Rosemary Tonks
Encyclopedia
Rosemary Tonks is an English
author
and poet
. She disappeared from the public eye after her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity
in the 1970s
, and nothing is known about her life since.
, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of typhoid and polio forced a return to England. She later lived briefly in Paris.
, 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".
Her work appears in many anthologies, including Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
(ed. Keith Tuma), Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
, British Poetry since 1945 and The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (ed. Sean O'Brien).
Tonks stopped publishing poetry in the early 1970s, at about the same time
as her conversion to a form of Christianity. Nothing is known publicly about her subsequent life. 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.
A BBC Radio 4 Documentary aired on March 29, 2009 stated that Tonks had disappeared from public view and now lives a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.
to exuberant disbelief of 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.
She believed that poetry should look good on a printed page as well as sound good when read: "There is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear's reaction". 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."
Her poem, "The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas" ends:
about symbol
ism and surrealism
. Al Alvarez
said of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms that it showed "an original sensibility in motion". Edward Lucie-Smith
said that "the movements of an individual awareness - often rather self-conscious in its singularity - supply the themes of most of her work." 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."
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. She disappeared from the public eye after her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity
Fundamentalist Christianity
Christian fundamentalism, also known as Fundamentalist Christianity, or Fundamentalism, arose out of British and American Protestantism in the late 19th century and early 20th century among evangelical Christians...
in the 1970s
1970s
File:1970s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: US President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office after the Watergate scandal in 1974; Refugees aboard a US naval boat after the Fall of Saigon, leading to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; The 1973 oil...
, and nothing is known about her life since.
Early life
Rosemary Tonks was born in London and educated at Wentworth School, London. Expelled in 1948, she published a children's story in the same year. She married at age 19, and the couple moved to KarachiKarachi
Karachi is the largest city, main seaport and the main financial centre of Pakistan, as well as the capital of the province of Sindh. The city has an estimated population of 13 to 15 million, while the total metropolitan area has a population of over 18 million...
, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of typhoid and polio forced a return to England. She later lived briefly in Paris.
Career
Tonks worked for the BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, writing stories and reviewing poetry for the BBC European Service. She published poems in collections and The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
, Transatlantic Review
Transatlantic Review
Transatlantic Review was a literary journal founded and edited by Joseph F. McCrindle in 1959, and published at first in Rome, then London and New York...
, London Magazine
London Magazine
The London Magazine is a historied publication of arts, literature and miscellaneous interests. Its history ranges nearly three centuries and several reincarnations, publishing the likes of William Wordsworth, William S...
, Encounter and Poetry Review, she read on the BBC's "Third Programme". She also wrote "poetic novels".
Her work appears in many anthologies, including Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry is a poetry anthology edited by Keith Tuma, and published in 2001 by Oxford University Press...
(ed. Keith Tuma), Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse is a poetry anthology edited by Philip Larkin. It was published in 1973 by Oxford University Press with ISBN 0-19-812137-7. Larkin writes in the short preface that the selection is wide rather than deep; and also notes that for the post-1914 period...
, British Poetry since 1945 and The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (ed. Sean O'Brien).
Tonks stopped publishing poetry in the early 1970s, at about the same time
as her conversion to a form of Christianity. Nothing is known publicly about her subsequent life. As Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion, FRSL is an English poet, novelist and biographer, who presided as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009.- Life and career :...
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.
A BBC Radio 4 Documentary aired on March 29, 2009 stated that Tonks had disappeared from public view and now lives a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.
Character of her poetry
Tonks' poems offer a stylised view of an urban literary sub-culture around 1960 full of hedonism and decadence. The poet seems to veer from the ennui of Charles BaudelaireCharles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
to exuberant disbelief of 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.
She believed that poetry should look good on a printed page as well as sound good when read: "There is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear's reaction". 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."
Her poem, "The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas" ends:
- — 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 had a mixed critical reception at best, although her critics admit that her grasp of the English language and her sense of London are sharp at times. Her novels are a kind of fictional autobiography in which is she not only plays the leading role but one or two supporting roles as well. She includes incidents and experiences directly from her past, often with only a thin fictional veil to disguise them. Some critics felt that this is a fault and labelled the autobiographical dimension of her writing “feminine” in a negative sense; others decided that her directness was invigorating and shows the uniqueness of her voice, making for a lively, distinct fictional world. 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 movement of symbolism that 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.Assessment of her work
She was praised by critics 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 ÉluardPaul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
about symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ism and surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
. Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez
Al Alvarez is an English poet, writer and critic who publishes under the name A. Alvarez and Al Alvarez....
said of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms that it showed "an original sensibility in motion". Edward Lucie-Smith
Edward Lucie-Smith
John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith is a British writer, poet, art critic, curator, broadcaster and author of exhibition catalogues.-Biography:Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946...
said that "the movements of an individual awareness - often rather self-conscious in its singularity - supply the themes of most of her work." 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."
Novels
- On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster (1948)
- Opium Fogs (1963)
- The Bloater (1968)
- Businessmen as Lovers (1969)
- The Halt during the Chase (1972)