Bedouin of the London Evening

by Rosemary Tonks

  Rosemary Tonks’s own analysis of Colette’s personal crisis is apposite here: ‘The shock to her ego was more than it could bear; there was nothing inside capable of withstanding the blow, her personality was fragmented, and she collapsed into a nervous breakdown’ (p.131). This reads almost like a textbook description of trauma, very like the one which Freud gives in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: when our ‘protective shield’ is shattered, it leads to fragmentation.

  Her belief in God served as another kind of protective shield. Everything could be explained and made safe with the Lord protecting her from Satan. Unfortunately, her extraordinary literary talent was the great casualty in this scheme. ‘I couldn’t read a book now, it wouldn’t have meaning for me,’ she noted in 1999:

  What are books? They are minds, Satan’s minds.

  How foolish they are!! When you think of the Lord!40

  Devils gain access through the mind: printed books carry,

  each one, an evil mind: which enters your mind.41

  But all this takes nothing away from the brilliance and originality of the regrettably small body of poetry she wrote as Rosemary Tonks in her 20s and 30s, before she was overwhelmed by events and changes in her life (and in her being) outside her control.

  After undergoing what was by design and effect a complete change in her identity, Rosemary Lightband, as she became, rejected not just her own books, but all books apart from the Bible (the Koran along with sacred texts from other faiths all served false gods and were anathema to her).

  When Rosemary Lightband visited libraries – which remained favourite haunts, along with cafés – it was to read Scripture, preferably from the Tyndale Bible, the first English translation, if they had it, or if not then from later King James Bible which drew on Tyndale. More modern Bibles were travesties of the Word.

  Contrary to what everyone who had known her believed, Rosemary was not a recluse. During the early 1980s she ‘began to search for a church bicycling across England’. And just as in her London years, she continued to inhabit cafés and parks, and was active as a silent, often solitary evangelist working outside any church, giving out Bibles around Bournemouth and in London. Ordering Bibles in different languages from the Trinitarian Bible Society, she made numerous trips on Saturdays or Sundays to Speakers’ Corner in London to give these to potential converts, from the mid 1990s until August 2012, by which time the travel and effort involved had become too much for her.

  Every summer she reviewed the investment income she lived off, and made sure she had donated exactly ten per cent of her earnings from the previous tax year to charities. On 30 May 2012, she noted: ‘Spent all day doing sums re my Income & my tithing: I love tithing, it makes me happy. Then ran down to Barclays in the sunshine, & got in just in time. Bank closes at 5pm.’42

  She mellowed in her more peaceful later years, and is said to have been popular with staff at the Piccadilly Hotel just round the corner from her house, where she went to have Christmas dinner every year on her own. She even made one friend there, who remembers her as kind, happy and always laughing. In April 2012 she decided she ‘must do something about being so cut off from people’,43 and started attending Open Air Mission meetings in Bournemouth on Saturdays, even having tea in cafés with some of the Christians she met there and rather reluctantly attending a few of their church services.

  Finally, in November 2012, she wrote to the cousin she had cut off years earlier to apologise: ‘I was boxed up, under the most frightful, frightful mental pressure. I was not myself. All my decisions were wrong, inhuman, appalling. Give me time, please, I long to explain it to you.’44 But no such opportunity was to arise.

  In February 2013 she spent several days in hospital, moving into temporary accommodation in the Piccadilly Hotel on being discharged, from where she wrote two further letters to the cousin, but only about her difficulties and immediate plans. Her failing health had made it impossible for her to continue to live alone at Old Forest Lodge, which she sold in May 2013, downsizing to a serviced garden flat not far from her old house after selling, giving away or destroying most of her possessions.

  She had only been there for four months when she was again taken to hospital by ambulance, having collapsed with exhaustion, caused by ovarian cancer. After three weeks of treatment, she was taken to a nursing home: ‘Horrors!! All the residents either demented or on the way to it. Staff very nice. Was absolutely terrified & lost. Decided I must leave at once. That very day. They wanted me to stay overnight. No. Must leave at once. […] called a taxi & I came post haste back to the flat. Loved it! Slept all night!!’45

  She spent the last three months of 2013 back in her flat, but much of January 2014 in hospital, and then had a few more weeks at home before she had to be taken to a different nursing home. She died on 15 April 2014 and was buried two weeks later in her mother’s grave at the Church of St Thomas à Becket, Warblington, Hampshire, without a funeral or any ceremony, in line with her wishes: the body was only a vessel for the spirit. She left instructions that the inscription on her headstone should read: ‘Rosemary Desmond Boswell Lightband’.

  The list of treasures recorded in ‘The burning of the idols’ could have graced a Sothebys catalogue. This was a collection of works created by devout artists from other faiths assembled by a knowledgeable collector who loved the art of ancient China and other cultures, all given to Rosemary Tonks on trust. Reading through this account, line by line, felt like the antithesis of Edmund de Waal’s redeeming tale The Hare with the Amber Eyes, in which a family history is brought to life through the netsuke figures passed on from one generation to the next through times of war, devastation and great personal loss.

  The treasures passed on to Rosemary Tonks from her aunt are lost forever. The one great gift she has left us – her books of poetry used to survive only in the libraries of collectors. Commenting on this situation in the aftermath of her death, Oliver Kamm wrote in The Times:

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS & NOTES

  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 Hallida
y, 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.

  Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms

  (1963)

  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

  Love Territory

  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.

  Running Away

  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

&n
bsp; 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?