The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  Ros’s last novel – Helen Huddleston – continued the theme of tragic heroines, but was also an opportunity to vent more spleen on the subject of lawyers. She named most of the characters after fruit and vegetables, including Lord Raspberry, Sir Peter Plum, the Earl of Grape and Sir Christopher Currant, and a maid called Lily Lentil.

  The author’s fondness for crimes against alliteration is also given full rein. We learn that the villainous Madame Pear, a brothel keeper who secretly plans to make the virgin Helen a star attraction of her house of ill-repute, “had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in stratagem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with sapphires of scandals . . .”

  About halfway through the novel, she also develops the habit of interjecting random foreign words and phrases into her text, such as “capriole!” and “coup-de-main”. Here is Lord Raspberry at dinner the night before he will kidnap the unsuspecting Helen Huddleston:

  In Helen Huddleston, he had seen a trunk of truism branching forth into womanhood. He was convinced that through time his desires would be directed towards every element of chastity pure and unadulterated it had not been his province yet to master.

  As he sat meditating on the digestion of a female fowl, pebble-dashed with meagre crumbs and damped with that delicious coat of delicacy for which an empty stomach and a dry tongue craves, the room seemed to whirl round him while a silvery mist blurred his vision enveloping him in a cloak of cobwebbed frailty.

  On his finger rested an historic ring centred with a gem of tradition that he boldly asserted was instrumental in creating evil in all its fulsome phases within the minds of its numerous possessors. Shaped like a spear in a cloud of dull white edged with delicate blue, in which could be seen a traitor’s star resembling that of Rasputin when on his pinnacle of monkdom, meting out his prayers of mockery to the duped goddess of Russia.

  Helen Huddleston was never completed. As she worked on the final chapters, her fingers became increasingly crippled with rheumatism and she was forced to give it up.

  Ros had spent her entire career in lengthy and vitriolic feuds with critics but she could give as good as she got. She once wrote a 10,000-word tirade against D. B. Wyndam Lewis who had written a sarcastic review of Irene Iddesleigh, judging it “a better book than Some Reactions of Colloidal Protozoids or The Chartered Accountants’ Year Book for 1926.”

  She imagined she had a legion of literary fans who thirsted “for aught that drops from my pen” and she never quite recovered from what she took to be the massive snub of failing to secure a nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. But she did have fans. The heaving bosoms, trembling lips, quivering voices and clammy hands that inhabit her world won her many admirers among the literary élite. Mark Twain called Irene Iddesleigh “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time”. In 1928, Aldous Huxley dedicated an essay to her dazzling synonyms, which included such gems as “sanctified measures of time” (Sunday); “globes of glare” (eyes); “bony supports” (legs); “southern necessary” (pants); and “globules of liquid lava” (sweat). Shortly after the Second World War, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien discussed her work in their literary group, the Inklings. The task was to see who could read aloud the longest without breaking into “helpless laughter”.

  Her final published work was a second collection of verses, Fumes of Formation. She died after a fall in her home in February 1939 at the age of seventy-eight. At the time, Ros was working on her final unfinished poem “Donald Dudley, the Bastard Critic”.

  Although none of her books are currently still in print, a few Ros enthusiasts have kept her legend alive. A biography – O Rare Amanda! – was published in 1954 and a collection of her most memorable passages was published in an anthology called Thine in Storm and Calm in 1988. In 2008, she was also fêted at a Belfast literary festival.

  One of her rarest books, Bayonets of Bastard Sheen (1949), compiled from letters written between 1927–39, mostly comprising attacks on critics, fetched £15,400 at auction.

  Most Pointless Work of Literature

  In 1939, the world was on the brink; dark clouds were gathering as half of Europe reeled under the heel of fascism. It was a time for writers and artists to stand up and be counted. The American author Ernest Vincent Wright rushed to his typewriter – to write a 50,000-word novel without using the letter “e”.

  Wright spent five-and-a-half months composing his opus Gadsby, helpfully subtitled A Novel of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter E. He used string to tie down the “e” key on his typewriter to make sure that it was never used accidentally. Wright failed to find a publisher and used his own money to bring out the book in 1939. Despite the magnitude of his achievement, the critics were unkind. One reviewer noted, “This book is a bit shit, frankly.”11

  This excerpt from the beginning of the book will enable you to judge for yourself:

  If youth, throughout all history, had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything”. A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport.

  Wright died a few months after publication. He is also the author of a humorous short poem: “When Father Carves the Duck”.

  Worst Science-Fiction Writer

  The awful truth of bad published science-fiction writing is that it only represents the tip of the iceberg. The really atrocious stuff, it should go without saying, never gets published at all. At least, that used to be the case before self-publishing and the Internet ensured that just about anyone can publish anything, bypassing all the traditional obstacles which have irritated writers through the centuries, such as editorial standards and censorship. So for a sci-fi work to be so memorably bad that it somehow rises above the dross that surrounds it is truly remarkable.

  The genre’s most beloved piece of appalling prose was tapped out on duplicator stencils by a typist who, according to sci-fi critic David Langford, “could usefully have been replaced by a infinite number of monkeys”. The result was Jim Theis’s legendary fantasy epic The Eye of Argon – the worst fiction ever to see the light of day.

  Theis was a sixteen-year-old science-fiction fan living in St Louis, Missouri, when he submitted his work to a fanzine in 1970. Some time in the late 1970s, the Californian sci-fi writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro got hold of a copy and showed it to other fans. It received a huge and incredulous reaction and was soon copied and distributed widely around science-fiction fandom. Readings quickly became a common item on science-fiction convention programmes.

  The Eye of Argon is a sword-and-sorcery novella featuring the adventures of a wandering swordsman called Grignr. The plot is basically as follows: Grignr the Ecordian is thrown into a dungeon after a bar brawl, escapes after fashioning a makeshift knife from the pelvic bone of a dead rat, attacks a group of priests offering up a sacrifice of a prostitute to their heathen god, then steals a bauble, the Eye of Argon, which metamorphoses into a cloud of vapour and attacks our hero, Grignr. (For those unable to contain their curiosity, please see Appendix IV – Chapter 1 of The Eye of Argon.)

  Theis’s book has been made into a party game at sci-fi conventions. The challenge is to read it aloud, straight-faced, without choking and falling over. Strict rules apply, including reading all of Theis’s mistakes exactly as written. Make it through a whole page without laughing and you become a “grand master”.

  The version which currently circulates on the Internet was painstakingly transcribed by Don Simpson from Theis’s original and bears his note at the bottom:

  No mere transcription can give the true flavour of the or
iginal printing of The Eye of Argon. It was mimeographed with stencils cut on an élite manual typewriter. Many letters were so faint as to be barely readable, others were overstruck, and some that were to be removed never got painted out with correction fluid. Usually, only one space separated sentences, while paragraphs were separated by a blank line and were indented ten spaces. Many words were grotesquely hyphenated. And there were illustrations — I cannot do them justice in mere words, but they were a match for the text. These are the major losses of this version (#02) of The Eye of Argon.

  Many people who have read The Eye of Argon find it hard to believe the story was not a collaborative effort or an intentional sci-fi satire but, in a rare 1984 radio interview, Jim Theis confessed that he was genuinely hurt by the negative reaction to his work. A copy of a 1995 reprint was sent to him, with no response. He died without addition to his literary canon in 2002.

  Most Non-PC Travel Guide

  In 1850, the British explorer Francis Galton spotted a gap in the travel guide market. There was, he thought, a shortage of useful information for those who had to “rough it” in a foreign land. He followed up with his 366-page book Art of Travel.

  Galton’s guide was packed with such useful tips as: how to stay afloat by using an inflated antelope skin; how to keep your clothes dry in a rainstorm (take them off and sit on them, in case you were wondering); how to avoid blisters (break a raw egg into each boot and fill your socks with soapsuds); how to get rid of lice (make yourself a necklace out of mercury, old tea leaves and saliva); and how to prevent your teeth from falling out if you catch scurvy (spread treacle and lime juice on your gums).

  Galton also offers tips on dealing with foreigners. He advises that “a skulking negro may sometimes be smelt out like a fox”. In a section on “The Management of Savages”, he wrote: “A sea captain generally succeeds in making an excellent impression on savages . . . if a savage does mischief, look at him as you would a kicking mule, or a wild animal whose nature it is to be unruly and vicious, and keep your temper quite unruffled . . . a savage cannot endure the steady labour that we Anglo-Saxons have been bred to support. His nature is adapted to alternatives of laziness and severe exertion.”

  Art of Travel is no longer in print.

  “If anything remains more or less unchanged, it will be the role of women.”

  David Riesman, conservative American social scientist, 1967

  Worst Foreign Language Phrasebook

  In 1855, Pedro Carolino decided to write the first ever Portuguese-English phrase book. He wasn’t about to be put off by the fact that he did not actually speak any English. Inconveniently, he also lacked a Portuguese-English dictionary. But what he did have was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. Using both dictionaries, Carolino first translated the Portuguese expression into French, then translated the phrase from French to English. The result was the accidental classic O Novo Guia da Conversação em Portuguez e Inglez (Guide to the Conversation in Portuguese and English), now better known as English As She Is Spoke.

  It was not the contribution to linguistics Carolino had hoped for.12 For example, armed with Carolino’s guide, a Portuguese traveller could complain about his writing implements (“This pen are good for notting”); insult a barber (“What news tell me? All hairs dresser are newsmonger”); complain about the orchestra (“It is a noise which to cleave the head”); or go hunting (“Let aim it! Let make fire him!”). They might also puzzle over what it means “to craunch a marmoset”, or “he burns one’s self the brains”, or the lesson contained in such well-known English proverbs as “nothing some money, nothing Swiss”.

  In one section, Carolino lists various body parts under the heading “Of The Man”:

  The fat of the leg

  The ham

  The brain

  The brains

  The superior lip

  The inferior lip

  The reins

  In the next chapter, he takes on “Familiar Phrases”:

  Have you say that?

  At what O’Clock Dine him?

  Have you understanded?

  The thunderbolt is falling down

  No budge you there

  Dress your hairs

  Will you a bon?

  Do not might one’s understand to speak?

  These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth

  He has spit in my coat

  I am pinking me with a pin

  He do want to fall

  He do the devil at four

  Dry this wine

  He laughs at my nose, he jest by me

  The books ends with a handy list under the heading “Idiotisms and Proverbs”, including:

  The necessity don’t know the low.

  Few, few the bird make her nest.

  He is not valuable to breat that he eat.

  He sin in trouble water.

  A bad arrangement is better than a process.

  He has a good beak.

  To build castles in Espagnish.

  Cat scalded fear the cold water.

  With a tongue one go to Roma.

  Take out the live coals with the hand of the cat.

  A horse baared don’t look him the tooth.

  Take the occasion for the hairs.

  To do a wink to some body.

  So many go the jar to spring, than at last rest there.

  It want to beat the iron during it is hot.

  He is not so devil as he is black.

  It is better be single as a bad company.

  The stone as roll not heap up not foam.

  He has fond the knuckle of the business.

  There is not better sauce who the appetite.

  The pains come at horse and turn one’s self at foot.

  He is beggar as a church rat.

  So much go the jar to spring that at last it break there.

  To force to forge, becomes smith.

  Keep the chestnut of the fire with the cat foot.

  Friendship of a child is water into a basket.

  Tell me whom thou frequent, I will tell you which you are.

  After the paunch comes the dance.

  Of the hand to mouth, one lose often the soup.

  To buy cat in pocket.

  To be as a fish into the water.

  To make paps for the cats.

  To fatten the foot.

  To come back at their muttons.

  When the book was first published, authorship was jointly attributed to Pedro Carolino and José da Foncesca, a well-known author, almost certainly without the latter’s knowledge or consent. We can only guess that Carolino hoped it would sell more copies if he put a famous name on the cover.

  In 1869, Carolino brought out a new edition that he credited solely to himself. This edition was published in Peking, possibly to cash in on ignorance of proper English in the Far East. Carolino’s misbegotten phrasebook was stumbled upon by a British traveller in 1860s, in the Portuguese colony of Macao, off the coast of China. He was astonished to find that it was being actually used as a textbook in the island’s schools.

  It has also attracted many famous fans, including Mark Twain. In 1883, he wrote an introduction for the first American edition:

  In this world of uncertainties, there is, at any rate, one thing which may be pretty confidently set down as a certainty: and that is, that this celebrated little phrase-book will never die while the English language lasts. Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naïveté, are as supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare’s sublimities. Whatsoever is perfect in its kind, in literature, is imperishable: nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect, it must and will stand alone: its immortality is secure.

  O Novo Guia da Conversação em Portuguez e Inglez has since gone on to become a minor classic and was reprinted as recently as 2002.

  Worst Stage Actor

  Robert “R
omeo” Coates had them rolling in the aisles everywhere he went. The problem was he was supposed to be a serious actor. He was so very, very bad that, for a while, he was the most talked about thespian in Regency England.

  He was born in Antigua in 1772, the seventh child of a wealthy sugar plantation owner, Alexander Coates. His father was so rich that he was once approached by representatives of King George III asking for a loan of £5,000 to help defend an attack on Antigua from Spanish and French raiders. Coates senior casually wrote out a cheque for £10,000 and told them to keep the change.

  In spite of their wealth, the Coates family were not immune to eighteenth-century child mortality rates: eight of their children died in infancy or early childhood. Only Robert, the youngest, survived to adulthood. Alexander Coates doted on his only surviving son and, when Robert had just turned eight, took him to England for a private education. When Robert returned to Antigua at the end of his expensive schooling, he was expected to take his place beside his father as heir to the Coates plantation and fortune, but he had enjoyed his time abroad and it only made his homeland seem very dull, with little to offer in the way of amusement and entertainment. He had tasted the excitement of London’s West End and had fallen completely in love with the stage. Sadly, his ardour was unrequited.

  When Alexander Coates died in 1807, Robert inherited the estate and an annual income of £40,000 – around £1 million by today’s reckoning. At the first opportunity, he returned to England where he took up residence in fashionable Bath. He soon became a figure of great local curiosity. He was thirty-seven years old but looked older, his skin heavily wrinkled by the Caribbean sun. He was also quite dark-skinned – a great novelty at a time when women still used arsenic to make their skin fashionably pale. It was rumoured that he was half-African.