In 2014, the year Rosemary Tonks died at the age of eighty-five, Bloodaxe Books published her Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. “Bedouin of the London Evening” is the title of a poem written in the early 1960s, and its eleven caustic lines are as good an introduction as any to the fervent maelstrom of dismay and regret, of mockery and aggression dramatized in nearly all Tonks’s poetry and fiction:

Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
Great city, filled with wind and dust!

Bedouin of the London evening,
On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.

And like a medium who falls into a trance
So deep, she can be scratched to death
By her Familiar—at its leisure!
I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.

I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.

Such a poem makes clear that Tonks had read and absorbed not only her early Eliot (the rhymes and repetitions are pure J. Alfred Prufrock) but also his French precursors Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. If turn-of-the-century Boston could be viewed through the dregs of a Parisian absinthe glass, the poem seems to ask, why not midcentury London? The vagrant, doomed, at once ecstatic and unillusioned personae who stalk Les Fleurs du mal, Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and Laforgue’s Derniers Vers are here invoked as dangerous but potent spirits in Tonks’s fantasy of herself as an urban Bedouin, a charismatic victim of rot, of waste, of bathos (that dressing gown), of modern anxiety. And yet, the poem also warns, this exuberant, reckless summoning of her Familiar—who might be glossed as the composite ghost of the poètesmaudits—may come at a high price, that of being “scratched to death.”

Neil Astley’s Bloodaxe edition combines Tonks’s two volumes of verse—Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967)—plus an interview, a couple of reviews, and a “late” short story. It was, however, by no means compiled with the help or blessing of the writer herself. When I say “late” I mean 1973, for toward the end of that decade Tonks decided to emulate her great hero Rimbaud and give up writing altogether. By 1980 her vita nuova was well underway: she was divorced (although it was at this point that she began insisting on being known by her married name of Rosemary Lightband), settled in the seaside town of Bournemouth, and devoted exclusively to God. Gunrunning Rimbaud famously dismissed his early effusions as rinçures (dishwater) but seems never to have taken active steps to prevent his work from being circulated or republished.

Tonks, after her great renunciation, took a firmer line: destroying the manuscript of her final novel, despite characterizing it as “the best thing I had ever written,” was easy, as was pulling out of a contract with the Phoenix Press, which wanted to issue a selection of her poetry. But further action was needed: Tonks wrote to publishers instructing them to remove her work from the anthologies in which it had appeared, and she would even—or so the rumor goes—withdraw her own books from public libraries so she could burn them. Reading itself became suspect. “What are books?” she reflected in a notebook entry from March 23, 1999. “They are minds, Satan’s minds. How foolish they are!” Four days later she expanded on this thought: “Devils gain access through the mind: printed books carry, each one, an evil mind: which enters your mind.” When Astley approached her some ten years before her death in the hope that she might recant her recantation and allow him to resurrect her work, the rebuff he received was unambiguous. He too, she was convinced, was a minion of Satan.

Fortunately, her surviving relatives, with whom she had not been in contact for many decades, felt differently. Her will contained no clauses banning the republication of her work, and after due and thoughtful consideration Tonks’s estranged family agreed to Astley’s plans. The admiring responses the book received from such as Michael Hofmann (in Poetry) and Patrick McGuinness (in the London Review of Books) in turn prompted the reissue of four of the six novels Tonks published in the decade of her pomp, 1963–1973, before personal crises and ill health led her to abandon both London and her literary career.

Born in Gillingham, Kent, in 1928, Tonks had a much-disrupted childhood. Her father, Desmond Tonks, had been working as a mechanical engineer in Nigeria when he died there, of blackwater fever, before she was born. Her mother, Gwendoline, née Verdi, traced her ancestry back to the Italian composer, and Tonks herself collaborated on a project, Sono-Montage (1966), with the Scottish poet Alexander Trocchi and the early experimenter with electronic music Delia Derbyshire—famous to British TV viewers for devising the theme tune for Doctor Who. Mother and daughter moved fourteen times during the war—“to avoid bombs and people,” as she later wittily put it. The phrase captures something not always apparent on the page but brought to the fore in the recordings that Tonks made of her poems: she was very posh.

Her crisp, almost regal intonations locate her in a particular stratum of the English class system and clash entertainingly with the mordant depictions of lowlife London bohemia presented in her poetry. The voice must have been partly formed at the girls’ boarding school Wentworth College in Bournemouth, to which she was dispatched at an early age. She left there at sixteen, possibly having been expelled for disruptive behavior. Two quotations from the notebooks that Tonks kept during her cloistered final decades, to which Astley was given access by her relatives after her death, suggest the turbulence of her childhood and adolescence: “I ruined my schooldays through my inability to control myself”; “No sense of self.”

Her mother embarked on a second marriage, and Tonks was given her first taste of expatriate life in the waning years of the British Empire, for her stepfather too was sent to Nigeria. In a 1970 interview with Terry Coleman published in The Guardian, Tonks recalls, again in somewhat dandyish terms, the mixture of luxury and peril involved in such postings: in Lagos they were furnished “with a large house, a shotgun, six or seven servants, and attacks of dysentery and malaria,” and indeed not long after this impressive ménage was established her stepfather, like Desmond Tonks before him, succumbed to one or other of these diseases. “To lose one parent,” one imagines Tonks quipping, “may be regarded as a misfortune…”

“Meanwhile…I live on…powerful, disobedient,” opens the last stanza of “Addiction to an Old Mattress”—a typically original and arresting title. Those are her own ellipses, and the staccato effects of her punctuation and imagery, her willingness to veer and stutter, to swoop from exuberant exclamation marks (on one occasion two of them) or soaring formulations to hesitant blanks and uncertainties make much of her writing seem vulnerable, a little lost or wayward beneath its surface panache. Disobedience took the form of reading Colette and French poetry and hanging out at the Caves de France in Soho but not of resisting the lure of her mother’s example; at the age of twenty, two years after returning to London, Tonks married an engineer, one Micky Lightband. He was six years older, and like her father eager to take on engineering assignments abroad. In their case, however, it was the wife rather than the husband who fell prey to disease: in Calcutta Tonks contracted paratyphoid fever and in Karachi polio. Her right hand became permanently withered—she took to wearing a black glove to conceal this—and she had to teach herself to write with her left.

Tonks’s poetry makes copious use of what Edward Said would have called Orientalist language to intimate her longing for the sorts of freedom and authenticity proffered by the Baudelairean invitation au voyage, referencing Kurdistan and sultans and Berbers and kef, or enthusing “Bolsters from Istanbul!”—a reworking of Laforgue’s “Messageries du Levant!” Her London Bedouin persona revels in filtering the city’s cafés and bedsits and jazz bars through the exotic tropes so expansively deployed by her favorite French poets, without, it must be admitted, evincing much more unease about their origins in colonial conquest than one finds in Rimbaud or Baudelaire. Her novels, however, are often more attuned to the actualities of empire. Tonks’s time as a young wife on the Indian subcontinent, for instance, was transposed onto Michael, the brother of Arabella, the heroine of her fifth novel, The Way Out of Berkeley Square (1970).

Michael is a would-be symbolist poet who has been sent down from Oxford and is desperate to escape dependency on his wealthy, overbearing father. The novel expertly captures the stifling luxury of their large house in Holland Park, which the dandyish Michael abandons with precisely the sort of enigmatic barb that Tonks was so fond of: “If you want to know what’s driving me out, it’s the gluey pots in the kitchen.”

Accordingly, he moves to Karachi, and from there reports back to his adoring sister that he has found a bookshop in the bazaar selling Joyce, Hazlitt, and Stephen Crane. In search of more sustained inspiration, however, he shifts quarters to the desert, where he is looked after by a lazy servant named Abdul and soon catches, as Tonks had done, polio. As happens so often in Tonks’s fiction, the quest for escape from the suffocating conventions of moneyed Englishness backfires, in this case for both siblings: Michael ends up paralyzed and on crutches, while thirty-year-old Arabella conducts an affair with a much older married man known only as the Wolf. The novel is an unsettling mixture of awkwardness, guilt, and periodic flights of erotic fancy, usually prompted by the receipt of one of the Wolf’s not particularly passionate letters.

In his review of Tonks’s work for Poetry, Hofmann suggests that her novels can be read as “the nobly nihilistic beginnings of chick lit.”¹ Her best is probably Emir (1963), not as yet reissued. The Emir of the title, Eugene Decroce, is an extremely large forty-year-old arty type with “a soft blue double-chin,” and although we learn that he smells “foreign” and his moniker is designed to conjure up the mysterious East, no more is divulged than that he has a “riotous European pedigree.” Like his creator, the Emir sports a black glove to conceal a deformed right hand. Elegant, sophisticated, well read, he pays elaborate court to the first of Tonks’s feisty fictional alter egos, Houda Lawrence, a young London bohemian who, it goes without saying, is an aspiring symbolist poet.

The romance here is even more wobbly and unlikely than in its successors but, no doubt remembering how Colette achieved success with her Claudine novels, Tonks tracks the semi-flirtatious disputes of her characters as if a declaration of “Reader, I married him” might be the novel’s ultimate goal. Page after page is taken up by their spirited verbal sparring. While Houda propounds decadent dogma about seeking vision through pain, the Emir takes the role of cynical littérateur, deftly puncturing her pretensions. Wildean epigrams and bons motsspice their every encounter: “History is a bed on which you change the sheets when you think they look dirty”; “A poet must be one of civilization’s failures”; “I cannot harm you; because you are completely vulnerable. But if the way up a publisher’s staircarpet led over my heart, you would not hesitate to tread it.” The plot melts away into a series of almost theatrical encounters between Houda and the Emir, all lit up with verbal pyrotechnics of that kind.

The chick-lit aspects of Tonks’s fictional world are even more pronounced in her last four novels. Here’s a typical passage from The Bloater (1968), which again features an overweight arty character, this time an opera singer, as a possible love interest:

Shall I wear bare legs and these almost non-existent sandals with slightly vulgar diamantés on them? Yes, with the covering fire of Billy’s most proper dark suit they’ll look rainy and perfect. Although walking on my own in the street they’d be so flashy I’d have to take them off and go barefoot.
Damn. This lip gloss is nearly finished; that means going all the way to Woolworth’s. And I’m working tomorrow.

Voilà—the Swinging Sixties. A profile of Tonks published in The Guardian succinctly captured the dashing figure she cut during that decade: “She has a white Italian sports car, a French purple velvet trouser suit, and lives in a Queen Anne house in Hampstead.” The house in Hampstead on Downshire Hill was close to that of the grande dame of English letters, Edith Sitwell, with whom she enjoyed “hobnobbing.” Tonks was also a regular at the Coffee Cup on nearby Rosslyn Hill, a literary café where the émigrés Elias Canetti and Fred Uhlman liked to hold forth, and the evocative photograph used for the cover of Bedouin of the London Evening shows her deep in thought in one of its nooks, pen in hand, a frothy cappuccino awaiting her attention, some tattered French-looking books before her to aid composition.

Although her novels never sold in the quantities of the likes of Jilly Cooper, the market they were aimed at was roughly similar. They are all more or less readable, and the ghastliness of the men can be quite entertaining, if also dispiriting. The civil servant Philip of her last, The Halt During the Chase (1972), is so unappealing that one wants to shake its heroine, Sophie, for dallying with him. She realizes how truly awful Philip is only after he has abandoned her at the Paris airport late at night with no money, as retribution for her “fucking refusal” to fly back to London with him, delivering this acerbic farewell with his lower teeth exposed, “like a furious chimpanzee.” Forced to fend for herself, Sophie walks to the Île Saint-Louis, using the Eiffel Tower for bearings, and there holes up for a week, imaginatively encountering the ghost of Baudelaire each night on the bridges over the Seine, “with that magnificent sneer embedded in his cheek.” Unlike Philip’s, Baudelaire’s sneer is a good one. On a visit to Montparnasse Cemetery in 1967 Tonks had lain down on his grave to make sure they were the same height, and her heroine finds similar solace in identifying with traces of the Baudelairean; at last she feels like “le poisson dans l’eau.”

Alas, the reissue of Tonks’s fourth novel, Businessmen as Lovers (1969), is unlikely to do much to enhance her reputation. I found its cast of moneyed English holidaymakers indulging in high-spirited pranks on an island off the coast of Italy genuinely annoying, while its topical references to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and les événements of 1968 merely illustrate the ingrained habit of the English upper classes to turn all politics into a private joke. Indeed, it is unlikely that any of Tonks’s somewhat dated novels would have been republished had her poetry not found, both before and after her death, numerous admirers, from Philip Larkin, who included “Story of a Hotel Room” and “Farewell to Kurdistan” in his Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), to Cyril Connolly, who felt her “hard-faceted yet musical poems have unexpected power,” to more recent poets such as Andrew Motion, Jo Shapcott, and the aforementioned Michael Hofmann.

Her second volume of poems, Iliad of Broken Sentences, is a considerable advance on her first. Rather like Frank O’Hara, Tonks fashioned from nineteenth-century French sources a nervous lyricism attuned to the rhythms of mid-twentieth-century urban angst and exhilaration. The cinema becomes a primary site of pleasure and transgression, although Tonks makes clear that there’s an element of defiant slumming it with the hoi polloiin her visits to the big screen. This is from the collection’s first poem, “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas” (all ellipses are hers):

No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum.
…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud—that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles—taciturn, luxurious.
…The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…

The “criminal shadow-literature” of the cinema is presented here as an escape from a tedious Emir or Bloater type who lies for hours on the sofa, drones on about the opera “horribly,” and is even cartoonishly imagined as wanting to help “a new, gigantic, Dutch soprano” with her arias. “Old goat! Blasphemer!” she rails at him. This “damnably depressing” male induces in Tonks’s supersensitive protagonist a fit of what she calls “café-nerves”—“Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!”

Semi-parodic hysteria of this kind punctuates many of the adventures embarked on by the Tonks persona in the volume, for her self-figurations often depend on contrasting her own galvanizing recklessness with those depicted as “something jugged,/Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw…” “It’s done by living, ignoramuses,” she expostulates in “The Desert Wind Élite,” a poem that explicitly reveals the contrarian values encoded in her use of Bedouin iconography.

I am outside life, and pour the sand
For my own desert, recklessly.
But if some flame splashes over from my arab hours
Into your dismal, shadow-bathing century…

Not all poètes maudits see themselves as savior figures, but Tonks often dreams of transferring to the “dingy souls” of her readers the invigorating energies released by her commitment to living. Something of her future as a proselytizer of evangelical Christianity can be glimpsed in her promise to rescue the “dusty mobs” that surround her from “shady air, oblivion, and psychiatric mash.” “Start Drinking!” she exhorts. “I shall seduce you. From my desk,/The Soho of my drifting, yellowed sentences/Calls out your name…” Heed this call and bohemian or (to use her term) Bedouin bliss will follow:

Choked-up joy splashes over
From this poem and you’re crammed, stuffed to the brim, at dusk,
With hell’s casual and jam-green happiness!!

For all the churn and vehemence of Tonks’s work, versions of this “jam-green happiness!!” suffuse much of it. Nothing could be further from the dry ironies of the Movement poets, who gained ascendancy in the mid-1950s. Her idiom harks back to the less cautious experiments of 1940s poets such as Nicholas Moore and Dylan Thomas, finding room for high Romantic locutions such as “the deep, opulent engorgement of your soul” as well as quasi-nonsense images like “He salts and peppers me another pair of arms.” As in Baudelaire and Laforgue, prospective journeys often fail to take place, but the process of imagining them is so uplifting and expansive that the poem develops a hurtling velocity all its own:

The great train simmers… Life is large, large!
…I shall live off your loaf of shadows, London;
I admit it, at the last.

From her journals, as well as from conversations with her friends and relatives, Neil Astley has pieced together the gradual collapse of the life and career that Tonks had fashioned for herself in London’s “loaf of shadows.” The introduction to Bedouin of the London Evening movinglychronicles the serial disasters that led first to her renunciation of literature and then to her religious conversion. The death of her mother, the breakdown of her marriage, the development of neuritis in her left arm, a costly lawsuit, a devastating burglary—all precipitated her quest for spiritual enlightenment. She visited mediums and healers, embraced Sufism and then Taoism, experimented with a Chinese spiritual teacher and an American yoga guru. Nothing helped. The rigorous Taoist meditation exercises that she undertook involved staring at a blank wall for hours on end, and this, she came to feel, had ended up damaging her retinas; whatever the cause, in December 1977 Tonks had emergency operations on both eyes, and for several years she could barely see.

In 1980 she sought refuge with an aunt in Bournemouth and decided to settle there permanently. Her eyesight slowly improved, and she took stock of her life: the only book she would allow herself to read was the Bible, and it became imperative that she personally destroy a significant hoard of Asian artworks that had been bequeathed to her by another aunt. These included Tang horses with riders, statues of Sung priests, Chinese jades and bronzes, and a Korean dancing figure. “The burning of some idols,” as she called it, took place in August 1981. Items that survived the incinerator she hammered to pieces until the remnants were down to “dog-biscuit size.” Two months later she visited Jerusalem to have herself baptized in the Jordan River. Her new life—which lasted more than three decades—had begun. Henceforth, she returned to London only to distribute Bibles translated into various languages at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

Astley adduces a sentence from an essay Tonks wrote on Colette in these pages as a kind of gloss on Tonks’s transition from the Bedouin to the convert.² In this review of a biography of Colette and of a translation of Conte des mille et un matins by Margaret Crosland and David Le Vay, Tonks reflects on Colette’s dismay at finding out that her husband, Willy, had been unfaithful: “The shock to her ego was more than it could bear; there was nothing inside capable of withstanding the blow, her personality was fragmented, and she collapsed into a nervous breakdown.” The difference of course was that Colette went on writing and publishing, while Mrs. Lightband reviled all that had appeared under the name Rosemary Tonks.

The shock delivered by her best poetry is also of a fragmentary kind: her syntax struggles to hold together all manner of odd phrases and peculiar lists (“bitter dogma, dialectic, creed;/H.P. sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, chutney”) and seems always on the point of being overloaded with “black, exhausting information.” “I think you are a mongrel,” the Emir complains to Houda, “who will one day do me some terrible injury from which I shall never recover.” A similar kind of mongrel ferocity animates Tonks’s epic of fragmentation, her Iliad of broken sentences, as of an appetite compelled to ingest all that comes its way:

For this is not my life
But theirs, that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.