Wordslinger: burst onto the literary CLIVE scene like Wyatt Earp--and then he disappeared.

live Sinclair spent most of his life in search ment of Custer’s Last Stand in Montana. (1948-2018) of his “inner cowboy”. He grew up in It was Smolinsky-like detective work that precipitated North , in the 1950s as a self-styled this pilgrimage. On one of his many trips to local auc- SINCLAIR “Hendonite”. The dullness of suburban life tion-houses to obtain nineteenth-century Americana, was relieved by classical Westerns which Sinclair bought a photograph of a nude woman covered Cshaped his imagination. In the Sinclair household it was only in a thin black veil. He eventually discovered that the universally acknowledged that John Ford’s The Search- photograph was of Josephine Marcus, Wyatt Earp’s Jewish ers (1956), starring John Wayne, was the greatest movie wife for half a century, whose family came from Prussia. ever made. A visit to the Hendon Odeon to see a Hol- His two imagined homelands (Wild West America and lywood Western (after donning a cowboy outfit with Jewish Europe) had collided. The mysterious photograph The Forgotten his younger brother Stewart) was the highlight of the led to the two novellas in Meet the Wife (2002) and to his week. Centre-stage in their home was a photograph of travel bool True Tales of the Wild West (2008). the brothers Sinclair dressed as cowboys aged 8 and 4 (the year when The Searchers first appeared). In most first met Clive Sinclair as a twenty-something Revolutionary school photographs before the age of 11, Sinclair wore graduate student in the early 1980s. Sinclair, then an over-large cowboy hat. still in his early thirties, had been showered with One of Sinclair’s earliest stories, “The Texas State literary prizes, and chosen as one of Granta’s Best BRYAN CHEYETTE Steak-Eating Contest” (1979), moves between New Iof Young British Novelists along with , Mexico, Texas and Los Angeles. It is the first of Sinclair’s , , and . At stories to include the down-at-heel Los Angeles detec- UEA, where he taught, he was considered to be on tive Joshua Smolinsky. Smolinsky is Sinclair’s Eastern a par with Angela Carter, and Ian 79 European “disguise”--who he “might have been” if the McEwan and was lauded by Malcolm Bradbury and 78 names of his Russian and Polish paternal and maternal befriended by W. G. Sebald. From the beginning I was overwhelmed by the intellec- The East European luftmensch tual energy, breath-taking originality and dark humour of and the earthy, big-hatted Texan his fiction. No one, in Britain at least, had written like this ’ before. One of my early favourites was the story “Ashke- are the two poles of SInclair s nazia” (1982) which recalls a fictitious -speaking imaginative world. country situated somewhere in central Europe:

grandparents had not been anglicized. The East Europe- Many of my fellow-countrymen do not believe in the an luftmensch and the earthy, big-hatted Texan are the existence of God. I am more modest. I do not believe in two poles of his imaginative world. myself. What proof can I have when no one reads what In 1970, when he was a postgraduate student, Sinclair I write? There you have it; my words are the limit of my drove to Mexico in his Ford Falcon from the University world. You will therefore smile at this irony; I have been of Santa Cruz, California. He was an habitual traveller commissioned by our government to write the official mainly in the United States, South America and the English-language Guide to Ashkenazia. Middle East which, along with North London, were the locations for his novels and stories. As he stated in an This was published twenty-five years before Michael early interview, he travelled widely so as to collect sto- Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) and led ries like a “big game hunter”. the way to such imaginative virtuosity. To understand His travelling adventures culminated in a 7000 mile the importance of Sinclair’s fiction one has to go back to odyssey in 2003 around the western states of America. this time when he was rightly thought of as instigating In a car full of friends and family, he traversed thirteen a “quiet but profound revolution” in British-Jewish let- States (from Kansas to New Mexico) in 20 days focus- ters. There were three main reasons for his under-stat- ing on the iconic characters and events at the heart of ed importance. Firstly, the range of his reading which America’s Wild West. The trip included a visit to Dodge mixed Nabokov with Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth with City in Kansas, Tombstone in Arizona (where he held Bram Stoker, Borges with Kafka; secondly, the extent of Wyatt Earp’s gun), Billy the Kid’s jail in New Mexico, his traveling throughout the Americas, the Middle East

Clive with Seth SInclair and Seth Haidee Becker courtesy Photos: Calamity Jane’s grave in South Dakota, and a re-enact- and Eastern Europe all of which resulted in remarkable and Fran in 1989. j e w i s h q u a r t e r l y s u m m e r 2 0 1 8 The SInclair Gang: Clive's son Seth (front), flanked by Haidee, Clive, and Haidee's daughter Rachel.

stories or startling “imaginary homelands”; thirdly, his Holocaust. How are you different from the Nazis? What From 1998 the painter Haidee Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Ba- sense of morality after the Holocaust (as a non-survi- makes the story-teller different? Why aren’t they Nazis Becker provided much needed shevis Singer—wrote their best vor) which placed self-conscious limits on his imagina- if their imagination throws off every Jewish convention contentment. He travelled regu- work in the shorter form. Being s i n c l a i r

tion and helped to define him as a Jewish writer in a that has been laid upon them? larly between Los Angeles, Santa one of the most accomplished “national sense” (as he put it). This moral seriousness informs all of Sinclair’s fic- Cruz, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv post-war British and Jewish Sinclair pointedly attempted to “write fiction that owed tion. One story speaks of a “Jewish Moral Bank” in visiting Seth and his wife Kate short story writers would, in an-

c l i v e nothing to any English antecedents”. He was a master sto- which “all a customer has to do is prove his Jewish in L.A. and life-long friends else- other age, have been enough for ry-teller whose “smart aleck” stories were always devilish- identity” whose members can “sit in judgement on any where in the U. S. and Israel. The Sinclair to be lauded today. ly playful with a battery of puns, puzzles and wise-cracks. question that haunts his fiction The exception to the rule is His topics included hopeless masculinity, misguided re- Sinclair pointedly attempted to after these tragic years is how Sinclair’s novel Augustus Rex venge, or the absurd consequences of sexual jealousy. He write fiction that owed nothing he can write about the death of (1992) which explores the limits was drawn to the gothic—vampires eating butterflies in those closest to him without ex- of the authorial ego in relation one of his stories— as well as other “outlaw” forms such to any English antecedents ploiting their memories? Can he to another great writer of short as detective fiction or the pulp fiction which inspired the live with the betrayal of his near- fiction, August Strindberg. In classical Western. This was a unique voice that was new subject that takes one’s fancy”. Another story invents the est and dearest by turning their this, his best novel, Sinclair has to both British and Jewish literature. Here are a few of his psychosis “Rosenberg’s Revenge” (after the poet Isaac deaths into a commodity—even Strindberg make a Faustian more memorable opening lines: Rosenberg who died in the First World War) which al- in the name of art? pact with Beelzebub so that he lows a character to attack a German student in the name In many ways, Sinclair’s life and his art could not be can be reborn. Strindberg’s death-defying revival be- Call me Schlemiel. You will after you’ve read this. of Jewish victimhood. Sinclair constantly questions the more different. He characterised the novelist in Diaspora comes a source of vengeful humour. But the vengeance (“The Promised Land”) behaviour of who were not there (whose flesh was Blues as follows, “all writers … must invent our own home- is well-earned in the novel as Strindberg was a notorious During the night I have a vision of bedbugs in con- not touched by the Holocaust) and who lay claim to a lands where we spend the best part of our days, utterly ego-maniac as well as a misogynist and an anti-Semite gress. (“Bedbugs”) spurious “moral superiority”. alone”. Here he is weighing the imaginative life of the writer (he even wrote an essay called “Why I am an Anti-Sem- “If you insist upon lying to me”, says my interroga- In Diaspora Blues: A View of Israel (1987), Sinclair with his actual relationship with his wife: “Does she suspect ite”). Confusing the imagination with life is a cardinal sin tor, “perhaps you will have more respect for a rabbi.” outlines his intense involvement with Israel, not least its that my real life is elsewhere, in a different country, without in Sinclair’s universe. 81 (“Svoboda”) writers, artists and film-makers, after 1967. But, in a later her?”. But he was not alone even in his imagination. In later That was why, in recent years, Sinclair repeatedly re- 80 I have never been on particularly good terms book— after decades of the radical right in Israel acting years he was haunted by his many losses and the question turned to the United States (where his son was born and with my organs. What a querulous bunch they are… with impunity—he “reserved the right to use my pen in of betrayal was no longer an abstract question. now lives) in True Tales of the Wild West and his penul- (“Kayn Aynhoreh”) whatever way I see fit” in relation to the Jewish State. He timate collection of stories, Death & Texas (2014). These did not “abandon” Israel but, as his novel Cosmetic Effects By choosing his "talent" over books blur fantasy and actuality by going back to the As well as writing smart, sassy fiction, Sinclair also (1989) makes clear, he also understood deeply the plight his "people" the story-teller founding myths of America. All nations are “imagined had an unusual sense of post-Holocaust morality which of the Palestinians under Israeli control and of his dissi- communities” and Sinclair shows in these late works was taken from and Yiddish lit- dent friends in Israel who could only protest. becomes a betrayer that the imagination and actuality are profoundly inter- erature in particular. Sinclair wrote his doctorate on twined. At last Sinclair was on terra firma and was no the Singer family—Isaac Bashevis, Israel Joshua and o, if Clive Sinclair is such an important writer, why That was why actual living relationships became as longer Joshua Smolinsky the luftmensch. their sister Esther Kreitman—which was published has he been largely neglected in recent years? There important to Sinclair as his writing. His deep and last- as The Brothers Singer (1983). It was the first book to are a number of reasons for this neglect but first ing friendships (reinforced with regular phone calls and hen I first interviewed Sinclair during the bring to life the Singer family as a whole through the among them are the serial tragedies which he en- carefully crafted correspondence) alongside his alterna- height of his fame and fortune he perched autobiographical novels of all three siblings. Sinclair Sdured a decade after the height of his success. Between 1993 tive homelands in California and Israel acted as a point me the prima donna. He perched me at only wrote books that he hoped would add to the sum and 1996 Sinclair lost his parents, his beloved wife, Fran, of stability; a fixed point where he could feel at home the end of his matrimonial bed, where of literature. Since its publication, the Singer family has and his sister-in-law, Susan. A recessive gene caused renal and be at his best with his life-long companions. He still IW balanced awkwardly with my all-too-cumbersome tape become an academic industry. failure (which also struck his mother) and he underwent wished to “distil the essence of other places. To become recorder. In an age of self-promotion, Sinclair was not a In The Brothers Singer Sinclair focuses on a story by dialysis and a kidney transplant during these years. These temporarily at home” in his imagination. But he craved great “advertisement for myself”. He refused to play the Isaac Bashevis called “The Betrayer of Israel”. This is about dark times were recorded in A Soap Opera from Hell (1998) life as much as literature. game and write middlebrow fiction. In an age of political a writerly persona who turns a sordid story of polygamy a dignified and humane collection of essays. This book was The second main reason for his neglect is that Sin- correctness he would rather not write than toe the line. into art. The choice is between the writer’s “talent” and his the companion to his Chekhov-inspired The Lady with the clair, as he would certainly acknowledge, was primarily A posthumous collection of stories Shylock Must Die “people”. By choosing his talent the story-teller becomes a Laptop and Other Stories (1996) which was given the Jewish a short-story or novella-length writer. His first two nov- (2018) will be published in July. These stories, among betrayer and is well-aware of the cost of betrayal after the Quarterly/Wingate Prize among other awards. els, Blood Libels (1985) and Cosmetic Effects, are personal his very best, are full of ghosts and of characters haunt- Holocaust. As Sinclair put it in an interview: After publishing ten books in a decade and a half he histories which have national consequences. These are ed by past loved ones. As Sinclair wrote memorably, The betrayal is that a writer has to be amoral—that was, in recent years, much less productive. Sinclair’s pri- novels, in other words, of the writerly ego gone berserk. “I’ve nothing against ghosts personally; some of my best is what is meant by following their imagination to its orities changed, after so much death and suffering, and But that was also the theme of many of his stories. It is not friends are dead”. Sinclair’s new readers will be haunted furthest extent. But the father-figure in their fiction he devoted a great deal of time to his son Seth as a single a coincidence that it was Sinclair’s collections of stories not just by an unjustly neglected author but by a revolu- becomes the person betrayed. He is the one who says father, his friends, many of whom he had known since and novellas which won the major prizes, rather than the tionary figure who helped to change British and Jewish that this betrayal has happened before and it led to the childhood, and what remained of his extended family. novels. Many of his favourite authors—Anton Chekhov, literature for years to come. JQ

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