Tropical Trouser-Leg

She first saw him​ walking ‘rather contemptuously’ across the Pont Marie. Frock coat, tall hat, ‘gone-bad, luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally cynical. It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’

This is how Rosemary Tonks retells her ghostly visitation in The Halt during the Chase (1972), the last book she published before she disappeared from public life, like a true poète maudit, only to re-emerge after her death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.

What they had in common wasn’t just masochistic moodiness, though there’s plenty of that in her verse, but the same galvanic experience of being in the world, as if she too was plugged into the ‘immense réservoir d’électricité’ described in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. ‘The main duty of the poet,’ Tonks declared, ‘is to excite – to send the senses reeling,’ but hyper-receptivity often seems like a cross she had to bear. In one of her poems, she is a ‘zoophyte’ ‘sponging up gravy, nightmares, dullness!’; in another, her ‘sugar-loving nerves’ have ‘battered her to pieces’. Elsewhere, she adopts the same tawdry Hellenic register as the Symbolists – apostrophic, over-punctuated, exclamatory – where falling drunkenly into the gutter might as well be a katabasis (though in Tonks’s underworld there are more dressing-gowns). Al Alvarez saw in her poems ‘a real talent of an edgy, bristling kind’; Ian Hamilton found ‘noise and vanity’.

But before she gave it all up, and renounced poetry to live alone by the sea as a born-again Christian fundamentalist, there were also the novels. Six acid comedies of bad manners, at least as splenetic as the poems, if not as fêted. A faultline divided her prolific 1960s: on the one side, Opium Fogs and Emir (both 1963), two quasi-Waughian works which have never been reprinted; on the other, four semi-autobiographical romps – The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way out of Berkeley Square (1970) and The Halt during the Chase – which are now available again as Vintage Classics. She claimed not to care much for them (‘the English like their porridge,’ she responded when her editor told her of the fifth novel’s success), but spending too much time with Tonks will teach you not to take anything she says too seriously. Whichever way you look at them – as confessions of an irrepressible ego; as experiments in whether or not English satire can bear the weight of Baudelairean malaise; as works of a woman who couldn’t turn a forgettable phrase, no matter her insistence that she just dashed them off to make ‘a lot of red-hot money’ – the novels are thrillingly strange things. She had the knack.

In The Bloater, her first obviously autobiographical novel, she hones her insult-toting, bon mot-slinging voice through the character of Min, an audio engineer at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, where Tonks herself worked. ‘None of the staff then in residence can have easily forgotten [her] visit to Maida Vale,’ Desmond Briscoe, manager of the studio at the time, later wrote. Tonks had arrived to record ‘Sono-Montage’ (1966), ‘an experiment in combining spoken poetry with electronically produced sounds’, on which she collaborated with the downbeat Scottish poet Alexander Trocchi, Delia Derbyshire – the maven of early electronica – and others, and which features Tonks’s cut-glass accent enunciating over warblings from another world. One of the poems included in the montage is ‘Orpheus in Soho’, in which she imagines the hero roaming ‘an underworld … hastily constructed,/With bitch-clubs, with cellars and passages’, secretly consoled by the fact ‘there is so little risk of finding her.’ A version of the project forms the backdrop to Min’s working life in The Bloater:

There’s no air in the workshop, we’re sealed in like tinned shepherd’s pie … We are setting a poem about Orestes to electronic sound. We’re taking the sentiment straight, no wit, no discords. We know that however well we succeed, fifty ‘experts’ (people who acquire theoretical knowledge without using it) will pour cold water on the result. And then five years later, grudgingly, and ten years later, publicly, stuff our work into the sound archives, and refer to it incessantly to intimidate future electronic composers.

Min argues with her colleagues over her recording of a heartbeat from a hospital, which they don’t think sounds enough like the real deal (‘it sounds as though it’s got heart disease … it sounds like an old blackbird flapping a pair of rotten wings’). As she and her co-worker Jenny, modelled on Derbyshire, sit about ‘waiting for a left-wing bureaucrat with no imagination to make a heartbeat’, they long for ‘flashy continental composers in white macs’ carrying ‘pamphlets and lectures in bison-skin despatch-cases’. It’s partly meant to be a parody of the English arts scene – there was less shepherd’s pie in Düsseldorf, probably – but when you look at photographs of Tonks from the time (blonde bobbed hair, black sunglasses: pure mod), it’s hard not to see the whole project as a rebellion against staid English dreariness. The Radiophonic Workshop, which closed in 1998, had exactly the legacy Tonks imagined. Derbyshire remains best known for the Doctor Who theme, which now sounds like tea-time background noise and not – as it must have done in 1963 – like a meteor landing in the garden. Nevertheless, Min is still bored, bored to tears as she finds ‘layers of brand-new tiredness inside the massive, overall exhaustion, so that you go on falling through one after another.’

Min is also ill. Somebody in a Tonks novel is always ill. Already plagued with eye problems, Tonks was struck down by something wherever she travelled, and she travelled a good deal, both during her itinerant childhood and later thanks to her husband’s work as an engineer: dysentery and malaria in Nigeria, typhoid in Calcutta, polio in Karachi. (The title of her Collected, Bedouin of the London Evening, was taken from one of her poems, but another could have served: ‘Twentieth-Century Invalid’.) Min’s affliction is gout, which seems ironic given her circumstances: ‘Gout! High living, pâté, port?’ ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ is the subtitle of the wellness book she is reading; for her, the body is sick and the mind is sicker. She is also, crucially, ‘caught in the more than half-serious dilemma of whom to choose as a lover’. When it comes to romantic escapades, Tonks’s women are beleaguered by male idiocy. Wherever they look: weedy poets, slow wits, Wodehousian knuts and blimps. Standing too long under an awning is a dangerous game when any old sexually aggressive bore might pop up with that ghastly greeting, ‘hullo!’ In Min’s case, the options are a malodorous opera singer she’s nicknamed ‘the Bloater’, who has convinced her that her revulsion might really be desire, and her divorced musicologist friend, Billy. It’s not so much a marriage plot – Min is already married to George, a man so useless he ‘hasn’t got the larynx’ to deliver ‘Umm?’ convincingly – as a peg on which Tonks can hang Min’s longing for a less immediately stultifying life.

Tonks is an aphoristic writer in the sense Susan Sontag meant it: ‘to write aphorisms is to assume a mask – a mask of scorn, of superiority.’ She throws out aphorisms, and scorn, like loose change (‘beauty is not in the eye; it is in the pocket’). The novels are like Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas dragged through the Hampstead mud. ‘After reading the book, one would be afraid to talk,’ Flaubert confessed, which is pretty much how those who encountered Tonks must have felt as she terrorised London’s literary salons with ‘an intensity bordering on active aggression’, as one person put it. She was pugnacious and proud of it: the precocious schoolgirl who never lost her competitive, out-manoeuvring edge. (She held on to a childhood trophy inscribed: ‘Rosemary D.B. Tonks. All events. Under 11.’)

Like so many other repackaged writers of the mid-century, Tonks’s reputation now is about the legend of rediscovery, as if she had emerged ex nihilo like one of those stowed-away Radiophonic tapes. So it’s strange to think of what must have then felt like her oversize presence in literary life. From her late teens she made a home of the Mandrake Club and Caves de France in Soho; she argued at the soirées held by the literary journalist and Romanian émigré Miron Grindea. In every interview – there were several – she bemoaned the ‘dry’, ‘academic’ consciousness of her English peers, all so woefully ‘terrified of writing passions’. From the mid-1950s, Hampstead was Tonks’s stamping ground. She lived with her husband on Downshire Hill, where she hosted dinner parties, ‘hobnobbed’ with the then septuagenarian Edith Sitwell (a neighbour), and held court at a local café with Elias Canetti. A profile in the Guardian in 1970 reports her turning up in a purple trouser suit and a white sports car, before walking so briskly over Hampstead Heath that the interviewer has to run after her. If all this suggests something close to what Baudelaire called the dandy’s ‘haughty exclusiveness, provocative in its very coldness’, it’s by her design.

The two novels before The Bloater are more obviously the work of the gutter poet who produced the collections Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). They’re made of the same stuff – meat, cabbages, grease. Opium Fogs opens with a man choking on a mutton bone outside one of London’s ‘steamy eating-houses’; Emir starts with a character taking a fungus found in their flat to a French chef for identification. What The Bloater and her other later novels have in common with the poetry is the commanding ‘I’: Tonks’s sulky and self-destructive mouthpiece. It would be unbearable if she wasn’t so good-humoured. Entire groups run afoul of this speaker, adding to a seemingly endless list of personae non gratae: waiters, Wagnerians, doctors (‘far too scientific these days’), flamenco dancers, seatbelt-wearers, ‘the sort of people who know the date’. It’s ridiculous for somebody who can refer with ease to Diaghilev and Chaliapin to scorn the supposed affectations of others, but Tonks’s speakers wear their hypocrisy lightly, or at least without shame. (If anything, it buoys them along.) Sometimes this misfires, as in Businessmen as Lovers, Tonks’s least successful novel and one that calls to mind a phrase from The Bloater, ‘rank silliness’, but mostly she succeeds – brilliantly, effortlessly – at making a virtue of scorn.

Min and her diseased heartbeat make the case for ‘taking the sentiment straight’ even when to others it seems phony, and Tonks’s prose is at its best when she strikes on the same strange passions that drive her poetry. This is where Businessmen as Lovers falls flat. The Min figure is now Mimi, a woman en route to an English colony in Livone, where she and a friend will spend the summer holidaying with their rich peers and lovers. This coterie consists of the usual gadflies and rogues, including an archaeologist, a sadistic dentist and two well-heeled businessmen. It’s Tonks’s only novel not set in England, but it betrays the worst excesses of English satire: shallow apoliticism, vague exoticism, a madcap plot that nevertheless leaves the social order totally undisturbed. There are repeated threats that Daniel Cohn-Bendit might turn up on the doorstep – probably to remind us it’s 1968 and the English are holidaying while Paris dissents. The story’s ludic machinations are tedious to recall, but at one point Mimi finds herself asking, ‘Am I to protect a Viennese doctor’s lemon tree from three English journalists?’ – a question you can imagine being spoken with the overexcited self-absorption of a 1960s Carrie Bradshaw.

The book isn’t without Tonks’s usual epigrammatic flourishes (‘it isn’t the adultery that bothers me, it’s the bad behaviour’), maledictions (‘Rabid puritan bull! Barrett of Wimpole Street!’) and mad imagery (a man eating grapes ‘like a lion gobbling earrings’), but she should be judged by the quality of her contempt – her maniacal precision – and the strokes here are too broad to justify such preening. The central conceit is given away in the title: businessmen are the real lovers, wooing one another with deals and gifts, and women are merely caught up in their courtship. When an Iranian magnate known as ‘the Persian’ is introduced, you wonder whether Tonks has any grasp at all of what she is trying to satirise. Wyndham Lewis suggested in Tarr that English humour is a ‘means of evading reality’; Tonks puts that to the test with such zealousness that she surely misses the joke.

Tonks deploys​ comic exaggeration throughout her writing, generally as a way of skewering the English. The real object of her contempt is the narrowness of English manners, the focus of her final books. The Way out of Berkeley Square is a novel about the family and – as Colette did to Sido in Claudine at School – she has done away with the mother. Arabella is instead raised by a despotic, pettifogging father:

When he rests his gloved hand on my shoulder it’s unaccountably heavy, really heavy, like a small leather dog, and seems to push me down – suppose we’re standing out in the street, saying goodbye to friends – I feel that I must struggle to throw off the weight of it. And when I wriggle it gives him an opportunity to smile at me, and at the same time to reproach me: ‘Rejecting my hand?’

He is not so much a faithful version of Tonks’s own father, who died before she was born, as he is a fine embodiment of stifling upper-middle class couth. Equally dominant in Arabella’s life is her brother, Michael, a poet who has absconded to Karachi. (In the gender-swapping way of the novel, nixing the mother in favour of the father, Michael is a better mouthpiece for Tonks than Arabella.) Caught between the poles of ‘art and matter’ represented by brother and father, she desperately wants out.

Arabella is thirty, but she’s so thoroughly infantilised by her father that it’s hard not to think of Tonks’s own upbringing: the only child of a widow, she was shuttled between homes and countries (‘to avoid bombs and people’) and then off to boarding school, where she was expelled for some form of mischief (‘it never occurs to you you’ll be rejected’). In interviews, she claimed both James Boswell and Giuseppe Verdi as ancestors; it’s not impossible, with the middle name Boswell and a mother née Verdi, but there’s a whiff of family romance to this self-construction. She wrote little about her mother, though it’s clear their relationship was delicate, and the only thing she said of her turbulent upbringing, in a diary, is that it left her with ‘no sense of self’.

If The Way out of Berkeley Square is about the father, then The Halt during the Chase is about the mother’s overbearing presence. As the book opens, Sophie is caught in another game:

It was never said that it was my mother who was the child, and myself who was the mother. Most of the time she was a wholly unreliable schoolgirl accomplice of my own age, because, although she was part of me, on account of the blood tie, she was in violent competition with me … There was a [further] catch to these manoeuvres, and that was that occasionally my mother played at being my mother.

Along with the infantile mother, Sophie is saddled with an unloving fiancé, whose ‘half-baked and half-hearted’ proposal suggests the Jean Rhys line: ‘Oh, God, what depressing places hotel bedrooms can be.’ Philip brings ‘all his strength and youth’ to working in the Treasury and is a total dullard: the sort of person Tonks must have been thinking about when she wrote about her ‘double life among the bores and vegetables’. He’s the son of a rich antiques dealer, Rudi Horner, who – like the father in The Way out of Berkeley Square – represents what’s so suffocating about the scene around her. (Also in this circle is a Russian princess, Melika, one of those aristocrats without money who often pops up in these books.) Sophie’s rebellion against this world is to start following the teachings of a man called Mr Ruback, Hampstead’s very own mystic, variously referred to by others as a ‘psychic’, ‘Sufi’ and ‘drug-taker’. Philip was ‘turning himself into a perfect little Englishman’, Sophie laments, ‘whereas I’m going back … to being continental … [He’s] going West and I’m going East.’

It’s a book of hauntings, from the ghost of Baudelaire to Philip turning into his father (a fate ‘worse than being haunted’: ‘you wanted to say to Nature: “Not again! We’ve just had all that”’). But the most unavoidable of these is the resemblance the novel bears to Tonks’s own life at the time. In his introduction to Bedouin of the London Evening, Neil Astley cites ‘the sudden death of [Tonks’s] mother, Gwen, in a freak accident in the spring of 1968’ as the first in a series of tragedies – including the end of her marriage, the loss of her vision and a burglary in which all her clothes were stolen – that would eventually lead to her breakdown in the 1970s. During this period, she would also begin to meet with a series of spiritualists.

The miraculous thing about the clairvoyants and psychics in The Halt during the Chase is that their advice – not least, packing off Sophie to a château in Alençon – actually works. She is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who never reaches the brink. At the end of the novel, she is ‘cut loose’ and ready to embark on a ‘new life’. It’s striking how happily Tonks’s novels end, when you set them beside Waugh’s death-filled Vile Bodies (by suicide, motor racing and dropping from a chandelier), or the wonderful dispatch in Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (now there’s a woman Tonks would love): ‘And last of all leapt Mr Trent-Garby, who, catching his foot in the ruined flower-box, fell headlong and was, I regret to say, killed.’ Cultural conservatism and anti-sentimentality have body counts, but Tonks isn’t a moraliser, and she cares too much about feeling. Her characters fall ill, but never fatally – if anything, illness quickly becomes a quirk of personality, and nobody has ever died of that. What’s at stake, then, if not the temporary bruising of ego?

The title of The Halt during the Chase is from a painting by Watteau. It’s a verdant scene of aristocratic couples lolling about – a vision of lightness and purity so at odds with the mad rush of Tonks’s city living that it’s hard at first to parse the connection, though the chateau in Alençon may be just out of the frame. Yet Watteau, admired by the French Symbolists for his balance of gaiety and melancholy, is not un-Tonksian. His great subject was sad clowns; it might be hers too. Walter Pater said that Watteau ‘was always a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all’. It’s fair to say that little measured up for Tonks either: not her peers, not the city, not any of the Sufi ‘seekers’, psalmists, Chinese spiritualists, American yoga gurus, mediums, tarot readers, Charismatics or Pentecostalists she turned to for help, and certainly not the English ‘porridge’ of her novels.

It didn’t matter, in the end, that she preferred the poems. Revulsion is a great equaliser, and she was hardly distinguishing between verse and prose when she wrote to herself in 1999: ‘What are books? They are minds, Satan’s minds. How foolish they are!! When you think of the Lord!’ All the copies she had of her own books were destroyed, allegedly, along with her collection of ‘Oriental treasures’ (three Tang horses with riders, four Sung priest figures, a Japanese warrior and dozens of other objects) and the unpublished manuscript of her final novel, which was about a man’s search for God. ‘Never mind the fame, I was burning many thousands of pounds … I can tell you I meant business!’ This period in Tonks’s life is so sad and strange you find yourself scrambling for continuity, reasoning that the set of personal misfortunes she underwent are so awful in their arbitrariness that they belong to tragicomic picaresque, like one of her novels, or that the single-mindedness of her faith lies on a continuum with the near Nietzschean resolve of her incorrigible speakers. And is exorcising your house of a poltergeist, as Tonks did in 1981, any madder than seeing the ghost of Baudelaire on his way to the Île Saint-Louis? Her critics tend to cling to her description of her smashed treasures as ‘dog biscuit size’, which sounds so much like her poetic idiom it’s almost comforting. Such attempts to square the life with the work are at best quaint and occasionally crass. The worse temptation is to read her – like the young character in Opium Fogs ‘worn out by narrow, accelerated passions’ – as a cautionary tale about burning the candle at both ends. It does little good to schematise an exceptional case.

Astley is right that the woman who wrote the two collections and these six novels is ‘a very different person’ from the one who destroyed them. At their best, the novels are feats of that earlier personality, shining and acrid in its ‘fierce hot-blooded sulkiness’. This might be why the most exciting passage in any of them is the ending of The Way out of Berkeley Square, when the poet-brother returns from Pakistan after catching polio. Arabella watches anxiously from the window as the car carrying Michael pulls up to the house. The driver gets out,

takes a crutch in either hand and lodges them in the gravel on either side of the opening. But instead of bending to the interior and making some motion of assistance he stands well back. A moment later a right foot, together with tropical trouser-leg of manila colour, is struck out of the car, and it gives the right crutch a sharp kick that puts it into a flowerbed … Oh yes, I know that egocentric foot.

There it is again: the glittering triumph of an unscathable ego. Tonks dedicated The Way out of Berkeley Square to three hotels in Karachi, where she presumably wrote it, and where, in 1952, an attack of polio left her with a withered writing hand that she took to styling out with a modish black glove – just like Michael. It goes without saying, of course: that foot is hers.