Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Desmond Boswell Lightband (17 October 1928–15 April 2014) was an English poet and author. After publishing two collections of poetry and six novels, she disappeared from the public eye in the 1970s after a religious conversion. Her complete poems were republished by Bloodaxe Books in 2014 as Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems.

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The Way Out of Berkeley Square, by Rosemary Tonks (1970)

Rosemary Tonks is now known as the poet who disappeared, thanks to a 2009 BBC program (“The Poet Who Vanished”) and features in the Guardian, TLS, the London Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation and others following her death in May 2014 and the reissue that fall of Bedouin of the London Evening, a collection of her poems and selected prose. In truth, she didn’t disappear as much as take a deliberate decision to step away from the life of London and literature she’d led since the mid-1950s. She had health problems, became a devout Christian, and spent her last thirty years in Bournemouth having little or no contact with the large circle of writers, artists, and friends she had known. Sometime in late 1981, she retrieved most of her souvenirs and papers from storage in London and burned them in her garden incinerator. In the years before her death, she read only from the Bible.

The reissue of Bedouin of the London Evening has done much to restore Rosemary Tonks’ standing as an innovative and challenging poet of the sixties. Though praised when her two collections of poems were first published, her poetry is aggressive, edgy, unsettled. “Her poems matched the forceful personality, being rhetorically explosive, with more exclamation marks than anyone else used,” one of her contemporaries recalled. She was neither feminist nor conservative: more than anything, she was an individualist. Several observers have remarked that she most admired the spirit of the flâneur — “equal parts curiosity and laziness” — as embodied in the work of Balzac and Baudelaire:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.

She was a creature of the city. As she writes in “Diary of a Rebel,”

For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness I need the café – where old mats Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves That are brilliant with the nap of idleness …And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!

She told a Guardian interviewer in 1968 that she used to drive straight into the centre of London each morning, and then to a cafe south of Putney Bridge, where she had scrambled eggs. And the photo on the cover of Bedouin of the London Evening shows her at work at a sidewalk table, a large café-au-lait sitting beside a stack of books and papers. Bloodaxe Books is to be commended for taking advantage of ebook technology and included recordings of Tonks reading a dozen of her poems, along with an interview with Peter Orr, in the EPUB and Kindle versions.

Tonks’ work as a novelist, however, has yet to be rediscovered, for the simple reason that it’s almost impossible to get hold of one of her six novels. The cheapest copy goes for over $70, the dearest for over $400. And forget about finding Emir (1963) outside a couple handfuls of libraries worldwide (she disowned it, anyway). Thanks to the Public Library of India, however, you can find her first novel, Opium Fogs (1963), online in electronic formats.

With the help of my daughter and the University of Washington Library, I was able recently to read Tonks’ 1970 novel, A Way Out of Berkeley Square. At the time it came out, the book probably seemed too odd, too marginal to merit much consideration. “I’m thirty, and I’m stuck,” Tonks’ protagonist, Arabella, complains. Living with her father, romantically involved with a married man, and barely employed with the job of decorating some flats her father is renovating, she was neither the Victorian model of a spinster nor the Seventies’ vision of a woman taking charge of her own life. One reviewer dismissed Arabella as “30 on her driver’s license and 13 in her emotional development.”

This is pretty close to her father’s estimation. He would have her be both the Victorian spinster, serving up a hot dinner and keeping a tidy home for him, and a go-getter, diving into the business of interior decoration with a profit-minded zeal. The one thing he can’t accept is what she is:

My father can’t bear ordinary life; a woman in a dirty cardigan with two pockets on the stomach misshapen by handkerchiefs makes him bristle up, the sight of a coarsely-patterned formica table with brown tea-cup rings on it and large yellow crumbs will cause him a temporary loss of personality, his ego buries itself in one of his shoes and leaves the rest of his body to look after itself, grey, inert.

“I’m out of the habit of taking action,” she thinks. “I don’t have a proper stake in life, in the world.” She definitely doesn’t care for a future of caring for her father for decades until he dies — and then having nothing to show for it. But she’s also skeptical that there is any pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow of marriage and/or career:

Inside the showroom I catch the eyes of various men and women, torpid and haggard as drug-addicts, as they turn over the endless fabrics. I have never actually seen a face with an expression on it in this showroom; blanks, and more blanks with dead eyes. The suffering is awful, and it goes on and on, like writing out “I must not say bloody” a hundred times at school, until you’re free to rejoin the mainstream of life.

Yet she wonders, “Shall I take this bit of life, because if I don’t I may not have any life at all?”

Her one lifeline is her brother, who has escaped from London to Karachi, where he is trying to find the distance and energy to make a start as a poet. They write each other nearly every day — he consoling her over their father’s domination, she cheering on his efforts to embrace his new surroundings and work on his writing. When his correspondence suddenly stops, she worries — then panics when she learns after a gap of weeks that he has contracted polio and is barely surviving with the help of his cook. (This parallels Tonks’ own experience of contracting typhoid and then polio while living in India early in the 1950s.)

The crisis kicks her out of her doldrums. Though still very much dependent upon him to arrange for her brother’s care and return to England, it’s Arabella who prods her complacent father and forces the action. In so doing, she discovers a capacity in herself she had not suspected: “I’ve found out that strength is silent; it doesn’t have to be talked about, proved, or borrowed from others. It isn’t even called strength, but action.”

It’s likely that The Way Out of Berkeley Square would have a more favorable reception today. A fair number of women (and men) are stuck living with their parents into their thirties with the decline in earning power and finding the experience demoralizing and emotionally stultifying. And Tonks’ prose is studded with little gems of description. Of her father’s car: “His new Bentley is fully automatic, has doors as heavy as safe doors from the Bank of England, and a steel body as wide as a ping-pong table. Inside you serve from one corner of it, while burning hot air and noisy stereophonic music try to draw off your attention, subdue, drown and kill you.” Of her married lover’s best talent: “Now there are some men who are so good at getting women across traffic that it’s a form of love-making, in which the woman is touched, protected, and lifted forward, until she reaches the opposite pavement in a state of mild delirium.” Kirkus’s reviewer called Tonks’ prose “A decorative style but it’s all parsley.” Well, if that’s parsley, I say bring it on.

I was able to get my hands on a copy of Tonks’ last novel, The Halt During The Chase (1972), so I hope to post something on that as well as Opium Fogs soon.

[The Neglected Books Page, 16 August 2018]

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Rosemary Tonks reading her own poem

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BBC Radio 4 - “The Burning of Some Idols” Book of the Week, Deaths of the Poets, Episode 4 of 5

What is the cost of poetry? Must poets be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive? Or is this just a myth? In our new Book of the Week, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley - both award winning poets themselves - explore that very question through a series of journeys across Britain, America and Europe.

From Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies and Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman’s leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.

The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet - exemplified by Thomas and made iconic by his death in New York - has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet’s life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security?

Today the poets explore the lives - and reclusive deaths - of Emily Dickinson and Rosemary Tonks.

Written and read by the authors Abridged for radio by Lauris Morgan Griffiths Produced by Simon Richardson.

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time is away (in their own words)

“Writers talking about their work…This upload features tracks from Maria Monti, Louis MacNeice, Rosemary Tonks, Meredith Monk, Sylvia Plath and more.” [13 July 2015, NTS Radio on Mixcloud]

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[photographer unknown; Michael Peters; Jane Bown]

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“The Woman Who Quit,” by Michael Hofmann

Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems, by Rosemary Tonks. Bloodaxe Books. £12.00. Dufour Editions. $26.00.

One door closes, and another opens. At least that’s what they tell you. When Rosemary Tonks died on April 15, 2014, at the age of eighty-five, it had the effect of freeing her poems, long-embargoed but dribbled out in anthologies, for publication. Neil Astley, himself poet, anthologist, publisher of Bloodaxe Books, and long-time admirer and connoisseur of Tonks, was able to talk her heirs into allowing a book of her writing to appear (Tonks herself had long set her face against such a thing). I am curious whether the one versatile volume, Bedouin of the London Evening, will be enough to satisfy 
demand (it contains all the poems in her two tiny trade books, thirty-five and twenty-six pages respectively, twenty-six and twenty poems, 
plus a wonderfully truculent interview, a statement, a couple of sharply intelligent book reviews, an uncollected short story, and an indispensable introduction from Astley, who at this stage has a near-monopoly of published information on his poet), or whether there is sufficient fascination with her to float a more general revival (Tonks also published six novels, potboilers maybe, but potboilers of the Bell Jar class) and perhaps a biography to shed some further light on the sad and disturbing phenomenon of The Woman Who Quit.

Almost since I can remember, Tonks has been a name to conjure with. (Not literally, though I suppose it is an anagram of “knots,” and of “stonk.”) But as an adamant silence following an utterly distinctive, perhaps irreplaceable career. As a rare gesture towards cosmopolitanism in England (the Amis-Larkin Movement disdained, among other things, poems set in foreign cities). As a fragrant reopening of a bottle stoppered up forty years ago. As an amplification of the furibund poems that stood out a mile in the sheepish anthologies where they appeared: a kind of wild forthrightness and nausea and dread about Sex and Regret and the City. As a return to the sixties — the lettering is Bloodaxe’s standard, but its orange-and-lemon-on-drab echoes the variants of Rubber Soul, and the Jane Bown cover photograph of the poet (“in the 1960s”) looking ruddy-cheeked, back-combed and even a touch horsey, sporting maybe the ruins of some white lipstick, and otherwise bedizened in zip-up ankle boots, checkered wool (Jaeger?!) pants, and a deeply comfortable, even much-loved-looking baby blue sweater, with a period glass of milky Nescafe, a purse, and a tatty stack of books on the table in front of her, holding a Bic Biro: somewhere between Julie Christie and the younger Camilla Parker-Bowles. Yes, and surely the setting is the Hampstead literary café the Coffee Cup on Rosslyn Hill, recently kept going by sentimental public subscription and haunted since the thirties by literary émigrés, as for instance Fred Uhlman and Elias Canetti, of whom one may read:

Both men were small in size and, albeit in different ways, in need for attentive listeners. Deeply suspicious of one another, they nevertheless had to put up with sharing the Coffee Cup.

That’s the place all right. It is one of the virtues — and perhaps requirements — of Bedouin of the London Evening that it serves as a sort of scrapbook. Scratch ’n’ sniff would have been ideal (Metaxa, patchouli, 
cumin, proper coffee, and Gitanes?) and — who knows — may still come.

[”…somewhere between Julie Christie and the younger Camilla Parker-Bowles.”]

Rosemary Tonks was born in 1928 in Gillingham, Kent. Her father, a British engineer, died in Nigeria before she was born, of something called Blackwater fever. She and her mother — the 
wonderfully named Gwendoline Verdi (and imagine the operatic Italo-Welsh temperament: “    ...    If only I could trust my blood! Those damn foreign women / Have a lot to answer for, marrying into the family,”) — moved constantly (fourteen times during the War, “to avoid bombs and people”). Tonks, by then perhaps one of the people to be avoided, was boarded at a girls’ school in Bournemouth on the south coast, which she left at sixteen. Small legacy, no college, perhaps a typist? One senses a sort of late Empire, or early Commonwealth background, middle class in the English sense, but working. Her mother married again, but this husband also met an untimely death in Nigeria.

At 18, [Tonks] was “back in London with her mother, very poor, and beginning to read Joyce and Baudelaire,” discovering public libraries, and hanging out at the Mandrake Club and the Caves de France in Soho, two bohemian watering-holes then at the center of London’s postwar counterculture that were popular with louche artistic types.

Thus Astley. Shortly after, at twenty, she married an engineer of her own, one Michael Lightband. (On the marriage certificate, she gives her occupation as “writer.” Her first book of poems, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, from 1963, carries the dedication “To Micky.” Bedouin includes a wedding photograph: satin, roses, lovely, upright, resolute-looking bride — always something about the chin — and tall, athletic, sandy, bespectacled groom; as I say, a scrapbook.) His work took them to India and Pakistan: again the Empire/Commonwealth theme. Unhappily, Tonks fell ill in both places, with paratyphoid and polio. (She lost the use of her right hand, and later was almost blind for a year.) It is hard to keep an accurate impression of her circumstances and whereabouts (and something like a chronology would have helped here), but she seems to have lived at various times on the subcontinent, in London, and in Paris, and now with her husband, now alone. Strange how soon vagueness gathers round someone, and someone intermittently in the public eye at that.

1963 was her year, or maybe one of her years. It was then she published Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms and two novels, one called Emir, the other Opium Fogs. In 1967 there was her second book of poems, Iliad of Broken Sentences, and then another run of novels: The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970), and The Halt During the Chase (1972). That was pretty 
much the size of it, ten years, all between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. She had a flair for titles, the reader will concede, pairing fragrant exoticism and the promise of action. Normally, one would expect a writer of both poetry and fiction — of whom there are not many — to gravitate over time towards the latter. Certainly, that’s the case with most of those I can think of: Hemingway, Lawrence, Pavese, Pasternak, Bernhard, Bachmann, Atwood, Ondaatje. I rather think that would have happened with Tonks as well. For reasons of economics, if nothing else. The industrial muscle of prose comes in for poetry’s tic douloureux; streams of tarmac for crazy paving. With Tonks, too, the novels are later than the poems, more numerous, and (the three I have managed to track down) actually more brilliant. The prose is quotable for longer stretches than the occasional line or line and a half of poetry. Perhaps prose satire better suited her 
agitation and extreme vulnerability; it kept her turned outward (there was only turbulence within); the poems are so volatile, they fly away, many of them — but I’ll come to that.

Often Tonks gives you the sense you get in the early Jean Rhys that she knows more than London, and that London is corrupt and grimy and really not her scene at all. She sees it with a savage wisdom from outside. I don’t know where she drew her implicit contrasts from, Africa or India or the European mainland — what her equivalent was to the childhood paradise of Rhys’s Dominica — quite possibly 
she had none. Accordingly, her books and characters are brittle, willful, unreconciled, aghast; there isn’t the bottomless soft French- or Caribbean-tinged sadness of Rhys. Not the helpless, shrugging 
acquiescence in further loss of independence and pride. Not the pervasive cafard at the back of everything. Not the loneliness. Tonks is never lonely, never miserable, because, as she noted in later life, “No sense of self.” She is just witty and seething and at large, in a world designed by James Ensor. “Her head was clipped like a dark brown bird. The word ‘Idiot’ was just within her clenched teeth.” Being a poet is not a career choice, it is the only way there is of remaining unbroken, and at an angle to the world. She is a reed with the backbone of an oak: “A solitary of twenty-two would rather break her heart in a back bedroom of the metropolis, than comb her hair and enter into civil conversation with someone who might help her.” She remains a poet until she breaks. Rhys bends, Tonks breaks. Tonks’s heroines are looking for a mate — but more trying not to look — in a chamber of horrors. They repay hate with love, and maybe love with hate. In the hothouse atmosphere of these books, you can’t really distinguish them anyway. Repulsion comes close to trumping attraction. A man-mountain like the opera singer called “the Bloater” in the book of that name is a challenge or a problem for the Tonks character. (Strange to say, these are the nobly nihilistic beginnings of chick lit; there are men, of course there are men, men are always with us, like the Victorian poor, but they are not the answer, any more than the poor are the answer. A doctor on horseback with a gold chain and sensitive hands is not yet enough to solve the problems of existence.)

The Tonks character is always trapped. As proud as Lucifer, and trapped. She may be on holiday in Italy with friends, or laid up with gout, she can as little escape as a character in a play can escape the footlights and the stage. Nothing exists apart from the trauma of the city for the single girl, and, occasionally, by way of disastrous 
variety, abroad, or the grotesquely implausible English countryside: “Outside, the lawn purred as though it had been stroked.” Tonks’s theme is opposing necessity, opposing the city, opposing (male or psycho-economic) dominion. Rhys with sadness falls in with it; what else can she do? (Women of her generation and background didn’t have jobs; not long after, they did: you might say, if plumbing would have solved Ibsen’s tragedies, as someone once claimed, then temping would have eased Rhys’s.) Tonks, though, fights back as hard as she can, but reflexively, impersonally, and with genius. “She smashed the pappadom on her plate, and ate the ruins.” She is a bundle of hubris. “I don’t know the sort of people who know the date,” she says. Listening to a woebegone girlfriend give a hilarious account of looking in her bedroom for her bed (“you know, I was on my knees going over every foot of the floor area    ...    ”), the Tonks character generously jumps to — for her — the only possible conclusion: “But life shouldn’t be like this.” This rebellion, indignation, outrage is Tonks’s subject everywhere. Life shouldn’t be like this. There are exquisite passages in Emir:

Nine months later she was typing in a London office; there was a rind of charcoal just inside her cuff; in short, she had a trade.

In London a cloud, rough and evil-smelling like a drunkard’s coat, descended at five o’clock. There were open territories; by moonlight, spotted like the flanks of a hyena; these were parks. On the way back to their rooms every face Houda passed had a snout as nude as a whippet’s.

Beauty is not in the eye; it is in the pocket. At twenty-one she received an income of three hundred pounds a year by her father’s will; and a small legacy from an aunt. Enough to set her free and give her an addiction to the brilliant streets.

Writing like this — a bit of Rhys, a bit of Knut Hamsun, a bit of Wyndham Lewis, a bit of Muriel Spark, overlaying the everlasting Shakespeare/Austen/ Brontë/George Eliot marriage drama — is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London, between Hangover Square and Carnaby Street. London, when it was still as forbidding as Bucharest, before it became as hip as Portland, before money and color and human invention and foreign visitors could wash it clean. Emir specializes in a kind of horrified alienation — like those first 
impressions of Paris that Rilke then worked for ten years to get down in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. And with human portraits, of course, to match, not just the gallery of vilely and spectacularly ineligible men, but also the heroine’s (and one suspects, maybe Tonks’s) mother: “Or with her domineering little head stuffed into a hat of apricot felt, she would pass across a restaurant a spotted pamphlet on vegetarian diet.” What a little jackpot of a sentence!

Over time, the play of so much sheer ghastliness over exposed nerves became muted into polish, sneer, and deliberate, efficient comedy. Having begun with “I sing the sullied,” the prose soon comes to ask, “Did you see    ...    ?” Alienation softens into Jerome K. Jerome-like fun; brutes become harmless, almost lovable eccentrics; desperate heroines are just short of being assimilated. A “strong neck so well rooted and bolted into his shoulders” is practically enough (Frankenstein’s monster should apply). The later novels have a pattering, aphoristic quality; characters and narrators talk as artfully as Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh; a relished put-down or snazzy generalization is never far away: “Of all peoples, the English least 
deserve their dandies.” They tan with their pants on; the ultraviolet fails to make it through the twill. A scene in an opera is: “A lot of musty dehydrated furs here tonight, at shoulder level it’s like a ranch of petrified foxes.” One character has “a head like a handsome bullet.” Another is said to have arrived “straight from the land of cabinet pudding and brown Windsor soup” — an almost Homeric periphrasis for England (and political logopoeia: those dishes, by the way, are real). A man being fed grapes is likened to “a lion gobbling earrings.” An exchange about relatives instantly assumes the worst:

“What are yours like, Min?” “Terrible. And yours?” “Mine are too nervous to finish a sentence. They all live in the country.”

In Tonks’s upside-down economy, this brilliant froth indicates the barrel is empty. What had begun as a scream at England ends up sounding terribly English. “I say it in the high tin of my English voice.”

In Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms there are maybe just four satisfying poems (the prose “Bedroom in an Old City,” “Rome,” “Blouson Noir,” and “Bedouin of the London Morning”) — but it’s a first book, and whose first book is a keeper? (I can only think of Stevens and Eliot.) Its showing is almost wholly in the realm of promise. Not “pity that there are not more poems like these,” but “pity that these distinctive stirrings, these experiments could not be sustained for longer.” Indeed, its noisy titles are themselves clamorous, or even glamorous promises: “20th Century Invalid,” “Diary of a Rebel,” “Gutter Lord,” “Ace of Hooligans,” “Escape!” It’s not that one doubts the impulse, intention, or occasion of the poems; damaged, they are out to do damage; themselves upset, to be upsetting. One of my 
favorite quotations is Musil’s “the man of genius is duty-bound to attack” — how much the more so then the woman of genius! But it’s a fact that this aggression is almost unknown in modern English writing, where there was no expressionism, no Futurism, no Acmeism, no Fauvism; and modernism itself increasingly seems an expensive import and an aberration. The esthétique du mal of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbière, Benn, Céline, even Sartre barely exists in the wholesome English: Lewis, mentioned above, very briefly in the “Blasting and Bombardiering” Pound of 1917, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, the late-lamented Peter Reading, and J.G. Ballard. Purely circumstantial in occasional others. What price the English maudits, or maudites, even?! The impulse wanders off into other media: Julie Burchill, Amy Winehouse, Tracey Emin, Sarah Kane. Tonks tosses out phrases like a beaver dropping saplings: “a guest at my own youth,” “sentenced to cabbage and kisses,” “a sirloin mattress,” “I am sick mortar and anonymous,” “my private modern life has gone to waste.” The melos is as sinuous as Keats, but toxic, and read aloud in Tonks’s — inevitable, predictable — cut-glass tones, the effect must have been truly alarming — imagine the Queen, effing and blinding, and not the downbeat Estuary Queen of today, but the shrill girleen of the Coronation.

The first poems don’t seem to know quite how to proceed. They could go anywhere, any of them, but the words are too big for their mouths. It’s as though Tonks had a small vocabulary — she doesn’t — and the words come back, time and again, like the words in a French poem, like buzzwords, too big for the poem, heavy words, requiring only to be said: dropped not placed. If the titles are too big for the poems, then so are the individual words as well. Syntax is random, sentences indeterminate, punctuation ineffectual. Three “oxygen”s and three “rainfield”s in the twenty lines of “Rainfield and Argument.” The poems are like broken sestinas, primitive, cannibal sestinas. “Modern” and “twentieth-century” all the time, and “dust,” “wing,” “cabbage,” “butcher,” “street,” “heart,” “Europe.” And in between, simple bathos in Tudorbethan, pebble-dash quatrains. In “Diary of a Rebel”: “For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness” — oh dear, yes, am I up to hearing this? — “I need the café.” Oh well, off you go then. Or “Story of a Hotel Room,” anthologized by Larkin but as naïvely earnest as any poem I know, that warns with risible (if true) arguments of the possible consequences of adultery:

Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us That without permanent intentions You have absolutely no protection — If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous, The concurring deep love of the heart Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

The words are oddly blank here, legalistic: an unhelpfully, if not posthumously, singing insurance policy. “You have absolutely no protection,” it says. The better poems are dragged more enthusiastically back and forth. They play out the great inversions and perversions 
of the French dix-neuvième with a fearless modern girl protagonist who’s drawn only to what’s worst for her:

After an all-night conversation When the street-wind hangs on snarling to your coat,  If you knew my (half erotic) convulsion of loathing  For the night.  — from “Bedouin of the London Morning”

One would be hard put to say whether she’s coming or going — anywhere out of this world — but isn’t it kind of magnifique, with its violent energies and pent-up discretion? “Brainsick and odious, / On the alluring quays he’s rotten with happiness” (“Blouson Noir”): 
a triumph of discord, rarely heard since Rimbaud, the short and very English “rotten” and “happiness” singing out among all those other long vowels.

Whatever the shortcomings, the convent-girl inhibitions (the school in Emir is described as turning out “each year thirty of the gentlest wives in England” — not Tonks!), the jejunery, the tangled snarls of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, Iliad of Broken Sentences, five years later, has none. A tiny book, but explosive, a comet — watch out, dinosaurs! This time, the titles, lids of Tate & Lyle syrup tins, barely fit over the homemade combustible contents. The opening poem, entitled “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas,” may sound like a comfy job-lot of favorite things, but it is a ferocious Kulturkritik, which kicks in with a new and epochal power:

I have lived it, and lived it, My nervous, luxury civilization, My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces. ...    Their idea of literature is hopeless. Make them drink their own poetry! Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

I’ve never heard “luxury” — the rhyme with “poetry”! — in quite that dangly-adjective way before. “Living it” is stressed throughout. “It’s done by living, ignoramuses,” jeers one of the poems. The word comes up a dozen times. “I have lived it, and lived it.” Houda in Emir says: “A poet must be one of civilization’s failures. You forget; it’s the mongrel who gets kicked.” Here it’s the Italo-Welsh mongrel lady who goes about kicking a failed civilization. It’s fantastic. An intellectual toad has come to call. “On my bad days (and I’m being broken / At this very moment),” speaks the eruptive Tonks character. Remember, “Life shouldn’t be like this.” But what can you do? It’s unendurable:

And he     …     is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes, He wants to make me think his thoughts And they will be enormous, dull — (just the sort To keep away from). …     when I see that cigarillo, when I see it     …     smoking And he wants to face the international situation     … Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!  —from “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas”

How considered is Mauberley by comparison, even Rimbaud seems almost staid. The punctuation is popping, typefaces come and go, the adjectives are spectral (“dead bedroom clothes”!), humor is a helpless, skittering, almost accidental by-product (“    … smoking”), it’s all one seethe of vomit, a whole staircase full of escalier, as we used to say: a parked tiger. At least half of these twenty poems are unrivaled in English; I think of Corbière or of George Grosz, or a wilder “Homage to Sextus Propertius.” Yes, it’s not much, when one thinks what there might have been, but these are Sibylline pages, and beyond price. Everything else is — shopping: “But after all, give me again that new green diction. / Oh yes, it’s atrocious. Certainly it’s literature.”

Tonks has a poem about revisiting an old address. It’s the theme of Robert Lowell’s wistful “The Old Flame,” and Philip Larkin’s quietly destructive “Home is so sad,” but this is one of the most hate-filled things I have ever seen    ...    glorious! The titles by now have stopped shouting. It’s called merely “The Sash Window,” but there’s enough in it to destroy several counties — maybe the Home Counties. It starts:

Outside that house, I stood like a dog; The window was mysterious, with its big, dull pane Where the mud pastes are thrown by dark, alkaline skies That glide slowly along, keeping close to the ground. — But for the raging disgust which shook me So that my throat was scratched by her acid (Whose taste is the true Latin of culture) —  I could have lived the life of these roads.

The speaker never gets above the level of that initial dog: servile, put there, grimly fascinated, on-guard. Everything — all the knowledge in a poem that is full of knowledge — remains physical, if not visceral. The whole governing idea of the poem (there is one!) is of the dog returning to its vomit; disgust or culture — it’s all one excoriation. “I could have lived the life of these roads”: the reader is left with a telltale roughness in the throat. Throughout her tiny Iliad, Tonks takes great delight in creating confusion in the categories of geography, meteorology, and material: a cosmic turbulence. A poem about London is “Farewell to Kurdistan.” Oriental references and vocables pop up everywhere. The intention is uncertain, maybe not even formulated, but the effect is derisory, alienated, a cod glamour: “Turk,” “souks,” “pour[ing] the sand / For my own desert,” “my arab hours,” “my Kurdish epoch,” “hotel berbers,” “Asia’s gold cake,” “Europe’s old blue Kasbah.” The weather, or better the atmospheric conditions, is always, similarly, “off.” The book is full of water, gas, fog, murk, reek; it flows from a leaky, guttering pipe, flaming and dripping; this is one of the things that give it its strongly nineteenth century feel, its gaslight London (“the street / Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum”) compounded from those of Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, Joris-Karl Huysmans, early T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (note the quotient of immigrants and visitors, not to mention prose writers in such a list!). And then there is the way things are forever congealing, liquefying, evaporating, precipitating, condensing. The rain makes “mud pastes,” presumably with some help from the building; later on, there are “wet patches,” and “the disinfectant dries off in whiffs.” Everything is changing its state: uncertain, unstable, revolting. The poem goes on:

That piece of filthy laurel moves up and down, And then the dead rose-leaves with their spat-on look Where the sour carbon lies     … under The sash of the window comes the smell of stewing innards, With the freshly washed lavatory — I know where The old linoleum has its platinum wet patches And the disinfectant dries off in whiffs. Hellish, abominable house where I have been young!

The “piece of filthy laurel” — that withering contempt — sounds like a twig shaken by an extra; it reminds you of how theatrical all this is. Smells, textures, tastes, the patterns of things appearing and disappearing: Tonks is quoted as saying, “The main duty of the poet is to excite — to send the senses reeling.” All these are worked in and summarized in the vicious and stately “Hellish, abominable house where I have been young!” with its rare, perfect tense. There is as much negative zest — nausea — here as there is positive in Leopold Bloom’s lustful hankering for grilled kidneys. “Carbon” brings in the coal-hole, but also strengthens (along with platinum) the science — and we’ve already had acid and alkaline — and the “French” feel of the writing (charbon). The speaker remains doggishly close to everything she describes: it all seems inhaled, “keeping close to the ground.” Bleach and coal, liver and leaves, stew and spit. There I could breathe, as Rimbaud says of his infernal outhouse. This shining platinum lavatory is both home altar and household god (the righteous washed lavatory — like the guarded guard!) and laboratory, from which has proceeded the toxic brew of Tonks’s consciousness. The poem continues and concludes:

With your insane furnishings — above all The backs of dressing-tables where the dredged wood Faces the street, raw. And the window With its servant-maid’s mystery, which contains nothing, Where I bowed over the ruled-up music books With their vitreous pencilling, and the piano keys That touched water. How forlornly my strong, destructive head Eats again the reek of the sash window.

Tonks has gone right on seeing the things one is not supposed to see: the shoddy backs of furniture stood in the upstairs bay windows of Victorian houses broken up into bedsits. And then music lessons, the definition of duress and accomplishment and “Art Lite” for the daughters of the bourgeoisie, the piano played “with real feeling, / the feeling of being indoors practicing,” as Randall Jarrell said. “Ruled-up” suggests both over-reglemented and its reaction in the pupil, crossed-out; the very strange “vitreous” (another one of what I think of as her instant adjectives — pure instinct) suggests faint and shy; “that touched water” — “water” presumably going back to “vitreous” — is difficult, perhaps damp, perhaps just the mixing of elements and states that goes on throughout the book. The “strong, destructive head” returns us to the dog, chewing these smells and memories, salivating over them, “forlornly” vomiting them back out. “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell, / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”

•

When things started to go for Tonks, everything went: “I’m leaving! Nothing can hold me! / The trains, watered and greased, scream to be off.” Her mother died in a mysterious “freak accident” in 1968. The last pieces of her writing in Bedouin are — no more poems! — a short story from 1973 and two book reviews from 1973 and 1974 for The New York Review of Books: a clever and adoring piece on Colette, an equally clever and agnostic one on Jean Garrigue and Adrienne Rich, suggesting maybe once again that her future would have been prose, and more strongly that her place was not England and her time was past. Then, in short order, divorce from “Micky” (though she went on calling herself “Mrs. Lightband”), breaches with friends and relatives, an end to work and disgust with all the work she had done (the burning of one more prose manuscript), the sale of her London house: the end of her life not just as a poet and writer, but as a woman and a social being. There began a period of distressing spiritual seeking — Astley itemizes them, “spiritualist meetings,” 
“mediums and healers,” “Sufi ‘seekers,’” “a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru,” and later on, “Charismatics and Pentecostalists” — along with the loss of physical and mental health, eyesight, morale, trust. As if all that weren’t enough, there were burglaries and lawsuits. In a gentlemanly kind of way, Astley tried to stick up for this period, to protect it from the more tabloid sort of “recluse” and “bag lady” descriptions. He means well, but to me it feels like a distinction without a difference. What happened to Rosemary Tonks seems like the most devastatingly comprehensive autoimmune attack. She perpetrated the destruction of a collection of Eastern artifacts she had inherited: priceless things were chopped up to “dog-biscuit size,” and burned in a garden incinerator. There was no nameplate or number on the door, which she rarely answered anyway; the curtains were kept drawn; inquiries by post concerning her past life in letters ignored. The only book she allowed herself, her “‘complete manual’ for living,” was the Bible, but even that was treated with an end of literary discrimination: she liked to read the oldest translation she could find, Tyndale’s if possible, otherwise the King James version. As long as she had funds, she trundled up to London, to give out Bibles at Speakers’ Corner. She died on April 15, 2014, after thirty-five desperately sad, pottery, withdrawn, tithe-paying, nay-saying, Bible-reading years in or near the shabby-genteel retirement place of Bournemouth on the English costa geriatrica where she had once been an incendiary and unwilling schoolgirl.

Rosemary — for memory — Desmond Boswell — for her early deceased father — Tonks: hypocrite auteur, ma semblable, ma soeur!

[“The Woman Who Quit,” Michael Hofmann, Poetry, 2 February 2015]

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No video of Tonks is extant, as far as we know; there is, however, this animation, which reaches deep within the uncanny valley to produce an artifact to which your loyal correspondent can only respond, with frank dismay: criminal, I damn you for it.

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The Intrigue of Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Tonks Bedouin of the London Evening Collected poems and selected prose 160pp. Bloodaxe. Paperback, £12. 978 1 78037 238 9

“Why do poets ‘disappear’?” The question easily piques the post-Romantic imagination. A garret, perhaps? Starvation? Suicide? Or the terrifying desertion of the creative capacity? The reality is always more complex, though perhaps no less spectacular, than these. When poets are said to have disappeared they are often in fact to be found in obscurity, still devoting themselves to their art in the face of indifference, misprision or even contempt. Such was the case of W.S. Graham, for example, who, legend had it, was believed dead even by his publishers, though in fact living both literally and figuratively on the edge, where sea meets land, in Zennor, Cornwall. Or Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who severely misjudged circumstance and prevailing opinion with her satire “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”: publishing a poem in 1812 which dwelt on the terrible personal cost of the Napoleonic Wars and predicted Britain’s eclipse by the United States cost her her literary career, and she never published again.

But it is those whose creative career stops long before their biological end, as in the case of Rosemary Tonks, who haunt us the most. Such a forsaking strikes at the heart of what the vocation of poet represents. It shows us how fragile, even frightening, the relationship between a writer and her or his words really is. Though her work appeared in the Penguin British Poetry Since 1945, edited by Edward Lucie-Smith (1970) and Philip Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), nothing more was heard from or about her until she re-emerged in 1996 in a long article by John Hartley Williams, an admirer, for Poetry Review. This led to her being anthologized again for the first time in thirty years by Sean O’Brien in The Firebox: British and Irish Poetry since 1945 and thereafter in Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001); but it was when Andrew Motion mentioned her as having “disappeared” in a Times article in 2004, followed by a feature programme, “The Poet Who Vanished”, by Brian Patten on BBC Radio 4 in 2009, that this difficult, farouche poet acquired an epithet guaranteed to intrigue new readers. Who was she, and what had happened to her?

“It is the poet whose creative career stops long before their biological end, as in the case of Rosemary Tonks, who haunts us the most”

Rosemary Tonks was born in Gillingham, Kent, in 1928. From the outset her upbringing was problematic: her father had already died in Nigeria of blackwater fever, a virulent complication of malaria, before she was born, and her mother had difficulty coping. The war brought frequent changes of address and eventually Rosemary was sent as a boarder to Wentworth College in Bournemouth. Contemporary photographs show it as a dignified mansion in extensive grounds bordering the sea, advertising itself as giving “close personal supervision”. The supervision was clearly too close, as Tonks left the establishment at sixteen under a cloud. The next few years continued a pattern of rootlessness: back to Nigeria and a new stepfather, who also died; marriage at twenty to Michael Lightband, a mechanical engineer; a life dictated by her husband’s job in engineering, with stints in Calcutta and Karachi; serious illness; a year alone in Paris. All this before she was twenty-five. Such diverse and demanding experiences would put a strain on the most equable of personalities and Tonks’s, by all accounts, was not an equable personality. Contemporaries speak of her as prickly, awkward, a woman who spoke little but who could suddenly come out with sharp and even judgemental remarks, someone who watched, listened and absorbed from the hubbub around her.

The year in Paris profoundly influenced her as a poet: not only did she read the nineteenth-century French poets voraciously, but she also steeped herself in the urban landscape from which they had drawn inspiration. It was an exotic and European education, and not one that was necessarily fashionable in the poetic London to which she returned (she and her husband settled in Hampstead).Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms appeared in 1963; Iliad of Broken Sentences four years later. She resisted pigeonholing, despite being a regular attendee at Lucie-Smith’s salon and knowing some of the Movement poets. The acerbic tone of the six novels she published between 1963 and 1972 (with titles such as Businessmen as Lovers and The Halt During the Chase) shows a sensibility that observes the foibles and stupidities of society from outside; it is the personality of the flâneur, the “peintre de la vie moderne”.

This is of course no coincidence; the disillusioned commentator of the industrial cityscape is the creation of the very French writers Tonks admired. But she picked up more than just their ennui; the savage determination to face a kind of truth, however ugly and rotten, to be and feel differently, to live with an intensity which transcends the everyday – all these are characteristics of her poetry. What Helen Lessore said of Tonks’s great-uncle, the First World War surgeon, painter and recorder of hideous facial injuries, Henry Tonks, can be applied to her: “[he] managed to convey a moral quality, a conviction that Beauty was somehow incidental, a side product of the pursuit of Truth; that it would be a reward unexpectedly discovered in the most unpromising material, provided that we followed certain disciplines and were faithful to our experience”.

This experience was not, however, the “exuberantly sensuous . . . hymn to sixties hedonism” invoked on the jacket of Bedouin of the London Evening. Tonks’s environment is far more the brown, smog-laden, flock-wallpapered, post-war austerity London to which 1950s Soho, with its private drinking clubs, ice cream parlours and bohemian (as opposed to free-love) attitude to sex, offered an antidote. She is both attracted and repelled by the escape it provides into the creative, dangerous underworld of the metropolis.

His search is desperate! And the little night-shops of the Underworld With their kiosks . . . they know it, The little bars full of dust as a stale cake, None of these places would exist without Orpheus And how well they know it.

The nights, for all their glittering eyes and excitement, seem always to end in disappointment, sordidness, even disgust, the sloppy négligé of the pale November morning.

I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth. I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown My private modern life has gone to waste.

Yet this is only part of the story. For Tonks was in fact very conscious of the disciplines of her art. She knew that to write well, you have to have read well; literature and life intertwine, “you look at life in a new way; then you look back to literature, then you look out at life again”, as she said in an interview in 1963. Poetry is a conscious making. “The assumption that it is . . . very close to nature, is an absolute fallacy. It is artificial from start to finish.” The London and Paris she evokes owe as much to Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire as they do to her own odyssey through coffee houses, cinemas and bars: “Tout l’affreux passé sauté, piaule, miaule et glapit / Dans le brouillard rose et jaune et sale des sohos / Avec des indeeds et des all rights et des haôs” (Verlaine, “Sonnet Boiteux”). Elsewhere, her feverish punctuation and disjunctive syntax are reminiscent of Tristan Corbière: “(That great lavatory coat . . . the cigarillo burning / In the little dish . . . And when he calls out: ‘Ha!’ / Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture)”. Another looming presence is that of Jules Laforgue: in the esoteric references (“the novocain of my horizon”), the apostrophes to the reader (“Academic! Hack! Vulgarian!”), the sudden yoking together of disparate images (“sirloin mattress”) and the deliberate descents into bathos (“Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote, / You took it – leaving mud and cabbage stumps”). And, of course, constantly stalking the poetry, struts Arthur Rimbaud.

“Rosemary Tonks knew that to write well, you have to have read well; literature and life intertwine”

All of which means that, although of an earlier generation, the poet who most comes to mind when encountering Tonks is David Gascoyne. The comparison appears at first sight instructive: their best work written by their late thirties, a powerful sense of their own destinies as poets and of dissatisfaction with the flawed world which greeted them, descent into mental instability and then silence. But the contrast is equally illuminating; whereas Gascoyne’s voice matured from the Surrealist excesses of his youth into the most serious examination of man’s relationship to God and mortality – as in the sequence “Miserere” and the metaphysical poems – Tonks remains frozen at an early stage where the work has not yet settled. As with other poets, though not all, who stop writing young, she does not often get beyond an anger and an attitudinizing which are essentially adolescent. Quite a few of the poems are, moreover, very inchoate in a way which does not spring from genius or the “dérèglement de tous les sens” but merely a failure to master her material: “He, kneeling, with the moonlit sight of thieves, / Begged the ounce hog of the hedges she would seed / A touchy litter of her vermin commoners / That, gentle, he find syrup in his torn lack mouth / Before the radiant traffic of space / Cut to pieces the palm of his hand”. So, although there are indications of movement away from the claustrophobic interiors of Tonks’s self-consciousness, it is impossible to say what a more assured body of her work would have looked like, had her poetic career continued.

And what did happen to Rosemary Tonks in the end? In 1968 her mother died in an accident and Tonks turned to a variety of faith healers to help her through this crisis; her marriage definitively collapsed (though she kept the name). More was to come: in late 1977 she suddenly suffered two detached retinas and remained virtually blind for nearly two years. Believing that somehow she had deviated from the right spiritual path, she withdrew to Bournemouth, lived as a semi-recluse, and turned to the Bible as her sole source of solace and, indeed, reading matter. This phase culminated in a literal bonfire of the vanities in her back garden in 1980, when she broke up and burnt a priceless collection of Asian antiquities bequeathed to her by an aunt, before having herself baptized in the River Jordan later that year. For the rest of her life, until her death in April this year, she rejected her poetic past; the God-struck Rosemary Lightband lived on, but Rosemary Tonks the poet was dead.

[“The Intrigue of Rosemary Tonks,” Hilary Davies, TLS, 10 December 2014]

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The Wisdom of Colette

Colette: The Difficulty of Loving by Margaret Crosland, Bobbs-Merrill, 284 pp., $8.95; The Thousand and One Mornings by Colette, translated by Margaret Crosland, by David Le Vay, Bobbs-Merrill, 155 pp., $6.95.

We call her great, for her gift to us is not limited to the art of writing: it is the gift of a culture. I do not mean simply French culture and taste, but that she made certain discoveries with regard to the art of being which are indispensable to our lives, and which are regularly lost in the Western part of the world.

These discoveries came about as she got round the difficulties of her life. She became gradually the journalist of her own life, and in that journalism are strokes of genius that befit her to receive Nietzsche’s blessing. We can think of her as the prime exemplar of experiencing, who obtains truths which can only be got through the agency of things. She always found life new enough not to have to invent it; or we might put it another way, and say that she invented it by understanding it.

Because she teaches with her life, she is, fortunately, difficult to categorize, and belongs to philosophy as much as to literature. Her novels, which are brilliantly written, are as novels weak. By this I mean that when we read them we do not undergo a moral enlargement by reason of a vision whose effects are permanent, as we do with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, or Henry James. She did not formulate in the abstract characters powerful enough to carry out schemes of redemption and enlightenment. That was not her way; it might very likely have seemed to her not truthful enough to what was all around her. And there is the danger, in finding one’s ultimate reach in literature, of losing the original talent with which one set out. If it had cost her her seership, then that would have been a loss so much more terrible than any gain in re-sizing her art that it is better forgotten.

The apprehension of sensual or magical situations is her province, enveloped alive in their own detail. Her supreme moment is the Annunciation; having learned to listen, she can hear when invisible forces announce their presences in mortal things. Should this sound too abstract for rational minds, we need only remind them of the grand pattern of evolutionary and spiritual behavior, and the humbler rhythms within the human body, and thereafter of the unseen, illogical, wholly real struggle between good and evil in the world, in order to regain their attention.

Given this basis for her writing, it will be seen that the more fresh life she lived, the stronger her work became. Life did not distract her from her thoughts; on the contrary, her real thoughts—the thoughts which were given to her—were outside, engrossed in life, and synonymous with it. She was never a mere clerk to her ego.

There were three marriages, a primordial mother a daughter a connection with the theater as an actress and dramatist, travels, a beautician interlude, books, and success.

The irony of the story is that everything is … [rest of article available by subscription]

[NYRB, Rosemary Tonks, 24 January 1974]

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The Desert Wind Élite

I am outside life, and pour the sand For my own desert, recklessly. But if some flame splashes over from my arab hours Into your dismal, shadow-bathing century... ...And burns you, gutter-polished citizen, With my story—the drifting novocaine of my horizon, My oases, and my mirages, they're built of tears And sheets and sheets of grey glass like an onion, My story written in the sand! Laziness, despair, Worldly pressures, traveling, & dirty clothes, the need for sleep, Contempt for time—and more despair. Oh yes; I'm a writer Daring enough to make the sand my paper, It's done by living, ignoramuses. Isn't there always The unreliability, the cool mouth-bite of a beloved body? That's the desert—where I hurry...slowly, very slowly, Sometimes...almost stock-still in a sand-drift...hurrying... While dusty mobs pass, driven by the moon. ...If it blasts you, modernists fobbed off With dingy souls, inside a century that growls For its carafe of shady air, oblivion, and psychiatric mash, Start drinking! I shall seduce you. From my desk, The Soho of my drifting, yellowed sentences Calls out your name...Choked-up joy splashes over From this poem and you're crammed, stuffed to the brim, at dusk, With hell's casual and jam-green happiness!! Ah, pour yourself a desert, man-in-the-shadow-skin. This last minute enamel re-satanizes Europe, And you will become my arab and my citizen. I was walking in this shadow-bathing century Pouring sand for my desert From my desolate high spirits... .....but recklessly, my arab and my citizen. [x]

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a mention in “The Ultimate Poet of Anti-Pathos”

Distance and difficulty, yes. But there’s also pleasure in the Stockhausen of modern poetry.

…JH Prynne is the ultimate poet of anti-pathos. Everything about him spells distance and difficulty. He does not give poetry readings; he does not appear in anthologies and is never nominated for prizes; his books have Captain Beefheart-like titles such as Her Weasels Wild Returning and Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage~~~Artesian; he attracts acolytes and execrators, rather than run-of-the-mill readers, and, most important, no one knows what any of it means. Such are the familiar assumptions where this poet is concerned. Passions run deep: when The Oxford English Literary History had the temerity to suggest that Prynne was more deserving of notice than Larkin, the brouhaha ended up on the Today programme. Now consider the following lines, from “The Glacial Question, Unsolved”:

We know where the north is, the ice is an evening whiteness. We know this, we are what it leaves: the Pleistocene is our current scene, and what in sentiment we are, we are, the coast, a line or sequence, the cut back down, to the shore.

As an advert for Prynne’s work, this would seem to send out all the wrong signals: pellucid, approachable and a world away from our image of Prynne the wilful mystagogue. As Jeremy Noel-Tod has pointed out, the immediate context is a geological controversy on whether the Pleistocene gave way as smoothly as we think to the Holocene, the era taken to mark the beginning of human time. With arch wit, Prynne embroils us in a modernist controversy, but one that played out roughly 12,000 years ago.

The poem comes from The White Stones (1969), a book as central to postwar British poetry as Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts, Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings or Rosemary Tonks’s Iliad of Broken Sentences. Around the time Prynne wrote it, his fellow Cambridge poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson was developing the theories of “naturalisation” that inspired her critical study Poetic Artifice. To Forrest-Thomson, as a formalist, poems are all about language, whereas “naturalising” readings want to think that poems are really, deep-down, about daffodils or train journeys from Hull to London.

It is an astringent approach, and the idea that Prynne’s poems are self-referential closed circuits is a handy excuse for the baffled. The truth, however, is that early Prynne is quarried from all too real and resistant material: frequent preoccupations include capitalism and commodification, scientific method and research, cultural archaeology, glaciation and the problem of waste (a recent pamphlet is titled Refuse Collection). The syntax of a Prynne poem will tend to be slippery, but one coping strategy is to imagine the humble comma-splice promoted to organising principle, yoking the poem’s heterogeneous material together. “Frost and Snow, Falling” begins: “That is, a quality of man and his becoming, / beautiful, or the decoration of some light and /fixed decision, no less fluent than the river / which guards its name”. It begins in medias res, like an overheard conversation, and uses parataxis to shuttle between the human and the natural worlds. This poem, too, ends with a geological vision, of “the whole pleistocene exchange” melting like snow, “driven into the ground”. […]

David Wheatley, Friday 8 May 2015  [x]

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Oath

I swear that I would not go back To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies That built the Earth—there, under the heavy trees With their bark that's full of grocer's spice,

Not for an hour—although my heart Moves, thirstily, to drink the thought—would I Go back to run my boat On the brown rain that made it slippery, I would not for a youth Return to ignorance, and be the wildfowl Thrown about by the dark water seasons With an ink-storm of dark moods against my soul, And no firm ground inside my breast, Only the breath of God that stirs Scent-kitchens of refreshing trees, And the shabby green cartilage of play upon my knees. With no hard earth inside my breast To hold a Universe made out of breath, Slippery as fish with their wet mortar made of mirrors I laid a grip of glass upon my youth. And not for the waterpools would I go back To a Universe unreal as breath —although I use The great muscle of my heart To thirst like a drunkard for the scent-storm of the trees. [x]

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Women and Poetry

Response by Jane Gapen, with a reply by Rosemary Tonks.

To the Editors:

About Rosemary Tonks’s review [NYRB, October 4, 1973] of Diving Into The Wreck by Adrienne Rich—how it aggravates me! What does it mean to say “It is not, regretfully we admit it, the ideal classical modern line, which can do every kind of work and for which we are searching; the one with which we can talk and think”? I’ll tell you what I think it means—that R. Tonks has her personal standards and Rich’s poetry doesn’t qualify. Too bad, I think it wrong not to let the reader know at once if the writing is poetry (authentic voice) or if it is not (contrivance). It’s hard to guess from this review which it is; and many other important considerations for a periodical like this one are quite lost. I object for those readers who are women and who particularly want and need to be in touch with the poetry which speaks and thinks from our anguish and outrage, the same which bewilders and frightens us unless it forges something we can use—something that can help us. R. Tonks only hints at the content of Diving Into the Wreck, as if it might be unseemly or old hat. Yet the poems are forged directly for our needs, from blood and sweat and many hot tears, which is the way it must be if it is to midwife our own passionate thought.

Yes, semblables, it is poetry and should be eaten like food seasoned with bitter herbs. It should be reviewed from a feminist outlook, and given close attention, for this is an important collection. Rich has been seeking the stream of her own life and consciousness as a woman for a good many poems over the years. Now she’s far down stream and into the river. She sees what she sees and it is man the wrecker and woman the wreck. This isn’t news, but only the authority of the artist can make us believe that what she sees is what is there. This truth will not be revealed until everyone understands it through feeling it—and we don’t yet, neither men nor women.

She sees also the androgyne, seems to wish the androgyne in her psyche into real life. This is something new and very difficult to talk about. Poetry serves us well here, although other feminist writers and some men are trying to talk about it.

But I must finish with R. Tonks. She says, “We may perhaps conclude that the basic fault of this book lies in the nature of a subject matter already familiar being joined to impersonality of presentation; the result is abstraction or politics.” It really hurts that a woman would say this about another poet; but worse, that it’s so far off the mark. Poetry does implicate politics—politics at the deepest level—and this is why the poetry of women is so fascinating and vital in our age. The deepest level—and who will find the courage to dive? Who does?

I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth

It is the androgyne who speaks. Perhaps it has always been—the only one able to master his, her means so as to speak both to men and to women with authority. I wonder if R. Tonks takes for impersonality the voice of authority, the authority of the artist, for there’s nothing impersonal in the imagery. I look for it and I find instead images swarming to their work from everywhere; news items, personal bits of the present, the past, dreams, memories, fantasies, quotations from the famous and from friends. All are engrossed by the artist in her impassioned necessity. There’s no other way to say these things and it’s why we need and honor the artist who can strike sparks from the overheated iron of our consciousness as she does it for herself. We see by the light of these sparks what has been dark…

Jane Gapen Monticello, New York

Rosemary Tonks replies:

I understand Miss Gapen’s feelings, but one must do the job in hand, which is to review a book of poems. If one wrote only about the subject matter of some of these poems, then that would be very much less than is required of a review of poetry.

[NYRB, 29 November 1973, in response to Tonks’s review of Adrienne Rich, “Cutting the Marble,” 4 October 1973]

[rosemarytonks]

obituary in The Times

Rosemary Tonks’s voice was still reaching young audiences decades after her two volumes of poetry and six satirical novels had gone out of print—by which point she was a Bible-reading recluse living in Bournemouth, attracting little attention from neighbours.

The key to her continuing appeal lies in something she told John Horder in an interview for The Times in 1967: “The main duty of the poet is to excite—to send the senses reeling.” She practised what she preached. The former poet laureate, Andrew Motion championed her sensuous, breathlessly hedonistic poems, such as “Badly Chosen Lover”… [rest of article available by subscription only; The Times, 8 June 2014]

[rosemarytonks]

Cutting the Marble

Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich, Norton, 62 pp., $1.95 (paper); Studies for an Actress and Other Poems by Jean Garrigue, Macmillan, 85 pp., $1.95 (paper).

The first poet is very interesting. In order to understand her, we must go into a certain room in Manhattan where a light is on over a table. A serious woman is sitting there, writing a lesson, which is the lesson of her life. On the paper we observe free verse stanzas in a near-colloquial idiom with a somewhat scientific vocabulary; they have an anonymous appearance. An occasional cockney rhyme (sister / glamor) comes up. Reading the lines gives us the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts:

In a bookstore on the East Side I read a veteran’s testimony:

introduces a fact, and related materials are used to describe thought later in the poem:

Pieces of information, like this one blow onto the heap

This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility. The subjective factor, with all its distortions, appears to have been edited out.

What we think of as diction is something that brings us quickly to the boil on an instinctive level, by throwing colored words at us in a way for which we are unprepared, as in the writing of Rimbaud or of Gerard Manley Hopkins; or a rigid, thrilling block of modern words, with a granite frost on it, which smashes us intellectually, like a phrase of Robert Lowell’s. Diction can then be identified by the autonomous life it leads; the poetry is already partly about the way it is written, and it becomes more difficult to paraphrase the content away from the page.

When a poet takes up a simpler idiom, like the one used by Adrienne Rich, subjects are of great importance. The presumption is that the poet has especially chosen a line that will allow her to cover ground of all kinds. Even so, we must be moderate in the expectations we form, for there are other difficulties in such a line—which, although fragmented, could be called a narrative line—and I shall try to show some of them. It becomes dangerous, rather than insidious, when there is insufficient fresh material within it; originally it did the work of prose and tends to be one-dimensional.

We must examine what is going on in the poems.

A cast of three or four men and women is living a life very close to the life of the newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper. There are refrigerators, airplanes, phone booths, hypodermics, chemicals, molecules, bombs—and subways, prisons, rooms where people all over the world become careworn in their efforts to face up to reality. But because these people, places, and objects are so little distinguished and personalized, we […] [rest of article available by subscription only]

[NYRB, Rosemary Tonks, 4 October 1973]

[rosemarytonks]

rare '60s-era Observer issue with cover photo of Tonks

From an ended eBay listing, asking price £45 [edited for clarity]:

This is a rare issue of The Observer magazine featuring poets from the 1960s including Rosemary Tonks, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin. Cover: POETS AND THEIR WORLDS. Rosemary Tonks, poet, photographed by Jane Brown [sic].

Contents:

Poets and Their Worlds—a look at the backgrounds against which poets from the 1960s composed their work. Featuring poems and photographs of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, R.S. Thomas, Richard Murphy, Iain Crichton Smith and Rosemary Tonks.

Making Friends with Panzers—German troops on NATO exercises in Pembrokeshire. [This would put it ca. 1961—?]

Spent hours today looking for an issue number/date, via ProQuest & the Guardian/Observer archives; no luck so far with any combination of titles, subjects and/or keywords—more information once I’ve tracked this down.

[rosemarytonks]

The main duty of the poet is to excite—to send the senses reeling.

[Tonks to John Horder, in a 1967 interview for The Times]