Customer Reviews (2) 
Bring back this out-of-print gem!
How to describe Amanda McKitttrick Ros? In her time (1860-1939) she was hailed as the "world's worst writer," celebrated by luminaries such as Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis. In both London and Cambridge, her devotees formed 'Amanda Ros Clubs,' which gathered to read her works aloud. There were contests held at these gatherings to see who could read from her work the longest without breaking into laughter. Her many admirers sent her letters in hopes to receive a reply in her characteristic tortured, circumlocuitous style.
A few samples will give only a slight idea of the cumulative effect of her prose and poetry. Here is a passage from her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh:
"Leave me now deceptive demon of deluded mockery: lurk no more around the vale of vanity, like a vindictive viper: strike the lyre of living deception to the strains of dull deadness, despair and doubt..."
And here is one from her second novel, Helen Huddleson:
"Ah dear Helen, I feel heart sick of this frivolous frittery fraternity of fragiles flitting round and about Earth's huge plane wearing their mourning livery of religion as a cloud of design tainted with the milk of mockery...
Clearly, she had a great love of alliteration. Amanda also disdained using one word when two or more might be employed: eyes were always 'piercing orbs,' tears were 'Nature's dewdrops,' and a hand was a 'bony appendage.' Few things were 'white' in her books when they could be called 'snowy' instead.
Then again, and in completely contrast to this high-flown language, there was an earthy, almost Rabelasian vigor to her work, as demonstrated by her poem entitled "Visiting Westminster Abbey":
"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."
She was the queen of the dangling participle:
"Endeavoring to get away, he held her still closer to him..."
"Still insisting on going home, he turned a deaf ear to her appeal..."
Amanda was also an imaginative and splenetic inventor of terms of calumny and opprobrium. Her two favored targets were critics (for obvious reasons) and lawyers (she was very litigious but seldom won a case). A few choice terms for critics included "Bastard Donkey-headed mites," "Drunken Ignorant Dross," "Poisonous Apes," "Talent wipers of wormy order," and "Auctioneering Agents of Satan." Amanda, when riled, was formidable.
However, as this slim biography makes clear, there was much more to Amanda than a seemingly endless capacity for bad prose. She was an eccentric of epic proportions. Although before marrying a stationmaster in the small town of Larne, Ireland, she had been a simple schoolmistress, her ambition knew no bounds. She was given to driving through the streets of Larne in a phaeton driven by a groom in livery. Occasionally, she'd conclude her drive by hoisting a banner with slogans taunting her critics or the latest object of a lawsuit. She seriously considered whether it would be worth her while to send her work off to the Nobel committee responsible for awarding prizes in literature.
Never, it seems, did she ever truly understand that her writing (and she herself) was a source of amusement, and she insisted to the end that her works were read "by the all the crowned heads of Europe, except the Emperor of Austria and the Czar of Russia." She lived in her own hothouse world peopled with fictional members of the aristocracy and villainous villains. It never seemed to occur to her that this absorption in a fictional world was the least bit odd. When Jack Loudan, the author of this biography, visited her, she favored him by serving tea and reading aloud from her second novel. He relates:
"I asked her why she had called the principal male character in the book Lord Raspberry. Her hand stopped as she was about to put the cup to her lips. There was a puzzled expression on her face as she looked at me. 'What else would I call him?' she asked. I understood then her complete inability to realise why people found her books amusing instead of the serious works she intended them to be."
Completely lacking in humor herself, she nevertheless was able to reduce others (and here I include myself) to paroxysms of helpless laughter. In fact, Loudan proposes that Amanda's work serves as a very useful litmus test of whether or not a person indeed has a sense of humor:
"Amanda is the most perfect instrument for measuring the sense of humor. Alert and quick-witted people accept her at once: those whom she leaves entirely unmoved are invariably dull and unimaginative. She is for people who do not always expect reason, who are ready to enter her world without disputation and to accept her magnificent incongruities."
At times Amanda confounds the reader. Her lexicon, for example, is highly personal and she uses words such as "socialist" and "mushroom" in an idiosyncratic and associative manner that admirers claimed foreshadowed James Joyce's stream-of-conscious narrative. Then, too, there are passages that leave one muttering, 'whaaaa...?' such as the following:
"He was tempted to invest in the polluted stocks of magnified extension, and when their banks seemed swollen with rotten gear, gathered too often from the winds of wilful wrong, how the misty dust blinded his sight and drove him through the field of fashion and feeble effeminacy, which he once never meant to tread, landing him on the slippery rock of smutty touch, to wander into the hidden cavities of ancient fame, there to remain and blinded son of injustice and unparalleled wrong!"
Indeed, as one commentator wrote of the opening sentence of one of her novels, "I first read this sentence nearly three years ago. Since then, I have read it once a week in an increasingly desperate search for meaning. But I still don't understand it."
One might wonder what separates Amanda's overripe prose from that of authors noted for similar excesses, such as H. Rider Haggard, Abraham Merritt, or Ronald Firbank. At least part of the answer, I think, is that these writers, while florid, never engage in the precipitous dips from elevated tone to the quotidian or mundane. They are, in a word, consistent. A great deal of Amanda's charm lies in her juxtaposition of high-flown rhetoric and the commonplace.
Alas, Amanda McKittrick Ros left only a handful of completed novels (three), a few broadsheets, and two volumes of poetry - Poems of Puncture and Fumes of Formation. Ironically, her books are now highly prized collector's items. A quick search of Bookfinder.com turned up very few of her books, but a glance revealed that what is on the market now fetches sums that would have made Amanda proud. Copies of her first novel sell for upwards of $500, while one bookseller wants over $1000 for a very limited edition of her collected letters, Bayonets of Bastard Sheen. I had a brief hope, after reading this book, of perhaps collecting a little Amanda McKittrick Ros myself, but these figures are simply too daunting. I contented myself instead by ordering a book published in 1988, Thine in Storm and Calm: An Amanda McKittrick Ros Reader.
An out-of-print gem
How to describe Amanda McKitttrick Ros? In her time (1860-1939) she was hailed as the "world's worst writer," celebrated by luminaries such as Aldous Huxley, Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis. In both London and Cambridge, her devotees formed 'Amanda Ros Clubs,' which gathered to read her works aloud. There were contests held at these gatherings to see who could read from her work the longest without breaking into laughter. Her many admirers sent her letters in hopes to receive a reply in her characteristic tortured, circumlocuitous style.
A few samples will give only a slight idea of the effect of her prose and poetry. Here is a passage from her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh:
"Leave me now deceptive demon of deluded mockery: lurk no more around the vale of vanity, like a vindictive viper: strike the lyre of living deception to the strains of dull deadness, despair and doubt..."
And here is one from her second novel, Helen Huddleson:
"Ah dear Helen, I feel heart sick of this frivolous frittery fraternity of fragiles flitting round and about Earth's huge plane wearing their mourning livery of religion as a cloud of design tainted with the milk of mockery...
Clearly, she had a great love of alliteration. Amanda also disdained using one word when two or more might be employed: eyes were 'piercing orbs,' tears were 'Nature's dewdrops,' and a hand was a 'bony extremity.' Few things were 'white' in her books when they could be called 'snowy' instead.
Then again, and in completely contrast to this high-flown language, there was an earthy, almost Rabelasian vigor to her work, as demonstrated by her poem entitled "Visiting Westminster Abbey":
"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."
She was the queen of the dangling participle:
"Endeavoring to get away, he held her still closer to him..."
"Still insisting on going home, he turned a deaf ear to her appeal..."
Amanda was also an imaginative and splenetic inventor of terms of calumny and opprobrium. Her two favored targets were critics (for obvious reasons) and lawyers (she was very litigious but seldom won a case). A few choice terms for critics included "Bastard Donkey-headed mites," "Drunken Ignorant Dross," "Poisonous Apes," "Talent wipers of wormy order," and "Auctioneering Agents of Satan." Amanda, when riled, was formidable.
However, as this slim biography makes clear, there was much more to Amanda than a seemingly endless capacity for bad prose. She was an eccentric of epic proportions. Although before marrying a stationmaster in the small town of Larne, Ireland, she had been a simple schoolmistress, her ambition knew no bounds. She was given to driving through the streets of Larne in a phaeton driven by a groom in livery. Occasionally, she'd conclude her drive by hoisting a banner with slogans taunting her critics or the latest object of a lawsuit. She seriously considered whether it would be worth her while to send her work off to the Nobel committee responsible for awarding prizes in literature.
Never, it seems, did she ever truly understand that her writing (and she herself) was a source of amusement, and she insisted to the end that her works were read 'by the all the crowned heads of Europe, except the Emperor of Austria and the Czar of Russia.' She lived in her own hothouse world peopled with fictional members of the aristocracy and villainous villains. It never seemed to occur to her that this absorption in a fictional world was the least bit odd. When Jack Loudan, the author of this biography, visited her, she favored him by serving tea and reading aloud from her second novel. He relates:
"I asked her why she had called the principal male character in the book Lord Raspberry. Her hand stopped as she was about to put the cup to her lips. There was a puzzled expression on her face as she looked at me. 'What else would I call him?' she asked. I understood then her complete inability to realise why people found her books amusing instead of the serious works she intended them to be."
Completely lacking in humor herself, she nevertheless was able to reduce others (and here I include myself) to paroxysms of helpless laughter. In fact, Loudan proposes that Amanda's work serves as a very useful litmus test of whether or not a person has a sense of humor:
"Amanda is the most perfect instrument for measuring the sense of humor. Alert and quick-witted people accept her at once: those whom she leaves entirely unmoved are invariably dull and unimaginative. She is for people who do not always expect reason, who are ready to enter her world without disputation and to accept her magnificent incongruities."
At times Amanda confounds the reader. Her lexicon, for example, is highly personal and she uses words such as "socialist" and "mushroom" in an idiosyncratic and associative manner that foreshadows James Joyce's stream-of-conscious narrative. Then, too, there are passages that leave one muttering, 'whaaaa...?' such as the following:
"He was tempted to invest in the polluted stocks of magnified extension, and when their banks seemed swollen with rotten gear, gathered too often from the winds of wilful wrong, how the misty dust blinded his sight and drove him through the field of fashion and feeble effeminacy, which he once never meant to tread, landing him on the slippery rock of smutty touch, to wander into the hidden cavities of ancient fame, there to remain and blinded son of injustice and unparalleled wrong!"
Indeed, as one commentator wrote of the opening sentence of one of her novels, "I first read this sentence nearly three years ago. Since then, I have read it once a week in an increasingly desperate search for meaning. But I still don't understand it."
One might wonder what separates Amanda's overripe prose from that of authors noted for similar excesses, such as H. Rider Haggard, Abraham Merritt, or Ronald Firbank. The answer, I think, is that these writers, while florid, never engage in the precipitous dips from elevated tone to the quotidian or mundane. They are, in a word, consistent. A great deal of Amanda's charm lies in her juxtaposition of high-flown rhetoric and the commonplace.
Alas, Amanda McKittrick Ros left only a handful of completed novels (three), a few broadsheets, and two volumes of poetry - Poems of Puncture and Fumes of Formation. Ironically, her books are now highly prized collector's items. A quick search of Bookfinder.com turned up very few of her books, but a glance revealed that what is on the market now fetches sums that would have made Amanda proud. Copies of her first novel sell for upwards of $500, while one bookseller wants over $1000 for a very limited edition of her collected letters, Bayonets of Bastard Sheen. I had a brief hope, after reading this book, of perhaps collecting a little Amanda McKittrick Ros myself, but these figures are simply too daunting. I contented myself instead by ordering a book published in 1988, Thine in Storm and Calm: An Amanda McKittrick Ros Reader.
Publishers, if any of you are reading this, please bring back Amanda!
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