Opinion

History’s ‘worst novelist,’ or artful troll?

But how about this?

“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.”

Such is the stirring overture of “Irene Iddesleigh” (1897) by Amanda M. Ros, a woman whose name is now invariably followed by the descriptor “the worst novelist in history.” On one level, it’s an astonishing accomplishment for a humble stationmaster’s wife from Northern Ireland: someone who was destined for obscurity rather than ignominy.

Her fate, however, was sealed from the moment an early review by the critic and humorist Barry Pain — under the mean-spirited title “The Book of the Century” — brought her to the attention of the literary elite. “It is a thing which happens once in a million years,” Pain had written of “Irene Iddesleigh.” “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.”

Pain’s review generated so much interest among the cognoscenti that an “Amanda Ros Club” was soon established in London, where members would share their favorite passages and compete to write their own imitations. Mark Twain said that “Irene Iddesleigh” was “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.” At meetings in Oxford, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their fellow Inklings would regularly challenge each other to read aloud excerpts from Ros’s books without laughing.

Her plotlines are conventional enough. The titular heroine of “Irene Iddesleigh” is in love with her tutor, Oscar Otwell, but is pressured by her adoptive parents into marrying the wealthy Sir John Dunfern. Inevitably, the relationship soon sours, and Dunfern is driven to a jealous rage on discovering that his wife’s true affections lie elsewhere. He imprisons her in a kind of oubliette that he calls “the room of correction,” but not before he unleashes a blistering castigation:

“Was I falsely informed of your ways and worth? Was I duped to ascend the ladder of liberty, the hill of harmony, the tree of triumph, and the rock of regard, and when wildly manifesting my act of ascension, was I to be informed of treading still in the valley of defeat? … 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!”

Ros had no more respect for subtext than for the opinions of her critics. She coined endless phrases to denigrate them, including “clay crabs of corruption,” “egotistical earth worms,” “auctioneering agents of Satan,” “talent pickers,” “hogwashing hooligans,” “bastard donkey-headed mites” and “evil-minded snapshots of spleen.” And yet with some reflection, she might have been grateful for Pain’s scathing review. Just as Walter Pater’s reappraisal of Botticelli in his book “Studies in the History of the Renaissance” (1873) reinvigorated interest in the neglected artist, Pain had immortalized the works of Ros.

Ros didn’t quite see it that way. She responded to Pain’s review with a lengthy diatribe as a preface to her second novel, “Delina Delaney” (1898). “This so-called Barry Pain,” she wrote, “has taken upon him to criticise a work the depth of which fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you believe, varied talent.” Her scalding review of a review even went so far as to suggest that Pain “must either have been in love, desperate love, with Irene or the author.” It was sexual tension, not literary taste, that accounted for Pain’s antipathy.

One of the most enthusiastic reviews came from Aldous Huxley, who compared Ros’s highly wrought and mannered prose to that of John Lyly, one of the “university wits” of Shakespearean England. Recommending “Delina Delaney” as “Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece,” Huxley went on to praise her for perfecting the style of “Euphuism,” which takes its name from Lyly’s prose works “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit” (1578) and “Euphues and his England” (1580). His writing is replete with ornate tropes and rhetorical devices, but Ros out-Lylys Lyly with ease. Take this example from her final novel, “Helen Huddleson,” published posthumously in 1969 — the words of Maurice Munro, Helen’s widower, who opens his story with an incredible sequence of alliterative architectural metaphors:

“My Helen! My Helen! … What care I for all the world and its sections of shams? What care I for its halls of hilarity, its congested clubs of contamination, its showrooms of sacrilege, its morning-rooms of mistrust, its dining rooms of danger, its tea-rooms of test, its lounges 0f lust, its suppers of slander, its ingle-nooks of ill, its forcing-beds of fornication, and all other enticing etceteras that go to shatter and crooken the straight lines of honest endeavour, when my Helen’s absence is ever present?”

The fusion of concrete and abstract nouns is as audacious as it is unrelenting. No subordinate clause escapes the embellishment of her prancing pen. Huxley marveled that Ros, almost certainly unfamiliar with the school of Euphuism, had somehow “arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development as Lyly and his disciples.” Like these early writers, Ros had become intoxicated with the joys of verbal artifice, often at the expense of artistry, and was therefore “an Elizabethan born out of her time.”

Yet I’m not entirely convinced that Ros was oblivious to the impact of her works. I have little doubt that her first novel was published in earnest, but is it not possible that once her reputation was established, she learned to play along, making those who mocked her the butt of the joke? If you read her three novels consecutively, it is clear her most derided habits seemed to escalate over time. The metaphors become more tortuous, the alliteration more insistent, the plot twists more improbable. (In “Delina Delaney,” a supposedly long-dead cousin is eventually identified by the six toes on her right foot.) Besides, Ros’s continual declarations of her own genius must surely be put down to mischief rather than delusion. At one point, she decided that her literary legacy was so secure that she was “sistering Shakespeare, Milton and Blake.”

Ros has an astonishing capacity to extend her metaphors beyond their natural remits. Mere sunlight is tedious to her, so in Chapter 3 of “Irene Iddesleigh,” she envisages a moment “when the hottest ray of that heavenly orb shall shoot its cheerful charge against the window panes.” By Ros’s standards this is restrained. But by Chapter 17, the metaphor has sprawled beyond any sane reader’s expectations:

“The mighty orb of gladness spreads its divine halo over many a harrowed home — it encircles the great expanse of foreign adventure and home-hoarded enterprise, and wields its awakening influence against the burthened boroughs of bigotry and lightened land of liberty to a sense of gilded surprise.”

Immortal stuff, obviously. And yet I suspect the author must have realized that this was precisely the kind of verbiage her fan base craved. She could not have been unaware of the criticisms; she spent a good deal of her time seeking out all press cuttings relating to her work, even from her harshest detractors. In one letter to a friend, she wrote:

“I would be glad to see the critique you mentioned which appeared in the ‘Daily Express,’ no matter how bad the beast described his effortless effort to sting the Author, who loves to see she can wring from the critic crabs their biting little bits of buggery! Every critique you see, cut it out and let me have it, please.”

What is this if not the knowing attitude of a professional goader? Note how Ros refers to herself in the third person, as though “the Author” is simply another one of her imaginations.

Amanda M. Ros wasn’t even her real name. She was born Anna Margaret McKittrick in the village of Drumaness on Dec. 8, 1860. When she died at a clinic in Belfast on Feb. 2, 1939, she was registered as “Hannah Margaret Rodgers.” “Ros” was a modification of her first husband’s surname, Ross, and her biographer, Jack Loudan, surmised that she had dropped the second “s” to imply that she was connected to the aristocratic de Ros family of County Down.

Ros was an early pioneer of self-publishing. Her first book was bankrolled by her husband as a 10th anniversary gift. She funded the publication of her subsequent works herself. Toward the end of her life, she even considered investing in her own printing machine. Whereas many criticized her vanity, I see much to admire in her persistence. Jean Cocteau once said that “to be granted dreams but not genius must be the worst of tortures,” but Ros would not permit her meager literary talents to present any kind of obstacle. “I feel I am a great favourite as a writer,” she wrote to one devotee. “My fame is established which is the chief point of success.”

Over the course of her career, Ros got better and better at writing badly, and her popularity soared. In this regard, she bears comparison with the New York socialite and singer Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), whose tone-deaf operatic efforts were so popular that tickets for her show at Carnegie Hall sold out within two hours. Perhaps Ros was living in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, or perhaps she accepted the ridicule as the price of her fame. A more intriguing possibility is that she was engaged in an elaborate form of trolling.

When Loudan once asked her why she had named one of her principal characters Lord Raspberry, Ros looked puzzled for a moment, then replied: “What else would I call him?” Loudan took this as evidence of “her complete inability to realise why people found her books amusing instead of the serious works she intended them to be,” but I’m not so sure. There are so many elements of Ros’s novels and poems clearly meant to be funny that I find it astonishing they have been so misinterpreted.

For instance, it’s striking that critics have not commented on the preface to “Delina Delaney,” in which our author takes a full page to bemoan the fact that she is expected to write a preface. And are we really to believe that Ros did not appreciate the humor in opening a poem about Easter with the line: “Dear Lord the day of eggs is here”? From the same volume, “Fumes of Formation” (1933), we have the oft-quoted “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 …”

As for Lord Raspberry in “Helen Huddleson,” he leads a cast of characters that includes Cherry Raspberry (his sister), Mrs. Strawberry, the Duke of Greengage, Sir Peter Plum, the Earl of Grape, Madam Pear, Sir Christopher Current and Lily Lentil. Is this unintentional comedy, as Mark Twain insisted, or the brilliant chicanery of one who, as a former school friend recalled, was “gay, lively and always ready for a prank”?

I’m inclined to think that Ros explicitly revealed her satirical intent in her epigraph to “Poems of Puncture” (1912): “if the ‘cuddy-brained’ can’t see/ Where lies the joke — Just think of me!” “Cuddy” is an old Irish term for a donkey, and one gets the feeling that it was perhaps the sneering intellectuals who were being taken in all along.

Perhaps we’ll never know for sure. But when I read of poor Helen Huddleson, whisked away to a brothel known as “Modesty Manor” by the evil Madam Pear, and kissed not by her captor’s lips but by “a pair of polluted rims of rouge,” I cannot help but sense the ghost of Amanda M. Ros laughing along with the rest of us.

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