View source for Rosemary Tonks

{{Short description|English poet and author}}
{{Use British English|date=May 2023}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=June 2024}}
'''Rosemary Tonks''' (17 October 1928 – 15 April 2014){{efn|In works, anthologies, and other publications that appeared before her death, those that included Tonks' year of birth stated it as "1932".<ref name="astley lost"/>}} was an English poet and author. After publishing two poetry collections, six novels,<ref name="Neil Astley">{{cite news|work=[[The Guardian]]|location=London|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/rosemary-tonks|date=2 May 2014|author=Neil Astley|title=Rosemary Tonks obituary: Poet and novelist who turned her back on the literary world for four decades|quote=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.}}</ref> and pieces in numerous media outlets, she disappeared from the public eye following her conversion to [[Fundamentalist Christianity]] in the 1970s; little was known about her life past that point, until her death.<ref name="Neil Astley" /><ref name=Motion>Motion, Andrew (2004). ''[[The Times]]'' (London); 30 October 2004 p. 8</ref><ref name=Indexer>Astley, Neil (2004), ''Being Alive'', Bloodaxe Books. Quoted in [http://www.theindexer.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=44 ''The Indexer'', April 2005.] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061002070734/http://www.theindexer.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=44 |date=2 October 2006 }} Accessed 12 January 2007</ref>

== Early life and marriage==
Born Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks in [[Gillingham, Kent]], she had a difficult childhood. She was the only child of Gwendoline ({{née|Verdi}}) and Desmond Tonks. Her father was the nephew of [[Henry Tonks]], the surgeon, painter, and in the 1920s, professor of fine art at [[Slade School of Fine Art|Slade]]. A mechanical engineer, Desmond died of [[blackwater fever]] in Africa{{efn|In general, available sources are silent on the location in Africa where Desmond Tonks died. One review of the 2016 edition of Tonks' collected works states "Nigeria".<ref name="chig rev">{{cite journal |last1=Brooks-Motl |first1=Hannah |title=Rosemary Tonks, ''Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems'' |journal=Chicago Review |date=1 January 2016 |volume=59 |issue=4 |pages=249–254 |url=https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA456988957&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00093696&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Ef16eac38&aty|id=[Review]}}</ref>}} before Rosemary was born. She spent her early years in and out of different schools and children's homes.<ref name="chig rev"/> Already suffering in her childhood from troubling eye conditions, Tonks was nevertheless an enthusiastic reader and writer from a young age.<ref name="chig rev"/><ref name="Neil Astley" />

Tonks attended [[boarding school]] at Wentworth college in Bournemouth.<ref name="Neil Astley" /> While still at school, she wrote the story which would form her authorial debut when BBC radio broadcast it in 1946.<ref name="astley lost"/> She published children's stories while a teenager, the first in 1946, which she also illustrated: ''On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster''.<ref name="astley lost"/>

In 1949, aged 20, she married Michael Lightband (who became a senior partner in a consulting structural engineering practice and later, a financier), and the couple moved to [[Karachi]] for his work, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of [[paratyphoid]], contracted in [[Calcutta]], and of [[polio]], contracted in [[Karachi]], forced a return to England. She lived in Paris in 1952–1953, before returning to London where she settled with her husband in Hampstead. They later divorced and lived several doors from each other for some years.<ref name="bedouin">{{cite book |last=Astley |first=Neil |chapter=Introduction |date=2014 |title=''In: new anthology of Rosemary Tonks' (2014) works''|postscript=:}} {{cite book |last1=Tonks |first1=Rosemary |title=Bedouin of the London evening: Collected poems & selected prose |date=2014 |publisher=Bloodaxe Books |location=Hexham (GB) |isbn=978-1780372389|author-mask=0}}</ref>

== Career ==
Tonks worked for the [[BBC]], writing stories and reviewing poetry for the BBC European Service. She published poems in collections and ''[[The Observer]]'', the ''[[New Statesman]]'', ''[[Transatlantic Review]]'', ''[[London Magazine]]'', ''[[Encounter (magazine)|Encounter]]'', and ''[[Poetry Review]]''; she read on the BBC's ''[[Third Programme]]''.

Her work appears in many anthologies, including: ''[[Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry]]'' (2001, edited by Keith Tuma); ''[[British Poetry since 1945]]''; ''The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945''{{efn|{{cite book |editor1-last=O'Brien |editor1-first=Sean |editor1-link=Sean O'Brien (writer) |title=The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 |date=1998 |publisher=Picador |location=London |isbn=978-0330372558}} }} (1998, edited by [[Sean O'Brien (writer)|Sean O'Brien]]); and the ''[[Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse]]''.

Tonks published two collections, ''Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms'' (Putnam, 1963) and ''Iliad of Broken Sentences'' (Bodley Head, 1967), and after both books went out of print following each publisher's decision to axe their poetry lists, she was discussing a selected edition of her work with [[John Moat]] and [[John Fairfax (poet)|John Fairfax]]'s Phoenix Press in Newbury from 1976 until 1980, when the project was abandoned following her conversion to a puritanical form of Christianity.<ref name="bedouin"/> Little was known publicly about her subsequent life past that point. As [[Andrew Motion]] wrote in 2004, she "Disappeared! What happened? Because I admire her poems, I've been trying to find out for years... no trace of her seems to survive – apart from the writing she left behind."<ref name=Motion/> In the 30-minute [[BBC Radio 4]] ''Lost Voices'' documentary, "The Poet Who Vanished", broadcast 29 March 2009, [[Brian Patten]] observed, from the literary world's perspective, she'd "evaporated into air like the [[Alice in Wonderland|Cheshire cat]]"; Tonks had disappeared from public view and was living a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.<ref name="Neil Astley"/>

==Withdrawal from literary life==
Following her death in April 2014, Neil Astley published an obituary<ref name="Neil Astley" /> and then an article<ref name="astley lost">{{cite news|last1=Astley|first1=Neil|title=Rosemary Tonks, the lost poet|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/31/rosemary-tonks-lost-poet|work=[[The Guardian]]|location=London|date=31 May 2014}}</ref> in the ''Guardian'', followed by his introduction to the 2014 Bloodaxe Books edition of her collected poetry and selected prose, ''Bedouin of the London Evening'',<ref name="bedouin"/> in which he revealed the background to her "disappearance", how she had "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".<ref name="Neil Astley" /> Her mental and physical health deteriorated following an emergency operation on New Year's Day 1978 to save her eyesight. Tonks characterised her dual detached retinas as her "reward" for "10 long years searching for God", believing they had been acquired through her practice of extreme Taoist eye exercises.<ref name="astley lost"/> Taoism had only been the most recent in a series of spiritual explorations with mediums, healers, spiritualists and Sufis. These had begun in 1968, when she rejected Christianity following the sudden death of her mother and her apparently unwanted divorce.<ref name="astley lost"/>

In the aftermath of the surgery she was left almost blind for the next few years, and in 1979 she moved to [[Bournemouth]] to recuperate, to the home of her aunt, Dorothy (a "double aunt", who was both Gwendoline's sister and married to Desmond's brother, Myles). In 1980 she moved into a house behind the seafront where she lived alone for the next 33 years, using her former married name, Rosemary Lightband. In 1981 she made the decision to "confront her profession"<ref name="bedouin"/> and burnt the manuscript of an unpublished novel, apparently in the belief that the work was spiritually dangerous. She had, not long before, in the October of the same year, also burnt a large number of valuable Oriental artefacts that had been bequeathed to her many years before, on the basis that they were the cause of supernatural ill-effects.<ref name="astley lost"/> That October she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised near the River Jordan on 17 October 1981, the day before her 53rd birthday. "Obliterating her former identity as the writer Rosemary Tonks, she dated her new life from that 'second birth'", according to Astley, and thereafter she never read any books apart from the Bible.<ref name="bedouin"/>

== Character of her poetry ==
Tonks's poems offer a stylised view of an urban literary subculture around 1960, full of hedonism and decadence. The poet seems to veer from the ''ennui'' of [[Charles Baudelaire]] to exuberant disbelief at modern civilisation. There are illicit love affairs in seedy hotels and scenes of café life across Europe and the Middle East; there are sage reflections on men who are shy with women. She often targets the pathetic pretensions of writers and intellectuals. Yet she is often buoyant and chatty, bemused rather than critical, even self-deprecating.{{sfn|Tuma|2001|p=556}}

She believed poetry should look good on a printed page as well as sound good when read. Poet and essayist [[Dennis O'Driscoll]] quotes Tonks in support of his own position on the visual importance of poetry in print: "There is an excitement for the ''eye'' in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear's reaction".<ref>{{cite magazine |last=O'Driscoll |first=Dennis |date=September 2003 |pages=12–31 |title=The Outnumbered Poet: Poets and Poetry Readings |magazine=MAZE |issue=14, Autumn |volume=2003 |url=http://metre.ff.cuni.cz/content/19 |via=Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague: Centre for Irish Studies |quote-page=19 |quote=Rosemary Tonks, a talented Englishwoman who took early retirement from poetry back in the Sixties, summarised the visual position well{{nbsp}}... |access-date=25 May 2023 |archive-date=13 November 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061113220506/http://www.poems.com/essaodri.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> Of her style, she said "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."<ref>[http://www.bartleby.com/66/6/61406.html 61406. Tonks, Rosemary. The Columbia World of Quotations. 1996<!-- Bot generated title -->] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071201092120/http://www.bartleby.com/66/6/61406.html |date=1 December 2007 }}</ref>

Her poem, "The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas" ends:{{sfn|Lucie-Smith|1978|p=247}}
{{Poem quote|1={{mdash}}All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.}}

==Novels==
Writing novels in a highly personal style that at times approached the tone of [[Evelyn Waugh]] in its cynical observations of urban living, Tonks as a novelist {{citation needed span|had a mixed critical reception at best,|date=May 2023|reason=Which sources say this?}} although her critics admit that her grasp of the English language and her sense of London are sharp. The anthologist, Keith Tuma, called these long-form works "poetic novels".{{sfn|Tuma|2001|p=556}} Her novels are a kind of fictional autobiography in which she plays not only the leading role but one or two supporting roles as well.{{opinion|date=May 2023}} She includes incidents and experiences directly from her past, often with only a thin fictional veil to disguise them. Some critics felt this was a fault and labelled the autobiographical dimension of her writing "feminine" in a pejorative sense; others decided her directness was invigorating and showed the uniqueness of her voice, making for a lively, distinct fictional world.{{opinion|date=May 2023}} Whatever the verdict, Tonks' novels deal with aspects of her life up to 1972, when her last work was published. Her fiction, in particular, moved from a dissatisfaction with urban living found in both her collections of poetry and in satiric novels such as ''The Bloater'' and ''Businessmen as Lovers'' to a pronounced loathing of middle to upper-middle class materialism in her later work. Her distaste for materialism meant that Tonks also developed an interest in the symbolist movement, which eventually led her to a conception of spirituality as the only alternative to materialism. This embrace of what she called "the invisible world" may have ultimately led her to distrust the act of writing itself, and caused her to abandon writing as a career.<ref name="Neil Astley"/>

== Assessment of her work ==
Critics praised Tonks as a cosmopolitan poet of considerable innovation and originality. She has been described as one of the very few modern English poets who has genuinely tried to learn something from modern French poets such as [[Paul Éluard]] about [[symbol]]ism and [[surrealism]]. [[Al Alvarez]] said ''Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms'' showed "an original sensibility in motion".{{sfn|Lucie-Smith|1978|p=245}} [[Edward Lucie-Smith]] said "the movements of an individual awareness – often rather self-conscious in its singularity – supply the themes of most of her work."{{sfn|Lucie-Smith|1978|p=245}} Daisy Goodwin commented on her poem, "Story of a Hotel Room", about infidelity: "This poem should be read by anyone about to embark on an affair thinking that it's just a fling. It is much harder than you know to separate sex from love."<ref>Daisy Goodwin. (2004). "Poems to Last a Lifetime". Quoted in [https://web.archive.org/web/20080606202557/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/11/07/boself.xml&page=3 Andrew O'Hagan. (9 November 2004). "Selling poems to the people". ''Daily Telegraph''.] Accessed 12 January 2007</ref>

In ''[[The New Yorker]]'', writer and critic [[Audrey Wollen]] describes a substantial comic achievement—this is from a 2023 Tonks reassessment: "All of ''The Bloater'', however—every single sentence—is funny."<ref>{{cite magazine
| url        = https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-writer-who-burned-her-own-books
| quote      = It is about flirtation as a method of self-organization, and a crush as a method of self-torture. All of ''The Bloater'', however—every single sentence—is funny.
| title      = The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books
| author     = [[Audrey Wollen]]
| magazine       = The New Yorker
| date       = 3 January 2023
| access-date = 6 February 2023
}}</ref>

== Publications ==

=== Poetry ===
* ''Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms'' (Putnam, 1963)
* ''Iliad of Broken Sentences'' (Bodley Head, 1967)
* {{cite book |last1=Tonks |first1=Rosemary |title=Bedouin of the London evening: Collected poems & selected prose |date=2014 |publisher=Bloodaxe Books |location=Hexham, Great Britain |isbn=978-1780372389|author-mask=0}}

=== Novels ===
* ''Opium Fogs'' (Putnam, 1963)
* ''Emir'' (Adam Books, 1963 or 1964)
* ''The Bloater'' (Bodley Head, 1968)
* ''Businessmen as Lovers'' (Bodley Head, 1969); US title, ''Love Among the Operators'' (1970)
* ''The Way Out of Berkeley Square'' (Bodley Head, 1970)
* ''The Halt during the Chase'' (Bodley Head, 1972)

=== Children's books ===
*  ''On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster'' (John Murray, 1948)
*  ''Wild Sea Goose'' (John Murray, 1951)

== Notes ==
{{Notelist}}

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

=== Sources ===
* {{cite book |last1=Lucie-Smith |first1=Edward |editor=Edward Lucie-Smith |title=British poetry since 1945 |date=1978 |publisher=Penguin |location=London |isbn=978-0-14-042122-4 |pages=245–247 |orig-date=First published 1970 |chapter=Rosemary Tonks |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/britishpoetrysin0000unse_h9o9/page/244/mode/2up |chapter-url-access=registration}}
* {{cite book |last1=Tuma |first1=Keith |editor=Keith Tuma |title=Anthology of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry |date=2001 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York |isbn=9780195128949 |pages=556–559 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/anthologyoftwent0000unse_q8k3/page/556/mode/2up |chapter=Rosemary Tonks (b. [''sic''] 1932) |chapter-url-access=registration}} p.&nbsp;556: Brief Tonks biography by Tuma; pp.&nbsp;557–559: Tonks' poems: "The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas"; "The Little Cardboard Suitcase"; "The Ice-cream Boom Towns"; (all 1967)

==Further reading==
* {{cite book |last1=Rak |first1=Julie |editor=Merritt Moseley |title=British novelists since 1960: Third Series |date=1999 |publisher=Gale Group |location=Detroit, USA |isbn=978-0-7876-3101-7 |pages=287–293 |series=Dictionary of Literary Biography  |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/britishnovelists207mose/page/286/mode/2up |chapter=Rosemary Tonks ({{sic|nolink=y|1932}}– ) |chapter-url-access=registration}}
* {{cite book |last1=Poirier |first1=Michelle |last2=Halio |first2=Jay L. |editor=Jay L. Halio |series=Dictionary of Literary Biography |title=British novelists since 1960. Part 2: H-Z |date=1983 |publisher=Gale Research |location=Detroit, Mich. USA |isbn=978-0-8103-0927-2 |pages=715–720 |chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/britishnovelists0014unse/page/720/mode/2up |chapter=Rosemary Tonks ({{sic|hide=y|1932}}– ) |volume=14|chapter-url-access=registration}}

==External links==
{{Wikiquote}}
* [https://www.backlisted.fm/episodes/129-rosemary-tonks-the-bloater ''Backlisted Podcast'' – Rosemary Tonks: ''The Bloater'']
* [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b072sj34 ''Lost Voices – Rosemary Tonks''], BBC Radio documentary, March 2009
* [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fmc6 ''The Bloater'' by Rosemary Tonks], ''The Exploding Library'', BBC. 2022.
* [https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-writer-who-burned-her-own-books "The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books"]. ''The New Yorker'' on Rosemary Tonks. 2023.
* {{OL author|OL1872219A}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tonks, Rosemary}}
[[Category:1928 births]]
[[Category:2014 deaths]]
[[Category:Writers from London]]
[[Category:English women poets]]
[[Category:English expatriates in Pakistan]]
[[Category:20th-century English poets]]
[[Category:20th-century English women writers]]
[[Category:Polio survivors]]
[[Category:English women novelists]]
[[Category:People from Gillingham, Kent]]