(Originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. I No. 2, Summer 1981, pp. 370-373)
THE FISHING AT CONEY ISLAND:
HUBERT SELBY JR. AND THE CULT OF AUTHENTICITY
It's a sunny early Sunday summer morning and the blood of women is on the pavement at W. 15th Street and Mermaid Avenue. Two whores were fighting last night, it's a mink-eat-mink world, and slashed each other with knives. On Neptune Avenue at Cropsey the watermelon-stand man and his helper are unloading a truckload of tiger stripes. They pass them like a bucket brigade and stack them in the shade, green-and-yellow watermelons the camouflage of Idi Amin's fighter planes. The recruiting office isn’t open, the rides haven't started, and the boardwalk is deserted except for the sparrows wetting their whistles in the drinking fountain which is always flowing there next to the pier. In the cool of the morning the first Jewish families have already set up their bridge tables on the beach. Soon it will be covered with them. There's something about the Jews. Ancient desert people. Some people believe that a lot of Jews playing bridge can cause rain. Let’s hope it does, that it rains in Brooklyn, so the trees will grow. They should be at Grossinger's playing bridge and make a little rain in the Catskills.
Meanwhile, out on the T-shaped pier at Coney Island, there are men standing with fishing poles and their lines in the water. Every now and then one of them reels in to check his bait and a remarkable item of tackle comes dripping, prisming and dazzling into the sunlight. It appears they use sinkers consisting of the necks of broken liquor bottles, jagged, wicked looking things. I hope the stripers don't cut themselves on them. If you asked the fishermen why they use broken glass for sinkers they'd probably reply that it's cheaper than lead.
The gin we drink is mighty sweet
On this son-of-a-bitch of a diesel,
But hand me the bottle, Sam--
Pop--goes the weasel! . . .
Unlike their European counterparts, American young people do not have the alternative of Marxism. Instead, they have been provided with the cargo cult of Waiting For The Man. It might be argued that any religion is dependent on its priesthood, but what has been obscured is that the medium of grace in religions of power is unclean practices and harmful substances, while in religions of redemption it is water. Not too many years ago a young woman gave her dying lover, who had been attacked by a shark, Christian baptism with sea water on a beach in California, and this was accepted and recognized by the Catholic Church. In one of the old Joe Palooka movies a reporter asked Joe what it was that made him stay the champ, whether he was doing it for his mother, for the old neighborhood, etc., and Joe kept replying, "Clean living. Just clean living. . . ." He was straight. Maybe that's why he was just a palooka. Pat Boone is not now nor will he ever be Little Richard. Water's too obvious, and there's no way around it. Water is common sense, but so is socialism. No, if the kids get tired of Sunday school then let them go to the pusher, the dope dealer. The candymen caper and expose their stigmata.
In other kinds of books and in real life persons may be thought of as being prisoners of their context. In Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream they are prisoners of their idiom. So restricted by their language (the book reads like one of Racine’s tragedies with their stripped-down vocabulary) does their possibility for conceiving ways out appear that the problem seems almost to be one of philology. By enclosing description and dialogue within the conceptual radius of the idiom the dramatic effect of the story is accomplished through the reader's being swept along in an involuntary suspension of disbelief. Instead of a tour de force the book is a power trip, a Coney Island ride, a short-heist book for law abiding citizens, what the Danes call a knaldroman, a bang novel. But drugs will never be anything but a power trip. The "dream" in the book, Harry's and Marion's dream of starting a coffee bouse-gallery, is like a couple of rich dealers buying a Scientology org. The way out, the real "back to the garden" may be indicated in this passage, which may be the only real departure from idiom in Requiem for a Dream:
Harry and Marion slept in each other’s arms on the couch,. The music was still playing and the light from the lamp in the corner blended with the sunlight that eased through the drawn shades. There was a stillness in the room that somehow ignored the noise of the Bronx streets, cluttered with people and vehicles grumbling, yelling and rumbling. Their skin was moist from the hot, humid air yet they slept undisturbed and restful. The apartment, and everything in it, seemed isolated and insulated from its surroundings, and reflected the attitude of the sleepers. Occasionally a truck would rattle windows and shake floors and walls, but the sound was muted by the stillness of the air; and, from time to time, something would disturb the air and the dust motes that floated in the diffused sunlight danced as the air gentled by in caressing waves. The summer sun continued to rise in the sky and propel shocks of heat down on the city and the heavy rnoisture moistened bodies and clothing and people fanned and wiped at sweating faces trying to survive another bitch of a day as Harry and Marion peacefully passed the day sleeping in each others arms oblivious to the reality surrounding them.
This is entirely isolated from the Newspeak of the rest of the book and it is brilliant, natural and majestic, evocative of American writing of another era. It reminds one of a similarly isolated passage in Gilbert Sorrentino's The Sky Changes.
He sits on the toilet in his roomette on the Santa Fe Chief. He has diarrhea, and his hands are shaking, there are beads of cold sweat on his forehead, and he drinks from a pint bottle of Jim Beam, gagging as he swallows. A crevice of sunlight appears at the side of the window shade at the moment the train begins to slow, entering Gallup. Carefully he puts the bottle on the floor and peeks out through the window, the shade pulled slightly back. New Mexican sun floods into his eyes, dazzling off the red sand and sterile mesas of rose and blue in the distance, the patches of powdery snow milk-white. The soft gong of the dinner steward approaches along the corridor, and he thinks, I should eat something. He picks up the bottle and drinks again, gagging again, choking, then retching bile and whisky onto the floor, his eyes still fixed on the buildings and the Chief shoulders quietly into the yards. Down an embankment sown with snow and rocks of blue and rust, the Log Cabin Motel; he starts as he sees what appears to be a green Ford station wagon in one of the carports, covered with dust and silvery rime, then as the angle changes he sees that it is a Rambler, but he keeps staring at it, staring at the motel as the Chief picks up speed, then staring at the ruthless land lavish before him. A drop of sweat hangs from the tip of his nose and his guts begin to flop over as the Chief hits its stride clattering and swaying toward Albuquerque.
He is junk, and he has no expectations in a world filled with love. Harry and Marion are love, and they have no expectations in a world filled with junk. But it's in the physical situation of the individuals in the two examples that the potential for realizing the ineffable is to be found. He should be cooling it in his berth with the shade up waiting for a glimpse of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, admiring the railroading in Raton Pass. I think of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok, enlightenment flickering in his smile. I think of Harry and Marion as the primeval couple in repose, their heads together, hurtling through interstellar space.
Along about afternoon the plentiful moisture in the air over the beach at Coney Island almost imperceptibly gathered together and rose like a tarpaper blimp and the underside of the sky gleamed like a sinktop. As if on a signal all the card tables and patio chairs were folded up all at once and the bridge players left. In a little while a breeze sprang up, and all of a sudden lightning cracked down and it rained the rest of the day and all night. But what about the Catskills? Is it raining? Maybe they're playing mah-jong, Kongs of Upward Going, the waiters at Grossinger's setting a Viennese table.
* * *
In the early 1970's the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital was a 6-story brick structure in neo-renaissance style located on the corner of lst Avenue and East 31st Street in New York City. The men's ward was on the ground floor and the women's ward was on the floor above it. The 3rd floor consisted of a psychiatric research facility operated by the New York University Medical Center, where programs of experiments were carried out on volunteer patients recruited from the younger – mostly college students – population of the men's and women's wards. The 4th floor contained the men's and women's locked wards. On the 5th floor were the reception wards where, perhaps surprisingly, the men and women had rather free access to each other, even dancing, if they wanted to, to the music from a free juke box. On the 6th floor, under the roof, were recreation spaces where patients, also those from the locked wards, were brought to play ping-pong, square dance, and play volleyball. There was also a large room up there where at regular intervals dances were held for the patients. The women's and men's wards visited back and forth several times a week to see movies in the dining rooms and to dance; and every evening there was mixed recreation in the "schoolyard" outside, facing the East River, with softball, volleyball, badminton, bingo games, refreshments, and a greensward where the patients could lounge under the open sky. The recreational staff were mainly intelligent and sympathetic volunteers from outside, many of them astonishingly cultivated such as a young lady who worked at the Park-Burnett galleries. As would be expected, many of the new arrivals in the open wards were patients who had been in the locked wards. The patients were treated by several doctors, who had their own private practices on the outside and so could hardly have been involved in intramural rivalry and intrigues; and it was the doctors, and not some basement tribunal as in Requiem for a Dream, who determined whether the treatment at Bellevue included electroshock therapy, nor was anybody conmitted in the judicial sense from there to the state hospitals. Instead, there were good meals and free chest X-rays. The Bellevue Hospitals, owned and operated by the City of New York, were a training center for nurses and nurse's aides. The students – bright, eager and inquisitive girls – took part in the daily routine on the wards and I can't imagine Sara Goldfarb fouling her bed and having to lie in it for days on end.
Fiction, like ignorance of the law, is no excuse, least of all in novels like Selby's whose appeal and effect are dependent on their purported super-realism – which may or may not be in agreement with Salvador Dali's definition of Surrealism as paranoid art. The best works of fiction, including Shakespeare's plays, are effective because they don't compromise the nature of fiction as being another reality. What happens to Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream is so momentous when one considers Selby's ground-swell concern for the creature-comfort needs of individual human beings for a bowl of hot soup and a clean bed, that it has the quality of a geological event. It’s future shock, or, as the Book of Mormon puts it, "a type of things to come."
The experience of men with their age-old and innate knowledge of the economy of ships, armies, empires, is brought to bear in Requiem for a Dream to make it a monumental warning about what is really going on in the United States. Heroin as an artificial necessity is an analog of the real necessities, of the groceries. But heroin is also a derivative of morphine, which is the only cheap, plentiful and really effective pain-killer in the world. Guys still raise homing pigeons on the roof, like in the Marlon Brando movie On the Waterfront, and on a Sunday morning in Brooklyn you might see people drive off the parkway near Fort Hamilton and release pigeons from crates. It's a grand summer morning, there's the Verrazano Bridge and ships sailing in and out of the Narrows, and if the wind is right you can hear chimes, electronic chimes chiming the hour from the U.S. Army Chaplains School at Ft. Hamilton. Remember a radio show called "The Great Gildersleeve"? Remember Digger O'Dell? Well, dig. The chimes on the chaplains school play the same tune as Digger O'Dell's doorbell. From the San Luis Obispo County (Calif.) Telegram Tribune, Saturday, December 27, 1980:
SHIFT TO SUN BELT BACKED, Washington (AP) – The United States should adopt an urban policy that not only accepts but actually encourages the population shift from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt region, a presidential panel says. . . . The commission's report acknowledged that the new urban policy it recommends could have "traumatic consequences" for Northern cities. . . . "In our view the moral and material resources of government would be better expended in planning for the future and helping people adjust to future imperatives in ways that derive from an understanding and acceptance of change," the report said. . . . The panel urged programs to assist older cities in coping with financial pressures, particularly welfare costs. . . .
There's no water in the Sun Belt. But there could be. You get a guy going like Water Commissioner Gildersleeve and motivate the farmer in Digger O'Dell and right away you've got the canals of Mars.
And Neptune's hand upon her breast
Drew fathoms deep the red Red Witch.--Garland Roark
"Wake of the Red Witch"
Copyright © 1981 by Kenneth Tindall