The Accidental Plough

I’ve never been too sure about anagrams, but there’s no denying that they can, on occasion, yield enticing results. See here, for instance. There can be very few phrases lurking in that list that a budding writer would overlook as inspiration for a worthy story. Who would not wish to weave some words upon the alluring loom of ‘creation temple beguiler’ or ‘impermeable ingot lecture’? The accidental plough prepares fertile fields indeed.

One’s mind turns, of course, to the late (but not quite great) Ernest Kinley-Fowlington, whose based an entire career on such anagrammatic games. Kinley-Fowlington had wanted to be a writer from an early age, but struggled to find a subject. His upbringing had been satisfactory, his social position ever-comfortable and his personal relations unstrained. Whichever way he looked at it there were few dark emotional ponds in which to cast the net of his literary aspirations. And so he seized inspiration from somewhere else entirely, using accidental methods to conjure up a context, from which he flew with unexpected confidence.

The idea was simple. The title of every story he ever wrote (and he wrote several hundred) consisted of an anagram of his own name. This was not only the title: it was also the diving board, the starting line – the boiling water waiting patiently for the uncooked egg. Once he’d found a new title he was away. Wherever that title pointed, he went. On a blank page he wrote nothing. But given another anagram he was fine. He was off again.

I’d be lying if I said that all Kinley-Fowlington’s stories are worth reading. But there are a few gems kicking around in the dirt. One of his later tales, To Sly New Florentine King (1987) – which consists of a fourteen pages of careful advice metered out to a non-existent Italian king – has always moved me; so too Gentility Knows Lone Fern, the novella-length study of a melancholy gentleman who falls in love with a small clump of fern. Though he was never really a humorist, a couple of stories are delightfully funny – Inserting Kennel Wolf Toy, for instance, or (continuing the kennel theme) the slyly elegiac Left-wing Sonority Kennel, both of which can be found in his 1978 collection Gentlefolk Win Oyster Inn.

Inevitably, too much Kinley-Fowlington can be tiresome – and, for all the pleasures of his anagrammatical findings, one ultimately senses the lack of weight behind his work. There was a good decade’s worth of fine work in this game of his; unfortunately he played it for forty-something years. He could at least have changed the anagram source – which would have saved us countless elks – but no, he persisted with the original plan right up into the end.

Still, his very last story was one of his best. Lenin Fleeing Knotty Rows is a riot of a yarn, with a historical significance hitherto unseen in Kinley-Fowlington’s work – and a denouement to die for (which, as it happens, is pretty much what he did).