–The London Review of Books reviews the reprints of three of the later novels by poet-novelist Rosemary Tonks. She wrote during the period 1963-1980. After a rather difficult life, she stopped writing in 1980 to become a fundamentalist Christian, dying in 2014. Here is a summary of her novels in the LRB review by Ruby Hamilton:
…Before she gave it all up, and renounced poetry to live alone by the sea as a born-again Christian fundamentalist, there were also the novels. Six acid comedies of bad manners, at least as splenetic as the poems, if not as fĂȘted. A faultline divided her prolific 1960s: on the one side, Opium Fogs and Emir (both 1963), two quasi-Waughian works which have never been reprinted; on the other, four semi-autobiographical romps â The Bloater (1968), Businessmen as Lovers (1969), The Way out of Berkeley Square (1970) and The Halt during the Chase [1972]â which are now available again as Vintage Classics. She claimed not to care much for them (âthe English like their porridge,â she responded when her editor told her of the fifth novelâs success), but spending too much time with Tonks will teach you not to take anything she says too seriously. Whichever way you look at them â as confessions of an irrepressible ego; as experiments in whether or not English satire can bear the weight of Baudelairean malaise; as works of a woman who couldnât turn a forgettable phrase, no matter her insistence that she just dashed them off to make âa lot of red-hot moneyâ â the novels are thrillingly strange things. She had the knack.
The novel entitled The Bloater apparently had been reprinted earlier than the three now reviewed. Unfortunately, the two early “Waughian” novels are not among those so far republished. Since both of these are now listed as “collectible” ($500+), we may hope to see them soon as reprints. The LRB review does suggest Waugh’s influence in one of the later, now reprinted novels:
The miraculous thing about the clairvoyants and psychics in The Halt During the Chase is that their advice–not least, packing Sophie off to a chateau in Alencon–actually works. She is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who never reaches the brink. At the end of the novel she is ‘cut loose’ and ready to embark on a ‘new life’. It’s striking how happily Tonks’s novels end, when you set them beside Waugh’s death-filled Vile Bodies (by suicide, motor racing and dropping from a chandelier) or the wonderful dispatch in Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (now there’s a woman Tonks could love): ‘And last of all leapt Mr Trent-Garby, who catching his foot in the ruined flower box, fell headlong and, I regret to say, was killed.”…
Tonks’s Wikipedia entry also notes that “her highly personal style … at times approached the tone of Evelyn Waugh in its cynical observations of urban living, Tonks as a novelist had a mixed critical reception at best, although her critics admit that her grasp of the English language and her sense of London are sharp.”
–The Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine has posted a list of travel books it recommends to its readers. The list includes Waugh’s A Tourist in Africa which was recently translated into Italian. Here’s the description (translation from Italian by Google):
Setting out without a precise destination is Evelyn Waugh‘s philosophy , always looking for confirmation of the prejudices that afflict him: the more indefensible an opinion is, the more he will champion it. To be funny he has to complain about something, and as soon as he sets out on a journey fate promptly begins to plot against him. In the guise of an old man full of ailments and equipped with these credentials, he decides to spend the winter in an Africa that is changing: and here he is, the innocent abroad . He comes across picturesque characters that he barely deigns to glance at, he stumbles into absurd situations that do not affect him, or into unlikely adventures that he knows how to present to the reader like no other. [Highlighting in original.]
—The Guardian has an article by Harry Taylor entitled: “London is Europeâs most congested city, with drivers sitting in traffic an average 101 hours last year.” Here’s an excerpt:
…The capital has been renowned for its traffic problems, with Piccadilly Circus becoming a byword for somewhere chaotically busy. In his 1938 novel Scoop, the author Evelyn Waugh satirised the junctionâs traffic, describing it as âstill as a photograph, broken and undisturbedâ.
–A story in The Spectator by Lydia Schmitt is entitled “Private schools were ruined long ago.” Here’s an excerpt:
There is a story in private education circles of an apoplectic father who raged to the bursar that he was unable to find a prep school for his son âwithout central-heatingâ. It is probably apocryphal, but it reminds us of the mad heights to which some private schools have stretched: rowing lakes, glitzy IT centres, West End-style theatres and Olympic-sized swimming pools, no doubt necessary for storing the ever-growing associated fees.
It wasnât always this way. My entire 1950s schooling was an exercise in back-to-basics privation, fostering a now-fashionable âresilienceâ and âgreenâ ethos, unnoticed by us pupils of those distant days. My small Dorset school, where it was not uncommon in winter for the inkwells to freeze over, produced two Dames of the British Empire.
I visited it a few years ago, to find it still surprisingly unbeholden to the current expectations of the entitled, continuing to use the freezing bathrooms with huge rusting enamelled iron bathtubs. I doubt the washing regime continues, however. We small girls were plunged into these baths three at a time, twice a week, as the tepid water became increasingly soup-like…
If you were deemed âpeakyâ you queued again for a spoon of Radio Malt. No one had a nut allergy. Hands were inspected before lunch, and you were dispatched to a chilly sink with a pumice stone if yours were inky. Once, my father, posted in the Middle East, sent the school a box of Jaffa oranges. We were transfixed as they were handed out, rather like Evelyn Waughâs children seeing their first bananas, though brutally devoured in front of them by their father.
