The Poet Who Never Was: Ern Malley [by David Lehman]

THE GREATEST literary hoax of the 20th century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lt. James McAuley and Corp. Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the 22-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised ("not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others"), they rapidly wrote the 16 poems that constitute Ern Malley's "tragic lifework." They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped "confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning" in place of coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French can mean bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding "preface and statement," outfitted Malley with a tear-jerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley's posthumous opus, "The Darkening Ecliptic," to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother's bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry. Artless Ethel, the bourgeois philistine, had the effect of authenticating Ern's poignant existence.

Ern Malley was hard to resist. His poems were charged with the premonition of an early death and the conviction that poetic greatness would be his if he could but live five more winters. "Now in your honour Keats, I spin / The loaded Zodiac with my left hand / As the man at the fair revolves / His coloured deceitful board," Malley wrote in "Colloquy with John Keats." McAuley and Stewart saw to it that Malley had, like Keats, died at the age of 25. They put a lot of Keatsian yearning into his poems. They also gave him a prophetic voice and a grave historical vision: "But where I have lived / Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray / Guernica is the ticking of a clock / The nightmare has become real, not as belief / But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo."

Harris fell for Malley, hook, line and sinker. So did his patrons and chums, including the painter Sidney Nolan. They devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to their excited discovery -- and were promptly ambushed by the hoax's exposure in the press in June 1944. Although this was scarcely a slow news summer -- the Normandy invasion took place in June, the liberation of France in August -- the story spread rapidly to England and America, and everywhere the reaction was the same: high hilarity at the expense of the Angry Penguins, the humiliation of Max Harris, a colossal setback for modernism in Australia. The hoax was, as Michael Heyward points out in his lucid and informative book, a decisive act of literary criticism, brilliant parody at the service of fierce polemic. If, as McAuley and Stewart insisted, the poems had no merit, then Malley's champions had convicted themselves of unsound judgment and corrupt taste.

But the story doesn't end there. Stranger turns were to follow. The South Australian police impounded the issue of Angry Penguins devoted to "The Darkening Ecliptic" on the grounds that Malley's poems were obscene, though in fact their erotic content was negligible when compared with, say, Tropic of Cancer or Ulysses. The court case that September featured some inadvertently hilarious testimony from a dunderhead police detective who didn't know the meaning of the words he thought were indecent.

The wondrous twist in the story was the surprising, and actually quite heroic, intransigence of Max Harris and his cohorts, who maintained in the face of all ridicule their belief in Malley's genius. "The myth is sometimes greater than its creator," said Harris. Sir Herbert Read, a tireless proponent of vanguard art, wired his support from England. It seemed to him that the hoaxers had been "hoisted on their own petard." It was, Read reasoned, possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means -- even if the motive of the writer was to perpetrate a travesty.

Later to emerge among Malley's most persuasive advocates were two pillars of the New York School of poetry. In 1961 Kenneth Koch printed two Malley poems, "Boult to Marina" and "Sybilline," in the "collaborations" issue of Locus Solus, the avant-grade literary magazine. In 1976 John Ashbery asked his MFA students at Brooklyn College to compare Malley's "Sweet William" to an early poem by Geoffrey Hill. Which did they think was the genuine article? (The students were divided.) Ashbery's point is that intentions may be irrelevant to results, that genuineness in literature may not depend on authorial sincerity, and that our ideas about good and bad, real and fake, are, or ought to be, in flux.

The best thing about The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward is that it reprints Malley's 16 poems, though I wish Heyward had included the prose "Preface and Statement." He gives us plenty of information, probably far more information than any of us wants or needs. He makes some errors. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, not two days later. "Annie Get Your Gun" is not a song in the musical "Oklahoma!." And what Keats actually wrote was "Beauty is Truth."

My chief disappointment is that Heyward fails to mount a strong enough literary defense of Ern Malley's poetry. The Ern Malley affair was the century's greatest literary hoax not because it completely hookwinked Harris and not because it triggered off a story so rich in ironies and reversals. It was the greatest hoax because the creation of Ern Malley escaped the control of his creators and enjoyed an autonomous existence beyond, and at odds with, the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart. They succeeded better than they had known, or wished. Malley's poems hold up to this day, eclipsing anything produced by any of the story's main protagonists in propria persona.

Crazy as it seems, the Malley poems do have merit. In a poem written during the Second World War, the French poet Robert Desnos pictures himself as "the shadow among shadows" poised to "enter and reenter your sunny life." This is Malley's self-conception, too. His gallows humor, self-lacerating irony, and odd, arresting juxtapositions contribute to an effect that other poets of the period strove for but few attained so unerringly as this speaker of "No-Man's-language appropriate/Only to No-Man's-Land." "Petit Testament," Malley's last poem, concludes with these lines: "I / Who have lived in the shadow that each act / Casts on the next act now emerge / As loyal as the thistle that in session / Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air. / I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything." A misprint in the first edition changed infinitive to infinite in the last line. I would be very curious to know which version of the line admirers of Ern Malley -- and readers of this post -- prefer.

from the Washington Post, March 6, 1994. See also this special issue of Jacket edited by John Tranter:
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/index.shtml
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-poems.html
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-lehm-stew.html

Comments

[Stephanie Brown]

Fascinating! I think "infinitive."

[Bob Holman]

Infinite!

I don't suppose O'Hara was referring to this in his Personism Manifesto -- "the nostalgia of the infinite" vs. "the nostalgia for the infinite"?

David, magnifico!

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Stephanie, and you, Bob. So far the vote is going 50-50.

[Joanie Mackowski]

Leaping Lehman! Thanks for this. Here's another vote for "infinitive."

[Judy Rowley]

I vote infinite. Great to encounter Malley once again.

[ALAN WEARNE]

The influence of Ern Malley on Australian Poetry had to wait a generation or so before it fully bloomed. Meanwhile the legend has it that the conservative forces represented by Messrs McAuley & Stewart had won, and no-one dared to write in the tradition that Ern represented. Few wanted to run the laughing stock risk. True to a point, but this doesn't take into account the visionary works of Francis Webb [who can more than hold his own with the Robert Lowell of the 40s & early 50s] and the fact that many emerging poets throughout English such Bishop, Wilbur and Larkin were returning to 'basics'.

Still by the time the counter-acting influence of the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountaineers etc had crossed the Pacific a new breed of younger poets were willing to follow in Ern's footsteps. Among these was that very fine poet New Zealand born Nigel Roberts who established his own roneo'd little magazine Free Poetry, based in the inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain. And it was free being handed out in bars and at readings for nothing. Doubtless similar was occurring throughout our language from Merseyside to the Bay Area via the Lower Eastside.

And then following in the Malley tradition came the ultimate one-off, a similar publication entitled Free Grass, featuring a number of young men [and one young woman] none had heard of before, writing hyper-expressive young folk poetry with manifestos & bio-notes to match. And who could have guessed that the poet John Tranter had, utilising the spirit of Ern, in somewhat reverse, concocted Free Grass one Saturday afternoon.

Around this time of course there had to be the Anthology representing the above poetry explosion and in 1970 Australian Poetry Now edited by Tom Shapcott fitted that bill perfectly, completed with not just poems but biographical notes and statements of poetics, both of which at times outdid the poems for sheer druggy-madness. Among many new poets was a Tasmanian, Timothy Kline, writer of witty, pithy verse with witty pithy Bio and statement to match. You bet they were since they were written by the much older Gwen Harwood a poet who had a reputation for inventing poets and sending forth poems under their name, just like McAuley and Stewart.

And then there was Your Friendly Fascist edited by the late [and amazing] Rae Desmond Jones [Rae was male & spelt his name that way]. This Free Poetry style magazine often contained weird and wonderful verse from the bi-sexual, Chinese-Malay, Billy Ah-Lun, whose life and career Rae would delight in expounding at dinner-parties and the like for decades. A strange little man who may or may not be living in Sydney...he just sent these great, sniggeringly provocative poems. Of course years later Rae admitted that he indeed was Billy.

As in the days of Ern the times demanded such poets, for there was the tragic hippy-poet Toby Nicholson, though his life, career and a few poems thereof could only be found years later in my verse novel The Lovemakers.

During my time at the University of Wollongong I would give a lecture on Ern, the Free Grass crowd, Timothy Kline, Billy Ah-Lun and Toby Nicholson only exposing them at the end as inventions, though let's face no more 'inventions' than the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa! Then I'd challenge the students to invent their own poet and write his/her poems together with bio-notes and statement of poetics.

I also had a scheme whereby I had the classes write Group Sestinas and Group Villanelles. When after many years I decided to publish these in book form I asked Billy and Timothy to supply blurb-quotes. In the Spirit of Ern to was the least I could do.

[ALAN WEARNE]

1070...not quite...1970!

[Summer Brenner]

INFINITIVE, no contest.

[David Lehman]

Thanks to all for their comments -- and special thanks to Alan for his info-packed post.

[ALAN WEARNE]

Timothy Kline's blurb quote for 'With the Youngsters' my collection of Group Sestinas & Group Villanelles reads: "Why didn't we know this would be the future: the disciplined anarchy of poetry at its most democratic, everything James McAuley feared and Ern Malley worshipped."
The volume's title comes from Art Blakey.