One of the great traditions of SF fandom is the late night Eye of Argon reading.
For those who aren’t familiar with this masterpiece of mixed metaphors, misused modifiers, and messy syntax, The Eye of Argon is a Short Story So Bad It’s Good. Written by Jim Theis in 1970, its first appearance in print was in a fanzine, OSFAN #10, accompanied by mediocre illustrations that were no way improved by being drawn onto a mimeograph sheet. Theis, who was only seventeen when he wrote his first and only published story, was attempting the sort of swashbuckling barbarian-meets-danger tale epitomized by Robert E. Howard’s Conan, complete with evil priests, a beautiful woman, and a cursed artifact, the eponymous Eye of Argon.
Alas, like so many writers, Theis’ reach exceeded his grasp. He didn’t quite understand that it’s impossible to kick someone between the testicles, for instance, or that there’s no such thing as a “scarlet emerald.” His mighty-thewed hero, Grignr, who escapes from jail thanks to a dagger fashioned from the pelvis of a rat (no, I am not making this up), has a name that defies pronunciation unless one is fluent in Serbo-Croat (and maybe not even then), while the dialogue consists of beauties like
"Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian", gasped the first soldier.
"Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!" returned Grignr.
or
Glancing upward, the alluring complexion noted the stalwart giant as he rapidly approached. A faint glimmer sparked from the pair of deep blue ovals of the amorous female as she motioned toward Grignr, enticing him to join her. The barbarian seated himself upon a stool at the wenches side, exposing his body, naked save for a loin cloth brandishing a long steel broad sword, an iron spiraled battle helmet, and a thick leather sandals, to her unobstructed view.
"Thou hast need to occupy your time, barbarian",questioned the female?
"Only if something worth offering is within my reach." Stated Grignr,as his hands crept to embrace the tempting female, who welcomed them with open willingness.
Worst of all, ending of the story inexplicably disappeared soon after publication, leaving readers guessing as to just what happened until a complete copy of OSFAN #10 surfaced in the Jack Williamson SF Library in New Mexico in 2004. This last half page, which is noticeably better written than everything that preceded it, is widely considered to be a hoax despite the survival of OSFAN #10, leading to the sort of highly detailed textual and forensic analysis more usually seen when dealing with ancient papyri.
Then again, we are talking about SF fen.
Of course something so beautifully, awfully terrible could not possibly remain hidden for long. The Eye of Argon, sans ending, was circulating among science fiction fans by the end of the 1970s. It soon became the object of something of a cult, especially after Samuel R. Delany claimed that he and a group of friends had written it at an early Clarion workshop as a lark. Wildside Press issued a trade paperback version in 2006 that contained the entire text, while several versions are available on the Internet. And of course, there are still Eye of Argon readings at dozens of conventions every year.
These are not readings by the author, of course. Jim Theis drifted away from fandom years ago, long before his story went much further than the people lucky enough to own a copy of OSFAN #10. No, these are very special readings, because it soon became evident that the best way to experience Grignr’s excellent adventure was to read it aloud, round robin style.
This is not nearly as easy as it sounds. Early copyists were careful to preserve every single misspelling, incoherent sentence, and misused adjective in the original, forcing readers to utter phrases like “Grignr advanced into the grips of the female's entrancing stare” or deliberately mispronounce common words like "blood" as "bllod" without cracking up and having to surrender the manuscript to the next hapless victim. I once saw a professional editor, veteran of years of slush piles, go into hysterics during an Eye of Argon reading when she got to “her lithe, opaque nose,” and I didn’t blame her for one nanosecond. Somewhere in the bowels of the Last Homely Shack East West of the Manhan is a ribbon I won for “Best Death,” earned for the time that I literally fell out of my chair and rolled about on the floor, laughing so hard I almost needed CPR to start breathing again.
Eye of Argon readings usually take place very late at night when convention-goers are already punchy and possibly somewhat drunk, which only makes it worse. Some readers have trained themselves to keep a straight face (one artist got through five whole pages and earned a standing ovation for her self-control at “Grignr spread his legs wide [page turn], into his mighty battle stance”), while others go to see where they’ll succumb this time. The story has become so popular that word has inevitably leaked out into the non-fannish world, where Theis inevitably learned that his juvenilia was being roundly mocked by hordes of nearsighted people in “And then Buffy staked Edward. The End” t-shirts. He was none too pleased, and fen insisting that his story was the object of derision only because they loved it didn't do much to mollify him before his death about ten years ago.
Such is the greatest of late night SF traditions, and if you, my dear readers, think that perhaps this is something unique to science fiction fandom…you would be wrong. Oh so wrong.
JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and their coterie have become legends. This group of writers, most of them associated with the University of Oxford, eventually grew to encompass Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Christopher Tolkien, Lewis' elder brother Warnie, Roger Lancelyn Green, Adam Fox, Hugo Dyson, R. A. "Humphrey" Havard, legendary medievalist J. A. W. Bennett, Lord David Cecil, and Nevill Coghill. They would meet either at the Eagle & Child pub or in Lewis's rooms to critique each others' writing, have a pint or two, and discuss literature in general. The Lord of the Rings, Out of the Silent Planet, and Charles Williams' All Hallows Eve all had their genesis at Inklings' meetings, and given Tolkien's propensity to revise his works into the ground, it's a safe bet that no one would have ever heard of Frodo, Aragorn, or Eowyn if the Inklings hadn't demanded that Tolkien keep writing.
It was not all serious at Inklings meetings, however; like most book lovers, Lewis and his friends enjoyed a good laugh from time to time. And so, on the nights when no one had a chapter to read, they would pull out a copy of an old book and start passing the book from hand to hand, each reading until he dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
The book was by a woman named Amanda McKittrick Ros, an otherwise average Irishwoman born Anna Margaret McKittrick in 1860 to a middle class Presbyterian family. Her works included the bestseller Irene Iddlesleigh, Delina Delaney, miscellaneous poems, and several other novels. She was the subject of a biography in the 1950s, a literary festival within the last decade, and a true legend of letters for being An Author So Bad She's Good.
Ros, a schoolteacher by training, had always wanted to write. Alas, her books had been rejected by numerous publishers until her long suffering first husband, a simple station agent named Andrew Ross, paid to have Irene Iddlesleigh published. Much to the surprise of everyone except Ros herself, her novels, which were firmly in the swooningly romantic tradition of Marie Corelli, soon became so popular that Ros was able to build herself a fine home, Iddlesleigh, from the proceeds of her works.
This could be any late 19th century popular novelist, so the reader is probably wondering why Tolkien, Lewis, and their friends found Amanda McKittrick Ros so amusing. Sentimental Victorian novels abound, so why were these the ones chosen by the men who made fantasy respectable? What distinguished Ros from, say, LT Meade or Baroness Orczy besides talent?
Behold:
"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!" (from Irene Iddlesleigh, Ros' first self-published book)
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? (the opening paragraph of Delina Delaney)
'Miss Shorthorn,' I said, with a sort of innocent emphasis, 'you will excuse my friend's loud jocularity. It is rather late, I know, for his feelings to adopt such a strain, but really the subject on which we were discussing was so hideously risible that I can well understand his lengthy laugh.' " (from Donald Dudley, The Bastard Critic, a short story carved out of the unfinished Six Months in Hell)
If these excerpts fail to convince you that Amanda McKittrick Ros was entirely worthy of the attention the Inklings paid her, there's more:
Madame Pear, villain of Helen Huddleston "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...."
while in a foreshadowing of
Clue most of the other characters in the book except the heroine (and a maid, Lily Lentil) are named after fruit, from Lord Raspberry and his sister Cherry to Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, and the best of all, the Earl of Grape.
It's not hard to see why contemporary critics fell all over themselves laughing uncontrollably lauding Ros; humorist Barry Pain called Irene Iddlesleigh "a thing that happens once in a million years" (and was dismissed as a "clay crab of corruption" by the furious author), while Mark Twain deemed it one of the most unintentionally funny books he'd ever read, which is saying something since one of his favorites was the immortal English Is She Is Spoke.
Even better, Ros didn't stop at prose. Oh, no! Versatile writer that she was, she wrote several equally notable books of poetry that included delights such as the patriotic "The Little Belgian Orphan" that urged British Tommies to:
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.
Or this wonderful excerpt from
The Lawyer, published in 1912 in
Poems of Puncture:
Beneath me here in stinking clumps
Lies Lawyer Largebones, all in lumps;
A rotten mass of clockholed clay,
Which grown more honeycombed each day.
See how the rats have scratched his face?
Now so unlike the human race;
I very much regret I can't
Assist them in their eager 'bent'
while poor Donald Dudley, who is of course a critic, is serenaded with the following memorable lines when he is whisked off to spend six months in Hell (presumably for giving
Irene Iddlesleigh or
St. Scandalbags a bad review):
Hurrah for the King of this Hell below,
Where mostly all of our folk doth go,
Not mizzled or decked in white array
Or straining to sing a roundelay
There you appear all naked and bare
Bereft of but one thing 'There, oh There.'
Others may prefer Ros' take on Westminster Abbey, home of the Poets' Corner, a place she could only observe since it's a fair bet that the Dean and Canons would collectively throw themselves into the Thames before letting Amanda Ros' remains anywhere near the likes of Thomas Hardy and Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
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.
Perhaps her single most memorable line, however, is the simple phrase that begins Ros' poem "Eastertide":
Dear Lord, the day of eggs is here....
Ros herself, who may have changed the spelling of her name to suggest a non-existent connection to a noble family called de Ros, was undaunted by critical brickbats and constant mockery. She soldiered on despite legal troubles stemming not from her books, but from her management of a lime kiln for a friend, endured the death of her beloved husband Andy after thirty years of marriage (and made his funeral memorable by having the hearse leave before several mourners she didn't like could follow), then remarried and devoted herself exclusively to her writing. Her last years saw new editions of
Irene Iddlesleigh and
Delina Delaney, and when she shuffled off this mortal coil to join the choir invisible, she could (and almost certainly did) look back on a life well lived.
Perhaps the last word should be left to this immortal Writer So Bad She's Good, beloved of Tolkien, hater of critics, and sui generis of Irish literature:
"I expect that I will be talked about at the end of 1,000 years."
I wouldn't bet against her, would you?
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