Hubert Selby Jr.: Rule Breaking Author

Hubert Selby Jr. was an American author who could hardly touch a typewriter without sparking controversy and creating a masterpiece. His work was inspired by his life in Brooklyn and his views of the human condition. His stories are painfully realistic and his characters are gritty and raw. His was a life that was filled with sickness, drug addiction, successes and failures, but he never lost hope. Despite the in your face brutality of Selby’s work, he was a kind and generous man. He saw all that was awful about the human spirit and put it on paper. He took all that was good about the human spirit and tried to apply it to his life.

Hubert Selby Jr. was born on July 23, 1928; he was an only child. His parents called him Cubby because he was their “cub.” The nickname stuck with him his whole life. He was raised in an apartment in the Bay Ridge area in Brooklyn. When he was a child, it was not apparent that he was going to grow up to be a famous author. He was just an average New York City kid. He went to grade school and dropped out after he finished the eighth grade.

Selby decided to become a Merchant Marine like his father and so he ran off to join the Merchant Marines during World War II. As a Merchant Marine, Hubert Selby Jr. would go out on ships that were carrying cattle overseas. On one of these trips the cattle were carrying bovine tuberculosis and had to be dumped overboard. Cubby was unlucky enough to contract the disease from the animals. The subsequent illness would affect the rest of his life.

When Cubby got home, he was very ill. He was placed in a tuberculosis ward inside a sanitarium, where he stayed for nearly four years. He had four surgeries and one of his lungs was completely removed along with some of his ribs. Nobody expected him to live; he was in very rough shape. In the end, he was the only man in his ward that survived the illness. He was eventually sent home, but he was physically weakened for the remainder of his life, which turned out to be a lot longer than anyone thought it would be.

When Cubby got home, there was no way he could work, so he needed to come up with a career that wouldn’t require him to be in good health. He figured he could probably write, so he started off by typing letters to his friends, just to get a feel for writing. He moved on to writing a novel shortly thereafter, which would come to be known as "The Last Exit to Brooklyn." "The Last Exit to Brooklyn" was published in 1964 and was a huge success, but Hubert Selby Jr.was about to drink that success and shoot it straight into his arms.

Cubby had always been something of a drinker, but when he was in the hospital, he picked up a more dangerous habit, narcotics. He was practically on his death bed and in a lot of pain, so doctors had no qualms about giving him morphine. This habit translated to heroine use when he got out. Within a few years of publishing his first bestseller, Hubert Selby Jr. was on welfare and damaging his health even further with his addictions.

In 1969, Hubert decided to give himself a new lease on life and gave up his drinking and drug use. He was able to remain sober for the rest of his life, but his experiences with drug use and the addict lifestyle would be evident in all of his work. He continued writing and produced several novels in the 1970's, one of which would turn out to be his second most popular novel. It was called "Requiem for a Dream" and it chronicled the misfortunes of four addicts from Brooklyn. It is among the most horrifying and honest novels about drug use of all time.

Hubert Selby Jr.’s work is not only interesting in its themes, but it is also very unique in its grammatical style. Cubby rewrote the book on grammar to suit what he thought it should be. He often did away with punctuation and was known for replacing apostrophes with slashes. He indented his paragraphs to suit the length of a pause he wished to convey and he wouldn’t even bother clarifying who was speaking in the dialogue of his stories. He also hated quotations and never used them.

Despite these quirks, or perhaps because of them, Hubert Selby Jr. became a phenomenal success overseas. Both his novels, "The Last Exit to Brooklyn" and "Requiem for a Dream" were made into popular movies. Nevertheless, Hubert was never a rich man and according to his friends, he remained humble and spiritual to the end of his life. He was always more concerned about giving than he was about getting and it apparently showed in the way he treated people. He may have been a frank and foulmouthed man, but he was also truthful and kind. That would be his legacy.

Hubert Selby Jr. was married three times in his life and was the father of four children. He was a man who was not supposed to make it out of his twenties and that was before he started using. He was much luckier than most of his characters in that he rose above his conditions and went on to lead a full and happy life. He died on April 26, 2004, in his home, with his third wife by his side. He was 75 years old. 

Shelly Barclay  

Source

Hubert Selby Jr.: It/ll be better tomorrow, Michael W. Dean & Kenneth Shiffrin, Squitten Pix, LLC., 2005