The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Meet literature’s Lord Lucan
Why did Rosemary Tonks, the Swinging London satirist, pull a vanishing act?
For many years Rosemary Tonks was seen as the literary equivalent of Lord Lucan or Shergar, most famous for having vanished. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was a critically acclaimed poet and novelist at the centre of London intellectual life; by the 21st century she had disappeared so comprehensively that it was widely assumed she was dead. A rumour persisted, however, that she was still an active visitor to public libraries, from which she would borrow copies of her own books – before taking them home and destroying them.
It was at the beginning of the 1980s that Tonks left London, severing contact with her friends and leaving behind instructions that her books not be reprinted. A 2009 Radio 4 documentary speculated on her fate: had she embarked on the hippie trail, or become a downand-out?
In fact, she had ended up in Bournemouth where she lived until her death, aged 85, in April 2014; at which point her reputation sputtered back into life. First, Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Books published her collected poems, under the title Bedouin of the London Evening; and now at last it is possible to buy one of her long-out-of-print, vanishingly scarce novels without taking out a second mortgage.
Vintage Classics is reissuing The Bloater (1968), a wonderfully unromantic romantic comedy, in which the caustic narrator, Min, has to decide which of two suitors will be an acceptable substitute for her husband in bed. It is also an acidulous satire on the BBC, inspired by the period in which Tonks had worked on Sono-Montage, a “sound poem” produced in collaboration with Delia Derbyshire, doyenne of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
The new edition comes with an introduction by comedian Stewart Lee, who became fascinated with Tonks after reading her obituaries and has been lobbying for her books to be reissued. It’s her unsparing, lethal humour he loves.
“I don’t think I’d like her as a person. All the lead females [in her novels] are ciphers of her, and while she would no doubt make you laugh in company, I think you’d come away feeling a bit soiled,” Lee tells me. “But there’s no two ways about it – a Tonks put-down is among the best. She is the mistress of the full-body social slam.
“I also like how the vividness of her descriptions of the sensual world contrast with her disappointment in stale social constructs, and the way she uses wit and comedy to mask a sadness at the world’s lack of value, of rigour, of truth.”
It is a sign of Tonks’s unworldliness, perhaps, that she predicted this spiky, eccentric comedy would “make a lot of red-hot money”. (The Bloater pleased the critics but never went near the bestseller lists.) But it was certainly a lot further within hailing distance of the mainstream than her discomfiting experimental poetry, in which she channelled Rimbaud and Baudelaire, with their sensuous, half-enraptured, halfdisgusted evocations of metropolitan life, to evoke 1960s London.
The great mystery, of course, is how somebody so viscerally devoted to literature – who once declared that “the main duty of the poet is to excite – to send the senses reeling” – came to see it as her duty to suppress her own work. It was a question that preoccupied Neil Astley in the years leading up to Tonks’s death, as he tried to establish contact with her and persuade her to let him anthologise some of her poems.
From her cousins – from whom she was estranged – Astley learnt her address in Bournemouth; they gave it to him on condition that he tell nobody he had so much as an inkling of her whereabouts. But Tonks refused to acknowledge the notes and gifts he left on her doorstep, or reply to his letters.
After she died, her family allowed Astley to read the mass of journals and notebooks she left behind, and he pieced together her story. “I talked to a couple of psychologists about what those writings showed,” he tells me. “They certainly felt they showed a borderline personality disorder of some kind.”
He points out that in middle age Tonks had been unbalanced by a succession of severe shocks. Her husband Michael demanded a divorce (this came as a stunning blow even though, like Min and her husband in The Bloater, they both had lovers), and her mother, with whom she had a close but trying relationship, died suddenly in an accident.
The interest in spiritual matters that suffused her poetry prompted her to explore a number of Eastern religions; Taoist eye exercises that involved staring at a blank wall for hours almost destroyed her sight. Her spirituality finally curdled into a fundamentalist Christianity, which made her regard any book apart from the Bible as literally the work of the Satan. “Devils gain access through the mind,” she wrote in her notebooks. “What are books? They are minds, Satan’s minds./ How foolish they are!! When you think of the Lord!” She burnt an unpublished novel and several poems, and changed her name to “Lightband”.
When Astley wrote to tell her
She called her editor ‘Satan’ and tried to destroy her books in the public library
that there was going to be a programme about her on Radio 4, he recalls, “in her diary she wrote that she had received ‘another postcard from Satan’. When I looked in her diary for the date of the broadcast, I saw she was in London selling Bibles at Speaker’s Corner that day.
“She wasn’t a recluse, but her journals show a pattern of her repeatedly making new friends and then very quickly turning against them as she decides they’re the devil in disguise. Her family had loved her books and loved her – they can only see the Rosemary who wrote those journals as really a different person.”
The gulf between those two people – the older Tonks, and the one who wrote such “bold [accounts] of the London of social and sexual freedom opening up around her”, as Stewart Lee puts it – seems unbridgeable. But it’s hard not to conclude that the best way to honour her memory must be to rescue her devilish books from oblivion.