Rosemary Tonks' 'The Bloater': A Deep Dive into a Unique 1960s Novel

The Enigmatic Rosemary Tonks

• 💡 Rosemary Tonks, an enigmatic writer of the 1960s, is the focus of this episode, with a particular emphasis on her novel The Bloater (1968).
• 🎭 The discussion covers her poetry, her friendship with Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, her varied career, and her eventual retreat from the world.
• 📚 Tonks herself reportedly attempted to remove her novels from circulation by borrowing and burning copies from libraries, making them exceptionally rare.

'The Bloater': A Rare and Vicious Comedy

• 📖 The Bloater, published in 1968, is described as a rare and often overlooked novel, with its original publication met with warmer reviews than Elizabeth Taylor's contemporary novel, 'The Wedding Group'.
• 🤢 Tonks is noted for her peculiar attunement to the "gross mildjweed corners of everyday life," using vivid imagery of unpleasantness to create her unique literary world.
• 💥 Despite being pitched as a "sparkling comedy," the novel is characterized by its sharp nastiness, contempt, and an "erotic charge of disgust."

The Radioonic Workshop and Literary Style

• 🎶 The novel features a chapter set within the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, offering a firsthand setting of this pioneering electronic sound studio.
• 🎤 A reading from the novel highlights Tonks' distinctive prose, which combines vivid, often visceral, imagery with a sharp, dismissive, and sometimes darkly comic narrative voice.
• ✍️ Tonks' later novels, including 'The Bloater,' were written quickly, intended as "entertainments" and a source of "red hot money," contrasting with her more intensely crafted poetry.

Themes of Gout, Authenticity, and Identity

• 🦶 The novel is presented as being about gout, which the protagonist attributes to her husband's neglect and views as a "welfare state disease" and a "malevolent emanation."
• 💔 The protagonist grapples with romantic encounters, attempting to reduce them to the physical while fearing emotional entanglement, a theme also explored in her poetry.
• 💖 A key moment in the novel involves the protagonist's insistence on the primacy of authenticity of her own heartbeat over a fabricated electronic version, suggesting a struggle between genuine expression and artificiality.

Tonks' Later Life and Legacy

• ✝️ Following her mother's death and health issues, Tonks experienced a breakdown, turning towards Sufism, mysticism, and eventually Christian fundamentalism, renouncing her literary work as evil.
• 🕊️ Despite her withdrawal and self-imposed obscurity, some accounts suggest she found a form of cheerful equilibrium in her later life dedicated to God.
• 📚 There is a strong argument for Tonks' work, particularly her novels, to be brought back into print, offering a unique and challenging voice in 20th-century literature.