Remembering snack cakes past.

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Dear Dr. Boli: My French teacher keeps going on about Proust till I just want to strangle her. But one of the things she keeps talking about is madeleines, which seem to be some kind of thing French people eat while they’re sitting around being French, and I started to wonder what they are. I could go to a French bakery and find out, but they might start speaking French, and if I have to hear another word of French after listening to Mrs. Costello butcher the language in third period it will just about kill me. So I thought I’d ask you: What are madeleines? —Sincerely, Olivia, Bored Out of Her Mind in Mrs. Costello’s Third-Period French Class.

Dear Miss: Madeleines are Hostess Twinkies stamped in a cockleshell mold, and with the filling removed. French people find them very evocative. They bring back old memories of things past, in the same way that, for Americans, unaltered Hostess Twinkies bring back memories of metal lunchboxes and food fights in the elementary-school cafeteria.

Once in a while, one is sitting and reading, minding one’s own business, when a stray thought comes careening up from the cerebellum, knocking every other idea out of the way and shoving its way to the front. It happened only yesterday afternoon to your servant the editor of this Magazine, and the stray thought made its home in his mind and would give him no peace.

The thought was that a certain literary mystery had a very simple solution that had been neglected by literary critics. It was a solution found in the works of Amanda McKittrick Ros, and especially in her first and most famous novel, Irene Iddesleigh.

Amanda McKittrick Ros was much admired by Mark Twain, C. S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley, among many others. They admired her immunity to good taste and her ability to pile up heaps of polysyllabic alliteration that veiled and befogged any meaning she might originally have started out to convey: she had a gift for awful prose—lush, extravagant, infinitely-labored-over awful prose—that no succeeding writer has matched, let alone surpassed. Critics quickly placed her in the first rank of truly bad novelists, and she has kept her reputation untarnished since then.

If you have not yet made the acquaintance of Mrs. Ros, you can find Irene Iddesleigh at Project Gutenberg. But it will be enough to quote a few passages, and then Dr. Boli is confident that his readers will see how they solve one of the outstanding literary mysteries of our time.

Arouse the seeming deadly creature to that standard of joy and gladness which should mark his noble path! Endow him with the dewdrops of affection; cast from him the pangs of the dull past, and stamp them for ever beneath the waves of troubled waters; brighten his life as thou wouldst that of a faded flower; and when the hottest ray of that heavenly orb shall shoot its cheerful charge against the window panes of Dunfern Mansion, the worthy owner can receive it with true and profound thankfulness.

Was that enough of Mrs. Ros? No? Then how about this passage:

When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life.

But perhaps, to understand our author’s skill as a novelist, we need something in a more narrative vein:

Better leave her to the freedom of a will that ere long would sink the ship of opulence in the sea of penury, and wring from her the words:—“Leave me now, deceptive demon of deluded mockery; lurk no more around the vale of vanity, like a vindictive viper; strike the lyre of living deception to the strains of dull deadness, despair and doubt; and bury on the brink of benevolence every false vow, every unkind thought, every trifle of selfishness and scathing dislike, occasioned by treachery in its mildest form!”

And now the literary mystery: Where did James Joyce find his chief inspiration for Finnegans Wake? This mystery we may now regard as solved.