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Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream

REQUIEM

FOR A

DREAM

A NOVEL BY HUBERT SELBY, JR.

THUNDER'S MOUTH PRESS

NEW YORK

This book is dedicated, with

love, to Bobby, who has found

the only pound of pure--

Faith in a Loving God.

Published in the United States by

Thunder's Mouth Press

An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Incorporated

161 William Street, 16th Floor

New York, NY 10038

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the

New York State Council on the Arts and

the National Endowment for the Arts

for financial assistance with

the publication of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Selby, Hubert.

Requiem for a Dream: a novel / by Hubert Selby, Jr.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-56025-248-0

I. Title.

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Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream

PS3569.E547R4 1988

813'.54--dc19 87-25366

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

FOREWORD

When I was in high school, I thought you had to be dead to be a novelist—dead, and from somewhere

else: England, the Midwest, France.

One of the more profound, if peripheral, epiphanies hitting me upon reading Last Exit to Brooklyn by

Hubert Selby, Jr., was that my working-class Bronx world was valid material for Art; that the voices, the

streets, the gestures that I knew so well were as human, as precious, and as honorable as any found

through the centuries and civilizations of literature.

Which is to say that I set down Last Exit to Brooklyn with the terrifying realization that if I had the will

and the talent to go with the eye and ear, I could grow up to be a writer.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that talent and material mean nothing without something

else that Selby possesses and projects on every page of every book he has written: Love—a forgiveness

and compassion that elevate all the bottom dogs that populate his world, the lost, the depraved, thsse

coldblooded, and the insensate. His art is his ability to humanize the seemingly inhuman, and by

extension to humanize the reader.

No one can convey the visceral experience of the suffering of people like Selby-the cruel hallucinations

of grace, of peace, of love, of Easy Street; the wracking ache of junk sickness; the choking rage of

parental/marital/sexual claustrophobia; the tightening screws of paranoid delusion; the pathetic

grandiosity of walk-around dreams; and the dread of the inevitable dawn.

Selby burrows under the skin and into the brains of the urban underclass to deliver infernal monologues

seething with tragically skewered delusions, short-term ecstasies, and obsessive furies that crash and boil

across the page, ceaselessly. At his best, he can literally stun us into empathy.

Requiem for a Dream tracks the destruction of four people-three young, and one older. Here, Selby

reports from the marrow of those addicted: to dope, to hope, to tragically childish visions of heaven on

earth. Even as its characters ascend to the heights, their nightmarish plummet can be foreseen, but this

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Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream

foreknowledge doesn't protect the reader from experiencing the almost unbearable suffering, the

degradation and oblivion, that is the price of dreams among the powerless.

Requiem for a Dream is quintessential Selby, fueled by moments which make the reader feel like the

unwilling newscaster witnessing the Hindenburg disaster who sobbed, "Oh, the humanity !"

It is Selby's gift to us that once again we find ourselves aching for his people—which is to say we find

ourselves loving the unlovable.

—Richard Price

New York City

January 1988

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

Requiem for a Dream was originally published in 1978. It is extremely gratifying to know that it is still

in print and going into another edition. Also, it is being made into a film, production scheduled to start

the middle of April this year. So the book still lives and breathes (as do I).

For me there is something beautiful and ironic in the fact that all this is happening now, during a time of

"unparalleled prosperity." The Great American Dream is coming true for many. Obviously, I believe that

to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys

everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except

those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is

simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.

I am not suggesting we need to give everything to the poor and homeless—the millions of them who are

still here in the midst of plenty—put on a hair shirt and go through the streets with a begging bowl. This,

in and of itself, is no more nurturing than the pursuit of "getting." I am not afraid of money and what it

can buy. I would love to have a house full of stuff—of course I would need a house first. I have been

hungry and see nothing noble m hunger. Neither do I see anything noble in eating high on the hog

though eating is certainly better. But to believe that getting stuff is the purpose and aim of life is

madness.

It seems to me that we all have a dream of our own, our own personal vision, our own individual way of

giving, but for many reasons we are afraid to pursue it, or to even recognize and accept its existence. But

to deny our vision is to sell our soul. Getting is living a lie, turning our back on the truth, and Visions are

glimpses of the truth: Obviously nothing external can truly nurture my inner life, my Vision.

What happens when I turn my back on my Vision and spend my time and energy getting the stuff of the

American Dream? I become agitated, uncomfortable in my own skin, because the guilt of abandoning

my "Self/self," of deserting my Vision, forces me to apologize for my existence, to need to prove myself

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Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream

by approaching life as if it's a competition. I have to keep getting stuff in an attempt to appease and

satisfy that vague sense of discontent that worms its way through me.

Certainly not everyone will experience this torment, but enough do and have no idea what is wrong. I'm

sure the psychologists have a term for this free-floating anxiety, but the cause is what is destroying us,

not the classification. There are always millions who seem to get away with doing the things that we

think abominable, and thrive. It certainly appears that way. Yet I know, absolutely, from my experience,

that there are no free lunches in this life, and eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility

for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.

This book is about four individuals who pursued The American Dream, and the results of their pursuit.

They did not know the difference between the Vision in their hearts and the illusion of the American

Dream. In pursuing the lie of illusion, they made it impossible to experience the truth of their Vision. As

a result everything of value was lost.

Unfortunately, I suspect there never will be a requiem for the Dream, simply because it will destroy us

before we have the opportunity to mourn its passing. Perhaps time will prove me wrong. As Mr.

Hemingway said: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

—Hubert Selby, Jr.

Los Angeles

1999

FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

I was a public school kid from Brooklyn facing my first exams during freshman year of college, and I

was terrified. High school was a joke. The only thing I learned was how to get away with cutting class.

So, when college came around I wasn't very prepared. I hit the library and tried to learn.

But Selby fucked everything up.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the word "Brooklyn." Now when you're from Brooklyn and you see

anything related to Brooklyn you're immediately interested. I pulled a worn copy of Last Exit to

Brooklyn off the shelf. This was before the movie, and I had no clue what I was holding. From sentence

one I was done, and so were my finals. I blew them off and I read. I read and I read and I screamed and I

connected and I recited and I rejoiced. This was storytelling. This was understanding. This was a deep

yet simple examination of what makes us human. I now knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell

stories.

Storytelling took me to L.A. and film school. Before school started they told us to prepare three short

scripts for projects to be executed during the year. So, I figured I should read short stories from my

favorite authors. That led me to Selby's "Fortune Cookie," which I shot right away. The story follows the

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Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream

rise and fall of a door-to-door salesman who gets addicted to the fortunes in fortune cookies.

After film school I figured it was time to make a feature, so I turned to novels of my favorite authors. I

found Requiem for a Dream in a book store on Venice Beach. I was excited to start it. I did, but I never

finished it. Not because it wasn't good. Rather, the novel was so violently honest and arresting that I

couldn't handle it.

It was on my shelf for a long time. Then, years later, my producer Eric Watson was heading off for a ski

trip with his family in Colorado. He needed something to read, and he grabbed the book off my shelf and

asked if he could borrow it. When he returned he said Requiem, for a Dream ruined his vacation and that

I must finish it. I did, and I knew we had to make it next.

This book is about a lot of things. Mostly it's about love. More specifically it's about what happens when

love goes wrong.

When it was time to write the script I rented an apartment in South Brooklyn, out by Coney Island. The

novel had amazing structure and it translated very well into three acts. But something was strange.

While breaking it down I realized that whenever something good was supposed to happen to a character,

something bad happened. Because of this, I couldn't figure out who the hero of the novel was.

After sketching out all the character arcs I realized they were all upside down. So I flipped them over,

and suddenly I had a "Eureka!" The hero wasn't Sara, it wasn't Harry, not Tyrone, not Marion.

The hero was the characters' enemy: Addiction. The book is a manifesto on Addiction's triumph over the

Human Spirit. I began to look at the film as a monster movie. The only difference is that the monster

doesn't have physical form. It only lives deep in the characters' heads.

Ellen Burstyn, who knocked it out of the park as Sara Goldfarb, told me Hinduism has two main gods—

Shiva and Kali. Shiva is the god of creation and Kali is the god of destruction. They exist as a team. One

cannot exist without the other. Just like the Christian God and the Devil. Good and evil. There is a

balance. Selby writes about Kali. He writes about the darkness.

It is in this darkness where Selby flips on his flashlight and searches for our humanity. It is that tiny but

priceless diamond of love lost in a universe of evil that he cherishes. And by leading us to it he reveals

everything—our beauty and our vanity, our strength and our weaknesses. He shows us what makes us

tick, what makes us hate and what makes us love. He reveals what it is to be human.

I needed to make a film from this novel because the words burn off the page. Like a hangman's noose,

the words scorch your neck with rope burn and drag you into the sub-sub-basement we humans build

beneath hell. Why do we do it? Because we choose to live the dream instead of choosing to live the life.

You won't ever forget this read.

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Hubert Selby Jr. - Requiem for a Dream [ENG].pdf

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