Sinclair Beiles: The first poet in space
by Heathcote Williams
“The poetry of Sinclair Beiles is distinguished and long distilled; its unexpected
striking images bring a flash of surprised recognition. The poems open slowly in your
mind, like Japanese paper flowers in water.”
William Burroughs
Despite Burroughs’ impressive recommendation Sinclair
Beiles often fell asleep during his own poetry readings thanks to
a hefty diet of prescription drugs which Sinclair would carry
around in a large plastic bag and which were always placed
beside him on-stage so as to be within easy reach. This was a
pity since Sinclair’s poems, as Burroughs had attested, were
worth listening to, once he could be aroused.
When I first met Sinclair he was living in Paris with a
Creole woman who had filed down teeth ending in needle-sharp
points. Early on in his life Sinclair would appear like an alert
wagtail, always hopping about possessed by new ideas: some
new artist he’d met – an exiled Romanian covered in etching ink
in a recondite atelier in the Marais whose poems were, in
Sinclair’s view, “better than Blake”; Serbian glass-blowers who
made crystal balls that were “better than television”; artists in
light who would “open up your Third Eye till you go completely
blind and mad but you won’t mind”. He had an eye for the
exotic; there was a transgendered Marxist performance artist
from Namibia who would recite the Communist Manifesto in
Xhosa.
Later Sinclair, who never mellowed just slowed down,
would be transformed into a leathery, tanned creature with
hugely sad, hooded eyes, seeming to operate at a quite different
metabolic rate from other people – sometimes giving the
appearance of a languid, philosophical sloth and then, when
baring his teeth in a smile, of a crocodile staring overlong at its
prey in a slightly unsettling fashion.
Here he is explaining himself to Gerard Bellaart in a letter
in 1969: “I can’t tell whether I’m cynical or optimistic –
whether there is something out there organising a life of
pleasure or pain for us. It’s beyond my scope. Whatever happens
is meat for my poetry. I record what’s happening. I don’t care
why. I haven’t been able to discern any pattern to my existence.
I don’t hunger after being part of a total harmony.”
He’d often attain this sort of lucid equilibrium for a while
but then he would always be unpredictably seized by some
unfathomable inner turmoil whereupon he’d explode, flailing
and shouting wherever he happened to be as his demons struck –
in the middle of the road; outside police stations; the food halls
of Fortnum and Masons – it never mattered that he’d chosen the
most perilous or ill-advised venues for his all-consuming fits of
psychic epilepsy.
Once upon a time Sinclair Beiles had been an editor at
Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press and he had lived in the Beat
Hotel at 9, rue Git-le-Coeur where, at various times, Allen
Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Harold Norse
had also stayed, often on a long-term basis.
Sinclair always claimed that it was thanks to his own
acquaintance with the dadaist Tristan Tzara that he was able to
introduce both Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, his fellow
hotel guests, to Tzara’s method of composition, commonly
known as ‘cut-up’.
As is now pretty well-known, this involves taking texts,
either in the form of a manuscript or the page of a book or a
newspaper, and then slicing them up the middle, placing the
disconnected halves next to each other and reading across the
severed, but parallel, lines in an attempt to glean a revealing
new text from the resulting assembly – the technique would
either produce novel, surreal juxtapositions or dire slabs of
impenetrable nonsense – sometimes, it has to be said, its
practitioners being too wasted to tell the difference.
It was a method later adopted as a helpful adjunct to his
song-writing by David Bowie, and Sinclair would also claim
that it had spawned Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking
following Sinclair’s having given the Professor a tour of the
hotel, during which Sinclair had pointed out some trays of
snipped-up newsprint awaiting assembly and had described to
de Bono how thought processes might be changed and
paradigms shifted, just by means of a pair of scissors and some
transparent tape – thanks to ‘cut-up’.
Sinclair saw The Naked Lunch through the press, going
through the galleys with Burroughs on their arrival from the
printers, and later Sinclair would also persuade Jean Fanchette
of Two Cities press to publish the first anthology of Dadaist cutups
containing the work of its four principal technicians:
Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and Sinclair. The book
was called ‘Minutes to Go’.
Though it’s commonly thought that Ginsberg edited
Naked Lunch by throwing all the pages up in the air, Sinclair’s
version differs: “All Ginsberg did was imperiously present it to
Olympia, where I was editor. I went to visit Burroughs at the
Beat Hotel to convince him to do it.”
In Paris in the early seventies Sinclair underwent his own
paradigm shift by abandoning his muse for an extraordinary
entrepreneurial venture that was entirely unconnected with
literature.
Sinclair had become transported by the idea that the barren
Sahara desert might be set on a much more productive course
with the aid of industrial quantities of discarded tea-leaves.
The idea arose as follows: one evening after a meal with
his mistress (whose distinctive teeth were invaluable in the
maceration of Sinclair’s food – their meals together echoing the
erotic meal in Tom Jones) Sinclair noticed that something was
growing in their window box.
There was nothing unusual in this except for two things:
first, Sinclair’s window-box had been filled entirely with sand
and secondly, Sinclair’s horticultural attentions had been limited
to emptying tea-leaves into it. Yet some form of vegetation was
beginning to grow there, despite these inauspicious conditions.
It was when he was hovering above the tea leaves, the
sand and the newly sprouted shoots, that Sinclair had his Eureka
moment whereupon he began to urge everyone that he met that
tea-leaves were the answer to the whole of the African
continent’s food shortages.
He didn’t let it go at that. With indefatigable verve he’d
throw himself into setting up elaborate presentations –
illustrated by ‘before-and-after’ Polaroid snaps of Sinclair’s
window box; by buckets of sand; by seedlings and plants; by
posters of the Sahara and a generous supply of old and soggy
tea-bags – all in the hope of attracting investors who were to be
persuaded that limitless acres of North African sand could be
composted using Sinclair’s method.
Not only were the Algerian, the Moroccan and the Libyan
by Heathcote Williams
“The poetry of Sinclair Beiles is distinguished and long distilled; its unexpected
striking images bring a flash of surprised recognition. The poems open slowly in your
mind, like Japanese paper flowers in water.”
William Burroughs
Despite Burroughs’ impressive recommendation Sinclair
Beiles often fell asleep during his own poetry readings thanks to
a hefty diet of prescription drugs which Sinclair would carry
around in a large plastic bag and which were always placed
beside him on-
worth listening to, once he could be aroused.
When I first met Sinclair he was living in Paris with a
Creole woman who had filed down teeth ending in needle-
wagtail, always hopping about possessed by new ideas: some
new artist he’d met – an exiled Romanian covered in etching ink
in a recondite atelier in the Marais whose poems were, in
Sinclair’s view, “better than Blake”; Serbian glass-
light who would “open up your Third Eye till you go completely
blind and mad but you won’t mind”. He had an eye for the
exotic; there was a transgendered Marxist performance artist
from Namibia who would recite the Communist Manifesto in
Xhosa.
Later Sinclair, who never mellowed just slowed down,
would be transformed into a leathery, tanned creature with
hugely sad, hooded eyes, seeming to operate at a quite different
metabolic rate from other people – sometimes giving the
appearance of a languid, philosophical sloth and then, when
baring his teeth in a smile, of a crocodile staring overlong at its
prey in a slightly unsettling fashion.
Here he is explaining himself to Gerard Bellaart in a letter
in 1969: “I can’t tell whether I’m cynical or optimistic –
whether there is something out there organising a life of
pleasure or pain for us. It’s beyond my scope. Whatever happens
is meat for my poetry. I record what’s happening. I don’t care
why. I haven’t been able to discern any pattern to my existence.
I don’t hunger after being part of a total harmony.”
He’d often attain this sort of lucid equilibrium for a while
but then he would always be unpredictably seized by some
unfathomable inner turmoil whereupon he’d explode, flailing
and shouting wherever he happened to be as his demons struck –
in the middle of the road; outside police stations; the food halls
of Fortnum and Masons – it never mattered that he’d chosen the
most perilous or ill-
Once upon a time Sinclair Beiles had been an editor at
Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press and he had lived in the Beat
Hotel at 9, rue Git-
had also stayed, often on a long-
Sinclair always claimed that it was thanks to his own
acquaintance with the dadaist Tristan Tzara that he was able to
introduce both Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, his fellow
hotel guests, to Tzara’s method of composition, commonly
known as ‘cut-
As is now pretty well-
newspaper, and then slicing them up the middle, placing the
disconnected halves next to each other and reading across the
severed, but parallel, lines in an attempt to glean a revealing
new text from the resulting assembly – the technique would
either produce novel, surreal juxtapositions or dire slabs of
impenetrable nonsense – sometimes, it has to be said, its
practitioners being too wasted to tell the difference.
It was a method later adopted as a helpful adjunct to his
song-
following Sinclair’s having given the Professor a tour of the
hotel, during which Sinclair had pointed out some trays of
snipped-
paradigms shifted, just by means of a pair of scissors and some
transparent tape – thanks to ‘cut-
Sinclair saw The Naked Lunch through the press, going
through the galleys with Burroughs on their arrival from the
printers, and later Sinclair would also persuade Jean Fanchette
of Two Cities press to publish the first anthology of Dadaist cutups
containing the work of its four principal technicians:
Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin and Sinclair. The book
was called ‘Minutes to Go’.
Though it’s commonly thought that Ginsberg edited
Naked Lunch by throwing all the pages up in the air, Sinclair’s
version differs: “All Ginsberg did was imperiously present it to
Olympia, where I was editor. I went to visit Burroughs at the
Beat Hotel to convince him to do it.”
In Paris in the early seventies Sinclair underwent his own
paradigm shift by abandoning his muse for an extraordinary
entrepreneurial venture that was entirely unconnected with
literature.
Sinclair had become transported by the idea that the barren
Sahara desert might be set on a much more productive course
with the aid of industrial quantities of discarded tea-
The idea arose as follows: one evening after a meal with
his mistress (whose distinctive teeth were invaluable in the
maceration of Sinclair’s food – their meals together echoing the
erotic meal in Tom Jones) Sinclair noticed that something was
growing in their window box.
There was nothing unusual in this except for two things:
first, Sinclair’s window-
to emptying tea-
It was when he was hovering above the tea leaves, the
sand and the newly sprouted shoots, that Sinclair had his Eureka
moment whereupon he began to urge everyone that he met that
tea-
He didn’t let it go at that. With indefatigable verve he’d
throw himself into setting up elaborate presentations –
illustrated by ‘before-
posters of the Sahara and a generous supply of old and soggy
tea-
composted using Sinclair’s method.
Not only were the Algerian, the Moroccan and the Libyan
embassies and their trade legations approached but also the
Secretary General of the UN, and the Queen of Holland together
with Tetleys Teas and Lyons PG Tips who were also all
targeted. According to Sinclair they’d “expressed very, very
great interest, man” inspiring Sinclair to go on to develop
extensive marketing plans.
“Those chimps who advertise PG tips on TV” Sinclair
proclaimed, “they’ll be dressing up as French Foreign
Legionnaires and singing great desert songs and then they’ll eat
some dates from a Tetley’s tea bag-sponsored oasis and
everyone will want to be there with them ” was one projected
advertising campaign.
I remember unkindly wondering how all these various
dignitaries, with whom Sinclair had evidently managed to
secure appointments, may have been reacting to Sinclair’s
conspicuous carrier-bag of pills, all the multi-coloured ‘uppers’
and ‘downers’ that were so constantly and so undisguisedly on
tap.
I’d see quite a bit of Sinclair throughout the seventies.
He’d dropped the tea-leaf project when Gerard Belaart of Cold
Turkey Press in Rotterdam had published his poems, together
with a play, under the title ‘Sacred Fix’ and Sinclair decided to
move to London to do some readings in order to promote the
book.
He came to visit a squatters collective where I lived in the
hope of finding himself a place to live. (We ran a mock estate
agency which boasted that it would “squat the building of your
choice”.
Sinclair was not the easiest ‘client’, being so often
disgruntled for one or other outlandish reason that had never had
any clear prospect of resolution, being more in his mind than in
reality. On one occasion, for example, Sinclair called by at four
in the morning to tell us that a squat that we’d set him up with
(gratis) was full of marauding goblins. These goblins (never
clearly identified) were stealing Sinclair’s manuscripts, then
pilfering his pills and inserting them into his rectum when he
was asleep so that they’d start working “just when I don’t need
them to work!”
I can see Sinclair, in an over-large grey tweed cap and a
great muffler, a briefcase spilling over with his Dionysian word
horde, standing in the middle of the road and shouting up in fury
at an open window in Westbourne Park Road. “Just.
when…I…don’t… need… them… to… work… Did you get
that?” “Yes, Sinclair. You’d better come up.”
Gods, both Judeo-Christian and African, were incessantly
cursed for interfering in Sinclair’s life and sending him highly
unstable muses, usually in the form of female vagrants in
varying states of decrepitude that Sinclair had picked up in the
all-night Post Office in William IV Street off Trafalgar Square.
“This is Mary,” he’d say by way of a brisk introduction,
“I can’t work with her. She’s mad. You take her off me. Take
her under your wing. She hasn’t got any wings. She’s too much.
For pity’s sake.” Often, if he was out of tranquilisers, he might
then threaten dreadful things to these hapless creatures trailing
behind him, although he’d once obviously discerned some spark
in them – something that he thought might help him on his
poetic ascent up Mount Olympus, until they’d disappoint him by
proving, as they inevitably did, not to have the necessary
stamina to tend to Sinclair’s demands. They’d be uncharitably
jettisoned by the monster that lurked inside him; one which
moved increasingly closer to the surface as the years went by.
Sinclair was certainly well aware that his brain had
suffered a seismic and irreversible tilt. He once wrote to Gerard:
“I have been dispossessed from my body and am borrowing
someone else’s mouth to speak through. For the last few days I
have actually been living in my friend’s mouth!”
But despite such evident psychic discomforts (which,
despite his often finding them funny, he always appeared to
believe in) Sinclair spoke with an unselfconscious pride about
the origins of the insanity that he must have found a handicap.
He ascribed it to this. Sinclair had loved the Beat Hotel, he
once said, because “It was full of unstructured people like
myself. Plato hadn’t given city rights to poets, had he? Well,
Plato could now go f-ck himself. We were a whole house full of
poets in a much better city than Athens and we were making it
all work.” But while Sinclair was living there, quite
contendedly as both Beat enabler and as literary flaneur (he’d
published a pornographic novel Houses of Joy with Girodias
under the pseudonym, Wu Wu Ming), he’d encountered the
Greek sculptor Takis and Sinclair had been levitated by Takis as
part of an art exhibition in the Galerie Iris Clert in the Latin
Quarter. It went wrong.
Sinclair had been persuaded to wear strips of metal inside
a special suit and then to place himself between two powerful
electromagnets which Takis had set up in the gallery. “We were
raised up into a magnetic field,” Sinclair said “and managed to
float for about 8-10 seconds. I got very high. It was on film, one
of the French newsreels. Takis had this going on for about six
days, I remember people crowding the streets, to get in”.
It was while Sinclair hovered in mid-air as Takis
magniloquently announced Sinclair to be “the first poet in
space” that something happened to Sinclair’s mental well-being;
it was a change which, though at first benign, grew increasingly
fevered. Sinclair had got high on this electromagnetic
experience, very high and then he’d somehow just crashed and
from then on he was seemingly unable to put the pieces back
together again. His gyroscope’s equilibrium was never the same.
This initial breakdown would lead to successive
confinements and to Sinclair being both chemically and
electrically hammered in an assortment of grisly asylums – often
growing madder and madder as he tried to break out of his
madness, like a wounded bear, unable to quite fathom what had
happened, until in the end, like several fellow Beats, he’d just
make a virtue of his abandoned rampages whenever his
changeable moods took over.
Here is a choice example from a recent memoir by a friend
of his George Dillon Slater who had got to know him in Greece:
“Only once did he [Sinclair] become less than gentle to my
knowledge and that was in Athens, in the asphyxiating
pollution, the constant din, the honking-swerving-screamingfist-
shaking-obscenity-laced psychological mess that driving
Greeks create in their capital. Sinclair was about due for a
breakdown and at such times there was no stopping him. He had
armed himself with two freakishly enormous carrots and was
pummelling passing cars with them, in a not so random fashion.
[…] He began walking across cars as they sat in gridlock; he
kicked them and shouted at them […] while pounding them with
the huge carrots. Eventually he broke off and strode up a side
street, where, stoked by his incandescent brain fever, he
confronted a formidable parked Mercedes-Benz. He
immediately clambered atop it, after scooping up a pail of nails
and a hammer that sat on the pavement unattended. Who could
know what angry demons pursued him, what inner turmoil?”
Slater would discover soon enough: “On the sturdy roof of
Secretary General of the UN, and the Queen of Holland together
with Tetleys Teas and Lyons PG Tips who were also all
targeted. According to Sinclair they’d “expressed very, very
great interest, man” inspiring Sinclair to go on to develop
extensive marketing plans.
“Those chimps who advertise PG tips on TV” Sinclair
proclaimed, “they’ll be dressing up as French Foreign
Legionnaires and singing great desert songs and then they’ll eat
some dates from a Tetley’s tea bag-
advertising campaign.
I remember unkindly wondering how all these various
dignitaries, with whom Sinclair had evidently managed to
secure appointments, may have been reacting to Sinclair’s
conspicuous carrier-
tap.
I’d see quite a bit of Sinclair throughout the seventies.
He’d dropped the tea-
with a play, under the title ‘Sacred Fix’ and Sinclair decided to
move to London to do some readings in order to promote the
book.
He came to visit a squatters collective where I lived in the
hope of finding himself a place to live. (We ran a mock estate
agency which boasted that it would “squat the building of your
choice”.
Sinclair was not the easiest ‘client’, being so often
disgruntled for one or other outlandish reason that had never had
any clear prospect of resolution, being more in his mind than in
reality. On one occasion, for example, Sinclair called by at four
in the morning to tell us that a squat that we’d set him up with
(gratis) was full of marauding goblins. These goblins (never
clearly identified) were stealing Sinclair’s manuscripts, then
pilfering his pills and inserting them into his rectum when he
was asleep so that they’d start working “just when I don’t need
them to work!”
I can see Sinclair, in an over-
horde, standing in the middle of the road and shouting up in fury
at an open window in Westbourne Park Road. “Just.
when…I…don’t… need… them… to… work… Did you get
that?” “Yes, Sinclair. You’d better come up.”
Gods, both Judeo-
unstable muses, usually in the form of female vagrants in
varying states of decrepitude that Sinclair had picked up in the
all-
“This is Mary,” he’d say by way of a brisk introduction,
“I can’t work with her. She’s mad. You take her off me. Take
her under your wing. She hasn’t got any wings. She’s too much.
For pity’s sake.” Often, if he was out of tranquilisers, he might
then threaten dreadful things to these hapless creatures trailing
behind him, although he’d once obviously discerned some spark
in them – something that he thought might help him on his
poetic ascent up Mount Olympus, until they’d disappoint him by
proving, as they inevitably did, not to have the necessary
stamina to tend to Sinclair’s demands. They’d be uncharitably
jettisoned by the monster that lurked inside him; one which
moved increasingly closer to the surface as the years went by.
Sinclair was certainly well aware that his brain had
suffered a seismic and irreversible tilt. He once wrote to Gerard:
“I have been dispossessed from my body and am borrowing
someone else’s mouth to speak through. For the last few days I
have actually been living in my friend’s mouth!”
But despite such evident psychic discomforts (which,
despite his often finding them funny, he always appeared to
believe in) Sinclair spoke with an unselfconscious pride about
the origins of the insanity that he must have found a handicap.
He ascribed it to this. Sinclair had loved the Beat Hotel, he
once said, because “It was full of unstructured people like
myself. Plato hadn’t given city rights to poets, had he? Well,
Plato could now go f-
all work.” But while Sinclair was living there, quite
contendedly as both Beat enabler and as literary flaneur (he’d
published a pornographic novel Houses of Joy with Girodias
under the pseudonym, Wu Wu Ming), he’d encountered the
Greek sculptor Takis and Sinclair had been levitated by Takis as
part of an art exhibition in the Galerie Iris Clert in the Latin
Quarter. It went wrong.
Sinclair had been persuaded to wear strips of metal inside
a special suit and then to place himself between two powerful
electromagnets which Takis had set up in the gallery. “We were
raised up into a magnetic field,” Sinclair said “and managed to
float for about 8-
days, I remember people crowding the streets, to get in”.
It was while Sinclair hovered in mid-
space” that something happened to Sinclair’s mental well-
fevered. Sinclair had got high on this electromagnetic
experience, very high and then he’d somehow just crashed and
from then on he was seemingly unable to put the pieces back
together again. His gyroscope’s equilibrium was never the same.
This initial breakdown would lead to successive
confinements and to Sinclair being both chemically and
electrically hammered in an assortment of grisly asylums – often
growing madder and madder as he tried to break out of his
madness, like a wounded bear, unable to quite fathom what had
happened, until in the end, like several fellow Beats, he’d just
make a virtue of his abandoned rampages whenever his
changeable moods took over.
Here is a choice example from a recent memoir by a friend
of his George Dillon Slater who had got to know him in Greece:
“Only once did he [Sinclair] become less than gentle to my
knowledge and that was in Athens, in the asphyxiating
pollution, the constant din, the honking-
breakdown and at such times there was no stopping him. He had
armed himself with two freakishly enormous carrots and was
pummelling passing cars with them, in a not so random fashion.
[…] He began walking across cars as they sat in gridlock; he
kicked them and shouted at them […] while pounding them with
the huge carrots. Eventually he broke off and strode up a side
street, where, stoked by his incandescent brain fever, he
confronted a formidable parked Mercedes-
and a hammer that sat on the pavement unattended. Who could
know what angry demons pursued him, what inner turmoil?”
Slater would discover soon enough: “On the sturdy roof of
the Mercedes he had a sudden plan to nail the carrots to its roof!
Voila! Une jardin des toits. A rooftop garden! This was not as
easy as it might have seemed, for he was surprised in the act by
a great foam of a man running out of a barbershop the car sat
before and his face obscured by clouds of leather.”
It turned out that the car which Sinclair had been so
diligently converting into a window box with hammer, nails and
crucified carrots belonged to a high-ranking officer in the Greek
navy at the time of the Junta. Following Sinclair’s inevitable
arrest a lawyer friend, Pandias Skaramangas, was dexterous
enough to be able to impress the Greek judge with what Slater
calls “a variation of the crazy-artist defence, citing the tendency
of intense creativity to bring out aberrant behaviour.”
After Sinclair agreed in court to submit to psychiatric
examination or face a term of imprisonment Sinclair left the
court whereupon he promptly melted into the Athens streets and
disappeared. For the most part Sinclair lived in dread of
institutions, and particularly of the electro-shock therapy that
would often be prescribed at moments of his greatest crises,
telling Slater “I know about shocks to the system. When they
administer shock in the clinics they place straps over your
stomach to prevent the spine snapping.”
But despite his largely home-made millstones, Sinclair
flew. He went to the edge, and then he flew and then he fell. But
before doing so he’d succeeded in fertilizing a pre-Beat cultural
desert with a number of his own surreal blooms: he wrote some
eleven books of poetry and scores of plays, and he’d play
midwife to the one book which – arguably more influential than
either Catcher in the Rye or On the Road – would drive a whole
generation insane as they studied the food on offer at the end of
Burroughs’ fork, cackling with a dark and gleeful relish as the
truth of Burroughs’ Swiftian analysis of how the whole system
worked sank in.
Now Sinclair’s own strange soul has been permanently
derailed. “Too many policemen shifting me shivering from park
benches”, he’d once explained in a moment of bleak desolation.
It’s not a full explanation of the still quite inexplicable
Sinclair, but all his life Sinclair Beiles had borne one burden
that could have had a bearing on a life essentially so tragic, it
being perhaps a rare ingredient in Sinclair’s madness in that it
wasn’t self-inflicted.
Sinclair was the grandson of Mendel Beiles, the manager
of a brick factory in Kiev who was destined to become known as
the Ukrainian Dreyfus. Mendel Beiles had once been prosecuted
in a notorious ‘blood libel’ case in Czarist Russia – he was
accused of having kidnapped children and of using their blood
in the making of Passover bread. This was, of course, untrue
and Sinclair’s grandfather was acquitted of the charge but,
although Sinclair would sometimes allude to the story in passing
he did so quite off-handedly as if attaching no particular
importance to it – it was just something, after all, which he’d
grown up with and yet somehow you’d wonder whether he
wasn’t ever haunted by in the dark watches of the night.
Haunted by the ancient shades of ravening Russian Cossacks
still determined to hunt down every last reminder of the quarry
that had eluded their bloodthirsty and anti-Semitic forbears.
But, despite all this, the sad, mad and bruised old mind
that was Sinclair Beiles was at root the mind of a natural
ecstatic, a luftmensch, of the kind that society is always inclined
to punish for one reason or another, which is why unreason is
sometimes such an attractive escape route, along with the
trickster’s madness, “crazy like a fox” though it’s tempting to
think, as just intimated, that Sinclair was perhaps also privately
haunted by some dark demons buried deep in his DNA, the
dybbuks and golems of the shtetl which no one would ever be
able to do anything about (and Sinclair must certainly have tried
-he ran through psychiatrists like boxes of Kleenex).
Sinclair was a man who’d often see enemies where there
were none – often perversely going out of his way to fill the gap
by creating them. He’d single out complete strangers in the
street, for example, to curse and berate them, much to their
alarm, until eventually he’d made a complete stranger of
himself.
“Sinclair is just mad,” people would say, or, more
sympathetically, “Poor Sinclair”, oblivious to the fact that,
however mad or even pathetic Sinclair seemed, he retained the
power to enrich.
Here he is in full flood writing to his Dutch publisher at a
time when, as I’ve no doubt, John Michell (since he’s not here
to defend himself) would have been helpful and patient with
Sinclair (HW likewise).
“Memo from England. Victims Wanted.
Life is really very lonely here on the literary level. There is
really no one to associate with or learn from. Drivel everywhere
and keeping on one’s guard that one does not bend purely for
social reasons, certainly not to Ira Cohen with his diarrhetic
illustrations and poems; or to Heathcote with his evangelistic
acrobatics. Why doesn’t he have done with it and found a
church?
The so-called highlight of English intelligentsia is Jean Michel
[John Michell] of Bath with his mystical New Jerusalem
chancre – this cabbalistic ape, this Jew with a foreskin that
covers his whole body like the membrane which covers a calf at
birth or a Bosch creature completely enveloped.
I wish them the very worst of the New Year.”
Despite his lunatic virulence (always relayed sheepishly in
life, as if he half-expected you to hit him) he still made you
laugh, and he continues to make me laugh though he’s dead. He was a fine writer, insanely damaged by himself and the world.
Here are Sinclair’s Last Words, written in Paris long
before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory: “Let me utter my last words in a taxi cruising
slowly/Through the beautiful posies of neon signs./Let someone
else die in my room on a turned mattress/So it doesn’t show
stains. Let him savour the smell of it./The smell of old lemons
and let his last moments/Be guillotined by badly played guitars
in other rooms./In readiness I have a shirt with the black ring
scrubbed off/The collar, and a suit which was shiny before I
sandpapered it./And now I must find my last words:/Oscar
Wilde looked at the wallpaper/and said: “I knew I had to go
first.” Goethe screamed,” Let there be light!” /Chekhov said,
“How stupid it is for me to die.”/ What can I say to the taxi
driver which is memorable enough./I cannot think./I am too
overcome by the outrages perpetrated against me./Perhaps I
should get the taxi driver to cruise even more slowly/So I can
pick up a whore and die in her room/With a beautiful zizzard of
neon flashing through the window./Let her invent my last words
with all her experience.”
Heathcote Williams
With thanks to Sinclair’s Dutch publisher Gerard Bellaart of
Cold Turkey Press who’s done more than anyone to keep
Sinclair’s work alive, and also to George Dillon Slater to whom
I’m indebted for being able to quote from ‘Who was Sinclair
Beiles?’ ed. Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, Sandton, SA.:
Dye Hard Press, 2010
Voila! Une jardin des toits. A rooftop garden! This was not as
easy as it might have seemed, for he was surprised in the act by
a great foam of a man running out of a barbershop the car sat
before and his face obscured by clouds of leather.”
It turned out that the car which Sinclair had been so
diligently converting into a window box with hammer, nails and
crucified carrots belonged to a high-
arrest a lawyer friend, Pandias Skaramangas, was dexterous
enough to be able to impress the Greek judge with what Slater
calls “a variation of the crazy-
After Sinclair agreed in court to submit to psychiatric
examination or face a term of imprisonment Sinclair left the
court whereupon he promptly melted into the Athens streets and
disappeared. For the most part Sinclair lived in dread of
institutions, and particularly of the electro-
telling Slater “I know about shocks to the system. When they
administer shock in the clinics they place straps over your
stomach to prevent the spine snapping.”
But despite his largely home-
before doing so he’d succeeded in fertilizing a pre-
eleven books of poetry and scores of plays, and he’d play
midwife to the one book which – arguably more influential than
either Catcher in the Rye or On the Road – would drive a whole
generation insane as they studied the food on offer at the end of
Burroughs’ fork, cackling with a dark and gleeful relish as the
truth of Burroughs’ Swiftian analysis of how the whole system
worked sank in.
Now Sinclair’s own strange soul has been permanently
derailed. “Too many policemen shifting me shivering from park
benches”, he’d once explained in a moment of bleak desolation.
It’s not a full explanation of the still quite inexplicable
Sinclair, but all his life Sinclair Beiles had borne one burden
that could have had a bearing on a life essentially so tragic, it
being perhaps a rare ingredient in Sinclair’s madness in that it
wasn’t self-
Sinclair was the grandson of Mendel Beiles, the manager
of a brick factory in Kiev who was destined to become known as
the Ukrainian Dreyfus. Mendel Beiles had once been prosecuted
in a notorious ‘blood libel’ case in Czarist Russia – he was
accused of having kidnapped children and of using their blood
in the making of Passover bread. This was, of course, untrue
and Sinclair’s grandfather was acquitted of the charge but,
although Sinclair would sometimes allude to the story in passing
he did so quite off-
grown up with and yet somehow you’d wonder whether he
wasn’t ever haunted by in the dark watches of the night.
Haunted by the ancient shades of ravening Russian Cossacks
still determined to hunt down every last reminder of the quarry
that had eluded their bloodthirsty and anti-
But, despite all this, the sad, mad and bruised old mind
that was Sinclair Beiles was at root the mind of a natural
ecstatic, a luftmensch, of the kind that society is always inclined
to punish for one reason or another, which is why unreason is
sometimes such an attractive escape route, along with the
trickster’s madness, “crazy like a fox” though it’s tempting to
think, as just intimated, that Sinclair was perhaps also privately
haunted by some dark demons buried deep in his DNA, the
dybbuks and golems of the shtetl which no one would ever be
able to do anything about (and Sinclair must certainly have tried
-
Sinclair was a man who’d often see enemies where there
were none – often perversely going out of his way to fill the gap
by creating them. He’d single out complete strangers in the
street, for example, to curse and berate them, much to their
alarm, until eventually he’d made a complete stranger of
himself.
“Sinclair is just mad,” people would say, or, more
sympathetically, “Poor Sinclair”, oblivious to the fact that,
however mad or even pathetic Sinclair seemed, he retained the
power to enrich.
Here he is in full flood writing to his Dutch publisher at a
time when, as I’ve no doubt, John Michell (since he’s not here
to defend himself) would have been helpful and patient with
Sinclair (HW likewise).
“Memo from England. Victims Wanted.
Life is really very lonely here on the literary level. There is
really no one to associate with or learn from. Drivel everywhere
and keeping on one’s guard that one does not bend purely for
social reasons, certainly not to Ira Cohen with his diarrhetic
illustrations and poems; or to Heathcote with his evangelistic
acrobatics. Why doesn’t he have done with it and found a
church?
The so-
chancre – this cabbalistic ape, this Jew with a foreskin that
covers his whole body like the membrane which covers a calf at
birth or a Bosch creature completely enveloped.
I wish them the very worst of the New Year.”
Despite his lunatic virulence (always relayed sheepishly in
life, as if he half-
Here are Sinclair’s Last Words, written in Paris long
before he would have been aware of any pressing need to devise a valedictory: “Let me utter my last words in a taxi cruising
slowly/Through the beautiful posies of neon signs./Let someone
else die in my room on a turned mattress/So it doesn’t show
stains. Let him savour the smell of it./The smell of old lemons
and let his last moments/Be guillotined by badly played guitars
in other rooms./In readiness I have a shirt with the black ring
scrubbed off/The collar, and a suit which was shiny before I
sandpapered it./And now I must find my last words:/Oscar
Wilde looked at the wallpaper/and said: “I knew I had to go
first.” Goethe screamed,” Let there be light!” /Chekhov said,
“How stupid it is for me to die.”/ What can I say to the taxi
driver which is memorable enough./I cannot think./I am too
overcome by the outrages perpetrated against me./Perhaps I
should get the taxi driver to cruise even more slowly/So I can
pick up a whore and die in her room/With a beautiful zizzard of
neon flashing through the window./Let her invent my last words
with all her experience.”
Heathcote Williams
With thanks to Sinclair’s Dutch publisher Gerard Bellaart of
Cold Turkey Press who’s done more than anyone to keep
Sinclair’s work alive, and also to George Dillon Slater to whom
I’m indebted for being able to quote from ‘Who was Sinclair
Beiles?’ ed. Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, Sandton, SA.:
Dye Hard Press, 2010
