The Open Road Blog

Writers seem unanimous in a belief that finding your voice is the foundation of good imaginative writing. But how a writer finds a voice usually has nothing to do with losing it. What happens is more like locating something that you didn’t even know existed or that was so important to your survival. Another way to look at it is to think of voice as style, although the latter is slightly more and slightly less than voice. Voice is how we say things or even how we look, through words, at things. Losing one’s voice is bad enough, but finding it can be equally daunting. The literary voice can be elusive as the Yeti or it can be as obvious as the nose on your face. In fact, the voice is located a little ways down from the nose on the way to the chin. What is spoken, its rhythms and its cadences, its peculiarities of expression, are the voice’s struts and beams. Take the case of Hubert Selby, Jr.

            “I had gone to sea when I was 15,” he wrote, “as a merchant seaman, and at the age of 18 I was taken off a ship in Germany and the doctors said I couldnt (sic) live more than a few months.” He had tuberculosis, and in October 1946 he was shipped back to the States, ostensibly to die. Through a new drug therapy, Selby managed to live on, even though his vision, hearing, and inner ear were affected by the illness. But not his voice. After three years in bed, ten of his ribs had been removed, one lung was collapsed, and the other only partially worked. Cubby’s sense of life and death, over five or six years of convalescence, was so profound, he realized that he needed to do something with his life before he died. “So I decided to write,” he said. By deciding to write, Hubert Selby was well on his way to finding his voice.

            As he noted in an introductory essay to Last Exit to Brooklyn: “I was less equipped to be an artist than any other artist who has ever lived. I only had 9 years of schooling.” He played sports, he said, but he “never read, never studied, never thought of writing.” What Selby had was determination and, as he said, he also had “a hard head.” In his search for a voice, he did not need education so much as experience, nor did he need reading and writing. But his determination and hard-headedness would help in the search. The first inklings of finding a writing voice occurred in the German hospital where, in order to stave off the boredom, Cubby (as Selby is called by his friends) began to read potboilers and mysteries, S. S. Van Dine to Mickey Spillane. Then, after leaving the hospital, he began to hang out with people from the neighborhood who attended Brooklyn College, one of these locals being the poet Gilbert Sorrentino.

What Cubby Selby then did is probably the surest way to find a voice—he bought a Remington typewriter. Yet that was not how he found his voice, although having the Remington probably did not hurt in his search. No, what helped him was to write a letter. Then another, and another. From these letters, he began to write a story. Since voice has to do with how we speak, letter-writing was a good place to start because we often eschew grammar and formality for the spontaneity of our god-given voice. Selby once observed that there are stories everywhere, but that each of us has our own story, and that is the story we need to tell. That is also the story that Hubert Selby needed to tell. The story—the story—is not necessarily about us, nor is it about preaching or teaching or our brilliant opinions. Consider Hubert Selby. He articulated just what the problem was when he observed: “I quickly discovered that thinking of a story is not the same as getting a line of prose to say exactly, and simply, what needs to be said.” In order to find his voice, Hubert Selby saw that he needed to write a line of prose that was simple and exact, containing only what needed to be said, and nothing else. I suspect he learned such compression—such concision—from his poet friends in downtown Manhattan where he hung out and drank.

            Here it is worth noting that our literary voices come from so many different things, including our upbringing, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, education, geography, nationality, and the books we read. Selby’s early influences were Melville, Joyce, and Babel. One might read a poet, though that poet would wind up being an influence on your prose, and vice-versa as was the case for Ezra Pound, who was influenced by Flaubert’s prose, especially his concept of le mot juste (the right or exact word). It was probably his reading of Flaubert that made Pound observe that for poetry to be good it ought to be at least as well written as prose. I could imagine that Hubert Selby was taken by such a notion too, especially as he congregated with poets as diverse and interesting as Gilbert Sorrentino, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, and LeRoi Jones.

Yet, oddly enough, finding one’s voice did not always depend on the words around you, as in one’s reading habits or the way that others spoke. Something about the music in the air also played into how one’s voice came about. Poems could be like piano concerts. But prose always seemed like a symphony. Cubby Selby must have noticed the symphonic elements of prose early on, as he listened avidly to Beethoven’s symphonies from an easy chair in his living room, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, contemplating the zeitgeist all around him. He often noted how his own prose was influenced by Beethoven’s music, so much so that he even wanted to be a composer before he was a writer. When he finally did become a writer, he did not so much write stories and chapters of books as he composed them. He was a composer of prose. As a result Selby’s writing is symphonic and Beethoven-like.

A writing voice is not all sound, though. Some of it has to do with sight. Anyone who reads Selby’s prose literally will see that it looks different on the page than other prose writing. The first time I read Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1964, I thought of prose poetry, writers like Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I had never read prose so energized, and this energy and emotion reminded me of good poetry. Because Selby was so enchanted by classical music, he said that he wrote in a manner that resembled musical notation. “I believe all the senses are involved in our experiences,” he observed in the essay that prefaces certain paperback editions of Last Exit to Brooklyn, “so the way a story ‘looks’ on the page is important. Forcing the eye to move an extra space will provide the ear with the necessary musical effect.” That is such an extraordinary observation I would suggest that only a genius could think in such a manner. It is not the kind of observation that an ordinary mortal makes, even if he or she is a writer creatively engaging the words.

            Of course, this genius known as Hubert Selby was a literary one, not so much a musical genius, although the music is there in abundance. The music is very much a part of Selby’s voice. Read aloud, his books like Last Exit to Brooklyn pretty much sing. Selby once observed, “I have always been enamored with the music of speech.” So the particular music he loved was speech’s music. He was not alone in this love of speech rhythms, but his own music was of the street, not of the parlor or boardroom. Like Dante, Selby loved the vulgar tongue, argot and all its crude energy. One does not necessarily have to be “of the street” in order to write with its rhythms. But it is probably a good idea to become thoroughly familiar with those rhythms before making them your own. Hubert Selby did not grow up in a Brooklyn tenement. He was the child of a blue-collar father and a mother who was a part-time librarian. He grew up in a house in a solidly middle-class neighborhood. But Cubby Selby knew the argot of Brooklyn’s streets like the back of his own hand. He knew the bad boys in the neighborhood and, in turn, they knew who he was too.

            Regarding the streets of Brooklyn and its cadences, I recall once hearing Selby speak at the New School in downtown Manhattan many years ago. A member of the audience suggested that his prose was so visual. She wanted to know how he created that effect. Cubby’s answer was startling. He told her that he was not a visually descriptive writer, but rather he wrote out of the speech rhythms of his characters. He mentioned the drag queen Georgette from Last Exit to Brooklyn. He said that her speech rhythms were sibilant, soft, feminine, with a lot of alliteration, the images romantic. So it turns out that we don’t actually see Georgette, but because we hear her, this powerful voice makes us feel as if we see her right there in front of us.

            Hubert Selby’s writing is filled with life experience, some of it experienced directly, some of it heard and absorbed, some of it felt. Selby’s own experiences were profound, placing him at the edge of existence, at the point of an extremity. He nearly died from his experiences, and I suppose that dying might be construed as the exception to Pound’s rule that a writer could not have too many experiences. After the harrowing experience of the German hospital where he lost ribs and most of one lung, Selby became addicted to pain-killing substances. He would go on to become a heroin addict for many years. All of these experiences wound up in his writing. Yet in appraising his unique voice, I don’t think that experience is everything there is to know about what shaped Selby’s voice. His imagination may be just as profound as his experiences. It was that very imagination which allowed Hubert Selby to locate the wellspring of what made things tick, then find a rhythm that fit upon the page in such a way that pleased its author and later appealed to such a broad audience. His lung collapsed, ribs removed from his body, addicted to painkillers, Cubby Selby came home to die. But instead of dying, he went on to become a great writer.

            Most of us are not going to wind up in the hospital of a foreign country, packed off a ship, dying from TB. But this reminds me of another thing I once read about the poet Ezra Pound. He said that every experience has its own unique rhythm. Whatever our experiences may be, they are ours; they have a rhythm and emotional shape, and they add to the richness of our writing voices. Selby’s prose reflects his own unique experiences at the mid-century in urban America. He was not a writer in the tradition of Ezra Pound, and yet through his association with Gilbert Sorrentino, he came in contact with a range of contemporary writers, many of whom were under the spell of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound’s old friend and American counterpart. Williams, like many other poets and writers of that time, thought Selby’s writing extraordinary. I think what attracted so many poets to Selby’s prose was the same thing that drew me to it when I was in my late teens. It is the energy and emotion, the “muscular, rhythmic prose,” as the New Statesman put it when Last Exit was published in England in the late 1960s.

There is yet another poetic influence besides Gilbert Sorrentino that is worth noting in Selby’s voice. He once roomed with the poet Joel Oppenheimer, and many of the peculiarities of Selby’s prose style—the use of the stroke (/) instead of an apostrophe, for instance, or no apostrophe at all—came directly from Oppenheimer’s poetry. In turn, Oppenheimer acquired these effects from Ezra Pound, the foreshortening of “your” into “yr,” the use of an ampersand instead of the “and”, etc., etc. Oppenheimer and Selby were the original odd couple, as odd as Wally Cox and Marlon Brando in Greenwich Village after World War II. Before their legendary falling-out, Joel Oppenheimer and Gilbert Sorrentino were the best of friends, and that is how Cubby knew Joel, through that long association downtown. But then Gil wrote about Joel in one of his novels, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which in turn drove a wedge between them. Back when everyone got along, I can imagine Selby playing his Beethoven symphonies loudly, sitting in an easy chair, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, while Joel tried to concentrate on reading William Carlos Williams while listening to some blues albums he brought along from Yonkers. Gil would be in the kitchen listening to the radio and reading the comics from the Sunday newspaper. LeRoi and Hettie Jones were in yet another room, reading the Sunday papers, talking about what they would do that afternoon, or figuring out the layout of the next issue of their magazine, Yugen. Fee Dawson sat on the couch, nursing a hangover, while Paul Blackburn rewound his reel-to-reel tape recorder. This tableau is both comical and revealing, almost like a Red Grooms construction of the Cedar Bar, and yet it illustrates how entangled and entwined voice is with style, the specific style being downtown New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These people were stylish downtown New York bohemians in the full blossom of youth, energetic and irreverent, the only thing holding them back being their lack of recognition and poverty. Hubert Selby was one of them, among them and with them in all that they did. He was as Brooklyn as Flatbush Avenue, and yet he was also as downtown and bohemian as Maxwell Bodenheim and Harry Kemp.

Last Exit to Brooklyn is a voice-driven novel, and it exemplifies how one might go about finding a voice in his or her own writing. Selby often spoke about how he created the characters in his first novel by hanging out in a diner near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a tough waterfront area near the East River in New York City. But the voice of Last Exit is also influenced by the experiences Selby had at sea as a merchant seaman. About a year before he died, I had the privilege of hearing him speak on the South Bank of London to an audience of about 500 people while the journalist Mark Lawson interviewed him. During that session, Selby mentioned how influential his days as a seaman were, and how fateful it all became. It was from being at sea that he contracted tuberculosis, while still in his teens, and had to be evacuated from his ship. Because of his illness, he spent many months in that German hospital. He told the audience that he had eight ribs removed. What he didn’t tell them was that also one of his lungs stopped working for good. Though he would pick up smoking Camel cigarettes again later in his life, Selby really only had very limited lung capacity, and this blockage must have influenced his voice too.

            A German doctor told him he might as well leave the hospital because he had no chance of surviving beyond a few weeks. How ironic that the frail man sitting on stage was in his seventies. He had lived well beyond fifty-five years since the German doctor cut his walking papers and gave him a death sentence! But Selby was one tough character, even in this frail state, and this contradiction between spiritual and mental fitness and a broken body was not unique to Cubby Selby. His voice was made of such stuff. So was his laughter. Cubby Selby had one of the greatest laughs on this earth, full of menace and madness, it was deep and resonating, his head thrown back, mouth open wide, almost like a Francis Bacon pope. One also recalls Marcel Proust, writing one of the great epical fictions of the 20th century from an invalid’s bed in a cork-lined bedroom. Anton Chekhov also comes to mind, writing volume upon volume of short stories, then one great play after another, all the time doctoring the infirm, while he himself was dying of the same illness that Hubert Selby had.