Max Harris is best known as the editor responsible for publishing the oeuvre of the fictional poet Ern Malley. The hoax has become the stuff of legend and Harris’s role as the dupe overshadows his substantial contributions to the arts in Australia for over half a century, as an editor, publisher, poet and the country’s most vocal champion of its nascent Modernism, in both painting and literature, throughout the 1940s. Harris’s journal Angry Penguins, which he founded at the age of 18, placed the Australian avant-garde in an international context, and included artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Australia’s leading surrealist, James Gleeson.
“Angry Penguins” became both a movement of artists, and a label of scorn used by conservatives for modernist trends in the culture. The phrase is taken from Harris’s poem “Mithridatum of Despair” and refers to drunks in tuxedos at night “straddling the cobbles of the square / tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight.” Harris’s early poetry is heavily influenced by European modernist and surrealist techniques, but an irrepressive lyricism is evident in even the most experimental works. The Ern Malley affair represented a fault line in the poet’s own writing. After the scandal, which saw Harris charged with Obscenity for publishing “indecent advertisements,” his poetry became less ebullient and more pensive, clear and declarative. “Aubade”, which imagines an elderly Oblomov, still in bed, stirring at a lyric gathering in his bowels, displays the poet’s own sardonic humor.
Aubade
Open up, Oblomov: for the dust pan sings
Tinny-tang for all your years asleep.
Who knows what maidens may have crept
And brushed their lids against your cheek.
Awake old slav, the kitchen calls,
Eggs are frying, a saucepan falls,
Outside an old grey wind begins to weep.
In your bowels a lyric stirs—
Your toilet call, you morning birds,
Urging out your lazy feet
To rest like dumplings on the boards.
Your brain now beats about its bowl,
Cake-making, for your acquaintance, Soul,
Will make a formal call at five.
Thi is, if you are still alive.
Old poet, dragging on your drawers,
Seeking a rhyme without a clause—
All creation is about its chores!
Oblomov sighs, subsides, and snores
Excellent post, TM. Thanks!
Posted by: David Lehman | July 13, 2022 at 11:53 AM