Sinclair Beiles, Beat Hotel, 1960

Photo: Harriet Crowder. Courtesy of Jim Pennington.

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.

Heathcote Williams, radical poet, playwright, actor, and friend of Sinclair Beiles, dies

Heathcote Williams, the radical poet, playwright, actor and polymathic English genius, has died at the age of 75. He had been ill for some time and died on Saturday in Oxford.

He was the author of many polemical poems, written over four decades in a unique documentary style. They included works about the devastation being wrought on the natural environment – Sacred Elephant, Whale Nation and Falling For a Dolphin – and Autogeddon, a grim and majestic attack on the car. Read more.

Heathcote Williams also contributed a chapter to the revised edition of Who was Sinclair Beiles?

Sinclair Beiles on meeting William Burroughs and Brion Gysin

Brief excerpt from Anton Kotze's documentary Sacred Fix

The Impossible Parish and Birds, by Sinclair Beiles

Published in Poems Under Suspicion and Poems on Bits of Paper: A Dual Anthology by Sinclair Beiles and Marta Proctor, Two Cities, Johannesburg, 1982.

Title page of Poems Under Suspicion and Poems on Bits of Paper: A Dual Anthology by Sinclair Beiles and Marta Proctor

Published by Two Cities, Johannesburg, 1982. 

Going Cold Turkey (in Cyberspace), by Jan Herman

The computer screen has become a substitute for reality, dominating us not just by way of social media but — old news — by making artifacts like books on paper seem obsolete. I plead seriously guilty, witness this blogpost with its images and descriptions. A package that came in the mail with several new items from Cold Turkey Press got me to thinking more than usually about this. Issued in minuscule editions, Cold Turkey chapbooks, folios, and cards compose a rare yet necessary archive that subverts the ordinary in literary content and artistic quality. Their scarcity notwithstanding, they are essential cultural documents — scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure, their intelligence distinctive. To be truly appreciated, however, these hand-made manifestations of the publisher’s mind must be experienced in the material world and not as digital simulacrums in cyberspace...More here 

Sacred Fix at the Librarie Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Thank you to Yannis Livadas for sending me this photo: Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and George Whitman at the Librarie Shakespeare and Company, Paris. Photo by Francois Lagarde. However, Yannis's eagle eye picked up what the unidentified man on the right is reading ... Sacred Fix by Sinclair Beiles. Date unknown. Sacred Fix was published published by Cold Turkey Press in 1976, and I think Ginsberg still had his beard till the mid-'70s. So maybe late '70s or early '80s?

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.

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