How to earn writing a bad name. Almost single-handedly.

"Every book is a failure." (George Orwell)

"Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred." (Gunther Grass, The Tin Drum)

"A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down." (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts." (Charles Dickens)

This piece – a case study of sorts I guess – is about an intrepid person. She started her working life as an advertising model and soon graduated to writing copy in her mentor’s ad agency. Not much later, he launched the bitchiest Hindi cinema-related magazine with our heroine at the helm as the editor. There she acquired the skills and insight and sharpened her claws. All this would help her become the No.1 Page 3 journalist later on. In the meantime, she survived a bad marriage and saved herself in time from getting hitched to a not-so-well-placed firang. Then came the biggest coup of her life. She married a highly successful and affluent businessman who would always keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Her career as a journalist too thrived. The only thing lacking was that, along the way, she never learned to write well. But she made up for it by her formula of “stealth and secrecy” and “dirty” writing. Then David Davidar, a Penguin India publisher, happened to her. This story about him, likely apocryphal, sums up what he thinks of her. Once, it seems, he heard the staff there guffawing her manuscript. Cease and desist, he admonished, her books pay your salaries. http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20080512&fname=Booksa&sid=1. Short of opening a Division called Pornguin India just for her, Penguin India rightly treats her as the only star they have in their stables judging solely by the sales of her sloppily written but racy novels and assorted non-fiction. After writing several novels laced with a surfeit of sex most of the titles of which start with the letter S, she decided to turn respectable and got down to writing a book of letters to her children, a marriage manual, an autobiography and so on until finally David “inspired” her to write about resurgent India, the way she tells it. That’s when I suspect the trouble started. Noticing suddenly that she was about the same age as India, she may have got a bad case of what is commonly known as delusions of grandeur. Else, can you imagine a shrewd operator like her going into the wildly narcissistic “Mein Hoon 60+ Mother India, yaney ki asli Bharatmata in a frilly pink taffeta dress” mode? And, insouciantly spouting stuff like “I am India”? And, then, after a bad review from a top-of-the-line national Indian magazine, going into a ballistic frenzy with: “The particular review … is a personal attack on me. The person who wrote it is a wife-beater; a freeloader; a frustrated has-been and a menace to society. There are other ratings that have already put the book on the best-seller list. So do I really care about that interview (sic!)”? http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/May112008/books2008051067312.asp. By the way, at http://shopping.sify.com/shopping/book_detail.php?prodid=15650603&cid=2, her India book is categorised as “Fiction”. It’s not a figment of my imagination. Check it out. But say what you may, our intrepid heroine’s books including this one seem to sell well against all odds – bad reviews, for one – like Bollywood movies. The reason for it, according to Prof Makarand Paranjape of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), http://makarand.com/acad/CulturalWorld-SystemandIndianEnglishLiterature.htm is that “if you can't write well at all”, make people want to “own” you. “The book is the next best thing; in any case, it is a symbol of her. She markets herself, not her writing." That probably explains why she is on the cover of Superstar India: From Incredible To Unstoppable (please read the Charles Dickens quote at the beginning). And, if the critics are to be believed, that is the best part of the new book. But please don’t forget that, notwithstanding her detractors, her Socialite Evenings, Starry Nights, Sultry Days and Second Thoughts are “course material in the University of London. Her work features extensively in Comparative Literature courses at Universities abroad and within India.” http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/29/asia/india-panel.php. Does all this remind you a bit of The Perils of Pauline?

Perils of Amanda, the hyper writer.

I’ve read about Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939), yes. I have not read a single one of her three novels, Irene Iddesleigh, Delina Delaney and Helen Huddleston, though. Her first novel was dubbed by the humourist Barry Pain "the book of the century". For his pains, he got the sobriquet, "clay crab of corruption" from the mistress of aliteration. It’s an irony of sorts that Pain has long been forgotten while Ros is still remembered. She’s even going to be celebrated in her native land, Ireland. Come 26 September, fans will read from Irene Iddesleigh in a Belfast pub. The one who manages to read the longest without laughing will win a copy of a Barbara Cartland novel, a return ticket to Ros’ hometown Larne and a copy of the writer’s ‘how-to’ handbook. Just to give you an idea of the daunting challenge, here’s an excerpt from Irene Iddesleigh: “The living sometimes learn the touchy tricks of the traitor, the tardy and the tempted; the dead have evaded the flighty earthy future and form to swell the retinue of retired rights, the righteous school of the invisible and the rebellious roar of the raging nothing.” Or, this bit from Delina Delaney: “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?” And, this gem from her poem, ‘Visiting Westminster Abbey’ (from Fumes of Formation – her other book of poetry being Poems of Puncture):

“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.”

Aldous Huxley insightfully explained the Ros phenomenon as follows: "In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented...”. He contnues: “This is how she tells us that Delina earned money by doing needlework: ‘She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness’.” Nick Page (In Search of the World's Worst Writer) tells us: "For Amanda, eyes are 'piercing orbs', legs are 'bony supports', people do not blush, they are 'touched by the hot hand of bewilderment'." Have alook at three woodcuts from Irene Iddesleigh here: http://www.oddbooks.co.uk/amanda/irenepics.html.