Rosemary Tonks - The Bloater

Rosemary Tonks, The Bloater (Vintage Classics)

Last year I was rapturously happy to be in receipt of the prohibitively expensive Rosemary Tonks novels that I'd not yet invested in as pdf's and wrote about them here, hoping not to offend any copyright on such long out-of-print books. Much to their credit, Vintage Classics have now re-issued The Bloater as a paperback with an introduction by Stewart Lee.

Feeling the need to gather whatever one can of Rosemary, it's worth it for that introduction alone but it's clearly well worth a re-read, too. It almost certainly isn't the best of the six novels and so one wonders why this is the first to be put out in a new paperback edition, in the hope that the rest might follow. That might be because, as Stewart's introduction points out, after the first two, the more mature books are the 'more conventionally constructed 1968-72 quartet'. Opium Fogs and Emir were indeed made of a more untamed, manic intensity but that only made them the more remarkable, presumably in 1963/4 and still now.

The Bloater is as psychologically acute but maybe a little more restrained. The main problem with it is why Min entertains the attentions of Carlos, the operatic baritone 'bloater', at all if she finds him so repellant but in that conundrum might lie a clue to a theme that runs through all Rosemary's work which is a tension between horror and fascination. The glamour of the tawdry downside of romance but an addiction to it as a corollary are part of her perverse appeal and such conflicted attitudes recur throughout, as in,

Everything I do or say will hurt and please him.

In his review in last Saturday's Times, William Boyd characterized Rosemary's 'rackety' novels as 'a strange hybrid of Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge with a dash of Joe Orton' which is at least a good starting point. The Muriel comparison is good, Beryl's a possibility but I'd rather put in Baudelaire for Orton, especially in the poems where the 'manic intensity' can't help but also bring to mind Sylvia Plath.

All writing is surely in some sort of way slightly autobiographical and Stewart points out that the main character in Businessmen as Lovers is called Mimi, as in 'me, me' which leads one to extrapolate from Min's line in The Bloater that,

Yes, I'm ungrateful, impossible to please, inhuman, malicious, and demanding.

Elsewhere the word 'haughty' triggers something in the sub-conscious Tonks concordance and, yes, it's in Bedouin of the London Evening, twice in Hydromaniac and 'foregrounded' in the last three lines, as we were once encouraged to notice, and also in Farewell to Kurdistan so one thing she can't be accused of is a lack of self awareness.

Having concentrated so many of its 140 pages on a critique of Carlos, making Min's husband a character almost as incidental as Mrs. Elizabeth Mainwaring in Dad's Army, she leaves that expensive, vain milieu of London society behind and goes away with Billy, who is the object of her more genuine affection, on the Rome Express. 

One can't help but be tempted to look for pre-echoes of the way Rosemary effected her later disappearance from the literary scene in real life in her work. If Min thinks that being in another country with a different man is going to be an idyll, we might suspect that she can't escape being herself. 

It's not easy for an artist to defy categories but Rosemary Tonks defies most things and wouldn't stop at categories. It's a brave attempt and you love her for the energy she puts into it.