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The best parts are the scenes set at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (where Rosemary Tonks worked with the legendary Delia Derbyshire), and the interactions between Min and her neighbour Claudio, alas these are but a sidenote to the main "story" of Min and her pursuers. This is one of those cases when the author’s own story may actually be more interesting than her novel. 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's Phoenix Press in Newbury from 1976 until 1980, when the project was abandoned following her conversion to a puritanical form of Christianity. [6] 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." [3] 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 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. [2] Withdrawal from literary life [ edit ] For this discussion of Rosemary Tonks fascinating third novel, The Bloater - first published by the Bodley Head in 1968 - Andy and John are joined by two enthusiastic fans of Tonks’s writing: the author and critic Jennifer Hodgson (who appeared on episode 61 to discuss Berg by Ann Quin) and the comedian, Stewart Lee.
From the rolling expanse of the Heath, through the smoke-filled pubs of Fitzrovia, and the “dim brown corridors” of Broadcasting House, to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, where bejewelled ladies and tailcoated men quaff champagne with delicate slivers of smoked salmon, The Bloater is a whistle-stop tour of London, the city that had long been Tonks’s favorite subject. Lucie-Smith, Edward (1978) [First published 1970]. "Rosemary Tonks". In Edward Lucie-Smith (ed.). British poetry since 1945. London: Penguin. pp.245–247. ISBN 978-0-14-042122-4. Poirier, Michelle; Halio, Jay L. (1983). "Rosemary Tonks (1932– )". In Jay L. Halio (ed.). British novelists since 1960. Part 2: H-Z. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol.14. Detroit, Mich. USA: Gale Research. pp.715–720. ISBN 978-0-8103-0927-2.
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The Bloater is long out of print, unfortunately, but the discussion also covers Tonks’s remarkable poetry, her friendship with Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, her eccentric career in fiction, radio and theatre, and her gradual retreat from the world. Daisy Goodwin. (2004). "Poems to Last a Lifetime". Quoted in Andrew O'Hagan. (9 November 2004). "Selling poems to the people". Daily Telegraph. Accessed 12 January 2007 The "disappearance" of the poet Rosemary Tonks in the 1970s was one of the literary world's most tantalising mysteries. Bizarre theories abounded as to her whereabouts – if she was still alive. As the poet Brian Patten put it in a BBC radio feature about her in 2009, she "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat". One contributor imagined her living in Cuba, "smoking cigars in a doorway". Other commentators over the years have made her into a nun; consigned her to a sect; had her communing with the ghost of Charles Baudelaire; or put her in a shed at the bottom of someone's garden. For some reason, these mythmakers always required her to be living in poverty.
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, and Poetry Review; she read on the BBC's Third Programme. Featuring the comedic voices of Natasha Hodgson, Athena Kugblenu and John-Luke Roberts, and created by award-winning producers Steven Rajam (Tim Key and Gogol’s Overcoat) and Benjamin Partridge (Beef and Dairy Network), this is an arts documentary series like no other.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, and Poetry Review, she read on the BBC's Third Programme. She also wrote "poetic novels". 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. Interviewed earlier in 1967, she spoke of her direct literary forebears as Baudelaire and Rimbaud: ‘They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them… The main duty of the poet is to excite – to send the senses reeling.’
But let's be honest with ourselves: you're not reading this strange, cynical, plotless dalliance because of its language. You're reading it because you found it. Somehow. Vain, materialistic, yet surprisingly tender, The Bloater is a sparklingly ironic comedy of manners for all flirtatious gossips who love to hate and hate to love.
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Among other admirers of her work were Cyril Connolly ("Miss Tonks's hard-faceted yet musical poems have unexpected power") and Al Alvarez ("real talent of an edgy, bristling kind"). Decades later, her mostly unavailable work is admired by poets including Andrew Motion, Jo Shapcott, Matthew Sweeney, Matthew Caley and John Stammers, who borrowed the title of his collection, Stolen Love Behaviour, from one of her poems.
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] Meanwhile, her friend and co-worker Jenny wonders whether to sleep with the guitar player with the soulful eyes or the poet with the long brown hair. And in between we have sessions in the studio where Min, Jenny, and that clod Fred are setting a poem about Orestes to electronic music. So it’s all very hip, cool, and sophisticated — and yet nothing more than a bit of kissing actually goes on.
February 2023
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.
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