There's a very, very brief biography of this Erica Wagner on
the Granta website. There appear to be several Erica Wagners in circulation, but this one is the author of
Gravity and a member of the
English Pen Executive Committee.
To be perfectly honest, her comments about Tolkien seem to have been inspired largely by the hopelessly under-researched article by the
Times Ireland correspondant. Had Tolkien actually led the Inklings in the sort of literary derision described in that article, someone who regarded his work as somewhat sub-par might well be rather offended; however, I think it much more likely that C.S. Lewis came up with this game, since he was an Ulsterman and my googling of Amanda McKittrick Ros turned up a
biography in which she is described as "C.S. Lewis' favourite bad writer".
I describe the article as 'hopelessly under-researched' because I could have written exactly the same article, without mistakenly saying that J.R.R. Tolkien was the leader of the Inklings, after approximately ten minutes on the Internet. What the Ireland correspondant of the
Times has done is to find an article about the event in Belfast on the
Culture Northern Ireland website, google Amanda McKittrick Ros, then make a few assumptions based on Tolkien's membership of the Inklings because people are likely to recognise his name. The complete absence of any knowledge about the Inklings on the part of both the author of the original article and the literary editor of
The Times can be seen in the description of Tolkien as their leader (if they had possessed any such thing, it would have been C.S. Lewis) and Mrs. Wagner's use of the phrase 'supercilious dons' (one Inkling was a G.P. and another an army officer; what they had in common was Lewis, not the University of Oxford).
The B.B.C. have done rather a better job of regurgitating the
Culture Northern Ireland article with their offering
Is this the world's worst writer?, although
inter alia Reuters and, believe it or not, a Turkish newspaper have also run the story. All of which begs the question: why buy
The Times if you have an internet connection?
Having said that, I'd like to return to Erica Wagner's comments. I feel a certain amount of her indignation with people who insist on ridiculing the less talented, and "the hot hand of bewilderment" (I would say "discomfiture") is a metaphor that I wouldn't have minded inventing either. However, as a pub game, neither intended as sensible literary criticism nor played for the purpose of humiliating the author, the Inklings Challenge sounds like fun. A similar game used to be played at fantasy conventions with Jim Theis' execrable
The Eye of Argon, and in this case his detractors didn't even have the common courtesy to wait until he was dead.
I'm quite uplifted to see one of Tolkien's detractors denying the existence of objective standards in literature (whilst still describing his writing - in this case almost certainly the first ten chapters of
The Lord of the Rings - as 'meretricious tosh'). At least she admits that she isn't the ultimate authority on literary quality, and she also makes a valid point: one man's meat is another man's poison. However, having read some of Ros' work, I can't help but think that the article would have gone unchallenged were it not for the mention of Tolkien's name.