Good to see that Gregory Penfold in Cape Town has received his copy of Who was Sinclair Beiles?, published by Dye Hard Press.
Showing posts with label Fred de Vries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fred de Vries. Show all posts
Monday, August 19, 2024
Sinclair Beiles in Cape Town
Good to see that Gregory Penfold in Cape Town has received his copy of Who was Sinclair Beiles?, published by Dye Hard Press.
Friday, October 6, 2017
A headstone for a poet who moved to a different beat
An article recently appeared in South African Jewish Report about the unmarked grave of Sinclair Beiles in Westpark Cemetery, Johannesburg. There are several inaccuracies in the article, as well as spelling mistakes. I also did not take the photo of Beiles's grave that appears in the article. When the journalist contacted me, I thought she was referring to some photos of Beiles's grave that I had posted on Facebook a few years back.The once prolific yet totally unsung and overlooked poet, died 17 years ago and to this day no one has honoured him with a tombstone befitting a man who lived a less than ordinary life.
Sinclair Simon Maurice Beiles was arguably South Africa’s best Beat Generation poet. He was once described by the legendary beloved Jewish singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen as “one of the best poets of the century”. Read more
Friday, July 21, 2017
Cutting it all up by Fred de Vries
There’s more than a touch of self-importance in the way
they pose for the photograph. It’s most obvious in the way they hold their
cigarettes, like would-be film stars – Humphrey Bogart, Yves Montand, with a
touch of Montgomery Clift. But you can also detect a sense of achievement; the
idea that they have stumbled upon something revolutionary and sublime.
The date is 13 April 1960. The place is the English
Bookshop in the Rue de Seine on Paris’ Left Bank, a few blocks from their
informal headquarters, a nameless flea-ridden lodging a.k.a. the Beat Hotel. On
the left of the black and white picture you see Swiss-born Canadian surrealist
Brion Gysin. For a guy with a bitchy reputation he seems almost jovial, saying
something to William Burroughs who is standing next to him, looking pale and
gaunt, as befits the author of two controversial novels, Junky and The Naked
Lunch. Spring has set in, but Burroughs is still wearing his hat and long coat.
Digesting Gysin’s wit, he manages a faint smile, which makes him look
momentarily handsome ... Read more.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? by Dawn Swope
This little book grows and grows. It is a revised and expanded edition, the third edition in all. The book
first surfaced in 2009.
Little was known about Sinclair Beiles outside of his home country, South Africa. He got a name largely by being around Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsberg and Corso at the ‘Beat Hotel’ in Paris in the 1950s. There were photos of them all together. Beiles collaborated on the cult book Minutes To Go in 1960. There were conversations about books in the pipeline. Beiles worked at the Olympia Press, famous of course for Maurice Girodias and Junkie and other things.
Beiles never quite established his name in Europe and he struggled in his homeland also. His Ashes of
Experience won prizes but caused few ripples anywhere.
But he had a gift and a band of people did believe in him over the years. Gary Cummiskey for one, Fred de Vries, Carl Weissner, Heathcote Williams. They all befriended Beiles through Europe, Amsterdam, London, Greece, South Africa.
Beiles was hampered by his drug consumption, his personal issues. He was always on the cusp of something. He was a casualty of the literary world, a sometime Syd Barrett figure. A nearly man.
Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska have researched and then some more to strip away the layers of time and fog around Beiles. More understanding, photos, bibliographies, letters. Well done to them.
Published in Beat Scene no 80, December 2015
first surfaced in 2009.
Little was known about Sinclair Beiles outside of his home country, South Africa. He got a name largely by being around Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsberg and Corso at the ‘Beat Hotel’ in Paris in the 1950s. There were photos of them all together. Beiles collaborated on the cult book Minutes To Go in 1960. There were conversations about books in the pipeline. Beiles worked at the Olympia Press, famous of course for Maurice Girodias and Junkie and other things.
Beiles never quite established his name in Europe and he struggled in his homeland also. His Ashes of
Experience won prizes but caused few ripples anywhere.
But he had a gift and a band of people did believe in him over the years. Gary Cummiskey for one, Fred de Vries, Carl Weissner, Heathcote Williams. They all befriended Beiles through Europe, Amsterdam, London, Greece, South Africa.
Beiles was hampered by his drug consumption, his personal issues. He was always on the cusp of something. He was a casualty of the literary world, a sometime Syd Barrett figure. A nearly man.
Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska have researched and then some more to strip away the layers of time and fog around Beiles. More understanding, photos, bibliographies, letters. Well done to them.
Published in Beat Scene no 80, December 2015
Friday, January 30, 2015
Out now: Who was Sinclair Beiles?, revised and expanded edition.
Available from Dye Hard Press at R150 per copy, including postage (South Africa only). Email dyehardpress@iafrica.com. For overseas orders, price will vary according to increased postal rates - please enquire with publisher.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Sunday, May 15, 2011
’n Roerende chaos
Indien jy wil weet hoe jy in die laaste dekade verander het, hoef jy net ’n boek of ’n gedig te lees waarvan jy tien jaar gelede gehou het. Só het ek agtergekom vele literêre helde het intussen saam met my jeugdige romantiek en boheemse versugtinge gesneuwel.
Onder hierdie dooie ikone tel die meeste skrywers van die Beat-generasie wat die wêreld- letterkunde in die 1950s onherroeplik verander en die deure afgeskop het vir die kontra-kulturele revolusie van die 1960s..Read more here
Onder hierdie dooie ikone tel die meeste skrywers van die Beat-generasie wat die wêreld- letterkunde in die 1950s onherroeplik verander en die deure afgeskop het vir die kontra-kulturele revolusie van die 1960s..Read more here
Friday, May 13, 2011
Collected works worth the effort: Fred de Vries interviews Gerard Bellaart
A Dutch publisher has been the self-appointed custodian of the works of SA poet Sinclair Beiles — who, he says, is a vastly underrated peer of the likes of Kerouac and Burroughs
A HAMLET in rural France, surrounded by sunflowers and vineyards, isn’t the most likely place to find a huge archive of the writing, letters, photos and pictures of SA’s legendary “beat poet”, Sinclair Beiles (1930-2000).
It’s almost surreal to see Dutch artist and publisher Gerard Bellaart carrying box after box of Beiles material from his studio so his visitor can work his way through piles of typed and handwritten pages, and marvel at the picture of Beiles and his American chum, Gregory Corso, in Athens in 1967. “I have some 1200 pages of unpublished material,” says Bellaart, who first encountered Beiles in 1967 in Greece, and kept up a correspondence with him until his death in 2000.
“It includes some stunning work, like The Idiot’s Voice and Inmates, which he wrote in a loony bin in London, where he met actress Sally Willis. She started a kind of therapy for him by giving him four subjects every day, which he would then turn into poetry. I also have the correspondence between them, which is extremely beautiful and touching.”
Beiles has often been dismissed as a marginal character in the beat history that was spearheaded by American writer Jack Kerouac in the mid-’50s. Beiles was responsible for the editing of William Burroughs’s masterpiece, Naked Lunch. And, with Burroughs, Corso and Brion Gysin he wrote Minutes to Go (1960), a tiny book that heralded the cut-up experiment in literature: writers doing a kind of remix of existing texts.
Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1930, the only child of Jewish South African parents, who moved back to Johannesburg when their son was six years old. He studied at Wits University and left SA in the mid-’50s.
After time in New Zealand, Spain and Morocco he moved to Paris, which was then the centre of international bohemia. He stayed in the notoriously anarchic Beat Hotel on Rue Git-le-Coeur, a stone’s throw from the river Seine.
He became involved with the American beats. He also worked as an editor for Olympia Press, brainchild of maverick publisher Maurice Girodias, who not only gave us “forbidden” erotic pockets but also seminal literary work by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Burroughs.
BEILES a beat writer? Way too facile, insists Bellaart. “I wouldn’t call him a beat poet. That’s such an empty phrase, it means nothing to me. Kerouac and those guys were no influence on Sinclair. I think he found them a bunch of country bumpkins.
“His cultural background was very European. They also didn’t have an eye for things visual. Sinclair had an exceptional eye for visual art.”
When the Paris scene fell apart in the early ’60s, most participants drifted south, doing the “karma circuit”, passing through Greece and eventually ending up in India, Kashmir and Tibet.
Beiles decided to stay in Greece, moving between Athens and the island of Hydra, where he befriended Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen. “What you had in Greece was a wave of expatriates, writers, artists and aristocrats like Princess Zina Rachesvsky. All of them outsiders and drifters,” remembers Bellaart, who hitchhiked from Rotterdam to Athens after he fell in love with Greek music that a truck driver played when he gave him a lift in Finland.
He bumped into Beiles at a party in Athens. They immediately got along. “I visited his flat and still remember how I walked in and saw poems. Poems everywhere. One of them was called Notes from the Promised Land, which ended up in Ashes of Experience, for which he won the Ingrid Jonker Award in 1970.”
Beiles had a history of mental instability. Diagnosed with manic depression as a teenager, he was subjected to electroshock treatment, and spent many months in psychiatric wards in Athens, London, Paris and Johannesburg.
His illness made him unpredictable and occasionally volatile.
Publishers were reluctant to deal with the “mad South African”, who once, in a fit of anger, threw a suitcase full of poems at an important London literary star.
Bellaart, however, wasn’t afraid. In 1970 he started his own publishing company, Cold Turkey Press, specialising in maladjusted writers such as Charles Bukowski, Antonin Artaud and Ezra Pound. Beiles fitted the bill perfectly. Here was a poet who assaulted deadening reality through a descent into delirium and fantasy.
“I saw him as the Holy Fool in the Russian tradition, not loony, but very wise,” says Bellaart, who published limited editions of Beiles’s Sacred Fix and Deliria, both now highly collectable.
AFTER Beiles returned to SA in the late ’70s, he married fellow poet Marta Proctor. They moved into a house in Yeoville, Johannesburg, and Beiles became a genuine Yeoville character, whose star rapidly waned during that highly politicised pre-1994 era.
Few were interested in the surrealist poetry and plays of that sickly man who used to scurry down Rockey Street, bumming coffee off friends and acquaintances. Most people found him initially entertaining, but soon became fed up with his antics and fantastic stories.
“Eventually he became like an untouchable,” says Bellaart.
“So he started making photocopies of his poems, stapled them and published them in editions of 15 or something, and sold some to Unisa.”
Bellaart, who never saw Beiles after the mid-’70s, still refuses to see his friend in terms of mad and normal. “He was very lucid in his descriptions of insanity. Is someone like that mad or normal? Those extremes are not applicable to Sinclair.
“It’s very hard to grasp him. Like all those fantastic stories he used to tell. They all happened within his own reality.
“That was the source of his poetry. And most did have a source of truth in them.”
Largely due to his worsening bipolar condition, Beiles fell out with almost everyone. Bellaart was an exception. They had a brief quarrel about a prose poem called Aardvark, in which Beiles tackled the decadence of the Lost City. Beiles thought it was his ultimate tour de force and wanted Bellaart to publish it.
BELLAART, however, could not make head or tale of it. “He sent me at least five versions. Just when I read my way through the previous one, he sent me a new one. I tried to deconstruct it, all the different characters. But I just couldn’t.”
Towards the end of his life, in 1997, Beiles did finally receive some recognition when the French Cultural Institute organised a Beat Hotel exhibition in Carfax, which featured a reconstruction of the Beat Hotel facade and two rooms, complete with a replica of Gysin’s hypnotic Dream Machine. Beiles read poems and had his 15 minutes of fame.
THREE years later he died, dismissed as a footnote to the beat history. An unjust epitaph, says Bellaart, showing me some of the exquisite mid-period poems. “He was hugely cultured. He had an enormous curiosity and an incredible ability to absorb things.
“I see Sinclair as someone who was outside everything. He had no affiliation with any movement. He was the most original of that whole late-’50s Paris scene. But because of his unevenness and his chaotic personal life, he was also the easiest to marginalise, to neglect. And to treat with condescension.”
The archives of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Bukowski, all contemporaries of Beiles, have been bought for huge sums by American universities and collectors, who are proud of their writers and poets.
The Beiles files are stored somewhere in rural France, waiting to change ownership. “They belong in kind, caring South African hands,” says Bellaart.
(Published in The Weekender, 16 August, 2008)
A HAMLET in rural France, surrounded by sunflowers and vineyards, isn’t the most likely place to find a huge archive of the writing, letters, photos and pictures of SA’s legendary “beat poet”, Sinclair Beiles (1930-2000).
It’s almost surreal to see Dutch artist and publisher Gerard Bellaart carrying box after box of Beiles material from his studio so his visitor can work his way through piles of typed and handwritten pages, and marvel at the picture of Beiles and his American chum, Gregory Corso, in Athens in 1967. “I have some 1200 pages of unpublished material,” says Bellaart, who first encountered Beiles in 1967 in Greece, and kept up a correspondence with him until his death in 2000.
“It includes some stunning work, like The Idiot’s Voice and Inmates, which he wrote in a loony bin in London, where he met actress Sally Willis. She started a kind of therapy for him by giving him four subjects every day, which he would then turn into poetry. I also have the correspondence between them, which is extremely beautiful and touching.”
Beiles has often been dismissed as a marginal character in the beat history that was spearheaded by American writer Jack Kerouac in the mid-’50s. Beiles was responsible for the editing of William Burroughs’s masterpiece, Naked Lunch. And, with Burroughs, Corso and Brion Gysin he wrote Minutes to Go (1960), a tiny book that heralded the cut-up experiment in literature: writers doing a kind of remix of existing texts.
Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1930, the only child of Jewish South African parents, who moved back to Johannesburg when their son was six years old. He studied at Wits University and left SA in the mid-’50s.
After time in New Zealand, Spain and Morocco he moved to Paris, which was then the centre of international bohemia. He stayed in the notoriously anarchic Beat Hotel on Rue Git-le-Coeur, a stone’s throw from the river Seine.
He became involved with the American beats. He also worked as an editor for Olympia Press, brainchild of maverick publisher Maurice Girodias, who not only gave us “forbidden” erotic pockets but also seminal literary work by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Burroughs.
BEILES a beat writer? Way too facile, insists Bellaart. “I wouldn’t call him a beat poet. That’s such an empty phrase, it means nothing to me. Kerouac and those guys were no influence on Sinclair. I think he found them a bunch of country bumpkins.
“His cultural background was very European. They also didn’t have an eye for things visual. Sinclair had an exceptional eye for visual art.”
When the Paris scene fell apart in the early ’60s, most participants drifted south, doing the “karma circuit”, passing through Greece and eventually ending up in India, Kashmir and Tibet.
Beiles decided to stay in Greece, moving between Athens and the island of Hydra, where he befriended Canadian troubadour Leonard Cohen. “What you had in Greece was a wave of expatriates, writers, artists and aristocrats like Princess Zina Rachesvsky. All of them outsiders and drifters,” remembers Bellaart, who hitchhiked from Rotterdam to Athens after he fell in love with Greek music that a truck driver played when he gave him a lift in Finland.
He bumped into Beiles at a party in Athens. They immediately got along. “I visited his flat and still remember how I walked in and saw poems. Poems everywhere. One of them was called Notes from the Promised Land, which ended up in Ashes of Experience, for which he won the Ingrid Jonker Award in 1970.”
Beiles had a history of mental instability. Diagnosed with manic depression as a teenager, he was subjected to electroshock treatment, and spent many months in psychiatric wards in Athens, London, Paris and Johannesburg.
His illness made him unpredictable and occasionally volatile.
Publishers were reluctant to deal with the “mad South African”, who once, in a fit of anger, threw a suitcase full of poems at an important London literary star.
Bellaart, however, wasn’t afraid. In 1970 he started his own publishing company, Cold Turkey Press, specialising in maladjusted writers such as Charles Bukowski, Antonin Artaud and Ezra Pound. Beiles fitted the bill perfectly. Here was a poet who assaulted deadening reality through a descent into delirium and fantasy.
“I saw him as the Holy Fool in the Russian tradition, not loony, but very wise,” says Bellaart, who published limited editions of Beiles’s Sacred Fix and Deliria, both now highly collectable.
AFTER Beiles returned to SA in the late ’70s, he married fellow poet Marta Proctor. They moved into a house in Yeoville, Johannesburg, and Beiles became a genuine Yeoville character, whose star rapidly waned during that highly politicised pre-1994 era.
Few were interested in the surrealist poetry and plays of that sickly man who used to scurry down Rockey Street, bumming coffee off friends and acquaintances. Most people found him initially entertaining, but soon became fed up with his antics and fantastic stories.
“Eventually he became like an untouchable,” says Bellaart.
“So he started making photocopies of his poems, stapled them and published them in editions of 15 or something, and sold some to Unisa.”
Bellaart, who never saw Beiles after the mid-’70s, still refuses to see his friend in terms of mad and normal. “He was very lucid in his descriptions of insanity. Is someone like that mad or normal? Those extremes are not applicable to Sinclair.
“It’s very hard to grasp him. Like all those fantastic stories he used to tell. They all happened within his own reality.
“That was the source of his poetry. And most did have a source of truth in them.”
Largely due to his worsening bipolar condition, Beiles fell out with almost everyone. Bellaart was an exception. They had a brief quarrel about a prose poem called Aardvark, in which Beiles tackled the decadence of the Lost City. Beiles thought it was his ultimate tour de force and wanted Bellaart to publish it.
BELLAART, however, could not make head or tale of it. “He sent me at least five versions. Just when I read my way through the previous one, he sent me a new one. I tried to deconstruct it, all the different characters. But I just couldn’t.”
Towards the end of his life, in 1997, Beiles did finally receive some recognition when the French Cultural Institute organised a Beat Hotel exhibition in Carfax, which featured a reconstruction of the Beat Hotel facade and two rooms, complete with a replica of Gysin’s hypnotic Dream Machine. Beiles read poems and had his 15 minutes of fame.
THREE years later he died, dismissed as a footnote to the beat history. An unjust epitaph, says Bellaart, showing me some of the exquisite mid-period poems. “He was hugely cultured. He had an enormous curiosity and an incredible ability to absorb things.
“I see Sinclair as someone who was outside everything. He had no affiliation with any movement. He was the most original of that whole late-’50s Paris scene. But because of his unevenness and his chaotic personal life, he was also the easiest to marginalise, to neglect. And to treat with condescension.”
The archives of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Bukowski, all contemporaries of Beiles, have been bought for huge sums by American universities and collectors, who are proud of their writers and poets.
The Beiles files are stored somewhere in rural France, waiting to change ownership. “They belong in kind, caring South African hands,” says Bellaart.
(Published in The Weekender, 16 August, 2008)
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Writing on the margin from the margin: Who was Sinclair Beiles?
Gary Cummiskey 
Gary Cummiskey 
Gary Cummiskey, Michael Titlestad
Gary Cummiskey, Michael Titlestad
Fred de Vries 
Fred de Vries 
Eva Kowalska, Fred de Vries 
Eva Kowalska, Fred de Vries 
From left: Gary Cummiskey, Michael Titlestad, Eva Kowalska, Fred de Vries.
All photographs courtesy of Arja Salafranca
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Writing on the margin from the margin: Who was Sinclair Beiles?
Dye Hard Press, in conjunction with WISER, invite you to
Writing on the margin from the margin: Sinclair Beiles
Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a compilation of writings about the South African Beat poet who died in 2000, was recently published by Dye Hard Press.
Co-editors Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, along with contributor Fred de Vries, will discuss issues about the book, such as:
· Why has Sinclair Beiles’s work been neglected in South Africa?
· Why has there previously been no serious attempt to evaluate his work, and why has it fallen to a small publisher to make the first attempt at doing so?
· What are the challenges involved in trying to evaluate a marginalised writer such as Beiles?
· What is the purpose and relevance now, in 2009, in writing about Beiles?
The panel discussion will take place in the Seminar Room at WISER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University on Monday, 9 November 2009, at 18:30
Copies of Who was Sinclair Beiles? will be on sale at the event
Writing on the margin from the margin: Sinclair Beiles
Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a compilation of writings about the South African Beat poet who died in 2000, was recently published by Dye Hard Press.
Co-editors Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, along with contributor Fred de Vries, will discuss issues about the book, such as:
· Why has Sinclair Beiles’s work been neglected in South Africa?
· Why has there previously been no serious attempt to evaluate his work, and why has it fallen to a small publisher to make the first attempt at doing so?
· What are the challenges involved in trying to evaluate a marginalised writer such as Beiles?
· What is the purpose and relevance now, in 2009, in writing about Beiles?
The panel discussion will take place in the Seminar Room at WISER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus, Wits University on Monday, 9 November 2009, at 18:30
Copies of Who was Sinclair Beiles? will be on sale at the event
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Fred de Vries on Sinclair Beiles
I did not know my subject. Or more accurately: I’ve never consciously met Johannesburg poet Sinclair Beiles, who was born in Uganda in 1930 and died seventy years later in the Johannesburg General Hospital. I may have bumped into him in Yeoville in the mid-nineties, but I have no recollection of that...read more here
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