Amanda McKittrick Ros is the greatest bad writer who ever lived. A master - or rather mistress, for she was nothing if not formidably female - of both poetry and prose, a gloriously over-the-top writer who was utterly convinced of her own greatness and of the merits of her work.
Irene Iddesleigh is a tale of a mismatched marriage. It contains one of Amanda's most famous quotes:
"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!"
Her second novel, Delina Delaney begins with possibly the most baffling opening sentence in any literature:
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?
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. It is magnificent in its impenetrable mystery; it is the riddle of the sphinx, the smile of the Mona Lisa. It sounds wonderful, but remains impervious to comprehension. I know it has something to do with the Western Borders of Ireland, for that is where Delina Delaney starts, but beyond that I cannot say why the soil is being examined and who is looking at it.
Delina shows perfectly Amanda's unique use of language. For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment.'
If Amanda had just written those two novels, her immortality would be assured. But, to the joy of bad verse fans everywhere, she was also a poet. Here is the final verse of her war poem, 'A Little Belgian Orphan':
Go! Meet the foe undaunted, they're rotten cowards all,
Present to them the bayonet, they totter and they fall,
We know you'll do your duty and come to little harm
And if you meet the Kaiser, cut off his other arm.
While her poem 'Eastertide' boasts one of great opening lines of bad poetry:
Dear Lord the day of eggs is here
'My chief object in writing is and always has been to write if possible in a strain all my own,' she once wrote. 'My works are all expressly my own -- pleasingly peculiar -- not a borrowed stroke in one of them.'
How true. No-one has ever written like Amanda McKittrick Ros. No-one else ever will.
