Rosemary Tonks

Rosemary Tonks (17 October 1928 – 15 April 2014) (In works, anthologies, and other publications that appeared before her death, those that included Tonks' year of birth stated it as "1932".) and pieces in numerous media outlets, she disappeared from the public eye following her conversion to fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s; little was known about her life past that point, until her death.

Early life and marriage Born Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks in Gillingham, Kent, she had a difficult childhood. She was the only child of Gwendoline and Desmond Tonks. Her father was the nephew of Henry Tonks, the surgeon, painter, and in the 1920s, professor of fine art at Slade. A mechanical engineer, Desmond died of blackwater fever in Africa before Rosemary was born. She spent her early years in and out of different schools and children's homes.

Career 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.

Her work appears in many anthologies, including: Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (2001, edited by Keith Tuma); British Poetry since 1945; The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (1998, edited by Sean O'Brien); and the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.

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. in the Guardian, followed by his introduction to the 2014 Bloodaxe Books edition of her collected poetry and selected prose, Bedouin of the London Evening, 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:

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 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". 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. 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. 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.

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."

A mural of Tonks was included in a series of murals displayed in Gillingham between 2022-2023 as part of Medway Libraries' Circle of Six project.

Publications

Poetry Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (Putnam, 1963) Iliad of Broken Sentences (Bodley Head, 1967)

Novels Opium Fogs (Putnam, 1963) Emir (Adam Books, 1963 or 1964) The Bloater (Bodley Head, 1968); reissued in 2022 by Vintage Classics with a new introduction by Stewart Lee, and also as a Penguin audiobook read by Florence Howard Businessmen as Lovers (Bodley Head, 1969); US title, Love Among the Operators (1970) The Way Out of Berkeley Square (Bodley Head, 1970) The Halt during the Chase (Bodley Head, 1972)

Children's books On Wooden Wings: The Adventures of Webster (John Murray, 1948) Wild Sea Goose (John Murray, 1951)