Richard Wright, haiku and Sinclair Beiles

"In 1959, he (Richard Wright) was introduced to haiku by Sinclair Beiles , a young South African poet who loved its form. Beiles was living in Paris and associating with other poets of the 'Beat generation' such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gary Snyder. Beiles's and the Beat poets' interest in Zen led Wright to the knowledge of haiku. Because the Beat Hotel was in the Latin Quarter and Wright lived very close to the hotel, Wright often frequented the hotel bar....Wright borrowed, from Sinclair Beiles,  RH Blyth's four volumes on the art and history of the haiku and its relationship to Zen philosophy and settled down to rediscover his old dream of oneness with life..."

(from The Richard Wright Encyclopedia,  Jerry W Ward, Robert J Butler)   

The passing of a poet: an obituary for Sinclair Beiles, by Shaun de Waal

Sinclair Beiles, who died on November 3 [2000] at the age of 70 in Johannesburg Hospital, was one of South Africa’s more unusual and often underrated poets. He was the first winner of the Ingrid Jonker Memorial Prize for poetry in 1970, but in later years was reduced to photocopying his poetry and plays and donating them to libraries to ensure, as he put it, that they would go on record.

Beiles was born in Kampala, Uganda, and educated in South Africa. During the 1950s and 1960s he travelled the world, establishing links with the beat generation of writers, particularly William Burroughs. He collaborated with Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin on early experiments with cut-ups – work in which the text was chopped up and then reassembled semi-randomly. The results of their first experiments were published as Minutes to Go. Burroughs continued to use this technique throughout the Sixties. Beiles also worked with Burroughs on the composition of Naked Lunch, in Tangier in the late Fifties, along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and helped get it published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press in Paris (where Beiles later stayed in the famous “beat hotel” along with Burroughs and Gysin). Naked Lunch went on to become one of the most influential texts of the Sixties counterculture and subsequently post-modern literature in general.

Beiles’s own poetry made less use of an intentional cut-up technique, but reflected a lack of concern with traditional poetic virtues, relying instead on raw energy and an immediate unedited apprehension of the poet’s reality. Beiles’s 1969 volume, Ashes of Experience, was his first substantial publication, written largely during a stay in Greece.

Beiles returned to South Africa in the Seventies and became a fixture of the Yeoville demi-monde in the Eighties. He often performed his poetry live, at venues such as the Black Sun, and was memorialised in Anton Kotze’s documentary Sacred Fix. He continued to write prolifically until his death. Among his later publications were the plays in verse, The Needle Vestel and Three Plays: Picasso as told by Max Jacob, and the poetry collections The Golden Years and Aardvark City. His selected poems were published in the US under the title A South African Abroad.

‘The Beats are traditional writers,’ said Beiles, ‘and among our tradition I am the only one who has chosen Chaucer as my model. Like Chaucer I am both classical and spontaneous. My role is as a pure poet. I don’t do anything but poeticise.’

He was buried on November 7 in West Park cemetery.

(Published in Mail & Guardian, November 10 2000)

’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

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)