Item #39536 Two letters from Sinclair Beiles to playwright, future head shop proprietor and publisher of Home Grown magazine (and fellow South African), Lee Harris. Sinclair BEILES.
Two letters from Sinclair Beiles to playwright, future head shop proprietor and publisher of Home Grown magazine (and fellow South African), Lee Harris.

35.

BEILES, Sinclair.

Two letters from Sinclair Beiles to playwright, future head shop proprietor and publisher of Home Grown magazine (and fellow South African), Lee Harris.

i) TLS, dated June 3, 1968. Athens. 111 words. Beiles writes that “The atmosphere for an exile here is pretty grim”, followed by a few characteristically bleak lines from his journal. The itinerant and penurious Beiles was subsequently jailed in Athens for trashing a Naval officer’s Mercedes, and lived in the Greek islands for a while in the 1970s;

ii) TLS, dated November 21, 1975, Holland Park, London. 98 words + 2 drawings in black marker pen and 13 words in holograph blue biro ink. The letter largely consists of three short ideas for poem postcards intended for publication by Lee Harris (they never materialised). Beiles has embellished the letter with a label advertising a South African cigarette brand, and two hand-titled drawings, the second of which, “A dead man levitates a Live Man”, probably refers to his participation in a happening by Takis at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, “L'Impossible, Un Homme Dans L'Espace” (1960), which involved the use of powerful electro-magnets that launched him across the gallery, an experience he claimed was the cause of the bipolar disorder that plagued him for the rest of his life.

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