Bedouin of the London Evening (4 page)
Read Bedouin of the London Evening Online
Authors: Rosemary Tonks
Her art, she had decided, was dangerous rubbish. The Bible was what mattered. She burnt the manuscript of her last novel and instructed publishers to remove her poems from anthologies.
I find this a deeply saddening mental state and, if the decision were mine, I’d have no hesitation in giving permission for Tonks’s work to be published now. The creator of a work of art can no more decide its fate than he or she can decide its critical reputation. […] In death, Rosemary Tonks deserves the respect of rediscovery.
46
I know I must share the delight of many thousands of readers that Rosemary Tonks’s family – not without much hesitation and careful consideration – decided in the end to agree with that sentiment. There was no ban on republication in her will, written many years after she ceased to be Rosemary Tonks, so that her books didn’t even exist for her then. The woman who destroyed that priceless collection given to her on trust seems to me a very different person from the author of those marvellously edgy and timeless poems.
This edition should re-establish Rosemary Tonks’s critical reputation as both a unique voice in 20th century poetry and the author of some exceptionally astute and unusual critical writing.
NEIL ASTLEY
This book could not have been published – nor this introduction written – without the support and assistance of the Rosemary Tonks Estate, and I wish to thank her cousins Jill Brandt, Wendy Reynolds and Tim Butchard for their kindness and help over a number of years, and most of all, for being open to make a difficult decision to act in the interests of the work for which they became responsible.
This introduction includes some material previously included in an obituary (2 May 2014) and an article entitled ‘Rosemary Tonks, the lost poet’ (31 May 2014) published in
The Guardian
, and I am grateful to the paper for allowing me to draw upon those pieces.
I would also like to thank in particular, for various kinds of help: Peter Armstrong, Sabina ffrench Blake, Denis Brandt, Sue Corbett, Vivien Green, Christine Hall, John Halliday, Clare Lindsay, John Moat, Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Brian Patten, Anthony Rudolf, Henry Summers, the late John Hartley Williams, and Nicholas Wroe.
1.
Rosemary Tonks, ‘Done for!’, see p.94.
2.
‘Rosemary Tonks: The Poet Who Vanished’, BBC Radio 4
Lost Voices
series, first broadcast 29 March 2009, repeated 4 April 2009, presented by Brian Patten, produced by Christine Hall.
3.
Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms
(Putnam, 1963);
Iliad of Broken Sentences
(The Bodley Head, 1967).
4.
Emir
(Adam Books, 1963);
Opium Fogs
(Putnam, 1963);
The Bloater
(1968),
Businessmen as Lovers
(1969) [published in the US as
Love Among the Operators
],
The Way Out of Berkeley Square
(1970) and
The Halt During the Chase
(1972), all from The Bodley Head.
5.
Diary article by John Horder,
The Times
, 16 October 1967.
6.
Anthony Rudolf, email, 8 May 2014.
7.
Interview with Peter Orr, 22 July 1963. See p.109.
8.
Julian Symons, ‘Smartening Up’,
The Spectator
, 9 May 1963.
9.
Terry Coleman, ‘Rosemary for remembrance: Terry Coleman talks to Rosemary Tonks’,
The Guardian
, 24 October 1970.
10.
Philip Annis, email, 30 March 2009. This was an inscribed (undated) copy he had bought from a second-hand bookseller.
11.
John Hartley Williams, ‘Downhill, Mad as Swine’,
Poetry Review
, 11 no.4 (Winter 1996).
12.
John Thompson, ‘An Alphabet of Poets’,
New York Review of Books
, 11 no.2, 1 August 1968.
13.
This paragraph and subsequent unsourced summaries draw upon ‘Surgery on Both Eyes and Conversion’, a private holograph document written by Rosemary Lightband in 1990 for her cousins, which they allowed me to read to help me give an accurate, balanced account of her life in the obituary and feature published in
The Guardian
. Since it was not intended for publication, I have paraphrased its content, only including direct quotation in a few instances where it was important that a particular word or phrase of hers be used.
14.
Rosemary Tonks said this of her Verdi ancestry (which may be fanciful) writing to John Moat: ‘I’m bound to have strong ideas, I always do, and I hope we won’t rub too much against the good friendship. My grandfather’s uncle, Giuseppe Verdi, was born on the 10th of a certain powerful month, and I was born on the 17th of that same month. He had to have his own way, in order to transform Italian opera, and I inherit one or two physical features –
and other hidden stubborn traits, connected with having my own way. My grandfather himself was a Prince of the Rosy Cross, a great spiritual power, whom we shall be happy is on our side. So we are set fair for this book!’
Letter to John Moat, 30 August 1977. University of Exeter, Special Collections Archives (GB 0029) EUL MS 230/4, Literary and personal papers of John Moat (hereinafter University of Exeter).
15. Adam international review, 257 (1956).
16.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 129 (16 July 2012).
17.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 121 (20 December 2009).
18.
Terry Coleman,
ibid
.
19.
Including Terry Coleman,
ibid
.
20.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 135 (18 October 2013).
21.
Terry Coleman,
ibid
.
22.
Terry Coleman,
ibid
.
23.
Terry Coleman,
ibid
.
24.
Terry Coleman,
ibid
.
25.
The Bloater
(The Bodley Head, 1968), dustjacket note.
26.
Tim Butchard, email, 21 August 2014.
27.
Jane Gapen, ‘Women and Poetry’,
New York Review of Books
, 20 no.19, 29 November 1973.
28.
Hull University Archives, Papers of Philip Arthur Larkin, correspondence between Rosemary Tonks and Philip Larkin, 6–22 July 1972 (U DPL2/3/61/39).
29.
Geoffrey Godbert, Letter,
The Guardian
, 8 June 2014.
30.
Anthony Rudolf,
ibid
.
31.
John Horder,
ibid
.
32.
Rosemary Lightband, diary note, 20 April 2010.
33.
Peter Armstrong suggested that sensory deprivation during the long period of near blindness and isolation could have been a factor here.
34.
Letter to John Moat, 26 November 1976, University of Exeter.
35.
Letter to John Moat, 30 August 1977, University of Exeter.
36.
Letter to John Moat, 27 July 1978, University of Exeter.
37.
Letter to John Moat, 18 September 1979, University of Exeter.
38.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 129 (2 June 2012).
39.
This introduction owes much to discussions and email exchanges I’ve had with three psychotherapists, Peter Armstrong, John Halliday and Clare Lindsay. This paragraph and the following one paraphrase comments made by Clare Lindsay.
40.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 85 (23 March 1999).
41.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 85 (27 March 1999).
42.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 128 (30 May 2012).
43.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 128 (11 April 2012).
44.
Letter to Jill Brandt, 28 November 2012.
45.
Rosemary Lightband, notebook 135 (21 September 2013).
46.
Oliver Kamm, Notebook,
The Times
, 10 June 2014.
This is the first collected volume of a young poet who is also a novelist. Rosemary Tonks is a Londoner, living in Hampstead; she has published two children’s books, and reviews poetry for the BBC European Service. ‘My ethos,’ she writes, ‘is a great European Metropolis; I want to show human passions at work and to give eternal forces their contemporary dimension in this landscape.’ Her sensuous diction explores a world of metropolitan moods and relationships, presenting an individual and exciting vision.
Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society
Jacket note,
Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms
(Putnam, 1963)
To Micky
To F.U.
He’s timid with women, and the dusk is excruciating
The bronze-brown autumn dusk!
And the half-lit territories of street and bed and heart
Are savage and full of risk.
On bronze nights
When the territory is half-lit by casual glances
He sweats, each step is hideous!
Once he knows his strength of course he will be ruthless.
Bedrooms – he’ll force an entrance,
On an evening full of leaves and blood and water,
By the elemental half-light of a passing glance.
Oh these brown nights are excruciating!
When the quarter’s full of gold air, very cold to breathe,
Lovers embrace at dusk with an enlightened coarseness
That makes the frigid grind their teeth.
In the deep bronze, when he goes out to acquit himself
It’s treacherous and elemental
In the half-dark of a street, a bed, a heart.
And also modern, young and gentle.
In the green rags of the Bible I tore up
The straight silk of childhood on my head
I left the house, I fled
My mother’s brow where I had no ambition
But to stroke the writing
I raked in.
She who dressed in wintersilk my head
That month when there is baize on the high wall
Where the dew cloud presses its lustration,
And the thrush is but a brooch of rain
As the world flies softly in the wool of heaven.
I was a guest at my own youth; under
The lamp tossed by a moth for thirteen winters
Sentenced to cabbage and kisses
By She who crammed an Earth against my feet and
Pulled over me the bright rain
Storm of fleece.
Not for me – citizenship of the backdoor
Where even the poor wear wings; while on Sunday
Gamy ventilations raise their dilettante
In the bonnet of the satin-green dung fly,
And fungus sweats a livery of epaulettes.
I was a hunter whose animal
Is that dark hour when the hemisphere moves
In deep blue blaze of dews
And you, brunette of the birdmusic tree,
Stagger in spat diamonds
Drunkenly.
Like some Saint whose only blasphemy is a
Magnificent juice vein that plucks his groin
With April’s coarse magicianship as green
As the jade squirt of fruit, I was the child whose breast
Rocks to a muscle savage as Africa.
Thundercloud, your wool was rough with mud
As the coat of a wild beast on which flowers grow,
Your brogue of grunts so low
They left soil in the mouth. After you, I
Walked as through a Djinn’s brain
Gleaming lane.
I was incriminated by your hammer
In my chest. And forfeit to the crepe hoods
Of my mother’s eyes; the iron door of her oven
And her church. Skies, cut to blind, had but laid on
Her priest’s mouth the green scabs of winter.
But I had the marvellous infection!
Leaning upon my fairy and my dog
In the ultramarine
Latitudes of dew shook like a tear that’s carried
Through darkness on the knuckles of
A woman’s glove.
I saw each winter where my hen-thrush
Left her fork in famine’s white banqueting cloth;
Could I not read as well the tradesman’s hand
With its magenta creases – whose soul turns blandly
On a sirloin mattress to smile at the next meal?
O She who would paper her lamp with my wings!
That hour when all the Earth is drinking the
Blue drop of thunder; and in
Dark debris as of a magician’s room, my beast
A scented breathing
To the East.