IT IS unfortunate that so many newcomers to Last Exit to Brooklyn will be approaching it in a muddle of expectation that, thanks to its long ordeal in the courts, has more to do with what has been said about the book than what the book itself says. It would be tedious to recapitulate the sad and shameful case in which two British Members of Parliament, motivated by the desire to protect the public from reality, arraigned Last Exit under the Obscene Publications Act and – on 10th December 1966, at Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, London – had the satisfaction of hearing an order for the forfeiture and destruction of three copies of the book. Mr Leo Gradwell, the magistrate responsible, pronounced that Last Exit, ‘taken as a whole, would tend to deprave and corrupt, and I cannot think, in spite of the evidence I have heard, that it can be justified by literary merit’. The evidence he refers to was provided by witnesses expert in aesthetics, sociology and pornography; despite their contention – and demonstration – that the book, far from being obscene, was a serious study of certain painful and shocking aspects of Western city life, the vague connotations of phrases like ‘deprave and corrupt’ prevailed. The gravamen of proof of the book’s power to debauch its readers rested with the prosecution, but no such proof was provided; nor, apparently, was it needed: stock responses to highly charged shibboleths like ‘filth’ were enough.
One had thought that the days when men in responsible public positions could confuse tendentiousness with reason were long over. But let a Member of Parliament cry ‘I am horrified that any one of my eight children may be exposed to this kind of filth’, or a retired headmaster intone Shakespeareanly ‘God preserve the boys and girls of England’, and many people are satisfied that they are listening to a good knock-down argument. The fact that the Director of Public Prosecutions initially refused, though invited, to take action over Last Exit may convince its new readers that not all our public guardians are repressive or frivolous, although they did under pressure finally bring a Crown case. It is the frivolous mind that responds with pious horror to distasteful subject-matter and ignores the genuinely moral purpose for which the subject-matter is deployed. Look into the repressive mind and you will see fear or obsession or both. The mature and well-balanced mind is, when shocked at revelations of human depravity or social sickness, concerned with making that shock fire a reforming zeal or, at least, stoke compassion. Repression does not come into it; rather, the need is felt to extend sympathy by publicising the bad news, broadcasting the agony.
Hubert Selby Jr, whose first book this is, brought a mature, well-balanced and well-trained mind to the execution of a task that must often have revolted him. He felt it necessary to disclose, not in the disinfected generalities of a textbook but through the flesh-and-blood immediacies of literary art, the horrors of a sector of New York where civilisation seemed to have broken down. The corruption of the best is always the worst: the worst depravities can spring out of the most complex social organisation. Take primitive man and you find patterns of behaviour dictated by ecological need: the anthropologist can study them coolly. Take an urban society that has gone rotten and perhaps only the artist (or the saint) is big enough to embrace it: something more than science is needed for its comprehension. In that district of New York whose ‘Lasciate ogni speranza…’ is the road sign which gives this book its title, a 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.
To call Last Exit to Brooklyn a novel is not strictly accurate. It is a group of stories or fictional studies, some of which have long had independent American magazine publication, but there is a unity of intention as well as scene which makes the term ‘novel’ – implying a larger and more complex organisation than the mere story altogether applicable. Selby, like John Dos Passos before him, presents his small fictional entities; as we continue reading these appear as segments of a larger whole; the final impression is of a planned symphony (or cacophony) which is as validly a novel as, say, The Big Money or Manhattan Transfer. The style of the book must also suggest the rapportage technique of Dos Passos. Unkind critics may call this ‘typewriter prose’. The fingers seem to pound the keys in a mad effort to record conversation and interior monologue white-hot: the leisurely scratching of the pen might induce too much ‘literary’ shaping, with a consequent loss of immediacy. If we are aware of Selby’s typewriter, we are also aware that his technique comes off: impatience with punctuation, a sudden block of uppercase letters (as though the shift-key had jammed), the logorrhea of over-rapid fingers – these are right for a literature of the machine age.
The direct, machine-like transcriptions of actuality which make up the book are one of the agents of shock. The youths in the first part of Last Exit – ‘Another Day Another Dollar’ – use the term ‘shit’ too often for readers (like Mr Leo Gradwell) brought up on traditional fiction, with its periphrases and author’s monitoring. But American youths of a particular class do, in fact, over-use ‘shit’ (‘Whassa time?’ one youth on Third Avenue was heard to say to another. ‘Four-thirty or some shit like that’, was the answer.) The unedited presentation of the Brooklyn vernacular leads to an equally naked series of descriptions of variations on the sexual act – ‘perversions’ dignified by sexologists as fellatio and anal coition. The sad and ironic thing about the indictment of Selby’s book as obscenity lies in the fact that true obscenity uses literary condiments to inflame the palate; Selby, committing himself from the very first page to an unedited recording, totally eschews the devices of titillation. Pornography is not made this way.
The literary value of the book, on the evidence of the careful choice of verbal technique and the exactness of the notation (both of speech and act), cannot be gainsaid. It requires considerable artistic skill to induce in the reader attitudes of compassion and disquiet through the immediate presentation of speech, thought and action.
The Dickensian tradition approves the frequent intervention of the author as moralist, nudging the reader, putting the required words in his mouth. Selby is working in a tradition nearly as venerable but far healthier – the naturalistic one, in which judgment is implied but never made the theme of a sermon. As a piece of twentieth-century naturalistic fiction, Last Exit exhibits artistic virtues of a very high order.
But in its choice of subject-matter the book goes further than any fiction one knows (I leave out of account sheer pornography, which is concerned not with reality but with fantasy). Violence, peripheral in most British novels, holds the centre here and has a hard light trained on it. It is an aspect of city life. we are forced to look at unflinching, but nowhere in the detailed descriptions is there a trace of that gratuitous elaboration which betrays fascinated gloating and invites it in the reader. The emotion you will feel is a kind of dispassionate classical anger: you do not wish to intervene, you wish to change the society in which this thing can happen. In the second section, ‘The Queen is Dead’, which portrays Georgette ‘the hip queer’, the emphasis is on sexual inversion, but a remarkable balance is maintained between clinical curiosity and disgust at human degradation: to be like Georgette is, after all, to participate in the human condition: he (or she) is not one of the insensate things of masturbatory fantasy. All Selby’s characters are strongly individualised: they invite a response, and the response is normally one of compassion.
The story of ‘Tralala’ ends with a horrifying image which sums up not merely the depravity of these policeless streets of Brooklyn but the evil of the whole world: the statistics of the concentration camps cannot do as much to provoke shock and horror and fear in us as this picture of the multiple raping of the unconscious girl and the ‘kids who… tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerkedoff on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying amongst the broken bottles rusty cans and rubble of the lot’. Again, the typewriterese triumphs: the facts could not be more naked.
But Selby’s concern is not only with the horrifying fusion of sexuality with violence that is part of the pattern of sick civilisations. ‘Strike’ is a far more poignant study of industrial unrest than anything in Dos Passos, and it presents, in the character of Harry, a brilliant (though depressing) picture of a later Zero than that of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine. We look round at this great modern city, with its triumphs of technology, and wonder when it will achieve the ennoblement of man. We are a long way past Wellsian optimism.
It is through its concentration on one aspect only of contemporary man – man as violent, mindless, predatory, lustful, degraded; man as less than an animal – that Last Exit to Brooklyn fails to earn the accolades bestowed on other controversial (and proscribed) novels of this century. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses are more important works than Last Exit because they are less kinetic: they discharge their emotions inside the book itself, producing the catharsis of art; they do not leave the reader in a state of disquiet which can only be relieved by action. Ulysses exhibits enough of the dregs of human minds but grants a final image of man as redeemable; Last Exit presents man either as unregenerate or as capable of being cleansed through imposed social change. It fails to show man as aspirant; it selects one extreme segment of human society, and this selection is more appropriate to a piece of didactic pleading than to a static work of literature.
The value of art is always diminished by the presence of elements that move to action: the pornographic and the didactic are, in a purely aesthetic judgment, equally to be condemned. But the irony of the legal situation as regards Last Exit lies in the fact that its prosecutors, recognising that the book was kinetic, mistook the nature of the kinesis. Last Exit presents social horrors out of reformist zeal, not out of a desire to titillate or corrupt. Those who found the book capable of debauching its readers were evidently most debauchable and regrettably cut off from a desire to expand their charitable propensities. Those who now approach Last Exit with open minds will soon consider that there is plenty of reforming to do well east of Brooklyn, and our professional reformers must be the first to be reformed. How this honest and terrible book could ever be regarded as obscene (that is, designed for depravity and corruption) is one of the small mysteries of the decade.
Published as the introduction to the Calder & Boyars edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1968