PLOT

Clancy Sigal. Born: 6 September 1926 in Chicago. Died: 17 July 2017

The first time Clancy Sigal went to jail he was five. His mother, a Socialist union organiser, had been arrested in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for violating social and legal norms when she convened a meeting of black and white female textile workers. Hauled away to the jailhouse, she took Clancy with her.

As a US Army sergeant in Germany, he plotted to assassinate Hermann Göring at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. A victim of the movie industry’s Communist-baiting blacklist, he represented Barbara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood agent (but improvidently rejected James Dean and Elvis Presley as clients).

During a 30-year selfimposed exile in Britain as an anti-war radical, Sigal was Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Doris Lessing’s lover and flirted with suicide as a sometime patient of RD Laing, the iconoclastic psychiatrist.

In short, in a mixed-bag life of almost a century, Sigal had enough rambunctious experiences to fill a novel — or, in his case, several of them. He drew on his escapades in criticallyacclaimed memoirs and autobiographical novels, developing a cult following, especially in Britain.

But when he died in Los Angeles at 90, he had never quite equalled the fame and commercial success achieved in the United States by other stars in his literary constellation — none of whom burned more blisteringly.

Sigal was a prolific essayist for The Guardian and other publications and a popular BBC commentator. His books, most famously Going Away: A Report, a Memoir (1961), chronicling a crosscountry escapist odyssey in a red-and-white Desoto convertible, were described as “proletarian literature”. The journalist George Plimpton ranked them with the works of Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Jack Kerouac and Harry Matthews in the genre of “American picaresque”.

As a career agitator on behalf of American blacks, Vietnam War deserters and the mentally ill, Sigal mirrored his fictional alter ego, Gus Black, in The Secret Defector (1992). “A traveling salesman of resistance, Willy Loman with leaflets in my battered suitcase instead of nylon stockings,” he wrote.

Clarence Sigal (he was named for the vaunted defence lawyer Clarence Darrow) was born on 6 September, 1926. He became Clancy when, while working as a stock boy at a department store, a boss with a speech impediment mispronounced his name. His birth certificate says he was born in Chicago; a cousin always insisted to him that he was actually born in Brooklyn, where he apparently spent time as a toddler.

Sigal’s first taste of egogratifying literary recognition came at the age of 10, when a local youth counsellor referred to him in a novel, Boys’ Club. He was 13 when he decided to become a writer. Too young to enlist in the Army when he sought to at 17, he was drafted in 1944 and shipped to Europe in the midst of the Second World War.

It was after the war, in occupied Germany, that he slipped away from his unit to Nuremberg. By his account he hoped to shoot Göring, the captured Nazi Luftwaffe commander, at his trial, but his gun was confiscatedatacheckpointbefore he could reach the courtroom.

After his discharge from the Army, he returned to California and enrolled at UCLA. There, he later wrote, a precursor to the Watergate scandal played out. As the story goes, a fellow student, H.R. Haldeman — the future chief of staff to President Richard M. Nixon — tried to cover up the beating death of a dog during a hazing ceremony at a fraternity where Haldeman, known as Bob, was pledge master. The incident was reported in the campus newspaper The Daily Bruin, where Sigal was an editor.

Sigal graduated from the university with a degree in English and briefly found work at Columbia Pictures, making his sole screen appearance in 1951 as a savage in the B movie Bride of the Gorilla, with Lon Chaney Jr. A card-carrying Communist at the time, he was blacklisted briefly for mimeographing subversive leaflets, he said, and joined the Sam Jaffe Agency.

In Britain, he and Laing experimented with LSD and, while dabbling in what he described as “an amoral Dostoyevskian world almost beyond suicide,” they formed the Philadelphia Association, a charity dedicated to the humane treatment of the mentally-ill. His self-diagnosis, he told The Chicago Tribune in 1992, was straightforward: “I’m this perfectly ordinary Jewish neurotic depressive anxiety-ridden professional writer.” Embarking on a four-year affair in the late 1950s, Sigal and Lessing — she was twice divorced with three children — proceeded to crib from it for their novels. As the British author Lesley Hazelton wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1982, along with Laing they formed “a circle of almost incestuous mutualinfluence”. Sigal,who insouciantly appeared in public wearing a Friar Tuck-like monk’s robe made for him by Lessing, was cast as Saul Green in her novel The Golden Notebook; Sigal kissed and told in The Secret Defector (1992), in which the character Rose O’malley was Lessing’s virtual doppelgänger.

When he returned to California decades later on assignment for The Guardian, he married Janice Tidwell, with whom he collaborated on several screenplays, and taught writing. She confirmed his death, from congestive heart failure. He is also survived by their son, Joseph Sigal. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

By his account he hoped to shoot Göring at his trial, but his gun was confiscated before he could reach the courtroom