Cover of the 1988 Grove Press reissue of Last Exit to Brooklyn

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1964 novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr. The novel has become a cult classic because of its harsh, uncompromising look at lower class Brooklyn in the 1950s and for its brusque, everyman style of prose.

Although critics and fellow writers praised the book on its release, Last Exit to Brooklyn caused much controversy due to its frank portrayals of taboo subjects, such as drug use, street violence, gang rape, homosexuality, transvestism and domestic violence. It was the subject of an important obscenity trial in the United Kingdom and was banned in Italy.

Synopsis

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.

• Another Day, Another Dollar: A group of Brooklynites get into a scuffle with a group of sailors on shore leave.
• The Queen Is Dead: Georgette, a transsexual, confronts her abusive brother and tries to attract the attention of a hoodlum named Vinnie at a benzedrine-driven party.
• And the Baby Makes Three: An alcoholic father tries to keep good spirits and maintain his family’s marriage traditions after his daughter becomes pregnant and then marries a motorcycle mechanic.
• Tralala: The title character, a young Brooklyn woman, makes a living attracting and stealing money from drunk, unsuspecting sailors in bars. In perhaps the novel’s most notorious scene, she is gang-raped after a night of heavy drinking.
• Strike: Harry, a detestable sycophant, gains a position as a high-ranking official at an industrial workers union. He uses the time and finances he receives during a long-term strike to explore the gay underground of Brooklyn, escaping his unhappy marriage while steadfastly denying his true sexuality.
• Landsend: Described as a “coda” for the book, this section presents the intertwined, yet ordinary day of numerous denizens in a housing project.

Style

Last Exit to Brooklyn was written in an unusual 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.

Also, 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.

The following is a typical example of the novel’s style:

She didnt need any goddamn skell to buy her a drink. She could get anything she wanted in Willies. She had her kicks. She'd go back to Willies where what she said goes. That was the joint. There was always somebody in there with money. No bums like these cruds. Did they think she'd let any goddamn bum in her pants and play with her tits for a few bucks. Shit! She could get a seamans whole payoff just sittin in Willies (page 111).

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 also appeared in The Provincetown Review in 1961 and drew some intense criticism.

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 flamed 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."

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, 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.

In 1966, Sir Cyril Black, a Conservative Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, initiated a private prosecution of the novel before Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court. The court delivered a guilty verdict. The public prosecutor brought an action under Section 2 of the Obscene Publications Act to the jury trial at London's Old Bailey court.

The jury was all male. The witnesses for the prosecution included the publishers Sir Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell. On the defense side were the scholars Al Alvarez II, and professor Frank Kermode, who had previously compared the work to Dickens. Judge Graham Rigers directed that the women "might be embarrassed at having to read a book which dealt with homosexuality, prostitution, drug-taking and sexual perversion". The trial lasted 9 days and the court ruled it guilty.

In 1968, an appeal issued by the lawyer and writer John Mortimer resulted in a judgment by Mr Justice Lane which 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.

Film

There had been several attempts to adapt Last Exit to Brooklyn into a film. One of the earliest attempts was made by producer Steve Krantz and animator Ralph Bakshi, who wanted to direct a live-action film based on the novel. Bakshi had sought out the rights to the novel after completing Heavy Traffic, a film which shared many themes with Selby's novel. Selby agreed to the adaptation and actor Robert De Niro accepted the role of Harry in Strike. According to Bakshi, "the whole thing fell apart when Krantz and I had a falling out over past business. It was a disappointment to me and Selby. Selby and I tried a few other screenplays after that on other subjects, but I could not shake Last Exit from my mind."^[1]

In 1989, director Uli Edel adapted the novel into a film. The screenplay was written by Desmond Nakano. The movie starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Lang, Burt Young, Ricki Lake and Jerry Orbach, as well as Stephen Baldwin and future star Sam Rockwell in small roles. Selby made a cameo appearance in the film as the taxi driver who accidentally hits the transvestite Georgette (played by Alexis Arquette). Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits provided the film score. The film version received excellent reviews and won a few critics' awards for Leigh's portrayal of Tralala, though its limited distribution and downbeat subject matter prevented it from becoming a commercial success. Ralph Bakshi referred to Edel's film as being "like a hot dog without mustard," saying that the film "was done horribly."^[1]

References

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