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 ...