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Jewish Quarterly Wordslinger: Clive Sinclair 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 London, 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 Martin Amis, Mexico, Texas and Los Angeles. It is the first of Sinclair’s Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie. 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, Kazuo Ishiguro 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 Yiddish-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. JEWISH QUARTERLY SUMMER 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 SINCLAIR 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- CLIVE 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 Jews 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.
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