Ern Malley - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

's most celebrated literary hoax. The poet, and his entire body of work, were created in one day in 1944 by writers James McAuley

James McAuley

James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism.-Life and career:...

and Harold Stewart

Harold Stewart

Harold Frederick Stewart was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered as the enigmatic other half of Ern Malley.Stewart's work has been associated with James McAuley and A. D...

as a hoax on Max Harris, Angry Penguins
Angry Penguins
Angry Penguins was an Australian literary and artistic avant-garde movement of the 1940s. The movement was stimulated by a modernist magazine of the same name published by the surrealist poet Max Harris, who founded the magazine in 1940, at the age of 18....

, the modernist

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

magazine he had founded and edited, as well as on contemporary trends in poetry.

In the decades after their publication, the hoax had a negative impact on the cause of modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

and Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...

Background

James McAuley and Harold Stewart were both, in 1944, in the Army Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs

Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs

DORCA, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs was a mysterious and difficult to categorise think tank and possibly intelligence organisation within the Australian Army in WWII....

. Before the war they had been part of Sydney's Bohemian

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...

arts world. McAuley had acted and sung in left-wing

Left-wing politics

In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...

revue

Revue

A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance and sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century American popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from 1916 to 1932...

s at Sydney University

University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

. Both preferred early Modernism

Modernism

to its later forms. McAuley, for example, claimed that T.S. Eliot's Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of...

(1917) was genius, but the subsequent Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

(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 modernist

Modernism

poetry magazine Angry Penguins and were jealous of the precocious success of Max Harris, the magazine's founder and editor.

Harris was a 22-year-old avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

poet and critic in Adelaide

Adelaide

Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...

, who in 1940, at the age of 18, had started Angry Penguins.

Creating the hoax

McAuley and Stewart decided to perpetrate a hoax on Harris and Angry Penguins by submitting to the magazine nonsensical poetry, which they felt captured the worst of modernist tendencies, under the guise of a fictional poet. They came up with a fictional biography for the poet "Ern Malley", who they claimed had died the year before at the age of 25. They chose the name "Malley" as a pun on the word Mallee

Mallee (habit)

Mallee is the growth habit of certain eucalypt species that grow with multiple stems springing from an underground lignotuber, usually to a height of no more than ten metres...

, denoting a class of Australian native vegetation and a bird, the Malleefowl

Malleefowl

The Malleefowl is a stocky ground-dwelling Australian bird about the size of a domestic chicken...

. Then, in one afternoon, they wrote his entire body of work: 17 poems, none longer than a page, and all intended to be read in sequence under the title The Darkening Ecliptic.

Their writing style, as they described it, was to write 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." They also included many bits of their own poetry, though in a deliberately disjointed manner.

The first poem in the sequence, Durer: Innsbruck, 1495, was an unpublished serious effort by McAuley, lightly edited to appeal to Harris:

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.

David Brooks

David Brooks (author)

David Gordon Brooks is an Australian author.He graduated from the Australian National University in 1974. He married Alison Summers in 1975. Brooks and Summers then studied abroad and received their M.A. degrees from the University of Toronto...

argued in his 2011 book, The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette
Adoré Floupette
Adoré Floupette is the collective pseudonym of French authors Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire used for their 1885 literary spoof titled Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette, a collection of poems satirising French symbolism and the Decadent movement....

and a Secret History of Australian Poetry, that the Ern Malley hoax was modelled on the 1885 satire on French Symbolism

Symbolism (arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

and the Decadent movement

Decadent movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...

, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette by Henri Beauclair

Henri Beauclair

Henri Eugène Amédée Beauclair was a French poet, novelist, and journalist. He was the chief editor of the daily newspaper Le Petit Journal from 1906 to 1914...

and Gabriel Vicaire.

Biography of "Ern Malley"

According to his inventors' fictitious biography, Ernest Lalor Malley was born 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

Graves' disease

Graves' disease is an autoimmune disease where the thyroid is overactive, producing an excessive amount of thyroid hormones...

, in May 1943, when Ethel found a pile of unpublished poems among his belongings. The fictitious Ethel Malley supposedly knew nothing about poetry, but a friend suggested that she send the poems to someone who could examine them.

Carrying out the hoax

McAuley and Stewart then sent Harris a letter, purported to be from Ethel, containing the poems, and asking for his opinion of her late brother's work.

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

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...

. 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

Sidney Nolan

Sir Sidney Robert Nolan OM, AC was one of Australia's best-known painters and printmakers.-Early life:Nolan was born in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, on 22 April 1917. He was the eldest of four children. His family later moved to St Kilda. Nolan attended the Brighton Road State School and...

, based on the poems, for the cover.

The "Autumn 1944" edition of Angry Penguins appeared in June 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

University of Adelaide

The University of Adelaide is a public university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third oldest university in Australia...

student newspaper ridiculing the Malley poems and suggesting that Harris had written them himself in some elaborate hoax.

The hoax revealed

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 McAuley and Stewart.

The South Australian police impounded the issue of Angry Penguins devoted to "The Darkening Ecliptic" on the grounds that Malley’s poems were obscene.

The Ern Malley hoax was on the front pages of the newspapers for weeks, and Harris was humiliated.

"Mr. Max Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America," McAuley and Stewart 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."

Immediate impact

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 fallout from events in the open marriage of its backers John Reed

John Reed (art patron)

John Reed was an Australian art editor and patron, notable for supporting and collecting of Australian art and culture with his wife Sunday Reed....

and his wife, Sunday.

Most people, including 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

Herbert Read

Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....

had been taken in by the hoax. Modernist novelists like Patrick White

Patrick White

Patrick Victor Martindale White , an Australian author, is widely regarded as an important English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, he published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays.White's fiction employs humour, florid prose, shifting narrative...

, 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

Vance and Nettie Palmer

Vance and Nettie Palmer were two of Australia's best-known literary figures from the 1920s to the 1950s. Edward Vivian "Vance" Palmer was a novelist, dramatist, essayist and critic. Janet Gertrude "Nettie" Palmer was a poet, essayist and Australia's leading literary critic...

disliked the Angry Penguins version of modernism with equal venom, though for different reasons, Ern Malley cast a long shadow over Australian cultural life.

In a 1975 interview with Earle Hackett

Earle Hackett

Dr Earle Hackett was an Australian pathologist and haematologist born in Cork, Ireland, son of a successful General Practitioner...

, Sidney Nolan credited Ern Malley with inspiring him to paint his first Ned Kelly

Ned Kelly

Edward "Ned" Kelly was an Irish Australian bushranger. He is considered by some to be merely a cold-blooded cop killer — others, however, consider him to be a folk hero and symbol of Irish Australian resistance against the Anglo-Australian ruling class.Kelly was born in Victoria to an Irish...

series (1946-47), saying "It made me take the risk of putting against the Australian bush an utterly strange object."

McAuley, Stewart and Harris in later years

McAuley went on to publish several volumes of poetry and, with Richard Krygier

Richard Krygier

Henry Richard Krygier , was an Australian anti-Communist publisher and journalist, and a founder of Quadrant magazine....

, founded the literary and cultural journal Quadrant

Quadrant (magazine)

Quadrant is an Australian literary and cultural journal. The magazine takes a conservative position on political and social issues, describing itself as sceptical of 'unthinking Leftism, or political correctness, and its "smelly little orthodoxies"'. Quadrant reviews literature, as well as...

. From 1961 he was professor of English at the University of Tasmania

University of Tasmania

The University of Tasmania is a medium-sized public Australian university based in Tasmania, Australia. Officially founded on 1 January 1890, it was the fourth university to be established in nineteenth-century Australia...

. 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. Harris died in 1995.

Subsequent re-appreciation

The fictional Ern Malley achieved a measure of celebrity. The poems are regularly re-published and quoted.

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

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...

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."

Interestingly, much of what Hughes admired in the Malley poems originated in the work of McAuley and Stewart, poets he claimed to dislike.

In the "Individual Notes on Works and Authors" in the "Special Collaborations Issue" of Locus Solus

Locus Solus (journal)

Locus Solus was a journal of experimental poetry and prose that published five issues in 1961 and 1962. Locus Solus was edited by the novelist Harry Mathews and poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Jimmy Schuyler, all of whom contributed content. The journal was named after the novel Locus Solus...

, Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...

wrote, "Though Harris was wrong about who Ern Malley 'was' (if one can use that word here), I find it hard not to agree with his judgment of Malley's poetry."

The American poet John Ashbery

John Ashbery

said of Ern Malley, in a 1988 interview in the magazine Jacket
Jacket (magazine)
Jacket is an on-line literary periodical edited by the Australian poet John Tranter. The first issue was in October 1997.Each new number of the magazine is posted at the Web site piece by piece until the new issue is full, when the next issue starts. Past issues remain posted as well...

"I think it was the first summer I was at Harvard as a student, and I discovered a wonderful bookstore there where I could get modern poetry – which I’d never been able to lay my hands on very much until then – and they had the original edition of The Darkening Ecliptic with the Sidney Nolan cover. [....] I always had a taste for sort of wild experimental poetry – of which there really wasn’t very much in English in America at the time – and this poet suited me very well. [...] I am obliged to give a final examination in my poetry writing course [at Brooklyn College, NY], which I’m always rather hard put to do, since we haven’t really studied anything. The students have been writing poems of varying degrees of merit, and though I give them reading lists they tend to ignore them, after first demanding them. And the way the course is set up there is no way of examining them on their reading. And anyway they shouldn’t have to pass an examination because they’re poets who are writing poetry, and I don’t like the idea of grading poems. So in order to pass the examination time I had to think of various subterfuges, and one of them is to use one of Malley’s poems and another forbiddingly modern poem – frequently one of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Mercian Hymns’. And asking them if they can guess which one is the real poem by a respected contemporary poet, and which one is a put-on intended to ridicule modern poetry, and what are their reasons. And I think they are right about fifty per cent of the time, identifying the fraud... [the] fraudulent poem."

The final irony is enduring fame: Malley is better known and more widely read today than either McAuley or Stewart.

External links

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Background

Creating the hoax

Biography of "Ern Malley"

Carrying out the hoax

The hoax revealed

Immediate impact

McAuley, Stewart and Harris in later years

Subsequent re-appreciation

See also

Further reading

External links