Sinclair Beiles on mental illness and being an outcast

In 1975 Sinclair Beiles gave an interview to Michael Butterworth, shortly after he had completed a lengthy in-patient treatment for mental disturbance at Bowden House.

The conversation allowed Beiles to speak about his illness and treatment:

“Conditions inside an asylum [being] ideal for a poet, because of the lack of personal responsibility living in the clinic. Somebody would arrive with a tray for my breakfast…and take it away again. Somebody would come and make my bed. I felt I was in a very congenial environment. The people were responsive to poetry – sometimes out of boredom, sometimes out of their own madness.”

Asked, “How do you cope outside, then?” Beiles responds:

“Well, I cope with difficulty. All sorts of things like washing, and all the chores of living like cooking and buying a chop and things like that, I find alien to me. But this time out, I’m trying to spend my time out altogether, and not go back.”

Do you mind me asking how your personal ‘madness’ started?

“It’s a chemical thing.”

Beiles considers being outcast in ‘The Conspiracy,’ and for him the boundaries become hazy under examination:

A conspiracy against us

Everything is a conspiracy

The grocer who wants to be cured of his

dermatitis

The frailty of our bodies

The sun

The light

Getting out of bed in the mornings

Our sex which cannot be satisfied

Which overwhelms us in the underground

And in libraries

A conspiracy of doctors

Who invite us to eat with mute children

Of Austrian mountains

Of getting lost

Of vigorous climbers

Who hug and kiss us

Of the society for the Prevention of

Schizophrenia

Of making love on Turkish trains

O[f] parents who insist on dressing us up

In the clothes of their absent sons

Of typewriters with their metallic clatter

Of lost letters

Of Summer armpits.

We want nothing

Nothing of this life

We do not want children

We do not want our mothers-in-law

To buy us houses in London

We do not want to live on the rent in

Tangier

Make 8mm films

Pose in the nude

Attend cocktail parties in our honor.

This conspiracy is never ending

Spiro and I will die of it

But at least we will die together.

First published here