The Woman Who Quit

Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems, by Rosemary Tonks.

Bloodaxe Books. £12.00. Dufour Editions. $26.00.

One door closes, and another opens. At least that’s what they tell you. When Rosemary Tonks died on April 15, 2014, at the age of eighty-five, it had the effect of freeing her poems, long-embargoed but dribbled out in anthologies, for publication. Neil Astley, himself poet, anthologist, publisher of Bloodaxe Books, and long-time admirer and connoisseur of Tonks, was able to talk her heirs into allowing a book of her writing to appear (Tonks herself had long set her face against such a thing). I am curious whether the one versatile volume, Bedouin of the London Evening, will be enough to satisfy 
demand (it contains all the poems in her two tiny trade books, thirty-five and twenty-six pages respectively, twenty-six and twenty poems, 
plus a wonderfully truculent interview, a statement, a couple of sharply intelligent book reviews, an uncollected short story, and an indispensable introduction from Astley, who at this stage has a near-monopoly of published information on his poet), or whether there is sufficient fascination with her to float a more general revival (Tonks also published six novels, potboilers maybe, but potboilers of the Bell Jar class) and perhaps a biography to shed some further light on the sad and disturbing phenomenon of The Woman Who Quit.

Almost since I can remember, Tonks has been a name to conjure with. (Not literally, though I suppose it is an anagram of “knots,” and of “stonk.”) But as an adamant silence following an utterly distinctive, perhaps irreplaceable career. As a rare gesture towards cosmopolitanism in England (the Amis-Larkin Movement disdained, among other things, poems set in foreign cities). As a fragrant reopening of a bottle stoppered up forty years ago. As an amplification of the furibund poems that stood out a mile in the sheepish anthologies where they appeared: a kind of wild forthrightness and nausea and dread about Sex and Regret and the City. As a return to the sixties — the lettering is Bloodaxe’s standard, but its orange-and-lemon-on-drab echoes the variants of Rubber Soul, and the Jane Bown cover photograph of the poet (“in the 1960s”) looking ruddy-cheeked, back-combed and even a touch horsey, sporting maybe the ruins of some white lipstick, and otherwise bedizened in zip-up ankle boots, checkered wool (Jaeger?!) pants, and a deeply comfortable, even much-loved-looking baby blue sweater, with a period glass of milky Nescafe, a purse, and a tatty stack of books on the table in front of her, holding a Bic Biro: somewhere between Julie Christie and the younger Camilla Parker-Bowles. Yes, and surely the setting is the Hampstead literary café the Coffee Cup on Rosslyn Hill, recently kept going by sentimental public subscription and haunted since the thirties by literary émigrés, as for instance Fred Uhlman and Elias Canetti, of whom one may read:

Both men were small in size and, albeit in different ways, in need for attentive listeners. Deeply suspicious of one another, they nevertheless had to put up with sharing the Coffee Cup.

That’s the place all right. It is one of the virtues — and perhaps requirements — of Bedouin of the London Evening that it serves as a sort of scrapbook. Scratch ’n’ sniff would have been ideal (Metaxa, patchouli, 
cumin, proper coffee, and Gitanes?) and — who knows — may still come.

Rosemary Tonks was born in 1928 in Gillingham, Kent. Her father, a British engineer, died in Nigeria before she was born, of something called Blackwater fever. She and her mother — the 
wonderfully named Gwendoline Verdi (and imagine the operatic Italo-Welsh temperament: “    ...    If only I could trust my blood! Those damn foreign women / Have a lot to answer for, marrying into the family,”) — moved constantly (fourteen times during the War, “to avoid bombs and people”). Tonks, by then perhaps one of the people to be avoided, was boarded at a girls’ school in Bournemouth on the south coast, which she left at sixteen. Small legacy, no college, perhaps a typist? One senses a sort of late Empire, or early Commonwealth background, middle class in the English sense, but working. Her mother married again, but this husband also met an untimely death in Nigeria.

At 18, [Tonks] was “back in London with her mother, very poor, and beginning to read Joyce and Baudelaire,” discovering public libraries, and hanging out at the Mandrake Club and the Caves de France in Soho, two bohemian watering-holes then at the center of London’s postwar counterculture that were popular with louche artistic types.

Thus Astley. Shortly after, at twenty, she married an engineer of her own, one Michael Lightband. (On the marriage certificate, she gives her occupation as “writer.” Her first book of poems, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, from 1963, carries the dedication “To Micky.” Bedouin includes a wedding photograph: satin, roses, lovely, upright, resolute-looking bride — always something about the chin — and tall, athletic, sandy, bespectacled groom; as I say, a scrapbook.) His work took them to India and Pakistan: again the Empire/Commonwealth theme. Unhappily, Tonks fell ill in both places, with paratyphoid and polio. (She lost the use of her right hand, and later was almost blind for a year.) It is hard to keep an accurate impression of her circumstances and whereabouts (and something like a chronology would have helped here), but she seems to have lived at various times on the subcontinent, in London, and in Paris, and now with her husband, now alone. Strange how soon vagueness gathers round someone, and someone intermittently in the public eye at that.

1963 was her year, or maybe one of her years. It was then she published Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms and two novels, one called Emir, the other Opium Fogs. In 1967 there was her second book of poems, Iliad of Broken Sentences, and then another run of novels: The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970), and The Halt During the Chase (1972). That was pretty 
much the size of it, ten years, all between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. She had a flair for titles, the reader will concede, pairing fragrant exoticism and the promise of action. Normally, one would expect a writer of both poetry and fiction — of whom there are not many — to gravitate over time towards the latter. Certainly, that’s the case with most of those I can think of: Hemingway, Lawrence, Pavese, Pasternak, Bernhard, Bachmann, Atwood, Ondaatje. I rather think that would have happened with Tonks as well. For reasons of economics, if nothing else. The industrial muscle of prose comes in for poetry’s tic douloureux; streams of tarmac for crazy paving. With Tonks, too, the novels are later than the poems, more numerous, and (the three I have managed to track down) actually more brilliant. The prose is quotable for longer stretches than the occasional line or line and a half of poetry. Perhaps prose satire better suited her 
agitation and extreme vulnerability; it kept her turned outward (there was only turbulence within); the poems are so volatile, they fly away, many of them — but I’ll come to that.

Often Tonks gives you the sense you get in the early Jean Rhys that she knows more than London, and that London is corrupt and grimy and really not her scene at all. She sees it with a savage wisdom from outside. I don’t know where she drew her implicit contrasts from, Africa or India or the European mainland — what her equivalent was to the childhood paradise of Rhys’s Dominica — quite possibly 
she had none. Accordingly, her books and characters are brittle, willful, unreconciled, aghast; there isn’t the bottomless soft French- or Caribbean-tinged sadness of Rhys. Not the helpless, shrugging 
acquiescence in further loss of independence and pride. Not the pervasive cafard at the back of everything. Not the loneliness. Tonks is never lonely, never miserable, because, as she noted in later life, “No sense of self.” She is just witty and seething and at large, in a world designed by James Ensor. “Her head was clipped like a dark brown bird. The word ‘Idiot’ was just within her clenched teeth.” Being a poet is not a career choice, it is the only way there is of remaining unbroken, and at an angle to the world. She is a reed with the backbone of an oak: “A solitary of twenty-two would rather break her heart in a back bedroom of the metropolis, than comb her hair and enter into civil conversation with someone who might help her.” She remains a poet until she breaks. Rhys bends, Tonks breaks. Tonks’s heroines are looking for a mate — but more trying not to look — in a chamber of horrors. They repay hate with love, and maybe love with hate. In the hothouse atmosphere of these books, you can’t really distinguish them anyway. Repulsion comes close to trumping attraction. A man-mountain like the opera singer called “the Bloater” in the book of that name is a challenge or a problem for the Tonks character. (Strange to say, these are the nobly nihilistic beginnings of chick lit; there are men, of course there are men, men are always with us, like the Victorian poor, but they are not the answer, any more than the poor are the answer. A doctor on horseback with a gold chain and sensitive hands is not yet enough to solve the problems of existence.)

The Tonks character is always trapped. As proud as Lucifer, and trapped. She may be on holiday in Italy with friends, or laid up with gout, she can as little escape as a character in a play can escape the footlights and the stage. Nothing exists apart from the trauma of the city for the single girl, and, occasionally, by way of disastrous 
variety, abroad, or the grotesquely implausible English countryside: “Outside, the lawn purred as though it had been stroked.” Tonks’s theme is opposing necessity, opposing the city, opposing (male or psycho-economic) dominion. Rhys with sadness falls in with it; what else can she do? (Women of her generation and background didn’t have jobs; not long after, they did: you might say, if plumbing would have solved Ibsen’s tragedies, as someone once claimed, then temping would have eased Rhys’s.) Tonks, though, fights back as hard as she can, but reflexively, impersonally, and with genius. “She smashed the pappadom on her plate, and ate the ruins.” She is a bundle of hubris. “I don’t know the sort of people who know the date,” she says. Listening to a woebegone girlfriend give a hilarious account of looking in her bedroom for her bed (“you know, I was on my knees going over every foot of the floor area    ...    ”), the Tonks character generously jumps to — for her — the only possible conclusion: “But life shouldn’t be like this.” This rebellion, indignation, outrage is Tonks’s subject everywhere. Life shouldn’t be like this. There are exquisite passages in Emir:

Nine months later she was typing in a London office; there was a rind of charcoal just inside her cuff; in short, she had a trade.

In London a cloud, rough and evil-smelling like a drunkard’s coat, descended at five o’clock. There were open territories; by moonlight, spotted like the flanks of a hyena; these were parks. On the way back to their rooms every face Houda passed had a snout as nude as a whippet’s.

Beauty is not in the eye; it is in the pocket. At twenty-one she received an income of three hundred pounds a year by her father’s will; and a small legacy from an aunt. Enough to set her free and give her an addiction to the brilliant streets.

Writing like this — a bit of Rhys, a bit of Knut Hamsun, a bit of Wyndham Lewis, a bit of Muriel Spark, overlaying the everlasting Shakespeare/Austen/ Brontë/George Eliot marriage drama — is far too beautiful and accomplished to be kept off the shelf. It catches like nothing else the smogs, the rodentine genes, the murky post-War grays, the lurking sexual violence of London, between Hangover Square and Carnaby Street. London, when it was still as forbidding as Bucharest, before it became as hip as Portland, before money and color and human invention and foreign visitors could wash it clean. Emir specializes in a kind of horrified alienation — like those first 
impressions of Paris that Rilke then worked for ten years to get down in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. And with human portraits, of course, to match, not just the gallery of vilely and spectacularly ineligible men, but also the heroine’s (and one suspects, maybe Tonks’s) mother: “Or with her domineering little head stuffed into a hat of apricot felt, she would pass across a restaurant a spotted pamphlet on vegetarian diet.” What a little jackpot of a sentence!

Over time, the play of so much sheer ghastliness over exposed nerves became muted into polish, sneer, and deliberate, efficient comedy. Having begun with “I sing the sullied,” the prose soon comes to ask, “Did you see    ...    ?” Alienation softens into Jerome K. Jerome-like fun; brutes become harmless, almost lovable eccentrics; desperate heroines are just short of being assimilated. A “strong neck so well rooted and bolted into his shoulders” is practically enough (Frankenstein’s monster should apply). The later novels have a pattering, aphoristic quality; characters and narrators talk as artfully as Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh; a relished put-down or snazzy generalization is never far away: “Of all peoples, the English least 
deserve their dandies.” They tan with their pants on; the ultraviolet fails to make it through the twill. A scene in an opera is: “A lot of musty dehydrated furs here tonight, at shoulder level it’s like a ranch of petrified foxes.” One character has “a head like a handsome bullet.” Another is said to have arrived “straight from the land of cabinet pudding and brown Windsor soup” — an almost Homeric periphrasis for England (and political logopoeia: those dishes, by the way, are real). A man being fed grapes is likened to “a lion gobbling earrings.” An exchange about relatives instantly assumes the worst:

“What are yours like, Min?”
“Terrible. And yours?”
“Mine are too nervous to finish a sentence. They all live in the country.”

In Tonks’s upside-down economy, this brilliant froth indicates the barrel is empty. What had begun as a scream at England ends up sounding terribly English. “I say it in the high tin of my English voice.”

In Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms there are maybe just four satisfying poems (the prose “Bedroom in an Old City,” “Rome,” “Blouson Noir,” and “Bedouin of the London Morning”) — but it’s a first book, and whose first book is a keeper? (I can only think of Stevens and Eliot.) Its showing is almost wholly in the realm of promise. Not “pity that there are not more poems like these,” but “pity that these distinctive stirrings, these experiments could not be sustained for longer.” Indeed, its noisy titles are themselves clamorous, or even glamorous promises: “20th Century Invalid,” “Diary of a Rebel,” “Gutter Lord,” “Ace of Hooligans,” “Escape!” It’s not that one doubts the impulse, intention, or occasion of the poems; damaged, they are out to do damage; themselves upset, to be upsetting. One of my 
favorite quotations is Musil’s “the man of genius is duty-bound to attack” — how much the more so then the woman of genius! But it’s a fact that this aggression is almost unknown in modern English writing, where there was no expressionism, no Futurism, no Acmeism, no Fauvism; and modernism itself increasingly seems an expensive import and an aberration. The esthétique du mal of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Corbière, Benn, Céline, even Sartre barely exists in the wholesome English: Lewis, mentioned above, very briefly in the “Blasting and Bombardiering” Pound of 1917, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, the late-lamented Peter Reading, and J.G. Ballard. Purely circumstantial in occasional others. What price the English maudits, or maudites, even?! The impulse wanders off into other media: Julie Burchill, Amy Winehouse, Tracey Emin, Sarah Kane. Tonks tosses out phrases like a beaver dropping saplings: “a guest at my own youth,” “sentenced to cabbage and kisses,” “a sirloin mattress,” “I am sick mortar and anonymous,” “my private modern life has gone to waste.” The melos is as sinuous as Keats, but toxic, and read aloud in Tonks’s — inevitable, predictable — cut-glass tones, the effect must have been truly alarming — imagine the Queen, effing and blinding, and not the downbeat Estuary Queen of today, but the shrill girleen of the Coronation.

The first poems don’t seem to know quite how to proceed. They could go anywhere, any of them, but the words are too big for their mouths. It’s as though Tonks had a small vocabulary — she doesn’t — and the words come back, time and again, like the words in a French poem, like buzzwords, too big for the poem, heavy words, requiring only to be said: dropped not placed. If the titles are too big for the poems, then so are the individual words as well. Syntax is random, sentences indeterminate, punctuation ineffectual. Three “oxygen”s and three “rainfield”s in the twenty lines of “Rainfield and Argument.” The poems are like broken sestinas, primitive, cannibal sestinas. “Modern” and “twentieth-century” all the time, and “dust,” “wing,” “cabbage,” “butcher,” “street,” “heart,” “Europe.” And in between, simple bathos in Tudorbethan, pebble-dash quatrains. In “Diary of a Rebel”: “For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness” — oh dear, yes, am I up to hearing this? — “I need the café.” Oh well, off you go then. Or “Story of a Hotel Room,” anthologized by Larkin but as naïvely earnest as any poem I know, that warns with risible (if true) arguments of the possible consequences of adultery:

Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
— If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

The words are oddly blank here, legalistic: an unhelpfully, if not posthumously, singing insurance policy. “You have absolutely no protection,” it says. The better poems are dragged more enthusiastically back and forth. They play out the great inversions and perversions 
of the French dix-neuvième with a fearless modern girl protagonist who’s drawn only to what’s worst for her:

After an all-night conversation
When the street-wind hangs on snarling to your coat, 
If you knew my (half erotic) convulsion of loathing 

For the night.
 — From Bedouin of the London Morning

One would be hard put to say whether she’s coming or going — anywhere out of this world — but isn’t it kind of magnifique, with its violent energies and pent-up discretion? “Brainsick and odious, / On the alluring quays he’s rotten with happiness” (“Blouson Noir”): 
a triumph of discord, rarely heard since Rimbaud, the short and very English “rotten” and “happiness” singing out among all those other long vowels.

Whatever the shortcomings, the convent-girl inhibitions (the school in Emir is described as turning out “each year thirty of the gentlest wives in England” — not Tonks!), the jejunery, the tangled snarls of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, Iliad of Broken Sentences, five years later, has none. A tiny book, but explosive, a comet — watch out, dinosaurs! This time, the titles, lids of Tate & Lyle syrup tins, barely fit over the homemade combustible contents. The opening poem, entitled “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas,” may sound like a comfy job-lot of favorite things, but it is a ferocious Kulturkritik, which kicks in with a new and epochal power:

I have lived it, and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

...    Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

I’ve never heard “luxury” — the rhyme with “poetry”! — in quite that dangly-adjective way before. “Living it” is stressed throughout. “It’s done by living, ignoramuses,” jeers one of the poems. The word comes up a dozen times. “I have lived it, and lived it.” Houda in Emir says: “A poet must be one of civilization’s failures. You forget; it’s the mongrel who gets kicked.” Here it’s the Italo-Welsh mongrel lady who goes about kicking a failed civilization. It’s fantastic. An intellectual toad has come to call. “On my bad days (and I’m being broken / At this very moment),” speaks the eruptive Tonks character. Remember, “Life shouldn’t be like this.” But what can you do? It’s unendurable:

And he    ...    is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull — (just the sort
To keep away from).
...    when I see that cigarillo, when I see it    ...    smoking
And he wants to face the international situation    ...    
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!
 — From The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas

How considered is Mauberley by comparison, even Rimbaud seems almost staid. The punctuation is popping, typefaces come and go, the adjectives are spectral (“dead bedroom clothes”!), humor is a helpless, skittering, almost accidental by-product (“    ...    smoking”), it’s all one seethe of vomit, a whole staircase full of escalier, as we used to say: a parked tiger. At least half of these twenty poems are unrivaled in English; I think of Corbière or of George Grosz, or a wilder “Homage to Sextus Propertius.” Yes, it’s not much, when one thinks what there might have been, but these are Sibylline pages, and beyond price. Everything else is — shopping: “But after all, give me again that new green diction. / Oh yes, it’s atrocious. Certainly it’s literature.”

Tonks has a poem about revisiting an old address. It’s the theme of Robert Lowell’s wistful “The Old Flame,” and Philip Larkin’s quietly destructive “Home is so sad,” but this is one of the most hate-filled things I have ever seen    ...    glorious! The titles by now have stopped shouting. It’s called merely “The Sash Window,” but there’s enough in it to destroy several counties — maybe the Home Counties. It starts:

Outside that house, I stood like a dog;
The window was mysterious, with its big, dull pane
Where the mud pastes are thrown by dark, alkaline skies
That glide slowly along, keeping close to the ground.

— But for the raging disgust which shook me
So that my throat was scratched by her acid
(Whose taste is the true Latin of culture) — 
I could have lived the life of these roads.

The speaker never gets above the level of that initial dog: servile, put there, grimly fascinated, on-guard. Everything — all the knowledge in a poem that is full of knowledge — remains physical, if not visceral. The whole governing idea of the poem (there is one!) is of the dog returning to its vomit; disgust or culture — it’s all one excoriation. “I could have lived the life of these roads”: the reader is left with a telltale roughness in the throat. Throughout her tiny Iliad, Tonks takes great delight in creating confusion in the categories of geography, meteorology, and material: a cosmic turbulence. A poem about London is “Farewell to Kurdistan.” Oriental references and vocables pop up everywhere. The intention is uncertain, maybe not even formulated, but the effect is derisory, alienated, a cod glamour: “Turk,” “souks,” “pour[ing] the sand / For my own desert,” “my arab hours,” “my Kurdish epoch,” “hotel berbers,” “Asia’s gold cake,” “Europe’s old blue Kasbah.” The weather, or better the atmospheric conditions, is always, similarly, “off.” The book is full of water, gas, fog, murk, reek; it flows from a leaky, guttering pipe, flaming and dripping; this is one of the things that give it its strongly nineteenth century feel, its gaslight London (“the street / Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum”) compounded from those of Charles Dickens, Thomas De Quincey, Joris-Karl Huysmans, early T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (note the quotient of immigrants and visitors, not to mention prose writers in such a list!). And then there is the way things are forever congealing, liquefying, evaporating, precipitating, condensing. The rain makes “mud pastes,” presumably with some help from the building; later on, there are “wet patches,” and “the disinfectant dries off in whiffs.” Everything is changing its state: uncertain, unstable, revolting. The poem goes on:

That piece of filthy laurel moves up and down,
And then the dead rose-leaves with their spat-on look
Where the sour carbon lies    ...    under
The sash of the window comes the smell of stewing innards,

With the freshly washed lavatory — I know where
The old linoleum has its platinum wet patches
And the disinfectant dries off in whiffs.
Hellish, abominable house where I have been young!

The “piece of filthy laurel” — that withering contempt — sounds like a twig shaken by an extra; it reminds you of how theatrical all this is. Smells, textures, tastes, the patterns of things appearing and disappearing: Tonks is quoted as saying, “The main duty of the poet is to excite — to send the senses reeling.” All these are worked in and summarized in the vicious and stately “Hellish, abominable house where I have been young!” with its rare, perfect tense. There is as much negative zest — nausea — here as there is positive in Leopold Bloom’s lustful hankering for grilled kidneys. “Carbon” brings in the coal-hole, but also strengthens (along with platinum) the science — and we’ve already had acid and alkaline — and the “French” feel of the writing (charbon). The speaker remains doggishly close to everything she describes: it all seems inhaled, “keeping close to the ground.” Bleach and coal, liver and leaves, stew and spit. There I could breathe, as Rimbaud says of his infernal outhouse. This shining platinum lavatory is both home altar and household god (the righteous washed lavatory — like the guarded guard!) and laboratory, from which has proceeded the toxic brew of Tonks’s consciousness. The poem continues and concludes:

With your insane furnishings — above all
The backs of dressing-tables where the dredged wood
Faces the street, raw. And the window
With its servant-maid’s mystery, which contains nothing,

Where I bowed over the ruled-up music books
With their vitreous pencilling, and the piano keys
That touched water. How forlornly my strong, destructive head
Eats again the reek of the sash window.

Tonks has gone right on seeing the things one is not supposed to see: the shoddy backs of furniture stood in the upstairs bay windows of Victorian houses broken up into bedsits. And then music lessons, the definition of duress and accomplishment and “Art Lite” for the daughters of the bourgeoisie, the piano played “with real feeling, / the feeling of being indoors practicing,” as Randall Jarrell said. “Ruled-up” suggests both over-reglemented and its reaction in the pupil, crossed-out; the very strange “vitreous” (another one of what I think of as her instant adjectives — pure instinct) suggests faint and shy; “that touched water” — “water” presumably going back to “vitreous” — is difficult, perhaps damp, perhaps just the mixing of elements and states that goes on throughout the book. The “strong, destructive head” returns us to the dog, chewing these smells and memories, salivating over them, “forlornly” vomiting them back out. “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell, / To toll me back from thee to my sole self!”

 

•

 

When things started to go for Tonks, everything went: “I’m leaving! Nothing can hold me! / The trains, watered and greased, scream to be off.” Her mother died in a mysterious “freak accident” in 1968. The last pieces of her writing in Bedouin are — no more poems! — a short story from 1973 and two book reviews from 1973 and 1974 for The New York Review of Books: a clever and adoring piece on Colette, an equally clever and agnostic one on Jean Garrigue and Adrienne Rich, suggesting maybe once again that her future would have been prose, and more strongly that her place was not England and her time was past. Then, in short order, divorce from “Micky” (though she went on calling herself “Mrs. Lightband”), breaches with friends and relatives, an end to work and disgust with all the work she had done (the burning of one more prose manuscript), the sale of her London house: the end of her life not just as a poet and writer, but as a woman and a social being. There began a period of distressing spiritual seeking — Astley itemizes them, “spiritualist meetings,” 
“mediums and healers,” “Sufi ‘seekers,’” “a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru,” and later on, “Charismatics and Pentecostalists” — along with the loss of physical and mental health, eyesight, morale, trust. As if all that weren’t enough, there were burglaries and lawsuits. In a gentlemanly kind of way, Astley tried to stick up for this period, to protect it from the more tabloid sort of “recluse” and “bag lady” descriptions. He means well, but to me it feels like a distinction without a difference. What happened to Rosemary Tonks seems like the most devastatingly comprehensive autoimmune attack. She perpetrated the destruction of a collection of Eastern artifacts she had inherited: priceless things were chopped up to “dog-biscuit size,” and burned in a garden incinerator. There was no nameplate or number on the door, which she rarely answered anyway; the curtains were kept drawn; inquiries by post concerning her past life in letters ignored. The only book she allowed herself, her “‘complete manual’ for living,” was the Bible, but even that was treated with an end of literary discrimination: she liked to read the oldest translation she could find, Tyndale’s if possible, otherwise the King James version. As long as she had funds, she trundled up to London, to give out Bibles at Speakers’ Corner. She died on April 15, 2014, after thirty-five desperately sad, pottery, withdrawn, tithe-paying, nay-saying, Bible-reading years in or near the shabby-genteel retirement place of Bournemouth on the English costa geriatrica where she had once been an incendiary and unwilling schoolgirl.

Rosemary — for memory — Desmond Boswell — for her early deceased father — Tonks: hypocrite auteur, ma semblable, ma soeur!