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Who Was Sinclair Beiles?

JvE: I found Who Was Sinclair Beiles? a fascinating read. It was so interesting to read about Sinclair Beiles, someone I didn’t know much about, from so many different perspectives. The interviews between Beiles and Gary Cummiskey and Beiles and dawie malan especially throw much light on the nature of the man himself. The essays by Cummiskey, malan, Earle Holmes, Alan Finlay, Eva Kowalska, George Dillon Slater and Fred de Vries serve to delve behind the man’s words and give us a glimpse into a unique character. I’d be grateful if you answered a few of my questions about this enigmatic man.

Beiles’ life is typical of the saying that “a prophet is without honour in his own country.” It is sad that a poet/playwright/writer who worked with iconic Beat poets of the sixties such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others has remained largely unknown in his own country. Why do you think Sinclair Beiles was not appreciated for who he was in South Africa?

EK: Beiles distanced himself, geographically and ideologically, from South Africa as it was when he first left the country. South African writing during apartheid was to a large extent ideologically loaded and politically driven, and Beiles removed himself and his work from that sort of literary “scene”. Beiles was idiosyncratic and tended towards the antagonistic, on both a personal and political level. Later on in his life he frequently commented, as he does in the interview with Earle Holmes, that he had little desire to “fit into” the South African writing community, an attitude which for some reason clouded popular appreciation of his work. Beiles did draw attention to himself in various ways, but his artistic outlook was not an applause-seeking one; he failed to engage the mainstream because it did not interest him. Possibly he would have wanted more recognition from his contemporaries, but although his writing was known to and highly regarded by a few local writers, for the most part such appreciation was not forthcoming.

GC: There are various reasons for this. Beiles spent almost three decades out of South Africa, coming back only occasionally, and finally returning to settle down only in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Apart from his first titles, the majority of his collections were published in limited editions by small and sometimes short-lived presses, and so it has been extremely difficult to have easy access to his work. His selection of poems, A South African Abroad, was published by Lapis Press in California in 1991, but even then a relatively small number of copies found their way to South Africa. Also, as Eva says, Beiles did not want to fit in, he did not want to be part of the South African literary scene. He wanted to distance himself from it, but at the same time he was also quite angry at being ignored.

JvE: How did each of you come to hear about him? And what led you to work together on compiling this book of interviews and memoirs about him?

EK: I first came across Beiles while doing research on the American Beat writers. Beiles was part of the group living and writing at what became known as “the Beat Hotel” in Paris, so he is mentioned in literature about that era. I found the presence of a South African writer in such an important moment of Beat literature interesting, and so decided to study Beiles’s poetry for my MA thesis. In doing so I quickly realised how very little material there was about his work. There is basically nothing except for a few reviews of the less obscure titles. This was challenging in terms of my research. It is very exciting to have so fresh and unexplored a topic, but daunting to not have any perspective on Beiles’s writing to judge my own against.

The book was initially Gary’s project; when I heard about it I was very keen to contribute. I was doing all this research and writing about Beiles already, and saw this as a good opportunity to put that work to good use. When Gary asked me to co-edit Who Was Sinclair Beiles? I saw it as a chance to be involved in something really new and interesting - it is literally the first book about Beiles and his writing - and to produce something about that total lack of information and criticism around Beiles’s work.

GC: I first encountered Beiles’s name one night in Yeoville, in 1991. I was wandering down Rockey Street, and I was looking in the window of a bookstore there, and there was this clipping, a review of A South African Abroad that had appeared in Mail & Guardian. I read about Beiles, his link to the Beats, his friendship with Burroughs, and the “helter-skelter surrealism” of his poems, as I think the reviewer put it. I had been a great admirer of the Beats and the surrealists for years, since I was a teenager, and I was astonished that a South African writer had been in that scene.

I met Beiles at his house in Yeoville in 1994 and interviewed him, but the interview wasn’t published until last year, by the literary journal, New Coin. It was a short while after that I thought about putting such a book together. At first I was just going to use a handful of previously published pieces about Beiles, those by dawie malan and Alan Finlay, but that would not have been enough to create a bound book. And so the project expanded slightly. Eva came on board as co-editor, but for financial reasons I still kept a close eye on the size of the book.

JvE: Could you please sum up the significance of Sinclair Beiles and his work for those who do not know of him at all?

EK: For me Beiles is essentially a Beat writer, and so his significance lies in broadening and enriching Beat literature, which tends, wrongly in my opinion, to be viewed as a “closed” sort of canon, limited to a historical period and a handful of American authors. When Beat literature emerged, when the Beats were writing their first texts, when Beiles was writing, the ideas and ideals they had in common were quite different from what has become the conventional understanding of “Beat”.

GC: Beiles was an outsider, and his work falls outside the mainstream. His voice is unusual for South African poetry. There are elements of surrealism in his work, but it is not orthodox or conventional surrealism, and if one regards Beiles as a Beat poet, then his work is also quite different from that of many of the US Beat poets. Even if the quality of his writing is uneven at times - and it is very uneven - that does not mean that his work should be ignored and deemed unworthy of serious consideration.

JvE: It seems to me that when Beiles came back to South Africa he was past his best writing days. Do you agree? Do you think that if he’d received the credit and acclaim he was due in South Africa for his unorthodox and yet remarkable achievements in Europe, he would have continued to produce work of note?

EK: I would agree that Beiles’s best work was written in the 1970s before he returned to South Africa, but I don’t think that the reception he and his work got here would have changed what, or how, he wrote when he returned. Certainly critical acclaim, or a lack thereof, does not seem to have influenced his earlier, better writing.

GC: Well, my favourite collection is his first, Ashes of Experience, which was the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker poetry prize in 1969. But there is work from the 1970s that is also quite strong: Sacred Fix and Dowsings, for example. There are also some interesting pieces in 20 Poems, published in 1980, as well as in Khakiweeds, from 1994. I don’t think it is a simple matter of saying his best work was his earlier poetry, though certainly his last few titles, from about 1996 onwards, leave a lot to be desired. I don’t think recognition in South Africa would have made much of a difference. And besides, sometimes recognition has the exact opposite effect, and a writer churns out crap to gain mass market applause.

JvE: What do you think his most impressive piece of work is, and why?

EK: Deliria, because of its absolute lack of concern for everything but the poet in the act of writing.

GC: Ashes of Experience. There is an intense energy in these poems, a sense of freedom and exploration.

JvE: Sinclair Beiles suffered from mental illness of some sort. He attributed it to an experimental “art happening”, I suppose you’d call it today. Could you tell the readers more about this event which led to his mental instability?

EK: Beiles had bipolar disorder, an affective disorder characterised by periods of depression and mania. I really don’t think that the “happening” he participated in had anything to do with his mental illness.

GC: The incident of the happening, Space Flight by the Greek sculptor Takis, was one that Beiles himself spread around as the cause of his disorder. But I also doubt his role in the happening had anything to do with his condition. In the introduction to Sacred Fix, Beiles said that most of the works contained in the volume were written while he was under psychiatric care in London, but he could sometimes get quite angry when he found references to his being in psychiatric care. He once maintained he had never been mentally ill, but had simply gone into care on occasions for purposes of relaxation.

JvE: Do you think this instability led to a decline in his work, or perhaps the opposite? People with bipolar disorder often have periods of extremely creative mania followed by periods of deep depression. Many famous writers, painters and poets suffer from this disorder. Two of them spring to mind: Vincent van Gogh and Stephen Fry. Do you know whether SB did most of his good writing during his manic periods? Or was he able to write when he was depressed?

EK: There is a commonly perceived linked between mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder, and creativity, though it has not really been proven. There is also a sort of “mythology” of the “mad poet”, which Beiles engaged and entertained. Some people, including writers and artists, who are bipolar, do feel that their manias and depressions bring a strong influence to bear on their creativity and productivity. Arguably, however, the increased amount of work produced during a manic phase might not be better than, or even as good as, work produced at other times. Also, having bipolar disorder does not mean that one is either manic or depressed all the time - these “episodes” can be years apart. I could not speculate on Beiles’s state of mind when he wrote, though his poetry reflects aspects of his mental illness.

GC: I agree with Eva. It is impossible to speculate what mood Beiles was in when writing this or that. But he always felt he was writing against time, before the next breakdown occurred, perhaps before the final collapse. In the poem “Terrible Dreams”, in Ashes of Experience, he writes: “All I can think of is writing as much as I can/ While a semblance of sanity and strength/ remains for me …”.

Sinclair Beiles receveing a medallion from William Plomer for the first Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize in 1969 for his first collection, Ashes of Experience.

JvE: SB was famous for not rewriting any work. He believed if you had to rewrite it then it wasn’t pure poetry, if I’m correct in interpreting what I’ve read about him. Do you think this is the reason that fellow poets looked down on him for not “crafting” a piece of work for weeks or months?

EK: This “first thought, best thought” philosophy is something of a Beat dictum. In their work it is a statement about form and technique, and the nature of poetry, and, as Beiles’s idea of “pure” poetry suggests, one he believed in and adhered to. It worked for him, although probably the concept of “not rewriting” shouldn’t be taken completely literally. Successive revisions of some of his plays are archived, for instance. All writers have their own techniques, methods and beliefs about writing. I doubt any one would seriously criticise another for their methodology, rather than the finished product.

GC: A criticism that some writers have made about Beiles was that he was unable to be selective about his work, to be self-critical in evaluation. For Beiles, it didn’t seem to matter whether what he was producing was good or bad, as long as he kept writing. Hence the very uneven quality of his work.

The “first thought, best thought” thing of the Beats is, as Eva says, not to be taken literally. Ginsberg’s work was carefully crafted; so was that of Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso. Gary Snyder said in an interview that nobody really took “first thought, best thought” seriously, “but it was a challenge”. Even the “automatic writing” of the surrealists should not to be taken literally. Andre Breton’s poems were carefully crafted, as were Paul Eluard’s.

But Beiles is not alone in having work that is uneven. The complete works of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky totals 12 volumes, half of which are now dismissed even by his admirers as doggerel and propagandist hack work, though Mayakovsky himself had a high opinion of it.

JvE: Could each of you give me a favourite poem or piece of SB’s writing and say why it means a lot to you?

EK: I like Sacred Fix, especially the “Selected Catastrophes” at the end, one of which reads as follows:

that summer
the children who had suffered so much
from the revenge of their parents
discovered in their extreme despair
that they were fire-worshippers
and everywhere in the city they threw off their clothes
and made fires of them
and chanted strange words
hitherto unuttered
and drawn up from the deep wells of their souls.
most of the buildings in the city were gutted
and with them many of the children.

GC : I like “Terrible Dreams” from Ashes of Experience. It was the first poem of his that I read and it says it all:

My condition is lamentable - to me anyway.
I keep a kind of old flying machine stability
On a cupboard full of drugs
And as I fly through the day
I can hear my nerves creaking.
I look over the side of the cockpit
And below I see the horrors of enemy territory
- the mental hospitals.
All I can think of is writing as much as I can
While a semblance of sanity and strengthen
remains for me,
I fear the fate of Artaud
Of Nietzsche
Of Nijinsky.
If some small magazine editor happens to
drop into your office
Or into your soup in the form of a fly when
You eat at
The arts laboratory
Perhaps you can pull out this work for his
consideration.
Tell him I have terrible dreams.

JvE: Finally, what is the value of SB’s work? Does his work live on in any remarkable way? Did he have a message that future generations could take forward with them? Or was his message more in living his life on the edge rather than in his work?

EK: Some of Beiles’s work is very provocative, very nonconformist, perhaps counter-cultural. He engages the social, cultural and political in innovative ways. It seems a pity that his work should be forgotten before it has been fully discovered just because it is ascribed to a bygone era. Beiles’s satires, social commentaries and anti-establishment rants remain entertaining and relevant beyond their immediate context.

GC: One of the reasons we compiled the book came from the realisation that while many people know of Beiles himself, or at the very least know his name, few know of or have even read his work. And when they have heard of him, it is in connection with Burroughs and the Beat Hotel. It is as if after that period Beiles disappeared off the side of the earth, so we wanted to show that there was more to him than that, and particularly more to his work.

When I first met Beiles, I was very eager to hear about Burroughs, Ginsberg, and so on, as no doubt did just about every other wide-eyed visitor who pitched up at his door. Afterwards I wondered if he ever got annoyed at this, you know, people contacting him to find out about the others, and not so much about him. It was always Sinclair Beiles, “the guy who knew Burroughs”, yet how many people pitching up at his door were interested in his own work, of visiting Belies for the sake of his being Beiles?

Yet some critics feel Beiles used the names of the Beats as a drawcard in order to “market” himself in South Africa, in order to gain recognition for a body of work they regard as highly questionable. In a recent review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? in Mail & Guardian, Stephen Gray poses the question of whether Beiles was not simply a con artist, a failure and a wannabe who used the names of his well-known acquaintances to gain credibility.

For me, the answer lies not so much in Beiles the personality, but in his work. It is a matter of whether his work is of value, of whether he made a contribution to South African literature, and the answer to that lies in his poetry.

JvE: Thanks to both of you for answering the questions above. Your insights into Sinclair Beiles’s life and works have inspired me to read more of the writings of a somewhat sad character. His contradiction in eschewing public opinion and yet bemoaning the fact that he never received recognition, is compelling too, and the perfect ingredient in creating a fascinating subject. Sinclair Beiles should be remembered not simply for his association with the Beat poets, but also for his eccentric life and his body of work. Well done to both of you for bringing him to our attention.

this interview first appeared on litnet