Lost & Found: Ern Malley, the Genuine Fake

By David Lehman

The Ern Malley poetry hoax refuses to die down. In 2002, nearly sixty years after two Australian servicemen invented a modern poet in a single afternoon, John Tranter's online magazine Jacket featured seven "new" Ern Malley poems: two by John Ashbery and five by John Kinsella. It's remarkable enough for newly written poems to surface from a poet deceased for sixty years. It's even more remarkable when that persistently productive, posthumously potent writer turns out never to have existed. New essays on Ern Malley—by Rebecca Warner and Judy Rowley—have appeared in print or been delivered at literary conferences in the past year. Now comes more evidence of the hoax poet's appeal. Peter Carey uses the story as the fulcrum of his new novel My Life as a Fake (Knopf, 2003). Everything else in this novel is trumped up, but the Malley hoax, which Carey retells in altered form, is true. In a novel of fabricated imitations it is the genuine fake. Though Carey changes the names of most of the personages involved—Ern Malley becomes in his telling Bob McCorkle—it is Malley's verse that he quotes and Malley's story, with its twists and paradoxes, that he appropriates.

Unlike most Australian literary developments, the Ern Malley hoax made international headlines when it was sprung in June 1944—not a slow news period. Two Sydney-based poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, had whiled away a weekend in 1943 by creating the complete life work of a nonexistent poet to whom they gave an identity, replete with birth and death dates and a surviving sister credited with having discovered the poet's manuscript. They called their creation Ern Malley: Ern, short for Ernest, perhaps in the spirit of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, in which characters make up names, assume false identities, and see them come to life; Malley, because it contained the French word for bad (mal), which in the hoaxers' judgment the poems certainly were.

Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart hated modernist poetry in general and despised the Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris in particular. Harris, at age twenty-two, edited a self-styled avant-garde literary magazine with a goofy moniker, Angry Penguins. It was to him that McAuley and Stewart submitted all sixteen of Malley's extant poems. Using the name of Ern's fictional sister Ethel, they attached a cover letter detailing the deceased poet's short, unhappy life. The poems came as a surprise to her, Ethel said. She wondered if they had any merit. She knew nothing about poetry herself and couldn't disguise her disapproval of her younger brother's bohemian ways. Ern was born in England in 1918, was taken to Australia when his father died two years later, and was brought up by Ethel after their mother died. He was then fifteen.

He had dropped out of school and worked as a garage mechanic in Sydney and as an insurance salesman and part-time watch repairman in Melbourne. "From things he said I gathered he had been fond of a girl in Melbourne, but had some sort of difference with her. I didn't want to ask him too much because he was nervy and irritable. The crisis came suddenly, and he passed away on Friday, the 23rd of July. As he wished, he was cremated at Rookwood." McAuley and Stewart had calculated the exact number of days that John Keats had spent on earth when he died shy of his 26th birthday and they gave their hoax poet the same lifespan.

The hoaxers wanted to expose Harris to ridicule. If Angry Penguins went for their hoax poet, it would show that the editor and his cohorts couldn't tell the real from the fake. After all, in crafting the Malley poems, they had gone out of their way to produce bogus verse. They lifted lines haphazardly from books opened at random, made nonsensical sentences, wove together misquotations and false allusions. They made certain the poems offered no coherence, no message, "only confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader." Max Harris fell for the bait hook, line, and sinker. He published, the hoaxers pounced, and to make matters even worse for the Angry Penguins crowd, the South Australian police seized the issue and filed obscenity

charges. The trial, especially the testimony of police detective Vogelsang, is a masterpiece of unwitting self-parody. Vogelsang declared the poems to be indecent, and for proof pointed at the word "incestuous" in one of them. On cross examination he admitted he didn't know the meaning of the word.

The poetry of Ern Malley initially succeeded on the terms that MacAuley and Stewart dictated. What they had written was parody, caricature. But it has lasted as poetry, and the continuing appeal of the work confirms that not the hoaxers but the hoaxed—especially Max Harris, who never modified his admiration of Malley's verse—have prevailed. It is not quite in spite of McAuley and Stewart that this happened; it is rather in the very nature of a successful hoax that it makes some predictions fulfill themselves. There are passages where the hoaxers succeed precisely in aping the thing they detest-but aping it so well that the result transcends their conscious aims. This stanza from

"Sybilline" goes so far as to intimate that Malley does not exist:

And now out of life, permanent revenant,

I assert: the caterpillar feet
Of these predictions lead nowhere,
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
And yet I know I shall be raised up
On the vertical banners of praise.

In the hoaxers' minds, this was a broad clue about the nonidentity of the poet; to read these lines and not become suspicious was to be obtuse. But to the reader prepared for the experience—the reader prepared by Pound and Eliot and Stevens and Auden—the lines haunt like the living hand of Keats, extended as the poet contemplates his impending death:

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.

The hoax made the news in 1944 as a victory for an old guard suspicious that the whole modernist experiment was phony. It stays news because the poems of Ern Malley remain, after all the controversy and debate, still in the minds of many the supreme achievement in modern Australian poetry. There is a marvelous combination of mystery, grandeur, dark humor, and self-deprecating wit in Malley. These lines are from "Petit Testament":

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.

Malley writes as if aware of his ambiguous existential status-as if merely by existing he is transgressing. Who can resist a poet who describes himself as "an interloper, robber of dead men's dream" and as "the black swan of trespass on alien waters"?

In May 1976, the faculty of the Brooklyn College M.F.A. poetry program consisted of John Ashbery, Jill Hoffman, and me. Each of us contrived an examination question that the students had to answer satisfactorily, in the form of a short essay, in order to receive the degree. For his question, Ashbery quoted two poems in their entirety, and wrote, "One of the two poems below is by a highly respected contemporary poet; the other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much modern poetry. Which do you think is which?" There then followed the poems, unidentified by author or title:

So much for the elves' wergild, the true governance
of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in
engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for
ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern.

Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground:
my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced,
sick on outings - I who was taken to be a king of
some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.

_____________________________________________________

I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your Albion;
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscene, the unforgivable rape.

One moment of daylight let me have
Like a white arm thrust
Out of the dark and self-denying wave
And in the one moment I
Shall irremediably attest
How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding)
My white swan of quietness lies
Sanctified on my black swan's breast.

Ashbery never revealed that one of the two poems was from the esteemed poet Geoffrey Hill's "Mercian Hymns"; the other was Ern Malley's "Sweet William." But you, dear reader, can surely tell the real from the fake. Can't you?

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