Sinclair Beiles - A Man Apart - Empty Mirror

12/11/2020 Sinclair Beiles: A Man Apart • Empty Mirror
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Sinclair Beiles: A Man Apart

Josh Medsker
From the frontpiece of the book Bone Hebrew: an Appreciation of Sinclair Beiles, published by
Cold Turkey Press. Courtesy of Gary Cummiskey.
Sinclair Beiles was a South African writer associated with the Beat movement of the late 50s and early
60s. During the time of his earliest successes, he moved from South Africa to Paris, to live with the
https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/beat/sinclair-beiles-a-man-apart 1/11
community of writers and artists, which included Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, and William Burroughs,
among others, at what would become known as The Beat Hotel. Yet, this “beat” tag could not contain him.
He also spent the early 60s in Greece, working with the Greek artist Takis on multimedia works, all the
while spooling out his own brand of surrealistic, enigmatic poetry. He oated around Europe in the
decades that followed… coming back to his homeland in the 90s, settling down in the artists’ enclave of
Yeoville, in Johannesburg. He continued to experiment restlessly, until his death in 2000. He is relatively
unknown outside of Beat and South African literary circles. Hopefully this article will go a long way
towards correcting that.
Gerard Bellaart is a legendary small-press publisher in France and was Sinclair Beiles’s publisher in the
1970s, with his Cold Turkey Press. I asked him how Beiles should be remembered. He replies that Beiles
work is “of the calibre of Celan”, the famed French surrealist poet, but doubts that his reputation will rise
anytime soon. “Beiles’ oeuvre as a whole has been neglected (read: ignored),” says Bellaart. He says that:
Literary market forces thought it more pro table to hail Burroughs and Gysin as the founding
fathers of the ‘cut-up’. Neither had either the culture or background to recognise the principle
of cut-up inherent, say in Mallarmé’s “Coup de Dés”, and in Baudelaire’s essay on de Quincy’s
de nition of Palimpsest for that matter. Sinclair Beiles of course knew these works by heart
and in French.
Furthermore, he believes that Beiles was an originator, and should be recognized as such. He continues:
It was Sinclair Beiles who rst developed the technique of using a layer of text as a transparent
entity, the superimposition of which would create an entirely new and unpredictable context.
The further appropriations of the technique by Burroughs and Gysin we do not need go into at
this point.
But perhaps the leading authorities on Beiles and his work are Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, editors
and publishers of Dye Hard Press in South Africa. They published the de nitive reference on Beiles, Who
Was Sinclair Beiles?, the updated version of which was published earlier this year.
Gary and Eva spoke with blogger Janet van Eeden about Beiles and his work, and Kowalska in particular
believes that Beiles is “essentially a Beat writer” but also believes that his writing will help expand the
de nition of Beat and that “the ideas and ideals they had in common were quite different to what has
become the conventional understanding of ‘Beat’”
Gary Cummiskey agrees. “Beiles was an

outsider,” he says. “If one regards Beiles as
Beat poet, then his work is also quite different
from 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.”
Beiles often found his mental faculties

unravelling, and spent time in psychiatric care,
on and off throughout his life. According to
Cummiskey, “In the introduction to Sacred Fix,
Beiles said that most of the works contained
in the volume were written while under
psychiatric care in London…” but at the same
time, “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.” Kowalska and Cummiskey both
agree that “his poetry re ects aspects of his
Sinclair Beiles in Rotterdam, 1972. Photograph by Gerard
mental illness,” and Cummiskey in particular
Bellaart. Courtesy of Gary Cummiskey.
contends that Beiles “always felt he was
writing against time, before the next breakdown occurred, perhaps before the nal collapse.”
Cummiskey states that “one of the reasons we compiled the book came from the realisation that while
many people know of Beiles, or at the very least know his name, few know of or have even read his work.”
He believes that Beiles should be more than a footnote in the Beat story or the saga of William Burroughs.
He does admit that when he rst met Beiles, he was “eager to hear about Burroughs, and Ginsberg, as no
doubt did just about every other wide-eyed visitor who pitched up at his door.” But he also says that
“afterwards I wondered if he ever got annoyed at this, you know, people contacting him to nd out about
the others, and not so much about him.”
Beiles’s biographers say that he considered himself a writer for the world, not beholden to any country or
literary community. They say he “distanced himself, geographically and ideologically, from South Africa
and its poetic culture. Kowalska says “Beiles was idiosyncratic and tended towards the antagonistic, on
both a personal and political level…”
Cummiskey says that “Beiles spent almost three decades out of South Africa, coming back only
occasionally, and nally returning to settle down only in the late 1970s/early 1980s.” He continues by
saying that:
…apart from his rst titles, the majority of his collections were published in limited editions by
small and sometimes short-lived presses…His selected 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 t 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.
Cummiskey, along with many other critics of Beiles’s work, agrees that “it didn’t seem to matter whether
what he was producing was good or bad, so long as he kept writing. Hence the very uneven quality of his
work.” He goes on. “The ‘ rst thought, best thought’ thing of the Beats is… not to be taken literally.” The
work of Beiles’s contemporaries such as Corso, Kerouac, and Ginsberg “was carefully crafted…” as were
the works of his surrealist predecessors Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. He doesn’t damn Beiles for his
uneven work, and recognizes that Beiles is far from unique in this regard. He gives the example of the
Russian poet Mayakovsky, whose “complete works total 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.”
Sinclair Beiles in Rotterdam, 1972. Photograph by Gerard Bellaart. Courtesy of Gary Cummiskey.
Barry Miles, the legendary Beat biographer (and author of The Beat Hotel) believes that these twin Achilles
heels, of poor distribution of the work and spotty self-selection skills, doomed Sinclair Beiles to the literary
ghetto in which he currently lives.
When I spoke to Miles for this article, he shed a little light on the collaborative relationship and friendship
between Beiles and his better-known comrade, Bill Burroughs. He says that “Burroughs rst knew [Beiles]
in Tangier, though not well. He always thought that Sinclair was crazy, but many poets are, or have had
episodes of craziness. I recently catalogued Burroughs’s archive for the last twenty years of his life and
there were more than seventy letters from Sinclair there so they remained in touch until Burroughs’ death.”
He draws a distinct line between the purpose of Burroughs’s cut-ups and Beiles’s. He says that “Burroughs
was looking for a new angle on the original subject, whereas Sinclair was looking for an overall density of
words – quite di cult stuff usually. His poems, if you can call them that, are heavy going and don’t really
make much sense to me though others clearly think they do.”
Miles believes that the main reason Beiles’s work stayed relatively underground was that “he never
published enough – there was no proper book, just very small limited editions. (not counting his
pornography for the Olympia Press, but that was under a pseudonym).” Miles says that “had City Lights or
one of the other well-known publishers done a book of his work” he might have enjoyed a greater
readership during his lifetime.
Still, many decades later, the work endures, with limited distribution and all of the rest of the problems a
writing life brings. Beiles felt fame was a double-edged sword, Cummiskey says. He also said that some
critics have accused Beiles of exploiting the fame of his more well-known writer friends, for his own gain.
Cummiskey goes on to say that for himself, “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.”
References:
Bellaart, Gerard. Email correspondence with author.
Miles, Barry. Email correspondence with author.
van Eeden, Janet. “Editors Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska in conversation with Janet van Eeden.”
kagablog.
Cummiskey, Gary, and Kowalska, Eva, editors. Who Was Sinclair Beiles? Revised and Expanded Edition Dye
Hard Press, 2015.
Josh Medsker
Josh Medsker is a New Jersey writer, originally from Alaska. His debut collection, Cacophony, was
published in 2019 by Alien Buddha Press. His ction, poetry, journalism, memoir, and literary criticism
has appeared in many publications, including Empty Mirror, Contemporary American Voices, Haiku
Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Anchorage Press. His website is joshmedsker.com.
Author: Josh Medsker Tags: Barry Miles, Beat Hotel, Sinclair Beiles, William S. Burroughs Category: Beat
Generation March 17, 2015
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Comments
Jan C. DUVEKOT says
During the sixties Sinclair stayed several times at our place, near the Sarphatipark in Amsterdam.
We had mutual friends in Paris at the Hotel Stella, in rue Monsieur le Prince. A famous hangout
during the Vietnam troubles. We worked on texts for the Paris Review. Sinclair needed a stunning
quantity of drugs to keep going. The psychiatrist in Amsterdam wondered how he could function.
We found Sinclair functioned just ne: he disregarded his surroundings, did not get into small talk
and wrote wonderful poetry that replaced super ouous conversation. He was a good lover, I was
told by his girlfriend. He behaved like an off stage jazz musician, which I found had a very
coherend and poetic spaciousness. Pity he didn’t talk more during our rides in town. He did
occasionally talk about Africa but then promptly fell asleep in my 2CV. I remember him once
reading a long poem about jazz musicians in imaginary London in the 14th century. His poetry
books in our appartment were stolen. Good sign. Cold Turkey Press in Rottterdam deserves credit
for saving much poetry from oblivion.
Reply
Josh Medsker says
Hi Jan! I’m just reading this now! Sorry for the extremely tardy comment. Wow! What a great
remembrance you wrote. Thank you! –Josh
Reply
Bruce says
Enjoyed the article on Sinclair Beiles, great to see him getting some acknowledgment.
Reply
Josh Medsker says
Hi Bruce! Thank you for the kind comment! I’m sorry for being so e n’ tardy with my
comment! Take care!– Josh
Reply
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12/11/2020 Sinclair Beiles: A Man Apart • Empty Mirror

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