Rosemary's Way Out

It wasn't quite as apparent as I'd hoped that a re-read of The Way Out of Berkeley Square by Rosemary Tonks would provide enough about 'being stuck' to base a whole essay on the theme of it. There's some and it might be enough but I don't know if it will seem like too much of a contrivance. It can be very hurtful when someone as eminent as Prof. Sir Stanley Wells along with all the other accoutrements that apply to his name, and his coterie of faithful followers, pile in to discredit one's work. Stan didn't make much of a case beyond his blustering outrage eight years ago but it would be worse if somebody were to find a fault that I suspected might have actually been there.

The first move would be to compare Arabella's situation in Berkeley Square with those of the Dubliners and Stephen Dedalus in Portrait.

When father overwhelms me with domestic tasks I've often wondered whether it's because he wants me to leave home and is driving me out, or whether he wants at all costs to keep me there by giving me so much to do that I can't roam abroad.

It's there alright and much else besides and both Rosemary and Joyce are heavily reliant on autobiographical material even if Rosemary transfers her illness to Arabella's brother, Michael, who has the same name as her real life husband and is in Karachi writing poems.

Some who believe themselves to be poets can't help but reflect on the situation and Rosemary, through Michael, like Joyce through Stephen, has a very familiar dissatisfaction with it,

Until a year or two ago I loved bookshops; but as I grew up, I grew level mentally with some of the books inside them and the disappointment was very great. No philosopher, when read, seemed truly to philosophise, no erotica was really erotic; no poetry was ever poetry. 

(and there's more worth having before...)

The fact that he [Michael] can't manage without books and never stops reading doesn't alter his contemptuous attitude towards them. 'I don't like the air around here, Pigeon, but I have to breathe it because there's nothing else.' That's Michael.

And it sounds like Rosemary, too. Sometimes you find a few lines in which an already favourite writer excels even themselves and it's not quite clear whether one falls in love all over again or if it only serves to confirm what you knew already. Going even further, in the last few pages, Michael says,

that from now on he's separated forever from the English poets by his sufferings and his experience, whereas before he was separated only by his contempt.

Rosemary can try to hide behind Michael but I can see her there, not least joining those bits up with the comments in her interview in which she despaired of 'English' poets in the 1960's 'not writing passions' which one could easily think refers to Philip Larkin as per the essay due any time soon in the Larkin Society journal.

I'm not taking sides because they are both at the very top end of my list of favourite poets and Larkin could be just as disparaging about other poets and often was.

The new essay, should it ever get done, would compare and contrast the 'ways out' of the various paralyses that Rosemary, Joyce, Larkin, Hardy and others either find or fail to. It might work. I might get away with it. And if I don't, as long as I've enjoyed it it won't matter.

We might like to glorify such things as 'work' but they're not. They are pleasure.