A headstone for a poet who moved to a different beat

NICOLA MILTZ

The once prolific yet totally unsung and overlooked poet, died 17 years ago and to this day no one has honoured him with a tombstone befitting a man who lived a less than ordinary life.

Sinclair Simon Maurice Beiles was arguably South Africa’s best Beat Generation poet. He was once described by the legendary beloved Jewish singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen as “one of the best poets of the century”.

Beiles was schooled at King Edward VII School and later at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was born in Uganda to Jewish parents in 1930.

He counted among his friends some of the most famous artists, poets and writers of our time including the acclaimed American Beat poets William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin.

They all lived in Paris at the infamous Beat Hotel in the late fifties – and collectively wrote the highly experimental “cut-up” book Minutes to Go, together.

Beiles, hobnobbed with other famous Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He namedropped friends like Leonard Cohen, TS Elliot, Dylan Thomas – these were his people, so he claimed.

And now a Cape Town man, himself a poet, wants to see Beiles remembered, and honoured for his flashes of brilliance and indelible, although unrecognised, contribution to the archives of Beat poetry.

Mark Hurlin Shelton who met the eccentric Beiles almost two decades ago, recently stumbled on a random Facebook photograph, one taken several years ago of Beiles’ sandy grave. This jolted him back in time to his heady, arty days in Yeoville in Johannesburg when he befriended the whimsical, quirky writer and interviewed him at the Times Square Cafe on Rockey Street in 1999 – possibly the last interview before he died a year later aged 70.

“I was immensely saddened to learn that he was buried in an unmarked grave without a tombstone and I wish to make the South African Jewish community aware, so that he might be remembered and honoured properly,” said Shelton who works as a Cape Town-based children’s entertainer.

He transcribed his interview with Beiles, intending to publish it, but never got around to doing so, and gave it the title “A cup of coffee with the poet, Sinclair Beiles”.

In it he quotes Beiles describing his early writing days: “I wrote my first poem when I was 17 years old. I traced it with my finger on the sands of Clifton beach. It was titled ‘Her eyes were red as Fireflies’, it was for an ex-girlfriend. I sat and watched as the sea came in and washed it away.”

Their interview took place over several hours during a rainy afternoon. Beiles chatted about his associations with many famous poets and writers including Ernest Hemingway, TS Elliot, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder.

Of Allen Ginsberg, Beiles had said: “I met Ginsberg in Tangiers with Burroughs. We would go together to the Cafe de Paris to smoke hashish… drink mint tea… Ginsberg was neurotic and quite mad in many respects… I liked him a lot. He was extremely emotional and he could get carried away on some or other wave of sincere feeling.”

Of Dylan Thomas, he told Shelton: “We used to meet down at the old French pub in Soho, London. He was a lovely man, but he was too often drunk. He lived in a world entirely made of words.”

When Shelton asked Beiles how the expression Beat Generation came about, the poet answered: “We were sitting together with Burroughs and Corso at the French Senate in Paris… Although the writers in our circle all wrote very differently, our work was rather complementary and we worked together and co-existed quite well.

“So, we were discussing what it was that set us apart from other contemporary poets. Gregory said that we wrote with a certain honesty of feeling that we shared a certain vision of holiness or Beatitude. A journalist… overheard this and the following day in the New York Herald Times the first mention of the Beat Generation was made.”

Beiles was often misunderstood and criticised by the media, and told Shelton that day: “I feel that the press find my poetry and my interpretations of life odious and irrelevant. They think I am overly euphoric. They see me as a fiddler-on-the-roof Jew, fiddling with words.”

A book published in 2009 by Dye Hard Press, titled “Who was Sinclair Beiles?” and co-authored by Gary Cummiskey and Ava Kowalska, contains essays and interviews that paint a portrait of Beiles the writer who once worked for Olympia Press and helped edit the Naked Lunch.

Cummiskey said of Beiles: “Sinclair was in fact a prolific writer, churning out masses of poems and plays in frantic bursts of activity. He was also, a woman informed me, ‘not well in the head’. He roamed the streets of Yeoville – where he lived – in a similar fashion to how he had roamed the streets of Paris.

“An article about him in the Mail & Guardian at the time referred to him as ‘The Wandering Poet of Paris and Yeoville’… Sometimes it is difficult to separate the myth from the facts about him.”

After Beiles’ crazy experimental fifties, he moved to Greece where he mingled with people like Allen Anson and Leonard Cohen. In the late seventies he returned to South Africa where he married poet and landscape artist Marta Proctor and they settled into the bohemian Yeoville scene.

According to Dutch freelance writer, Fred de Vries, Beiles died “sick and depressed”.

“He left a large number of poetry collections and piles of letters. Although his debut collection Ashes of Experience won the Ingrid Jonker Memorial Prize for poetry in 1970, his work is now out of print, and few people recognise his name or importance,” said De Vries.

Allen Ginsberg who knew Beiles well once said: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked,” perhaps he was referring to Beiles when he uttered these words.

Cummiskey has in the past made enquiries at the cemetery regarding graveside services. “I am one of Beiles’ biggest fans. That is why I wrote my book on him. I feel his legacy to South African literature does not deserve to be forgotten and disappear into oblivion.”

He admitted that Beiles had mental health issues and “could be difficult at times” but many have “very warm and wonderful memories of him and to dismiss him, as some have, as a mad hatter, would be insensitive and cruel”.

It is believed that inquiries have been made regarding a headstone by a biographer, an art dealer and Beiles’ widow Marta Proctor.

The photograph at his graveside, taken by Cummiskey about three years ago, shows a sagging bunch of yellow flowers – evidence that someone close to him had been there. But now all that’s left in this world of Sinclair Beiles is lonely volumes of poetry, books and play scripts which like the poet himself have been reduced to dust.

Beiles is survived by his widow Marta Proctor who could not be reached at the time of going to press.