Hubert Selby, Jr.
"The
Demon" and "The Room"
by Hubert
Selby, Jr.
Book reviews
by Rob Couteau.
Published in:
The
Bloomsbury Review.
May / June
1990.
(Denver,
CO: Owaissa Communications Co., Inc.)
All
text Copyright © 2006-2007 Rob
Couteau
The Demon
and The Room, by Hubert Selby Jr.
(London: Marion Boyars, 1989.)
Harry White, also known as “Harry the lover,” is a bright young executive at the Lancet Corporation. His desire for the “promotions and the money, property and prestige” cause him to cautiously place his love life on hold, fearful that the bizarre intensity of his passions will interfere with his striving for success. Eventually, however, he limits himself to weekend assignations. After a year of such “good behavior,” an urge forces itself upon him: he’s increasingly distracted at work, and he feels “a tension building up in his body.” Finally, Harry begins rushing through his lunch so that he can spend the remainder of the hour walking the streets, “unaware that he inevitably would stroll behind this broad or that one until it was time to go back to the office.”
As time goes on, he finds it increasingly difficult to return to work on time. He’s overtaken by an impulse that he can neither understand nor control. His wandering leads to a number of encounters that are marked by such ferocity, cruelty, and deceit that they border on the inhuman. Only his boss’s belief in Harry’s business potential–expressed through a series of threats and incentives–serves to curb such impulsive behavior.
Much of The Demon reads like a Pavlovian odyssey in which a man’s behavior is controlled through temptations (corporate incentives) that appeal for a while but then are no longer enough: the demon of other instincts–darker, more passionate fruits–breaks into consciousness and redirects it into a haunted (and often incomprehensible) terrain. It’s not only an unbounded sexuality that threatens Harry with psychic dismemberment; he’s also driven to attain a perfect (yet sterile) professional “success.” Although he remains disturbed by his inability to achieve a more balanced state of emotional well-being, ultimately, he’s drawn only by emotions of the lowest common denominator: narcissistic sexuality; the thrill of petty thievery; and, ultimately, the fantasy of taking a life.
Harry’s pain is the pain of modern man:
Harry’s life continued to be a series of little compromises, and reevaluations of ethics and situations; of readjustments to life and then unwilling and agonizing acceptance of them that necessitated little lies, which, in turn, demanded more lies and readjustments and reevaluations. And it was not with the worlds ethics and morals that Harry was compromising, but with his own. That is what produced the conflict. That is what created the pain.
Indeed, the key to the book is found here, where Harry muses: “But the inner man knew that when you take something away that a life is dependent upon, you must replace it with something of value.” The statement could easily apply to Harry’s inability to creatively reimagine his life. Yet, everything that might lead to a harmonious “life fully lived” has been aborted from the start. When Harry cannot find contentment with the lifestyle of the Lancet Corporation, his imagination leads him to a cruel, vicious tangle of desire. In the quote above, what was taken away was his desire to steal; the replacement was an appetite for murder. Unable to commune with his demon, Harry is made one with it: “It was as if his voice was coming through a tunnel and there was a stone coldness in the sound of his voice.” At the end of his ordeal, he feels only numbness, the “numbness and alienation that allowed him to do what he had to do ... That numbness ... Deadness.”
While Harry is at least tossed back and forth between worlds, the nameless criminal in The Room sits alone in a remand cell, scheming and dreaming a continual fantasy of revenge and retribution. For nearly 300 pages, a man stews in his own bestial juices, and we are privy to his every affliction.
Here, Selby portrays the most desolate and desperate of men: one whose inferiority is counterpointed by a series of brutal domination fantasies. Fabrications such as a brilliant self-defense in a courtroom–after which he’s followed by reporters, is interviewed, and then testifies in a Congressional hearing (in which he plays a leading role)–are interspersed with harrowing scenes of childhood victimization, humiliation, and abuse. The tale unfolds with Selby’s impeccable artistry of the obscene, using the most vulgar rhythms of argot with a musical sensitivity and empathic awareness of the downtrodden and forgotten in society.
The extreme fluctuation between states of inferiority and superiority is a major theme in this portrayal, and the author doesn’t wince from the use of any subject that can be used to drive home the point. Imagining himself as a sadistic trainer of dogs, the protagonist scrapes their paws clean with a wire brush, wondering “how long it would be before he could see a bit of bone thrusting itself through the mangled flesh.” As a result of his examinations, the “animals screamed and yelled until, with constant and considerate lashings, they learned to howl and yelp with great canine artistry.” He confronts his own tortured self and describes his agony and misery in similar detail:
And for krists sake dont smile. Whatever you do dont smile. Then theyll really get bugged. Youll really bring them down. All for you. Theyll find out whats making you smile and yank it away from you.
While the trajectory of Harry White’s plight is a broader one–rising to higher success, plummeting to more miserable depths–the nameless petty criminal in The Room is more pitiful, his pain and terror more human. Rather than succumbing to the numbness of a demonic possession, he’s simply left to ponder the futility of life:
And anyway, whats the use? Everything will fall apart eventually anyway. Everything always ends up nothing eventually. I cant win. I just cant seem to win. […]
Really doesnt make any difference where I go or what I do. May just as well stay here, or anywhere. Its all the same. And always will be …
His prurient imaginings and his lurid, sadistic dreams serve to compensate for his own browbeaten nature:
Theres always somebody bugging you. They just wont leave you alone. No matter how simple things are theres always some sonofabitch complicating things and fucking with your life. Jesus, this fucking world stinks. People are nothing but a bunch of shits. A rotten bunch of shits. They always want to screw you. You go in to buy a pair of shoes and tell the guy what kind you want and the exact size and everything else and he sticks something on your foot and when you tell him it doesnt feel right he tells you its your size and it looks great on you and all that shit and by the time you get home your feet are blistered and all fucked up and you cant even kill the sonofabitch or shove the fucking shoes up his motherfucking ass.
