Vanished poets

‘My private modern life has gone to waste,’ wrote Rosemary Tonks, and, in another poem ‘Ah to desire a certain way of life and then to gain it! What a mockery, what absolute misery.’

Rosemary Tonks, who died recently aged 85 was memorable described in a BBC radio feature as ‘the poet who vanished.’ Born in 1929, the precocious young writer married young, and lived abroad with her husband in India, Pakistan and Paris before settling in London.

In her 30s she wrote six novels, and edgy, distinctively-voiced poems about city life in the hedonistic 1960s. Even then, however, she seems to have questioned the validity of the values embraced by her circle of literary friends.

Rosemary Tonks turned her back on Christianity after the death in 1968 of her mother, whom she felt had been failed in her last days by the Church. There followed what Tonks described as ‘ten long years searching for God’ when she explored and rejected in turn a range of spiritual beliefs.

In 1977 as she gradually recovered her sight after an operation to repair detached retinas in both eyes, the first book she read was the New Testament where she found the spiritual truth she had been searching for. She was baptised in the River Jordan in 1982, the day before her 53^rd birthday. It was, she said, her ‘second birth.’

Already she had turned her back on her former life, rejecting her writing as a ‘waste’, breaking off contact with people she had known. Effectively, she ‘vanished’.

Little is known about her subsequent decades, but I find her story intriguing.

I love that picture of her struggling to read the Bible as her eyesight was gradually restored, her spiritual perception awakening as her physical vision healed.

She faced up to the inadequacy of her existing values. She knew both the exhilaration of achieving her goals, and the unexpected dejection of finding in the achievement ‘a mockery…absolute misery.’ As Jesus said ‘What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world yet forfeit their soul?’

And so she took the courageous step of turning from everything she had considered significant and choosing instead the way of quiet faith. Some of us, rather than being led through faith to embrace new values, are tempted to use religion as a means of achieving the same old goals of power and wealth and position with a façade of holiness.

As Christians, we are challenged to set our hearts against ‘worldliness’ – godless, self-focussed values. I wonder, however, if Rosemary Tonks’ apparent withdrawal from life shows a misunderstanding of worldliness? Most Christians sense a call to live out alternative values at the heart of life in a messy world, rather than fleeing from it. Even contemplatives hold in their hearts the world they pray for.

If Tonks continued writing (and those of us who write, write because we must) she published nothing. We can’t judge her choices, but feel a certain sorrow that she didn’t use her powerful, God-given talent to share with us highlights from her journey into a new country.

The vanished poet’s most controversial act was what she called ‘the burning of some idols’ – the destruction of some priceless oriental artefacts she had inherited from an aunt in  the belief that they were in some way associated with malign spiritual forces. To some people, this seems like madness, and yet people whom I trust speak convincingly of encounters with the demonic.

Be that as it may, ‘the burning of the idols’ is a powerful, challenging symbol for us. St Paul wrote ‘I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord. I consider them garbage.’ Do we, as Christians, seek to have everything else and faith as well? Or are we edging towards the clarity of vision of a St Paul and perhaps a Rosemary Tonks, and realising that Jesus Christ is the one big thing?

Rosemary Tonks’ approach to dealing with the past was to live as though it didn’t exist. As Neil Astley put it in The Guardian she ‘obliterated the person she had been.’ It is generally healthier not to shut ourselves off from what we have been and done, but to acknowledge our past, to live as we are, an amalgam of success and failure, sadness and joy. For as Christians, our past is not obliterated but redeemed. The way of Christ is a mode of living which brings not mockery and misery but affirmation and joy.

Perhaps at some point in the past the poet in us vanished. But as we read, wounded eyes opening, we hear the song singing in us once again, not diminished by the pain of our failures, but somehow deepened, enriched.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 19th June 2014)