Wayne Gooderham explores the influence of Hubert Selby Jr's transgressive masterpiece on popular music; and on the gender sensibilities of
The Smiths,
Van Morrison and
The Velvet Underground in particular. CW: Some may find the language quoted in this article that describes LGBTQI people & sex workers outmoded or offensive
This year sees the 60th anniversary of Hubert Selby Jr’s controversial debut novel,
Last Exit To Brooklyn. With its frank depictions of then-taboo subjects such as gay sex, recreational drug use and domestic and sexual violence, it is unsurprising that the book caused something of a sensation upon its release. Less a novel in conventional terms of possessing a central narrative/protagonist,
Last Exit To Brooklyn is rather a collection of short stories set in the working-class district of Suset Park – depicted here as an infernal demimonde of hopped-up hoodlums, cold hearted sex workers and, to adopt the parlance of the novel, lonely drag queens. It is the book Allan Ginsberg proclaimed “should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” It is also Selby’s masterpiece.
The novel began life in 1957 with the publication of a short story that would eventually become the second chapter of the novel. At approximately 50 pages in length, ‘The Queen Is Dead’ tells the story of Georgette, a trans sex worker who, along with her “drag queen” friends, decide to host a party for a gang of neighbourhood roughs. Georgette is hopelessly in love with the gang’s leader, Vinnie, who enjoys Georgette’s attention but is simply using her for sexual kicks and to gain access to her ready supply of drugs (chiefly “bennies” or Benzedrine: a powerful, and that time still legal, amphetamine). As the party becomes more and more strung out – with Georgette shooting up heroin in the bathroom – the romantically decadent atmosphere degenerates into a kind of violent orgy. The story climaxes with Georgette undergoing a humiliating sexual encounter with Vinnie, before fleeing the apartment and then ODing. And though her ultimate fate is ambiguous, she certainly suffers a physic death if not a physical one.
In its compassionate yet unsentimental depiction of the doomed Georgette, ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is perhaps Selby’s greatest achievement. And it can lay claim to have influenced three pieces of music that, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, will undoubtedly still be eagerly listened to in a hundred years’ time. And while its influence on two of the works is largely unequivocal, its influence on the third is more contentious and will require some unpacking. So, let’s begin with the most obviously unequivocal work – the one that wears its influence on its (record) sleeve: the Smiths’ 1986 album, and its title track,
The Queen Is Dead.
“
I’m the 18th pale descendent / Of some old queen or other” The Smiths – ‘The Queen is Dead’
Like all the best allusions,
The Queen Is Dead works as a stand-alone title without any prior knowledge of the original source. And while it may seem that the homosexual connotations of “queen” do not extend much further than the cover artwork (Alain Delon’s androgynous beauty gazing glassy-eyed from out of the final scenes of 1964 French noir,
L’Insoumis) traces of Selby’s lovelorn protagonist linger on in the title track’s playful advocation for regicide – like a watermark in old pound note.
To begin, there’s the sample that opens both the album and the song: a snatch of ‘Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty’ from Brian Forbes’ 1962 British film,
The L-Shaped Room. The scene in question is another drunken party: this one held in a seedy Notting Hill boarding house rather than a New York apartment block. And though this party is fuelled by cheap booze instead of hard drugs, the guests are similarly made up of individuals scraping by on the fringes of “respectable” society: as well as the unmarried pregnant protagonist, there are a couple of sex workers, a gay Black jazz musician, and, most strikingly, Cicely Courtneidge as an elderly lesbian and ex-music hall star. It is Courtneidge who leads the World War I sing-a-long, and she does so in male drag – changing into her old army uniform and affecting a gruff male voice – an image harking back to the previous scene when she bemoans how modern pantos aren’t “much cop nowadays … fancy a man playing the Principle Boy! That’s a disgrace to the profession”.
And then there’s the title track proper, ‘The Queen Is Dead’, which also seems to contain sly allusions to Selby’s chapter. Where Selby gives us an apartment of drag queens, Morrissey gives us (the then) Prince Charles “dressed in [his] mother’s bridal veil”. Where Selby presented us with a gang of neighbourhood roughs, Morrissey describes a “nine-year-old tough / who peddled drugs”. Even the throwaway Freudian couplet – “But when you’re tied to your mother’s apron / No-one talks about castration” – could be a humorous nod towards a disturbing scene at the beginning of Selby’s story, when Georgette is stabbed in the leg – “I’ll make ya a real woman without goin ta Denmark… You don’t want that big sazeech getting in yaway Georgie boy. Let me cut it off…” – and then taken back home to her mother to recuperate: “She rocked with Georgette’s head cradled in her arms.” And then there’s the closing refrain – “life is very long when you’re lonely” – which, in the context of the song, seems something of a non-sequitur; but, if considered in the wider context of the song’s allusions, could be taking us back not only to Courtneidge’s lonely lesbian and a long-gone “dear old Blighty”, but also to Selby’s heartbroken drag queen.
Indeed,
The Smiths’ ‘The Queen Is Dead’ is where Morrissey’s twin obsessions with the decadent glamour of the gay, mid-century New York City/New York Dolls (who he once memorably described as “transexual junkies”) and the monochromatic realism of British kitchen sink drama come together to create a fascinating hybrid: a witty Ortonesque state-of-the-nation address and one of the Smiths’ most powerful and provocative moments. And, in a pleasing piece of synchronicity, Johnny Marr has credited the inspiration for his furiously driving rhythm guitar part to the Velvet Underground’s ‘I Can’t Stand It’ (which had been released the previous year on the outtakes collection,
VU) – bringing us nicely to the second major work of music to have been influenced by Selby’s 50-page chapter...
