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.
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.
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