Beware the Muddy Drops of Rancid Rascality

Back in 2012 in a blog titled “Grey Natter,” I rewrote the opening paragraph of Fifty Shades of Grey to be more like the opening of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. My goal, which I neglected to state at the time, must have been to lift the much-maligned prose of FSG into the lofty realms of literary fiction. At the end of the blog, I even patted myself on the metaphorical back for succeeding. You can judge for yourself:

It was the best of hair, it was the worst of hair, it was the age of being ill, it was the age of ordeals, it was the season of not sleeping with it wet, it was the spring of reciting mantras, it was the winter of eye rolls, we had nothing but blue eyes too big before us, we were all going to wear ponytails, we were all going to look semi-presentable.

Looking back, I have to say (of course I have to say it — who else would?) that I didn’t do half bad at proselevating the FSG snippet. Today, however, I may have met my Waterloo in this arena. Consider this opening text:

Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waste of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity, dash it against the rock of gossip, better still, allow it to remain with the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn. Such were a few remarks of Irene as she paced the beach of limited freedom, alone and unprotected. Sympathy can wound the breast of trodden patience — it hath no rival to insure the feelings we possess, save that of sorrow.

These lines introduce us to Irene Iddesleigh, an 1897 novel by Amanda McKittrick Ros. We have the novel thanks to Amanda’s husband, who underwrote the publishing costs as a tenth-anniversary gift to his wife. One critic describes Ros’ style as having “the final merit of concealing thought and plot. Your mind rocks along in an amiable delirium.” I learned all this reading Michael Dirda’s Washington Post article “What’s the worst novel ever? It might be this 19th-century train wreck.”

If you want the whole story of Irene, Dirda provides it. I will forgo a recap of it here and concentrate on my real task, which comes in two parts. First, find an example of literary fiction that reeks of high writing style and critical acclaim and then transform Ros’ wordslaughtering to emulate it. My first thought was War and Peace, but it begins in French, which I have still failed to learn. So, forget that one. Then I remembered Catch-22. Here’s how the Joseph Heller novel opens:

It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him. Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice, The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.

All right. Here goes my Catch-22 version of Irene:

It was troubled waters at first glance. The moment Irene spied Oscar [her lover] treading the beach of limited freedom, she foolishly abandoned her honor to be dashed cruelly against the rock of gossip. Irene was in the ICU suffering a pain in her oasis of futurity that fell just shy of becoming the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn. The doctors were muddled by this fact. If it became the bosom, they could pour chilled waste upon it as a curative. If it didn’t become the bosom, they could release her and thus heal the wound of their trodden patience. But this just being short of the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn all the time left them unsure of the feelings they possessed, save that of sorrow.

Not bad. Not good but not bad.

I must admit at this point that, when I began this exercise, I thought I might have a new career in saving the world from bad prose by parodying it, becoming, if you will, a sort of on-call roast writer. But then I read this paragraph from Dirda’s article on Irene:

Today, what stands out from the novel — aside from its cliched plot turns and winding, elaborate sentences — are its truly bizarre “poetic” expressions: “the meddling mouth of extravagance swallows every desire, and eats the heart of honesty with pickled pride,” “the lonely stare of grave bewilderment,” “inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery,” “the village of Opportunity,” “the tuitional click of bygone attachment,” “bathed in the ocean of oblivious ostentation,” “the lake of evasion,” “the muddy drops of rancid rascality” and, not least, the mysterious “polluted stocks of magnified extension.”

There’s no way I can top that. All that is left for me, then, is to hurl myself immediately into the lake of evasion. Mind the splash.