As for me, I stubbornly refuse to re-dream the good times. I'm able to put up with the present only

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. They know' he says, with the primitive vigour of a secret Bible-reader escaping from an age of psychoanalysis." The poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks wrote her third novel, The Bloater, in just four weeks in the autumn of 1967, which would have been impressive by any standards but her own. She had originally set out to finish it in half the time and had hoped it would earn her “a lot of red-hot money.” (Here, she fell short too). But the result was a dizzying, madcap story that was a hit with the critics. Again, most writers would have been over the moon with such a reception, but Tonks could never be so predictable. “It just proves the English like their porridge,” she once reportedly replied to congratulations from her editor. To borrow a confession from The Bloater’s canny narrator—a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Tonks herself: “I knew perfectly well what I was doing.” Her poetry – published in Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) – is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was ’Bedouin of the London evening’ in one poem: ’I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste.’ Rosemary Tonks - The Bloater; Emir; Opium Fogs; Businessmen as Lovers; Love Among the Operators; Way Out of Berkeley Square; The Halt During the Chase; Bedouin of the London Evening: The Collected PoemsYou’ll have to rely on Interlibrary Loan to get a copy of The Bloater: there are no copies available for sale at the moment. Fortunately, there are almost 60 copies held in libraries worldwide, so all you need is a library card and a little patience. 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. There is a straightforward interpretation of Tonks/Lightband’s total rejection of her past writing: it promotes women speaking of their sexual needs and pleasures with clarity, intoxicants enjoyed and encouraged, poetry seeking “the Eros of grey rain, Veganin, and telephones.” (Veganin is an over-the-counter drug consisting of acetaminophen, caffeine, and codeine.) But accounts of her life suggest that her conflict was not with the content, necessarily, but the very concept of writing for others at all. In 1999, she noted in a private journal, “What are books? They are minds, Satan’s minds. . . . Devils gain access through the mind: printed books carry, each one, an evil mind: which enters your mind.” The bloater of Rosemary Tonks’ title is an opera singer, and The Bloater itself is a bit like Così fan tutte updated for the Swinging Sixties. Min, married to George, who seems to have a bird on the side, is being pursued by the Bloater (he never gets a real name), while she contemplates if she wants Billy the musicologist as a friend or lover. Claudi, another one of Tonks’ older men of ambiguous European origin, flits in and out to offer advice and moral support in the role of Don Alfonso.

Featuring contributions from poet Brian Patten, editor and champion of Tonks's work Neil Astley, writer and Tonks fan Jennifer Hodgson, and New York Times religion correspondent Ruth Graham. In the aftermath of the surgery she was left almost blind for the next few years, and in 1979 she moved to Bournemouth to recuperate, to the home of her aunt, Dorothy (a "double aunt", who was both Gwendoline's sister and married to Desmond's brother, Myles). In 1980 she moved into a house behind the seafront where she lived alone for the next 33 years, using her former married name, Rosemary Lightband. In 1981 she made the decision to "confront her profession" [6] and burnt the manuscript of an unpublished novel, apparently in the belief that the work was spiritually dangerous. She had, not long before, in the October of the same year, also burnt a large number of valuable Oriental artefacts that had been bequeathed to her many years before, on the basis that they were the cause of supernatural ill-effects. [1] That October she travelled to Jerusalem and was baptised near the River Jordan on 17 October 1981, the day before her 53rd birthday. "Obliterating her former identity as the writer Rosemary Tonks, she dated her new life from that 'second birth'", according to Astley, and thereafter she never read any books apart from the Bible. [6] Character of her poetry [ edit ]

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Comedian and writer Athena Kugblenu searches for Rosemary Tonks, a poet and writer who "vanished like the Cheshire Cat" shortly after the height of her fame in the late 1960s. Changing her name and embracing a very specific form of Christianity, Tonks disavowed her previous literary life - to the point that she would visit libraries and bookshops and attempt to destroy her work.

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. 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. 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 fact is, I didn’t get it. It’s quite well written and the voice of Min, the narrator, is readable enough, but frankly, I couldn’t see the point. First published in 1968, this seems to me to be a sort of late-60s Bridget Jones Diary. Min, the narrator, has a successful career in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and is married. However the Workshop gets just a couple of scenes, chiefly so Min can have awkward relationships with her two co-workers. Her husband, who may or may not be having affairs, gets barely a mention. Meanwhile, Min is being pursued by two suitors – the titular bloater and Billy, whom she seems to actually care for. There’s some chat with female friends and a lot of confused angst...and I just didn’t find it funny or engaging.I think if she'd allowed come to her senses in the end that he was the one for her, and looked at her prejudices square in the face, I could have forgiven the evil comments about the man. Even the way she refers to him is atrocious. But as it is I just feel so sad for him. 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.” In 1970 though, she converted to Fundamentalist Christianity and did her best, even through the courts, to remove her novels, and much of her poetry, from sale, and the public eye generally. Following this, she lived as a hermit, refusing to use a telephone or indeed any other means of communication with even friends and family. Critics praised Tonks 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 Éluard about symbolism and surrealism. Al Alvarez said Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms showed "an original sensibility in motion". [11] Edward Lucie-Smith said "the movements of an individual awareness – often rather self-conscious in its singularity – supply the themes of most of her work." [11] 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." [12]

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. My reading life has been immeasurably improved by Rosemary Tonks’s Bedouin of the London Evening.’– Max Porter, Guardian (Books of the Year 2015) Rak, Julie (1999). "Rosemary Tonks (1932[ sic]– )". In Merritt Moseley (ed.). British novelists since 1960: Third Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit, USA: Gale Group. pp.287–293. ISBN 978-0-7876-3101-7.

Bedouin of the London Evening

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] Bedouin of the London evening: Collected poems & selected prose. Hexham, Great Britain: Bloodaxe Books. 2014. ISBN 978-1780372389. Her first two novels, Opium Fogs (1963) and Emir (1963), were praised for their evocative images of the metropolis, and are best regarded as companion pieces to the Baudelaire- and Rimbaud-influenced Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963), Tonks’s first poetry collection, in which she adorns bohemian sixties London with exotic Oriental imagery inspired by her travels. (Tonks and her husband, an engineer-turned-financier named Michael Lightband, whom she wed in 1948, spent the early years of their marriage in India and Pakistan, where Tonks contracted first typhoid and then polio. The latter left her right, writing hand withered—so she taught herself to use her left instead.) Tonks was interested in capturing what she once so fragrantly described as “the flavour beneath the flagstones.” Her poems are full of dirty mattresses and stained dressing gowns, foggy, grimy city streets and badly lit grotty rooms in boarding houses, and her novels are pretty piquant too. “I do see that he is large and that washing takes time, I do see that he spends most of his life travelling, or appearing in a professional capacity,” says Min of the Bloater. “Even so, it’s monstrous of him.” I decide, too, that the only thing for it is to be stunned by the sheer sordidness as well. I'm glad Claudi used that word, because it's not always possible to put your finger on beastly words when you need them to set your mood" (149). Still aware of some supernatural occurrences, she embarked on an act that saddened her family when they learned of it after her death: she decided to destroy her priceless collection of oriental treasures. A bequest from an aunt by marriage, they were "graven images" that had to be burned by fire, according to the second commandment. Retrieving the five suitcases from London, she filled two garden incinerators with more than 40 artefacts, itemised in a handwritten list titled "The burning of some idols (11 August 1981)", and set fire to them. These included Chinese silk robes, carved Chinese letter seals and other artefacts of marble, terracotta, porcelain, plaster, mother of pearl, ivory, wood and stone, from China, Korea, Japan, Africa, Greece, Bali and Persia. She smashed and hammered at the Tang and Sung figures until she got the remnants down to "dog-biscuit size".