Rosemary Tonks - Emir

Rosemary Tonks, Emir (Adam Books, 1963)

An enormous and gratefully received bit of good fortune came my way recently that provided the opportunity to read Rosemary Tonks's first novels, Emir and Opium Fogs, without the exorbitant expenditure required to own copies for oneself. It transpires that I'm not the only one whose most expensive book acquisitions are hers. The Bloater, which is the only one I'm now missing, should be along in its own time and then there will be nothing more to want.

I read Emir yesterday on the same day that I listened to a new recording of Schonberg's Pierrot Lunaire (review to follow soon-ish). One needs a lie down after a day like that. While I relished more adventurous artworks when I was young, enjoying The Faust Tapes and most things avant garde when I was about 13, I'm much more Bach, Handel and Mozart these days.

Not that Rosemary would have necessarily regarded herself as avant-garde or part of any such school or 'movement'. In Emir, she has as much scorn for the Bohemian, where one might have inadvertently put her, as she does for the conventional, the conservative and everything else. It is her deep dissatisfaction with everything that makes her both so gorgeous and so impossible. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that she disowned all her worldly work, set off in search of something she found more meaningful, not altogether successfully, and almost literally disappeared. She might well not have been the easiest company in life but her writing is like nobody else's. Muriel Spark is the very gentlest and most comforting of companions compared to Rosemary.

A concensus of opinion rather than any verified dating makes Emir the first of her novels. It is as brilliant in its relentless dismissal of all social nicety as it is flawed by its lack of anything else. It is a comedy and, like all her novels, a brilliant one but to anyone coming unprepared to it, say via Joanna Trollope, it might look like grotesque tragedy. Houda, the poet about town, has more than one admirer but the others are bit parts compared to Eugene, the Emir, who is ladies' man, but,

At the same time that he sets fire to my nervous system, a flood of curses rises to my lips.

 

Or, 

These cabbage raptures are all very well, but at the other end of the railway line I shall need proficiency in all the meticulous cruelties of a twentieth-century love affair.

 

Perhaps its less a novel than a concatentation of maxims that look cynical but actually despair for want of something better. Perhaps only one of such searing intelligence as Rosemary's could produce quite such compulsive writing whether it's a novel or not. But once you've picked it up, forget doing anything else. It's not rambling or thoughtful, philosophical or ruminating like Tolstoy, George Eliot or maybe Balzac. She's the Sex Pistols. It demands to be read, right now, imperfect in so many ways that it may be.

Englishness is a regular target for her satire but Frenchness, or any other alternative option, isn't given any better welcome,

An English garden is way out of time. And from it, London appears to belong to a backward race where whole castes are separated from one another by the mis-pronounciation of a single word, by the stitching of a glove. 

Houda is, of course, a poet as was Rosemary in her best work. I'm not sure if Rosemary seriously thinks that 'poet' is the higher calling because I certainly don't but many still believe poetry to be something more refined than prose. It isn't. Why would it be. In among the scathing, ultra-sensitive, unforgiving insights into what she sees as superficial, there is great 'poetry'. I think it was a bright tie seen through a long, white beard that was like 'a regatta seen through sea fog'.

She does her best to go 'beyond the grasp of the ratepayer' because,

Beauty is a grocer's work.

 

Emir is a joyous book, as enthralling for all the reasons some readers think it's bad as for all the gauche, showy things that make it good. I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy it as much for its total lack of compromise as I liked the later, supposedly better-made novels.

At least she tried.

I will go back in search of her grave again if it is, as it is said to be, not very far from here. With others among my favourite writers recently losing points, Rosemary Tonks never does.