Brooklyn Revisited
On the anniversary of Hubert Selby Jr’s ‘Last Exit out of Brooklyn’
This past summer saw the 60th anniversary of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr.’s first and finest novel. Selby is mainly known as the author of Requiem for a Dream - itself mainly known as a Darren Aronofsky film - and his nightmarish prison allegory, The Room. Although Selby’s books are overwhelmingly recognised for their bleak subject matter, Last Exit seems to ‘take the cake’ (at least, reputably) for Selby’s most notorious text.
Given Selby’s reputation, the status of any novel in such a harsh corpus as the ‘most obscene’ or ‘most brutal’ is worth any reader’s eye; but the question of whether it is, in fact, worthy of such a bizarre title - as if a novel’s ‘brutality’ or ‘obscenity’ were ever its most germane elements - or whether Selby is deserving of such bona fide notoriety, is less certain.
Is Last Exit to Brooklyn brutal? The short answer is: yes. It is. Pimps, prostitutes, domestic violence, gang rape - Hubert Selby, Jr.’s anthology of the oppressed is, in many ways, what it’s made out to be. In three hundred pages he grapples with a variety of suffering. Storylines intersect and arcs intertwine across six distinct vignettes: a benzedrine-popping transgender prostitute falls in love with a motiveless criminal. A closeted union man gradually self-destructs. The naive scheming of a teenage prostitute - originally published as the short story ‘Tralala’ in The Provincetown Review - culminates in unspeakable horror. The novel is more nuanced than ‘brutal’, however. It ranges over anguish, loneliness, lovelessness, and visceral depictions of the deepest emotional turmoil. It is all of these things, and it is brutal - but why should that make it ‘obscene’?
You would think after novels like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Junky that anything could be written about any sort of character - no matter how immoral - in any situation - no matter how cruel. But it wasn’t until Last Exit to Brooklyn hit the UK that the rights of the author were challenged in court, and critical dispatches about the depravity of a fictional debut culminated in the most important censorship trial of the 20th century.
The players: the private prosecution, notably Sir Cyril Black (Tory MP for Wimbledon), and expert witnesses for the prosecution, Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell; speakers for the defence included Frank Kermode and Al Alvarez. The novel was prosecuted under Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act (1959), the same absurd law, introduced by Roy Jenkins, which came for Lady Chatterley's Lover thirty years after its release for containing the words “fuck” and “cunt”. If these four-letter words were reason enough to prosecute a work, it’s an absolute wonder Last Exit made it across the UK border to begin with, never mind onto the desk of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Reading Kermode’s essay on the ordeal, Obscenity and the Public Interest, it becomes painfully clear that the majority of ‘experts’ against the novel (many of them priests) - or, the ‘pro-censorship camp’ - had no clue what they were talking about despite their moral certainty. They proved unable to define what constitutes ‘obscene’ without describing their own personal reactions to carefully selected excerpts. The Act elects to define ‘obscenity’ as vaguely as possible: as something with the potential to deprave or corrupt.
Not only was the criteria for prosecution laughably subjective, suggestive of a wider legal programme invested in controlling the contents of art, but it left numerous questions unanswered, such as: What is the direct link between reading a book like Last Exit and going out and killing people? The burden of proof should have been on the prosecution - i.e., to prove that the novel literally caused readers to act badly - which, despite their ultimate victory, they failed in. It was the same with the Lady Chatterley case: no direct link was drawn between reading about adultery and committing it, or a case for the purpose of art being to inspire people to act rather than think. So, the flimsy basis of the prosecution may account for how short-lived the censorship ban was in practice: by 1968, the book was back on shelves, and an appeal issued by John Mortimer resulted in the abolition of private prosecutions under the Act. It marked a turning point in British censorship law.
“The novel’s significance lies partly in the British intelligentsia’s violent response”
In the trial itself, the onus was placed on the defence to prove Selby’s literary merit. Kermode situated Last Exit as an American naturalist novel (in the traditions of Dickens and Zola), but we could also cite the innovations of James Joyce, the Beats, and various postmodernists to account for his avant-garde uses of voice, syntax, and punctuation. On an aesthetic level, Selby’s significance is profound. But the novel’s significance transcends this, not only because of the trial, which is historically significant, but also because of the British intelligentsia’s volatile response.
In Last Exit we read a pre-Stonewall depiction of queer cultures, transgenderism, and sex work. All of these were evidently uncommon in mainstream literature at the time - e.g., homosexuality was only decriminalised in the UK in 1967, and wasn’t removed from the DSM as a mental disorder until 1973. Last Exit is therefore especially unique for how it paints as ‘real’ a portrait of the lowest depths of Sunset Park, through the lives of its characters, as is possible in words. Class is a core element of the novel alongside sexuality and gender. After reading the transcripts of the trial in which Kermode bore witness for the defence, we discover the prosecution was as disturbed by the novel’s refrained use of Biblical quotations as Selby’s use of an everyman vernacular. The third-person narrator reads much the same as the dialogue: spare, vulgar, and totally accurate. The novel was banned for its ‘obscene’ depictions of queerness, sex, addiction, and lifestyles judged too immoral for public consumption, but the novel’s language - which assumes the idiosyncratic dialects of working-class people - is what likely shook powerful men like Sir Cyril, maybe as much as its brutal contents.
Sir Cyril stands alongside the stuffy school of Oxbridge intellectuals, such as C.P. Snow, and publishers like Basil Blackwell, whose conservative views couldn’t permit the existence of this type of fiction, even if it was well-established by the mid-1960s. Dragging Joycean stream-of-consciousness techniques to the spheres of oppression and degradation which conservatives neglected was too much for the British establishment, no matter Selby’s literary merit, because it reminded them of these spheres’ existence. The lower depths delve in every culture and society, made deeper by systemic neglect.
“The abused identities, fringe viewpoints, and evocative communities which make up these vignettes”
Hubert Selby, Jr. was neither gay nor gender queer. He was determined to represent the struggling proletariat around the docks of New York as vividly and truthfully as he could, so he wrote about people he drifted alongside in the late 1940s and 1950s during his own ‘down-and-out’ period, himself struggling with heroin addiction. The sexualities and gender expressions of his characters break barriers into the private worlds of the ordinary and remarkable people which Selby knew. Every facet of these vibrant characters is deeply human and this is Selby’s vital point. Repressed desires, intimate secrets, vulnerabilities, the whole humane plethora. The abused identities, fringe view-points, and evocative communities which make up these vignettes, all form a brilliant tapestry of irreducible lived experience. It is a series of admittedly harsh truths, which Selby neither recommends nor dismisses. The fact that they exist is enough.
Obscenity is a moral category. If something is dubbed ‘obscene’, it supposedly degrades the moral character of readers. But, if the most moral thing a novelist can do is to not shy away from injustice, instead holding a viewfinder up to it, then Selby is one of the U.S. literati’s spiritual gurus. Obscene or not, brutal or kind, Last Exit is one of the most moral post-war novels: conscious of class, queerness, sex and sexism, and altogether intersectional in its approach to abuse. Its radical ‘together-in-suffering’ insignia is its triumph - the solidarity which the ruling class, evidently, fears above all. In an era of book burnings and bans, especially in so-called ‘liberal democracies’, revisiting this radical monument to those rejected and abandoned by class society has never been more prescient. Allen Ginsberg prophesied that Last Exit would be “eagerly read in a hundred years”, speaking in jest, and with a progressive’s conviction. Here’s to another forty.
