Original subtitles

You think the tired bottoms can stand one more?

Yeah? All right, cool.

Now, this night, the topic was song of forgiveness, and this is another

relationship between me and the big weasel in the sky.

From time to time, I write psalms, and this is Psalm 16.

Prelude.

God speaks.

Whoever seeks me finds me.

Whoever finds me knows me.

Whoever knows me loves me.

Whoever loves me, I love.

Whomever I love, I kill.

Angry. Fiendish. Brutal. Scathing. Devastating. American cold hero.

Profane. Belligerent.

Rageaholic. Controversial.

Motherfucker.

Kelly was one of a kind. I mean, he's an icon for God's sake, you know. I can't

imagine a contemporary writer has not been influenced by Hubert Selby.

He was a real guy, you know, with like lust and anger and rage and frustration.

I just found him very into being concerned about

his soul and the soul of others.

I consider the...

opportunity to bring to life a character of Hubert Selby Jr.'s on film,

one of the great gifts of my life.

Part of Selby's place then in literary history is his absence from it. He's

the case of a writer who essentially wrote himself off the map of American

literature.

Hubert Selby Jr.

was known to friends as Cubby.

Cubby was a tough but sweet guy from the streets of Brooklyn who wrote the way

that real people talked.

His best-known books were Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream.

He described himself as a scream looking for a mouth.

Poet Allen Ginsberg said that Selby should still be eagerly read in a

hundred years.

Cubby was an only child.

born to Adeline and Hubert Selby Sr.

on July 23, 1928.

He was nicknamed Cubby because he was the cub, the junior to his father's

senior. He called himself Cubby because he didn't want to, like, hang around in

the street with a name like Hubert because he was afraid he'd get, you

know, his lights punched out.

Hubert, you know, some kid named Sam or Billy or Joe would hit him because he

figured that was like a sissy name.

Cubby grew up in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn.

and lived in an apartment at 230 Bay Ridge Parkway.

He loved Brooklyn.

Hubert Selby Sr.

was a merchant seaman.

Hubert Selby Jr.

only finished the 8th grade before dropping out of school to join the

Merchant Marines himself.

Away from home for the first time, the teenager had a blast, spending two years

drinking and womanizing his way across Europe.

During the war, Cubby was just a young teenager, 16, 17 years old.

World War II I'm talking about. He ran away from home and he joined the

Merchant Marine.

And the ship that he was on, they were carrying beef cattle to Europe to feed

the troops.

It wound up that the cattle had bovine tuberculosis and they had to throw the

cattle overboard.

But Cubby wound up contracting tuberculosis from these cattle.

Even though, like, I guess he started out his adult life as, you know, a

pretty hale and hearty physical specimen, he had gotten TB and had, you

know, severe lung problems and other medical problems.

When he got back to the States, he wound up in a sanitarium, which is what they

did to tubercular patients at the time.

And he spent quite a few years in the sanitarium.

I got back to this country and...

They said I couldn't live more than two months, and my mother got streptomycin

in the black market.

And they gave it to me, and it kept me alive. It frizzled my brain.

It just destroyed my brain.

I went wacko and crazy. I'm still nuts on it.

His whole tuberculosis war died except him.

Doctors thought he would die many times.

Three years in bed.

Four operations in one year.

Half my chest ending up on a Dempsey dumpster, an incinerator, or on a

garbage dump.

Food for seagulls and rats.

Endless, torturous, godless nights.

And interminable, painful, fatherless days.

Where were you, Pop?

Sliding off a bar stool and pissing in your pants?

When he had his lung removed, he says they...

At that time, the way they used to do it is they'd remove ribs out of your back,

and they removed about six ribs out of his back to get to the lung and remove

the lung.

And he asked the doctor, and he said he wanted the ribs from the doctor.

He was going to have them made into letter openers for his friends.

He spent nearly four years total in the hospital.

While bedridden, he decided he had to do something important with his life.

He said he had this terrible vision of himself once being an old man and dying,

and saying to himself as he was dying, what the hell have I done with my life?

And at that moment he said, I better do something and I'm going to write.

So he began to write.

His first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, was published in 1964.

This existential tale shows a violent world populated by brutal factory

workers. and nihilistic, cross-dressing drug addicts. Last Exit to Brooklyn

quickly became an international and controversial bestseller.

In his early 30s, his long-time alcohol abuse was supplanted by about five years

of heroin addiction.

Narcotics and booze had a devastating effect on Selby's life.

Initially offering comfort to his many ailments, shooting dope and drinking

soon led to empty, massive, and unstoppable misery.

The story goes that he was looking at the beaches of Normandy, and he

hadn't even taken a drink yet. And the next thing he knew, he was lying on the

beach, and there was a captain or some officer looking down at him, saying,

does this happen to you often?

Even after having a hit with Last Exit, he was later impoverished for a spell

and spent some time on welfare.

He was too physically and mentally ill to work.

Here's a guy who writes the greatest work in American literature, you know,

of its time, Last Exit.

And as he tells it ten years later, he's pumping gas, he's working at a gift shop

at the Mondrian.

He was living in this really crummy old place, you know.

So I saw Cubby and I said, Cubby, I know you made money off the book.

I said, where the hell is it?

He says, you want to see $60,000?

He showed me his arms, you know, needle marks, track marks.

Fragile yet so indomitable.

What demons haunted your life?

What angels sang in your heart?

Were you constantly forced to choose between the angels and the demons? Did

you know the difference?

Did you believe you were putting angels in your arms?

When he was in the hospital with tuberculosis, in terrible pain after his

operations, when they took out his ribs, they gave him morphine.

He found out how easy it was to get morphine, and that's how he became a

drug addict.

And Cubby said, the first time they gave me morphine, I fell in love.

Everybody hung out on the corner candy store, a place called Vogel's.

That's where I met Gil Sorrentino.

And then we all used to go to this coffee shop.

The Greeks, he mentions it in The Last Exit.

He used to go to the pool room with a crowd of guys, and I went with my crowd

of guys. We all sort of knew each other by sight, and I knew Cubby when we were

maybe 16 is when I sort of became really aware of Cubby about the time he'd got

out of the hospital.

But he ran around with a completely different bunch of guys, sort of like

not from the neighborhood, but further toward downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn

Army Base, where much of Last Exodus sat. They were all petty crooks. They

were like, you know...

burglars and second story men and when they could they mugged like soldiers and

sailors on the base who were drunk and steal their money but he started losing

heroin like so many people start using heroin i'll get a little high on

saturday and then slowly it turned into like a full-blown addiction probably had

been in the nut house and uh he was a terrible junkie And he was hard to be

with when he was addicted because he'd always be surrounded by other junkies.

If you went to see him, you know, it'd be three or four guys you never saw in

your life. You know how junkies clump together.

There's nothing more boring in the entire world than a heroin addict.

I mean, they don't have anything to say.

And the things they do say are sort of like cryptic messages to each other that

you're excluded from. Except you don't care that you're excluded because the

cryptic messages have to do with scoring.

co-users at one time. Me never as, you know, as obsessive as you got it in here

as Cubby was, you know.

Selby moved to Hollywood to get away from himself, but found he couldn't

escape his own insidious habits.

He went to Los Angeles. One of the reasons he went there was to get away

from the New York drug world, New York drug scene. He went to Los Angeles,

which of course didn't work because he fell into the Los Angeles drug scene.

But before he left, he had told his agent at the time, Karen Schnitzler,

Karen, I want you to send me X number of dollars a month.

Karen called me up and said, I got a call from Cubby. He wants all the money.

I said, is it a lot of money? She said, an awful lot of money. And she said,

Cubby, you told me that I wasn't to send you any money more than your allowance.

Cubby said, I don't care what I told you. I want my money.

And Karen said, what am I supposed to do? I said, what do you mean, what are

you supposed to do? It's his money.

You know what he's going to do with it, but you can't say you can't have it.

So with great foreboding, Karen sent him all the money, as I say, which was an

awful lot of money.

I got a call from Cubby, and I knew at the time that he had written Last Exit

to Brooklyn, and it had become a big seller.

So I asked him where he was.

He said, in L.A.? I said, well, when did you get in town?

He said, a couple of years ago.

I said, why didn't you call me, you son of a bitch?

He said, because I've been in jail.

Selby was nearly destroyed by his own rages and the toxic chemical remedies he

poured on top of them.

He knew he had to change or die.

I always believed that cliche that, you know, you had to be completely fucked up

to write about fucked up stuff.

And that was completely life-changing for me.

to meet Hubert Selby Jr., realized that he was this, in his own

tough, wiry, badass way, a spiritual giant.

And moreover, he explained the key thing to me that both put me at ease and

scared the shit out of me, which was, hey man, once you get off the dope and

the alcohol, that's when you realize how really dark you are.

Because there's no buffer between it and you.

His novel Requiem for a Dream follows the intersecting miserable spirals of

four drug addicts in the Bronx.

Selby also wrote The Room, The Demon, The Willow Tree, Waiting Period, and a

book of short stories called Song of the Silent Snow.

His earlier books mainly depicted the disease of the human condition.

But he moved from problem to solution with The Willow Tree, where he offered

love and forgiveness as the answer to violence and hatred.

He wanted to write for people who were thinking about their lives.

Not about how to turn their lives into literature, but about what to do at the

sorest point of spiritual deprivation.

In 1969, at the age of 40, Cubby got completely sober and stayed that way

through the end of his life.

He focused on channeling his rage into his writing.

Every three weeks I'd come to in the recovery room, and Mom would be there

wiping my head, rubbing my lips with an ice cube, smiling, reassuring, saying

something, and she was always alone.

Did she conceive me by herself?

Am I the product of an immaculate conception?

Am I a new Messiah here to talk about the Father's love and then be crucified

on the cross of your indifference?

Jesus Christ, Pop, where the fuck were you?

Everybody who knows him knows the story about he didn't want to

leave without accomplishing something.

To live your life, however long it is, 30 years, 100 years,

And at the end, you look your life over and say, holy mackerel, I blew it.

I blew the whole thing.

And then you drop dead. Oh, boy.

That's scary.

Shelby became a writer because he couldn't work anymore on account of his

physical health when he was young.

And he sat there and he tried to commit suicide a few times and said, well, what

can I do for a living?

You know, he had no degree, no anything, no skills.

I mean, all he did was, you know, he was a merchant seaman, which basically meant

he went out to sea, came back, got a check, got drunk, went back out in a

boat, got drunk, and came back.

I knew I couldn't go to school long enough to be a composer, and I knew the

alphabet. I figured, well, what the hell am I writing?

I started writing because of a couple of spiritual experiences.

I had no idea that's what they were.

But they were remarkable experiences.

Altered my life.

And gave me my aesthetic.

The way I had to write. I mean, everything was just laid out there.

Cubby talked frequently about having spiritual experiences.

The first was in the hospital when he was 19.

There was a young Greek boy, and we were all going for operations. Every three

weeks we'd go get another couple of ribs cut out.

Collapsed the lung permanently.

That's about the only treatment they had.

So he went for a routine operation.

The Greek kid still hadn't come back.

Then the nurse came and took his bedside table and rolled it away.

The kid had suddenly died.

And there was an old man, and he was very close with this young Greek kid.

And he was kind of a religious man, and we used to poke fun at him, call him

Hocus Pocus.

And one day he came over to me, and he asked me to write a letter.

I had never written a letter.

Nothing.

Why would he ask me?

Anybody else would have done it. Nurses would have done it. My mother would have

done it. I was the least likely person, yet he asked me. So I said yes.

And I say, I'm totally unequipped.

How do I write a letter to strangers saying, hey, we're sorry your kid

dropped it?

What the fuck? Oh, my God.

But as I say, I say yes to life.

And life gives me everything I need.

So anyway, I wrote the letter and we mailed it. And I don't know how much

later, I got a letter from his parents saying the letter made them feel

wonderful.

Thankless for writing. It thrilled them. It filled their hearts.

Why did he ask me?

Because I was in more need of the miracle he was offering me than anybody

else in the room. That is where I said yes.

When I said yes to writing a letter.

that it was impossible for me to run and he got out of the hospital he was on

unemployment insurance and he in this apartment was a little apartment behind

a barber shop and he had a little tiny backyard that was about as big as a

handkerchief you could just about three people could fit in there and cubby put

a card table and a straight chair out there and put his typewriter out there

and then he would write letters to people he people he you know he would

see the next day he would write a letter to long letters or short letters, any

kind of letter, telling him what he was doing, what he thought, what books he

was reading and so on. What he was doing was learning how to write.

I published his first story, actually. I published a little magazine called Neon

from 1956 to 1960.

Cubby's first story was published in Neon called Home for Christmas.

It's the first thing they had written that really had a kind of like, if you

will, a professional...

polish to it although there's crudity in the story but it was obvious that you're

you're dealing with somebody who really knew what he was doing at this point he

was didn't know a lot but he didn't overreach himself he knew quite well

what he was doing he said who am i to edit out whatever's coming out

of the mind to be written who am i to stand in the way of it who am i to say

this is not allowed or this is tasteless or this, who am I to get in the way of

anything? I always remembered that.

That was a really, I thought, interesting and remarkable comment.

The writer has no right to be there in the work.

I don't have any right to impose myself between the people I'm creating on that

page and the reader.

and that the responsibility of the artist is to transcend the human ego.

I think he was writing the equivalent in fiction of spiritual

guidebooks for the sick.

It was a summer afternoon, Cubby brought it over.

We had a bunch of people over. We were sitting in our like a little backyard.

We all lived in more or less the same neighborhood in Brooklyn.

We were sitting in a little backyard. People were outside, you know, having a

couple of beers and talking. And I sat inside the house and I read The Queen is

Dead. And I was absolutely astonished by the story.

Because I realized when I read this story that Cubby had just simply

flowered with this story.

There was one fellow who...

Had friends.

He was kind of an uptown guy.

Seymour Crim.

And he had friends in the publishing world.

And he took Last Exit. And he gave it to one of his editor

friends. And they called me.

And they offered me a contract.

So I went down to the Cedar Street Bar. And Roy was there. Amiri.

He was still Leroy Johnson.

And I told him what happened.

He said, well, why don't you get an agent?

I said, I don't know anything about an agent. How do I know?

He said, well, try Sterling Lord. He's Jack's agent, Jack Carroll.

Try him.

So I gave him a call. I dropped the manuscript off. A couple of days later,

he called. He says, I read your manuscript. I think we can make money

together.

And he called Bonnie Rossett, sent it over there, and it got published.

Tra-la-la. That was a... First time I read that, that was a really frightening

story. Last Exit to Brooklyn, those are wild stories.

I mean, if you encounter those in the 50s... The subject of Last Exit to

Brooklyn is about the disappearance of love and its substitute in all kinds of

forms. It's America.

So business, unions...

prostitution, all kinds of moneyed activity is substituting for love.

I was one of those guys brought down by the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was 1965.

My friend Eddie says, hey, some guy wrote a book called Last Exit to

Brooklyn.

You want to read it? I said, what the hell do I want to read that shit for?

All I want to do is get the hell out of here.

I asked Cobby once, where is this Brooklyn?

Because I grew up myself in Brooklyn, and I never encountered the worlds he

was writing about. And he said, naturally, that he was writing a

Brooklyn of the soul.

You know, that as real as the book may be, its real landscape was a landscape

of spiritual anguish.

Heads pop from windows.

and from bars asking what happened and the cops yelled for everybody to shut up

then asked what was going on.

The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows.

The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the

street was quiet just the sound of a tug and an occasional car and even the blood

couldn't be seen from a few feet away.

It's like the marriage of

literature and Charlie Parker.

The guy used words like musicians use, you know, notes.

If you notice the way his paragraph indentations are, they're of different

sizes, like there'll be a small indentation or a long indentation, and

to him that signified the length of the pause as in music.

Salvin was famous for something of an eccentric typography.

Instead of periods, he would use slashes. Instead of apostrophes, also

slashes. He didn't tend to use capital letters at the beginning of paragraphs.

Even the stuff he did with grammar, you know, like using weird slashes instead

of apostrophes.

Crazy, you know, like shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, you know, in

Last Exit.

I mean, you know, but he was he was a bebop cat, you know, and that's how he

wrote. I remember reading a New York Times review where they just slaughtered

him. And because of the capitalization like this, a section in the last exit to

Brooklyn where everything's capitalized because everybody's screaming.

And I just thought this jumps off the page. It's so fantastic.

This is a kind of slash and burn aesthetic, and punctuation is a nicety.

But also, I think, it's that we're in a world that doesn't stop.

It rather stops and starts.

You know, so you get slashes in the middle of words. You don't get periods

at the end of sentences. You get these things that imply endlessness.

Selby broke the rules to better describe the rhythm of the street, but he did it

consistently. and with purpose.

His book, Last Exit to Brooklyn, sort of liberated me in the way I thought about

writing. Most stuff I had read up till then didn't throw away punctuation. It

wasn't as poetic.

He brings poetry to prose.

As a reader, I can't stand all this, he says, all these quotes and apostrophe.

For one thing, don't, D-O-N-T.

Now, why in the name of Christ do you need an apostrophe?

Don't is don't, doesn't is doesn't.

You know, there are a few cases like I'll, ill, you need something.

It was just like this new informal...

freedom, you know, from like what you were learning, like you have to write in

a certain King's English kind of way. When I first started writing, I had a

manual typewriter.

And the apostrophe was an uppercase over the number

eight.

And in a manual typewriter, you know, it's work shifting.

Whereas the slash...

is lowercase and the question mark. So rather than going like that, I just...

So that's why it's the slash.

And I think it looks better, neater, than having all those phallic symbols.

For Selby, punctuation is like a cookie cutter, and he's not interested in

baking something whose shape you know.

I was completely overwhelmed by his

artistry.

The way he could not say who was talking, just go from one

character's dialogue to the next, all blended together without establishing

who was speaking, but his characters were so clear, you knew who was

speaking. I thought that was an amazing accomplishment, and I was

wondering, did you think about doing that?

Or did you just do it? He said, oh, no, I really thought about doing that. I

practiced doing that.

I don't have to go into a whole bunch of description about an individual.

If I really know that individual, if I can project the rhythms of their life in

the way they move, in the way they speak, and that is reflected in the

narrative, dealing with that individual. As an example.

Vinny, there's a lot of short kind of rhythms, beats, and

language that fits the fucking Vinny.

You know this guy Steve who got killed? He was my boy.

He was on the same bench with me. Me and him was real tight, man. We ran the yard

up there.

We were the Gs on the first bench. What we said was law.

We even got sent to the hole together. A couple of creeps wouldn't give us the

packages they got from home, so we dumped them.

I'm telling you, we was real tight, man.

Whereas Georgette, we have a lot of alliteration. We have a long,

flowing kind of line.

Very effeminate.

Goldie sent Rosie, a demented female who acted as sort of a housemaid for gin,

cigarettes, and another gross Benny.

They made a small pot of bullion and danced around it, dropping tablets and

enchanting, Benny in the bullion, Benny in the bullion, whirling away the fear

and boredom, giggling, popping Benny, whirling away.

And so I don't have to go through all kinds of explanations about this.

So everybody has their own rhythm and I try to reflect that.

Almost every story Selby wrote had a main character named Harry, like Harry

White and the Demon.

Harry Black in Last Exit, Harry Goldfarb in Requiem, Harry Bernard in Waiting

Period, and Harry Kane in Fear X.

Cubby told me a funny story once. He used to run around with these guys, as I

say, from the Army base, and one of the guys was a guy that everyone called The

Hat. He always wore one of those big bookie hats like they used to wear in

the old days, like a pearl gray hat, big, big brim with a crease down the

middle. We all called him The Hat. I don't remember his real name. He was an

Italian kid.

And he was always going to jail on some, like, crappy little charge. You know,

he'd get like six months or eight months.

He was a small-time crook, right?

His famous remark, by the way, was he got out of jail once and Cubby asked

him, like, how you doing?

Hat. And the hat said, I don't do much.

I sleep 13 hours and fuck around the other 12.

That was the hat. In any event, Cubby told me once that He was in a car with

the hat.

And he saw a guy walking along the street with a girl.

And the hat leaned out the window and yelled at the guy, Hey, Harry, that's

hump. When he and his friends would walk down the street and they'd see a guy

with a girl, they would always, if they outnumbered the guy, they would always

say, Hey, did you hump her, Harry?

Cubby liked, for some reason, the fact that Hat had called this guy, whom he'd

never seen in his life, Harry.

And Cubby thought that Harry was a perfect generic name for like anybody.

And the other was there should be some old bag that hung out in some bar he

used to go to.

And she used to sit there by herself half cocked and do this thing like, fuck

you, Harry, fuck you, fuck you.

And so between those two, I think it's just like, you know, Harry became, you

know, whatever it was to be a male character that was Harry to him.

what his influences were.

And his only influence he could think of would be Beethoven.

What Beethoven does is state something and then state it again.

And then he'll go back to it and do a little variation on it. Then he'll state

it again.

Then he'll go back to it and do another variation.

Then he'll state it again. In other words, and when you read Cubby's

stories, you see this is how Cubby's stories works.

There are long passages of Cubby's stories that you could call for one of a

better term, linger.

In other words, He's wearing you out with this stuff. But he wants to wear

you out. For me, it's like a huge canvas, like Bosch or Bruegel, where all

kinds of wriggling figures are jostling each other for pride of place.

You never know what's coming up next. Sometimes the worlds intersect.

He's taking you into a world in which you really don't want to be. You don't

want to be living there.

And he makes you live there. He sticks your face into it. There's no relief.

It's claustrophobia. Because, you know, he freed, like he did so many people,

you know, from Richard Price on, you know, he freed you up as a writer to

like, I can write about this. I'm allowed to do that. That exists.

He wasn't wringing his hands or pulling his hair about like, you know, look how

horrible life is or anything like that. He was just saying, yeah, well, you

know, on one hand, it's sort of like steps to a chicken coop short and

shitty. But at the other hand, it was just.

These people are alive.

He just took all the dead writing styles of the past and blew them away, not

intentionally, but the only pure and perfect way, which is unintentionally

and unknowing.

So the first thing that's true about these books is that they were as hotly

desired on the one hand by people who felt that the secrets of life

were not being revealed in contemporary literature, and they were fiercely

resisted as well.

Obscene literature is a $2 billion a year business.

That's $2 billion.

Through this material, today's youth can be stimulated to sexual activity for

which he has no legitimate outlet.

I said, hey man, you know, it's really weird meeting you because, you know, you

were the first.

Your book was the first one I ever like jerked off to. And he said, man, you're

sicker than I thought. What part?

Innumerable psychiatrists, sociologists and psychologists attribute the moral

decay among our people in very large part to the obscene and pornographic

literature so prevalent in our society.

This moral decay weakens our resistance.

to the onslaught of the communist masters of deceit.

Bill Ward and Harriet Sommer were the editors of a little magazine called

Provincetown Review.

They published Covey's story, Tra-La-La, and the guy who was selling it up in

Provincetown in a bookstore, the cops arrested him and closed the bookstore

down. Selby's work was the subject of two obscenity beefs, one in 1961 in

Massachusetts and a very high-profile case in London in 1966.

Last Exit Trial was a gift.

It was the biggest thing since Lady Chatterley's Lover, which, as you

remember, was, in fact, a dirty book.

It all started off when a literary agent sent his book, Last Exit to Brooklyn, to

my office in London.

I was in France skiing at the time, and I received it from my partner, Marion

Boyer, saying, this book has come in, it looks very interesting, a bit dangerous

perhaps, but do you think we ought to do it?

So I read it there in two days and phoned her up and said, of course we

must do it. It tells about real conditions and so on. Of course it tells

about ugly situations, but there's no doubt there's a strong moral force

behind it and we should do it. So she signed the contract and it came

out in, I think it was early 66, that suddenly it was

attacked. This puritanical group being urged by Billy Graham to start

prosecuting publishers, and unfortunately they picked on you, rather

at random.

The trial went wrong from the first moment. The jury, of course, couldn't

read the book.

I mean, you know, they were given, I think, little time to read it in and

didn't really have the IQ.

It took them three weeks to read it. They were not allowed to take it home.

They had to sit in an empty courtroom and read all day long.

occasionally sending out messages, what does this word mean, what does that word

mean, and so on.

They were, on the whole, working-class jury from South London.

You can usually tell quite a lot about the jury from the newspapers they carry

into court.

The predominant one was the Daily Express.

There was one young man who looked a bit better educated than the others who

carried the Guardian, the only one. And when the jury found against us, and they

took two hours to make up their minds, I suspect the man carrying the Guardian

held them up quite a long time.

We were only fined a very, very small amount.

But our costs, of course, were enormous.

We're not going to lie down and accept this verdict.

There's only one thing you can do when you don't accept a verdict, and that is

to challenge it.

I said, we have to appeal.

I mean, this is a book.

of consequence, and it will simply lead to other prosecutions and other looks of

consequence. All these law lords, there were other lords involved in our defence

team in the first trial, and no, no, they all advised against it. If I were

you, I would accept the situation because you cannot improve it by trying

to launch an appeal.

We were in front of three appeal judges.

Two of them, we realised, were very much on our side from the beginning by the

kind of questions they asked.

Don Mortimer was going to do this case at the Court of Appeal, and he did it,

and he won it.

August 1968, we finally won our appeal.

It took two years. We had the three cases. It was worrying. It nearly

bankrupted the company.

because we put so much time, energy and money into it. We founded a society

called Defensive Literature and the Arts Society, D-A-L-A-S, which went on for a

number of years and raised money for other trials thereafter.

And so it was. And the book brought us greater fame than it would ever have

done if it had not been prosecuted in the first place.

Probably one of the most surprising things that's happened in...

the american-led american pop culture relationship is the two really excellent

movie versions that have been made of his novels last exeter brooklyn and

requiem for a dream the book last exit of brooklyn i read the first time in

german it was published in german

translated into German and was called Letzte Ausfahrt Brooklyn.

It had the same cover what it had here, the big freeway sign.

For me, when I read it the first time, I saw it immediately as a movie.

What is that, darling?

That's teaching people not to fuck with Harry Black.

I tried to connect all the stories because realizing that all those stories

play in the same neighborhood, I thought it should be a story about a

neighborhood.

Hey, Spook!

How's it going?

Fine, fine.

You're not bullshitting me about that bike, are you?

No, no, no. I'm getting it.

Really.

But I'm really looking forward to getting a ride on it.

How come you know her?

She's around, you know, from the neighborhood.

Yeah, well, I don't like you knowing girls like that. Come on.

I used to support myself by working as a prop man on feature films.

And one of the relatively rare experiences I had that I really valued

from those jobs was working on Last Exit to Brooklyn and the reason why I valued

it was just because I got to meet and hang out with Hubert Selby. I said to

him that he should come to the set for about the first two weeks

so he could see if I have questions I can ask him and he could see what we are

doing. I was very wary of meeting him because I thought between Last Exit and

The Room whoever wrote those books had to be completely out of his mind.

I was pretty wary of taking his book and desecrating it into a movie, and I

thought that he himself must be pretty warped.

Selby was completely friendly and approachable, and here I was,

a nobody, an assistant prop man, and he was entirely willing to spend time

talking with me at any moment of the day.

seemed to have no interest in the kind of hierarchy of the movie set or any

feeling that he was important or royalty or anything of the sort.

The first time I met Cubby, I was shocked because he was such a sweet,

gentle person.

And if you think of his work, those are the last words you would think of.

No trucks gonna get out of here, you hear me? No trucks out!

No trucks out!

This thing's going to get out of hand here.

We're going to need some backup.

And I don't mean just a few men.

Send everything you've got.

Send gas! Send horses!

Capi was sitting with me at night watching the dailies.

When the light turned on, Capi was sitting there crying and said, and full

of tears, and said, Poor Harry.

Poor Harry. What a poor motherfucker.

In the year 2000, Requiem for a Dream was made into a film, Reset, in

Brooklyn's Coney Island.

Selby co-wrote the screenplay with director Darren Aronofsky.

I sort of saw myself as a humble prophet to the book, and I was just interpreting

it for a different medium. So I tried to be as truthful to the book as possible.

I didn't feel like the book really needed fixing.

I just tried to turn it into the visual medium and the sound medium that film

is.

See that, Seymour?

You see how good your son is?

He knows what it's like for his mother living all alone.

No one to visit her.

Hey, Ma.

You on uppers?

What? You're on uppers.

You're on diet pills, ain't you? I told you, I'm going to a specialist.

When I was in college, I was studying for finals. I was a freshman. I was very

nervous because I was a public school kid from Brooklyn, and I had never

really studied that hard and worked that hard. But I was studying for the first

time, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the word Brooklyn.

And when you're from Brooklyn and you see anything about Brooklyn, you're...

immediately interested and I pulled Last Exit to Brooklyn from the shelf and I

started reading and it changed my life that book and changed the way I thought

about writing and thought about telling stories and sort of sent me down the

path of becoming a writer and a storyteller. A long time ago, maybe

1980, we had moved back east and I had nothing to do one day and so I sat down

and I wrote.

The first draft of screenplay for Requiem.

He had written a draft of it when the book first came out, but the draft had

been lost.

I couldn't find this script. My son found it in the cellar, my mother's

house, fortunately.

And I sent it to him. And so he sent it over to me, and it turned out that his

draft was about 90%.

similar as far as the scenes we had chosen.

And he said, wow, what you kept for the draft is almost exactly or at least 80%

of what I have.

When we finished Pi, there were a lot of people who were very interested in

making a film with us.

And they said, whatever you want, you know, bring us. And then I brought them

Requiem for a Dream, and most of them didn't even call back.

So it...

It's not the type of thing that you look at and sort of see a finished product.

And it was very, very difficult to get it together. But we found some brave

financiers and, you know, after just a lot of pleading and begging and working,

we got through that process and brought it to the screen.

There was a possibility of doing the music for Requiem for a Dream, but I

didn't want to enter Cubby's world anymore.

For music, I mean, because if I do something, I get in all the way, and I

just said I can't.

One of the producers said, hey, why don't we get Cubby to play?

Put him in there.

And so they had a uniform that fit me perfectly in there, and I was the

meanest, meanest goddamn prison guard since Captain Muncie.

Come on!

Come on, move that thing!

You don't feel so hip, slick, and cool right now, do you, man?

Oh, God, are you a sorrowful sight.

Come on, put it back into it.

You've been living off everybody else. Look at this guy.

Can't move, can't move.

Ask the trouble with you, New York dope fiend.

You got a rotten attitude, you know that, man?

Having him on set, it was during one of the most emotional times in the

shooting, as far as it was one of the more difficult things that the actors

were doing.

But I'd have him come out with the book and read to the actors from the book

before I would call action and the take would start.

And that was just amazing.

And Sarah said, a little red riding hood, and I'm going ipsy-pipsy to the

announcer. And she sat back down and sobbed and sobbed.

And then, in time, quieted slightly.

When Cubby came on the set, I was shooting the scene in the hospital.

It was a grueling scene to do.

And very frightening.

And I was screaming.

And I knew Cubby came on the set, but I couldn't stop to be introduced to him.

Because I was in the scene.

Ready? And...

One.

I had a scene that I was withdrawing

in jail, and we had started kind of rehearsal and placing the

cameras, and I remember we went to do a take, and they said action, and I was

kind of going through the motions of withdrawing, and all of a sudden I heard

this voice.

And it kind of just cut right through me, right to my gut. And it was Hubert

Selby Jr.

reading the exact selection from the novel that I was going through at that

time. When I completed the scene, I went over to where he was sitting to be

introduced. And the first words he said to me were, You're a poet.

It's probably the most...

beautiful compliment I've ever gotten in my life as an actress to be called a

poet. And of course only a poet could think to say that.

Well, I can tell you the first time I met Mr. Selby, I went to his house or

his apartment in Los Angeles and I actually stole one of his pens because

in case we weren't going to work together, I thought it'd be kind of cool

just to have one of his pens. So I stole one.

He'd never collaborated with anybody on a project that was not oriented by

himself. Did you know my wife?

But he thought about it, called and said that he'll do it, and then we began

writing.

No.

His themes are very interesting.

And I like the contrast between extreme violence and extreme poetry.

I think he inspired a lot of writers and also filmmakers because of his visual

aspects of his writing. They're very easy to transcend to cinema.

In a way, he was a simple guy.

He wasn't a college professor.

Not a lot of people know this, but even though he never went to high school and

he never went to college, Cubby actually was a college professor at the

University of Southern California.

At the bottom of 125, the sun is so familiar.

What a beautiful use of words is, the sun is so familiar.

Wow, that's a brilliant little line, because it really tells me a

lot about...

The narrator, maybe not so much right there at that instant, but it's the kind

of thing that resonates and hangs in there.

So the more I read, the more I understand. No, the sun is coming.

We're not talking about specifics.

It's familiar.

And, of course, it has to. You can't look at it. I think he says that. You

can't look the sun in the eye.

You just have to be aware of it.

They have a master's program called Masters of Professional Writing in the

graduate school.

fiction workshop in that program.

This phone call comes in, this is Cubby Selby, and I'm wondering if I could be

of any use to you down here, if you have any positions that I might be able to

teach.

And I said, well, the usual thing we do is to have you send in a resume. And I

stopped dead and I went, just a second, is this Hubert Selby Jr.? He said, yes.

I said, you're teaching next spring.

I met Cubby in the classroom setting and I think all of us were a little bit

intimidated because we didn't know what he would be like or what to expect and

of course we quickly saw you know this really tremendously gentle soul who

could also cut to the chase and I think you know.

I think that's an important asset of him was that he wasn't just, you know, very

dear and gentle. He had an edge too.

I remember the first story I brought in, of course, you're always nervous with

the first story that you show someone, anyone.

And he pointed out a few minor things and then he just said, you know, you

just need to send this out and see where it goes.

Like if I sent out a story and someone didn't like it, Covey would just say,

well, fuck it. You know, that's just one person. And that's the exact sentence he

would use.

He would just say, Fuck him. It's just one person, and you need to send it out

400 times before you give up.

Selby's work has had a lasting effect on modern literature and life.

His books are translated into over a dozen languages, and there are countless

pop culture references to Selby.

There's a Simpsons episode called Last Exit to Springfield. It even has Homer

Simpson playing a union strike leader who seems to be based on Harry Black

from Last Exit to Brooklyn. I move that Homer Simpson be our new union

president. All in favor?

Aye! All opposed?

Nay.

Congratulations, Homer!

Yay!

Hey, what did this job pay?

Nothing. Don't! Unless you're crooked.

Woo-hoo!

In my book, Between Thought and Expression, I included an interview with

Hubert Selby. I've only done two interviews.

One was President Havel, and the other was Hubert Selby.

The only reason I did the interview was so I could meet him.

The way he influenced other artists is really amazing.

The Smiths named an album after The Queen is Dead, a chapter on last exit.

A book was written about him, and he is taught in many colleges.

They even had a literature class named after him. It was called From Selby to

Solzhenitsyn. In my history of literature, it's as important as

important gets, you know?

Are they teaching him at Princeton? You know, I have no fucking idea.

They should.

There should be a Selby wing.

I told Jerry Stahl the story about how once upon a time my dad had shouted at

me, and you, mate, you're going to Florida to lose your fucking arm, which

was a reference to the episode in the book Requiem for a Dream where the guy's

arm is amputated in a prison hospital because he'd been injecting it in the

one spot and it had turned gangrenous.

I don't think I'd be putting any more dope than that on. Jerry loved this

story, and he told Selby. And Selby loved the fact that for this period of

time in the 80s, his expression had become literally folkloric.

Now let's ask what happens to Hugh Selby, because I want to account for the

fact that Selby hasn't really had, outside of a literary

clique that he grew up in, the recognition that most writers who cause

that kind of a scandal would get, whether people like them or not.

It's strange to me that in America he's not really getting the respect

that he gets over in the rest of the world.

Mr. Selby was a European writer much as Orson Welles was a European filmmaker.

A moment that I can't forget happened in Cannes, where after Requiem for a Dream

was made into the film, they announced that the author of the book,

Hubert Selby, was in the audience. And the whole place stood up and gave him an

ovation that lasted forever.

When the film was over, there was a kind of stunned silence and then

thunderous applause.

And I stood up to turn to look back to the audience, because we all turned to

acknowledge their applause.

But as I turned, the first person I saw was Cubby, coming toward me, his face

streaming with tears.

And he said to me, I love you.

I was very thrilled to have

been. able to take part in giving him that experience there.

In 1989, I called him. I said, let's go to Europe together and read things we

wrote to a bunch of people. And it was like hanging out with this great rock

star because every night we'd be somewhere and out come these hardcover

books of his in translation and these people lining up with moist hands and,

you know, trembling to meet the great Hubert Selby.

and there he is this this rock star just uh being very gracious and everyone is

all mr selby and he's like just lining them up an artist like hubert selby is

more mainstream in europe and i think that's why he translated well there and

was accepted there and he also described an image of america that they

wanted to believe that we didn't want to believe that americans don't want to

believe that this is

the American life.

And the Europeans truly believe that it is. The Europeans have a more advanced

society in some ways. They have social democracy, you know what I'm saying?

Healthcare, education, you understand?

They have the consciousness of being European. These Americans are not even

Americans.

They still celebrate European culture as more valuable than their own.

When you go to college, you don't learn anything about America.

English literature, French drama, German philosophy.

Do you know anything about Canadian literature?

What about Mexican literature?

His work encapsulated a certain view of America. I think for Europeans, it was a

very exotic view.

And for Americans, it was an extremely skewed view.

The Europeans have a distance from the kind of maelstrom of conflicting and

contradictory ideas and emotions that makes, creates American culture.

So you've got a writer whose work is very uncompromising.

Now, you could say, but Dostoevsky's work is uncompromising too.

He writes about...

misfits and people devoid of grace, anarchists, terrorists,

idiots, all kinds of figures inhabit Dostoevsky.

Prostitutes, lost angels, endless spiritual tarnish.

But let's just say one thing.

Dostoevsky is an emanation of the Russian soul, which in its literature

thrives on misery.

America is the happiness machine.

Requiem, it's a story about drugs and drug abuse, but that isn't its primary

theme. That's its subject matter.

And I think the Europeans saw beyond that. And I think Americans...

didn't want to see beyond it because it was dark and gritty, you know, and they

see that. So, you know, in America, it gets cult status, underground status.

Requiem for a Dream was about a junkie and his mother and et cetera. But what

was it really about was about the death and destruction wreaked by what we call

the American dream.

Cubby once said, what we call success is about getting, getting, getting, getting

money, prestige, feeding the ego.

When you follow that path in life, you're really breaking down the gates of

hell.

We're taught in this country to worship getting things.

No one tells you that the purpose in life is giving.

We have the whole thing upside down.

We spent a great deal of time going to the VA hospital in Westwood.

This is a guy that he had to fight to get those benefits. He was in the

Merchant Marines, and he had to fight to get the benefits. And for years, he

didn't have benefits.

I was having breakfast with him in L.A.

And he finally managed to get a free cane from the government.

And he was so happy that he finally got something out of that fucking

government, man. And he's got this cane now. It's one of these aluminum canes

they give you.

And so we finished breakfast, and we started to leave, and he forgot his

fucking cane. That's how much he needed it. I got a call from Cubby one day. He

says, Gil, I have to ask you something.

I said, what is it?

He said, the American Academy of Arts and Letters wants to give me an award.

For my work, but I don't want to take it. I said why don't you want to take

it? He said well, they didn't help me out when I was really broke I said come

be this is not that kind of an award.

This is not an award They don't give awards to needy artists who say can you

give me an award? That's the Guggenheim is like that or the National down for

the Arts is like that you apply for the effort You can't apply for this award

Then I got a call or a letter, whatever it was, from somebody at the American

Academy and said, we understand that you're an old friend of Hubert Selby's.

I said, yeah.

We want to give him an award. He doesn't want to take it.

I said, I know. Can you persuade him? I said, I'll give him another try.

I gave him another try, and he said, no, I'm not taking their award. And the same

reason was given. They didn't help me out when I was broke. It was $7,500.

And at the time, because he was out in L.A., as far as I know, living on

welfare.

Selby had always liked being an American, and he'd lived through the

Great Depression, was a veteran of World War II, and had survived numerous

personal and national disasters.

But he was appalled with the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, and the

fact that so many Americans were blindly backing Bush.

In 2003, Cubby wrote this to his friend, Nick Toshes.

There's an element in my life now that I have not experienced in the past, being

ashamed of my country.

I have certainly disagreed with some of the clowns we elect, but what is

happening now is disgraceful.

I, too, have thought of moving to Europe, but I can't now. It's too late.

Can't breathe.

Can't walk much.

Plus my family's here.

People like Baby Bush are anti-art because they don't want

any sense of freedom or a generational lead-in, continuation

of freedom and that individual sense

of accomplishment.

I hope I can do Cubby justice.

And the last year of his life, He was very upset about what was going on in

this country, this whole bullshit in Iraq.

You know, a lot of times we talk about how angry Kirby was. What was he angry

about? Well, I know what the fuck he was angry about. He was angry about the same

goddamn thing that I'm angry about, the unfairness of life.

And we would be driving to San Diego or Santa Barbara, and I'd be fearing for my

life. I would test the seatbelt, make sure I'm going to survive this.

And he's driving, we're swerving like, that gentleman, that shit!

And we used to get together and remark to each other, we're really angry

people. I said, I'm mad.

And he's like, me too!

He was able to not internalize the rage that had destroyed him, but

to express the rage through his work.

I mean, that's the other common denominator of his work, really, was the

rage that he lived with.

He railed against the religious God, and he railed against bureaucracy.

Periodically, there is a national emergency that necessitates, according

to the government, abridging a little more of our constitutional rights to

protect our freedom. They have become expert in taking advantage of these

situations and convincing us that a serious threat exists.

Yeah, and it is in our best interest to allow them to temporarily suspend our

freedom to protect our liberty.

Like, we should be grateful to them for going to the trouble to take the weight

of freedom off our shoulders.

Our only hope is not more bombs, but a couple of dancers going back and forth

from Moscow to New York.

He really hated that Bush got into office.

It was the darkest period of his life.

Man, the darkest period in Cubby's life. Sheesh, that's scary.

Leave you drunken son of a bitch.

Looking at you is like looking in a mirror.

I didn't hear myself then.

But now my perception was slowly changing.

Words are no longer necessary.

But I will say them anyway.

I love you, Pop.

Totally and unconditionally.

And I thank you for loving me so much.

You cried yourself into a drunken sleep.

God bless you, Pop.

The nightmare's over.

And I saw him, and I said, Hey, Cubby, I heard you were dead.

When I told everybody I was going to be riding with Hubisal B. Jr., they said,

Oh, is he still alive?

He said, Oh, no, man.

No way am I going to die. I might miss a party or a great time.

He was dying for like 50 years.

And I honestly thought, you know, every time I met him, I thought he was on his

last legs. But he was like the Duracell bunny. He wasn't going anywhere. Even

though his mortality was very obvious, it just kind of felt like this guy's

never going to die. He's one of these guys who's dying, who's going to outlive

you.

Hubert Selby Jr.

is a good reality check for anyone who thinks that writing is going to make him

rich. He did not die rich, though he lived a rich life.

Cubby Selby was married three times.

He said the love of his life was his third wife, poet Suzanne Selby.

He has four children and a dozen grandchildren.

selby went on to live to the age of seventy-five making a lot of great art

and many friends along the way a week after his death a memorial was held at

the egyptian theatre in hollywood four hundred and fifty people turned out and

some of his closest friends got up to speak about his magnanimous spirit a

recurrent theme of the talks was his irreverent sense of humour Between

airplanes and Eurorail, we went across the European continent.

One time we found ourselves driving through the Swiss Alps, and we took a

beauty break to get out of this little box van we were driving into.

Behold the Alps. I said, isn't it beautiful? He goes, ah, it's a bunch of

rocks. I want lunch.

And so one day at breakfast in Switzerland, in 90 minutes, he outlined

the willow tree.

From its beginning to its end, he told me the whole story. And he said, I'm

going to write that book if I can live long enough.

And as you all know, death was always just hovering around Cubby, and he had

no fear of it ever.

A lot of writers like Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ernest Hemingway

had backgrounds similar to Selby, with booze, drugs, madness, disease, and

destitution.

But Selby was one of the few artists who got out alive.

and lived the second half of his life somewhat sanely.

He even got to enjoy himself a bit.

In his early 40s, when he stopped drinking and using drugs, he said he

chose life.

And one of the things he made a promise to himself was to say yes to life and to

say yes. So if people asked him to do things, especially all these book

readings and things of that nature, he just said yes.

And then, of course, he'd get there and find out he had to walk, you know, a

quarter mile from the parking lot to wherever he was speaking and he'd be

pissed off.

But I'm never going to do it again until the phone would ring the next day and

he'd say yes.

And that was, I guess, a deal he made with himself. And maybe that's the

reason that a guy who they told him, you know, shouldn't have been born alive or

shouldn't have lived to be three or shouldn't have lived to be 21 or wasn't

going to live to be 24.

No way would be alive when he's 40.

Lived to be 75, because he just kept saying yes to life.

He didn't see himself as special, you know, and it wasn't like, oh, I'm a

humble guy.

He didn't, like, think about it. He was just, you know, he had seen all there

was to see on the bottom, and he had kind of seen the heights, and it didn't

make much different to him, you know?

Cubby was an authentic human being.

He was himself.

And to see that in this frail little man, that courage and nobility

affects everyone who is exposed to it.

He was very generous when I was writing Permanent Midnight. And I remember I

showed him the first section of this book, which is a memoir about being a

dope fiend. And he said, you know, it's really great, but...

The one thing I would advise you to do, I'm like, oh, great, what?

Start over?

He's like, no, make sure that when you write about the people you hate, that

you write about them with love.

And coming from anyone else, that would have been so Billy Graham.

But coming from Hubert Selby, it was like this just

fiendish little Buddha guy.

telling me how it was. When I was in LA, I would give him a call or have him come

to a show or whatever.

Because I admired him.

I mean, and I liked him, but I really admired him.

I never felt when I was with Cubby, when we were alone together at his place or

something like that, I never felt like he, and then eventually me, like

we were worried about...

the future or what was going to have to happen in an hour or 15 minutes or

something, you know. I really felt it was just him and me in the moment. It

was so fucking sweet.

He always talked about people in the most beautiful ways.

He used words that were so simple, but, you know, coming out of anyone else's

mouth, they might be cheesy or something, but out of him, it was so

sincere. I mean, he affected my life in many ways, I guess, because he was a

true friend.

You had to be tough to have those opinions. You had to be tough to be him.

And you had to be tough to believe the way he believes.

And I just loved him for being able to talk about that. And with

none of the sort of baggage that words like God or spirituality or compassion

or faith have in the plastic world.

was on a spiritual journey. That's the sense that I got.

And that's reflected in his writing and specifically in Requiem. As bleak as it

got, I always felt that there was hope.

The soul has got to go through the fire and show that although we're

burned by the fire, we still limp through.

You know, this is someone who has all the burdens.

of enormous disease and suffering, and yet you have the feeling when you see

him that he's going to start to skip or whistle a happy song.

I can honestly say in all sincerity, he never believed that he was great or

better or different from anyone else.

Just, you know, just say one of a kind.

Hubert Selby Jr. beat drugs and booze and disease and kept working, even going

to teach class at USC on an oxygen tank up to a few weeks before he died.

The last thing Cubby wrote four days before his death simply said, a list of

indignities.

Birth.

Death.

He died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

at 6 a.m. on April 26, 2004.

He passed calmly, at home, listening to music and holding Suzanne's hand.

There's one kind of favor I ask of you.

There's one kind of favor I ask of you.

There's one kind of favor that I ask of you.

I want to see my dream escape me.

And the two white horses standing in line.

And the two white horses standing in line.

And the two white horses standing in line.

Crowds that make you the friends of mine.

Oh, just focus.

ZAP!

What's a typical day for Cubby?

Madness.