Wednesday, April 27, 2016

An email from Mike Hardaker regarding 'The White-hearted Nigger'

As stated in Who was Sinclair Beiles?, when I met Sinclair he told me that his first publication was a novel called The White-hearted Nigger, which I have never been able to trace.

However, I have just received the following communication from Mike Hardaker:

Just a little Sinclair Beiles note that may be of interest. Volume 4/2 of Nimbus (a British “little magazine” of the 1950s) includes a piece called “The Commercial Traveller” by Sinclair Beiles, which is billed as "Being the first chapter of a novel entitled The Life and Times of a White-hearted Nigger”. Then, The Painter and Sculptor for 1958 has an advert for The Memoirs of a White-hearted Nigger being published by "Halcyon Press Limited, 24 Charlotte Street, London W1, (Mayfair 7153)”.

I have no idea whether the book was ever actually published, and these are just stompies picked up from Google Books snippets, but it does give some context to Beiles’s claim regarding his first book. As for his claim that it was published by The English Literary Review, that might be a misremembering of Nimbus’s secondary title of New English Review. As far as I can tell, Nimbus was also published by (or via) Halcyon Press, and certainly from the same Charlotte Street address.