Happy Birthday Ern Malley! [With an introduction by Thomas Moody taken from David Lehman]

Yesterday marked the 105th birthday of Ern Malley, who remains one of Australia’s most internationally renowned poets and our greatest ever literary hoax. After I disclosed that I'm Australian in our first ever email exchange, David immediately wanted to know where I stood on the whole Malley affair. While the hoax overall has legions of fans, many people feel that the poems themselves cannot possibly possess any quality due to the nature of their genesis. In his review of The Complete Poems of Ern Malley published in Jacket in 2002, David offers a comprehensive introduction to Ern’s formative years and a lucid and insightful commentary on his poetry, arguing that Ern’s oeuvre has merit beyond the hoax, no matter the dubious motivations behind the poems’ creation. You can read David’s review here. Happy birthday Ern!

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

"THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal 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 twenty-two-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 sixteen 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 a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking 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."

 

 

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weeps gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. 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.

Comments

[Sally Ashton]

I have to say the final line, "I have split the infinitive..." is pretty genius.
Thanks!

[Sally Ashton]

P.S. In answer to your question at the end of your review, most definitely "infinitive!"
cheers~

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Sally. I agree with you: "infinitve" is the better choice. I believe that "infinite" was the product of a typo. When I have asked people to choose, the vote is 50-50. But then I believe the orihgnal version of Marianne Moore's "Poetry" is much superior to the 3-line version she preferred late in life; yet I when used to ask people to choose, a lot of them picked the latter.

[ALAN WEARNE]

There has been subsequently, at least on Australian shores, an entire School of Ern, where poets would appear who hadn't been known before, complete with their biographies. In the late 1960s/early 70s the wonderful Sydney poet Nigel Roberts brought out his roneoed magazine [as was done in those days] "Free Poetry", only to be somewhat upstaged by by the one edition "Free Grass", complete with a contingent of fabulous hippyesque pieces from folk none of us had ever heard of. This was around the same time as Tom Shapcott's ground breaking anthology "Australian Poetry Now", one which featured the hi-powered Tasmanian Timothy Kline, with his intricate bio-note and over-the-top statement of poetics. Soon there'd come another fabulous versifier, this time in Rae Desmond Jones' magazine "Your Friendly Fascist".in this case the bi-sexual, over-the-top Malay Chinese Billy Ah Lun, who Rae would tell how sent him all these entertainingly creepy, sado-sexual bits and pieces. And then there was the the tragic Toby Nicholson whose druggie career somewhat paralleled that of Micheal Dransfield and a few others.

All the above were hoaxes in their way, not just in their poems but in their biographies. John Tranter produced the "Free Grass" contingent, not merely their poems but their lives; the somewhat older poet Gwen Harwood must have had a great time inventing not just Timothy Kline but his life, works and what he believed in; Rae Jones had a great time for years regaling dinner parties and the like about this funny little man whom he had never met but just kept on sending him these weirdo poems; whilst I had doubtless as much fun inventing both the life of Toby Nicholson and certain of his poems for my verse novel "The Lovemakers".

Both Timothy and Billy made guest appearances years later supplying blurb-quotes for "With The Youngsters". a collection I compiled of Group Villanelles and Group Sestinas composed by my classes at the University of Wollongong. Timothy's quote was most apt: " Why didn't we know this would be the future: the disciplined anarchy of poetry at its most democratic, everything that James McAuley feared and Ern Malley worshipped."

[David Lehman]

Gwen Harwood invented Walter Lehmann.
It happens that my name is Lehman and my wife's maiden name is Harwood.
Delightful.

[ALAN WEARNE]

Gwen Harwood wrote under at least 7 pseudonyms with the Walter Lehmann being responsible for yet another hoax: one where a poem published in 1960 in The Bulletin, a leading magazine of the time, announced via an acrostic: FUCK ALL EDITORS. Of course where pseudonyms stop and heteronyms take over depends on the creative energies of the poet: certainly Harwood's Timothy Kline with his bio-note and statement of poetics heads in that direction Fernando Pessoa devoted so much of his life to. Whilst McAuley and Stewart mightn't have known it, but Ern was surely in that tradition. One wonders what they would have made of Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, in particular the high-grade modernist excesses of de Campos.