Book Review

20th Century Boy:

Notebooks Of the Seventies

by Duncan Hannah

I don’t ordinarily dumpster dive for reading materials, but when I looked into a recycling bin outside a grocery store and saw a bunch of copies of this one, I thought I’d better check it out. Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy is a memoir from the 1970s art and music scene, mostly taking place in New York City. That much alone was enough to pique my interest and after opening it and leafing through a few pages, I saw it had photographs of Debbie Harry, Richard Hell, the Talking Heads, Andy Warhol, and a few other notables of the underground scene. I knew I was in territory that was both familiar and interesting.

Artist and sometimes actor Duncan Hannah kept journals from his high school years and through his twenties. He extracted the most interesting bits and put them together for this collection which captures the feel of aimless bohemian living at the margins of the art world. The first thing that caught my attention is his writing style. Hannah writes in short, no-frills sentences that recall the simplistic prose of Hemingway. I find Hemingway to be a bore though. Hannah largely succeeds in writing this way. He writes with a flow and consistency that I always found absent that other writer’s style. Reading Hemingway is like trying to drive a car with the emergency brake on; reading Duncan Hannah is like zipping in and out of fast-moving traffic on a finely tuned motorcycle.

Then the content is something else. The author starts this book as a teenager in Minneapolis just when the sexual revolution begins to blossom. He sleeps around with a lot of girls, does a lot of drugs and alcohol, plays in a band, and has ambitions to become an artist, all while his parents fret over the possibility of him becoming a permanent screw-up. He becomes an art student at Bard college located in downstate New York, continuing on a similar course until he finally winds up in Greenwich Village where he continues his studies.

One night at a concert, he catches the attention of Danny Fields, the rock band manager who signed The Doors, MC5, and The Stooges to Elektra records. Hannah is a good-looking boy with a sense of fashion and the two hit it off immediately. Danny Fields introduces him to a lot of rock stars and artists and Hannah easily adapts to the in-crowd at Max’s Kansas City among other places.

One of the exciting things about this book is all the rock concerts and related parties the author goes to. Most of this involves the proto-punk and glam scene of the early 1970s. He sees some of the earliest performances of Patti Smith and Television. He probably also sees more New York Dolls shows than anybody else in history. He even gets to meet Iggy Pop backstage and then watches him come on stage with The Stooges too loaded to stand up, let along sing. Iggy falls on the drum set then falls off the stage before they carry him out on a stretcher, leaving the band to play an all-instrumental set to the audience’s disappointment.

Then there is the sex, the drugs, and the parties. Hannah snorts up what must be most of the cocaine in Peru and a huge cargo of whatever came out of Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia too then tempers his highs with gallons of liquor so that, aside from being popular, he also earns a reputation for being a hardcore lush. This never stops him from getting laid though. Despite going through life being alcoholically challenged, he still manages to get it up with women and maintain long-term relationships. Duncan Hannah gets more ass than a toilet seat. And then there are the men. You see, Hannah is a cute, androgynous prick-tease so he gets hit on by every gay man who can’t keep his hands to himself, but since he is straight, he always disappoints them and one even gets violent when rejected. Overall, it’s a wild and exciting life, one that most people never get to live let along survive. In the latter half of the book, he is much more engaged with his art.

A typical day for Duncan Hannah goes like this. “I woke up at 11:30 AM with a poisonous hangover, not sure if I slept through one night or two. I went down to the corner where I saw Patti Smith hanging out so we got some breakfast. I did some coke, spent a couple hours painting then went to visit a gallery uptown. I took my girlfriend out to dinner where Tom Verlaine and three members of Blondie were sitting at nearby tables. We all got drunk then I had sex with my girlfriend in the bathroom. I went off to watch a French movie starring Alain Delon, headed uptown to a Roxy Music show, said hi to Johnny Thunders in the concert hall, and got invited to party where I tried to talk to David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I smoked a joint with Jim Jarmusch, did a few lines of coke and a hit of acid and ended up in bed with some girl who smelled bad but had a nice body. Anita Pallenberg came in and told us to get out of her bed and Mick Jagger stepped on my toes as I made my way out the door. I hope I can sell some paintings tomorrow.”

This is the kind of book that could suffer from redundancy, but it moves along at such a fast pace that it never slows down or gets dull. The copious amounts of name-dropping can be a little annoying at first; it’s like listening to some nobody trying to impress others by talking about all the important people they know, but Hannah’s encounters with this legendary crowd are persistently interesting and he does have some good conversations and experiences with them. Besides, he fits in with them and never sounds fake or pretentious.

While I am not a huge fan of Duncan Hannah’s paintings, I find 20th Century Boy to be a fascinating chronicle of New York’s downtown scene in the 1970s, probably the best decade the city has ever seen for its exploding music scene and dynamic social life. It was a time when New York was still affordable, fun, and stylish, a time when the greatest social asset one could have was simply to be an interesting person. New York, and America in general, just aren’t like that anymore. As a document of glam, punk, the drug culture, the Sexual Revolution, old New York, and the lives of starving artists, this book can’t be beat.

 

Book Review

Secret Societies

edited by Norman MacKenzie

It is possible that some degree of secrecy is necessary for the survival of a society. That is a view put forth by Norman MacKenzie, the editor of Secret Societies, a collection of scholarly essays on the titular subject. This statement is less of an argument in favor of anything and more of an introductory idea to lead into a history of secretive organizations, what they do, and what they have done.

In the introduction and conclusion by MacKenzie, he starts with a Freudian explanation as to why secrecy develops in an individual. In order for society to function, some things need to be done out of the public eye. For this reason, we have private bathrooms, clothing, and bedrooms with locks on the doors. Governments and militaries also need to keep secrets, and sometimes groups that oppose them form in secrecy to protect their members’ identities. In the latter case, secrecy can be used as a motivational force or as a means of social bonding. Some people even fetishize secrecy and go to great lengths to maintain a private life strongly guarded from their public persona. MacKenzie’s introductory remarks lead to the question of what kind of a man joins a secret society (historically, secret societies have been primarily open to male membership only). Maybe the question “What kind of a man reads Playboy would yield a similar answer. (That is an obscure joke. If you want me to explain it you will have to go through an initiation ceremony after paying a $100 entrance fee. Feel free to contact me if you are interested.) MacKenzie actually leaves this question unanswered by the end of the book.

From there, we get a series of chapters written by historians and social scientists, none of which are people I have ever heard of. The first examines secret societies in pre-modern, tribal cultures. Even though the author uses the outdated word “primitive”, the essay still stands up as a good introduction to the subject. It is written from a functional perspective to show how secret societies connect members to their group, transmit knowledge across generations, preserve specialized skills, and maintain structure in society. Some of these societies maintain legalistic codes and shamanistic traditions that are necessary for cultural survival. None of this was new information to me, but I can see how it might be eye-opening information for someone unfamiliar with the social sciences. And I’m not referring to opening the eye in the triangle, so don’t even go there.

From there, essays cover the Mau Mau movement which happened in Kenya when members of the Kikuyu tribe rebelled against British colonialists. The Thugees of India were also a troublesome group of Muslim highwaymen who secretly worshiped the Hindu goddess Kali similar to the way Santa Muerte is prayed to by members of the Mexican underworld today. We also learn about medieval societies like the Assassins, led by Hassan-i Sabbah and the Knights Templar. By this point, you might notice that there is a political dimension to some, if not all, of these secret societies. The Carbonari, for example, were a group of Italian nationalists and the Assassins were formed because Hassan-i Sabbah had ambitions of becoming a prominent imam in the Islamic caliphate. The Chinese triad societies also originated as Buddhist monks who fought to restore the Ming Dynasty after the Mongol Manchus invaded and conquered them from the north. (Lesson for the MAGA people who don’t know about history: the Great Wall of China failed)

The Enlightenment saw a different kind of secret society emerge. The Order Of the Rose Cross formed to push the newfound interests in science, philosophy, medicine, alchemy, and mysticism, serving as inspiration for later modern groups like The Hermetic Order Of the Golden Dawn which was little more than a bunch of men wearing costumes and pretending to be wizards. Those types might have insisted on secrecy simply because they knew people would laugh at them. The author isn’t sure if the Rose Cross actually existed, but there are better texts out there that give a more complete picture like The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances A. Yates. Then came the Freemasons and the Illuminati, two groups that have had more conspiracy theory crap written about them than any other organization. The Illuminati were little more than a book club for anarchist and atheist college students.

In modern times, nationalist and terrorist groups operated as secret societies like the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of the IRA. Meanwhile, the Northern Irish Order of Orangemen grew to maintain Protestant dominance, resisting the revolution to unite Ireland under one government at the expense of the British colonialists. The Orangemen might bear some semblance to the Ku Klux Klan, addressed in the final chapter, since both secret societies intended to maintain and preserve a way of life they saw slipping away from them as the rest of the world progressed and changed. The Sicilian-American Mafia also get an informative chapter describing their history and complex relationship with legal institutions. The Mafia also originated as a means of maintaining social stability through family loyalty on the island of Sicily which kept getting conquered and re-conquered by foreign invaders with little interest in the impoverished peasant farmers of that Mediterranean island.

These chapters are all good works of scholarship, written mostly from a historical perspective with not so much sociology. Given how old most of these secret societies are, that shouldn’t be a surprise since sociologcal data would be hard to come by. Most are also written from a neutral standpoint, but this academic distance is broken in the chapters on Mau Mau, who the author brands as terrorists, and the Ku Klux Klan, who the author rightfully expresses a healthy degree of disgust over. The quality of the writing is a little dense, a little dry, but mostly consistent in detail. The issue of conspiracy theories is never approached. Several of these groups, along with the Jews, the New World Order, the Bilderbergs, and so on have been targeted by all kinds of kooks and loonies as part of a mythical world-dominating cabal. This paranoid tendency has its roots in the politics of the Habsburg Empire and the Russian aristocracy before the Bolshevik Revolution. Consideration of these conspiracy theories is well beyond the scope of this book. However, most of these secret societies written about here have been involved in conspiracies in one form or another. The difference is, these conspiracies are bottom-up plots forged by groups that seek to gain power or preserve power they once had. They are not top-down conspiracies coming from powerful elites who want control.

Overall, Secret Societies is a good book, if a little dull at times, about groups that use secrecy as a tool for social or political purposes. If you want sensationalism or wild speculation, you will only be disappointed here. There are no false flags, smoking guns, occult rituals, or lizard people included. Thank whatever non-existent god you might believe in for that. If you’re serious about history from a realistic standpoint, this might be an interesting book for you. If you’re looking for rabbit hole full of delusional nonsense, you’ll do better looking for it on the internet. I guarantee you, there’s no shortage of garbage there.

 

Book Review

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's:

A Secret History of Jewish Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century housed a large population of Jewish immigrants, most of them living in tenements. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side, due to low rents and high crime, became a haven for artists and musicians. The streets there were rough and the music that grew out of that atmosphere came to be known as punk rock. The center of this scene was a biker bar named CBGB, owned by a Jewish man named Hilly Kristal. Few historians or journalists have drawn a direct connection between the old Jewish slums and the first wave of punk so Steven Lee Beeber does just that in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

From the beginning, Beeber, a Jewish writer himself, defines what he considers to be the essence of Jewishness and then proceeds to demonstrate how this cultural trait had a direct influence on the rise of punk and the form it took. He starts by naming comedian Lenny Bruce as the patron saint of Jewish punk. Bruce embodies this essence which Beeber describes as being coarse in mannerism, ironic, transgressive, socially progressive, culturally hybrid, and humorous with an eye towards sharp social observation and critique. Lenny Bruce was all about pushing the boundaries of convention in order to hold a mirror up to society regardless of how uncomfortable that could be. This got him into a lot of trouble. According to Beeber, this attitudinal stance is characteristic of Jewish Americans and he proceeds to examine the ways in which this essence manifested in the punk scene of the 1970s.

Before getting to the musicians, the author covers the influence of Jews behind the scenes in the likes of rock journalists, business owners, band managers, song writers, and record producers. Managing culture from the wings and in the background is another characteristic that Beeber brings up as a trait of American Jewishness. It is the kind of thing that idiot conspiracy theorists will cite as evidence that sinister Jews run the world and the author does not examine this at all. It is safe to say that the Jewish author of this book isn’t suggesting anything of the sort though.

The chapter on Lou Reed, lead member of the massively influential Velvet Underground, establishes another aspect of Jewish-American identity, that of the outsider, a trait that fueled the energies of punk in a potent way. Lou Reed himself was a chronic outsider, being unable to relate to his Jewish family as well as the larger American society. His struggles with being bisexual made his outsider status that much more prominent and painful too since his parents made him get shock therapy to cure him of his possible homosexual tendencies which were considered a mental illness in the 1960s. Reed was young at the time and actually not entirely sure if he really was gay, making it all that much worse. While in The Velvet Underground, he felt he had found some acceptance as a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, but the other people there belittled him for being Jewish. It’s no surprise that Lou Reed earned a reputation for being prickly and stand-offish in the 1970s. And here a sub-theme to this book gets introduced since anti-Semistism and Jewishness ran along parallel lines as punk developed into a full-blown genre of rock.

Other early chapters bring the Jewish traits of punk out into the open as Beeber writes about synth-punk pioneers Suicide with their intimidating and confrontational musical stance, Boston’s Jonathan Richman who also brought a heavy element of anxiety into his outsider brand of rock, and Lenny Kaye who worked as a journalist and guitar player for Patti Smith. But the theme of the book really comes out in its full strength in the chapters on The Dictators and The Ramones.

The almost all-Jewish Dictators, fronted by Handsome Dick Manitoba, began as a joke band. The lyrics on their first album were full of self-effacing humor and macho posturing that was calculated to both celebrate and overcome the stereotype of Jewish men being nerdy intellectuals by embracing lowbrow culture and hyper-aggressive street gang toughness. They wanted to prove they were more like Meyer Lansky and less like Woody Allen without letting anyone forget that underneath it all, they were a bunch of Jewish comedians anyhow. Outside of the punk scene in New York though, no one seemed to get the joke.

The Ramones did something similar. Drummer Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, formed a band with Johnny and Joey Ramone. The latter was the older brother of Johnny’s high school friend. Joey was Jewish himself, overly tall and skinny due to a congenital bone disease that made him both awkward and intimidating. He also suffered from mental illness, making him the ultimate example of punk in the Jewish sense as Beeber describes it. But there was a strange contradiction at the heart of The Ramones; while Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, Johnny and Dee Dee were political conservatives who collected Nazi memorabilia. The connection between punk’s Jewishness and its parallel tendency towards anti-Semitism and Nazi fetishism is taken up in a later chapter. Beeber comes up with some plausible, if underdeveloped, explanations for why Jewish punks and Nazi fetishists could ironically exist in the same space while holding the punk scene together. He sees The Ramones as emblematic of this condition even though he never examines it from the other side, making no commentary on why the punks who wore swastikas saw no problem in socializing in a music scene with such a heavy Jewish presence.

After that, this book begins to fall apart. The chapter on Richard Hell is weak. After Beeber contacted Hell and asked him for his input, Hell told him that even though he had a Jewish father, he didn’t identify as Jewish since he was raised in a secular family without any emphasis on his ethnic background. Beeber can’t accept this as he sets out to prove that there is some kind of Jewishness present in Hell’s music. It feels like Beeber wrote the whole chapter to berate Hell for not honoring his ancestry. Hell himself doesn’t deny being Jewish or even feeling ashamed of it; he just isn’t interested in it and can’t relate to it. Beeber can’t just let him be what he is and delves into Hell’s artistic archive in search of something Jewish to prove that Hell really does have a Jewish essence. At this point, Beeber’s concept of Jewishness becomes arbitrary and petty.

The chapters on Chris Stein of Blondie and Jewish women in punk are even worse. Chris Stein is an interesting case because he is Jewish but also collects Nazi memorabilia. Beeber mentions this briefly but spends most of the chapter writing about his wife Debbie Harry who he insists on calling a shiksa. Without any in-depth explanation as to why Stein’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman is of any importance to this narrative, the chapter doesn’t amount to much.

The chapter on women is spotty too. He writes about Genya Ravan whose band wasn’t connected to the punk scene. Her only real contribution to punk involved her producing the first Dead Boys album. When they showed up to the studio wearing swastikas, Ravan, a survivor of the Holocaust, lectured them about how offensive that was and those nasty boys obediently took them off before they started recording their album Young Loud and Snotty. He also writes about Helen Wheels who was a minor player in the CBGB scene. Then Beeber brings Madonna into the discussion even though she was neither punk nor Jewish, but he applauds her because she did become fascinated with the kabbalah in her later years. Then the Riot Grrl movement gets a few paragraphs , even though none of those musicians were Jewish. He says they were honorary Jews because of their punk attitude though. And this is a problem I have with political correctness. The author feels he is obligated to include a chapter on women just because that is expected of authors these days, but Jewish women didn’t play a prominent role in the early days of punk so we get a sloppy chapter that doesn’t mean much of anything as a result. It would have been better, and more honest, to just accept that early punk women weren’t Jews and leave the useless chapter out.

Then there is a passage about punk in England. The Jewish band manager Malcolm McLaren and influential fashion designer Vivienne Westwood get good write ups. Sid Vicious’s Jewish girlfriends Nancy Spungeon also gets her story told right up until the murder.

So is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s a glass that is half empty or half full? I’d prefer to say it is both at the same time. Half of the chapters are well-written and half aren’t. I think Steven Lee Beeber made a mistake in his approach by trying to state a thesis and then following up by defending it. The result is an attempt to twist information to make it suit his argument which doesn’t always work. Things get pretty messy when he writes about Jewish punks that don’t quite fit into his theory. Also he doesn’t comprehend that non-Jews and members of other ethnic groups might share the same qualities of Jewishness that he outlines. I can accept that Jewish attitudes had a lot to do with the directions that punk went in, especially in regards to the outsider status, sense of humor, and social commentary. Beeber obviously wrote this out of a sense of pride in his heritage and he is entitled to that, but the result is some valuable insights alongside a lot of dreck. More importantly, it provides a new angle on understanding Jewish cultural history as much as it does a new angle on punk, particularly in the greater New York City area. I think the book works better as an homage to the oversize presence of Jews in rock and roll and American counter-cultures though.

 

Book Review

The Mekong:

Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future

by Milton Osborne

The first time I ever saw the Mekong River was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. After visiting the National Palace, I stood on its banks, looking across to the other side. A couple days later, while taking a bus to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I went across the Mekong by ferry. After traveling up the east coast of Vietnam to Hue, I crossed over into Laos and again stood on the bank of the Mekong in Savannakhet. My travels took me up to Vientiane where I ate river fish and som tam on the north shore and then took another bus north to Luang Prabang. One evening, I climbed down into the river valley after dinner. As the sun set on the Mekong there, the whole valley filled with an intensely golden light which was like no sunset I had ever seen before. It was the golden color of those stupas all over Southeast Asia, but brighter and more vibrant. I later went back down south and crossed the Friendship Bridge spanning the Mekong, arriving in Nong Khai, Thailand. Over the years, I would have more encounters with this legendary river.

Milton Osborne’s The Mekong: Turbulent Past Uncertain Future is significantly less exciting than any travel adventures I have had in that region. The history presented here is interesting enough, but it gets a light treatment without too many details.

The Mekong begins in the mountains of Tibet, flows south through Yunnan Province in China, cuts through a corner of Myanmar, drops further south through Laos, forming the border along the northern and eastern edges of Thailand. From there it turns inland again into Laos, enters Cambodia, and flows towards the delta in Vietnam where it merges into the South China Sea. Osborne’s historical narrative begins with the Khmer Angkor Kingdom, mostly known now for its iconic Angkor Wat. Portuguese explorers arrived and the Spanish followed. Those colonial powers did not conquer the Khmers or the Annamese, but they did have a significant impact on their affairs. The colonialists left for a long time and the Siamese conquered the Khmers and Laos while the Chinese invaded Vietnam. When the French colonialists showed up, they were welcomes as liberators since they freed those people from the tyranny of the Siamese and the Chinese. The honeymoon period didn’t last though and the French colonialists turned out to be just as severe. Even worse, they exploited the land for raw materials in far more damaging ways than the other Asian conquerors had.

In the heart of this colonial atrocity, there is an interesting adventure story. A group of explorers had a vision of using the Mekong for transport with the intention of moving commercial goods between China and the Mekong Delta where ships could transport them over to Europe. Their intentions may have been less than noble, but they were the first people to map the Mekong River and the story of their explorations is an adventure that rivals the best travel narratives. This really is the best part of the book.

From there, Osborne writes about the French – Indochina War and the end of colonial rule, the American invasion of Vietnam, and the future of the river. This last section deals mostly with environmental concerns largely in relation to China’s ambition to build dams on the Mekong. This has caused controversy with the countries further downstream.

The writing in this book is simple and clear. The first half covering the pre-modern and colonial periods are the best. Osborne does not give highly detailed accounts of events and it is all too obvious that a lot more could have been written. Osborne acknowledges that colonialism was a gross injustice, but he doesn’t dwell on the atrocities to any great extent. He isn’t dismissing this ugly side of Southeast Asian history so much as minimizing it for the sake of brevity and accessibility. This might bother some readers. Another major omission from this book is that almost nothing is said about the kingdom of Siam or the modern nation of Thailand, a significant portion of which is on the southern and western shores of the Mekong. A lot of what is included also happens in the Cambodian areas adjacent to the Mekong, mostly the plain of Angkor and the Tonle Sap tributary river which not directly on the titular body of water.

The Mekong is an interesting read, but it has its limitations. It is, so far, the only book that I know of that treats the entire river as a subject of history. It’s the kind of book that makes good casual reading if you stumble across a copy somewhere, but it isn’t something I would recommend hunting down. Most of what Milton Osborne writes about can be found in other sources that go further in depth. The target audience for this book is probably the handful of intelligent travelers and expats who are interested in more than beach parties and prostitutes. But if you’ve been to the Mekong, it might be a good book to enhance the memories you have. Personally, I have no desire to remember the persistently annoying mosquitoes, but I am more than happy to remember eating those fish that can be bought in the restaurants along the shore. The Laos and Isan Thai people stuff those freshwater fish full of lemongrass and garlic, pack them in salt for a week, then grill them. You eat it with green chili seafood sauce, sticky rice, and papaya salad. Wash it down with a Beer Chang and have a great night with the Asian friends you will inevitably make while in this most gregarious part of the world.

 

Book Review

The Demon

by Hubert Selby Jr.

It’s the American Dream, Hubert Selby Jr. style. The Demon tells the story of Harry White, a corporate executive and sex addict from Brooklyn who simultaneously rises to the top and plummets to the bottom. It’s a Selby novel so you know from the start it’s not going to be pretty.

On the surface, Harry White seems like a good enough guy. He loves his family, especially his grandmother, and has potential as a businessman. We learn a lot about him when he plays softball on a team of regulars from the bar where he hangs out. During one game, a married woman pushes her infant past the diamond in a stroller. While playing in the outfield, he strikes up a conversation with her and abandons the game to go have sex with her while her husband is away. That happens after he scores the only run in the game. His team wins 1 – 0. This scene sets up the tone for the rest of the novel in two ways: one is that it that it shows how smooth he is at seducing women, and the other is that it sets him apart from his peers, proving that he is one step ahead of them. It also shows how quickly he can move from being a responsible team player to a man who can impulsively leave his responsibilities behind to pursue his own selfish interests. The psychology of his inner mental world comes out as the novel moves along.

The more Harry chases tail, the sloppier he gets at his job. His office manager Wentworth reprimands him for always coming back from lunch late, pushes him to be more professional, and start a family. Wentworth turns out to be a strong mentor for Harry, helping him tame his impulses, and sublimate them into superior work for the benefit of the corporation. One day, during an office party at a country club, Harry meets Linda, the woman he falls in love with, marries, and has children with. She is a bit more than a trophy wife as she nurtures his better side and brings out his finer tendencies. Aside from his deep commitment to her, he discovers he has a talent for growing plants, virtually turning their house into a wild jungle of trees, flowers, and hanging plants.

Up until this point, we know that Harry has a darker side. This is as much a story of his inner torment as it is a story of his rise to success. Selby describes this as a nervous and irritating itch in his inner mind that Harry tries to silence. At first, he can only silence it by seducing married women, but since this habit drives him towards irresponsibility, he decides to clean up his life and distract himself from his psychological pain by working extra hard. He temporarily cures his sex addiction by becoming a workaholic. This appears to be good since he grows wealthier, becomes a top executive helping to drive his company to greater business deals, and his marriage grows stronger. The problem is that all of his success does not cure his neurosis. Hard work and family life are only a medium-range fix and the urge to sleep around again grows stronger and stronger until he goes back to picking up women in bars. This up-again-down-again cycle of bipolarity continues through to the end of the book with the highs and lows getting more extreme. Harry’s entire motivation is to silence the nagging uneasiness that underlies everything he does. Eventually we see that this is his real problem; the sex addiction and climb up the corporate ladder don’t make it go away. After a brilliant passage in the book where Harry goes into therapy with a psychoanalyst that fails to see what the real problem is, he transfers his neurosis into other darker activities, namely shoplifting, burglary, and finally murder.

The contrasts embodied in Harry White are what make this book so successful. Harry is in the middle, between a happy marriage and a destructive impulse towards adultery. Harry is not sociopathic feeling guilty because he loves his wife and children. He knows what he does is wrong, but he is unable to control his behavior. He leads a double life because his secrecy stems out of a deep sense of shame. This is even more poignant because his wife is intensely devoted to him and worries about his mental health constantly. We see that Harry could have a more satisfying life if only he learned how to tame his inner demons. We also see that his mental discomfort motivates him to do both good and bad in equal proportions, making a cure for his neurosis an impossibility. Harry White is a tragic figure, not an evil figure.

The story is not terribly original. Harry White is the man who is unhappy even though he has everything. That obviously isn’t the strongest part of the novel. What is great about it all is that Selby, does what he does best: charting an inner landscape of one man’s misery and expressing it in a way that makes the writing almost more like poetry than ordinary fiction.

While Selby describes the psychological turmoil of Harry, one element is persistently absent. Selby never clearly spells out what the source of Harry’s neurosis is. At a certain level this works because it draws us closer to Harry’s mind, dragging us deeper into his mental confusion. And actually Harry knows that he is motivated by a desire to silence his mental pain, but he never gets to the deeper root of his problem. I do think Selby provides us with an ambiguous clue though. Near the end, before Harry’s final act of violence, he fantasizes about being a great softball player. This relays the narrative back to the beginning when Harry, being the most effective player on the team, abandons the game for a tryst. One way to interpret this is that Harry’s anxiety and proneness to addiction result from an unfulfilled desire to be a great baseball player. That’s every American kid’s dream, right? And yet the only thing that ever prevented him from reaching that goal was a misplacement of his priorities; he pursued a fleeting, short-term pleasure rather than working hard to gradually reach a long-term goal. Is Selby diagnosing an American illness, one that grows out of a quick-fix society where convenience and instant gratification override any desire for quality or deep satisfaction? Or maybe the softball fantasy is simply another manifestation of Harry’s neurosis, a Freudian cigar that is really just a cigar. The lack of a final answer just makes this novel more effective as an engine of discomfort.

In the end, Harry White is an archetype of the American Dream, though it is not ultimately clear if Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Demon is meant to make a statement about capitalism in America the way Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho does. Selby tends to write more about existential crises more than moral dilemmas, but he does so in a way that prods the reader towards uncomfortable moral questions. Harry White is just as disgusting as he is sympathetic and how you choose to judge him in the end says a lot about where you stand as a moral person in a morally flawed society, a sick society like America that could be healthy if only it learned to contain and control its evil, a society embodied in the character of Harry White, bent on destruction despite its unlimited potential for greatness.