The Inklings' Challenge

[The Saucepan Man]

I came across this in the Times newspaper yesterday and thought it might be of interest, as it was not something that I had heard about before.

Queen of risible fiction is at height of hilarity again

I've pasted the full text below, as the link will probably not last. The passages most relevant to this site are in bold.

Queen of risible fiction is at height of hilarity again
BY DAVID SHARROCK, IRELAND CORRESPONDENT

SHE has languished in obscurity for too long, but last night the world’s worst novelist was celebrated in pints and prose.

Amanda McKittrick Ros, a Victorian scribbler much admired by some of the English language’s finest writers, was back where she belongs — bringing guffaws of joy to the parlour bars.

Belfast ended its annual literary festival with a recreation of the Oxford evenings hosted by J. R. R. Tolkien for a circle of dons who called themselves the Inklings and included C. S. Lewis. Tolkien set his Inklings a challenge. The works of McKittrick Ros would be read aloud to the accompaniment of beer — and whoever laughed first lost.

Their favourite was Irene Iddesleigh, but there were many to choose from — Delina Delaney, Helen Huddleston — and they all shared a passion for heaving bosoms, trembling lower lips, meaningful glances and endless alliteration.

In Irene Iddesleigh she wrote: “Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”

And musing on humanity she pronounced: “The living sometimes learn the touchy tricks of the traitor, the tardy, and the tempted; the dead have evaded the flighty earthly future, and form to swell the retinue of retired rights, the righteous school of the invisible, and the rebellious roar of the raging nothing.”

For McKittrick Ros, eyes were “piercing orbs”, legs “bony supports” and people did not blush but were “touched by the hot hand of bewilderment”.

Frank Ormsby, editor of Thine in Storm and Calm, an anthology of Ros’s work, said that “she alliterated obsessively”. “Even if one has forgotten her work for a few years, you only have to read a few paragraphs and you find the smile broadening on your face. You begin to realise why her work had such an appeal.”

Mark Twain, Aldous Huxley and Siegfried Sassoon were also admirers. David Lewis, director of the culturenorthernireland website, said: “Any writer who is proud of ‘disturbing the bowels’ of her readers and can describe critics as ‘auctioneering agents of Satan’ is worthy of praise in my book. Ros was an inveterate social climber, claiming to be descended from King Sitrick of Denmark.

“She even changed her name from Ross to Ros, linking herself with the old family of de Ros. In fact she was a school mistress who married Andrew Ross, the station master at Larne Harbour.”

The winner of last night’s reading contest at the John Hewitt pub was due to be presented with a Barbara Cartland novel and a return rail ticket to Larne, Co Antrim, where her achievements are recognised by a plaque in the library.

The writer, who died in 1939, was in no doubt of her talent, confidently predicting: “I expect I will be talked about at the end of a thousand years.”

She described critics as “evil-minded snapshots of spleen” and “auctioneering agents of Satan”. At least her husband was sympathetic, paying for the publication of her first novel as a wedding present. McKittrick Ros, born near Ballynahinch, came top in a book entitled In Search of the World’s Worst Writers by Nick Page. He described her as “the greatest bad writer who ever lived”.

She was also an atrocious poet, writing doggerel such as this verse from her Great War poem A Little Belgian Orphan:

Go! Meet the foe undaunted, they’re rotten cowards all,
Present to them the bayonet, they totter and they fall,
We know you’ll do your duty and come to little harm
And if you meet the Kaiser,
cut off his other arm

Summing up her style, McKittrick Ros wrote: “My chief object in writing is and always has been to write if possible in a strain all my own. My works are all expressly my own — pleasingly peculiar — not a borrowed stroke in one of them.”

COMMENTARY BY ERICA WAGNER, LITERARY EDITOR

So, the supercilious dons set themselves the task of bracing against "the worst"? Don't make me laugh. We are talking about Tolkien, aren't we, author of some of the most metricious tosh ever perpetrated on English literature? Right, come and get me, all you Lord of the Rings flag-wavers. I can't read the stuff. Which goes to show: it's a matter of taste. One woman's awful is another's bliss, and when it comes to poor old Amanda, well, I rather wish I'd thought of "the hot hand of bewilderment" myself.

When I was sixteen, I adored Lady Chatterley's Lover; now Lawrence makes me cringe, but I'm not sure that's his fault. Moby-Dick: overwritten lunacy about a giant vengeful mammal, or masterpiece? I'm in the latter camp. John Updike's lastest novel, Terrorist, has, for the most part, taken a critical pasting: and yet the book is flying off the shelves. Literary critics tend to be pretty snooty about Dan Brown, but what do the numbers say? So who has the upper hand? The novelist A. L. Kennedy runs excerpts of reviews on her website, dividing them into "good", "bad" and "odd". Mostly, all sorts appear for all her novels: what does that say? As Nick Hornby said to me recently, the author is left hoping that the reviewer who liked the book is the smarter one, but there's no way of knowing.

I'm not too comfortable with the idea of worst and best; the truth is that literature is subject to fashion, as is everything else. Is her verse on the Great War atrocious doggerel, or simply of its time? No, it's not my cup of tea, and I'm not saying that it's impossible to make judgments - but readers should be aware that they are that, judgments. In literature there are no proofs as there are in maths. Amanda predicted she'd still be talked about in 1,000 years: how kind of us to help her out.

I do find it rather delightful that the Inklings should choose to amuse themselves in this way. It is interesting, though, that a man whose works themselves have been the subject of ridicule should take such delight in ridiculing the works of another writer (a point made by the Times' literary editor, herself clearly no fan of Tolkien). That said, McKittrick Ros' stuff stuff does look pretty dreadful ...

[Lush]

Oh, I read about this on the BBC. I remembered being in the "Bird and Baby" and thinking that this was exactly the sort of place to sit around and make a fool out of yourself.

I think that Ms. McKittrik Ros must have had a sense of humour. "Auctioneering agents of Satan?" The woman was obviously having a laugh, at least in part.

I think it's wonderful that her memory has been preserved, actually. Perhaps the good Inklings would not agree, but then again, she obviously was a great source of mirth for them. And we should not forget to be grateful to those who provide us with such amusement.

[Bêthberry]

I'm having such a tough time deciding which of various suitable lines to take as a new siggie.

Originally Posted by Erica Wagner

We are talking about Tolkien, aren't we, author of some of the most metricious tosh ever perpetrated on English literature? Right, come and get me, all you Lord of the Rings flag-wavers. I can't read the stuff.

The thought of Tolkien as a perp is delectable. Maybe I'm watching too much CSI and Law and Order though.

Originally Posted by Erica Wagner

In literature there are no proofs as there are in maths.

But there are proofs in whiskey. What do you suppose was done to the Inkling who lost? Drowned his humour in whiskey? Did he lose his beer that night? Or have to pay for the next round? Inquiring minds want to know, how did the lads met out their punishment?

[Lobelia]

Actually, from the sound of this writer, I'm surprised that they haven't started an equivalent of the competition where you have to come up with something worse than "It was a dark and stormy night" as a novel opening (can't remember the competition name off the top of my head, it's too late at night). She's lucky all she had was a bit of laughter from the Inklings!

This Erica Wagner ... she is somebody other than a certain mild-mannered publisher at Allen and Unwin here in Australia ... isn't she?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

There's a very, very brief biography of this Erica Wagner on the Granta website. There appear to be several Erica Wagners in circulation, but this one is the author of Gravity and a member of the English Pen Executive Committee.

To be perfectly honest, her comments about Tolkien seem to have been inspired largely by the hopelessly under-researched article by the Times Ireland correspondant. Had Tolkien actually led the Inklings in the sort of literary derision described in that article, someone who regarded his work as somewhat sub-par might well be rather offended; however, I think it much more likely that C.S. Lewis came up with this game, since he was an Ulsterman and my googling of Amanda McKittrick Ros turned up a biography in which she is described as "C.S. Lewis' favourite bad writer".

I describe the article as 'hopelessly under-researched' because I could have written exactly the same article, without mistakenly saying that J.R.R. Tolkien was the leader of the Inklings, after approximately ten minutes on the Internet. What the Ireland correspondant of the Times has done is to find an article about the event in Belfast on the Culture Northern Ireland website, google Amanda McKittrick Ros, then make a few assumptions based on Tolkien's membership of the Inklings because people are likely to recognise his name. The complete absence of any knowledge about the Inklings on the part of both the author of the original article and the literary editor of The Times can be seen in the description of Tolkien as their leader (if they had possessed any such thing, it would have been C.S. Lewis) and Mrs. Wagner's use of the phrase 'supercilious dons' (one Inkling was a G.P. and another an army officer; what they had in common was Lewis, not the University of Oxford).

The B.B.C. have done rather a better job of regurgitating the Culture Northern Ireland article with their offering Is this the world's worst writer?, although inter alia Reuters and, believe it or not, a Turkish newspaper have also run the story. All of which begs the question: why buy The Times if you have an internet connection?

Having said that, I'd like to return to Erica Wagner's comments. I feel a certain amount of her indignation with people who insist on ridiculing the less talented, and "the hot hand of bewilderment" (I would say "discomfiture") is a metaphor that I wouldn't have minded inventing either. However, as a pub game, neither intended as sensible literary criticism nor played for the purpose of humiliating the author, the Inklings Challenge sounds like fun. A similar game used to be played at fantasy conventions with Jim Theis' execrable The Eye of Argon, and in this case his detractors didn't even have the common courtesy to wait until he was dead.

I'm quite uplifted to see one of Tolkien's detractors denying the existence of objective standards in literature (whilst still describing his writing - in this case almost certainly the first ten chapters of The Lord of the Rings - as 'meretricious tosh'). At least she admits that she isn't the ultimate authority on literary quality, and she also makes a valid point: one man's meat is another man's poison. However, having read some of Ros' work, I can't help but think that the article would have gone unchallenged were it not for the mention of Tolkien's name.

[Mänwe]

I cannot add to this particular discussion, but I would like to introduce a few links containing certain texts written by a writer whom I, having read said text, hold in little regard. I hate Tolkien 'bashing'.

Moorcroft

http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.html?id=953

Meiville

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/11/...and-revolution

Please read them at your leisure and comment on them if it takes your fancy. I am surprised anyone would say that it was a poor book.

[Later edit] I do apologise if I have detracted from the 'point' raised in the first post. I felt that these following texts may have some added worth to the discussion.