Thread by @thomasjbevan1

//THREAD\\

In which we consider the lesson from

'It/ll be better tomorrow'

(Hubert Selby Jr. Docu)

Essential reading from all #fiction #writers

(and everyone else)

@MattheWrite @SamuelThews @ryanstephens @pathtomanliness
@VeraMistral

/Epigram\

‘Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you’ve got.

Which means of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is bringing you closer to death.

But it’s no big deal.

They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied...

So when I totally embrace this process,

this life/death,

and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this gibberish and hang out with the gods.

It seems to me that this is worth the price of admission'

Hubert Selby Jr (1928-2004)

The subject of today's #amwriting thread..

Praise for Selby Jr:

‘I can’t imagine a contemporary writer who’s not been influenced by Hubert Selby.’ Lou Reed

‘He was very into being concerned about his soul and the soul of others’ Richard Price (Clockers, Lush Life, HBO’s The Wire)

...

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

Jerry Stahl
(writer of, among other things, the excellent and criminally underrated novel I, Fatty.)

amazon.com/I-Fatty-Jerry-…

/Housekeeping\

For brevity sake, I’m not going to attribute all quotations etc.

If you want to delve deeper then watch the documentary, or better yet read Hubert Selby Jr’s novels.

[x]= my analysis

/x\= my subheadings

On with the show...

/Childhood & Illness\

Selby grew up in Bay Ridge neighbourhood of Brooklyn

Only finished 8th grade of school. Dropped out to join Merchant Marines

[No formal education- autodidact]

Two years drinking and womanising across Europe.

[Went out & sought life]

1 ship he was on as a teen in WW2 carried cattle to Europe to feed troops. Cattle had Bovine TB. Selby contracted it.

Severe lung problems. Sent to sanitarium in USA. Given 2 months to live. Survived thru black market medication.

Whole TB ward died apart from him.

3 years in bed, 4 surgeries in 1 year. Selby had lung and 6 ribs removed

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

Had vision of being an old man who was dying saying ‘What the hell have I done with my life?’

Decided to write...

@DrRalphNap

/Success & Drugs\

First novel= Last Exit to Brooklyn.

International & controversial best seller.

Now in 30s he switched from alcohol abuse to 5 years of serious heroin addiction

‘Led to massive, empty and unstoppable misery’

Was impoverished& spent time on welfare

Where’d the money go?

‘You wanna see $60k?’ *rolls up sleeves to show trackmarks*

Moved to Hollywood but couldnt escape insidious habits

Did time in jail

‘Nearly destroyed by his rages& the toxic chemical remedies he poured on top of em. Knew he had to change or die

/Clean\

Stahl: ‘I bought the cliché that you had to be fucked-up to write about fucked up stuff. [Selby] both put me at ease& scared shit out of me when he said ‘Hey man, once you get off dope and alc that’s when you realise how dark you are- there’s no buffer between it& you’

Now clean he wrote Requiem for a Dream (1978), The Room (1971), etc which depict the disease of the human condition.

The Willow Tree (1998) offered love & forgiveness as the answer to violence and hatred.

‘Wrote about what to do at the sorest point of spiritual deprivation.’

‘He didn’t wanna leave without accomplishing something.’

HSJ: ‘To live your life, however long it is, 30 years, 100 years, and at the end you look your life over and you say ‘Holy mackerel, I blew it! I blew the whole thing! And then you drop dead. Oh, boy. That’s scary.’

/Miracle\

I started writing because of a spiritual experience...’

‘I say yes to life and life gives me everything I need.’

When on TB ward asked by religious man to write letter to friend on wards family saying that friend had died.

Why me? I was totally unequipped...

But said yes anyway

This was when Selby began to write

Why was he asked?

Selby: ‘Because the man knew that I needed the miracle that he was offering me more than anyone else. And I’ve said yes to writing ever since.’

/Learning to write\

On welfare. Had tiny Brooklyn apartment, with tiny square of backyard.

Put card table, straight chair and typewriter out there & wrote letters to people.

What he was doing, what he thought, what he was reading.

He was learning how to write.

‘Writer has no right to be there in the work. I don’t have any right to impose myself between ppl I’m creating on page & the reader.

The responsibility of the artist is to transcend the human ego’

He was writing the equivalent in literate of spiritual guidebooks for the sick.

Last Exit... is about the disappearance of love and its substitute in all kinds of forms- Business, Unions, Prostitution all kinds of monied activity that is substituting for love

[#writers- You need to be able to describe your theme and know it at this level of depth]

/Style & Innovations\

‘It’s like the marriage of literature and Charlie Parker. The guy used words like musicians used notes.’

Paragraph indentations are different lengths. To him that signified the length of the pause as in music.

Eccentric typography...

used / instead of ' ,

didn’t tend to use capital letters at the beginning of paragraphs.

Weird repetition shit shit shit shit shit shit

‘But he was a bebop cat & that’s how he wrote’

Lot’s of capitalization because everyone is screaming at each other. Jumps off the page.

A slash and burn aesthetic. Punctuation is a nicety.

Selby broke the rules to better describe the rhythm of the street. But he did it consistently and with purpose.

Selby: ‘As a reader I can’t stand all these 'he said, they said', all these apostrophes and quotes.’

'When I first started writing I had this manual typewriter. Apostrophe was upper case over the number 8. On a manual typewriter that’s work. Whereas the slash is a lower case question mark.'

[Style partially born out of practicality and necessity]

Characterisation:

He goes from one characters voice to the other without saying who is who but the characters are so clear that you can tell.

‘I really thought about doing that, I practised doing that.’

‘Everybody has there own rhythm and I try to reflect that.’

Said only influence was Beethoven. ‘What Beethoven does is he states something& then he states it again. And then he’ll go back &do a little variation on it. And then he’ll state it again.’

He freed up writers:
‘I can write about this? I’m allowed to do that? That exists?’

His books were hotly desired by people who felt that the secrets of life were not being revealed by contemporary literature, & they were fiercely resisted as well.

Unappreciated?
Nicholas Winding Refn: ‘Selby is a Euro writer in the way that Orson Welles was a Euro filmmaker’

/Conclusion\

HSJ: ‘What we call success is about getting, getting. Getting money, prestige, feeding the ego. When you follow that path in life yr really breaking down the gates of hell… We’re taught to worship getting things. No one tells you the purpose in life is giving.’

He was able to not internalise the rage so it destroyed him, but express the rage through his work.

‘He was dying for like 50 years. Every time I saw him he was on his last legs.’

[But he still kept going because the work kept him going]

'Hubert Selby Jr is a reality check for anyone who thinks they are going to make it rich from writing.
He did not die rich.
But he led a rich life- 3 wives, 4 children, 12 grandchildren.
Went on to live to age 75, making a lot of great art and many friends along the way.'

‘In his early 40’s when he stopped drinking and using drugs, he said he chose life.

One of the things he made a promise to himself was to say ‘yes’ to life.

If people asked him to do things- book readings etc- he just said yes.

He didn’t see himself as special… he had seen all there was to see at the bottom, and he’d kind of seen the heights. Didn’t make much difference to him, you know?’

He said: ‘Make sure that when you write about the people you hate, you write about them with love...

... Coming from anyone else that would’ve been so Billy Graham, but coming from Hubert Selby… He was like this frail little Buddha guy, telling you what was what.'

/End of Thread\

Hope you enjoyed this thread.
If you did an RT would be appreciated

And as always thanks to
@StoicGoatFarmer
@StoicMDJ
Brooklyns own @GoldmundUnleash
@BillyRedHorse
@drbabelovelife
@Sociopathlete
@TellYourSonThis
@AJA_Cortes
@EdLatimore