The Rosemary Tonks Archive, Newcastle University

My intrepid journey into the North last week was the furthest I've been since I was last up that way not long into the current millenium. It was worthwhile to undergo the hardships of long-distance coach travel for the sake of seeing Durham Cathedral in the flesh, revisiting Lindisfarne and, quite brilliantly, being able to book myself in to Newcastle University Library's Special Collections and spend an afternoon communing with Rosemary Tonks via the archive they have of her there.

It is not to be undertaken lightly or without some sense of guilt. What Newcastle has is digitalized copies, to be viewed on a laptop, of her diaries, address book and notebooks from after she had renounced her work as a poet and novelist. The first indexed item one sees is a picture of the box they come in, on which it very clearly says,

All these notebooks are written in a certain way which is incomprehensible to the layman.

It is mere gibberish to the layman; for they cannot be understood. To the ordinary person the only conclusion is that the writer must be mad.

And she asks,

Please... I beg you to burn these notebooks

but they didn't. And so one is intruding where one hasn't been invited in looking at this private material and one feels bad about it, grasping at such excuses as one is only doing so because you love her. Why would anyone write down such things if they were not meant to be read. Larkin got lucky when his secretary burnt his journals before anybody else read them but perhaps Rosemary remained a writer for all that she had abjured her career as such but still felt the need to write things down for her own benefit, which might be where serious writing begins.

I only found two asides that made any reference to her published writing. I don't know if the Newcastle Archives are filed by subject area or any other but the content of the Rosemary archive doesn't really belong under Literature. She was not writing poems or novels by the time of these documents. At her own word, the best place for them might be under Psychiatry and then we involve ourselves, however improperly, in the life of a lady and her neuroses, obsessions, anxieties and moments of happiness, her comforts and joys, medications, appointments and mood swings.

Most movingly, in among her love for Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, her dismay at 'too much tennis on T.V. + that terrible Fiona Bruce in a long piece on paintings forgery', the waitress she doesn't like in the coffee shop and, over and over again, the ravens in whose croaking she finds comfort, the last entry in her diary, on 12/2/2014, is a delivery from Sainsbury's. Those won't have been her last words but they might have been the last words she wrote and compared to Goethe's Mehr Licht, or even Oscar's Either those curtains go or I do, they are the most ordinary words one could have from one who had once been such an extraordinary writer.

Before that, it is sometimes sleeplessness and the milky drinks she had faith in. She is totally convinced on a regular basis, as on 11/6/99, that,

Hooray !!

Married! To an absolutely darling man !

"Come along, my Rosemary,

Follow me, my own child..."

and that man is the Lord.

 

Newspaper reports of a poltergeist not far from where she lived in Bournemouth and destroyed her collection of ancient artefacts are understandably, in her circumstances, seen to be significant.

Her admirers might be tempted to cite Ophelia and say,

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown

but Rosemary's poems, novels and interviews from the 1960's and into the 70's had expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the world as she found it then so I'm reluctant to find fault with her for going in search of something better. It's not obvious that she found it but at least she disdained celebrity status and made for herself a way of life that made some strange sense to her.

I was glad to establish that we had the same birthday, as if astrology actually meant anything, to witness the ordinariness of the life she chose having once been the cover girl of a generation of English poets and to see that she, too, thought, as on 24/10/98, at the age of 70,

The difference between my happy normal self & the distressed wrestling person is UNBELIEVEABLE.

 

I'm not sure she'd have been the easiest of company at any time of her life because she must have been nothing if not demanding but the few hours spent with her daily notes made me grateful they weren't destroyed and, compared to the lives of such luminaries as Eliot, Yeats, Ezra, Dylan Thomas, Ted and Sylvia, Stevie Smith and others, I'm not sure how 'mad' she really was. 

Maybe in the end we either just like somebody else or we don't. And nobody in their right mind would undergo coach travel from Portsmouth to Newcastle and back to pry into a dead poet's private notes unless they cared.

Yes, the main point was Durham Cathedral, then revisting Lindisfarne and what proves to be the area I usually decide on when having a 'holiday' but any sort of experience can be given vaguely religious status if it means enough to us. We pay our money and we makes our choice. 

I'll meet with whichever friends want to see, or pay their respects at, Rosemary's grave at Warblington some time quite soon, very informally.