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Emir, by Rosemary Tonks (1963)

Cover of 'Emir' with photo of Rosemary Tonks by June Johnston
Cover of ‘Emir’ with photo of Rosemary Tonks by June Johnston

Rosemary Tonks’ first two novels, Emir and Opium Fogs were published within weeks of each other and TLS and other papers reviewed them together, so it’s hard to be sure which one was written first. But my bet is on Emir. If Opium Fogs is never less than eccentric, it is at least a finished work. Emir is just eccentric.

Having now had my hands on all of the six novels that Tonks published between 1963 and 1972, I can say that the ploy of Emir is, in rough terms, the plot of every one of Tonks’ novels: a young woman of definite opinions but indefinite sense of self is pursued by varied men of varied ages, is intrigued by one or more of them, and ends up with none. As Neil Astley makes clear in his introduction to his superb 2014 reissue of Tonks’ poems, Bedouin of the London Evening, Tonks’ heroines mirror many aspects of their creator’s own life and character.

Her father died of blackwater fever in Africa before she was born; she and her mother moved 14 times during the war; she spent years semi-abandoned in boarding schools; she married and moved to India and then Pakistan with him, suffering typhoid fever in in the first and polio in the second; lived briefly in Paris; and returned to live as something of a reluctant member of the arts-and-literature scene in London. Her poetry and then her novels attracted some attention in the 1960s, but she seems never to have been fully comfortable with her work or life during this period. Her mother’s death led to a spiritual crisis, and she went through a series of conversions before ending up, increasingly ill and reclusive, by the seaside in Bournemouth. Rediscovered in a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary [Can anyone provide a recording of it?], she died in 2014 just months before Astley’s Bloodaxe Books published her work for the first time in over 40 years.

In Emir, Tonks’ young woman, Houda Lawrence, is already suffering from the romantic equivalent of Groucho Marx’s quip that “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”: “Even supposing she had been able to find someone of her own age who was attractive to her, she would at once have begun to watch him for the first mistake.” Though an aspiring poet who walks the streets of London, green notebook in hand, she finds herself “deaf to the joys of professional Bohemia: which is certain death.” And she is still struggling to get out from underneath the influence of a mother who wants her to surrender to her proper role as wife and helpmeet.

Her taste in men leads her to dance around the edges of an affair with Eugene, a man of “rioutous European pedigree” and impeccable taste in clothes. “An older woman encountering his glance — it was like being stared at by a violet — might have summed him up: ‘Untrustworthy to a degree. But worth it.'” Of his parentage, Tonks writes only that “there was a suggestion of a child being carried in and out of opera boxes.” Tonks is by far at her best in artful character assassination: “However long he waited, Eugene always managed to appear to be dismissing a waiter when she arrived.”

Her dialogue, however, makes one long for the gritty realism of Les Liaisons dangereuses:

“A poet must be one of civilization’s failures. You forget; it’s the mongrel who gets kicked.”

“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.”

“My God. What a low estimate you have of my ambitions. The staircarpet of a great poet is the only walk I could take after the arrogance of the pavement.”

I haven’t made a definitive study of the subject, but I’ll go out on a limb here and postulate that no one not looking at a staircarpet ever used the word “staircarpet” in a conversation. Twice.

I confess to having spent more for a copy of Emir than for any book I’ve ever owned. It was the only copy I’ve seen come up for sale in the last couple of years. And I will offer as a service to other readers the assurance that this is a book you need not covet, particularly when the superior Opium Fogs is available free on the Internet Archive (link). As Charles puts it in his Sonofabook review, Tonks spends far too much time in the book “trying to score points in the parlour game of cleverness.”


Emir, by Rosemary Tonks
London: ADAM Books, 1963

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