Last Exit to Brooklyn 
by 

Hubert Selby Jr., 

 

Gilbert Sorrentino (Editor)

 

A Society of Laws

The pomposity of the literary establishment in the 1960’s was as bad as it ever has been. I can recall my encounter, as a twenty year old, with Last Exit. But before I bought it, I got a copy of the New York Times review. ‘Another Grove Press porno piece,’ or something roughly equivalent is what I remember. So I ignored the book for the next 50 years. A big mistake, only to be excused by lack of experience. As Sam Goldwyn put it: “Don’t pay any attention to the critics; don’t even ignore them.”

The fact that the book rates on the filth scale at about the same level as a middling episode of Law & Order SVU, proves just how obsessed with limiting literary experience those who controlled the book trade really were. Narcissistic street boys, casual prostitutes, transsexuals with authentic feelings and thugs were people who couldn’t be taken seriously as people. Nor did their views about what constitutes human relationships, especially the language in which those relationships are described, have any place in literary fiction.

What amazes (and frightens) me is how much nothing has changed in the last half century except for a more general awareness of the under-culture of casual violence and criminality as a way of life. There is of course nothing new in its existence except its increasing publicity. So the world looks like its gone to hell in a hand basket. And the improved visibility of this world is used to justify everything from racism to evangelical revival; from the war on drugs to the war on immigrants. But it is bunk. Selby knew that a substantial portion, often the largest portion, of the ‘civilized world’ lives in uncivilized conditions. And so has it always been, even if the rather more civilized portion ignores it.

Membership in the under-culture is not a choice; it’s an adaptation to reality. The most significant component of that reality is law. It is the law that creates the under-culture of addicts, street sex workers, and petty thieves who mature into not so petty thieves. St. Paul, he whose mission was overthrowing the law, had it right when he quotes the law to his own advantage, “for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law?” But Paul had one law on his side - Roman citizenship. There is no such loophole for those of the under-culture. The law applied to and in the under-culture is essentially arbitrary oppression by the strong of the less strong. In that situation, survival means knowing your place, sticking to your assigned role, and accepting your lack of relative strength.

The under-culture is a culture of victims who accept their status and act in implicit protest with as much malice as they can get away with. Hopelessness not love is the most powerful emotional force. Love presumes hope; it doesn’t create it. So the law of the under-culture is not the law of the jungle. In the jungle, there are adaptations of speed, size, coloring, and intelligence that give hope and consequently the opportunity for instinctive love. In the under-culture, hope is a lethal trait, a delusion that literally kills. 

Despite its grisly content, therefore, Last Exit is a book created out of empathy. Selby knew his characters, and he recognized their dilemma: adapt or die. Since the under-culture doesn’t change much from generation to generation, what he has to say is as important now as it was then. There are many, apparently an increasing number, who share much with Georgette, Shelby’s transvestite sacrificial figure, whose “life didnt revolve, but spun centrifugally, around stimulants, opiates, johns...”

Postscript: A comment by another GR reader provoked a realization by me that Selby had described a process of criminalization of minority groups that is more or less traditional in America. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...