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Rosemary Tonks obituary
Rosemary Tonks in the 1960s, when two volumes of her exuberantly sensuous poetry were published. Photograph: Jane Bown
The poet Rosemary Tonks, who has died aged 85, famously
"disappeared" in the 1970s. The author of two poetry collections and six
published novels, she turned her back on the literary world after a
series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question
the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing
spiritual quest.
Interviewed in 1967, she spoke of Baudelaire and Rimbaud as her direct literary forebears: "They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them … The main duty of the poet is to excite – to send the senses reeling."
Her poetry – published in Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) – was exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to 60s hedonism set amid the bohemian night-time world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was "Bedouin of the London evening" in one poem: "I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste."
And "waste" was how indeed she came to see her life in "that frightful epoch". Her own work was "dangerous rubbish" and she followed Rimbaud in renouncing literature totally, believing that Proust, Chekhov, Tolstoy and French 19th-century poetry had carried away her mind, locked her up in libraries, and led her away from ordinary, everyday things, from truth and God.
Living for the next four decades as the reclusive Mrs Lightband in an anonymous-looking old house tucked away behind Bournemouth seafront, she cut herself off from her former life, refusing to see relatives, old friends, or publishers like me who hoped she might change her mind and allow her poetry to be reissued. As far as the literary world was concerned, she "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat", as Brian Patten put it in a BBC Lost Voices half-hour feature, The Poet Who Vanished, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2009. I let her know about this programme – she did have two radios to connect her with the outside world of unbelievers.
She was born in Gillingham, Kent, the only daughter of Gwendoline (nee Verdi) and Desmond Tonks. Desmond was a mechanical engineer, who died of blackwater fever in Africa before Rosemary's birth; he was the nephew of the surgeon and painter Henry Tonks, an official war artist on the Western Front during the first world war and then professor of fine art at the Slade during the 1920s. Desmond's brother Myles was married to Gwendoline's sister Dorothy, the aunt who was later to provide Rosemary with refuge in Bournemouth when her life crisis had become unbearable alone.
Brought up as a grieving widow's only child, Rosemary was sent to boarding school at Wentworth college in Bournemouth, and wrote children's stories in her teens. She had eyesight problems from an early age, with a squint, a lazy left eye and astigmatism in both eyes.
She married Michael Lightband, an engineer (later a financier), at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, London, in 1949. Her husband's work took them to India and Pakistan, where she contracted paratyphoid fever in Calcutta, followed by polio in Karachi in 1952 which left her with a slightly withered right hand. Such was her determination that she taught herself to write and paint with her left hand, and took to wearing a rakish black glove over the other.
After a spell in Paris in 1952-53 – living on the Île St Louis – the couple set up home in the fashionable area of Downshire Hill, Hampstead, where Rosemary played at being hostess firstly for Michael's business associates and later for her own entourage. Living just around the corner from Dame Edith Sitwell – and "hobnobbing" with her, she told family – Rosemary became the toast of London's literary parties, one of very few published women poets of that time and author of six novels, from Opium Fogs (1963) to The Halt During the Chase (1972).
The sudden death of Gwendoline in a freak accident in 1968 precipitated a personal crisis. Believing the church had failed her ailing mother when she had most needed its help, Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi "seekers" before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.
After the collapse of her marriage, she entered the solitary later phase of her life, living just a few doors away from her ex-husband and his new wife, working at Taoist meditation and the writing of a new novel.
In 1977, she was admitted to Middlesex hospital for emergency operations on detached retinas in both eyes, which saved her eyesight but left her nearly blind for the next few years. Unable to see properly, emaciated and "psychologically smashed", she could not cook or shop and rarely left home.
In 1979, she sought haven at her aunt Dorothy's flat in Bournemouth, where again she looked for help from spiritualists – this time Charismatics and Pentecostalists – before finally finding her own spiritual truth in the Bible itself, especially the New Testament, the first book she was able to read as her sight began slowly to return, albeit imperfectly.
Moving into the Bournemouth house in 1980, she completed the obliteration of the person she had been, consigning an unpublished novel to the garden incinerator, along with a priceless collection of Oriental treasures, once her inspiration – all these were false gods to be destroyed. That October, she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised near the river Jordan.
She continued to live in the same house until last summer, when she moved to a flat overlooking the sea after selling, giving away or destroying most of her possessions.
Interviewed in 1967, she spoke of Baudelaire and Rimbaud as her direct literary forebears: "They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them … The main duty of the poet is to excite – to send the senses reeling."
Her poetry – published in Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) – was exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to 60s hedonism set amid the bohemian night-time world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was "Bedouin of the London evening" in one poem: "I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste."
And "waste" was how indeed she came to see her life in "that frightful epoch". Her own work was "dangerous rubbish" and she followed Rimbaud in renouncing literature totally, believing that Proust, Chekhov, Tolstoy and French 19th-century poetry had carried away her mind, locked her up in libraries, and led her away from ordinary, everyday things, from truth and God.
Living for the next four decades as the reclusive Mrs Lightband in an anonymous-looking old house tucked away behind Bournemouth seafront, she cut herself off from her former life, refusing to see relatives, old friends, or publishers like me who hoped she might change her mind and allow her poetry to be reissued. As far as the literary world was concerned, she "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat", as Brian Patten put it in a BBC Lost Voices half-hour feature, The Poet Who Vanished, broadcast on Radio 4 in 2009. I let her know about this programme – she did have two radios to connect her with the outside world of unbelievers.
She was born in Gillingham, Kent, the only daughter of Gwendoline (nee Verdi) and Desmond Tonks. Desmond was a mechanical engineer, who died of blackwater fever in Africa before Rosemary's birth; he was the nephew of the surgeon and painter Henry Tonks, an official war artist on the Western Front during the first world war and then professor of fine art at the Slade during the 1920s. Desmond's brother Myles was married to Gwendoline's sister Dorothy, the aunt who was later to provide Rosemary with refuge in Bournemouth when her life crisis had become unbearable alone.
Brought up as a grieving widow's only child, Rosemary was sent to boarding school at Wentworth college in Bournemouth, and wrote children's stories in her teens. She had eyesight problems from an early age, with a squint, a lazy left eye and astigmatism in both eyes.
She married Michael Lightband, an engineer (later a financier), at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, London, in 1949. Her husband's work took them to India and Pakistan, where she contracted paratyphoid fever in Calcutta, followed by polio in Karachi in 1952 which left her with a slightly withered right hand. Such was her determination that she taught herself to write and paint with her left hand, and took to wearing a rakish black glove over the other.
After a spell in Paris in 1952-53 – living on the Île St Louis – the couple set up home in the fashionable area of Downshire Hill, Hampstead, where Rosemary played at being hostess firstly for Michael's business associates and later for her own entourage. Living just around the corner from Dame Edith Sitwell – and "hobnobbing" with her, she told family – Rosemary became the toast of London's literary parties, one of very few published women poets of that time and author of six novels, from Opium Fogs (1963) to The Halt During the Chase (1972).
The sudden death of Gwendoline in a freak accident in 1968 precipitated a personal crisis. Believing the church had failed her ailing mother when she had most needed its help, Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi "seekers" before turning to a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.
After the collapse of her marriage, she entered the solitary later phase of her life, living just a few doors away from her ex-husband and his new wife, working at Taoist meditation and the writing of a new novel.
In 1977, she was admitted to Middlesex hospital for emergency operations on detached retinas in both eyes, which saved her eyesight but left her nearly blind for the next few years. Unable to see properly, emaciated and "psychologically smashed", she could not cook or shop and rarely left home.
In 1979, she sought haven at her aunt Dorothy's flat in Bournemouth, where again she looked for help from spiritualists – this time Charismatics and Pentecostalists – before finally finding her own spiritual truth in the Bible itself, especially the New Testament, the first book she was able to read as her sight began slowly to return, albeit imperfectly.
Moving into the Bournemouth house in 1980, she completed the obliteration of the person she had been, consigning an unpublished novel to the garden incinerator, along with a priceless collection of Oriental treasures, once her inspiration – all these were false gods to be destroyed. That October, she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised near the river Jordan.
She continued to live in the same house until last summer, when she moved to a flat overlooking the sea after selling, giving away or destroying most of her possessions.
Following his post on the folk singer Shelagh McDonald, Jonathan Law continues his
occasional series on artists who have vanished into thin air with a look at a
strange and possibly brilliant poet…
If you’ve
ever come across the work of Rosemary Tonks, then I think I might hazard a
guess where: probably, you’re one of that vast horde of readers – at last
count, some quarter million strong – who have armed themselves with copies of
the Bloodaxe Books anthology Staying Alive: Real Poetry for Unreal Times
(2002). While this militantly eclectic volume has become far-and-away the
country’s best-selling anthology of contemporary verse, Tonks’s own books have
been impossible to obtain for some 40 years; there is no Collected or Selected
Poems. The reasons for this – and very strange reasons they are too – will
emerge by the end of this post.
If you did
chance on one of the Tonks pieces in Staying Alive, I think you’ll have
paused a little before turning the page. At a time when every run-of-the-mill
poet is hailed as “a unique and distinctive voice”, Tonks’s wholly idiosyncratic
work is a reminder of what such a claim might really entail. Unique and
distinctive? Well, here, from the Bloodaxe book, is the whole of one piece,
‘Addiction to an Old Mattress’:
No, this is
not my life, thank God …
… worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;
Obsessed first by one person, and then
(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another:
These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,
They belong to the people in the streets, the others
Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.
… worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;
Obsessed first by one person, and then
(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another:
These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,
They belong to the people in the streets, the others
Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.
Salt
breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!
Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.
Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd
That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas
That float themselves about from place to place, and then
Spend hours – just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.
Yalta; deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones.
Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.
Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd
That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas
That float themselves about from place to place, and then
Spend hours – just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.
Yalta; deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones.
Meanwhile …
I live on … powerful, disobedient,
Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,
With these people … who are going to obsess me,
Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgiveable
For this is not my life
But theirs, that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.
Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,
With these people … who are going to obsess me,
Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgiveable
For this is not my life
But theirs, that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.
Whether it
appeals to you or not, this is poetry of an alarmingly original order. The
voice is nervy, febrile, often caustic and accusatory, with an underlying
hauteur (“these people”). Sudden swerves in argument and abrupt changes of tone
are registered by Tonks’s most obvious formal quirk – her wanton use of
ellipses, dashes, and exclamation marks. There’s an abundance of brilliant,
baffling phrases (“moody isobars”, “sumptuous tittle-tattle”) – and the
occasional pratfall into something rather like nonsense (“Asia’s gold cake”).
Reading this
for the first time, in the Bloodaxe book, you might wonder why you have
never heard of the woman Tonks and flip to the index in search of some basic
data. But if you do, the mystery deepens vertiginously. The entry reads:
Tonks,
Rosemary (b. London, 1932: disappeared 1970s)
***
While it
would be untrue to say that we know nothing about Tonks, the things that we do
know are not generally those that we long to. After a comfortable London
childhood, Rosemary attended Wentworth School until the age of 15 or 16, when
she was expelled for reasons nobody now seems to remember. Somewhat remarkably,
she was already a published author; her children’s tale Miss
Bushman-Caldicott(“the story of a very nice cow”) had been broadcast on BBC
radio in October 1946 and was subsequently included in Uncle Mac’s
Children’s Hour Story Book. A novel for children, On Wooden Wings: The
Adventures of Webster, followed in 1948. The trail then goes cold until the
early 1950s, when – still aged just 19 – Tonks married a wealthy banker, whose
business affairs took them to Karachi. This sojourn is presumably responsible
for the vein of Eastern exotica – all bustling souks and magic carpet rides –
that runs through Tonks’s poetry. Wretchedly, it also brought an attack of
polio that – by some accounts – left Rosemary with a withered arm.
The early
1960s find Tonks and her husband settled in a vast house in Hampstead and at
the centre of a somewhat louche set in which writers, artists, and academics
rub up against Old and New Money. While some who attended the couple’s
celebrated parties recall a witty and vivacious woman, others remember their
hostess as shy and self-conscious about her polio arm. Away from the social
whirl, these were years of intense literary activity. Tonks reviewed for the
BBC and the New York Review of Books and the first of six adult novels
appeared in 1963; like its successors, Opium Fogs is a short, brittle
satire set in a milieu of wealthy Bohemianism, collapsing marriages, and
intense but unsatisfactory love affairs. The tone has been described as one of
“well-bred savagery”. The same milieu – and the same strong hints of
autobiography – inform the altogether more extraordinary poetry that Tonks
began to publish at around this time; her first collection, Notes on Cafes
and Bedrooms, came out in 1963 and a second, Iliad of Broken Sentences,
in 1967. For once, the cliché about ‘slim volumes’ is entirely apt: the books
contain Tonks’s complete poetical works – a total of 46 short poems.
If Tonks’s
poetry seems outlandishly original to most English readers, this is due in part
to her choice of masters; her most obvious influences were Rimbaud and
Baudelaire and there is clearly a wider debt to French symbolism and surrealism
–movements that remain pretty much unassimilated in contemporary English verse.
She is also, like these writers, a very urban poet – arguably, the finest poet
of London life since Eliot (who was himself largely formed by Baudelaire,
Laforgue, and the poetry of 19th-century Paris). Indeed, it is
fascinating to note how far Tonks’s London – the London that was just beginning
to Swing – is still recognizably that of Eliot, writing some 40 years earlier.
The London celebrated by Tonks is still a city of fogs and smokes, of
sulphurous Novembers and “dark rag-and-satin” Aprils – a real-but-unreal city
of tenebrous railway stations and “side-streets / Mouldy or shiny, with their
octoroon light”, of hidden squares “stuffed with whisky-dark hotels” and
“little bars as full of dust as a stale cake”. It comes as something of a shock
to realize that the London of Alfie and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ is, after all,
closer in time to the city of The Waste Land than to our city of Nandos
and Boris Bikes and unimaginably rich, inexplicably slandered Russian
philanthropists – but so it is, it is …
Poets’
attempts to explain their own work are often weirdly off-the-mark but Tonks
sums up her poetry and its preoccupations very well:
I have
developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write
lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. My subject is city life—with its
sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed
buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its
enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.
The accuracy
of this could only be established at length – but suffice it to say there is a
particularly fine lyric about the “great lonely joy” of going to the cinema by
yourself:
I
particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum
… the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid … or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum
… the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid … or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
(‘The Sofas,
Fogs, and Cinemas’)
and another marvellously strange
piece about crossing the “magnetic landscape” of the city in the “precarious
glass salon” of a London bus:
… I
began to feel as battered as though I had been making love all night! My limbs
distilled the same interesting wide-awake weariness. We went forward at a
swimmer’s pace, gazing through the walls that rocked the weather about like a
cloudy drink from a chemist’s shop – with the depth and sting of the Baltic.
The air-shocks, the sulphur dioxides, the gelatin ignitions! We were all of us
parcelled up in mud-coloured clothes, dreaming, while the rich perishable
ensemble – as stuffy and exclusive as a bag of fish and chips, or as an
Eskimo’s bed in a glass lift – cautiously advanced as though on an exercise
from a naval college.
(‘An
Old-fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes’)
If Tonks’s vision of urban life is more celebratory than Eliot’s, it can involve a similarly fierce sense of detachment from the epoch and the culture. She writes disparagingly of the “tragic, casual era” of the 1960s and more savagely of “a century that growls/ For its carafe of shady air, oblivion, and psychiatric mash”. Elsewhere, you will find this unsettling declaration:
I
understand you, frightful epoch,
With your jampots, brothels, paranoias,
And your genius for fear, you can’t stop shuddering.
Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.
With your jampots, brothels, paranoias,
And your genius for fear, you can’t stop shuddering.
Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.
I know that
to get through to you, my epoch,
I must take a diamond and scratch
On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message
And my joy – sober, piercing, twilit.
I must take a diamond and scratch
On your junkie’s green glass skin, my message
And my joy – sober, piercing, twilit.
(‘Epoch of
the Hotel Corridor’)
In all this
we begin to approach the central mystery of Tonks’s life – her sudden decision,
in her early 40s, to abandon literature and la dolce vita for poverty,
seclusion, and silence. With hindsight, it is tempting to see portents all over
the work. Those who have read the late novels say that Tonks’s disillusion with
modern life and modern loving gives way to something much darker here – an
apparent loathing for materialism and carnality in all their forms. Is there
not a hint of finality in the title of her last, bitter comedy of sexual
pursuit, The Halt During the Chase? (The title is in fact borrowed from
the last, barely finished painting by Watteau. And
what of the poetry? Well, make of it what you will, but the last poem in
Tonks’s last published collection includes these haunting lines:
… England is
darker than a thrush, tonight,
Brown, trustworthy hours lie ahead. Suddenly
My past hurls her dream towards me!
I steady myself … but how tender, carnal, blasé it is.
Brown, trustworthy hours lie ahead. Suddenly
My past hurls her dream towards me!
I steady myself … but how tender, carnal, blasé it is.
Let me hide,
well away from a past that dreams like that.
Away from streets that taste of blood and sugar
When the glowing month smashes itself against the hedges
Away from streets that taste of blood and sugar
When the glowing month smashes itself against the hedges
In the dark.
I need ink poured by an abbey…
(‘A Few
Sentences Away’)
Let me hide:
from the carnal and the blasé, from the past, from the sweet and bloody
seduction of dreams.
***
According to
one account, the moment of crisis was brought on by a visit from Baudelaire’s
ghost. In truth, no-one knows exactly when or how it happened, but at some point
in the mid-1970s Rosemary Tonks slipped out of that big house in Hampstead and
to all intents and purposes vanished. She would never publish again and for
many years the literary world had no idea if she was alive or dead. Even now,
accounts of her fate remain vague – but there seems to be some agreement that
Tonks had a violent religious conversion and lived for years with one of those
semi-sinister hippy-Christian sects that flourished at the time. Other versions
have her becoming a nun and/or spending time in Soviet Russia.
Although
Tonks’s name vanished from most literary accounts of the 1960s, her work was of
such singularity that it could hardly be forgotten for good. Among those who
would try and fail to track her down in the decades ahead was Andrew Motion,
who recalled in 2004: “Disappeared! What happened? Because I admire her poems,
I’ve been trying to find out for years … according to some people she became a Sufi.
Others say she entered a closed order. Others imagine her footloose and
anonymous, travelling the wide world. In any event, no trace of her seems to
survive – apart from the writing she left behind.”
The first
sign of a renewed interest in this writing came in 1996, when Jo Shapcott and
Matthew Sweeney included two of her poems in their ground-breaking Faber
anthology Emergency Kit – Poems for Strange Times. At the turn of the
century several big anthologies followed suit, notably Sean O’Brien’s The
Firebox, Oxford’s Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish
Poetry, and – critically – the bestselling aforementioned Staying Alive.
Apart from spreading the word about Tonks’s poetry, these books inevitably
stirred up interest in the enigma of her life – an enigma that received
nationwide publicity when BBC radio broadcast the documentary Rosemary
Tonks: The Poet Who Vanished in 2009. Paradoxically, the invisible poet was
in danger of becoming a celebrity. Indeed, in 2013 it’s startling to see just
how far the super-reclusive Tonks has penetrated the culture. Trawling the net
in search of Tonksiana you’ll find a much-watched fanvid
in which Sarah Parish intones Tonks’s ‘The Story of a Hotel Room’ over footage of herself in a clinch with David Tennant. You’ll also find speculation as to whether (Nymphadora) Tonks, the shape-shifting magus and Guardian of the Department of Mysteries in the later Harry Potter books, was created in honour of the poet. I’d love to believe that was true.
in which Sarah Parish intones Tonks’s ‘The Story of a Hotel Room’ over footage of herself in a clinch with David Tennant. You’ll also find speculation as to whether (Nymphadora) Tonks, the shape-shifting magus and Guardian of the Department of Mysteries in the later Harry Potter books, was created in honour of the poet. I’d love to believe that was true.
The BBC doc
resolved at least one part of the enigma, by establishing that Tonks was still
alive and leading a secluded, anchoritic, existence in a shed-like structure at
the bottom of someone’s garden. Attempts by the media and literary worlds to
make contact have, however, been rebuffed as firmly as those of friends,
family, and well-wishers over the past four decades. In particular, publishers
seeking permission to reissue the poems have met with a stony refusal. When the
collected volume appears it will no doubt be posthumously – Tonks is in her 80s
– and there will be talk of a major literary event. You can even see a
Plath-like cult developing around the mystery woman with the sharp, cruel take
on it all. Suddenly it all begins to feel like something out of The Aspern Papers. You can almost see those
publishing scoundrels hovering. - Jonathan Law thedabbler.co.uk/2013/04/disappearing-acts-2-rosemary-tonks/
Lost Classics 8: Rosemary Tonks...
Many
have tried and many have failed: all the money in the world can’t buy
you an audience with Rosemary Tonks, whose withdrawal from the literary
world mirrors that of Harper Lee. Though she might not want it, the
small body of work produced by this enigmatic poet in the 1970s is
deserving of a mass audience, says Nichola Daunton…
If
that isn’t strange enough, she is now thought to be living (at the ripe
old age of 81) in a shed at the bottom of someone’s garden, refusing
all contact with the outside world (including her friends and family)
and all attempts by her publisher to get her work back into print. Many
people have been on her trail and failed to find her, the former Poet
Laureate Andrew Motion included.
I first discovered Rosemary Tonks after turning on BBC Radio 4 one day back in 2009 and hearing the documentary Rosemary Tonks: The Poet Who Vanished.
The story alone was enough to keep me listening, but it was the poetry
that really grabbed me, particularly a reading of her best known poem ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ from Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms.
Luckily
for me, after hearing the documentary I discovered that the University
of Glasgow, where I was studying at the time, had a copy of her second
poetry collection Iliad Of Broken Sentences and one of her novels, The Way Out of Berkley Square.
I renewed them both many times no one else seemed to have heard the
documentary and gone looking for her work. Recently, I’ve also had the
good fortune to get my hands on an ex-library copy of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms for the bargain price of £29. With titles like Bedouin of the London Evening, The Flȃneur and the Apocalypse and Blouson Noir,
there is a decidedly French air to much of her work, and indeed the
ghosts of Baudelaire and Rimbaud do haunt much of her writing, something
which made her style very distinct from her English contemporaries. And
yet despite this European flair and the exoticism imbedded in many of
her later poems (inspired by time spent living in Karachi with her
husband) she is definitely a London poet. Her London is one of cinemas,
ill-fated love affairs, cafés, cigarettes and dressing-gown hours, a
romantic and desperate vision of life that seems to cost her dear in
much of her work, and perhaps gives us a clue as to why she wanted to
escape.
Indeed, internet rumours about Tonks
abound, as people try to scrape together any information they can. Did
she suffer from a withered arm after contracting Polio in Karachi? Did
she have as many love affairs as her poetry and her novels seem to
suggest? Did her contraction of Polio effect her brain? Did she become a
nun? The only thing that is clear is how little people actually know.
There are no validated photographs of her, no names of family or
friends. Indeed, it is precisely because Tonks was writing when she was,
that she was able to get away with so dramatic and complete an exit.
Anyone writing in today’s digital age leaves behind a trail so large it
would be quite easy to compile their complete biography.
The age is trying to catch up with her however. If you search for Rosemary Tonks you will find that someone has published the entirety of Iliad of Broken Sentences
on their website (albeit riddled with spelling mistakes!) which, given
that Tonks is so against her work being re-published, raises interesting
questions about artistic ownership. Once you have put something into
the public sphere, it is impossible to take it back, but should we
respect someone’s wishes to not have their work re-printed, even if that
work is of such artistic merit? Whether her work will be re-published
after her death is yet to be seen, but I am sure there are a lot of
people out there who would be very happy if I typed up all of the poems
from Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms and published them online, and
perhaps a handful of people who would also consider it artistic
blasphemy. But as her books become increasingly rare, and prices rocket
higher and higher, her work is at risk of becoming an elitist fashion
accessory, only accessible to those who can afford to pay for it, which
doesn’t seem very Christian-spirited.
Only time
will tell whether we will hear more from this enigmatic writer, whether
she still wrote poetry and novels after her disappearance and if any of
it will ever see the light of day. Perhaps we should be content with
what we have, the mystery and enigma are part of the appeal after all,
and hope that one day her work will be re-published and available to
everyone. - Nichola Daunton
Waiting for a left-wing bureaucrat to make a heart-beat: The electroacoustics of Rosemary Tonks
Rosemary Tonks is a poet and novelist about whom very little
is now known. She was active in the sixties and gained some acclaim for
her collection Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) which by
most accounts had a genuine claim to belonging to the Symbolist and
Surrealist poetic traditions. (Edward Lucie-Smith, an authority on
these matters, certainly seems to have agreed, and that’s good enough
for me.) English Surrealists have always tended to drop off the map
somewhat – I remember having an undergraduate essay on David Gascoyne
returned to me with the comment, “well, it’s certainly all your own
work, because no-one talks about Gascoyne anymore.” But none have
disappeared in quite the same way as Tonks, who apparently became a
Fundamentalist Christian in the seventies and has since ceased
communication with the outside world. This blog post
has some fascinating speculation about what might have become of her
(though of course it can only be speculation) – the suggestion that she
packed it all in after seeing the ghost of Charles Baudelaire is a
particularly striking one.
I was starting to suspect that Tonks was actually one of those mythical, hoaxed-up literary beasts, until I got my hands on a couple of her short, supposedly quite autobiographical sixties novels, The Bloater and Businessmen As Lovers. The narrator in each novel (Min in the first case, Mimi in the second) wields a snappy wit at every aspect of modern urban life; sexually frank, world-weary — something of Djuna Barnes’s cosmopolitan-grotesque aesthetic lurks in them; or perhaps Katherine Mansfield at her most urbane (I’m thinking of the acid and super-decadent ‘Je ne parle pas français’). The later Muriel Spark novel Loitering With Intent also has a bit of this quality – a kind of well-cultivated savagery. The politics of Tonks’s two novels are at times questionable: in Businessmen As Lovers, set in May 1968, Mimi and her friend travel nonchalantly through France and onwards to a Mediterranean holiday with their wealthy friends and lovers whilst Paris revolts; in The Bloater, liberals and lefties are dismissed as joyless bureaucratic bores. I do sense that Tonks is apolitical in all directions, though, and in the second novel she punctures the pomposity of capitalist playboys at every turn – the title refers to both the sexual and material comforts that women can or can’t get from wealthy men, and also to the more specific observation that businessmen “make love” to each other by “flirting” over deals, waiting anxiously for calls to be returned, giving each another gifts…
To get to the point, though. In the first of these novels, The Bloater, the narrator is employed – quite in passing, not particularly crucial to the “plot”, whatever that may be – as the manager of an electronic sound studio. As such it’s required reading for those interested in the development of mid-century electroacoustics. Tonks’s first-hand experience of such studios, I would guess, came from the BBC – her experimental sound-poem, Sono-Montage, was realised by Desmond Briscoe and others at the Radiophonic Workshop in 1966. Briscoe writes about working with Tonks on this work in his book The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years, and the radio reviewer for the BBC’s Listener magazine was impressed by the sound-poem’s strangeness. These sessions presumably gave Tonks the required familiarity with the practical matter of producing electronic sound to set several scenes from her novel inside a studio.
The first thing you notice is that there’s a complete absence of futurism in depictions of the oscillators, tape machines, reverb boxes and so on used in the studio (much in the way that the truly urbane writer is unastonished by modern life and is quite familiar with its grime). There’s no wide-eyed wonder at strange new sounds, and the studios are not gleaming, metallic sci-fi spaces (in the way that Stockhausen-esque electronic music is part of the sci-fi furniture in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, published three years earlier). Instead, we have this:
I was starting to suspect that Tonks was actually one of those mythical, hoaxed-up literary beasts, until I got my hands on a couple of her short, supposedly quite autobiographical sixties novels, The Bloater and Businessmen As Lovers. The narrator in each novel (Min in the first case, Mimi in the second) wields a snappy wit at every aspect of modern urban life; sexually frank, world-weary — something of Djuna Barnes’s cosmopolitan-grotesque aesthetic lurks in them; or perhaps Katherine Mansfield at her most urbane (I’m thinking of the acid and super-decadent ‘Je ne parle pas français’). The later Muriel Spark novel Loitering With Intent also has a bit of this quality – a kind of well-cultivated savagery. The politics of Tonks’s two novels are at times questionable: in Businessmen As Lovers, set in May 1968, Mimi and her friend travel nonchalantly through France and onwards to a Mediterranean holiday with their wealthy friends and lovers whilst Paris revolts; in The Bloater, liberals and lefties are dismissed as joyless bureaucratic bores. I do sense that Tonks is apolitical in all directions, though, and in the second novel she punctures the pomposity of capitalist playboys at every turn – the title refers to both the sexual and material comforts that women can or can’t get from wealthy men, and also to the more specific observation that businessmen “make love” to each other by “flirting” over deals, waiting anxiously for calls to be returned, giving each another gifts…
To get to the point, though. In the first of these novels, The Bloater, the narrator is employed – quite in passing, not particularly crucial to the “plot”, whatever that may be – as the manager of an electronic sound studio. As such it’s required reading for those interested in the development of mid-century electroacoustics. Tonks’s first-hand experience of such studios, I would guess, came from the BBC – her experimental sound-poem, Sono-Montage, was realised by Desmond Briscoe and others at the Radiophonic Workshop in 1966. Briscoe writes about working with Tonks on this work in his book The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years, and the radio reviewer for the BBC’s Listener magazine was impressed by the sound-poem’s strangeness. These sessions presumably gave Tonks the required familiarity with the practical matter of producing electronic sound to set several scenes from her novel inside a studio.
The first thing you notice is that there’s a complete absence of futurism in depictions of the oscillators, tape machines, reverb boxes and so on used in the studio (much in the way that the truly urbane writer is unastonished by modern life and is quite familiar with its grime). There’s no wide-eyed wonder at strange new sounds, and the studios are not gleaming, metallic sci-fi spaces (in the way that Stockhausen-esque electronic music is part of the sci-fi furniture in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, published three years earlier). Instead, we have this:
There’s no air in the workshop, we’re sealed in like tinned shepherd’s pie. The clock is silent but the hands go round fast with that railway station stutter. I’m late of course, and the little silver music-stand has been put out for me already. I arrange my papers; I stop being human. There’s no time to make mistakes in here, they’re too expensive. We are setting a poem about Orestes to electronic sound. We’re taking the sentiment straight, no wit, no discords. We know that however well we succeed, fifty ‘experts’ (people who acquire theoretical knowledge without ever using it) will pour cold water on the result. And the five years later, grudgingly, and ten years later, publicly, stuff our work into sound archives, and refer to it incessantly to intimidate future electronic composers.Tonks’s recording (I mean in writing) of electronic sound is actually a study in obsolescence. The atmosphere, claustrophobically academic, is stuffy in every sense. The studio that Min works in isn’t identified as the Radiophonic Workshop, but its collaborative atmosphere and the strong presence of female sound engineers (think Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Maddalene Fagandini) is evoked. The working process is depicted as one held up by multiple squabbles, such as this one to do with the correct recording of a heart-beat sound:
‘You’ll never get that heart-beat to sound like a heart-beat’, says Fred, the defeatist.I don’t mean to suggest that Tonks’s novel offers a true depiction of the Radiophonic Workshop — I don’t think it’s even intended to be anything of the sort. The things we usually talk about when we speak of Delia and Daphne and Desmond — a sense of fun, an almost twee charm — persist because they’re perhaps in part true. Tonks’s account, though, is useful and interesting as a counterpoint to the kind of discussion. Ultimately, there is a sense that the studio is frustratingly provincial. Tonks’s somewhat continental sensibility dictates this. Min’s co-worker laments that
‘So what? It’s a real heart-beat. It was recorded in hospital. It’s the real thing.’ I’m trying, at least.
…
Fred plays with his tools, a razor, a miniature screwdriver, and some joining tape. He wants to make his heart-beat, and that will take at least three-quarters of an hour. If it’s better than the one I’ve brought in from outside, from the sound library, I can use it. If it’s worse, we shall have to start at this point all over again tomorrow morning. And if you stick in one place too long in constructing electronic sounds, you lose your ear, your memory of sound already used, and your ability to improvise spontaneously so that the whole thing ‘jells’.
‘On the continent in electronic studios enthusiastic young people with ideas work together as a team.’ …(note: The picture accompanying this post is of Maddalena Fagandini, not Rosemary Tonks. As far as I’m aware, there are no pictures of Ms. Tonks on The Internet.) - idletigers.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/waiting-for-a-left-wing-bureaucrat-to-make-a-heart-beat-the-electroacoustics-of-rosemary-tonks/
We both have a picture of flashy continental composers in white macs, young, clean-shaven, and curt in speech, arriving at London Airport with pamphlets and lectures in bison-skin despatch-cases. Whereas here we are, sitting about, waiting for a left-wing bureaucrat with no imagination to make a heart-beat.
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