If you missed the live video of Henry's semiregular video feature, Gallimaufry, it's over on Facebook. And here, with links, is the script:
The end of each year is when critics like to tot up the best-ofs in their fields. This allows them time for omniscient overviews, large pronouncements, and easy writing, as most of their compilations are already done, accreted month by month.
But as the kids say, that’s just not how we roll at Henry Bemis Books.
We put the “ba” in “Bah” and the “bu” in Humbug!”
Settle in, then, and join us for The Best of the Worst.
-Each year since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honored an author who has produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature (for links to last year’s competition, click here).
The Award was established by Rhoda Koenig, a literary critic, and Auberon Waugh, at that time editor of Literary Review. This year’s winner and nominees were honored November 30 at a dinner in London:
Christopher Bollen has won the 25th annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award for The Destroyers (Scribner).
The award was announced at a lavish ceremony on Thursday 30 November at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square, London, where the 400 guests raised a toast to the winner.
The award was announced at a lavish ceremony on Thursday 30 November at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square, London, where the 400 guests raised a toast to the winner.
Although it may not seem so from what I am about to share, 2017 was a vintage year for this burgeoning microgenre. Alison Flood reported in The Guardian,
Pulsing waves, fumbling fingers, tortured tongues and firework metaphors are as abundant as ever on the shortlist for the Bad Sex in Fiction award, which is returning for its annual exhibition of atrocious erotic writing. But this year, even the sworn foes of feeble literary coupling who run the prize concede, the sex in books has actually got better.
According to the Literary Review’s Frank Brinkley, the magazine has noted an improvement in the sex scenes in this year’s fiction. “There’s plenty of sex around (such as in Patrick Ness) but a lot of it is quite good,” he said. “Maybe we are having an effect – definitely literary fiction’s changing and the ‘Oh sod it, I’ll put in a sex scene’ attitude that prompted the creation of the award has pretty much fallen by the wayside. Maybe publishers aren’t pushing for it in the way that ‘sex sells’ was used as a prompt 15 years ago, either. All to the good.”
According to the Literary Review’s Frank Brinkley, the magazine has noted an improvement in the sex scenes in this year’s fiction. “There’s plenty of sex around (such as in Patrick Ness) but a lot of it is quite good,” he said. “Maybe we are having an effect – definitely literary fiction’s changing and the ‘Oh sod it, I’ll put in a sex scene’ attitude that prompted the creation of the award has pretty much fallen by the wayside. Maybe publishers aren’t pushing for it in the way that ‘sex sells’ was used as a prompt 15 years ago, either. All to the good.”
The judges of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award were swayed by a scene involving The Destroyers’ protagonist, Ian, and his former girlfriend on the island of Patmos, where their relationship has been rekindled:
“She covers her breasts with her swimsuit. The rest of her remains so delectably exposed. The skin along her arms and shoulders are different shades of tan like water stains in a bathtub. Her face and vagina are competing for my attention, so I glance down at the billiard rack of my penis and testicles.”
Christopher Bollen is based in New York, and is editor at large of Interview magazine. The Destroyers is his third novel. He was unable to attend the ceremony. The judges said in a statement:
“Christopher Bollen has prevailed against strong competition. In the week that Prince Harry announced his engagement to Meghan Markle, it seems only fitting that Britain’s most eligible literary prize has been snapped up by an American.”
Among the other shortlisted books were The Seventh Function of Language by Prix Goncourt winner Laurent Binet (“Bianca grabs Simon’s dick, which is hot and hard as if it’s just come out of a steel forge, and connects it to her mouth-machine”); Venetia Welby’s Mother of Darkness (“The green grass curls around Tera’s left breast as she curves her sleek physique around Matty’s diabolical torso like a vine. Paralysed, complete, the marble statue of the lovers allows itself to be painted by the dawn’s lurid orange spillage”); and War Cry by Wilbur Smith (“He kissed her and she responded and the boundaries between them blurred, like two watercolours on a piece of paper, joining as one to create something entirely new”).
Previous winners of the Bad sex prize include Giles Coren, Rachel Johnson, and Norman Mailer. Coren, who, like Bollen, stumbled over his description of male genitalia, writing that it was “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath”, took the win in good spirits, saying of the other shortlisted passages: “I wish I’d written them all.” Others have been less sanguine. Tom Wolfe, who won for a passage from I Am Charlotte Simmons featuring the line “slither slither slither slither went the tongue”, boycotted the ceremony, saying that judges had failed to grasp his irony.
“There’s an old saying – ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing’,” Wolfe told Reuters. “In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.”
The award, which aims to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”, was presented, in Bollen’s absence, by Carry On star Fenella Fielding.
Despite suggestions that the prize “might be having an effect” in raising the general standard of writing about sex in fiction, organisers said that judges were kept busy with dozens of nominations. “Although we found lots of good sex [in fiction] this year, that doesn’t mean the bad sex was gone … There’s still plenty of room for the prize,” said the Literary Review’s Frank Brinkley. “But perhaps it means that some of the serial offenders have learned their lessons.”
“There’s an old saying – ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing’,” Wolfe told Reuters. “In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.”
The award, which aims to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”, was presented, in Bollen’s absence, by Carry On star Fenella Fielding.
Despite suggestions that the prize “might be having an effect” in raising the general standard of writing about sex in fiction, organisers said that judges were kept busy with dozens of nominations. “Although we found lots of good sex [in fiction] this year, that doesn’t mean the bad sex was gone … There’s still plenty of room for the prize,” said the Literary Review’s Frank Brinkley. “But perhaps it means that some of the serial offenders have learned their lessons.”
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet
He puts his hands on Bianca’s shoulders and slips off her low-cut top. Suddenly inspired, he whispers into her ear, as if to himself: ‘I desire the landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape I do not know but that I can feel, and until I have unfolded that landscape, I will not be happy …’
Bianca shivers with pleasure. Simon whispers to her with an authority that he has never felt before: ‘Let’s construct an assemblage.’
It included another passage from The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen:
On the stone porch, in the hot, mountain air, we grapple with our clothing, which, in the darkness, becomes as complicated as mountaineering gear. Her black shirt around her neck, mine unbuttoned, our shorts and underwear slid to our ankles, we seem to be moving at avalanche speed and also, unfortunately, with avalanche precision.
Mother of Darkness by Venetia Welby
Light filters in from the ravaging streaks of the dawn. It splits into fragments of every hue the world has hidden as it strikes the prism of their shelter. Tera’s eyes expand and reflect, crystal orbs of time and space. She moans in colours as he pushes the white dress away and beyond the angelic flesh, luminescent against the damp, mossy bed.
As a God Might Be by Neil Griffiths
Looking down, she unbuckled his belt. ‘We’re grown-ups.’
Perhaps he wasn’t quite in the moment, because he thought of Kierkegaard and Socrates. If there wasn’t great wisdom gained by lust, by love, its consummation – the aesthetics of all this – then you were doing it wrong.
‘Kiss me again.’
The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek
Memories of these previous encounters became distant, remote, erased once I got down to brass tacks with Jon de Lee.
With Jon it was communication, a dialogue between two bodies, electric impulses transmitted over wires of flesh and bone. Words one cannot speak, words that can only be heard. Skin that became skin that became skin anew.
We made love and we had sex and we had sex and we made love. But reader, again, I implore. Mistake me not. I am not your Pollyanna, I am not your sweet princess. We fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked, we fucked.
War Cry by Wilbur Smith (with David Churchill)
‘I’m going to have you now,’ Leon said. He led her back up the beach to where the sand was dry. Then he took off his coat, placed it on the ground and she lay down upon it.
‘Christ!’ he muttered, placing himself on top of her. ‘It’s bloody cold. I might get frostbite on my cock.’
She gave a low purring laugh. ‘Silly man. Why don’t you put it somewhere hot?’
Here Comes Trouble by Simon Wroe
A clothed body is always human or human-like, a naked body always animal or animal-like. Only at close quarters is the full extent of a body’s wildness revealed, like when a bird gets trapped inside a house. One is moved to not entirely human thinking then. One goes towards its animalness.
-Rather more upmarket and mass audience are the Bulwer-Lytton Awards, which were tossed at people for the 35th year in 2017.
Conceived to honor the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George, Earl Bulwer-Lytton and to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the time to actually write entire books, the contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Bulwer was selected as patron of the competition because he opened his novel "Paul Clifford" (1830) with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night." Lytton’s sentence actually parodied the line and went on to make a real sentence of it, but he did originate the line "The pen is mightier than the sword," and the expressions “the almighty dollar” and "the great unwashed." His best-known work, one on the bookshelves of many of our great-grandparents, is "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), a historical novel that has been adapted for film multiple times.
As has happened every year since the contest went public in 1983, thousands of entries poured in not just from the United States and Canada but from such far-flung locales as England, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Botswana.
The winner was this Terry Pratchett pastiche:
Among the honorable mentions, these:
Bad writing, of course, is not new. The movie industry’s gutter will always be Ed Wood, director of Plan 9 From Outer Space, and literature will always have Mrs Amanda McKittrick Ros. She was born this week- Friday- in 1860:
100 years ago, one of the favorite clubs at Oxford and Cambridge was the Amanda McKittrick Ros Society.
It is in the nature of academic institutions to preserve, rediscover, and reevaluate the merits of authors and books long lost in the shuffle of time.
One of those authors, nearly lost to the fickle nature that is human, was Amanda McKittrick Ros. A jumped-up Irish railway stationmaster's wife, best thought of, in contemporary terms, as the Hyacinth bouquet of the Emerald Isle, Ros discovered her true calling as a novelist in the 1890s.
Though she is best remembered for her novels, Ross was also a poet.
And in the guise of a poet, Amanda Ross has a fierce rival in the person of William McGonagall, the itinerant Scottish poet who died in 1902, and who has never gone out of print in a century-and-a-half precisely because his verses were so Dreadful. In the posted version of today’s script, we include video of the Scots actor Billy Connolly reading one of McGonagall’s disaster poems.
What's the job of Scholars is to weigh these claims. Over the last century-and-a-half, Ross has retained the title of worst novelist in the English language. Mark Twain called her the queen and Empress of the Hogwash Guild. The author Wyndham Lewis said that any book by Amanda Ross was better than the title, Some Reactions of Colloidal Protozoids, as well as the Chartered Accountants’ Year Book for 1926.
It is her first husband to whom we owe the career of the writer Amanda McKittrick Ros.
It is in the nature of academic institutions to preserve, rediscover, and reevaluate the merits of authors and books long lost in the shuffle of time.
One of those authors, nearly lost to the fickle nature that is human, was Amanda McKittrick Ros. A jumped-up Irish railway stationmaster's wife, best thought of, in contemporary terms, as the Hyacinth bouquet of the Emerald Isle, Ros discovered her true calling as a novelist in the 1890s.
Though she is best remembered for her novels, Ross was also a poet.
And in the guise of a poet, Amanda Ross has a fierce rival in the person of William McGonagall, the itinerant Scottish poet who died in 1902, and who has never gone out of print in a century-and-a-half precisely because his verses were so Dreadful. In the posted version of today’s script, we include video of the Scots actor Billy Connolly reading one of McGonagall’s disaster poems.
What's the job of Scholars is to weigh these claims. Over the last century-and-a-half, Ross has retained the title of worst novelist in the English language. Mark Twain called her the queen and Empress of the Hogwash Guild. The author Wyndham Lewis said that any book by Amanda Ross was better than the title, Some Reactions of Colloidal Protozoids, as well as the Chartered Accountants’ Year Book for 1926.
It is her first husband to whom we owe the career of the writer Amanda McKittrick Ros.
She was a 27-year-old spinster schoolteacher when she met a widower, a 35-year-old railway stationmaster, Andrew Ross. They married in 1887 in County Antrim, Ireland. Once she felt the call to be a writer, she dropped an ‘s’ from her surname, some suggest, to imply a link to a prestigious Irish family called de Ros. She also claimed the McKittricks were of the line of the ancient kings of Denmark.
She was never a shrinking, diffident author. She wrote: "My chief object of writing is and always has been, to write if possible in a strain all my own. This I find is why my writings are so much sought after." She imagined "the million and one who thirst for aught that drops from my pen", and predicted that she would "be talked about at the end of a thousand years."
Ros imagined herself a social reformer, her work an expose of life among the louche upper classes, thus “disturbing the bowels of millions.”
Her inspiration was a contemporary romance novelist, a lesbian music hall-singer-turned-writer born Mary Mackay (1855-1924), who as Marie Corelli was vastly and inexplicably popular for thirty years. She outsold Kipling, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle in the day, and her collectors included members of the British royal family and both Lord Randolph Churchill and his son, Winston. Among the critical responses to her work were that she was "a woman of deplorable talent who imagined that she was a genius, and was accepted as a genius by a public to whose commonplace sentimentalities and prejudices she gave a glamorous setting."
Another reviewer described her style as a mashup of "the imagination of a Poe with the style of an Ouida and the mentality of a nursemaid." Among her characters’ preoccupations were a recurring yen to “reconcile Christianity with reincarnation, astral projection, and other mystical ideas. New Age sorts cherish her to this day.
Vastly wealthy, Corelli retired to Stratford-on-Avon, became a noted patron of the restoration of Shakespeare sites in the town and of the RSC, and received guests in her gondola- imported, complete with gondolier- from Venice.
Inspired by the first decade of Corelli's publications, Amanda Ros produced her own great opus, and her husband financed the publication of Irene Iddesleigh as a gift on their tenth wedding anniversary, thus launching her literary career.
It would have been a small-bore launch, early-North Korean missile-sized, perhaps, in the way of vanity press authors through time, and sinking, after a short flight, beneath the waves, had not a reader sent a copy to a leading humorist of the day, Barry Pain.
Pain read it, recognized its unique qualities, and on February 19, 1898, he published a review in Black & White magazine under the banner title, THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY:
...I had seen no advertisement of it, I had read no reviews of it. It has come up at me suddenly out of the night. To speak more correctly, it has been sent me by some friends in Ireland. They thought that I should be amused by it, confusing me probably with the other man of the same name who writes the so-called funny articles. The book has not amused me. It began by doing that. Then, as its enormities went on getting more and more enormous in every line, the book seemed something Titanic, gigantic, awe-inspiring. The whole world was full of Irene Iddesleigh; by Mrs. Amanda M'Kittrick Ros, and I shrank before it in tears and in terror.
Never mind the plot; it's got a plot, but the plot is as nothing compared to the style, and the style reaches its full beauty in the form of reflections. I will give two reflections, and guarantee them genuine, and return the price of Black and White to anybody who can prove that they are not genuine.
"Our hopes, when elevated to that standard of ambition which demands unison, may fall asunder like an ancient ruin. They are no longer fit for construction unless on an approved principle. They smolder away like the ashes of burnt embers, and are cast outwardly from their confined abode, never more to be found, where once they existed only as smoldering serpents of scorned pride."
"The silvery touch of fortune is too often gilt with betrayal; the meddling mouth of extravagance swallows every desire, and eats the heart of honesty with pickled pride; the imposury of position is petty, and ends, as it should commence, with stirring strife. But conversion of feminine opinions tries the touchy temper of opposition and too seldom terminates victoriously.'"
Immediately after the second of these beautiful reflections occur the words "Great Mercy!" I rather think that, too. But I don't comment. I can't; nobody could. This is the reason why I have seen no reviews of this book. It is a thing which happens once in a million years. There is no one above it, and no one beside it, and it sits alone as the nightingale sings. The words that would attempt to give any clear idea of it have still to be invented. The most stupendous and monumental characteristic on it is perhaps its absence of any sense of humor. As a rule the absence of this sense is delicious, but it is not so here. One takes one's hat off to it and abases oneself. One thought before one read this book that one knew what the absence of that sense meant, but one didn't. Mists rolled away, snowy peaks, never before scaled by human foot, of the very existence of which never dreamed, stretched themselves heavenwards. Never was any absence so essentially and intrinsically absential, as the absence of the sense of humor in this book.
Once more I quote two passages:
"Yes, when the merriment was at its height, and the heat too oppressive to allow much comfort to the corpulent, the espoused of Irene dropped unexpectedly out of the midst of the aristocratic throng, and being passionately an ardent admirer of the fairy-like fruits of the efforts of the horticulturist directed his footsteps towards the well-filled conservatory at the south wing of the building."
"'First of all, the lady who shared its midst was a born imbecile, the eldest daughter of my great-great-grandfather, Sir Sydney Dunfern. She was nursed and tenderly cared for within these walls for a period of thirty-six years, and through the instantaneous insanity of her ward, was marked a victim for his murderous hand. Yes, it has been related that during midnight, when she was fast asleep, he drew from that drawer' (here Sir Join pointed to the wardrobe) 'a weapon of warlike design, and severed her head almost from her body, causing instant death.'"
And after that it seems idle to quote such pretty sentences as the following:
"Nor until he was in full possession of its contents he could not form the faintest imagination of its worth."
"Invitations were issued numerously for the reception to be held at Dilworth Castle after Irene's marriage, but sparingly during the ceremony; all of which were mostly accepted."
These, as advertisement says, are good goods, and you have a hundred and eighty-nine pages of them for half-a-crown. I hardly see how it can be done honestly at the price, but the fact remains that it is done. No man who possesses half-a-crown can afford to do without Irene Iddesleigh, by Mrs. Amanda M'Kittrick Ros.
It is enormous. It makes the Eiffel Tower look short; the Alps are molehills compared to it; it is on a scale that has never before been attempted. But it ends sadly. Once more I quote.
"The little narrow bed at the lowest corner on the west side of Seafords graveyard was the spot chosen for her remains. Thus were laid to rest the orphan of Colonel Iddesleigh, the adopted daughter and imagined heiress of Lord and Lady Dilworth, what might have been the proud wife of Sir John Dunfern, the unlawful wife of Oscar Otwell, the suicidal outcast, and the despised and rejected mother.
"She who might have swayed society's circle with the sceptre of nobleness – she who might have still shared in the greatness of her position and defied the crooked stream of poverty in which she so long sailed – had she only been, first of all, true to self, then the honourable name of Sir John Dunfern would have maintained its standard of pure and noble distinction, without being spotted here and there with heathenish remarks inflicted by a sarcastic public on the administerer of proper punishment; then the dignified knight of proud and upright ancestry would have been spared the pains of incessant insult, the mockery of equals, the haunted diseases of mental trials, the erring eye of harshness, and the throbbing twitch of constant criticism."
I have called it the book of the century, but that is understatement. Anything that could possibly be said about the book would be understatement. The "throbbing twitch of criticism" realizes its impotence. Before a book like this it ceases to throb; or to twitch; or to criticise. The "erring eye of harshness" closes with a click and goes stone blind. It is too dazzling. It is too great. It is too much. Never since the world began has there been anything like it. Irene! I cannot go on. Iddesleigh! I become ejaculatory. I lie still. I tremble.
Never mind the plot; it's got a plot, but the plot is as nothing compared to the style, and the style reaches its full beauty in the form of reflections. I will give two reflections, and guarantee them genuine, and return the price of Black and White to anybody who can prove that they are not genuine.
"Our hopes, when elevated to that standard of ambition which demands unison, may fall asunder like an ancient ruin. They are no longer fit for construction unless on an approved principle. They smolder away like the ashes of burnt embers, and are cast outwardly from their confined abode, never more to be found, where once they existed only as smoldering serpents of scorned pride."
"The silvery touch of fortune is too often gilt with betrayal; the meddling mouth of extravagance swallows every desire, and eats the heart of honesty with pickled pride; the imposury of position is petty, and ends, as it should commence, with stirring strife. But conversion of feminine opinions tries the touchy temper of opposition and too seldom terminates victoriously.'"
Immediately after the second of these beautiful reflections occur the words "Great Mercy!" I rather think that, too. But I don't comment. I can't; nobody could. This is the reason why I have seen no reviews of this book. It is a thing which happens once in a million years. There is no one above it, and no one beside it, and it sits alone as the nightingale sings. The words that would attempt to give any clear idea of it have still to be invented. The most stupendous and monumental characteristic on it is perhaps its absence of any sense of humor. As a rule the absence of this sense is delicious, but it is not so here. One takes one's hat off to it and abases oneself. One thought before one read this book that one knew what the absence of that sense meant, but one didn't. Mists rolled away, snowy peaks, never before scaled by human foot, of the very existence of which never dreamed, stretched themselves heavenwards. Never was any absence so essentially and intrinsically absential, as the absence of the sense of humor in this book.
Once more I quote two passages:
"Yes, when the merriment was at its height, and the heat too oppressive to allow much comfort to the corpulent, the espoused of Irene dropped unexpectedly out of the midst of the aristocratic throng, and being passionately an ardent admirer of the fairy-like fruits of the efforts of the horticulturist directed his footsteps towards the well-filled conservatory at the south wing of the building."
"'First of all, the lady who shared its midst was a born imbecile, the eldest daughter of my great-great-grandfather, Sir Sydney Dunfern. She was nursed and tenderly cared for within these walls for a period of thirty-six years, and through the instantaneous insanity of her ward, was marked a victim for his murderous hand. Yes, it has been related that during midnight, when she was fast asleep, he drew from that drawer' (here Sir Join pointed to the wardrobe) 'a weapon of warlike design, and severed her head almost from her body, causing instant death.'"
And after that it seems idle to quote such pretty sentences as the following:
"Nor until he was in full possession of its contents he could not form the faintest imagination of its worth."
"Invitations were issued numerously for the reception to be held at Dilworth Castle after Irene's marriage, but sparingly during the ceremony; all of which were mostly accepted."
These, as advertisement says, are good goods, and you have a hundred and eighty-nine pages of them for half-a-crown. I hardly see how it can be done honestly at the price, but the fact remains that it is done. No man who possesses half-a-crown can afford to do without Irene Iddesleigh, by Mrs. Amanda M'Kittrick Ros.
It is enormous. It makes the Eiffel Tower look short; the Alps are molehills compared to it; it is on a scale that has never before been attempted. But it ends sadly. Once more I quote.
"The little narrow bed at the lowest corner on the west side of Seafords graveyard was the spot chosen for her remains. Thus were laid to rest the orphan of Colonel Iddesleigh, the adopted daughter and imagined heiress of Lord and Lady Dilworth, what might have been the proud wife of Sir John Dunfern, the unlawful wife of Oscar Otwell, the suicidal outcast, and the despised and rejected mother.
"She who might have swayed society's circle with the sceptre of nobleness – she who might have still shared in the greatness of her position and defied the crooked stream of poverty in which she so long sailed – had she only been, first of all, true to self, then the honourable name of Sir John Dunfern would have maintained its standard of pure and noble distinction, without being spotted here and there with heathenish remarks inflicted by a sarcastic public on the administerer of proper punishment; then the dignified knight of proud and upright ancestry would have been spared the pains of incessant insult, the mockery of equals, the haunted diseases of mental trials, the erring eye of harshness, and the throbbing twitch of constant criticism."
I have called it the book of the century, but that is understatement. Anything that could possibly be said about the book would be understatement. The "throbbing twitch of criticism" realizes its impotence. Before a book like this it ceases to throb; or to twitch; or to criticise. The "erring eye of harshness" closes with a click and goes stone blind. It is too dazzling. It is too great. It is too much. Never since the world began has there been anything like it. Irene! I cannot go on. Iddesleigh! I become ejaculatory. I lie still. I tremble.
Undeterred, Ros launched Delina Delaney into the world in 1899, and it made her enough to build a rather grand house she called Iddesleigh. After the preface to Delina, she inserted a lengthy attack on Pain, calling him “a clay crab of corruption” for starters before claiming he denounced her work because he was secretly in love with her for her genius, and yet so did not understand that genius when turning the pages it produced. (Mark Twain also got ahold of Irene, and declared it “the greatest unintentionally funny novel ever written.”)
She went on to produce two excrescences of poetry to rival William McGonagall, “Poems of Puncture,” in 1912; and a valedictory, “Fumes of Formation,” in 1933.
As Dr. Watson wrote of Sherlock Holmes’ encounter with The Giant Rat of Sumatra, more Ros output was something “for which the world is not yet prepared,” yet her third novel, Helen Huddelson, somehow escaped into print in 1969.
Ros was a tireless advocate of alliteration. Three years ago, the journalist Alison Flood asked a question many have pondered the last 125 years: is Amanda McKittrick Ros the worst writer ever to put pen to paper in the English tongue?
...I haven't had a chance to read all of Irene Iddesleigh, or Delina Delaney – but believe me, I soon plan to rectify that. [Ros scholar Mark] O'Connell provides some winning examples: "Eyes are 'globes of glare.' When their owners are unhappy, these globes are 'stuffed with sorrow'. Trousers are not trousers; they are 'the southern necessary'," he writes, before highlighting this extraordinary sentence from Delina Delaney: "She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness." (That is, Delina did some work as a seamstress so she wouldn't have to live off her father.)"
It gets better. O'Connell tells us that "most of the characters in her last novel, Helen Huddleson, were named after fruits and vegetables (from aristocrats like Lord Raspberry and Sir Christopher Currant right down the social scale to Madam Pear and Lily Lentil the servant girl)".
Here's the opener to Irene Iddesleigh – my mind is boggled: "Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn," Ros writes. "Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience,— it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow."
Here's the first lovers' glance between Delina Delaney and Lord Gifford : "Could a king, a prince, a duke – nay, even one of those ubiquitous invisibles who, we are led to believe, accompanies us when thinking, speaking, or acting – could even this sinless atom refrain from tainting its spotless gear with the wish of a human heart, as those grey eyes looked in bashful tenderness into the glittering jet revolvers that reflected their sparkling lustre from nave to circumference, casting a deepened brightness over the whole features of an innocent girl, and expressing, in invisible silence, the thoughts, nay, even the wish, of a fleshy triangle whose base had been bitten by order of the Bodiless Thinker."
Fleshy triangle indeed. I think I am falling headlong into a new obsession. Ros also loathed all her critics, calling them variously "bastard donkey-headed mites" and "clay crabs of corruption", asked her publisher if she should take a stab at the Nobel (thank you again Mark O'Connell for this gem: "What think you of this prize?" she asked. "Do you think I should make a 'dart' for it?"), and wrote fantastically awful poetry. Here's her "Verses on Visiting Westminster Abbey" : "Holy Moses! Take a look! / Flesh decayed in every nook! / Some rare bits of brain lie here, / Mortal loads of beef and beer."
It gets better. O'Connell tells us that "most of the characters in her last novel, Helen Huddleson, were named after fruits and vegetables (from aristocrats like Lord Raspberry and Sir Christopher Currant right down the social scale to Madam Pear and Lily Lentil the servant girl)".
Here's the opener to Irene Iddesleigh – my mind is boggled: "Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn," Ros writes. "Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience,— it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow."
Here's the first lovers' glance between Delina Delaney and Lord Gifford : "Could a king, a prince, a duke – nay, even one of those ubiquitous invisibles who, we are led to believe, accompanies us when thinking, speaking, or acting – could even this sinless atom refrain from tainting its spotless gear with the wish of a human heart, as those grey eyes looked in bashful tenderness into the glittering jet revolvers that reflected their sparkling lustre from nave to circumference, casting a deepened brightness over the whole features of an innocent girl, and expressing, in invisible silence, the thoughts, nay, even the wish, of a fleshy triangle whose base had been bitten by order of the Bodiless Thinker."
Fleshy triangle indeed. I think I am falling headlong into a new obsession. Ros also loathed all her critics, calling them variously "bastard donkey-headed mites" and "clay crabs of corruption", asked her publisher if she should take a stab at the Nobel (thank you again Mark O'Connell for this gem: "What think you of this prize?" she asked. "Do you think I should make a 'dart' for it?"), and wrote fantastically awful poetry. Here's her "Verses on Visiting Westminster Abbey" : "Holy Moses! Take a look! / Flesh decayed in every nook! / Some rare bits of brain lie here, / Mortal loads of beef and beer."
Even during her lifetime, Ros was the Florence Foster Jenkins of literature, crossed with the socially snobbish cluelessness of Margaret Dumont’ characters in all the Marx Brothers’ films. Every bad review’s author came under a hail of vituperation from the village of Larne’s leading authoress.
A Mark O’Connell Kindle Single, “Epic Fail,” reports,
There were Amanda McKittrick Ros societies at Oxford and Cambridge. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their fellow Inklings were largely responsible for this enthusiasm: the informal Oxford literary group held sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter … She was a sort of Bizarro World Oscar Wilde: an Irish author who became a London cause célèbre for the complete witlessness of her writing.
In 1917 Andrew Ross died, and in 1922 Ros married Thomas Rodgers (1857/58–1933), a County Down farmer.
Ros herself died in 1939. Tragically, her work survived, as Wikipedia found:
Belfast Public Libraries have a large collection of manuscripts, typescripts and first editions of her work. Manuscript copies include Irene Iddesleigh, Sir Benjamin Bunn and Six Months in Hell. Typescript versions of all the above are held together with Rector Rose, St. Scandal Bags and The Murdered Heiress among others. The collection of first editions covers all her major works including volumes of her poetry Fumes of Formation and Poems of Puncture, together with lesser-known pieces such as Kaiser Bill and Donald Dudley: The Bastard Critic. The collection includes hundreds of letters addressed to Ros, many with her own comments in the margins. Also included are typed copies of her letters to newspapers, correspondence with her admiring publisher T.S. Mercer, an album of newspaper cuttings and photographs, and a script for a BBC broadcast from July 1943.
A few enthusiasts have kept her legend alive. A biography O Rare Amanda! was published in 1954; a collection of her most memorable passages was published in 1988 under the title Thine In Storm and Calm. In 2007 her life and works were feted at a Belfast literary festival.
Critics continued to autopsy her novels for years. Aldous Huxley wielded a sharp scalpel; the great Canadian critic, Northrop Frye, wrote that Ros used "rhetorical material without being able to absorb or assimilate it: the result is pathological, a kind of literary diabetes."
The Amanda McKittrick Ros Society carries the lonely burden of preserving her work for the millennium.
They have 981 years to go.
I have written before about Amanda Ros. I have attempted to talk about her on this program, and one of my segments that was eaten up by vastly more important things. so today, I present you a contest. You are now transported back to CS Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College Oxford, Circa 1942. We cigars have been lit. The port decanter has been passed. JRR Tolkien has read a new chapter from The Lord of the Rings. And now the ever mischievous Lewis dusts off a favorite game From their undergraduate days: how long can you go, listening to Amanda Mckittrick Ros, before you laugh?
I have a stopwatch. I am going to start it. Now, I am going to read starting with chapter 4.
I have written before about Amanda Ros. I have attempted to talk about her on this program, and one of my segments that was eaten up by vastly more important things. so today, I present you a contest. You are now transported back to CS Lewis's rooms in Magdalen College Oxford, Circa 1942. We cigars have been lit. The port decanter has been passed. JRR Tolkien has read a new chapter from The Lord of the Rings. And now the ever mischievous Lewis dusts off a favorite game From their undergraduate days: how long can you go, listening to Amanda Mckittrick Ros, before you laugh?
I have a stopwatch. I am going to start it. Now, I am going to read starting with chapter 4.
CHAPTER IV.
When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright
and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice,
there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe,
disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated
imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet
such is life.
Sir John's visits began now to be numerous at Dilworth Castle, each
visit serving further to strengthen the link of relationship, and bury,
in the heaving breast of seeking solace, the dull delight of the weary
past. As the weeks wore on, he reckoned them only as days, when
comparing their loving length with those of the bleak years he tried to
enjoy alone, before taking such steps--yes, serious steps--as those
fancied by the would-be bachelor.
At first he was careless and indifferent to the flowery harangues of
mothers who paid him periodical visits, with their daughters, of
apology, and firmly retained the obstinate qualities of an autocratic
ruler, until softened in the presence of one he found he was learning to
steadily love. He believed now that the chief stripes,
viz.--observation, inclination, advancement and accomplishment, in the
well-spun web of matrimony, must harmonise with the groundwork of
happiness, without which our lives are not worth an unstamped coin.
Love's path, on which Sir John was known now to tread with the step of
intensity, seemed smooth as the ice of Inglewood. There were no
obstacles in his way of which he was yet aware, save imagination; this,
also, was chased from his mind by the evident and ample return of
Irene's polished affection, the foul gloss of which he failed to notice,
and whose pretentions were so cleverly carried out as to defy detection.
Irene was an accomplished and clever girl, and well able to sustain her
hidden regard throughout for one who for years previous had been
endeavouring to remove the great barrier of position which blocked his
path of approach towards her affection. As yet her parentage was totally
unknown to Sir John; still, he felt it must not have belonged to the
rude and ridiculous, since she possessed all the qualities, outwardly,
and features, of a highly refined race. And when only a girl of eleven
summers, when the worthy hand of benevolence, friendship, and love
clutched the tiny fingers of absolute want, there visibly seemed nothing
lacking in appearance, manner, or education to solicit the pity or
suspicion of her charitable guardian and protector.
Sir John Dunfern's many visits of late to Dilworth Castle had been
creating quite a sensation throughout the quiet corners of costly
curiosity, until an announcement appeared in _Mack's Society Journal_ to
the following effect:--
"A marriage is arranged to take place in August between Sir John
Dunfern, of Dunfern Mansion, County Kent, and Irene Iddesleigh, adopted
daughter of Lord and Lady Dilworth, of Dilworth Castle, in same county."
This notice, no doubt, caused the partakers in drawing-room
_tetè-a-tetès_ to share in the pangs of jealousy, with silent
resentment. Perplexity, a little, would find refuge within the homes of
many who led Society by the string of superficial show and pompous
importance; and during the interval that elapsed between such an
announcement and its important celebration, many and infamous were the
charges poured forth against Irene Iddesleigh.
The month preceding Irene's wedding was one of merriment at Dilworth
Castle, Lord and Lady Dilworth extending the social hand of fashionable
folly on four different occasions. They seemed drunk with delight that
Irene, whom they looked upon as their own daughter, should carry off the
palm of purity, whilst affluence, position, and title were for years
waiting with restless pride to triumph at its grasp.
It was at the second of these social gatherings that the first seed of
jealousy was sown within the breast of Sir John Dunfern, and which had a
tendency to remain until it gradually grew to such a rapid state of
maturity as to be rooted, if possible, for ever from its dusty bed of
ambush.
Yes, when the merriment was at its height, and the heat too oppressive
to allow much comfort to the corpulent, the espoused of Irene dropped
unexpectedly out of the midst of the aristocratic throng, and being
passionately an ardent admirer of the fairy-like fruits of the efforts
of the horticulturist, directed his footsteps towards the well-filled
conservatory at the south wing of the building.
The different-shaded lights which dangled from its roof bestowed a look
of Indian exquisiteness on the many quaint and delicate productions of
nature that rested daintily in their beds of terra-cotta tint.
But before leaving the room he vaguely scanned the throng to catch a
glimpse of Irene, and failed to notice her amongst the many who danced
so gaily to the well-timed tunes of the celebrated pianist, Charles
Wohden, whose musical touch was always capable of melting the most
hardened sinner into moods of mellow softness, or cheering the most
downcast and raising their drooping look of sadness to that of
high-strung hilarity.
Sir John wandered in and out through the numerous windings of sweetest
fragrance, until arriving at the farthest corner, of rather darkened
shade, and on a wire couch beheld the object of his pursuit, in closest
conversation with her tutor, whose name he had altogether failed to
remember, only having had the pleasure of his acquaintance a few hours
before.
"Can it be possible?" exclaimed Sir John, in profound astonishment.
"Why, I have been searching for you for some time past, and have
accidentally found you at last!" Irene, rising to her feet in a second,
was utterly dazed, and had the dim lights shewed her proud face to
advantage, the ruddy glow of deepest crimson guilt would have manifested
itself to a much greater degree. Making multitudinous apologies, etc.,
she at once joined Sir John, who led her back, in apparent triumph, to
share the next waltz.
How the true heart beat with growing passion during the remainder of the
merry festivity, and as the final announcement of separation was
whispered from ear to ear, the gradual wane of Love's lofty right would
fain have dwindled into pompous nothing as the thought kept tickling his
warm enthusiasm with the nimble fingers of jealousy. That she whom he
had ardently hoped should share his future with sheer and loving
caresses of constant companionship and wife-like wisdom should be
trapped in probably vowing to another her great devotion for him!
But better allow the sickening thought to die on the eve of insult
rather than live in the breast of him who, at no distant date, would
hear the merry peals of wedding bells ring with gladness, and naturally
rejoice at the object of their origin...
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