Harry Fainlight

Harry Fainlight (1935-1982) was a British/American poet associated with the Beats movement.

He was the younger brother of Ruth Fainlight (b 1931), also a poet, who edited a posthumous volume of his work, "Selected Poems", published in 1986.

Early life

Educated at English grammar schools and Cambridge University, where he was contemporary with Ted Hughes, Fainlight was a precocious youth who admired the Beat poets and published in English magazines like "Encounter" from his early twenties. Dual citizenship gave him the opportunity to travel freely to the US and view heroes such as Allen Ginsberg at first-hand. He stayed in New York for three years from 1962. During his sojourn there, Ginsberg called him, “the most gifted English poet of his generation”, and Fainlight contributed to Fuck You, a radical arts magazine published by Ed Sanders (see also The Fugs).

Like Ginsberg, Fainlight was Jewish, fundamentally homosexual, and a keen experimenter with drugs. While in America his work included a poem, Mescaline Notes and a disturbing epic about a bad LSD trip, The Spider.

Fainlight returned to London in the spring of 1965; there, small imprint, Turret Books, issued the only volume published in England in his lifetime, "Sussicran", a slim 12-page pamphlet. The title is “Narcissus” reversed.

The International Poetry Incarnation, June 11, 1965

When Ginsberg visited London in June 1965 and read at Better Books in Charing Cross Road, the event was so popular, shop manager Barry Miles suggested a larger event, incorporating fellow beat writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso who were due in the city. Ginsberg’s girlfriend of the time, Barbara Rubin, asked which was the largest venue in London. Miles’s wife mentioned the Royal Albert Hall. Rubin spontaneously booked the 7000-seat venue for 10 days later.

Incredibly, for a modern poetry reading, the International Poetry Incarnation was more than sold out. It was, says Miles - in Stephen Gammond’s film," A Techniclour Dream" (2008) – “like a poetry rave,” the first sign of many like-minds being interested in “underground’ art [A Technicolour Dream, a film by Stephen Gammond] .

Harry Fainlight was one of 17 poets booked to appear alongside Ginsberg. His awkward performance, his spasming mouth hampered by having taken amphetamines, can be seen in Peter Whitehead’s film of the event, "Wholly Communion" (1965). The packed hall takes against the young poet as he stumbles through The Spider and is interrupted by Dutch writer Simon Vinkenoog, high on mescalin [A Technicolour Dream, a film by Stephen Gammond] , who chants “Love, love!” when the crowd becomes restless. [Wholly Communion, a film by Peter Whitehead] It was hard for Fainlight to continue reading after this. The occasion upset him deeply, [A Technicolour Dream, a film by Stephen Gammond] though was typical of various crises and outrages in a troubled life.

International Times

Fainlight became a founding contributor of International Times (IT), a countercultural newspaper launched in October 1966 from the basement of the Indica Bookshop. In a review in The Wolf online magazine of "From The Notebooks" [ [http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/15/15_review.htm The Wolf Magazine, July 2007] ] , a book transcribed from a lecture Fainlight gave at the Cambodian Embassy in the ‘70s, Niall McDevitt cites "Tales From The Embassy", a trilogy of stories by Dave Tomlin (another guiding spirit behind IT) which features Fainlight as poet Harry Flame. The narrator recalls smiling at Flame on a beautiful morning, the latter replying with a grimace: “I’ll get you for that!”

When, at the suggestion of Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber offered to publish Fainlight’s work, he lit a petrol-soaked rag and posted it through the publisher’s letterbox. [ [http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/15/15_review.htm The Wolf Magazine, July 2007] ] But he also joined in with the antic spirit of the time. In late summer 1967 John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins organised a parade, “The Death and Resurrection of IT”. [ [http://www.portobellofilmfestival.com/talkpics/talk-2008carnival-05.html Talking Pictures, Portobello Film Festival] ] Fainright appeared in this piece of improvised street theatre as the human personification of the magazine. He was carried in a coffin on a ‘rebirth journey’ from the Cenotaph in Whitehall to Notting Hill Gate (including a ride on the Circle Line), where the procession wound through Portobello Market and IT (Fainlight) was symbolically resurrected at the Tavistock Road junction.

elected Poems

In his review of "From The Notebooks" [ [http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/15/15_review.htm The Wolf Magazine, July 2007] ] Nall McDevitt called the 78-page "Selected Poems" (Turret, London, 1986), edited by Ruth Fainlight “underwhelming”, [ [http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/15/15_review.htm The Wolf Magazine, July 2007] ] noting that pastoral works far outnumbered the poems inspired by his years in New York and asked “where were the gay-sex-in-toilets poems or the out-of-it-on-drugs poems?” Ruth Fainlight responded with a letter she received from her brother in 1981. [ [http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/17/17_hf.htm The Wolf Magazine, April 2008] ] Harry Fainlight wrote: “Your particular duty now is to help preserve the poetry that I wrote before I went to America (& since) & which belongs to your own literary area but which has been cut off & isolated from it by those three intervening years. Politically, it is only the work of those three years which they wish to exploit. And the formulae of exploitation are very profitable & so they keep on repeating them. But they have become more & more irrelevant to the whole of my work; those years exist in it only as a body of water, a lake in a far greater surrounding land mass. Certainly they are not where I live. I am saying all this because there is still no one who really cares enough to be responsible for my work; to protect it from the inroads of philistinism. If you do not, it encourages the philistine movement.”

Fainlight never sustained a significant relationship, never lived with anyone and was, according to his sister, “in and out of mental hospitals all his adult life." [ [http://www.cprw.com/Bush/fainlight.htm Interview with Ruth Fairlight, Contemporary Poetry Review] ] He committed suicide in 1982.

References