Rosemary Tonks - Opium Fogs

 

Rosemary Tonks, Opium Fogs (Putnam, 1963)

There appears to be some doubt about whether this was Rosemary Tonks's first novel, or Emir. Both published in 1963, Emir acknowledges this as 'by the same author' but the favour is not returned which might suggest that this came first.

1963 was quite a year for dubious goings-on, from Larkin's adventures 'between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP', Profumo, the Big Freeze and the last days of Sylvia Plath. 

Opium Fogs suits this zeitgest of sinister, gothic horror with its venal self-regard, ultra-sensitivity and ghoulish atmosphere.

I read it in two halves, not finding the same verve and gusto that runs through Emir and the later novels in the first half but overawed by its pace, energy and density as it ran grippingly, menacingly and awfully to its end. I'm not sure if that was an effect of the book or my reading of it, yet, but it soon proved to have the same eccentric, raw genius that makes it Rosemary and nobody else.

Gerard, a librarian, Dr. Bobo Swingler, Swingler's wife, Bebette, and the alluring Gabiella are locked into helplessly destructive infatuations and neuroses. Nobody in a Tonks novel can be in love happily,

'You're saying: a relationship is only ideal when it's precarious!' 

They have a chronic horror of themselves, each other and the wider world. The English way of life,

kills life - and...exactly resembles an old-fashioned mad-house, full of clamps, restraints, and booby traps, where the inmates feel a moral obligation to drag one another down, suck one another's blood and put out one another's eyes.

Whereas most sex scenes in books can be seen as candidates for the Literary Review's  Bad Sex in Fiction Award, with it being not such an easy thing to translate into the analytical structures of language, Rosemary's oppositional way of interpreting anything and everything wouldn't dream of trying to make it sexy,

Gabriella, alert to all the forces that were abroad, accepted the fog, the silence, and the ticking clock as unmistakeable signs of the displeasure of her invisible adversary.

And the rest, like all the rest, is the heaviest irony. 

They fell upon one another like tired animals, who have fatigue and ennui to make love for them when they pause.

If her characters feel bad about themselves, that is only a fraction of how badly they think of other people,

The only thing which has any meaning is the first moment of attraction between strangers: everything thereafter is farce and disillusion.

Some 37 years later, Lou Reed reflected in between morose songs that 'after the first kiss, it's downhill all the way' but, as in Emir, even Bohemia is associated with the 'shallow', 'low' and 'middle-brow'. There is no word in the language that Rosemary can't inflect with disdain but she does it with such gauche panache if not in a French way.

These first two novels are flamboyantly over-written. The later books possibly relaxed into something more considered without losing their acerbic edge but it's often the case that an artist's early work shows what they were about rather than after they have refined themselves and possibly lost something raw and more telling.

With great art work on the cover, Opium Fogs may be 'of its time' with its 1963 sleaziness but Rosemary's art went well beyond its place in time, compromising with nothing quite as mundane. I hope that my modest contributions to Tonks Studies, as well as better efforts elsewhere (if you know where to find them) are entirely unsuccessful in bringing further attention to her work. She wouldn't have wanted it. She disowned it to such an extent that she'd borrow her own books from libraries and destroy them. I'd prefer she thus remained our precious little secret. The asking price for what few copies of her books remain available offer some hope that she will.