[In the essay below, Peavy asserts that narcissistic pride, more than circumstance, leads the primary characters of Last Exit to Brooklyn to their tragic ends.]

Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn has been attacked as immoral and even pornographic. After a series of trials in England, the book was officially suppressed. Last Exit to Brooklyn has also been banned in Italy, and has been the subject of controversy in the United States. The characters in Selby's stories are homosexuals, prostitutes, dope addicts, and hoodlums, and his plots illustrate the degenerate, depraved, and doomed existence they live.

Selby's realistic style is as objectionable to many readers as the actions he describes. Nevertheless, Selby is not a salacious or pornographic writer; he belongs to the tradition of the religious-moralist-satirist that includes Swift and Pope and which began with the medieval preachers who denounced lechery and gluttony by presenting repulsive portraits of the sins of the flesh. Selby's description of an unlovely and unloving humanity is expressed in the only language appropriate to both his aesthetic and moral intentions.

Selby has an almost obsessive concern with sin—not with the fact that it exists, but that it has become, as he says, "an ambiguous thing in our society." In a letter to me (1967), Selby wrote: "we continually avoid the responsibility of our actions. We rationalize, qualify, and if that doesn't work we use Freud to justify immoral acts. We have even gotten to the point of eliminating our conscience that way. Obviously the results must be one only ignoble, but catastrophic." Selby's vision is apocalyptic, and the intensity of this vision accounts for the violence of his language and the sordidness of his descriptions. Selby is convinced that we learn only through emotional experience. In the letter mentioned above he told me "I try to put the reader through an emotional experience rather than just tell him a story. I feel that if I am successful he will be forced to think in spite of himself and the book. He may hate the book and think it loathsome, but if I succeed he will be haunted by what is in the book."

The sin most frequently attacked by Selby in Last Exit to Brooklyn is pride. In "Landsend," for instance, pride is a cause of alienation and unhappiness. It caused the young Negro woman, Lucy, to be a scolding parent and a nagging, frigid wife. Extremely caste-conscious, she wishes to be accepted by the "nice white girl" who lives in her building, and refrains from even speaking to the other people in the project. She makes her sons miserable by not letting them play with the "spick" children in the neighborhood, and by constantly punishing them for acting like "ragamuffins." She nags her husband about his speech, and, frustrated that he will not move from the housing project until he finishes TV-Radio repair school, she turns her back to him in bed. In another of the vignettes in "Landsend" the Negro Abraham, a husband and the father of five children, begrudges his wife enough money to run their home. While his children suffer from malnutrition, he spends all his money on the upkeep of his Cadillac, his "processed" hair, and his women. The most fully developed treatments of the theme of pride, however, are contained in "The Queen is Dead," "Tralala," and "Strike." In these stories, pride brings about total degradation and death to the protagonists.

Selby has said that almost all of life and its emotions can not only be found in the Bible, but are "summed up" there. Each of the stories in Last Exit to Brooklyn is prefaced by a Biblical quotation. The quotation which preceeds "The Queen is Dead" is Genesis 1:27, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." The quotation from Genesis in this context is ironic, for George Hanson [Georgette] and her "gay" friends have parodied God's act of creation by crossing over to the other sex. Georgette takes pride in being an overt homosexual and transvestite, and feels "intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren't gay (look at all the great artists who were fairies!)." Georgette's pride is paralleled by that of Vinnie, whose constant reiteration of the masculine code of virility is really a facade hiding his own bisexuality. Georgette respects Vinnie's pride, and is careful not to wound it publicly by a too aggressive pursuit of Vinnie. "It wasn't fear of being rebuked or hit by him (that could be developed in her mind into a lovers quarrel ending in a beautiful reconciliation) that restrained her, but she knew if done in the presence of his friends .. . his pride would force him to abjure her completely and then there would not only be no hope, but, perhaps, no dreams."

Vinnie's pride is an important foil to Georgette's own self-deluding hubris. When he was fifteen Vinnie was proud of his car theft and his pugilistic abilities, and when he was sixteen his pride caused him to be sentenced to jail. Apprehended for car theft, Vinnie had knocked the two arresting officers down the steps of the stationhouse. "Possibly he might have gotten away, but he went to the Greeks and displayed the gash in his head to his friends telling them how he dumped the two cops." Vinnie was later proud of the time he spent in jail and of the more notorius hoods he met there; "the glory of having known someone killed by the police during a stickup was the greatest event of his life and a memory he cherished as would an aging invalid, at the end of a disappointing life, a winning touchdown made at the end of the final game of the season." Most importantly, Vinnie is proud of the perverted love Georgette feels for him, for it gives him status within his peer group. He wanted them to be certain that "Georgette was in love with him and that he could have her anytime he wanted to, . . . feeling superior to the others because he knew how Steve who had been killed by the bulls, and because Georgette was smart and could snow them with words . . . (mistaking in his dull, never to be matured mind, her loneliness for respect of his strength and virility)." The self-delusion caused by Georgette's pride (her belief that Vinnie will succumb to her seductiveness as a "queen"), and the callowness caused by Vinnie's pride are seen when Georgette struggles to regain her composure after being stabbed in the leg. "She looked at Vinnie with pleading in her eyes trying to regain her composure. . . . hoping to gain his sympathy, looking tenderly as a lover taking irrevocable leave, and Vinnie laughed thinking how much she looked like a dog beggin for a bone."

The sexual aberrations of Georgette and her "girl" friends (Goldie, Lee, Camille) are mirrored by Vinnie and the boys in his gang (Harry, Malfie, Sal), for if they are homosexual transvestites (queens), the latter group of men are bisexuals who, under certain conditions, may be had for the price of liquor and narcotics. Georgette's group prides itself in false feminity, constant preening, and catty observations about the dress of rival queens. Vinnie's group, on the other hand, revels in an exaggerated maleism which is as perverted as the feminine airs assumed by the transvestites. For instance, at the wild party at Goldie's house Georgette offers her glass of gin to Vinnie, but Vinnie refuses because "the code forbids drinking from the same glass as a fag." Nevertheless, within the hour Vinnie is to have sexual relations with two of the queens (pederasty with Lee and fellatio with Georgette). Yet Vinnie can do this without any loss of caste with the gang, for he is still subscribing to the rigid code of machismo, which allows him to be the active partner in pederasty and the passive partner in fellatio and still maintain his status as a "straight," or normal male. The pride of Vinnie's peer group allows them to enjoy homosexual relations without any danger to their male ego, for they always cover up any pleasure they might derive from such acts in the ridicule, hostility, and cruelty they direct toward the overt homosexuals.

The death of Georgette is a masterful blend of narcotic delirium and Georgette's persistent desire for romance, beauty, and love. The long paragraph in parenthesis on page 77 is a flashback of memory which epitomizes the sordidness of her life. She remembers with revulsion a scene with the "john," and she repels it with a fantasied image of the present, which she reconstructs within the drama of Italian opera. In the beginning of the story, when Georgette is pursuing Vinnie at the Greek's, she knows that she can have him for a few dollars. She does not want him on a business basis, however, for that would make her his "john." What Georgette wants is love, or something that her pride can twist into the resemblance of love. This desire underlies Georgette's desperate attempt to convince herself that Vinnie did not perform pederasty with Lee, a rival queen, and that her own act of fellatio with Vinnie is beautiful, an act of love. Georgette imagines Vinnie's penis as a rose which he has presented to her as her lover, but the fecal odor and Vinnie's crude instructions obtrude into Georgette's fantasy of a tender love scene. Georgette injects an overdose of morphine into her arms and legs, and as the chill creeps into her extremities, she fantasies herself and Vinnie in the scene that closes the first act of Puccini's La Boheme. In this scene a candle carried by Mimi is extinguished by a gust of wind in Rodolpho's room, and Mimi drops her key. Rodolpho helps Mimi search for the key, and in the dark their hands chance to meet. "Vinnie .. . yes, yes. Vincennti. Vincennti d' Amore," murmurs Georgette as she imagines Vinnie in the role of Rodolpho, singing his great aria, "Che gelida mania" (Your tiny hand is cold). ". . . yes, yes. Cold, O my beloved," replies Georgette, and pictures herself singing "Mi Chiamano Mimi, " Mimi's candle causes Georgette to recall the candle light by which she read Poe's "The Raven," while in the background the recorded music of Charlie ("The Bird") Parker played. The candle light, the poetry reading, and the music had moved Vinnie to an unaccustomed tenderness, and the effect the scene had on the drugged members of the party caused Georgette to exult in her pride ("The guys were staring and Vinnie seemed so close she could feel the sweat on his face and even Lee was listening and watching her read and they all knew she was there; they all knew she was THE QUEEN"). This recollection is projected into her dream fantasy of Italian opera: "Si, A candle. Soft candle light. . . and I will read to you." In the opera, Rodolpho and Mimi stand in a window in a flood of moonlight, and in a rapturous duet ("O soave fanciulla") proclaim their love for each other, then passionately kiss. Just before Vinnie left her Georgette had wondered "Why didn't he kiss me? If he would only let me kiss him"; in the fantasied scene from the opera, Vinnie and Georgette (as Rodolpho and Mimi) embrace. With her dream of love shattered, the degraded queen dies, still grasping at her histrionic fantasies of beauty and dignity. Georgette's death is signalled by the closing line of Leoncavallo's tragic opera Pagliacci—"La commedia e finita" (The comedy is ended), which merges with Mimi's death song "Sono andati."

Georgette's pride results in a perversion of God's creative act (alluded to in the quotation from Genesis that prefaces "The Queen is Dead"). Another kind of pride is illustrated by the protagonist in "Tralala," for her pride in her body and in her abilities as a prostitute take her beyond any possible redemption (significantly, the quotations from the Song of Solomon which preface "Tralala" are the readings for the feast day of Mary Magdalene). Both Georgette's homosexuality and Tralala's debased heterosexuality preclude the possibility of love in their relations with other people. "Tralala" orignially appeared in The Provincetown Review, and was subsequently involved in an obscenity trial. Allen Tate, who defended the story in Provincetown, said that the moral of the story is that "the wages of sin is death." "Tralala" is more a portrayal of hubris than a condemnation of prostitution, however, for Tralala, like Georgette, exhibits a pride which is both selfdeluding and self-destructive. She is proud of her enormous breasts and the fact that she can get any man she wants. "If a girl liked one of the guys or tried to get him for any reason Tralala cut in. For kicks. The girls hated her." She goes about the cheap waterfront bars, pushing out her chest, and enjoying her success with drunken servicemen. But "no drunken twobit sailor or doggie for her. Oh no. Ya bet ya sweetass no. With her clothes and tits?"

Ironically, Tralala's fortune changes when a lonely army officer offers her love rather than money before his embarkment for the war overseas. The magic talisman of her breasts never seems to work for her after this, and she grows "dirtier and scabbier." She can no longer compete with the flashier prostitutes in the Broadway bars. Her fall is rapid, for soon even the 8th Avenue bars "with their hustlers, pushers, pimps, queens and wouldbe thugs kicked her out and the inlaid linoleum turned to wood and then was covered with sawdust and she hung over a beer in a dump on the waterfront, snarling and cursing. . . ." Ultimately she returns to her old haunts in Brooklyn, still clinging to the conviction that with her breasts (the symbol of her pride) she "could always makeout." Tralala's narcissistic pride in her body and her arrogant assertion of her sexual prowess leads to her destruction. On the day of her death she compulsively tries to steal another woman's man in a bar. The woman warns her to stay away, but Tralala, primarily to regain her status, continues in her endeavors to arouse the man. All else failing, she pulls up her sweater and bounced her bare breasts on the palms of her hands. Then she "slowly turned around bouncing them hard on her hands exhibiting her pride to the bar," challenging all the men present to test her sexuality. What happens next is inevitable; the meretricious Circe, after turning the drunken men into swine, copulates with some forty or fifty of them in an empty lot near the bar. Tralala is proud to the end, and during the entire orgy she swills beer and yells that she has "the biggest goddam tits in the world." The final horror of her death represents the total debasement of her body—the ultimate mortification of the flesh. Lying in a pool of beer, blood, urine, and semen, Tralala pays for her pride.

Like Tralala, Harry Black, the protagonist in "Strike," is destroyed by an arrogant and self-deluding pride. Harry was "the worst lathe operator of the more than 1,000 men working in the factory" and a petty functionary in the outer clique of the union. His egotism, however, prevents him from perceiving the truth about himself and alienates him from society. At home he is a failure as a husband and father, at work he is despised by both labor and management, and in the homosexual world to which he ultimately descends he is looked upon with contempt and loathing. So self-deluded is Harry, however, that he never suspects that his pride makes him the prey of people who use him for their own ends. The neighborhood gang uses him as a source of free beer and money, yet he mistakes their actions for friendship. The union leaders look upon Harry as a "patsy," an irreplacable scapegoat who is the "best diversionary action they had" in their relations with both management and the union membership, yet Harry mistakes their maneuvering of him for genuine interest and admiration. And, saddest of all, Harry becomes the "john" or paying client of homosexuals, mistakenly believing their prostituted lust is love (when Harry's money runs out near the end of the strike, his lover leaves him).

Ultimately, Harry becomes an overt homosexual, but his one unsuccessful attempt on a neighborhood boy leads to his public degradation. Harry has always defied authority figures, such as the various company bosses, and it is characteristic that he defy God himself when, in his pain and humiliation, he hurls his blasphemous and obscene invective toward heaven. Behind this obloquy, however, is not only Harry's arrogance and pride, but also the necessity for him to believe that God, too, is a homosexual. Blinded by his own blood, his arms ripped from their sockets, Harry attempts to raise his battered head in a gesture of proud defiance.

Similarly, Georgette and Tralala go to their deaths defiantly. Georgette dies from a self-inflicted overdose of morphine rather than admit that her life is sordid, that her love is a lie; Tralala dies as a result of her defiant challenge to copulate with all the males in the neighborhood. The protagonists of "The Queen is Dead," "Tralala," and "Strike" are all victims of hubris who fall because of a narcissistic pride or self-love which is also self-destrusctive.