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The Ern Malley Affair
When the young, successful and beautiful Australian literary editor, Max Harris, received out of the blue a package of poems by a recently deceased poet, Ern Malley, he was convinced that he had stumbled on the work of a young genius.
392 pages, Paperback
First published October 16, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
June 8, 2012
This is a true story, and an amazing one. The “Ern Malley affair” was a famous literary hoax in 1940s Australia: without doubt, the greatest literary hoax of all time. It began when Max Harris, young editor of the Adelaide-based avant-garde magazine Angry Penguins, received a package from a certain Ethel Malley, containing The Darkening Ecliptic, a manuscript of surrealistic poems by her brother Ern, a Melbourne garage mechanic, who had died recently at the age of twenty-five. Did Harris think they were any good? Did he ever! Harris at once pronounced Malley a genius, and a lavish special commemorative issue of Angry Penguins was devoted to Ern’s poems. Then the truth came out. There was no Ern, and no Ethel either. Ern’s “works of genius” had been cobbled together in an afternoon by two traditionalist poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, in an attempt to discredit the avant-garde.
Up to a point, they did: Max Harris was certainly never the same again, especially after the South Australian authorities decided that the Malley poems were obscene and dragged the young publisher through a public trial. The one-time enfant terrible of the University of Adelaide ended his days not as the great novelist, poet, or even literary editor he had imagined he would be, but as a canting, boorish newspaper columnist, churning out opinion pieces for Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile, hoaxer-in-chief James McAuley, following his youthful jape, became an arch-conservative, founding the right-wing Australian journal Quadrant, while Stewart, ever the more interesting of the two, moved to Japan where he became a devotee of Zen and made collages. Interviewed in later years, Stewart never wanted to talk about the Malley business, and said that his old life in Australia all seemed like a dream.
But the Malley story was far from over. If Ern’s fame as a great poet had been brief, his fame as a hoax kept on growing, and has not abated to this day. The Malley poems confront us with crucial literary questions. With Malley, we are by no means a world away from “exquisite corpse” poems, from The Waste Land (that great modernist echo chamber of allusions), from the cut-ups and fold-ins of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, from the whole panoply of surrealist techniques. When David Bowie glues together random strips of words to write his lyrics (“Serious moonlight, indeed!” as a friend of mine once exclaimed), he is very much in the tradition of “Ern.” Are these techniques all to be condemned? And how much, in the end, does authorial intention matter, as opposed to the words on the page?
There are lines in The Darkening Ecliptic that are better (more haunting, more simply memorable) than almost anything in “real” Australian poetry: “Rise from the wrist, o kestrel / Mind, to a clear expanse”; “My blood becomes a Damaged Man / Most like your Albion” (from a poem addressed to William Blake); “Princess, you lived in Princess St., / Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun / With the left hand”; “I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.” Are the Malley poems just rubbish? Or did the compilers of this hasty oeuvre, in mimicking surrealist techniques, inadvertently liberate a deeper world of meaning? In any case, Ern took on a life of his own, and soon became a cult figure, the missing genius of Australian literature. The artist Sidney Nolan painted his portrait.
I’ve often thought that the Malley affair is a classic Australian movie just waiting to be made. The story formed the basis of Peter Carey’s much fictionalised account, My Life as a Fake (2002), but the Malley story is compelling enough without magic realist embellishments. Michael Heyward’s book includes the full text of Ern’s legendary manuscript. Almost sixty years later, the enigma remains. As Ern put it, “I am still / The black swan of trespass on alien waters.”
Up to a point, they did: Max Harris was certainly never the same again, especially after the South Australian authorities decided that the Malley poems were obscene and dragged the young publisher through a public trial. The one-time enfant terrible of the University of Adelaide ended his days not as the great novelist, poet, or even literary editor he had imagined he would be, but as a canting, boorish newspaper columnist, churning out opinion pieces for Rupert Murdoch. Meanwhile, hoaxer-in-chief James McAuley, following his youthful jape, became an arch-conservative, founding the right-wing Australian journal Quadrant, while Stewart, ever the more interesting of the two, moved to Japan where he became a devotee of Zen and made collages. Interviewed in later years, Stewart never wanted to talk about the Malley business, and said that his old life in Australia all seemed like a dream.
But the Malley story was far from over. If Ern’s fame as a great poet had been brief, his fame as a hoax kept on growing, and has not abated to this day. The Malley poems confront us with crucial literary questions. With Malley, we are by no means a world away from “exquisite corpse” poems, from The Waste Land (that great modernist echo chamber of allusions), from the cut-ups and fold-ins of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, from the whole panoply of surrealist techniques. When David Bowie glues together random strips of words to write his lyrics (“Serious moonlight, indeed!” as a friend of mine once exclaimed), he is very much in the tradition of “Ern.” Are these techniques all to be condemned? And how much, in the end, does authorial intention matter, as opposed to the words on the page?
There are lines in The Darkening Ecliptic that are better (more haunting, more simply memorable) than almost anything in “real” Australian poetry: “Rise from the wrist, o kestrel / Mind, to a clear expanse”; “My blood becomes a Damaged Man / Most like your Albion” (from a poem addressed to William Blake); “Princess, you lived in Princess St., / Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun / With the left hand”; “I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.” Are the Malley poems just rubbish? Or did the compilers of this hasty oeuvre, in mimicking surrealist techniques, inadvertently liberate a deeper world of meaning? In any case, Ern took on a life of his own, and soon became a cult figure, the missing genius of Australian literature. The artist Sidney Nolan painted his portrait.
I’ve often thought that the Malley affair is a classic Australian movie just waiting to be made. The story formed the basis of Peter Carey’s much fictionalised account, My Life as a Fake (2002), but the Malley story is compelling enough without magic realist embellishments. Michael Heyward’s book includes the full text of Ern’s legendary manuscript. Almost sixty years later, the enigma remains. As Ern put it, “I am still / The black swan of trespass on alien waters.”
January 9, 2014
The most famous Australian poet, leaving aside the Banjos and Lawson, is Ern Malley, but Ern Malley never existed. This is the kind of thing that could only happen in Australia: everywhere has its literary hoaxes, but usually the hoax isn't better than the 'real' work of the hoaxers or the real work of the hoaxed.
Heyward does a great job telling the story, though the legal wranglings at the end of the book (takeaway: forties Australia was a horrible time and place) are much less fun than the development of the hoax and his description of the personalities involved. Cliche alert: it reads like a thriller. Or so I imagine, since I haven't read a thriller for some time. Anyway, I couldn't put it down.
The book lacks one thing: a real engagement with the intellectual and artistic problems a successful hoax creates. The editor who accepted the Malley poems argued that the hoaxers, freed from the constraints under which they usually wrote, wrote better than they could have done otherwise: in other words, standard mid-century surrealist/psychoanalytic nonsense. Heyward suggests that the strange quality of the Malley poems is caused by the fact that there was no single Malley; that there are so many different Malleys, in other words, standard late-century postmodern nonsense.
I think the real issue we have to face is: what sort of a literary movement would *not* be subject to hoaxes like this? The neo-classicists were fooled by 'Ossian,' the Romantics fooled by almost everything, and so on. There was never a literature that could not be parodied with great success. But modernism was and is more easily open to it, simply because there are no 'rules' for success in modernist art. This is a problem we're still dealing with. Some people try to impose rigid rules (James Wood), some people revel thoughtlessly in their absence, and the best authors, I suspect, are the ones who can really work through the incredibly strange situation of a high art form that lacks established criteria. I certainly haven't done so.
Heyward does a great job telling the story, though the legal wranglings at the end of the book (takeaway: forties Australia was a horrible time and place) are much less fun than the development of the hoax and his description of the personalities involved. Cliche alert: it reads like a thriller. Or so I imagine, since I haven't read a thriller for some time. Anyway, I couldn't put it down.
The book lacks one thing: a real engagement with the intellectual and artistic problems a successful hoax creates. The editor who accepted the Malley poems argued that the hoaxers, freed from the constraints under which they usually wrote, wrote better than they could have done otherwise: in other words, standard mid-century surrealist/psychoanalytic nonsense. Heyward suggests that the strange quality of the Malley poems is caused by the fact that there was no single Malley; that there are so many different Malleys, in other words, standard late-century postmodern nonsense.
I think the real issue we have to face is: what sort of a literary movement would *not* be subject to hoaxes like this? The neo-classicists were fooled by 'Ossian,' the Romantics fooled by almost everything, and so on. There was never a literature that could not be parodied with great success. But modernism was and is more easily open to it, simply because there are no 'rules' for success in modernist art. This is a problem we're still dealing with. Some people try to impose rigid rules (James Wood), some people revel thoughtlessly in their absence, and the best authors, I suspect, are the ones who can really work through the incredibly strange situation of a high art form that lacks established criteria. I certainly haven't done so.
December 22, 2015
I’ve read this book before but The Ern Malley Affair is such a complex and interesting story populated by the most impressive array of real-life characters that reading it again is like reading it for the first time.
The Ern Malley Affair chronicles the mid-World War II literary battle between Australian writers exploring modernism and Australian writers convinced that modernism was a bunch of boo-hockey. In 1943, Max Harris, co-editor of the Angry Penguins literary journal, received a number of poems from a woman named Ethel Malley. She wrote in an accompanying letter that they were the work of her now dead brother and wondered if there was any literary merit in them. Max Harris was bewildered and ecstatic, believing them to be the stuff of genius.
Instead, they were the stuff of a hoax. Written in a single afternoon by poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley to expose Harris as unable to recognise truly worthy poetry, the poems and the non-existent poet nevertheless took on lives of their own.
The story of Ern Malley and Max Harris, if portrayed as fiction, would be dismissed as requiring too much suspension of disbelief. The fact that it is a true story makes it delicious, even as we wonder – seventy years later – how something that was intended to enable a moment of jumping up from behind a couch and shouting, “Surprise!” has managed to maintain such a grip on the literary industry of an entire country.
Probably because the poems, which were intended to be specimens of bad poetry display moments of evocative brilliance. “The black swan of trespass on alien waters.” “It is necessary to understand / That a poet may not exist, that his writings / Are the incomplete circle and straight drop / Of a question mark.” “O far shore, target and shield that I now / Desire beyond these terrestrial commitments.” “I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.” Good poets trying to write bad poetry might not be able to shed the influence of themselves as easily as they had hoped.
The story itself deserves five stars but the writing of Michael Heyward is dense at times and sometimes requires momentary diversions to the dictionary. In fact, sometimes his writing suffers from the same insensibility that some of the poetry of Ern Malley does, requiring the reader to ponder it much longer than would have been necessary had it been written simply.
There are also a lot of tangents explored as the author seeks to develop a wider sense of the literary community, the diverse literary feelings and the broader societal expectations of the time. It’s a triumph, particularly when you consider how far Australia and the world has come in terms of literary exploration. This hoax could not be perpetrated now and if it was, it would not receive anywhere near the same sort of attention as it did back then (broadsheet newspapers covered it with as much fervour as the Pyjama Girl murder trial happening at the same time).
This book won’t be of any interest to anyone who doesn’t care about or enjoy poetry. It’s very much for a niche audience. But if you fall within that niche, you’ll be fascinated by a story that enfolds John and Sunday Reed (patrons of the arts at the time), the famous painters Sidney Nolan (who deserted the army and changed his name for a time) and Albert Tucker, and a huge cast of supporting players. Special mention must go to Detective Vogelsang, who investigated Ern Malley under the obscene, immoral and indecent provisions of South Australian law at the time, and Magistrate Clarke who found some references to be indecent and thought it might be possible for certain plays by Shakespeare to be prosecuted under the same laws if anyone was so inclined.
The book includes all the Ern Malley poems, so you can make up your own mind about whether they are any good or not. I doubt any two people will come to precisely the same conclusion. Which is an apt description of how literature has evolved. It is a deeply personal thing and being asked to justify why you love a piece of poetry is like being asked to justify why you love your significant other. Why one poem (or one person) speaks to someone is a great mystery of life.
The events are also a cautionary tale for writers. Because once they publish, they will forever be associated with their writing. Harold Stewart and James McAuley were never able to shake their tags as the authors of the Ern Malley poems and they ended up resenting it. Perhaps they would have faded into obscurity without Ern Malley. Perhaps they would have gone on to develop reputations independent of him. But they never got to find out.
The Ern Malley Affair is a story that is greater than the sum of its parts and I have no doubt I will read it again because it made me think about many more things than simply poetry. And if this review seems vague, it’s not intentional, it’s just that it’s difficult book to do justice to within such few words.
The Ern Malley Affair chronicles the mid-World War II literary battle between Australian writers exploring modernism and Australian writers convinced that modernism was a bunch of boo-hockey. In 1943, Max Harris, co-editor of the Angry Penguins literary journal, received a number of poems from a woman named Ethel Malley. She wrote in an accompanying letter that they were the work of her now dead brother and wondered if there was any literary merit in them. Max Harris was bewildered and ecstatic, believing them to be the stuff of genius.
Instead, they were the stuff of a hoax. Written in a single afternoon by poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley to expose Harris as unable to recognise truly worthy poetry, the poems and the non-existent poet nevertheless took on lives of their own.
The story of Ern Malley and Max Harris, if portrayed as fiction, would be dismissed as requiring too much suspension of disbelief. The fact that it is a true story makes it delicious, even as we wonder – seventy years later – how something that was intended to enable a moment of jumping up from behind a couch and shouting, “Surprise!” has managed to maintain such a grip on the literary industry of an entire country.
Probably because the poems, which were intended to be specimens of bad poetry display moments of evocative brilliance. “The black swan of trespass on alien waters.” “It is necessary to understand / That a poet may not exist, that his writings / Are the incomplete circle and straight drop / Of a question mark.” “O far shore, target and shield that I now / Desire beyond these terrestrial commitments.” “I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.” Good poets trying to write bad poetry might not be able to shed the influence of themselves as easily as they had hoped.
The story itself deserves five stars but the writing of Michael Heyward is dense at times and sometimes requires momentary diversions to the dictionary. In fact, sometimes his writing suffers from the same insensibility that some of the poetry of Ern Malley does, requiring the reader to ponder it much longer than would have been necessary had it been written simply.
There are also a lot of tangents explored as the author seeks to develop a wider sense of the literary community, the diverse literary feelings and the broader societal expectations of the time. It’s a triumph, particularly when you consider how far Australia and the world has come in terms of literary exploration. This hoax could not be perpetrated now and if it was, it would not receive anywhere near the same sort of attention as it did back then (broadsheet newspapers covered it with as much fervour as the Pyjama Girl murder trial happening at the same time).
This book won’t be of any interest to anyone who doesn’t care about or enjoy poetry. It’s very much for a niche audience. But if you fall within that niche, you’ll be fascinated by a story that enfolds John and Sunday Reed (patrons of the arts at the time), the famous painters Sidney Nolan (who deserted the army and changed his name for a time) and Albert Tucker, and a huge cast of supporting players. Special mention must go to Detective Vogelsang, who investigated Ern Malley under the obscene, immoral and indecent provisions of South Australian law at the time, and Magistrate Clarke who found some references to be indecent and thought it might be possible for certain plays by Shakespeare to be prosecuted under the same laws if anyone was so inclined.
The book includes all the Ern Malley poems, so you can make up your own mind about whether they are any good or not. I doubt any two people will come to precisely the same conclusion. Which is an apt description of how literature has evolved. It is a deeply personal thing and being asked to justify why you love a piece of poetry is like being asked to justify why you love your significant other. Why one poem (or one person) speaks to someone is a great mystery of life.
The events are also a cautionary tale for writers. Because once they publish, they will forever be associated with their writing. Harold Stewart and James McAuley were never able to shake their tags as the authors of the Ern Malley poems and they ended up resenting it. Perhaps they would have faded into obscurity without Ern Malley. Perhaps they would have gone on to develop reputations independent of him. But they never got to find out.
The Ern Malley Affair is a story that is greater than the sum of its parts and I have no doubt I will read it again because it made me think about many more things than simply poetry. And if this review seems vague, it’s not intentional, it’s just that it’s difficult book to do justice to within such few words.
July 11, 2015
Ernest Lalor Malley was the modernist poet Australia desperately needed. These were desperate times. Australia was in a state of shift. World War: The Sequel was still raging across the boundaries of Europe and the Pacific. Singapore had fallen to the Japanese the year before and the japs were expected on our beaches at any moment. And what of Banjo Paterson, bush poet/Australian legend? Dead, two years previous when his heart gave out. Modernism, a dire threat to the our arts was creeping silently onto our shores - for a colony founded by crooks, thieves and murderers Australia was puritanical about literature and the arts (and still is - have a look at our history of banned books (what? American Pyscho is still(!) banned in Queensland - no great loss, I guess)). Copies of Ulysses were heavily thumbed and handed round discreetly, having to be read in privacy, under the table or in a different slip sleeve. Modernist poets such as Auden, Cummings, and Eliot were gaining influence on Australia's poetry scene through literature journals like Angry Penguins. Still, Australia's modernist poetry scene was flegdling, often criticized as confused gibberish.
And then Malley came along. He cut such a tragic/romantic figure. Dead aged 25. Of what? Graves disease - dreadful tragedy. He wrote 15 poems across the last five years of his life. They were complex and thoughtful, often difficult to glean meaning from. Here's a more simple bit from his Durer:Innsbruck, 1945 poem:
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.
Good, no? Ethel, Ern's simple, unpoetic sister, found these poems on cleaning out his room after his death and not understanding their meaning or importance sent them to Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins. Harris, realizing he had gold in his hands immediately offered to publish the poems, complete, in a future issue of his magazine. It was the publishing dream. To find a dead poet - what luck! And too when the output was so rich, even perfectly flawed. Australian poetry would be forever changed. And it was.
Turns out it was all a hoax. Ern never was. He was invented by two Sydney poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. With a disgust of modernist poetry they got drunk and wrote 15 poems in one afternoon by splicing together lines out of whatever books they had nearby. They "are the conscious product of two minds, intentionally interrupting each other's trains of free association, and altering and revising them after they are written down. So they have not even a psychological value." They intended to bring down Max Harris, undermine his critical ability and expose the modernist movement of what it really was: nonsense.
This book does an excellent job of covering all this while presenting the poems themselves to criticism. It includes the ridiculous trial that resulted, wherein Harris was convicted of publishing immoral works. If the poems were without meaning how could they be immoral? Truth is, the poems are good. Very good. Have a read. Definitely of better quality than the output of the two poets' "serious work." In that way the hoax was a complete failure, following and marring the work of the two poets hereafter.
But the hoax was also a success. Australian publishing turned their back on the modernist movement and experimental literature. It seems silly to blame the current state of Australian literature on Ern Malley though it seems obvious there has been an influence. Australian literature must be seen to be Australian if it has a chance of winning awards. Rarely is awarded Australian literature complex or difficult to read. It must not challenge the reader. It must romanticize the bush. It must acknowledge the aboriginal people as having cultural and spiritual wisdom. It must be heavily rooted in "place." It must not be modern or cosmopolitan. There is only the occasional exception.
The Ern Malley Affair is essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern Australian poetry/literature.
And then Malley came along. He cut such a tragic/romantic figure. Dead aged 25. Of what? Graves disease - dreadful tragedy. He wrote 15 poems across the last five years of his life. They were complex and thoughtful, often difficult to glean meaning from. Here's a more simple bit from his Durer:Innsbruck, 1945 poem:
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.
Good, no? Ethel, Ern's simple, unpoetic sister, found these poems on cleaning out his room after his death and not understanding their meaning or importance sent them to Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins. Harris, realizing he had gold in his hands immediately offered to publish the poems, complete, in a future issue of his magazine. It was the publishing dream. To find a dead poet - what luck! And too when the output was so rich, even perfectly flawed. Australian poetry would be forever changed. And it was.
Turns out it was all a hoax. Ern never was. He was invented by two Sydney poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. With a disgust of modernist poetry they got drunk and wrote 15 poems in one afternoon by splicing together lines out of whatever books they had nearby. They "are the conscious product of two minds, intentionally interrupting each other's trains of free association, and altering and revising them after they are written down. So they have not even a psychological value." They intended to bring down Max Harris, undermine his critical ability and expose the modernist movement of what it really was: nonsense.
This book does an excellent job of covering all this while presenting the poems themselves to criticism. It includes the ridiculous trial that resulted, wherein Harris was convicted of publishing immoral works. If the poems were without meaning how could they be immoral? Truth is, the poems are good. Very good. Have a read. Definitely of better quality than the output of the two poets' "serious work." In that way the hoax was a complete failure, following and marring the work of the two poets hereafter.
But the hoax was also a success. Australian publishing turned their back on the modernist movement and experimental literature. It seems silly to blame the current state of Australian literature on Ern Malley though it seems obvious there has been an influence. Australian literature must be seen to be Australian if it has a chance of winning awards. Rarely is awarded Australian literature complex or difficult to read. It must not challenge the reader. It must romanticize the bush. It must acknowledge the aboriginal people as having cultural and spiritual wisdom. It must be heavily rooted in "place." It must not be modern or cosmopolitan. There is only the occasional exception.
The Ern Malley Affair is essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern Australian poetry/literature.
November 15, 2020
I’ve always struggled with poetry since school because there’s such a deeply personal and opaque aspect to it that I find hard to penetrate. It’s like this ever elusive vapour that I can’t pin down and focus on. However, there are snatches of poetry and poets I adore - Ted Hughes because of where I now live and particularly R S Thomas because his stark, peculiar vision chimes with his life and some of my religious upbringing, being carted around dank village chapels on Sunday afternoons as my dad preached. Ern Malley is a very different prospect, the Möbius strip of artistic intent and produced work: a constantly shifting enigma of hoax and genius, or misguided intent and enthusiastic response. Malley is not just a hoax or a mean spirited prank but an accidental colossus who makes us think about how we process art
The story in a nutshell: two somewhat conservative and traditionalist young poets get annoyed by the puppyish modernist Max Harris and his movement and journal, Angry Penguins. In an attempt to embarrass him they create a fake poet called Ernest Lalor Malley who died at 25, leaving only a clutch of heated poetry as his belongings which his sister Ethel then forwards to Harris. Ethel is in many ways more vivid than Ern ever is, a satire of a certain kind of lower/ middle class loyalty to a family member they can’t even begin to understand, and an important one for Ern to work as a poet. Because Harris believes Ethel he takes the poetry as the fevered semi genius of a formative talent and happily publishes them. So far the prank works. But then Harris gets repeatedly humiliated once the prank is discovered, the original poets begin to get pangs of regret and then - because the whole affair has exposed Harris as some sort of figurehead of modernism in an extremely conservative Australian culture - the journal and Harris are taken to court for obscenity
What’s amazing about the story is it never works as how fiction would deal with it - although I am about to read Peter Carey’s novel inspired by it and then possibly that other classic of fictional characters come to life, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker. Harris is puppyish but charming; the conservative poets priggish and mean spirited; the poets then become tortured by their prank and turn to religion and find their guilt breaks up their close friendship; Harris is humiliated but ultimately vindicated and becomes an affectionate figure in Australian culture; Ern eventually transcends his grubby beginnings and genuinely becomes a figurehead for Australian culture: because as prank poets go, he’s accidentally very good indeed and probably far better than anything Stewart and McAuley wrote before they created him (although their various ways of tackling with their guilt leads them to creating memorable art as a response)
It’s an endlessly fascinating story, a sort of literary ouroboros, and Heyward’s book manages to bring you into the heart of it - by presenting the poems almost as evidence you are asked to judge how Malley stands as a poet, how he stands as a cultural sensation, how he stands as a figurehead. Heyward deftly presents the facts of the case but also nudges you into thinking about the poetry as an artefact in and of itself. It’s also a story with dozens of fascinating cameos - my own favourite is JIM Stewart, aka the crime writer Michael Innes, complaining about how florid the prose is which as anyone who has got stuck in one of the more overripe Appleby books will attest is pretty fucking hilarious (and reminds me of the plot in Anthony Berkeley’s Dead Mrs Stratton, although sadly this was published ten years or so before Malley turns up). It feels like the Malley affair almost galvanises the counter culture in Australia as a reaction to the mockery it was met with
And it also nicely ties in with my earlier reading this year about Duchamp and the surrealists: they are evoked several times in the book, and obviously are again the source of disdain by Stewart and McAuley, but in many ways Malley is just a readymade made flesh. Found art in its greatest and most original form. That Malley is still remembered decades after a mean spirited prank led two bored writers in a military desk job to take the piss out of someone who annoyed them is a miracle. That Malley still has actual artistic merit is yet another
The story in a nutshell: two somewhat conservative and traditionalist young poets get annoyed by the puppyish modernist Max Harris and his movement and journal, Angry Penguins. In an attempt to embarrass him they create a fake poet called Ernest Lalor Malley who died at 25, leaving only a clutch of heated poetry as his belongings which his sister Ethel then forwards to Harris. Ethel is in many ways more vivid than Ern ever is, a satire of a certain kind of lower/ middle class loyalty to a family member they can’t even begin to understand, and an important one for Ern to work as a poet. Because Harris believes Ethel he takes the poetry as the fevered semi genius of a formative talent and happily publishes them. So far the prank works. But then Harris gets repeatedly humiliated once the prank is discovered, the original poets begin to get pangs of regret and then - because the whole affair has exposed Harris as some sort of figurehead of modernism in an extremely conservative Australian culture - the journal and Harris are taken to court for obscenity
What’s amazing about the story is it never works as how fiction would deal with it - although I am about to read Peter Carey’s novel inspired by it and then possibly that other classic of fictional characters come to life, Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker. Harris is puppyish but charming; the conservative poets priggish and mean spirited; the poets then become tortured by their prank and turn to religion and find their guilt breaks up their close friendship; Harris is humiliated but ultimately vindicated and becomes an affectionate figure in Australian culture; Ern eventually transcends his grubby beginnings and genuinely becomes a figurehead for Australian culture: because as prank poets go, he’s accidentally very good indeed and probably far better than anything Stewart and McAuley wrote before they created him (although their various ways of tackling with their guilt leads them to creating memorable art as a response)
It’s an endlessly fascinating story, a sort of literary ouroboros, and Heyward’s book manages to bring you into the heart of it - by presenting the poems almost as evidence you are asked to judge how Malley stands as a poet, how he stands as a cultural sensation, how he stands as a figurehead. Heyward deftly presents the facts of the case but also nudges you into thinking about the poetry as an artefact in and of itself. It’s also a story with dozens of fascinating cameos - my own favourite is JIM Stewart, aka the crime writer Michael Innes, complaining about how florid the prose is which as anyone who has got stuck in one of the more overripe Appleby books will attest is pretty fucking hilarious (and reminds me of the plot in Anthony Berkeley’s Dead Mrs Stratton, although sadly this was published ten years or so before Malley turns up). It feels like the Malley affair almost galvanises the counter culture in Australia as a reaction to the mockery it was met with
And it also nicely ties in with my earlier reading this year about Duchamp and the surrealists: they are evoked several times in the book, and obviously are again the source of disdain by Stewart and McAuley, but in many ways Malley is just a readymade made flesh. Found art in its greatest and most original form. That Malley is still remembered decades after a mean spirited prank led two bored writers in a military desk job to take the piss out of someone who annoyed them is a miracle. That Malley still has actual artistic merit is yet another
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 30, 2014
The Ern Malley Affair is an account of one of the most perplexing literary hoaxes in history.
In 1940s Australia, the self-appointed leader of the literary avant-garde was a young poet and editor named Max Harris. Harris was a fervent and imaginative but rather derivative and somewhat incoherent writer, who justified his incoherence on the grounds of being influenced by surrealism. His literary magazine Angry Penguins featured the work of himself and his friends, and also regularly carried the art of Sydney Nolan, who was part of Harris' circle at the time.
Harris was widely regarded as a charlatan, not just by more traditionally-minded writers but also by members of the public; there's a photo in this book of him suffering the indignity of being thrown into the Torrens River by a bunch of students. Two Australian servicemen, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, decided to play a little trick on Harris and over the course of an afternoon or so, cooked up a bunch of fake avant-garde poems and a fictional, young, dead poet, 'Ern Malley', and submitted them to Angry Penguins with a covering letter from the poet's 'sister', explaining about her late brother and how she didn't understand this newfangled poetry but she thought that Mr Harris might appreciate them.
Harris swallowed the bait, and devoted the next issue of the magazine to publishing all of Malley's poems. Almost as soon as he'd decided to do so, doubts were being raised by some of Harris' associated about whether or not Ern had really existed; he seemed too good to be true.
The clincher was that the hoaxers, McAuley and Stewart, were not just two blokes having a laugh, but were themselves serious and talented poets who cannibalised some of their own work to confect Ern's. The result is a body of poetry that's both brilliant and shoddy, and shoddy partly because it's so brilliant. McAuley and Stewart were all about craft, but in knocking off the Ern Malley poems in such high spirits they infused them with a giddy energy that their own serious and more highly-worked poetry tended to lack.
As the rumours began to spread, Harris began to suspect that he’d been duped, and when the truth finally came out, he was held up to ridicule. Bravely, he defended the poetry on its own grounds, saying it was better stuff than the poetry McAuley and Stewart wrote when they were really trying — which was partly true. But then the whole thing took a turn for the bizarre, when a stolid police detective named Vogelsang took it upon himself to prosecute Harris for obscenity.
The trial was a farce. It effectively killed Harris as an avant-gardist; later in life he became quite the artistic conservative. McAuley and Stewart felt a little remorse at how Harris got dragged over the coals. McAuley himself retreated into a particularly harsh and anti-modernist style of Catholicism, while Stewart — a closeted gay man who never came out — became preoccupied with Japanese culture, turned to Buddhism and published popular translations of haiku.
So the Ern Malley story is not just one of sensible blokes taking idiots down a peg or two, nor is it about philistines attacking culture. McAuley, Stewart and Harris were men of integrity, even though they weren’t always willing to recognise it in each other. The story remains fascinating because Ern Malley — sardonic, funny, pretentious, self-critical, incoherent, menacing, but never, ever boring— looms over all three of them. The poems, flickering between genius and piss-take, endure.
In 1940s Australia, the self-appointed leader of the literary avant-garde was a young poet and editor named Max Harris. Harris was a fervent and imaginative but rather derivative and somewhat incoherent writer, who justified his incoherence on the grounds of being influenced by surrealism. His literary magazine Angry Penguins featured the work of himself and his friends, and also regularly carried the art of Sydney Nolan, who was part of Harris' circle at the time.
Harris was widely regarded as a charlatan, not just by more traditionally-minded writers but also by members of the public; there's a photo in this book of him suffering the indignity of being thrown into the Torrens River by a bunch of students. Two Australian servicemen, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, decided to play a little trick on Harris and over the course of an afternoon or so, cooked up a bunch of fake avant-garde poems and a fictional, young, dead poet, 'Ern Malley', and submitted them to Angry Penguins with a covering letter from the poet's 'sister', explaining about her late brother and how she didn't understand this newfangled poetry but she thought that Mr Harris might appreciate them.
Harris swallowed the bait, and devoted the next issue of the magazine to publishing all of Malley's poems. Almost as soon as he'd decided to do so, doubts were being raised by some of Harris' associated about whether or not Ern had really existed; he seemed too good to be true.
The clincher was that the hoaxers, McAuley and Stewart, were not just two blokes having a laugh, but were themselves serious and talented poets who cannibalised some of their own work to confect Ern's. The result is a body of poetry that's both brilliant and shoddy, and shoddy partly because it's so brilliant. McAuley and Stewart were all about craft, but in knocking off the Ern Malley poems in such high spirits they infused them with a giddy energy that their own serious and more highly-worked poetry tended to lack.
As the rumours began to spread, Harris began to suspect that he’d been duped, and when the truth finally came out, he was held up to ridicule. Bravely, he defended the poetry on its own grounds, saying it was better stuff than the poetry McAuley and Stewart wrote when they were really trying — which was partly true. But then the whole thing took a turn for the bizarre, when a stolid police detective named Vogelsang took it upon himself to prosecute Harris for obscenity.
The trial was a farce. It effectively killed Harris as an avant-gardist; later in life he became quite the artistic conservative. McAuley and Stewart felt a little remorse at how Harris got dragged over the coals. McAuley himself retreated into a particularly harsh and anti-modernist style of Catholicism, while Stewart — a closeted gay man who never came out — became preoccupied with Japanese culture, turned to Buddhism and published popular translations of haiku.
So the Ern Malley story is not just one of sensible blokes taking idiots down a peg or two, nor is it about philistines attacking culture. McAuley, Stewart and Harris were men of integrity, even though they weren’t always willing to recognise it in each other. The story remains fascinating because Ern Malley — sardonic, funny, pretentious, self-critical, incoherent, menacing, but never, ever boring— looms over all three of them. The poems, flickering between genius and piss-take, endure.
February 13, 2020
Such a strange story. There is a lot of human interest when we read about the people’s actions, motivations, and conversations and letters. The testimony from the later court case is a hoot - convoluted but amusing, and more of that section would have been great. Heyward also, however, spends a lot of time analyzing the poems and modern poetry in general. It’s far more than necessary to understand the tale at hand. This book strikes the tone of a really personable doctoral dissertation, which is a bit more than I felt like cozying up with for my evening reading. I do at least appreciate that the author has given a lot of thought and effort into presenting the case thoroughly. I was less interested in the academic/literary criticism and analysis, but it was worth inclusion, since the entire hoax was a bizarre form of literary criticism.
June 2, 2011
Even if you're not interested in poetry, this is a gripping read. The true story of how a young Adelaide cultural magazine editor (Max Harris) was duped into believing that the work of a totally fictitious, supposedly recently dead poet was of great literary value. It reads almost like a detective novel, and descends into tragedy when the young editor then becomes the victim of a witch hunt, and dragged through the courts on charges of indecency. A well researched, well written and well presented book.
And if you are interested in poetry, it should be top of your reading list.
And if you are interested in poetry, it should be top of your reading list.
August 13, 2012
Skim-read this, really. Has the material for a wonderful five-minute anecdote, but not for 300 pages. Or perhaps I just lack the stomach for undergraduate politics and the infighting of poets.
September 8, 2017
The Ern Malley affair was a literary hoax that was a nine-day wonder in wartime Australia. Two Sydney poets opposed to the modernist movement in Australian poetry decided to spoof the editor of an Adelaide based journal Angry Penguins. They succeeded and it became an opportunity for the Philistine element in the Australian media and public (always a large circle) to vent their hostility at avant-gardism, Bohemianism and intellectual culture in general, culminating in a ludicrous trial in which the editor was found guilty of publishing indecency and fined (but could actually have been - literally - flogged under the law as it stood then). Heyward argues that the ramification of the hoax was that it destroyed avant-garde experiments in Australian letters for a generation, leading to the long dominance of Australian poetry in particular by the reactionary anti modernists Hope and McAuley (the latter being one of the hoaxers and the former being in on the whole thing). I have known about the hoax since very soon after my arrival in Australia from some references in the introduction to the Penguin Book of Australian Verse, and various references since, so it was good to finally read a full account of the story. The hoax consisted of a manuscript "The Darkening Elliptic" of modernist, stream of consciousness image poems by a dead young working class Australian Ernest Lalor Malley found by his sister among his possessions. Max Harris and John Reed the editors of Angry Penguins, and the artists Sydney Nolan who drew lifelong inspiration for the poems, always maintained that the hoaxers wrote better than they knew and produced work of real merit. Given that "Ern Malley" has been reprinted about half a dozen times since and into the 21st century maybe they were right.
February 19, 2018
This is the book to read if you have a burning desire to learn about Australia's greatest literary hoax. Not just who and how, but even why and where and when. And then a little deeper still. Perhaps a bit too deep into the surrealists and the poetic movements of the time for me. But an enjoyable tale nonetheless.
February 10, 2015
A bit heavy handed at the beginning as he sets up the protagonists , but once you get to the hoax its a rollicking read perhaps drawn out too much and to that end over analyzed. Who knew poetry was so contentious but it does give you insight to the Australian landscape in the 1940s and how surrealist like Dali were treated by the conservatives.
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April 22, 2015A classic in the history of aleatory poetry.
December 31, 2018
2 Stars = Blah. It didn't do anything for me.
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