Devil’s Lake

In contrast to Scott Selby’s belief that scholars considered his novel All Mine to be his worst due to the fact that he wrote the novel in a language he had invented and he alone could understand, scholars in fact believed it was his worst because it was “very, very bad.” That the language Selby thought he had invented was English probably did not help. Yet this scholarly skepticism was unfortunate largely for the scholars themselves, as Selby actually did invent English. Although Selby may not have been the first to believe that a language like English could exist, he was the first to use it consistently. The notion that English, as suggested by some linguists, is a combination of Germanic and Latinate languages is abusrd, especially considering that English speakers, like Selby, had, and have, no clue what Germans or Italians are saying.

English, as Selby constructs it, is a complex system consisting of various symbols called words. These words are composed of letters. Letters, like words, are symbols, but letters, unlike words, are the symbols that make up the symbols known as words (symbol, for example, is a word made from the symbols s, y, m, b, o, and l. These symbols can also be words because they often sound like the words they are constructing. Consider, for example, s for yes, y for why, b as in bee, o as in O, m as in capital M, and l as in llama). For Selby, a symbol is a “thing that stands in for another thing.” When asked, for example, what the letter l stands in for, Selby says for l-ness—“letters, like all things, are the thing-ness of the being-ness which is its own selfness. In other words, an l is an l is an l is an l.” Unfortunately, no one but Selby understood what he meant. At first, Selby thought it was because he was speaking English, but since it was all he knew how to speak, he did not have a choice. He would often repeat what he said, but louder—“letters, like all things, are … ” and on he went shouting each word as if he were yelling at a drowning man. Eventually, those who asked him gave up and simply nodded when he spoke, which made Selby think they finally understood him.

The first person to understand what Selby was saying was his father, the amateur magician and prognosticator Louis Selby-Auger, son of prognosticator and magician Vincent Legerdemain-Selby. That his father was an amateur illusionist played a great role in Selby’s belief in his invention, although not in the way most scholars think. The only one who is aware of what role it plays is the writer who was most influenced by Selby, the Irish poet Mathers O’Divney. O’Divney, who died last year as the result of a misplaced metaphor, writes in his seminal work on Selby, The Magician’s Son, that it “was almost as if Selby didn’t exist since Selby tried so vigorously to be his father.” O’Divney is correct, but only insofar as he is wrong. In other words, it is not possible, as O’Divney claims, for a person to be both his father and his son, although it is possible for a father to be a son and a son to be a father. Despite the fact that these possibilities have nothing to do with our examination of Selby, they are important insofar as they exist as things we can rule out. The list of things we have ruled out is quite long so we will not discuss it here.¹ What we can discuss here is the nature of the elder Selby’s influence.

The elder Selby was, according to his son, his father. In addition, the elder Selby was also the younger Selby’s best friend and confidante, “capable of the greatest magic known to single women. He would do this thing,” the younger Selby remembers, “where he’d cook meat by boiling it. One minute the pot would be cold water and the next it would be boiling hot. When he placed the meat inside, it turned dark brown. It’s really difficult to describe. You just had to be there.”²

In addition to the “boiling meat” trick, Selby’s father also “made meatloaf on the grill,” “mowed the lawn in black dress shoes,” and “saved pennies in a large wine jug he kept on the top of his dresser.” “After my mother left,” Selby remembers, “my father’s act was the talk of the neighborhood. He’d have an audience every night, if one woman could be called an audience. They watched him make chop-suey with ketchup and hamburger and noodles with ketchup. Once, he even pulled a turkey loaf covered in ketchup out of the oven. It was as if he’d been doing these tricks his entire life.”

The elder Selby’s tricks influenced Selby greatly because they taught Selby about the necessity of illusion. Specifically, his father’s act showed Selby how to commit oneself totally to a performance, whether or not the performance was a performance. Selby’s works work because they attempt to articulate their meaning sentence after sentence. In other words, Selby’s novels never stop to take themselves for granted, constructing their complex narratives from the words themselves. Selby somehow manages to write what he calls “sentences” to form “paragraphs,” or a collection of sentences that revolve around a common theme. It is only when he wants to move on to a new idea that Selby “begins” a new paragraph. Unfortunately, it was exactly this illusion that would get Selby into trouble.

In 1983, an author accused Selby of plagiarism. Selby’s longtime friend and collaborator, the little-known Dean Pariah, told The New York Standard Bearer Selby had copied his unpublished novel The Kindling Drum word-for-word. Selby, of course, denied it and accused Pariah of “acting out of a need for attention.” Although it appears, at first, as if Selby’s novel does share similarities with Pariah’s Kindling Drum, their novels are actually quite different. For example, Selby writes in The Kindling Drum, “The novel is a result of nothing more than persistence, persistence and pain.” In his Kindling Drum, Pariah writes, “The novel is a result of nothing more than persistence, persistence and pain.” Now, these sentences do appear, at first, to be strikingly similar. Note, for example, how there is no difference between them. That is what makes them so strikingly different. It is because they are so similar that they are so unique, considering Selby wrote one and Pariah, who is not Selby, the other. Pariah was a short, balding Chicagoan with an appetite for the ponies where Selby was a tall, muscular, and strikingly handsome Midwesterner who had never bet any money on the horses. In addition, it would also be difficult to believe that the man responsible for the official catalog of human gestures could be so bold as to steal from his colleague.³

What Pariah could not understand was Selby was not plagiarizing as much as he was paying homage. It was, Selby said, inevitable. “How does one become a writer after all? They do it by reading others who are writers first. They do it by understanding why they are copying one person as opposed to another. The only reason my work and Dean’s can be so similar is we are both aping the same person. It’s the same with magic. What matters is how you handle the illusion—the illusion that you are the first to think of what you’re doing.” Selby means all authors, whether they like it or not, are nothing more than conmen. “There is a theory that each age has to interpret itself. They say every age is responsible for telling new generations what theirs was like. I hate to say this, but I’m not sure things change that much from age to age. I’m really not.”

It is this pessimistic attitude that is at the core of the book that has gotten Selby both the most attention and the most criticism. His novel Golden Hours is an inspiring story about the disintegration of the human race. It is perhaps Selby’s best novel because it manages to be both informative (“ … houses are nothing more than four walls and what’s called a roof”) and thrilling (“ … as the car chased the human race around the corner, the human race leaped a generation from Avenue C to D”). Golden Hours is, according to Professor Dickey Divine of Erin Go Galway, suscessful because it is written so vividly. Divine divines:

One can remember distinctly how it looks—tangy with a hint of garnet—how it sounds—quiet like a leopard is quiet—and how it feels to read it for the first time—like lying beneath a wet electric blanket. At the core of the book is language. What I mean is language for Selby seems to be nothing more than a system of sounds perfected by humans to acquire those things that make them happy. Selby very cleverly makes the point that most scientists of dubious breeding believe it was our progenitors—the apes—that first created language, and it wasn’t, since everyone knows apes can’t speak.

Unfortunately, it was this comment that brought Selby unwanted controversy.

Golden Hours had been out already for almost ten years before an ape residing at the Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois came across a copy of it and was surprised to find such bold claims about where language came from. He was, a zookeeper reported, “livid in the way only apes can be livid. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t sleep. He refused to answer any of his mail. We didn’t know what to do.” The controversy began after the ape, Harry, passed away from malnutrition and sleep-deprivation. Harry’s fans were like Harry, not dead, but livid, going so far as to boycott Selby’s book. The problem with the boycott was no one read Selby by that time anyway so all it really did was annoy Selby.

It was not until just before his death that Selby reclaimed some of the fame he had once tasted, like the ice cream left on a wrapper. Selby, in some sense, came full circle, especially if a circle is a square. His final book, This Is It So It Better Be Good, reaches back into his childhood interest in being a child, an interest that is, critic Davidson Whippet of Coleman College in Chicago writes, “illustrative of a writer coming to terms with something. He may be facing the fact that he might be the greatest writer in the English language, especially since he is the only one writing in it.” Even though Selby makes the same claim throughout his entire oeuvre, it is not until his later works that Selby begins to believe it. For example, in his early novel Don’t Tell Me It’s 6 Already Selby writes, “I’m the greatest writer that ever lived.” Take, for example, one of his last novels, Just Let Me Die Already, where he writes: “I’m the greatest writer that ever lived.” It is obvious, even to those not familiar with Selby, that the latter sentence contains much more convition than the former. Note how similar the sentences are without being different. This was Selby’s strength.

Selby did not only succeed at the sentence level; he also succeeded in writing paragraphs, chapters, and sections. He could even, if he were lucky, write an entire novel, something he managed to do only thirty or so times. What was amazing was how long it took a brilliant writer like Selby to finish a novel, seeing as he was always so successful with its constituent parts. It took him so long because he was inventing every word he wrote. This was something Pariah also did not understand. Even though Selby was “copying” writers who came before him, he was also inventing the language he was writing in. When sked how that was possible, Selby said that he did not know and that if I asked any more questions, he would leave, even though Selby was at home when the interviewer asked him the question. It did not matter since Selby died soon after the interview.

Despite completing a book before his death, Selby died before he could read it, so he never knew how successful a novel it actually was. He died dimeless in a ramshackle bedsit in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Still, Selby’s work lives on despite the riots caused by the recent push for a Chair of Selby Studies at Coleman College in Chicago. Mistaking Shelby for Bellamy, the radical anti-institutionalist, the school’s English Department imploded. Fortunately, only graduate students were hurt. Perhaps we can comfort ourselves not only with the loss of so many graduate students, but also with the knowledge that Selby is still available to those who read Selby. After all, it was Selby who said, “What matters most to the writer is the ability to say what needs to be said when saying what needs to be said doesn’t need to be said.”