THE Co Down-born novelist and poet, Amanda McKittrick Ros, once predicted she would be would still be talked about in “1,000 years”. It’s a bit too early yet to say whether she was correct; but so far so good. If only through featuring on many shortlists for the title “worst writer ever”, Ms McKittrick Ros is still talked about fairly frequently, decades after her books went out of print.
The coming year may be critical to longer-term viability. She was born 149 years ago yesterday, on December 8th, 1860, so her sesquicentennial year begins today. Perhaps this will attract more coverage than the last milestone: the 70th anniversary of her death, which fell earlier in 2009.
For a writer who craved posthumous fame, her death – on February 2nd 1939, in the same week WB Yeats was buried – was ill-timed. Oddly enough, this was not a criticism ever levelled at her poetry, in which meter was generally competent. But comparisons with Yeats are still unhelpful, as her verse On Visiting Westminster Abbeyindicates: "Holy Moses! Have a look!/Flesh decayed in every nook!/Some rare bits of brain lie here,/Mortal loads of beef and beer,/Some of whom are turned to dust,/Every one bids lost to lust;/Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'/Undergoes the same as you." Then again, and in fairness to McKittrick Ros, it should be said that her fame rests less on her poetry than her prose, which was sufficiently notorious in the early 20th century to earn the satirical attentions of Mark Twain among others.
In this at least, she was keeping good company. Twain once wrote of Jane Austen: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." His attitude towards McKittrick Ros was slightly more indulgent. He acclaimed her debut novel, Irene Iddesleigh, as "extraordinary": albeit as an addition to the "hogwash" literature he enjoyed collecting.
The title of her aforementioned novel illustrates one of McKittrick Ros’s stylistic keynotes. She could resist anything except alliteration. So when the eponymous Irene, already married to the rich but old Sir John Dunfern, acquires an attractive young tutor called Oscar Ottwell, there can only be one outcome.
When their subsequent affair is uncovered, the jilted husband angrily rewrites his will. Or as the novelist puts it, in a typical passage, he “[demands] then and there that the pen of persuasion be dipped into the ink of revenge and spread thickly along the paragraph of blood-related charity to blank the intolerable words that referred to the woman he was now convinced, beyond doubt, had braved the bridge of bigamy.” Initially self-published, the cost borne by her husband as a 10th wedding anniversary present, McKittrick Ros eventually secured legitimate publication, along with substantial sales. She also earned cult status with the likes of Twain, Aldous Huxley, CS Lewis, and many other notables, most of whom seem to have been enjoying a joke at her expense.
But Huxley wrote an apparently serious essay about what he thought she represented. And she has had her defenders; even if these tend to argue not that she was good – just that she was bad in an interesting way. Indeed, some of her writing defies analysis, which is normally a plus point in literature.
Here for example, from her second novel Delina Delaney, she seems to be saying something about Ireland. But it's anybody's guess what, exactly: "Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?" This may be the sort of thing one critic meant when he said that her style "has the final merit of concealing thought and plot" so that the reader's "mind rocks along in an amiable delirium".
On the other hand, some of the more mystifying phrases arise from her troubled relationship with syntax. Take another sentence from Irene Iddesleigh: "On entering the chamber of sickness one morning with a new bottle of medicine, sent direct from London, Sir John raised himself slightly on his left elbow and made inquiry about his son".
This is doubly puzzling because Sir John could hardly enter a room and raise himself on his left elbow simultaneously, even if he wasn’t on his deathbed, which he is. The puzzle is resolved only when we realise the person entering the room is not him but a woman mentioned in the previous sentence.
It was for such reasons as this that, in his book In Search of the World's Worst Writers, Nick Page crowned McKittrick Ros as the greatest bad writer of all. This is a controversial claim and should help ensure that, if not for 1,000 years, she will be talked about for a few decades yet.
In the interim, it’s hard to argue with her self-assessment in 1927: “My chief object [...] 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. My works are all expressly my own – pleasingly peculiar, not a borrowed stroke in one of them.”
- fmcnally@irishtimes.com