Reviewing The Bloater in the TLS, Sarah Curtis showed how Tonks wrapped things up as neatly as the ending of a Mozart opera: “It all works out happily, with the unsuitable suitor rejected, husband fobbed off with a convenient lover, and even a little reference to ‘the moral dimension,’ so that the reader is not too outraged by all this mini-skirted flippancy.” Yet the literary world both attracted and repelled her, and she was to turn against its materialism, false values, betrayals and indulgence, as she was to follow Rimbaud in renouncing literature itself: "The mistakes, the wrong people, the half-baked ideas, / And their beastly comments on everything. Foul. / But irresistibly amusing, that is the whole trouble" ("The Little Cardboard Suitcase"). A woman’s personality would always make more sense in a situation that hasn’t happened yet. What Min admires in Billy is that he “moves straight into the future without any effort. In fact he’s one of the few people who are simultaneously alert to their own past, present, and future”—whereas she has a tendency to boil her life down into “pure beef essence” before she can contemplate what might happen next. That’s alienation, baby. When Billy does finally kiss her, Min swoons and observes, “I’m not the spectator I’m accustomed to being; I’m not in front of him, nor am I getting left behind.” The present arrives, without expectation. Love is being allowed, for the length of a kiss, to step outside of history. The poetic drive to a bathetic climax manages to be both funny and oddly moving, Tonks demonstrating that even in her contempt she finds poetry in the everyday interactions of human beings, however contrived. The penultimate chapter, from which this was taken, in which the Bloater and Min go on a date to the opera, is an incredible sustained exercise in comic release. The effect is somewhat like listening to James Joyce doing a particularly sarcastic stand-up routine, only to walk away and find you’re still thinking about the characters in his skits.

Tonks stopped publishing poetry in the early 1970s, at about the same time as her conversion to a form of Christianity. 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." The Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, which published three of Tonks' poems in 2001, states that permission to use her poems was obtained from a literary agency, Sheil Land Associates, Ltd. In the 30-minute BBC Radio 4 Lost Voices documentary, "The Poet Who Vanished", broadcast March 29, 2009, Brian Patten observed, from the literary world's pespective, she'd "evaporated into air like the 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.

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. [7] So what to say? Well, it's very short and the amount of time she spends being mean to the attractive, successful, powerful, attentive opera singer who she deigns to allow to flirt with her, is minimal. It's very funny at times because she is such a character too.

I don't know if I can recommend it on plot. With any other story this probably would have been a 5-star. As for me, I stubbornly refuse to re-dream the good times. I'm able to put up with the present only 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 had a mixed critical reception at best, [ citation needed] 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". [7] 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] 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] 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. [2] Assessment of her work [ edit ] Clearly, she was intent on making a complete break with her former self. But one can see in Rosemary Lightband a mutation of Tonks’s facilities as a writer into something else. Those same habits of mind – the form-seeking, the heightened awareness, the relentless self-interrogation – metastasized. In a letter to her great-niece from 1987, she writes that her former life was exactly ‘the preparation needed’ for studying the bible, ‘because your mind is alerted to unravelling mysteries hidden in words’. There’s an unassuming passage towards the end of The Bloater in which Min is rueing her domestic failures, but also seems to be reflecting on the source of her difficulties. ‘I know that one of my weaknesses is the fact that I can’t see dust’, she says. ‘I’ve been taught to see the fish lying in a stream, which means that I can penetrate through the glass clothes of a river and see its insides.’ This gift of obscene seeing was Tonks’ too. A writer like her, so vigilant about signs and symbols, so deep within her regime of self-punishment, must have read significance into her misfortune, especially the loss of her sight. Perhaps she decided that if you can’t cure your reading with your life, or your life with your reading, or your life with a different one, you must stop yourself from looking underneath the water.

Has anyone seen Rosemary Tonks?’ began an unusual announcement in London’s Evening Standard in November 1998. The request was on behalf of the publisher Bloodaxe Books, who were keen to reissue her poetry but explained that ‘we haven’t managed to speak to anyone who’s seen her since the seventies’. At the close of the decade Tonks had seemingly vanished, absconding from Hampstead and her career as a celebrated writer. No further poetry appeared, no new novels were added to the run of six that she’d published between 1963 and 1972, and it was widely believed she’d put a ban on anyone ever republishing them. The collected poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, finally appeared after her death in 2014. An introduction by the publisher Neil Astley revealed that Tonks had in fact been living in Bournemouth. ‘In illness you want to be alone’, she’d once said about her stint in Paris recovering from polio. In 1979, following a series of personal crises – the sudden death of her mother, the collapse of her marriage, burglaries, a lawsuit, an operation to correct detached retinas that left her partially blind for several years – she had retreated to the coast. Tonks attended boarding school at Wentworth college in Bournemouth. [2] While still at school, she wrote the story which would form her authorial debut when BBC radio broadcast it in 1946. [1] She published children's stories while a teenager, the first in 1946, which she also illustrated: On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster. [1] As our hosts shine the spotlight on strange, funny and sometimes disturbing novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Rosemary Tonks and David Foster Wallace, listeners are invited to inhabit their eccentric worlds - gaining a deeper understanding of their workings and the unique literary minds that created them. This is one of those cases when the author’s own story may actually be more interesting than her novel. 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." [13] Publications [ edit ] Poetry [ edit ]