Bedouin of the London Evening

by Rosemary Tonks

  c. 1952-53.

  Rosemary Tonks, London, 1969

  (photo: Associated Newspapers/REX)

  One of very few other published women poets of that time, she wasn’t, however, noted for supporting the sixties sisterhood, being taken to task by Jane Gapen in the New York Review of Books for an unsympathetic review (p.117) of Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, which ‘should be reviewed from a feminist outlook… It really hurts that a woman would say this about another poet.’27

  Nor did she feel connected with other poets. ‘They are a rather lost set, you know, in London,’ she told Peter Orr in 1963. ‘They form movements.’ (p.109) However, she did form close relationships with both Robert Conquest, the Movement’s anthologist, and poet and novelist John Wain. Philip Larkin admired her work, and corresponded with her28 when editing his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), resisting her suggestion that her poem ‘Love Territory’ (p.39) would represent her better than one of his eventual choices, ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ (p.62) and ‘Farewell to Kurdistan’ (p.97).

  Geoffrey Godbert recalls meeting her at gatherings of the Group at Edward Lucie-Smith’s Chelsea house in the 1970s: ‘She immediately gave the impression of a coiled spring waiting and needing to be unsprung. Surrounded by the voices of conventional wisdom, she manifested the loner’s stare into, and the need to speak of, the indescribable future before it was too late.’29

  Anthony Rudolf met her a few times in the mid sixties at the house of their onetime patron, Miron Grindea: ‘She was a forceful personality and I recall an argument we had in the presence of Pablo Neruda in Grindea’s legendary salon. Her poems matched the forceful personality, being rhetorically explosive, with more exclamation marks than anyone else used.’30 John Horder also recalls how she ‘spoke with an intensity bordering on active aggression’.31

  Re-reading Rosemary Tonks’s work, and talking and corresponding with family and others who knew her, traits soon become apparent which connect the outspoken and uncompromising writer who had no truck with politics (in the novels) or feminism, and was dismissive of any poet whose work she felt lacked integrity or authenticity, with the single-minded born-again Christian convert, the later Mrs Lightband. Despite the divorce she never wanted and could never forgive him for, she kept her ex-husband’s name – needed for the new identity – and cut off anyone else in her family who divorced, regardless of fault, including one cousin who had always been dear to her.

  The poems are full of damning judgements, insults, extremes, resentments, betrayals and irreconcilable opposites. She writes of her ‘intolerance’, of being ‘powerful, disobedient’, and of leading her ‘double life among the bores and vegetables’. In ‘Diary of a Rebel’ (p.44), she needs the café for her ‘fierce hot-blooded sulkiness’; in ‘Poet as Gambler’ (p.67), ‘gutter and heavens’ were her lottery in a ‘wasted youth’; in ‘Running Away’ (p.40) she tears up ‘the green rags of the Bible’: ‘I left the house, I fled / My mother’s brow where I had no ambition / But to stroke the writing / I raked in. / […] I was a guest at my own youth; under / The lamp tossed by a moth for thirteen winters.’

  The younger Rosemary comes across as headstrong, wilful, stubborn, obsessive, rebellious, judgemental, fiercely intelligent, and given to extreme ways of thinking. Growing up a widow’s only child during the 1930s, packed off to boarding school before and during the war, she was disconnected from other people: ‘For this is not my life / But theirs, that I am living. / And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day’ (‘Addiction to an Old Mattress’, p.91). Much of her fiction also shows a similar sense of disconnection, with other characters perceived as separate from a witty narrator or protagonist, or even observed from some distance as in the short story ‘The Pick-up or L’Ercole d’Oro’ (p.137). Looking back in her 80s, trying to make sense of her upbringing, she noted: ‘No sense of self’.32

  The last review she published was a long essay on Colette in the New York Review of Books (p.127), parts of which read uncannily like versions of her own plight (except that both parties in her own marriage had apparently been unfaithful):

  [Colette’s] childish idea of herself had run on unchecked after marriage, and Willy had fostered it; in fact it was all she had. Suddenly she found out that he was unfaithful. 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. At that moment she lost her childhood, and no longer knew who she was. […] When it was all over, and as soon as she began to write the first Claudine, she found herself, and could repair her identity. But this time a new self was in charge. It prescribed physical exercises for her body, and undertook the task of learning how to think, and be; the spirit stopped still and listened – an Oriental skill.

  During her childhood, her widowed mother had sought guidance from mediums, and Rosemary thought her mother’s life and her own had been harmed by their self-fulfilling prophecies as well as by the church. Like her mother, she was superstitious, but took this to an extreme, believing in signs and omens that showed the presence of evil spirits. There was cause and effect in supernatural occurrences, and she came to see almost everything in life as black or white, good or evil.

  The sudden death of her mother Gwen in a freak accident in the spring of 1968 precipitated a personal crisis. Believing the church had failed her ailing mother when she’d most needed its help, Rosemary turned her back on Christianity, and for the next eight years attended spiritualist meetings, consulted mediums and healers, and took instruction from Sufi “seekers”. The inspiring presence in her house of a collection of ancient artefacts, including Oriental god figures, led to her approaching a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. All these she repudiated in turn.

  Following the collapse of her marriage, she entered the solitary later phase of her life. By 1977 she was living just a few doors away from her ex-husband (soon to be joined by a new wife) on Downshire Hill, doing Taoist meditation, writing reviews and working on a new novel. But other misfortunes followed: a burglary in which she lost all her clothes; a law-suit costing thousands of pounds; and ill-health, including incapacitating neuritis in her one good arm.

  Rosemary attributed her next life disaster to her difficult Taoist eye exercises, which involved staring for hours at a blank wall, turning the eyes in and looking intensely at bright objects. On the last day of December 1977, she was admitted to Middlesex Hospital for emergency operations on detached retinas in both eyes, which saved her eyesight but left her nearly blind for the next few years. This was her reward for ‘ten long years searching for God’. Unable to see properly, emaciated and ‘psychologically smashed’, she couldn’t cook or shop, and rarely left home. Following a whole series of personal crises, this isolating experience of near-blindness which continued with only minimal improvements over many months must have been traumatic, with the sensory deprivation involved possibly helping to trigger a gradual shift in her mental state.33

  She had been discussing – since November 1976 – the publication of a selection of her poems by John Moat and John Fairfax’s Phoenix Press in Newbury. This was to include 34 of the poems from her two collections from Putnam and Bodley Head, both publishers having first declined to release paperback editions after the hardbacks had sold out, before stopping publishing poetry altogether: ‘Which is the reason I am landed as I am,’ she wrote to John Moat.34 In August 1977, she commented:

  Some of these poems will need revision. I know what’s wrong; it will take a few days.

  The poems go into 4 categories. Travel, the Life, Love, Early Youth. I’ll come up with a special title for the book. Titles are most important. If I do finish the novel on time, then I will indeed compose a new poem – it used to take me up to 2 months. (Long ones 3 months) I have a bundle of notes sitting here waiting, but then so does the bill for rates, and although I am financially OK at the moment I’m concerned to be able to mai
ntain my way of life into the future and until death. No one’s going to pay me for writing poems!35

  But there were to be no more poems (or revisions). By July 1978 she was still struggling to recover from her ordeal:

  I’ve had the most tremendous fight, month after month alone, to get back sight to what it was before op. I shall make it, with God’s help. Am doing it – or rather He is. The thing is that I am worn down & so weak & wasted by the struggle that everything is the most terrible effort. And it has to go on – as this thing takes months to heal, a friend tells me. […] I cannot work on the poems at moment, I can just about write this letter. […]

  You could publish them as they are, uncorrected by me. But they will have no support (from novel & other books in preparation) & will sink like a stone & be lost all over again. By the autumn/winter I should be able to get the novel to my agent.36

  Her struggles continued. Writing a year later:

  The thing is that I am still fighting for my eyes. At last something is happening. I am keeping a record: it is incredible. Everything is agony, you see. Last year just having them open was agony – & couldn’t see when they were. Now it seems a door might have opened for me: I am getting discharge from both eyes, and a hundred other things. I am being healed. […]

  I plan to spend the winter at my aunt’s, very slowly correcting my big book.37

  Later that autumn she left London for Bournemouth, given refuge at her aunt Dorothy’s flat, where again she looked for help from spiritualists – this time Charismatics and Pentecostalists – before coming to the realisation that her own spiritual truth lay only in the Bible itself, especially the New Testament, the first book she was able to read as her sight began slowly to return, albeit imperfectly.

  Deciding to settle in Bournemouth, she tried for several months during 1980 to sell her London house, but each time a buyer turned up the sky would darken and there would be a foul smell in the house. This happened so often that she ruled out coincidence. She cleaned every room obsessively and threw out all her books on spiritualism and the occult, all to no avail. Finally, believing that the Oriental religious artefacts that filled the house must be exerting some malign power, she packed them all into five suitcases and got help to have them deposited in the vault of Barclays Bank in Hampstead. She saw these as sinister objects, stolen from temples and graves, which had led her to seek knowledge of God through what she now believed to be a diabolical Eastern religion. The very next day a young couple came to see the house in bright sunshine, loved it and bought it.

  In November 1980 she moved into Old Forest Lodge, an unremarkable three-storey house tucked away behind the sea-front, where she was known to neighbours as Mrs Lightband. Here she cut herself off totally from her former life, refusing to see or to respond to letters from relatives, old friends, or publishers like myself whose hopes had to be dashed. It wasn’t an easy place for anyone to find, with no nameplate or number on the door; the curtains were kept closed to deter would-be visitors, and knocks on the door and rings on the doorbell were rarely answered.

  There she resolved to free herself of all the remaining kinds of ‘bondage’. She had broken with her last healer, who had failed to cure her eyesight problems, having realised she’d become psychologically dependent upon him. To escape the pull of other healers, mediums, spiritualists and evil spirits, she turned to the Bible, which became her ‘complete manual’ for living. Next to go were sleeping tablets, which she’d been on for most of her life; shaving a little more off each tablet with a razor each day, she managed to wean herself off them totally after a year. Once totally free, she would be baptised.

  Still troubled by what she took to be supernatural occurrences, she felt she must still be in bondage to other forces, and embarked on an act which was later to sadden her family when they learned of it after her death. She decided to destroy her collection of Oriental treasures – a bequest from an aunt by marriage – which were ‘graven images’ that had to be burned by fire, according to the Second Commandment. Retrieving the five suitcases by taxi and train from London, she filled two garden incinerators with over 40 artefacts itemised in a handwritten list titled ‘The burning of some idols (11 August 1981)’, and set fire to them. These included three Tang horses with riders, four Sung priest figures, a Japanese warrior, a Korean dancing figure, Chinese jade and small bronzes, Chinese silk robes embroidered with dragons, carved Chinese letter seals (rose apricot stone), Chinese dogs on stands, chess-set and lion mask, along with other artefacts of marble, terracotta, porcelain, plaster, mother-of-pearl, ivory, wood and stone, from China, Korea, Japan, Africa, Greece, Bali and Persia.

  Over the next few days she smashed and hammered at the still intact Tang and Sung figures until she got the remnants down to ‘dog-biscuit size’. All this while, she said, there were noises in the house, and a mile and half away, another house was wrecked by flying objects and furniture thrown about by a poltergeist which had to be exorcised. The local Bournemouth newpapers for that week document those other occurrences (she kept the cuttings), which were witnessed not just by the household concerned but by four other people including a policeman.

  That left what she called her ‘profession’ to be confronted. She still had the manuscript of an unpublished novel (‘the best thing I had ever written’), about a man’s search for God, written during the six years leading up to her eye operation, but a medium had recounted the entire plot to her, complete with detailed descriptions of all the characters, which meant the book must be dangerous and could lead others astray. Into the incinerator it went. She had already contacted John Moat withdrawing the selection of poems which the Phoenix Press was to have published. The fate of an extended essay on Baudelaire is unknown: this was to have been appeared in the US in 1977, probably in the New York Review of Books, where she had earlier published two other articles.

  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’. Mostly keeping herself to herself, for the next 34 years she lived an insular, private life, quite comfortable in her circumstances, defiantly independent but isolated in her continuing search for God, always alert to the ‘brainwashing’, controlling or manipulating tendencies in the religious groups and beliefs she encountered.

  Ever restless in spirit, she fought daily battles with her inner demons, plagued by self-doubt and frequent bouts of debilitating depression which could only be lifted by asserting her absolute belief in God’s love for her. In this she was helped by the ways in which her magical thinking had developed over the course of her later solitary life: birds were her soundscape, and birds were associated with her mother, whom she called ‘Birdie’; and she would interpret soft calls or harsh caws or cries from crows and seagulls in particular as comforting messages or warnings from the Lord, and would base decisions on what to do, whom to trust, whether to go out, how to deal with a problem, on how these bird sounds made her feel. Depression was Satan trying to weaken her, but a positive feeling from God would drive him out and restore her well-being. She also only had to hear particular pieces of music on the radio and what she called ‘the Flood’ would immediately be lifted from her: Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’, Borodin’s 2nd String Quartet (‘a message of exquisite sound from the Lord stilling & resting the whole body with the heart’s joy’), and Bach’s ‘Jesus Joy of Man’s Desiring’.38 All these were pieces her mother had loved and played to her in her childhood. And of course Scheherazade saves her life every day by telling stories.

  Clearly, Rosemary suffered in her later life from what some would categorise as a “borderline personality disorder”. She avoided talking to other people wherever possible, keeping any verbal or physical contact (including necessary communication with people in shops and on buses) to the absolute minimum, sometimes handing people notes because talking personally with alm
ost anyone could push her into one of her black depressive states, as would any kind of stress or emotional upset. Sadly, she blocked attempts by concerned family members to offer help or to stay in touch with her, finding any such contact so emotionally overwhelming that she became terrified even of speaking a few words on the telephone, knowing this would set off another attack of ‘the Flood’.

  But she adapted her life to this condition, managing practical arrangements in appropriate ways, and analysing everything that happened to her with intelligence and articulacy in the notebooks she kept, right through to her mid 80s, using these as a kind of self-therapy. Believing totally in the efficacy of what most other people would see only as signs or omens, she interpreted symbols and metaphors in quite literal terms. Her bouts of depression were caused by Satan and her thoughts at such times were not hers but ones he was putting into her head. She was married to the Lord and therefore couldn’t feel lonely; when she did so, or had other doubts or anxieties, this was Satan undermining her.

  I’m not qualified to attempt a psychological reading of her condition, which seems to have evolved and become more complex over many years, but discussions I have had with three psychotherapists39 suggest that it must have been rooted in childhood separation and rejection trauma, and in never having had any sense of a strong, secure attachment to other people from birth, exacerbated by her mother’s death, her feelings of betrayal and rejection, her near blindness with prolonged sensory deprivation and isolation, and the other personal crises. Depression is often associated with rage which cannot be expressed, and having only one fragile parent – with her dead father experienced as an absence she could never fill herself – would have made anger unsafe for an insecure only child. Anger is internalised, directed more inside the self, and the more that anger grows, the more frightening it becomes; and so is configured as a Satan or self-damaging voice inside as a way of containing it, as an inner world response to trauma.