Though Rosemary Tonks’ Emir includes Opium Fogs in its “by the same author” list and not vice-versa, it’s a safe bet that Opium Fogs was written second. On all counts — particularly form, style, and characterization — it’s the more successful book. What’s more, throughout the book there are signs of material from Emir being reused, reworked, and improved.
Emir’s character Toby Garnett, for example, a bookstore clerk “too intelligent to be out of work and too intelligent to work” is resurrected in the form of Gerard Plowman (a librarian this time), the lovesick protagonist of Opium Fogs. Tonks shifts gender, telling most of the story from Gerard’s perspective and giving secondary focus to Gabriella, the object of his infatuation. She also steps up her geometry, incorporating two romantic triangles that intersect with Gabriella and the unlikely figure of Dr. Bodo Swingler, another character of ambiguously European origin.
Tonks is far more successful in the playing the parlour game of cleverness than she was in Emir. The text fairly crackles with apt lines: Gerard is a man “for whom everyday life is the equivalent of sewing mailbags in prison.” Another character is “celebrated as an international nobody.” A group of undertakers looks “as if they read nothing but obituary notices, and dined exclusively on bread and water and soapflakes.” A man’s conversation “was as stimulating as being told the plot of a play by someone who hasn’t seen it.” And it’s full of helpful advice: “If you are out to borrow money or ask a favour, nothing puts your victim on guard more rapidly than laughing at his jokes and generally making yourself agreeable.” “There is no better entertainment, when you’re stone cold and bored to death, than watching someone park a motor-car. The effect is therapeutic, wonderfully reviving.”
Opium Fogs is also fascinating to read if you know something of Tonks’ story. Like Tonks, Gabriella “married and left England a moody little beauty of twenty-two;” she also spent “eighteen months in India, ten of them paralysed.” In Tonks’ case, her bout with polio left her with limited use of her right hand. When Gabriella walks, “one saw that she went slowly as though one leg was very tired.” Though Gerard fervently seeks to rekindle their romance, Gabriella has moved on from his adolescent notions of love and happiness: “For women like Gabriella it is quite simply the
second-rateness of adultery that makes it so difficult to swallow.” Still in recovery from her illness, she wants simply “… to live with the minimum of difficulty. Don’t you understand? I need a roof overhead, three meals a day, the company of people who mean nothing to me, and permission to be tired and ugly for days on end.”
On the other hand, Gerard embodies the spirit of the flâneur that one finds throughout Tonks’ poetry. In her poem, “The Flâneur and the Apocalypse,” she wrote,
For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe
With its great streets full of air and shade,
Its students and cocottes,
And traffic, roughly caked with blood,
Is not enough.
The whole of Europe put to sleep
By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,
And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,
And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,
Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.
The emotion that shines brightest throughout Opium Fogs is Tonks/Gerard’s love-hate relationship with the city of London. The book is full of passages that aspire to the energy of the “Michaelmas term lately over” opening of Bleak House:
The Metropolis was clad in mildew, alive with glittering ooze and great fever clouds.
It was the funeral couch of a buried Pharaoh who has been wrapped up like a black-shirted vegetable in mouldy linens, crepes, plasters and aprons, steeped in the preserving vinegar of ancient curses. And loaded with the cookery of dark cosmetics, surrealist lavas, enamels, and armoury as fragile as the metal blisters on the sides of roasted fish.
People shook hands as though they had them buried up to the shoulder in earth.
The air was foul as in a gambling den, where everything is greasy to the touch.
One heard the railways shaking their chains.
But not so far away the sky opened for an instant over the Thames, to dry streets of shiny platters where the rank mane of Neptune lay overnight.
An interesting black day began.
The “opium fogs” of the title captures both the atmosphere and addictive nature of London life. “After this city which is so dirty, so impossibly difficult to live in,” Tonks writes, “you could never bring yourself to respect another which made living easy.” In fact, it’s a shame that Lauren Elkins missed the opportunity to include Rosemary Tonks and Opium Fogs in her recent book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Tonks’ authorial voice embodies “the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of society” that Wikipedia offers as the essence of the flâneur. And it would serve as a perfect dessert to follow an entrée of such heavy London seriousness as Doris Lessing’s novel from the year before, The Golden Notebook.
Opium Fogs is available in electronic formats on the Internet Archive (link).