hubert selby jr.

Available on DVD is a documentary film titled It/ll Be Better Tomorrow [sic] about the American writer Hubert Selby Jr. who died in 2004. It is narrated by Robert Downey Jr. and features interviews with Lou Reed, Ellen Burstyn and Henry Rollins. Selby is best known for his 1964 novel Last Exit To Brooklyn which is a compendium of six stories, which may be read individually or as a whole, set in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn in the 1950s. It is a breathtaking work of transgressive fiction that is as convulsively beautiful and tender as it is brutal and visceral. In storytelling the lives of prostitutes, drug addicts, transvestites, gangs and sailors (some of whom Selby knew personally while working as an itinerant) Last Exit To Brooklyn is authentically epic - by virtue of its uncompromising humanity - in the modest scale of its characters. It is written in Selby's own idiosyncractic style which, composed in stream of consciousness, dispenses with grammar. Apostrophes and quotation marks are absent - dialogue is transmitted in upper-case - giving the narrative a frisson of urgency, like a missive being smashed out on the Remington from Hell.

Originally published by Grove Press in America, who also published William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller, the British rights to the manuscript were acquired by Boyars and Calder. In 1967, they were defendants in a successful obscenity trial brought against them by a Conservative MP outraged by the 'profanity' and the 'degenerate behaviour' depicted within its pleasing Pop Art jacket-cover. There is delicious satire in that people who monopolise the airwaves in vein-necked protest - the lips pursed in surburban pique - are sometimes the very people who enjoy being beaten to within a dint of faint in a latex mask by Great Aunt Edith's hairbrush. Morality is infinitely subjective.

Selby has published several other books: Requiem for a Dream (1978) which, like Last Exit to Brooklyn, was adapted into a major film, together with The Room (1971) - which he cites as his 'darkest work' - and The Demon (1976). For most of his life he battled heroin addiction, depression and health problems that related from a lung operation to cure tuberculosis. The literary establishment obstinately resisted any formal acknowledgement of Selby - notwithstanding his exceptional contribution to modern literature - but if one may be judged by one's supporters and fans - he was a Great.