suffering from nervous exhaustion and on meds, leaves his wife and children — from whom he feels cut off and alienated — at home, to take his daily walk, today in the snow. During this walk he has an epiphanic experience, in which he feels brightness and joy, the leaving behind of “all worries and cares, all horrors of the past and future” (211) and the disappearance of his footprints in the snow: “Soon he no longer heard the crunch of his foot on the snow no matter how he strained to hear it, and it did not surprise him as his body felt so light it seemed impossible for him to even leave a print, all he knew was that he could walk forever” (212). His body begins to feel lighter and lighter and glow in the sparkle of the snow: “He knew that he was glowing. He knew that his eyes were afire with that light. He knew that light shimmered from him even through his clothing. He felt his legs getting lighter and when he looked down there were no footprints” (212). When he comes out of this state of grace, Harry realizes and returns to the love of his family. He has been touched by grace and returns home a new man.

“4st 7lb” lifts the no footprints in the snow image from Selby, though minus the redemption. In its identification with an anorexic young woman the song performs a Selby-esque becoming-woman but, like the album’s use of the Selby sample at the beginning of “Of Walking Abortion,” truncates Selby’s redemptive tendencies. The statement about regretting his entire life and wanting to live it over again is in answer to a question about what his defining moments have been; and there have been other interviews in which he repeats the same answer to the question of what made him become a writer — a choice he made after nearly dying of tuberculosis at age eighteen and realizing that he would regret his life if he made nothing of it (Lindbloom; Burstyn). The quote continues as follows:

I knew that some day I was going to die, and that when I died two things would happen to me. Number one, I would regret my entire life, and number two, I would want to live my life over again, and I would die. And I was terrified, absolutely terrified. So I knew I had to do something with my life. I was terrified of living my whole life, and at the end looking at it and having blown it. I was on disability at the time, and my wife was working part-time, I think at Macy’s, it was the Christmas season, so I bought a typewriter, and decided I was going to be a writer. I didn’t know anything about writing. But I knew I had to do something with my life, and that was the only thing I could think to do… So I sat there for two weeks with that typewriter and I had no idea how to write a story, I just had to do something before I died. So I wrote a letter to somebody. And that’s how it started. The long process of learning how to write.

(removables.co.uk)

“Of Whales and Dreams,” the penultimate story in Song of the Silent Snow, dramatizes this looking backwards over one’s life from the position of old age, and celebrates the path well-chosen. It begins with “Many, many years ago a man told me that to deny my dream was to sell my soul” (195), the protagonist choosing to pursue his dream of being a sailor and “teaching the whales to dance,” arguably a metaphor for Selby’s life as a writer, in which, through the dream he still pursues as an old man, he is dancing together with his friends “and this thing called death no longer exists, being dissolved in our oneness” (197). By preserving, isolating and looping the anxious pretext of the statement, as “Of Walking Abortion” does, whilst excluding and rejecting the redemptive component of Selby’s self-preservation narrative, The Holy Bible demonstrates how it picks and chooses, twists its sources to suit and construct its own intransigent tales of self-destruction. “Die in the Summertime” hammers this particular nail home. Says Richey in 1994:

“Die in the Summertime” was written before anything had happened to me, that was basically an old man looking back over his life, over his favourite period of youth. His childhood, basically. Everybody’s got a perfect mental time of their life, and that’s what that song is about.

(qtd in Bailie, “Manic’s”)

In Selby’s old man looking back, childhood is just the beginning: in Richey’s response it is the beginning of the end.