The Willow Tree: A Novel (38 page)

Through the support of writers such as Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, known now as Amiri Baraka, Selby found a publisher for his first novel,
Last Exit to Brooklyn
(1964), a series of stories fused into a single narrative. It was published to rave reviews, and Ginsberg said he hoped the book would “explode like a rusty, hellish bombshell over America, and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” Indeed, it seemed he had changed the face of modern literature.

After the success of his first novel, Selby moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to beat his addictions and start over. He kicked his heroin addiction while in jail on a possession charge, and when he was released he went directly to a bar in West Hollywood. There he met his third wife, Suzanne Schwartzman, with whom he would have two children. The couple joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1969, and Selby began to write again, this time clean and sober. In the seventies, his reputation expanded with the release of his second and third novels,
The Room
(1971) and
The Demon
(1976).
Requiem for a Dream
(1978) established Selby as a poet laureate of the dark side of the American Dream.

An established writer by the eighties, Selby began teaching younger writers at the University of Southern California. He saw
Last Exit to Brooklyn
made into a film in 1989, followed by
Requiem for a Dream
in 2000. He succumbed to lung disease in 2004, a consequence of his battle with tuberculosis in the 1940s. Selby is survived by his wife, four children, and twelve grandchildren.

Selby as a newborn in 1928. When asked to recount a defining moment in his life he mentioned the circumstances surrounding his birth: “I was in deep serious trouble. I was blue from cyanosis, my head was all twisted and out of shape, and a few kinds of brain damage. My mother, she almost died too, she had severe toxemia, and when she asked the doctor what she should do about feeding me, he said, ‘Well, just keep breastfeeding him and eventually he’ll suck out all the poison.’ They had to drag me screaming into the twentieth century . . . I have been defiant ever since.”

Selby as a toddler in the early 1930s. During this time the family lived across the street from what is now the New School for Liberal Arts, in a luxury apartment building where Selby’s father worked as a superintendent. They later settled in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. While growing up in Bay Ridge, Selby acquired the nickname ‘Cubby,’ which stuck with him for the rest of his life. “Anyone who knew Cubby, only called him Cubby,” said Selby’s friend and fellow novelist Gilbert Sorrentino.

A postwar portrait of Selby’s parents, Adalin and Hubert Sr. As multigenerational Americans of Anglo-Saxon Methodist heritage, the Selbys were an anomaly in Bay Ridge, where many Irish, Italian, and Norwegian families settled in the early twentieth century. “I was a member of the smallest minority in the country, for God’s sake!” Selby joked in an interview with
Rain Taxi
quarterly. Hubert Sr., a native of Island, Kentucky, lost both of his parents before he was thirteen. He spent much of his youth working as a coal miner and later served in the Merchant Marine. According to Selby, his parents were ill-matched. “My mother’s a very strong, powerful woman,” he explained. “And my father was a drunk.” He often felt torn between the two of them. “There was a lot of conflict. I wanted to please my mother, and I wanted to please my father. And so, it’s pretty hard to please them both when they were so opposite in personality.”

Selby in 1943, shortly before he forged his birth certificate and enlisted in the Merchant Marine, an act that would change his life forever. Selby’s ship was responsible for transporting cattle to troops during World War II. It was soon discovered that the cattle were infected with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in humans. Selby contracted the disease and was taken off of the ship in Germany. Back in New York, he was admitted to a sanatorium and told he had three months to live. “I was in the hospital and this so-called specialist consultant came by,” he remembered. “He wouldn’t come in the room. He just stood out in the hall and he said, ‘You know there's nothing we can do for you, you just don’t have any lungs, you can't possibly live. So just go home and sit in a chair and be as comfortable as you can, because you’re gonna die.’ And he walked away and sent me a bill!”

Selby with his cousin Adalin, who was named after his mother, in the 1940s.

A 1975 passport photo of Selby. The following year he published his third novel,
The Demon
. It received negative reviews but has since become a cult classic. Selby speculated that critics did not like the fact that the novel depicted the spiritual emptiness of American middle-class life. “I am obviously attacking the American Dream,” he told John O’Brien in an interview. “The old clichés. The very foundations of our nation. They don’t want to hear that.”

Selby and his third wife, Suzanne, with their son, Bill, in 1970. The family lived in a triplex in West Hollywood. At the time Selby was working on his second novel,
The Room
, which many consider his masterpiece. “Cubby asked me to marry him the night we met in 1967 and continued to ask me for two years,” says Suzanne.  The couple married two years later at the suggestion of Selby’s AA sponsor. Although both had struggled with addiction in the past, they remained clean and sober for their entire marriage, which lasted thirty-five years. (Photo courtesy of Bill Shumate.)

Selby with his son Bill in 1983. During these years the family lived on welfare, as Selby made little money from his writing and remained largely ignored by the literary establishment. “I’ve never gotten a fellowship, I’ve never gotten a grant, I’ve never gotten anything,” Selby once said. In his forties he went to work as a gas station attendant, and later, in his fifties, as a hotel clerk.