Howling to be a Beat

Howling to be a Beat

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-09-07-howling-to-be-a-beat

STEPHEN GRA
Sep 07 2009

Who indeed was Sinclair Beiles? That is the question asked by Gary
Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska in this genial, absorbing and
well-produced booklet put out by Dye Hard Press. Was he really the
great South African poet of his generation (unrecognised), or was he,
well, some sort of impostor? A scam?

The outline of his biography cannot be disputed. Born of South
African parents in Uganda in 1930, he technically did not become a
South African citizen until he had completed his education at King
Edward's and then studied at the University of the Witwatersrand. His
most memorable poem is about those lost days: his father taking him
downtown to the ice rink and the waltzes they played to keep the
skaters circulating, clockwise.

Then he headed overseas to make it there, especially in Paris, where
spoiled children of other troubled nations in the 1950s were intent
on breaking into new modes. So we have his mates William Burroughs
and Allen Ginsberg of the United States, catching up on being
post-surrealist -- in English, which was a novelty then. Apparently
our representative joined these slovens of intellectual history in
the Beat Hotel, even to become one of them.

This feat Beiles tirelessly reminds us of in the interviews included
here, name-dropping being his ticket to fame. Never a mention of
details such as Burroughs shooting his own wife and forever wondering
why she was deceased. As for Ginsberg, smelling of rusty rags -- once
when I tried to interview him and he reckoned I was unseducible, all
I could get out of him was giggles.

Always billed over there as the exotic "South African poet", Beiles
achieved distinction in turn by chasing his German girlfriend over
the rooftops, intending to impale her on a sword. This apparently was
in revenge for what Germans had done to Jews.

But possibly his walk-on part in the Paris scene was not the starring
role he made it out to be.

In the classic accounts of the period, James Campbell's The Beat
Generation and Barry Miles's The Beat Hotel, "our boy" merits only a
footnote or two, and no listing of his works, if there were any, in
the bibliographies.

The conquest of Greece had to follow, where, of course, he spoke no
Greek either and so could further build up the myth of his talent
without contradiction. Walter Battiss schlepped back from Athens a
substantial volume of Beiles's verse, which he and his editor, Phil
du Plessis at Wurm magazine in Pretoria, named Ashes of Experience.

As there was no other text messing up the old forms with such zest,
he was next in line after Ruth Miller and Sydney Clouts to win the
Ingrid Jonker Prize. That finally put an end to the generation of
soldier-poets, opening the way for the 1970s.

Next I went to Athens myself on a mission to collect Beiles's latest,
to be issued as an offshoot of IZWI magazine, of which by then Du
Plessis and I were two of the editors.

Hence Tales of 1972, published by so-called Gryphon Poets (spot the
encrypting of the names Gray and Phil there).

The sculptress Aileen Lipkin, who was for a time to become Beiles's
partner once he returned, provided the logo. Graphics were by Cecil
Skotnes in a limited edition, which as a result was due to be a sell-out.

When I went to Caxton Printers in Doornfontein to collect a copy of
what I had so slaved over, I found I had been deleted on the press.
Instead the volume bore the notice: "Produced by Bernard Sachs."

Sachs, an acquaintance of Beiles's generous mother, who was our
sponsor, was the man who had purloined much of Herman Charles Bosman.
End of my career as a publisher.

For Lionel Abrahams of Purple Renoster, Beiles did produce a cute
satire or two of the local scene.

For IZWI he turned in a payback in memory of Ingrid Jonker. But he
was more concerned with his own penis than her suicidal wade into the waves.

"I am an invention. My poems a publicity trick," he had to admit. The
omens were not good.

The trawl of the collection of Cummiskey and Kowalska really begins
here with the records of many local witnesses.

They record his drunken Yeoville years, his spouting about past
achievements, with the publications becoming ever more private or
even nonexistent. Kowalska lists more than 100 play scripts -- anyone
remember a production?

So it was downhill all the way to his demise in 2000.

Was he, as he claimed, famous only for being overlooked? Or was he
merely the demented con man who had all of the South African poetry
scene welcoming him where he belonged, only to blow it big time? Over
to these dedicated record-keepers for an answer.

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