What is so remarkable about Selby is that he makes us see all these people as real, e.g., what did John Dillinger read in the bathroom—? Jack The Ripper drinking sherry, perhaps: as against the more devastating manifestations of their "public" faces, the small notations of their lives. All these people are so far from enviable, they live in a special hell: the clue to Selby's brilliance is that he has not invested any of them with dreams and/or aspirations which are, for them, phony. They move in the circumscribed area of their own despair—even Georgette's narcotic dream of happiness with Vinnie is only faggoty desire. As a matter of fact, Georgette's page of impossible romantic desire, her "vision" of a love idyll with Vinnie is perhaps the most unerring detection of the vulgar since the scene in the room above the town festival with Emma and Rodolphe in Madame Bovary—although she is on a "higher" level than those with whom she associates; her dreams place her, precisely, in her element, which seems to me a cogent understanding of the homosexual, an avoidance of the adventurous cast in which his world has been so often molded. The look is without pity, but not without compassion. Georgette, after all, really does love Vinnie, as well as she possibly can.

The use of cops. "Another Day Another Dollar," the scene with the hoods, GIs, and cops: when that cop speaks you get chills up your back, he almost clubs you from the page itself. You can see his fat, red face and sloping shoulders, the blue uniform stained black under the arms, the other copper moving sullenly around the edge of the crowd, waiting for someone to say something out of line. (In "Double Feature," the sudden terror which ends a very funny sequence occurs when two cops enter the theater at the complaint of the manager in re: the two young drunks.) If you prove you can't freely conduct yourself, you are forced to conduct yourself according to the laws of a more powerful phenomenon . . . cops, hoods, junk, what have you.

Selby: "My stories are about the loss of control." You can live a total lie out so long as you act as if you belong to the society—in Selby's case, since the society is hellish, brutal, one wrong step and your head is broken—and it begins as a child (the playground scenes in "Landsend"; nobody has a chance). If you allow what is bothering you to get out of control for just an instant, you pay the price of destruction. The police are interchangeable with the society in the strict mechanistic terms of punishment for transgression. If the skillet doesn't fry you, the fire will broil you. A harsh world of pain and horror, the police aid and abet the misery, they don't, in any way, alleviate it.

The world of these streets sheer chaos, love does not exist in a world of violence except in the hokey, campy love of Georgette for Vinnie. She loves him, but in some story-book way based on a future which is not only not realizable, but which doesn't even exist as a vague possibility. Her future is death, she dies on the subway (where else?) in her pathetic dream, if she hadn't she would live to go back uptown, still craving Vinnie, still convinced that their lives together could be beautiful—the ultimate mistake of the orgasm theory.

Important to realize that these people have not wholly been turned into what they are by the society in which they exist—they, in a very real sense, have created this society, Frankenstein creating a monster who hunts down his creator, things interact. Everything is spurious and shoddy but death and pain and squalor which are unbearably real. In "Landsend," nothing is of value, from Ada, whose religion is psychopathological, to Abraham, who starves his children to keep his Caddy going, all is filth and horror. The women in the project's "recreation" areas turn, as the story progresses, into Yahoos, searching each other's heads for lice.

"Strike" is, for me, a masterpiece, possibly the finest short story written in this country in a decade. Every false ideal, every rotting set of values, every cliché we have ever heard about marriage, homosexuality, labor and management, the dignified poor—all are exposed by this merciless flat prose. No comments, ever, in Selby. The prose moves the experience directly to you, it is style-less.

That which stands out so clearly in Selby's prose is the fact that none of it is what is thought of as "quotable." There is no "style," no "elegance." He is, by any standards which may be used to measure him, a PROSE writer—nothing at all of the poet in him, the stories are constructed simply, in a horizontal line, the words are true to the narrative they move. And the narrative moves, forward, the classic climax is reached, the story pitches down, no chance for a reversal, at all. It is like one dull stone piled atop another, nothing remarkable about them in any way at all, and suddenly the mind is confronted by a pyramid, an overwhelming edifice—it won't go away, a new thing has been made and placed in the world.

The ear for speech, impeccable. People don't talk the same way unless they are joined together in some common purpose, have common lives, goals, desires. The great mistake of so many prose-writers in their transcription of speech is to record its syntactical eccentricities and habits carelessly, e.g.—they'll have an uneducated laborer speak the same way as an uneducated thug. Or, a cop will speak the same way as those he bullies, and arrests. The mark of brilliance and honesty in speech transcription resides in the differentiation of language patterns. Only a fool can be misled by the heavyhanded vulgarity of so many popular prose-writers who mistake one brand of grammatical aberration and slang, for another. Look at the differences, subtle and beautiful, in Selby's work, between the speech of those who are societally close to each other. Cops and thugs, thugs and queers, Italians and Negroes. The speech of Alex, who runs the diner, with that perfect placing of his scatah! The difference in speech as the character normally employs it, as against the way he speaks when he is placed in a situation in which he is not at home, not comfortable, viz., Harry Black, one, the way he speaks to his wife, two, the way he speaks at the job, three, the way he speaks to the union officials, four, the way he speaks to the queers in the gay bar, five, the way he speaks to his wife after he has become homosexually involved. These are real differences, recorded perfectly. As James used speech to move and develop his narrative, his unfolding plot, Selby uses it to denote aspects and/or changes of character, emotional states. Check also the subtle differences in the cop's threats to the thugs and to the GIs in "Another Day." The former a bluff, a "gruff reproof"—the latter loaded with poison, and very real. Finally, the incredible pre-strike speech of the union boss to the members. For me, one of the most precise delineations of the pompous and vulgar I've read in years. Each word set into that speech as a tile, the grammatical mistakes are of the sort that his listeners would never recognize, but would consider a mark of being "smart," there is a veneer of "culture" (after all, this is the boss) over the words, as he gives them cliché after cliché. What is more remarkable, they are so placed that one can see behind the words, as it were, discover the gross distortions of fact, the real contempt he has for the rank and file as he patronizes them. They're all "buddies"—he loathes them. It is a parallel to the vulgarity registered by politicians when they smilingly eat, in order, knishes, pizza, and cuchifritos on the Lower East Side. A fantastic contempt for the populace, but the unerring knowledge of the "leader" that his crassest insults, his most flagrant patronization seem like unity with them. Even though they know he's a son of a bitch, they fall for it when he kisses a baby; how many Puerto Ricans voted for Rockefeller because he speaks Spanish?—Words are weapons, when joined with the properly related acts, they are formidable weapons, viz., Selby's intrusions of remarks describing the boss leaning "wearily" on the lectern, his "worn" face, his "humble" stilling of applause.

Again, Selby has a perfect eye and ear for strata of society, their beliefs, values, the things they cherish and desire. In "Tralala," he sends her, after she realizes that her body, and especially her huge breasts, are real sexual assets, out of the filth of the Brooklyn neighborhood in which she was born, to Manhattan, to search for more lucrative trade. To anyone who knows people like Tralala, their ideas of elegance, and the big-time, the bar he sends her to in order to hustle registers with a shock that is so acute one forgets how absolutely perfect a spot it is: The Crossroads. Exactly the right combination. Someone like Tralala would know the bad rep of joints like the 8th Avenue bars (where she eventually gravitates), would never move into a hotel bar (an impossible field of action for a Brooklyn slut, better send an East Harlem junkie to Brooks Bros. for clothes), and the small, expensive traps in the East Fifties would never see her—significantly, not because they are expensive and chic, but because, being in the Fifties and outside the area of Times Square, they would never seem to her places where she could hustle well-paying customers. Tralala would select exactly what she does select, The Crossroads; the perfect example of vulgar pretension, strictly for the tourist, who thinks that New York begins at 42nd and ends at Rockefeller Center; apropos of this, I wonder how many tourists think of Times Square as "seamy"—I would hunch less than 50%. One must remember that Tralala is one of the millions of Americans who live out their lives in the belief that a nightclub looks like a Hollywood set of the 30s, complete with Fred Astaire; if she ever went to, say, The Blue Angel, she'd think somebody was putting her on, what, this a nightclub? Selby is completely aware of this. What is mediocrity and vulgarity to an expensive whore is the zenith of "night-life" for Tralala. Selby's power is partially explained by this exhaustive, painstaking attention to details. See also, the cars the hoods talk about in "Another Day"—not a Ferrari, Mercedes, or Rolls in the lot. These people are real because their acts are acts which are utterly true to the environment they inhabit, they explain it, and vice-versa.

Part of the fascination Vinnie feels for Georgette lies in the fact that he thinks of her as cultured. She seems to hold out to him a world so far removed from his own experience of slums, violence, prison, etc., that he can't resist finding out what she knows, or what he thinks she knows. So, too, the rest of the guys in the queer party uptown. The fags are hip, the hoods are not. A less penetrating writer would have Vinnie a bebop fan. But people like Vinnie were not bebop fans. They listened to popular music, and do so today. Maybe today a Vinnie might listen to "soul" music or the Bossa Nova, but you'd never catch him with a John Coltrane or Omette Coleman record. There are such subtle gradations of difference in the "lower" classes, and Selby is aware of them. One thinks of the fantastic inaccuracies of reporters who write that kids say "hep" to each other, wear levis and sweat shirts, and greet each other with phrases like "hiya Gate." These guys are always at least ten years behind what's happening, and their confusion of present values (real) with present values (imagined) sullies their reportorial accuracy as concerns both the present and the past. Selby is deadly accurate. Vinnie is amazed by Bird. Of course—Vinnie knew as much of Bird in the mid-forties as Miss America did. Maybe less. Bad, or careless, or popular writers are not only that, they are immoral as well.

They extrapolate cultural values from economic levels on assumption, thereby confusing whole segments of society with other segments. The stories, the intellectual "sets" created out of such confusions enable great lies to persist, viz., the white middle-class, as well as the black middle-class, conception of the lower-class Negro and his "tastes." Or, check the fantasies apparent in this confusion: the mistaking of "bopping" gangs with those who listened to the music, bebop. Boppers (the rumbling gangs) were called that after bop was dead, they listened to R & B, rock 'n' roll, mambos. Or the confusion, still apparent, of beatniks with hipsters, hipsters with junkies, junkies with beatniks, beatniks with artists. Bad, dishonest writers play on the public's desire to be deluded, and they prosper thereby. Selby wrenches things back into context. The lie can become so great that even the actual inhabitants of the various social strata may be duped, e.g., many beatniks think of themselves as hipsters, while there are no hipsters at all today, at least not in New York; again, vocals in the Sinatra-Darrin-Damone style (the Las Vegas syndrome), with fingersnapping and big bands orchestrated mostly for muted brass behind the ancient bebop 4-4 splash cymbal, are thought of (by apparently thousands) as "hip." Only a writer with a passion for delineating his time and environment can explode this kind of garbage in thought. As well as being a finished artist, Selby is a meticulous student of the lower-class, the underworld, the dispossessed. The people he writes of are not the one or two who are weekly sentenced for murder and extortion—they are the hundreds who are daily sentenced (or not sentenced at all) for assault, Sullivan Law violations, disturbing the peace, etc. They are the men who don't break out of Alcatraz and Quentin with Bogart and Cagney, but who cop pleas and draw one to three in such unknown and unprepossessing spots as Coxsackie and Elmira. The differences between robbing a car and a bank between mugging and armed robbery, are real. The exact separation of one sort of criminal from another makes clear whole pockets of society. Dante put his various sinners in different bolgia; he made a moral separation. Selby does the same in his mundane hell.

Selby presents his homosexuals as people whose lives are not particularly glamorous, nor are they sordid, given the world in which they move—they are essentially futile. Most literature has tried to depict the homosexual as someone to be laughed at, shocked by, or pitied. Not in these stories; they are essentially vulgar and their lives are a scramble to avoid the world of the john, although the john is preyed upon and laughed at. One of the great miseries of Harry Black in "Strike" is that he is never accepted by the other queers as queer. When they met him he was a john, but though his homosexual proclivities become more active, more pronounced, he remains in their eyes what he originally was, the same john; or, worse, he is thought of as a "dilettante" queer. They refuse to consider him as someone who wants to love, he eventually bores his lover when he runs out of money near the end of the strike. His value as a john is over, he has discovered that he now is in a position which is neither homosexual nor heterosexual, and cannot handle this fact, cannot "adjust" to the fact that the queers think of him as someone who is simply square. The ultimate placing of the homosexual in "Strike" comes in the drag ball, which Harry attends, and where, incidentally, he is not attracted to the queens but to the other "active" (male) queers. The queens are not presented as immoral, or evil, the situation is not really sordid, but grotesque, there is a kind of bizarre humor about it which becomes more bizarre because the participants are not at all aware that they are so. Their frenzied dancing in women's clothes is what it is, ridiculous, as men in women's clothes always look to a non-partisan eye. When the dancing queens' genitals fall out of their lace panties, it is certainly not an occasion of eroticism, but one of hilarity. It is to Selby's credit that he refuses to ornament such situations. Harry is pitiable, but the queens are gross. While their lives, when they are "straight," may be a constant whirl of riposte and wit, when in drag, they take their places in the ludicrous world which Harry Black skirts the fringes of, and to which they have barred his entrance. He is a john, while they are hip. A finely drawn comment on the narcissistic qualities of the hermetic group.

Some more on the homosexual in Selby's work: In "Queen," one of the fags screams in disgust when the girl upstairs is rushed to the hospital in advanced labor—"you're bringing me down!" Also one of the favorite epithets one queer will use against another (or against a queer-baiter) is, "you rotten fairy"—and in "Strike," the fag who dances with Harry in the strike HQ was at one time a bricklayer, and takes delight in squeezing Harry's hand between her forearm and biceps; a grim gesture toward a world of virility and strength which she has long ago abandoned. What seems to come through these instances is a double-edged "set" toward the heterosexual world, a sort of hatred inextricably wedded to a feeling of superiority e.g.—"even though I'm gay, I'm more of a man (or woman) than you are"—or, as above, in "Queen," a feeling of revulsion and apathy toward the normal functioning of the woman, as if childbirth is somehow "square." The most salient example of this duality, this love/hate occurs at the end of "Strike" when Harry, who is left bloody and beaten in the lot after making advances to a small boy, shouts (in his mind) "GOD YOU SUCK COCK!" A hatred for a God who would allow him to suffer such implacable despair, along with a real desire, a need, that God be a homosexual. The statement is, at once, both blasphemous and adoring.

Harry is, absolutely, a schlemiel: without that word's humorous connotations. There is no area of his life in which he is successful. As husband and father, he is inept and psychotic. As worker, he is sloppy and lazy. As shop steward, he is a patsy, used by the union. The management simply wants him fired as a condition for acceding to the strikers' demands. As a rather hopeless example of the john, he fails miserably because he thinks that his homosexual lover will really love him. And, finally, when he succumbs to his desire to become an overt, active homosexual, he picks on a little boy in his own neighborhood. A loser, a suicidal character all the way.

The movement of the background, the social aspects of "Strike," coincide with Harry's movement from a partially "controlled" existence to a shambles of acts and emotions which bring about his destruction. He can be neither normal nor homosexual. Another reason why the fags he meets have contempt for him is that he hasn't enough strength to shun his "daytime" world or his gay world. In the gay bar he thinks he's impressing the queer at the bar when he tells him he's a shop steward, in charge of the strike; and of course, he is secretly laughed at. A shop steward is, simply, a john, but Harry doesn't know this, he never knows it. The homosexuals go along with him so long as he has money, though, and so long as his vulgarity and naiveté are amusing, which seems a fairly lucid statement on the lumpen qualities of sexual desire, both homo- and heterosexual; again, no world of adventure, no superior and "dangerous" existence as limned by the homosexual writing of our time. This is simply how it is. An insistence on the equality of grossness shared by both arenas; a fat, pimply whore as against a beard disguised with face powder—both quite ugly. Selby has shone a strong light on areas heretofore lost in shadows. The stories, without comment, comprise a manual of candid distinctions.

"Landsend" is the last word on the low-rent housing project—it stands as the bitterest and fiercest indictment yet written on this contemporary phenomenon. Needless to say, it will probably be thought of as an anti-human attack, whereas it is actually an anti-humanist attack. Here, Selby intimates, is the upshot of that renaissance dogma that man stands at the center of his world. These people are at the center of the world, the housing project is a Utopian concept, e.g., give the slobs better housing and they'll be good. Not a start toward understanding the individual problems of the poor and sick. What is ignored in this cynical bureaucracy is the fact that these people are striving for those values which are essentially useless, if not evil, values of a world devoid of humanitarian feeling, while drenched with the idea of the individual. Perfectible man is moved a notch further toward perfectibility by putting him in "better" housing—no matter the damage to him by this sterile and vicious institutionalizing. So long as one puts up a little "recreation area" every block or so, complete with backless benches and leafless trees, the middle-class conscience is assuaged. If the emotional bankruptcy of living in such cells bursts out in destruction and violence, these same minds simply set it down to ingratitude, the ingratitude of the bestial poor, the minority which isn't "ready" yet to take its place in the pursuit of happiness the rest of us are apparently engaged in (and one may note that only the American Declaration of Independence speaks of the "pursuit of happiness"—presumably the "happiness" attainable by those who were granted the franchise). The simple violence and bestiality of the poor is condemned by the people who display the identical traits in a more subtle, complex, and "sophisticated" way—the former is called criminality, while the latter is labeled rugged individualism. The distinctions are implied in "Landsend," the frustration and misery of being a tenant in this cynically and carelessly "given" housing bursts from these people in section after section, a horror of despair, ugliness, violence, and stupidity. But is it any more culpable, any more putrid than the drug firm which sold thalidomide even though it was known to be dangerous? Is that Chairman of the Board in Coxsackie? The populace of "Landsend" will see plenty of jails for acts which are certainly no worse: but they are "ungrateful." Why weren't they happy in their nice concrete rooms, with their nice iron stairs, and their lovely leafless trees? The middle-class mind will apparently never understand the difference between a vicious crime and a crime caused by a day-in, day-out environment of viciousness. The inhabitants of "Landsend" are indeed enthusiastic followers of the Zeitgeist, they're going along with the values that the "better" elements have prescribed as correct—their methods are cruder, and they can only expect a state-appointed defense, so they rarely come up smelling like a rose as does, say, Charles Pfizer. Or, look at it this way: these people do their best to live up to that old tried-and-true (and patently un-Christian) aphorism, "God helps those that help themselves." Which, incidentally, is a proverb which was first seen in Poor Richard's Almanac, by that most humanistic and bourgeois of the founding fathers, good old Ben Franklin—which seems to prove something about the red, white and blue God we have invented here. He's a conservative. The only trouble is that they usually get caught "helping" themselves. It's a toss-up between jail and welfare, even though these poor citizens are following the accepted prescription for the good life: but no matter where they wind up the Goldwaters and the Mitchells seem to assume their crimes stem from some evil flaw, which in turn stems from a vague and unexplained un-American and un-Christian attitude. Even Luther would roll in his grave to see what had been made of him. The idea that the poor deserve their poverty is not so discredited as one would like to think.

Selby is a moralist, although not one in the sense that he intrudes on his stories in order to let you know what he, as a writer, thinks. The stories are perfectly clear, without any comments from him. Or, as Allen Tate, at the defense of "Tralala" in Provincetown said, the moral of the story is "the wages of sin is death." Selby's people, as I have implied, are perfect examples of democratic people—they live in a world which has raised to staggering importance the dictum of the individual's importance, his free will, his freedom of choice. Their choices, however, given the environment which somebody else 's free choice has handed them, or forced them into, are invariably the wrong ones, and they suffer for their acts. It's important to point out that the odds against them making the choices they do are staggering. Selby's stories, although they are not "social," are a perfect delineation of the effect of environment on character; conversely, they limn the oftentimes forgotten concomitant of that—the impossibility of character functioning properly in an environment which actually gives it no selection of choice at all—so it is a kind of hypocritical democracy these people partake of, much like that of Negroes who try to register to vote in Mississippi. When Tralala opens the captain's love letter to her it is to check and see whether there is any money in it—she tears it up in disgust when she finds there is none, just his protestations of love for her. What kind of love could she know? Where has her "wise" selection of possibly proffered loves been exercised? She, like the old song says, don't know what love is. The most meaningful example of her worth, the one thing which she can draw on to prove her value as herself, Tralala, a woman, not a cipher, is her sexual ability, when, at the end, she offers to take on the whole neighborhood in a gang-shag. This seems to me so utterly sad, so crushing, that it is unutterable. She doesn't do this as a "gag," or for money, she does it (God help us ) out of a feeling of pride in herself, her worth and "know-how" as a whore. In her mind, she has not defiled her body, nor do those who take advantage of her offer, defile theirs. She triumphs over those she feels contempt for, she has taken her choice (and what other?). Also, see Harry's end in "Strike," as counterpoint to these remarks on the cast, such a meager selection of choices in such a world will put on any act. Originally, Selby had Hairy dying at the end: to enhance the force of his degradation, his tragedy, he allows him to live, the implication of what his future life will be in such environment as he inhabits is obvious—he is ruined, just as effectively as John Profumo was ruined. One must remember that the world of Harry Black is not one which may be deserted at will; Harry can't move to another neighborhood and "start fresh." His "choices" are strictly limited. One enters this world of necessity, and one dies in it unless an economic event of almost-miraculous proportions takes place. It must be stressed that the change in the ending is one of kind, not degree, of "wages."

Selby's style: nothing is ever described in terms of physical characteristics. Which places him in the position of being forced to give us the truth—occasionally clothing is described since in a world such as Selby proposes, clothing is a badge of situation or intent. But it is never used as a gimmick, but as a fact. Some writers, the best, let's say, of the "popular" writers, use clothing and "taste" as an indication of what to expect from the character—this will occur in Fitzgerald, more especially, O'Hara. But they are concerned, of course, with the clash of different segments of society. Many times, they are totally out of touch, as, O'Hara's conceptions, in stories written in the last five years, of the Village, painting, the new poetry and fiction. These are conceptions that are fifteen or twenty years old. Again, O'Hara will use a description of a vulgar character's tasteless clothes as an indication of that character's inherent vulgarity: the reader is clued as to what to think. Occasionally, as if to show you that it's nothing but a gimmick, he'll write a story like "Exactly Eight Thousand Dollars Exactly": one character is held against another, the reader is given over to the movement of the story in terms of these characters' appurtenances and acts, and at the end, he turns the tables on you, a writer's joke. Which certainly indicates that he knows that these tricks are simply that, no more. It's almost a confession that he's aware that his great failures are failures of character delineation, though they are cloaked in a dense, pointed resumé of social appearances. Fitzgerald, of course, never understood the poor, and confused poverty with vulgarity. What's worse, he confused "family" money with "breeding." Which, in a bizarre way, is his great value—he demonstrates that in a world of fun and games, it is possible, even probable, that one may learn to climb the ladder: which is a useful, though oblique comment on said move. Gatsby is a classic manual on this process, and proves that Fitzgerald understood, thoroughly, the world of the parvenu. But his mentality was middle-class, he thought this world, for all its failings, was better than the world of the poor; and I don't mean that in an economic way; it was, simply, better, morally and ethically. The dullest Midwestern boy and the most vapid Southern girl, so long as they had position and money, fascinated him. If his bitterness had only come to him earlier we might have had a literature of the affluent which would have stood as clear as Selby's does on the rejects. But he is often embarrassing, he didn't even know how the poor speak, and the words he puts in their mouths are as hopeless as Henry James' conception of a Boston cop's syntax. When he uses such speech for "comic" effect, it comes out like Amos 'n' Andy. Selby never uses these superficial things to move along his narrative. His ear, as I said, is incredibly acute. There is a section in "Queen" in which perhaps eight people are talking, and the reader knows, absolutely, who is doing the talking: a precision of recording, for narrative effect and character placement, not to show how "good" he is. Dialogue used, not as a verbatim transcription of the language people use, but as a revelation of their positions within the hellish society they inhabit. Of course, Selby doesn't employ anything resembling a "clash" of societies in any of his stories. I would guess that his idea is that if one society is presented in all its facets a reader may gauge his own against it, illuminating his own particular area of life. In totally presenting this world of the wretched and violent, Selby implies a truth, or truths, for those who do not live in it, but who live on a higher plane, socially, morally, or economically. Their movements may be gauged against the movements of those who are not so fortunate, or so good.

At the risk of rehashing the absurdities of the Provincetown Review trial, I feel a few remarks might be in order in re: the "obscenity" of "Tralala." The old banality holds true: anyone who could be excited by "Tralala" is in bad shape to begin with; again, none of the sex scenes in Selby are exciting in the pornographic sense of that term. The smattering of love that one finds in his stones is always sullied by the terms of its actuality: it's either love on one partner's part—the other thinks of it as lust, or gratifiction—or, the partner is disgusted and/or terrified by it. These few "love" scenes are the only ones which might possibly enclose the never-never land of pornography where women are nymphomaniacs and men are capable of countless orgasms. The other sex scenes in Selby (those totally devoid of love, or "tenderness") are, in a word, horrifying. The gang-shag in "Tralala," the fierce and pathological rape that Harry commits on his wife in "Strike" (who doesn't know it's a rape, or pathological—there's a comment on the quality of that marriage for you!), the fumbling and giggling excitement of the queers over their rough trade: all these things are so far removed from the excitement of pornography as to seem self-evidently non-salacious. They lack the eroticism of love, and the eroticism of simple lust—in Selby lust is most often revealed as the opposite of love, not a concomitant. To call these stories obscene or pornographic seems to me to be an indication of idiocy or neurosis . . . but not really. Selby's people do, say, and think what people like this (and not necessarily like this) really do, say, and think, e.g., everybody looks alike in the sex act, the variations being learnable, and exhaustible. Selby's sex episodes seem to terrify those who would ignore the fact that a human being's sexual knowledge really has very little to do with soft lights, sweet music, and the smell of expensive perfume. He speaks of this trite aspect of human life in an off-hand, matter-of-fact way, bluntly, as he speaks of all the events he wishes to delineate. It may be his matter-of-factness, his candor, which enrages the good people concerned with public morals. He is not only not erotic, more significantly, he is not exotic. None of the other contemporary writers (with the exception of Genet) whose names are most often associated with "writing about sex" can totally avoid that latter term. Burroughs, Miller, Durrell, Mailer, Rechy, Baldwin—all occasionally turn on the orange lights and cover the bed with black silk sheets. In their work, lust occasionally becomes attractive; for Selby, lust is the crushing price one pays for not possessing love, or for being ignorant or mistaken about it. Nathanael West looked at it in somewhat the same way, but his vision was cynical and not so intransigently uncompromising as to push the idea to its limit. Selby pushes it all the way, and then over the edge.

Selby has told me that the prose writers he most admires are Swift, Crane, William Carlos Williams, Isaac Babel. Among his contemporaries, Rumaker and Woolf. An even cursory examination of the work of these men compared with his own will reveal the same essential attention to the minute detail, the "flat" word, the simple declarative sentence, the absence of bizarre syntax: basically, the attention is directed toward what is being said, the experience, the emotion itself—as removed from the glittering icing which is so praised in our time (v. Updike). And not a simplicity raised to the conscious level of "style"—as in the latter work of Hemingway, or the imitations of popularizes like Shaw and Jones. For Selby, as for the writers he admires, "style" is malleable, not something which, once achieved, may be used as a container for varying shades of emotion, as trademark. The style is transparent, not noticed, as one does in Updike, a virtuoso of the banal, whose style is so labored that one may be momentarily blinded to the fact that he is saying nothing, his emotional registrations are phony, it is Euphues reincarnated. His work is a trompe l'oeil of letters: wow! that really looks just like an old poster and a rusty nail! On Tad Madison's knotty pine wall, or: The Tragicall Historie of a Copiewriter.

I can't recall ever before seeing a technical device such as Selby employs in his stories so masterfully. I speak of the rapid change within the paragraph, and sometimes even within the sentence, from one voice to another, usually the first person to the third, and vice versa: in "Another Day Another Dollar," to select one model, we have: "The cop stepped over to the soldier and told him if he didn't shut up right now he'd lock him up and your friend along with you." (italics mine) What we are given here is a remarkably versatile device enabling the narrator to remain in the third person, but overcoming the sometimes restrictive necessities of that position, by being able to identify, at will, with whatever speaker happens to be holding forth in a story at a given time. What is so useful concerning this device is that it precludes the necessity of inventing a first person narrator who would necessarily be part of the story, another character; or of slipping in James' "invisible observer." Selby is able to remain aloof from the story, remain the writer as writer, not character, and yet at the same time can enter the story as whatever character's voice he chooses to assume, as in the example above. This seems to me to be an extremely liberating technique for a writer of prose, giving him total freedom within the action of the story, but allowing him the omniscience that a first person narrator could not have (Gatsby, The Good Soldier). It tends to give the prose a quality of strength and speed and drive, a genuine support for the older discovery (which Selby employs) that one need not say, "he said" and "she said" so long as the dialogue is precise to its characters. I've heard people say that this is an indication of Selby's "primitive" qualities, which serves as an indication of the perception of the gentle readers. The more intimate one becomes with these remarkable stories, the more one realizes that Selby has taken great care with each word: another reason why the stories are lacking in "quotability." Each word builds to the end of the story, the stories are wholes, none of them can be excerpted from without an almost total loss being suffered in the quality of the excerpted section.

That Selby's prose is full of technical brilliance, is a truism. What is more, none of it is gratuitous, but all contributes to what is happening in the narrative. The use of upper case letters in the Vinnie and Mary sections of "Landsend" is not a "humorous" invention: Vinnie and Mary converse normally in a shout, one finds them all over New York, they are what Italians call carfone, people lower than the lowest peasant. The page after page of upper case come across, finally, as an irritant to the reader: they are meant to be so. Note, also, the change in sentence structure and length from the beginning to the end of "Tralala," coinciding with the change in Tralala' s fortunes, from isolated events of the sordid, to the overwhelming wave of bestiality which her life becomes, no one thing differentiated from the other, a total degradation, homogeneous. None of these things are instances of "style," per se. They are organic to the "content," both narrative and emotional, of the stories. Selby's exactitude of knowledge concerning the aesthetic tastes of his characters has already been touched on, and one may add another instance found in "Queen" where Georgette reads, in the light of flickering black candles, The Raven. What else?

Edward Dorn, writing of Burroughs, says that he is an author who considers his readers a city dump. I would suggest that Rechy thinks of his readers as yokels, Gelber, perhaps, as those folks around the corner who don't know that on the avenue people are turning on. I select these writers because they stand as three of the noted "tough" writers of the moment. Selby may be placed against them with no loss to him. His is an art which might be described as an attempt to get beyond the concerns of these men with the world of the sordid, to the world of the sordid, an art which registers the emotional mutilation possible (and probable) in a segment of society where all values have been totally corrupted in the name of progress and law and order. It is not a world of romantic criminality, nor is it a world of the consciously alienated hipster. It is a world where crime is a fact of everyday life, not an event which one nervously partakes in, "beat" style, turning the overt criminal act into an "assault" upon the state, or the prevailing "current of opinion"—crime not as an instance of epater le bourgeois, but crime as an instance of, say, belching—ho, hum, it's Tuesday, let's go break a couple of heads. The innuendoes of the work seem to imply that none of this is remediable, given the context of society in which this subculture functions. I'd guess that Selby thinks of his reader as someone who might possibly want to know the truth about a real, living hell which exists in our own time, in the city of New York. He has succeeded in professing this truth with great artistic distinction, without patronization, without romanticizing its facets: most important, he has done it without egoistic remonstrations or possible "solutions." He is, in my mind, one of the most powerful prose writers now working in America, as well as the best commentator on the urban poor since the Crane of "Maggie" and "George's Mother." In short, an artist of unmistakable brilliance and authenticity.