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Ern Malley

Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley (April 14, 1918 - July 23, 1943) was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. He has become one of the best-known names in the history of Australian poetry.

The story

According to the "biography" of Malley constructed by his inventors, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, Malley was born Ernest Lalor Malley in Liverpool in 1918 and migrated to Australia as a child with his parents and his older sister, Ethel. His father died in 1920, and after his mother's death in 1933, Malley lived alone in Sydney, working as an insurance salesman.

His life as a poet became known only after his premature death at the age of 25 from Graves Disease, in May 1943, when Ethel found a pile of unpublished poems among his belongings. Ethel Malley, supposedly, knew nothing about poetry, but a friend suggested that she send the poems to Max Harris, a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic in Adelaide, who in 1940 had started a modernist magazine called Angry Penguins.

Ethel sent them, along with a letter asking Harris's opinion of her late brother's work. There were 17 poems, none longer than a page, and all intended to be read in sequence under the title The Darkening Ecliptic. This was the total Malley oeuvre, but it was destined to cause a revolution in Australian cultural life.

The first poem in the sequence was called Durer: Innsbruck, 1495:

I had often cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,

Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colourful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters -

Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.

Now I find that once more I have shrunk

To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

About Angry Penguins

Harris read the poems with, as he later recalled, a mounting sense of excitement. Ern Malley, he thought, was a poet in the same class as W. H. Auden or Dylan Thomas. He showed them to his circle of literary friends, who agreed that a hitherto completely-unknown modernist poet of great importance had been discovered in suburban Australia. He decided to rush out a special edition of Angry Penguins and commissioned a painting by Sidney Nolan, based on the poems, for the cover.

The "Autumn 1944" edition of Angry Penguins appeared in June of 1945, owing to wartime printing delays. Harris eagerly promoted it around the small world of Australian writers and critics. The reaction was not what he had hoped or expected. An article appeared in the University of Adelaide student newspaper ridiculing the Malley poems and suggesting that Harris had written them himself, in some elaborate hoax. Others began to ask, who was this Ern Malley? Why had no one ever heard of him?

The Hoax Debate

On 17 June, the Adelaide Daily Mail raised the possibility that Harris was the hoaxed rather than the hoaxer. Alarmed, Harris hired a private detective to establish whether Ern and Ethel Malley existed or had ever done so. But by now, the Australian national press was on the trail. The next week, the Sydney Sunday Sun, which had been conducting some investigative reporting, ran a front-page story, alleging that the Ern Malley poems had in fact been written by two other young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart.

McAuley and Stewart, it turned out, had invented Ern and Ethel Malley out of thin air. They had written the whole of The Darkening Ecliptic in an afternoon, writing down the first thing that came into their heads, lifting words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare and a Dictionary of Quotations: "We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary."

McAuley and Stewart were both, at this time, in the Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, but before the war, they had been part of Sydney's Bohemian arts world. McAuley had acted and sung in left-wing revues at Sydney University. Both preferred early Modernism to its later forms. McAuley, for example, claimed that T. S. Eliot's Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock (1917) was genius, but the subsequent Waste Land (1922), regarded by many as Eliot's finest achievement, was an incoherent mess. Both men lamented "the loss of meaning and craftsmanship" in poetry. They particularly despised the well-funded Angry Penguins and were jealous of Harris's precocious success.

"Mr Max Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America," they wrote after the hoax was revealed. "The distinctive feature of the fashion, it seemed to us, was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.

"Our feeling was that by processes of critical self-delusion and mutual admiration, the perpetrators of this humourless nonsense had managed to pass it off on would-be intellectuals and Bohemians, both here and abroad, as great poetry.

"However," [they went on] "it was possible that we had simply failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions. The only way of settling the matter was by way of experiment. It was, after all, fair enough. If Mr Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject the poems, then the tables would have been turned."

Reaction

The Ern Malley hoax was on the front pages of the newspapers for weeks. Harris was humiliated, and Angry Penguins soon folded, although the magazine's demise had more to do with a libel case brought against Harris for an unconnected review and the emotional fall-out from events in the open marriage of its backers John Reed and his wife, Sunday.

Most people, even most educated people with an interest in the arts, were persuaded of the validity of McAuley and Stewart's "experiment." The two had deliberately written bad poetry, passed it off under a plausible alias to the country's most prominent publisher of modernist poetry, and had completely taken him in. Harris, they said, could not tell real poetry from fake, good from bad.

The Ern Malley hoax had long-lasting repercussions. To quote the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, "More important than the hoax itself was the effect it had on the development of Australian poetry. The vigorous and legitimate movement for modernism in Australian writing, espoused by many writers and critics in addition to the members of the Angry Penguins group, received a severe setback, and the conservative element was undoubtedly strengthened."

Controversy over Ern Malley continued for more than twenty years. It spread beyond Australia when it was learned that the British literary critic Herbert Read had been taken in by the hoax. Modernist novelists like Patrick White, and abstract painters, found themselves tarred with the Ern Malley brush. Since both McAuley and Stewart and the left-wing nationalist school around Vance and Nettie Palmer disliked the Angry Penguins version of modernism with equal venom, though for different reasons, Ern Malley cast a long shadow over Australian cultural life.

Historical perspective

McAuley went on to publish several volumes of poetry and, with Richard Krygier, founded the literary and cultural journal Quadrant. From 1961 he was professor of English at the University of Tasmania. He died in 1976.

Stewart settled permanently in Japan in 1966 and published two volumes of translations of traditional Japanese poetry which became best-sellers in Australia. He died in 1995.

Harris, however, once he recovered from his humiliation in the Ern Malley hoax, made the best of his notoriety. From 1951 to 1955, he published another literary magazine, which he called Ern Malley's Journal. In 1961, as a gesture of defiance, he re-published the Ern Malley poems, maintaining that whatever McAuley and Stewart had intended to do, they had, in fact, produced some memorable poems. Harris went on to become a successful bookseller and newspaper columnist. His political views moved significantly to the right as he got older (he had been a member of the Communist Party at the time of the hoax), and in the mid-1960s, he claimed to sympathise with McAuley and Stewart's motivations in creating Ern Malley. He died in 1995.

Malley

Ern Malley himself, though fictional, has become a celebrated figure. The poems are regularly re-published and widely quoted - far more so than anything McAuley or Stewart wrote under their own names. When the Australian historian Humphrey McQueen called his history of modernism in Australia The Black Swan of Trespass, the allusion was immediately recognised. Australia is now quite proud of Ern Malley, a genuine literary celebrity in a country that has not produced many.

At a more serious level, some literary critics take the view that McAuley and Stewart outsmarted themselves in their concoction of the Ern Malley poems. "Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators," Max Harris wrote. Harris, of course, had a vested interest in Malley, but others have agreed with his assessment. Robert Hughes wrote:

"The basic case made by Ern's defenders was that his creation proved the validity of surrealist procedures: that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody; and though this can't be argued on behalf of all the poems, some of which are partly or wholly gibberish, it contains a ponderable truth... The energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value, and that is why he continues to haunt our culture."

Hughes' comments however ignore the fact that the Malley poems incorporate many lines and images from McAuley and Stewart's own poetry, although in a deliberately-disjointed manner. The first Malley poem Durer: Innsbruck, 1495 was an unpublished serious effort by McAuley, only lightly edited to appeal to Harris. Much of what Hughes admired in the Malley poems originated in the work of McAuley and Stewart, poets he claimed to dislike.

Joanna Murray-Smith's play Angry Young Penguins (1987) is based on these events, and Peter Carey's novel My Life as a Fake draws some of its inspiration from the Ern Malley affair. Elliot Perlman recounts the tale of the Ern Malley hoax in his 2003 novel Seven Types of Ambiguity. In 2005, "The Black Swan of Trespass", a surrealist play about the real life of a self-admittedly fictional Ern Malley by Lally Katz and Chris Kohn, premiered at the Melbourne Malthouse Theatre.