Clive Sinclair’s STR82ANL: A Review

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece reviewing—quite briefly—the works of British author Clive Sinclair, whose Bedbugs I found while digging around in Newtown’s notorious Gould’s Book Arcade. Thanks to the recent work of Australian lit magazine Contrappasso, the author was spared unjust obscurity, with their publication of Sinclair’s most recent unpublished short story STR82ANL making it into their second issue (available here for purchase). As the days of technological transparency are ripe, one must be careful, to say the least, when google-searching this new title from Sinclair, as the results are varied and not all literary. Yet if you do chance upon the desired result, the outcome will be no less bizarre and intriguing.

Like much of Sinclair’s work, an undercurrent of sexuality flows seamlessly through the text. This is so well accomplished that more than once I’ve had to re-read a paragraph or sentence just so I can be sure of what I’ve read, such is Sinclair’s skill in artistic eroticism, not too dissimilar from Nabokov (most notably in his masterpiece Lolita). STR82ANL delivers exactly what it promises for those whose curiosity and, to an extent, voyeurism, is provoked simply by reading the title. Yet Sinclair’s artistic merits take on a drastically new meaning in his latest work. Simply put, he combines artistry and sexuality in a way he has not pursued before, at least to this extent, and gives new meaning to the word ‘artist’.

Arturo Kingfisher is a married painter, and his next muse is the married Ida Siskin, who agrees to pose nude for him in his studio after much reluctance. What might strike some as sounding positively Anais Nin-esque quickly becomes carnal to the point of hilarity, the hope for romance all but washed away in a combination of paint and lubricant. Writing literature’s most bizarre sex scenes seems to be Sinclair’s forte, however, the effect is amplified in this short story. It is not easy to write sex scenes, or so I am told, as they often suffer the fate of leaning towards either Mills and Boon romance or generic, awkward soft-core porn that does nothing for the literary palate. For instance, in his The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas was apparently the recipient of a ‘worst sex scene’ award for his writing. As Trish Bolton writes in her review of Tsiolkas’ book, ‘Sex is difficult to write without riddling it with cliché, overblowing it with sentiment, or resorting to orgasmic metaphors’. Thankfully, Sinclair avoids both disintegration into archetypal romance and formulaic rigidity, and his scenes breathe fresh life into something seemingly impossible to transcribe into words:

Now he finds himself thinking about it again. He is still thinking about it as he prepares his penis for banditry with a Trojan, and scoops the remaining raw umber from his palette with an index finger. Ida gasps, but raises no objection when he inserts finger and oily paint as far up her rectum as possible. Ridiculous as it sounds he wishes his wife could be there to applaud his achievement as he slowly feeds his penis into Ida’s little anus, which expels some bubbles and a small wake of raw umber.

The scene, of which above is only an excerpt, betrays both realism and romanticism. It is somewhat devoid of romance but at the same time there is, undoubtedly, a subtle sense of intimacy that, I suppose, is inevitable considering the subject matter. Moreover the piece is not without its artistic merits—metaphorically speaking. Sinclair is an astute lyricist whose works are instantly transformed into poetry with just the right phrasing, avoiding boredom and generic language at every turn. And of course, as is so often the case with Sinclair, the potent element of sexuality cannot be understood without its humorous side. And as always, Sinclair injects this humour into his works alongside his Jewish identity: ‘Take that you antisemitic cocksucker,’ Zachary bellows. ‘That’ll teach you to stick your uncircumcised dick into my wife’s Jewish arse!”

For already-made fans of Sinclair, this short story should be more than palatable, though for others it simply may be an acquired taste. The short story is published in its entirety in the second issue of Matthew Asprey’s and Theodore Ell’s Contrappasso, available here.

Jewish New Year: Great Jewish Writers

In light of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year which begins tonight, I thought it a fitting occasion to celebrate some of the greatest Jewish writers whose works have continued to leave a great impact on literature of all kinds. It is fair to acknowledge that many are considered, at least in my opinion, some of the best writers at all of all time.

Beginning with perhaps one of my favourite authors of all time, Franz Kafka’s obscure yet simultaneously accessible works have held the benchmark of great surrealist fiction for come time, and will undoubtedly continue for many more years. My favouriye of his works, The Castle (1926) and The Metamorphosis (1915) are exemplary works of the kind of fiction that was termed Kafkaesque, to denote the nightmarish, unexplainable state of events that one finds oneself in. Oftentimes Kafka’s work bares a striking similarity to Poe’s macabre sense of death and misfortune, particularly his In the Penal Colony (1941), featuring one of the more bizarre, imaginary machines of any piece of fiction. The Castle meanwhile exhibits Kafka’s characteristic sensation of class and social impenetrability, explored through devastating though at times witty prose. Kafka is one of the most popular subjects for analysis, though it’s Imagined Cities’ (2005) author Robert Alter’s simplistic though intriguing insights into Kafka’s works in relation to the city that are particularly poignant, highlighting the theme of isolation that was so central to Kafka’s works: “The city for Kafka is above all a place where one is alone, and his parrable-like short narrative pieces remind us repeatedly. In a few of them, the aloneness is dramatised by the stance of the speaker at the window, looking out into the street.”

Kafka’s case is a particularly interesting one, as his work was notoriously meant to have been burnt by his publisher and friend, Max Brod. Refusing his friend’s wishes, Brod went ahead and published the works that Kafka wished to be burnt. It is a strange sensation to know that while the world has been graced with Kafka’s works, it was, as Howard S. Becker notes in his Art Worlds (1982), ultimately not of the decision of Kafka for us to read them. As such Kafka’s work carries with it a sense of guilt, in my opinion, and emerges as one of the more significant bodies of work to have ever been published. After finishing his diaries in particular I was overcome with a feeling of disturbed voyeurism, enjoying what I had read though at the same time knowing that the author for whom I had developed so much admiration for did not want me to read the source of this esteem.

Often when one is writing about Jewish writers, the inevitable greats emerge: Philip Roth, Henry Roth, a still somewhat neglected Clive Sinclair, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow. Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep (1934), Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) are excellent works of fiction, possibly regarded as the magnum opus of each author, respectively. My favourites of Roth (a difficult choice given the number of his books) include the short but captivating The Dying Animal (2001), in which Kafka’s rare work also makes an appearance, and the racing (and racy) Sabbath’s Theatre (1995), which features Roth’s well-known ‘dirty old man’ archetype character. Portnoy’s Complaint, a notorious addition to the list of banned works in Australia during censorship due to its masturbatory themes, is another great work of Roth’s.

 

The relationship between Bellow and Singer, as discussed in Matthew Aspey’s interview with Lester Goran, shows the often conflicting and intriguing nature of these writers:

ASPREY: You say in your memoir that Singer didn’t like Bellow. Yet Bellow translated—

GORAN: ‘Gimpel the Fool’.

ASPREY: ‘Gimpel the Fool’, which is a wonderful story, and a wonderful translation, too.

GORAN: Yes, Bellow put his heart and soul into it. He was anxious for the world to acknowledge Singer in the same way as he had. But Singer’s distaste for Bellow was as primitive as it could be. He was scared—with me too—that people would say, “This is not Singer’s writing, this is Saul Bellow’s writing…”

ASPREY: You’ve said that Singer was insistent that you take a translator credit even if you didn’t consider yourself a translator so much as a kind of assistant.

GORAN: This was on Isaac’s part a kind of favor that he did. Mostly he did it with women. He would be trying to get connected to some woman somewhere and he would call her a ‘translator’ and the thing wouldn’t get published because she would mess it up grammatically. He felt I was a miracle worker at the beginning. He had ten stories published in a row and he hadn’t really been hitting that well, even before the Nobel Prize, and the same thing after. We did okay.

Asprey’s great article on experimental realism in Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep can be found here: http://www.arts.mq.edu.au/current_students/new_and_current_hdr_candidates/hdr_journals/neo_2012/issue/2009/articles/brownsville

The influence of these writers stretches into various categories, including musical. While Virginian post-rock band ‘Gregor Samsa’ got their name from the doomed protagonist in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Australian rock band ‘Augie March’ were evidently lovers of Bellow’s work.

Criminally Neglected Authors: Clive Sinclair and his ‘Bedbugs’ (1982)

One of my previous posts mentioned in passing Jewish-British author (not scientist), Clive Sinclair. His work, as described by a fellow reader and friend of mine, resembles the prose of Philip Roth meshed with Vladimir Nabokov, the latter of which is one of my favourite authors. Having finally got around to his Bedbugs (1982), this tie to Nabokov in this collection is no exception. The stories carry the familiar scent of Nabokov’s meticulous detailing of subtle sexual obsession, colourful and surreal scenes that are to the point of being comical in their playful absurdity:

Humbert: Naked, except for one sock and her charm bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philtre had felled her, so I foreglimpsed her; a velvet hair ribbon was still clutched in her hand; her honey-brown body, with the white negative image of a rudimentary swimsuit patterned against her tan, presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy lamplight, a little pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock. (Nabokov, 1959: 125).

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1959)

Taken from his Lolita (1959), this excerpt mirrors Sinclair’s rich, languid, poetically sexual prose. Pornography for the mind, and I mean this in a good, not critical way. Though Sinclair’s approach to the sexual is a tad less enigmatic:

She tumbles, hits the floor with a thump, and remains utterly inert. Spreadeagled, supine. There is no blood, but I do not know if this is a good sign or a bad sign. Her hand is limp. I feel for the pulse, but it is either stopped or I have my thumb in the wrong spot. Her heart. Situated, of all places, beneath her left breast. I place my hand upon the breast. It is warm certainly. But I can feel no heartbeat, though the nipple tantalizingly hardens. (1982: 15)

But it would be premature to assume that the stories are just purely fixated on sex (in terms of gender or otherwise), and instead what is being communicated in Sinclair’s obscure yet biting prose is the ultimate powerlessness of both man and woman. Power struggles between the sexes is evident, but ultimately each character is at the mercy of love and jealousy. Marriage, then, is a prominent theme throughout many of the stories- Tzimtzum, Somewhere over the Rainbow, Bedbugs, Ashkenazia, while others, such as The Incredible Case of the Stack o’ Wheats Murders deal explicitly with the familiar debate between sexism and freedom of expression. The theme of marriage as a nail in the coffin is revisited in Sinclair’s great work Cosmetic Effects (1989).

Short stories share the similar format as television shows like The Twilight Zone– long enough to draw you in each time but short enough to disappoint you when each story comes to an end. It makes me vaguely distrustful of the subsequent story, but with Sinclair’s seemingly effortless flow through each story, the break in between is not quite so stark. The last collection of short stories I read that followed a similar pattern in each tale was Graham Greene’s sense of love and loss and the tolerance of banality in his May we borrow your husband? (1967). Sinclair’s stories operate in a similar manner, though with a more surrealistic prose that, again, mirrors Nabokov, but which focuses more on the grim realities of love more so than the bittersweet loss of it that Greene masters. In a story like Rainbow, the obscureness can have a tendency to run away with itself. Though Sinclair seems not to take himself too seriously as the bizarre descriptions of sex and childbirth in Rainbow function more as comic relief, too arcane to be taken seriously.

Being both a writer and academic, Sinclair, like Nabokov and Roth, includes these professions throughout the stories, tapping into the sexual frustration of student/teacher relations in a few of the works, like Lolita most evidently, but also similar to Roth’s The Dying Animal. Politically as much as sexually charged, the gender themes interwoven with each segment appear to be fighting against a common enemy bigger than their own differences- whether it be politically or racially motivated. My favourite remains the first of the stories, Bedbugs, a tale that focuses on a conflicted Jewish teacher’s short-lived affair with a German student. The end scene of this one is perhaps the surrealist, though it is the sex scene that I found to be the best aspect- both magical and dark, a pseudo-romantic scene similar to his later Cosmetic Effects. The scene follows:

Possessed now, I turn out the lights so that Inge’s naked body is illuminated only by the smouldering charcoal, a serpentine shape, splashed with red, and undulant stream of lava into which I fling myself.

‘Take me,’ hisses Inge, ‘here, as I am, on the floor.’

While the madness lasts I pump my body into her, aware only of our sweat and the uncontrollable pleasure, dimly conscious of the mocking parody the dying embers cast upon the wall. Spent, prone upon Inge’s salty body, I gasp for breath in the sulphurous air.

‘Please,’ whispers Inge, ‘I am not finished.’ She directs my hand down her belly to a damper place. Slowly my senses settle as I watch Inge’s spectre writhe, and listen to her ecstatic groans…  (15-16)

Cosmetic Effects, meanwhile, contains a slightly less surreal but all the more amusing account of sexual delights between characters Jonah and Stella:

                I look at her in amazement. Fucking Grace Kelly is not the sort of experience a man is supposed to forget…

                ‘Jonah,’ she says, looking up at me with an exasperated smile, ‘you’ll never find an easier fuck than me.’ Her continuing efforts to verify this claim cause the quilt to slide slowly off my back and, in so doing, fully expose the machinery of her love-making; the thighs, the belly, the breasts. Above each of the last are crescent-shaped scars that resemble closed eyelids. Sleep on, my lovelies, I shall not disturb your slumber tonight.

Cosmetic Effects (1989)

Sydney writer and academic Matthew Asprey conducted an interview with the author in 2009, eagerly awaiting publication. He writes in his Global Prowl travel blog:

There was one thing I wanted to accomplish before the unrelenting expense of staying in London forced us somewhere else. One grey wintry morning I went to Chelsea to interview the writer Clive Sinclair. I’d requested an interview by email a few years ago after reading his brilliant story cycle The Lady With The Laptop (1996). Clive welcomed me into his study. He tended the fireplace as we discussed each of his books from the near-disowned Bibliosexuality (1973) to Clive Sinclair’s True Tales of the Wild West (2008). We talked about Israeli politics, his love of Westerns, his wide-ranging travels. When I have time to transcribe the tapes I’ll edit together a Paris Review-style interview. More people should read Clive Sinclair’s books.  See more here: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/137902-escape-to-lisbon

More people should, indeed, read his books. These include: Bibliosexuality (1973) , Hearts of Gold (1979), The Brothers Singer (a biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1983), Blood Libels (1986), Augustus Rex: A Novel (1992), The Lady with the Laptop and Other Stories (1996), For Good or Evil (1998), Meet the Wife (2002) and True Tales of the Wild West (2008). His works are mostly found on the sites Abebooks.com and Amazon.