Last Exit to Brooklyn

Last updated
Last Exit to Brooklyn
LastExitToBrooklyn.JPG
First edition
Author Hubert Selby Jr.
Cover artist Roy Kuhlman
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Transgressive fiction
Publisher Grove Press
Publication date
1964
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages320 pp
OCLC 18568386
Followed by The Room  

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1964 novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr. The novel takes a harsh, uncompromising look at lower class Brooklyn in the 1950s written in a brusque, everyman style of prose. [1]

Contents

Critics and fellow writers praised the book on its release. Due to its frank portrayals of taboo subjects, such as drug use, street violence, gang rape, homophobia, prostitution and domestic violence it was the subject of an obscenity trial in the United Kingdom and was banned in Italy.

Synopsis

The stories are set almost entirely in what is now considered the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn; the location is widely misreported as Red Hook, where one story is set and parts of the 1989 movie were filmed. [2] Last Exit to Brooklyn is divided into six parts that can, more or less, be read separately. Each part is prefaced with a passage from the Bible.

Style

Last Exit to Brooklyn was written in an idiosyncratic style that ignores most conventions of grammar. Selby wrote most of the prose as if it were a story told from one friend to another at a bar rather than a novel, using coarse and casual language. He used slang-like conjunctions of words, such as tahell for "to hell" and yago for "you go." The paragraphs were often written in a stream of consciousness style with many parentheses and fragments. Selby often indented new paragraphs to the middle or end of the line.

Selby did not use quotation marks to distinguish dialogue but instead merely blended it into the text. He used a slash instead of an apostrophe mark for contractions and did not use an apostrophe at all for possessives.

Publication history

Last Exit to Brooklyn started as The Queen Is Dead, one of several short stories Selby wrote about people he had met around Brooklyn while working as a copywriter and general laborer. The piece was published in three literary magazines in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Tralala first appeared in The Provincetown Review in 1961, drawing criticism which resulted in an obscenity trial. [3] [4]

The pieces later evolved into the full-length book, which was published in 1964 by Grove Press, which had previously published such controversial authors as William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller.

Critics praised and censured the publication. Poet Allen Ginsberg said that it will "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years." [5]

Trial

The rights for the British edition were acquired by Marion Boyars and John Calder and the novel ended up in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The manuscript was published in January 1966, received positive reviews and sold almost 14,000 copies. The director of Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford complained to the DPP about the detailed depictions of brutality and cruelty in the book but the DPP did not pursue the allegations.

Sir Cyril Black, the then-Conservative Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, initiated a private prosecution of the novel before Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court, under judge Leo Gradwell. The public prosecutor brought an action under Section 3 of the Obscene Publications Act. During the hearing the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate ordered that all copies of the book within the jurisdiction of the magistrates' court be seized. Not a single bookseller possessed a copy, but the publishing offices of Calder and Boyars, within the Bow Street Magistrate's jurisdiction, were discovered to be in possession of three copies. The books were duly seized, and Boyars was summoned to show cause why they should not be forfeited. [6] Expert witnesses spoke, "unprecedentedly," [7] for the prosecution: they included the publishers Sir Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell. [7] On the defense side were the scholars Al Alvarez II, and Professor Frank Kermode, who had previously compared the work to Charles Dickens. Others who provided rebuttal evidence included H. Montgomery Hyde. [8]

The order had no effect beyond the borders of the Marlborough Street Court, the London neighborhood of Soho. At the hearing Calder declared that the book would continue to be published and would be sold everywhere else outside of that jurisdiction. In response the prosecutor brought criminal charges under Section 2 of the Act, which entitled the defendants to trial by jury under Section 4. [7]

The jury was all male. Judge Graham Rogers directed that the women "might be embarrassed at having to read a book which dealt with homosexuality, prostitution, drug-taking and sexual perversion." [9] The trial lasted nine days; on November 23 the jury returned a guilty verdict.

In 1968, an appeal issued by lawyer and writer John Mortimer resulted in a judgment by Justice Geoffrey Lane that reversed the ruling. The case marked a turning point in British censorship laws. By that time, the novel had sold over 33,000 hardback and 500,000 paperback copies in the United States.[ citation needed ]

Film adaptation

In 1989, director Uli Edel helmed a film adaptation of the novel.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hubert Selby Jr.</span> American writer

Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr. was an American writer. Two of his novels, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), explore worlds in the New York area and were adapted as films, both of which he appeared in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Mortimer</span> British barrister and author (1923–2009)

Sir John Clifford Mortimer was a British barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author. He is best known for short stories about a barrister named Horace Rumpole, adapted from episodes of the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey also written by Mortimer.

<i>The Soft Machine</i> 1961 novel by William S Burroughs

The Soft Machine is a 1961 novel by American author William S. Burroughs. It was originally composed using the cut-up technique partly from manuscripts belonging to The Word Hoard. It is the first part of The Nova Trilogy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prosecutor</span> Legal profession

A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the adversarial system, which is adopted in common law, or inquisitorial system, which is adopted in civil law. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal trial against the defendant, an individual accused of breaking the law. Typically, the prosecutor represents the state or the government in the case brought against the accused person.

Transgressive fiction is a genre of literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who break free of those confines in unusual or illicit ways.

<i>Oz</i> (magazine) Australian satirical magazine

Oz was an independently published, alternative/underground magazine associated with the international counterculture of the 1960s. While it was first published in Sydney in 1963, a parallel version of Oz was published in London from 1967. The Australian magazine was published until 1969 and the British version until 1973.

<i>Requiem for a Dream</i> (novel) 1978 novel by Hubert Selby Jr.

Requiem for a Dream is a 1978 novel by American writer Hubert Selby Jr., that concerns four New Yorkers whose lives spiral out of control as they succumb to their addictions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilbert Sorrentino</span> American writer

Gilbert Sorrentino was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, professor, and editor.

Meng and Ecker was a British underground comic written by David Britton and illustrated by Kris Guidio. It was published in 1989 by the controversial Manchester-based company Savoy and lasted for nine issues before being banned in 1992 under obscenity laws.

John Mackenzie Calder was a Scottish-Canadian writer and publisher who founded the company Calder Publishing in 1949.

Michael Butterworth is a British author, publisher and campaigner who first became known publicly as an author of New Wave science fiction. He later founded the publishing house Savoy Books with David Britton in 1976 and the contemporary art journal Corridor8 with Sarajane Inkster in 2009. He successfully fought a charge of obscenity against Britton's controversial novel Lord Horror during 1992, the first novel to be banned in England since Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1967.

Calder Publications is a publisher of books. Since 1949, the company has published many books on all the arts, particularly subjects such as opera and painting, the theatre and critical and philosophical theory. Calder's authors have achieved nineteen Nobel Literature Prizes and three for Peace.

This is a list of works by the English writer Anthony Burgess.

<i>The Willow Tree</i> (novel)

The Willow Tree is a novel written by Hubert Selby, Jr. and was published in 1998. It was Selby's first novel in twenty years, since 1978's Requiem for a Dream.

<i>The Room</i> (novel) 1971 novel by Hubert Selby Jr.

The Room is the second novel by Hubert Selby Jr., first published in 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyman Andrews</span> American poet (1938–2009)

Lyman Henry Andrews was an American poet, literary critic and friend of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, amongst other writers with whom he maintained a lifelong contact. Based since the early 1960s in the United Kingdom, he was acquainted with writers and poets such as William S. Burroughs, Mohamed Choukri and W.H. Auden.

<i>Last Exit to Brooklyn</i> (film) 1989 film by Uli Edel

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1989 drama film directed by Uli Edel and adapted by Desmond Nakano from Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1964 novel of the same title. The film is an international co-production between Germany, the UK, and the United States. The story is set in 1950s Brooklyn and takes place against the backdrop of a labor strike. It follows interlocking storylines among the working class underbelly of the Red Hook neighborhood, including unionized workers, sex workers, and drag queens.

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr.

<i>R v Penguin Books Ltd</i> 1960 UK court case on obscenity laws

R v Penguin Books Ltd, was the public prosecution in the United Kingdom of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for the publication of D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The trial took place over six days, in No 1 court of the Old Bailey, between 20 October and 2 November 1960 with Mervyn Griffith-Jones prosecuting, Gerald Gardiner counsel for the defence and Laurence Byrne presiding. The trial was a test case of the defence of public good provision under section 4 of the Act which was defined as a work "in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern".

Joseph Leo Anthony Gradwell DSC was a British barrister, a magistrate and a Second World War Royal Navy volunteer, who in July 1942 against orders, led his own RN-adapted trawler HMS Ayrshire and three merchant ships from the disaster of Convoy PQ 17 into Arkhangelsk, Soviet Union.

References

  1. DePalma, Anthony. "Hubert Selby Jr. Dies at 75; Wrote 'Last Exit to Brooklyn'", The New York Times , April 27, 2004.
  2. "Fifty Years Later, Looking for Last Exit: Chasing Hubert Selby’s ghost through the neighborhood he captured in his controversial classic." by Henry Stewart. BKLYNR Issue 36 | October 10, 2014
  3. Depalma, Anthony (2004-04-27). "Hubert Selby Jr. Dies at 75; Wrote 'Last Exit to Brooklyn'". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-08-24.
  4. Simpson II, Tyrone R. (2011). Ghetto Images in Twentieth Century American Literature. London, UK: Palgrave. p. 85. ISBN   978-0230115934.
  5. Homberger, Eric (28 April 2004). "Hubert Selby Jr". The Guardian .
  6. Forell, Claude. "A Noble Crusader for Purity." The Age Literary Review, Archived 2003-01-17 at the Wayback Machine March 25, 1967.
  7. 1 2 3 Newburn, Tim (1992). Permission and Regulation: Law and Morals in Post-War Britain. London: Routledge, pp. 96–8. Google Books
  8. H. Montgomery Hyde, Last Exit To Brooklyn, The Times , 6 December 1967
  9. "Obituaries: Hubert Selby, Jr.", The Times , April 28, 2004.
  10. Luerssen, John D. (2015). The Smiths FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Important British Band of the 1980s. Backbeat Books. p. 237. ISBN   978-1-4803-9449-0.