23 Nov 2006
I did not know my subject. Or more accurately: I’ve never consciously met Johannesburg poet Sinclair Beiles, who was born in Uganda in 1930 and died seventy years later in the Johannesburg General Hospital. I may have bumped into him in Yeoville in the mid-nineties, but I have no recollection of that. I first heard about him through a musician friend, who had tried to work with him, but had given up in exasperation. He told me Beiles was well acquainted with beat writers like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. My first thoughts: yeah, right.
My interest for Beiles was aroused much later, when I came across a photograph of him in Barry Miles’s book The Beat Hotel, depicting the history of the bohemian hotel in Paris that hosted dozens of underground artists between 1958 and ’63. I saw the picture of a handsome young man, photographed among soon-to-be-famous characters like Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso. So indeed he had know the beat luminaries.
When it turned out there was also a connection with my hometown Rotterdam (where Cold Turkey Press published two crucial volumes of Beiles poetry) I started to consider a Beiles-biography. Beiles brought together three of my passions: South Africa, beat writing and Rotterdam.
Once my research got under way, it turned out there were also personal similarities. Beiles was an only child. He didn’t have children. He led a wandering life, never able to settle anywhere. He was constantly plagued by this nagging feeling that life is elsewhere, whether this was Morocco, Spain, Greece, New Zealand, Paris, London or Johannesberg.
But Beiles was also a sick man, literally. He was under medication for much of his life, had been in and out of mental institutions and had been subjected to electroshock treatment. The list of shrinks who tried to treat him is impressive, including Laing and Berke. He had among others been diagnosed as borderline schizophrenic and as manic depressive. In his letters – he wrote maniacally – he comes across as a lateral thinker, free spirit, smooth operator, growler, genius, intellectual, child-like, dreamer, womaniser, fantasist and sometimes brilliant, sometimes disappointing poet. Moreover the letters, clippings and interviews showed that Beiles excelled in almost-truths, half-truths and nearly-truths. Something he may have picked up during his stay in Morocco, where, in the words of Paul Bowles ‘[people] don’t make much distinction between objective truth and what we’d call fantasy’.[1]
So here I am, faced with the formidable task of describing the life and times of a not quite famous subject who left behind a legacy of endless and often untraceable travel, extremely limited editions of poetry and thousands of letters. He stayed in dozens of different places and knew hundreds of people, from Leonard Cohen to Greek café-owner in Rockey Street. The awareness of the impossibility of re-tracing a life slowly turns into quiet despair, as I plough my way through a randomly arranged mountain of letters, poems, clippings, interviews and books that should provide some context.
But while biography – essentially a well-researched story of a human life - is the problem, it is also the salvation. Biography has inbuilt restrictions, but also offers absolute freedom.
The biography, wrote Dutch essayist S. Dresden in his seminal overview Over de Biografie, is a literary form which is defined by paradoxes. It hovers between the historical novel and scientific research. Every biography is a subjective version of reality, shaped by the author. The subject is at the same time a novel-character and someone who really lived. A biography is framed by history, but it should also carry the author’s interpretation of these historical facts, the artistic truth.[2]
In commercial terms, biography is currently the most popular literary genre. Biographies sell like crazy. We want to know about other people’s lives, peer through the keyhole and hear the gossip, disguised as literature. Anything sells, from the adventures of gormless soccer star David Beckham to the obscure post-modernist writer B.S. Johnson. People have less and less time for fiction. Driven by a need for self-improvement and voyeuristic tendencies, they go for non-fiction.
This development, wrote Ben Pimlott in an essay published in The Guardian last year, has resulted in an avalanche of low quality publications.[3] One of the reasons for this disconcerting phenomenon is that ‘where a novelist has to create a world and grab attention within the first few pages, a biographer can compensate for dull thoughts and flat writing by offering a stolen yarn about a figure of historical interest’. The other reason is that its popularity has turned the biography into a ‘constipated form’. Ever longer, ever more meticulously researched, biographies have become scholarly monuments. There is an urge to be ‘definitive’, meaning inclusiveness instead of selectivity.
It would be tempting, especially from a commercial point of view, to place Beiles firmly in the beat tradition, and write in a straightforward, linear narrative, much like Barry Miles has done with his books on Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac. Like the beats (who themselves had actually very little in common except for a bohemian lifestyle, a fanatical urge to write and a rejection of American society) he was a free spirit. But where the beats were quintessentially American in their outlook and writing, Beiles drew from diverse sources, ranging from the surrealists and the ancient Greeks to Chaucer and Rabelais. Moreover, Beiles never became famous like Ginsberg or Burroughs. And his South African and Jewish roots beg for a different approach.
It would also be easy to portray Beiles as some kind of exotic derivative of Burroughs. And although his years in the Paris Beat Hotel and his work with Burroughs (he edited Naked Lunch and co-wrote Minutes to Go with Burroughs, Corso and Gysin) were pivotal, Beiles had little in common with Burroughs, apart from financial dependency on a parental trust fund. Beiles wasn’t gay, wasn’t a junkie, wasn’t cool, wasn’t a novelist and wasn’t a guilt ridden murderer.
That said, writing a Beiles biography does entail similar problems as writing a beat biography. Basically, a beat biography is a contradiction in terms. The beats wrote their own biographies, which were endlessly open and could be interpreted in multiple ways. Their lives were their art, their art was their lives - life was lived to write about. The beats scoffed at the idea of anything resembling a structure in life. If there was a structure, it was a sense of self-destruction.
Often there was no distinction between fact and fiction. The beats were elusive: they hid in the city’s underbelly; they travelled all over the world, with a preference for places with a touch of Otherness, like Mexico and Morocco. There were times when no one knew where or how they were. They were compulsive letter writers, through which they created and perpetuated their own myths, which resulted in infinite interpretations and re-interpretations, dependent on person, time and place.
And, the nightmare for any biographer, facts were hardly ever facts. Take for instance a seemingly simple incident, the conception of Minutes to Go in 1959, in which Beiles’s life overlapped temporarily with that of Burroughs.
Fact: In April 1960 this small blue book, a collection of cut-up prose and poetry by Beiles, Burroughs, Corso and Gysin, was published by Paris based Two Cities.
How did this book come about?
Barry Miles starts the “Cut-Ups” chapter in his Burroughs biography El Hombre Invisible with the words: “One day in late September 1959…”. That day, writes Miles, Brion Gysin was in Beat Hotel mounting drawings and slicing through the boards while simultaneously slicing through the Herald Tribunes he was using to protect the table. When he was finished, he took the strip away and noticed a strip underneath which could be read across, combining stories from different pages. [4]
Gysin told Burroughs about his discovery, who was equally excited and called it “a project for disastrous success”. The two did more experiments with newspapers, and later literary texts. Within days, writes Miles, they had introduced Corso and Beiles to this new method of writing. Soon the four of them had enough “cut-ups” to make a selection of the best for a small volume, which would become Minutes to Go.
Miles says that Burroughs and Gysin took the project extremely seriously. So seriously that there were big arguments between them, Corso and Beiles. “Beiles later reported getting so tense that he had to leave the room to throw up.”[5]
In his Ginsberg biography, which appeared three years earlier, Miles described Beiles’s state as slightly worse: “The ensuing argument got so bad that Beiles had a nervous breakdown.”[6]
In his The Beat Hotel Miles adds more details. The discovery of the cut-up technique happened in room 25 of the Beat Hotel. This time the Paris New York Herald Tribune, The Observer, The Daily Mail and advertisements torn from Life magazine were on the table on which Gysin did his slicing.
Miles dwells on the cut-up and its uses, but he never mentions how, why or when Corso and Beiles got involved. He does refer to the arguments though. In this third version Sinclair “sometimes had to go outside and vomit”.[7]
Late in January 1960, the four poets “prepared the best of the early cut-ups for publication”.
Other sources differ from the Miles version. The recently published book of letters by Gregory Corso, An Accidental Biography, shows that Corso was not in Paris at all during the time the cut-ups were conceived. He arrived in Athens on the 15th of September and stayed there until the 19th of December. Only then did he return to Paris. None of the subsequent letters, however, mention anything about the cut-ups or Minutes to Go. Given the allegedly heated arguments, the breakdown of Beiles, and Corso’s known dislike for the cut-up method, this is surprising, if not strange.[8]
In his Brion Gysin-profile Rub out the Word Steven Davis also uses “one day in September” to mark the birth of the cut-up. He feeds the myth, however, by stating that Gysin was cutting through an article on the Beat Generation that had appeared in Life magazine.[9] In the same profile Burroughs talks about only becoming interested in the cut-up method in the summer of 1960.[10] Additionally, Davis completely ignores the involvement of Beiles, stating that “Minutes to Go was broadcast by the BBC and then published in “a pamphlet” with Burroughs and Gregory Corso”.[11]
Concerning the title, Miles gives three possibilities for its origins. He quotes Gysin as crediting Beiles. “I chose the title by words said by Beiles: ‘You’ve got to get this going, there are only minutes to go’.”[12] Burroughs, Miles continues, “remembered it as coming from an overheard conversation, as a fellow resident of the hotel yelled up the stairway for his company to hurry up because they were late”. Beiles himself allegedly attributed the title to Burroughs when he said: “Burroughs named it Minutes to Go after pulling out a pocket watch and looking at it.”[13]
However, the story Sinclair Beiles told Pretoria journalist/librarian Dawie Malan is quite different. Here he positions himself at the centre of the invention.
Sinclair Beiles: “I remember we’d go walking and Gysin would get very paranoid. He’d say: look at that guy over there, he’s an undercover policeman, I’ve seen him outside the Hotel’s entrance, he’s following us…”
Dawie Malan: “A drug-induced paranoia?”
SB: “I don’t know. He and Burroughs used to construct these conspiracy theories all the time. When we went walking, I used to go out of my mind with boredom, listening to this shit. So I thought I must distract them by calling out signs on the street, advertisements, at random. That set him giggling and then, I think when he was cutting boards, and through the newspapers underneath, it reinforced what we were doing already. Anyway, after that I said ‘Gosh, let’s get together and do it, the lot of us.’ So we went to Brion’s room and there were a lot of us sitting around with bowls and dropping in pieces of paper and taking them out…”
DM: “The Tristan Tzara exercise.”
SB: “Ja. So I said: ‘Let’s make a book, and they said great…’ (…) So everybody prepared their own pages - this was done for about two days, and I took all the pages and typed them up.”[14]
Back to the Pimlott essay in The Guardian. Pimlott denounces contemporary biographers for opting for formula and lack of experimentation. ‘…the Victorian tome still reigns’.
His essay is a plea for variety, an urge for biographers to apply less rigid forms, styles and structures. ‘Good biography’, he concludes, ‘is flexible, making unexpected connections across periods of time, and including unexpected essays on topics which, for the involvement of the subject, might never get written about at all.’ He propagates the subtle brushstroke instead of the plodding typewriter, because a good biography is like a good portrait. ‘It captures the essence of the sitter by being much more than a likeness. A good portrait is about history, philosophy, milieu.’
Biographies are almost organic affairs. Each subject begs for his own type of biography. The scattered life of Beiles, his marginal status and the unavailability of most of his work reject the straightforward factual narrative, the literary criticism as well as the celebrity approach. A Beiles biography demands a different method. It should have pieces of fictionalised narrative, little essays, interviews, poems. Ideally it should be a cubist mosaic of different perspectives, all giving credit and credibility to the life of a wandering poet.
[1] Conversations with Paul Bowles, Ed. Gena Dagel Caponi, Mississippi: University Press, 1993, p 65
[2] S. Dresden, Over de Biografie, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1987, p. 47
[3] B. Pimlott, Picture this…, The Guardian, August 28, 2004
[4] B. Miles, William Burroughs El Hombre Invisible, London: Virgin Publishing, 1992, p. 115
[5] id. p. 116
[6] B. Miles, Ginsberg, A Biography, London: Virgin Publishing, 2000, p 283
[7] B. Miles, The Beat Hotel, London: Atlantic Books, 2000, p. 201
[8] An Accidental Biography, the Selected Letters of Gregory Corso, Ed. Bill Morgan, New York: New Directions Books, 2003
[9] S. Davis, “Rub out the Word”, in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, Ed. Holly George-Warren, New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1999, p. 322
[10] id. p. 322
[11] id. p. 322
[12] B. Miles, William Burroughs El Hombre Invisible, London: Virgin Publishing, 1992, p. 202
[13] B. Miles, William Burroughs El Hombre Invisible, London: Virgin Publishing, 1992, p. 202
[14] D. Malan, Interview with Sinclair Beiles, Yeoville, 1994