Sometimes you really want to like something but it doesn't come up to expectations. One's investment in it is not only financial and time but also emotional. I was playing for high stakes with The Way Out of Berkeley Square. And won. If The Halt During the Chase was good and Businessmen as Lovers had much to like about it but will need another chance to entirely convince, this one is tremendous.Arabella is 30 and 'stuck' in her life as housekeeper to her wealthy father, with her married suitor and beloved brother who is out in Pakistan, a poet and idealist looking for higher things in his life. It wasn't until some way into the novel that I began to wonder whose fault it is that she enslaves herself to three men and that is surely one question we might ask but not necessarily the main point.
I don't know if I've read a more fiercely intelligent writer than Rosemary Tonks - George Eliot in her time, maybe- and it's more apparent in her novels than it is in her poems. The poems exude louche disillusion. It's an exercise in itself to find the right words to define it precisely. I've tried 'morbid' and 'jaundice' in the poem below but, of course, the answer is the poems themselves, not a description or synopsis. In the novels there is more space to develop her piercing psychological insights and well-read reference points.
One report from someone who knew her mentions her fluency in other languages and how she might transpose into Italian in conversation. It suggests that apposite citings of Boris Godunov, Krapp's Last Tape, Tiepolo, Mandelstam and Heine are not showy name-dropping but things that came readily to a sophisticated mind.
More impressive than that, though, are the way she, as Arabella, unmasks the motivations of her characters. Her assignations with her 'Wolf', the 'happily married', predatory dinner date who is significantly older but physically, if not emotionally, attractive to her, show him to be transparent to her but that doesn't help when she wants him and doesn't want him in equal measure.
She admires her father in a parallel way while being repelled by his controlling nature and her brother, Michael, away in Karachi, is accorded something like saint status while ostensibly indulging himself and has successfully extricated himself from the family home.
Rosemary had pre-empted the vogue for the 'unreliable narrator' by a few years although it had surely existed before it became quite so much the fashion.
The guilt involved in invading the privacy of a writer who determinedly repudiated all her work, and worldly goods, by reading her work quite so avidly is more tangible with Rosemary than even reading the likes of Larkin's letters. In publishing the Letters to Monica, Anthony Thwaite suggested that Larkin knew he was 'writing for posterity' with others than Monica Jones reading over her shoulder. Whether James Booth was in a position to make the same point with the Letters Home is open to more doubt. At least the Rosemary Tonks poems and novels were in print once and Neil Astley's point is that there was no objection in her will and agreement with her estate was eventually achieved.
Exactly how much we can stretch this to infer anything from the work about the life could be difficult but Michael contracts polio in Karachi in the novel, which is the dramatic climax, which is what had happened to Rosemary. To extend that into reading a certain amount of Michael's venture to the East, his poetry writing and interest in high-minded, and international, writing, into something like a version of Rosemary herself is easy to do. In the first pages, he is described as someone who,
You can't force them to be happy if their way of being happy is to be half unhappy.
And that seems to me as good a way into understanding Rosemary and her repudiation of her previous life and work, which she took to fundamentalist lengths, as well as good reason to sympathize with and love her even if she wouldn't have wanted that either. It's possible that plenty of us know what she meant about bourgeois values, the superficiality of the worldliness she understood so well, including that of the literary world she was a bit of a star in but most of us decide to live with it as best we can rather than cut ourselves off so comprehensively.
She had shown she could do it if she wanted but decided she didn't want to.
I usually cover one envelope in notes and page references reading a book like this but The Way Out of Berkeley Square has filled two.
It gets to the point when one can't be bothered to be intelligent, even to oneself.
he indicates that I'm a bestial peasant, at the mercy of the flowing of my blood.
There is the almost subliminal inter-textual mention from another novel of having babies that needs some sort of forensic detection; the description of skating across a cracking frozen lake and glancing into the abyss below; the 'abysmal' jet flight; a brief mention of pop music, which was far better then that it is now, and specifically the highly evocative world of Peter Sarstedt. And that is only the highlights of the first side of the first envelope.
She is the very greatest at accessing the very dread beneath everything but she isn't Franz Kafka, she is witty, sexy and quite clearly capable of being a party animal, not bleak.
If this was the greatest novel in the English language, it would surely be in print and nowhere near as hard to hear about, never mind find, so I will not get carried away on a wave of hero worship. But what is the best novel. Dubliners isn't a novel so it's not that. Middlemarch, some of Hardy's deterministic pessimism, Camus, Gide, Balzac. Some say Tolstoy. More recently, Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday. Julian Barnes. Virginia Woolf. I don't know. It's a list I haven't done. But I do know that I've not enjoyed a novel this much for a long, long time.
Last year I said Ian Bostridge's book about Schubert's Winterreise was the best book I've ever read and so it must be but, like when you've written a poem you like and have to leave it a while before seeing if it's any good, I'll have to have a look back at The Way Out of Berkeley Square in due course and see if it's as close to 10/10 as it seemed on first reading.