Jack Loudan’s O Rare Amanda! counts among the most
embarrassing books I’ve encountered. The embarrassment - my own - stems from my having
read the book while on public transportation. It is not unusual in San
Francisco to witness public displays by persons solipsistically seized by some secret
mirth, but I am usually not one of them. My inability to stifle my tittering
and snorts of laughter, more than once resulting in my spewing my coffee,
caused some fellow passengers to edge away.
Loudan’s 1956 biography of Irish writer Amanda McKittrick
Ros (1861-1939), frequently heralded as the worst novelist in the English
language, offers a well-researched, affectionate, even admiring portrait. Ros, a
literary folk artist, provided to fiction something akin to what Mrs. Miller
provided to popular song. Rather than indulging in easy ridicule, though, Loudan,
who took the trouble to get to know Ros personally, takes her seriously. He
situates her not on the eccentric fringe – or rather, not only on the eccentric fringe - but places her delirious combination
of romance and nonsense in the context of other literary trends and writers. The
latter include her two influences, Marie Corelli and Regina Maria Roche (Ros
was not much of a reader), as well as respected writers whose works might, with
generosity, be aligned with her own, including Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and
even, in view of Ros’ idiosyncratic language, James Joyce (Ros herself would
have fumed at the Carroll comparison; Loudan notes that her envy at the sum
paid for the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland led her to read
the book, which she found to be “an idiotic, nonsensical, whimsical disjointed
piece of abject happenings bursting with Stygian Style Expressions lined
throughout with a pricky-patterned policy the gods would grunt at & decent
minds abhor.”).
O Rare Amanda! alternates biographical material with chapters
devoted to each of her three novels – Irene Iddesleigh, Delina
Delaney and Helen Huddleston - and her two books of poetry, Poems
of Puncture and Fumes of Formation. An inspiration for Elizabeth
Taylor’s fine novel, Angel, Ros claimed to have begun her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, at a precocious age, though this appears to have been a typical
Rosian amplification. Her novels employ classic Victorian themes, each
featuring a young, impecunious woman crossing class boundaries and suffering
through love and deception with “men of rank and wealth and power.” But the
manner of their telling is utterly singular, as almost any passage reveals
(part of the hilarity of O Rare Amanda! comes from Loudan’s extensive
sampling of her work, but as the Internet offers readers an abundance of Ros,
I’ll forgo doing the same). With what Osbert Sitwell called an “innocently
garish and ridiculous” style, her narratives employ alliteration, dangling
modifiers, pause-inducing imagery, words used in bafflingly novel ways, characters
left in one setting only to reappear mysteriously in another, temporal
impossibilities, and improbable behaviors. “Her world is one of people who
speak and act so unlike mankind that we do not expect them to behave normally,”
writes Loudan.
Initially self-published, Ros would likely have vanished
into obscurity had not her first book been forwarded to humorist Barry Pain.
Reviewing it in 1898, Pain called it “The Book of the Century…a thing that
happens once in a million years. There is no one above 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 not been invented.” Pain’s review thrust Ros
into popularity and set her on a lifelong, furious crusade against critics.
Loudan supplies a full two-column page of terms she used to describe them; “bastard
donkey-headed mites,” “talent wipers of wormy order,” and “the mushroom class
of idiotics” are among the kindest.
One of the strengths of Loudan’s book is his attention to
the critical reception of Ros’ output. Few disliked her work. In addition to a
strong popular following, she also found favor among the intelligentsia, who
rallied around her singular talent, launching “Amanda Ros Clubs” and holding dinner
parties where fans competed to impersonate her style. Several critical accounts
Loudan includes are nearly as amusing as Ros’ own words; the critic Thomas Beer,
for example, wrote that Irene Iddesleigh left him “dizzy.” A delicately
nuanced, droll assessment of her talent by Aldous Huxley, who “saw in her
circumlocution ‘the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind
and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic,’” led Ros to
declare him one of the few persons capable of understanding her. Subtlety in
the recognition of her work, however, was lost on Ros, who seemed, like some of
her readers, incapable of grasping sarcasm unless it bludgeoned her. Loudan limns
this appreciation gap by suggesting that “Amanda is the most perfect instrument
for measuring the sense of humour.”
For all of Ros’ engagement with the “crabbing critics,” her
high opinion of her own work never seemed to waver. Late in life, she asked
her publisher whether she might “make a dart” for a highly remunerative
literary award she’d just learned about (the Nobel Prize), and also predicted
that her writing would stand the test of time and be read “1,000 years from
now.” But despite her obliviousness to the manner in which many viewed her writing,
Ros seemed at times to have had some perhaps accidental but nonetheless keen
insight into what she was doing. “My chief object in writing is and always has been to write if possible in a strain all my own.” Few would
dispute that she succeeded. And in the end, Ros may have the next to last laugh (the
last, surely, is reserved for her final reader), as writing this singular won’t
easily vanish as long as there are those who love the English language.
Loudan’s charming and highly entertaining biography will help insure that
longevity.
Transformed as I was into a public spectacle by Loudan’s
book, though, nothing in it prepared me for my first attempt to swallow Ros
herself in a large dose. I can safely vow that I have never before experienced
such a response to literature. Opening Delina Delaney at random one
night, I began to smile, then giggle, then a sudden spell of manic derangement
seemed to take hold, propelling my mind into regions of disbelief and
helplessness. One may note the instability of modern narratives, but it
would be hard to find a work more capable of rendering language so nearly void
of meaning – none, anyway, that could simultaneously provoke such breathless,
unhinged laughter.
Passengers on my daily commute should be immensely grateful
that I read Delina Delaney in the privacy of my home. I know I am.
