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.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

One of these days I may have to write a serious and considered response to Michael Moorcock, but today is not that day. Instead I shall offer my immediate reactions on this re-reading of Epic Pooh.

First and foremost, what is most evident throughout this essay is that Moorcock has a gigantic chip on his shoulder about that ill-defined socialist bugbear, the English middle class. Most of his opinions about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien particularly seem mere tributaries to a deep dislike and mistrust of a stereotyped bourgeoisie, with whom he identifies them. To which social class Moorcock believes himself to belong I'm not entirely sure, since I very much doubt that he wishes to identify himself with the aristocracy, and his concerns don't look very working class to me. Then again, perhaps he thinks, as so many champagne socialists do, that an expressed virulent dislike for the middle class places one outside the system.

Given this obvious dislike of self-satisfied suburbanism, it seems interesting to me that he has neglected to examine The Hobbit, in which the hero is forced to shake off his pompous bourgeois lethargy and actually do something useful. Perhaps this is more than an accident. Moorcock quotes two passages from The Lord of the Rings as proof of his opinions about Tolkien's entire body of work, both fairly minor and unimportant passages. He seems completely blind, however, to the social commentary of the scene in The Ivy Bush. Such small concerns are the daily fare of village gossip; as are the dogmatic moral judgements and idle speculation that appear from a number of characters in that scene. Tolkien lived before tabloid journalism became the norm, but he would have recognised how such reporting fills the exact void in people's lives left by the dissolution of community: the need to know about and pass judgement upon one's neighbours. Tolkien punctures a number of bourgeois balloons in the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings and the self-importance of gossipping busybodies is one of them. Given this reading, I find it difficult to see how it lulls one. I suppose if one were to sit back, secure in one's intellectual superiority, and think "look at the stupid rustics", one could easily see this as a rather patronising laugh at the expense of the rural working class; but the irony is that to understand the passage in that way one would first have to hold just such an opinion. It amuses me to think that much middle-class socialism is based on just such opinions.

That, I suppose, is the real flaw in Moorcock's analysis. However much he may rail against Thatcherism (how Tolkien is an apologist for that I'm not entirely sure, since he was dead before the movement began), he is himself very much what one might call 'new bourgeois': a group which reads The Guardian and The Independent and thinks itself very progressive because it buys a copy of The Big Issue once in a while, donates to Oxfam and wishes that Thatcher had never been Prime Minister. What gives Moorcock away is the following passage.

That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

To my mind, the association of all popular culture with moral and intellectual degeneracy is one of the most bourgeois and reactionary stances there is. 'Our free-falling academic standards' have been a staple of middle-class complaint, probably ever since Britons first began to educate one another. The following passage contains another very bourgeois and very British assumption:

...as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall.

I've said elsewhere that the idea of a declining world and nostalgia for vanished glories is a strong element in the earliest English literature that survives. For the writer of The Ruin this was inspired the great architectural works of a vanished people (the Romans, although they are never named as such); the author of The Wanderer asks in a series of rhetorical flourishes what happened to the heroes and glories he remembers; Beowulf is full of intimations of coming disaster, looking back to a world of lost heroes and a greatness long since fallen. My point is that English people, like all people to some extent, are inclined to think that the present is in constant decline and the future is uncertain. There is nothing new or world-shattering about thinking this, nor is it any more accurate than it was in Augustan Rome or pre-conquest England. The real amusement lies in Moorcock's simultaneous belief that Victorian and Georgian political values are morally bankrupt, so that we are to believe at one and the same time that the world is in decline and that we are morally and intellectually superior to past generations. How this manages to be true I cannot imagine; at least Tolkien decided to plant his feet firmly in the continuing decay camp and thus avoided the contradiction.

That may seem a lot like a political tirade, but I feel justified in spending time on the politics of that article rather than Tolkien's fiction, because the article was itself more about politics and class struggle than about literature. There is actually little difference between some of the passages that Moorcock dislikes and others of which he approves. The distinction lies in what Moorcock thinks the authors stand for, and for him Tolkien stands for stodgy Victorian bourgeois little-Englanders. What I think Tolkien actually stood for politically was non-Socialism, and not even on ideological grounds, but because he disliked large bureaucracies interfering in the lives of ordinary people. That Tolkien fails to question "white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us" is only true because we never find out about Sauron's clothing, and Saruman spends a lot of his time wearing white or many colours. As for the world outside the Shire being dangerous, isn't it always dangerous to step outside one's own society? Tolkien himself believed that Hobbits needed to step into the dangerous world outside the Shire to attain their true potential. In that regard he promotes the idea that we should venture out into the wider world, that we should accept the dangers and the opportunities that such a step presents. Aside from anything else, an adventure set in the Shire of the early chapters of LotR would be crushingly dull, and Tolkien knew that. If anything he is saying that the dangerous outside world is more desirable, grander and more heroic than the well-ordered and well-tilled countryside that he invented for his diminutive heroes. Only by stepping into this world can they grow enough to save their own from the malicious vandalism and industrial tyranny of Saruman. All in all, once again Tolkien is more complicated and less devoted to the establishment than one of his detractors thinks.

I find the association of Sauron and the Orcs with the working class extremely difficult to understand. Sauron and his Orcs are united, and often divided, in wickedness, but at completely different levels of the social scale, like the baronet Sir Oswald Mosley and his black-shirted footsoldiers. Surely someone who says, as I do, that the British Union of Fascists was a morally reprehensible and very dangerous movement is not attacking the working class. Smaug in The Hobbit speaks in the drawling tones of an Old Etonian; the increasingly deluded Denethor is an aristocrat as well, but Lotho Sackville-Baggins, misguided corrupter of the Shire, is as deliberately middle-class as it is possible to be. Contrary to popular belief, double-barrelled surnames are decidedly non-U. Incidentally, I find that the motto on a plaque in Tower Hamlets commemorating the Battle of Cable Street is They shall not pass.

In short, Michael Moorcock is attacking his own social group, from which he means to disassociate himself because he would rather be working class. That this is another trait of the English middle class which can be seen in his article only reinforces the fact that Moorcock is what he is attacking. What he means to attack is the incarnation of the English middle class represented by Tolkien's generation, which Tolkien enjoyed gently pricking when he wrote social comedy. The real objection, of which Moorcock may or may not be aware, is to Tolkien's constant attacks on the shibboleths of socialism: advancement through scientific progress, social engineering and organisation, and the idea that those in charge know what is best for us. Tolkien's is a dissenting voice that doesn't even really attack socialism, but rather some of its outcomes and ideas. Some of his points have been borne out by successive socialist governments in Britain, and that no doubt further irritates those who dislike his politics. What always seems to go over their heads, though, is that Tolkien disapproved of political posturing in general. Both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit feature large, public acclamations of leaders who have shown real leadership and personal worth. It was this desire for trustworthy and honest leaders, uncorrupted by political considerations, that lay behind his taste for either anarchy or absolute monarchy. Tolkien did not trust the men in grey at all apart from Gandalf, who isn't technically a man.

Of course, the problem for some members of Moorcock's generation is that they define themselves as rebels against the establishment, but have themselves become the establishment. Everyone does, of course; it's one of the indignities of age, but sometimes it gives rise to a need to rebel against the old order, with which Moorcock identifies Tolkien and Lewis. Their comfortable Edwardianism was what the youth of the 1960s wanted to overthrow, and now that's been done all that's left to rebel against are Moorcock's contemporaries and the ideas of Victorian Britain, particularly its middle class. I find it particularly sad that he blames the Thatcherism he so hated on the attitudes of Tolkien's generation, when it can be seen more as a reaction against the complete disarray that had arisen under the previous Labour government. Perhaps that is too hard a thought to accept: that Britain in the 1970s swung violently between left and right wing political mismanagement. For him the left is always on the side of the angels.

In any case, it's rather sad to see someone fighting political battles by attacking someone like Tolkien, whose books concern themselves with more universal ethical concerns. No political system can survive unless it knows how people should be treated, and Tolkien's idea seems to be that people should and must take responsibility for themselves and their neighbours, keep their promises and choose their leaders with care. That is not a politically biased position, although the partisan on either side of the spectrum might think it to be an attack on them. I note that Moorcock now lives in that well-known left-wing utopia, Texas, where surely the business-driven politics of 1980s Conservatives have never held sway.

The final point is this. Of those who attack Tolkien, nearly everyone seems to have an axe to grind, and it's normally political. People like Philip Pullman appear to dislike the fact that Tolkien has no specific message to peddle, whereas others like Moorcock prefer to associate him with political or social ideas that they find reprehensible. Of course there are others who simply argue that his works are meaningless drivel, but even they support a particular literary style that is widely at variance with Tolkien's. All of them are basically saying that their opinion, their social conscience or literary judgement is superior to that of the unwashed rabble of Tolkien fans, who wouldn't know decent literature (like Moorcock's or Pullman's) if it jumped up and gave them a haircut. Personally I found His Dark Materials declined as its message became clearer, and the one novel of Moorcock's that I've ever read struck me as no more than a decent enough read. Unlike them, however, I don't assume that this makes their writing either reactionary garbage or lightweight nonsense. It seems to me that the people who most dislike Tolkien are the people who are least able to leave their real-world hang-ups at the door. They dislike him because they dislike LotR, and they dislike that because they were never prepared to accept the fictional world on its own terms. That's where W.H. Auden's observation arises, although even that was inaccurate: I've met people who are quite indifferent to LotR; an opinion that I respect as honest and concerned with literary appreciation. I also respect the recorded dislike of the Times literary editor, because she is merely expressing an honest opinion, not pushing some other agenda through an ostensible literary critique. Perhaps I'm stuck in a perpetual childhood, but growing up is severely overrated if it means judging everything by where it appears to stand on the political spectrum rather than whether or not I like it.