I found this glowing review of Who was Sinclair
Beiles? on Goodreads today: I certainly could not have asked for more!
Thank you, Mat!
**************
An excellent 'festschrift' (or 'celebration'), rather
than a strict biography, on the mysterious South African beat writer, Sinclair
Beiles.
Beiles is probably most famous for helping Burroughs
get Naked Lunch published at Olympia through Girodias, at a time when
Burroughs was really strung out on paregoric and/or heroin. His most famous
work in print is probably as one of the four contributors (Beiles, Burroughs,
Corso & Gysin) of the now legendary cut-up compilation, Minutes to Go,
published in 1960.
However, as this book illustrates, Beiles is [sic] quite
a prolific poet and playwright and apart from the above two works, much of his
writing has surfaced 'under the radar' and hasn't been the subject of much
attention by either critics or fellow poets and writers. Beiles is someone
whose quality of writing is as notoriously inconsistent as it is hard to track
down and read his books in the first place.
One of his books of poetry, Yeoville, for example,
was only published in a limitation of 4 copies.
What Beiles has in common with Burroughs is their meeting
in Tangier and in Paris, an interest in drugs, an interest in experimental
artists and writers and also, interestingly, a regular allowance from their
families which allowed them both to focus much time on their writing.
I hope this book goes some way to revealing more about
this great writer to the literary world. His poetry and plays have been
criminally neglected and underrated and it is high time that his work is
evaluated alongside many of the other great beat writers who are already firmly
and undeniably well ensconced in the beat cannon and annals of history (in
particular Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg).
Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska have done a terrific job
of compiling these (mostly flattering) articles on Sinclair and his art. This
is the best introduction to a little-known artist.
If you can obtain a copy, I recommend getting the second
edition which is revised and expanded and contains an excellent
bibliography-in-progress of Beiles' works in print.
Read the original post.