With the advent of Who Was Sinclair Beiles? edited by Gary Cummiskey and Eva Kowalska, literary critic Stephen Gray, who had dealings with Beiles, “South Africa’s only beat poet”, questions whether Beiles deserves a place in the South African pantheon, much less that of the great Beats.
Along the way, he gives Cummiskey and Kowalska’s effort a goodly carrot:
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.
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Photo courtesy George Slater
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