The importance of being Ern - Ern Malley, Australian hoax poet

COMBINING high intelligence, high drama, side-splitting comedy, and disarming pathos in equal measure, the poetry of Ern Malley is surely the greatest literary hoax of the century. It was an in-joke that got out of control, a brilliant act of deception, not least because it tricked everybody by proving so durable, so fascinating, so arguable. Ern Malley was invented to prove a point about the development of contemporary poetry, and he did it decisively, or so it seemed at the time; but half a century later the issues the hoax raises about literary value are far from being resolved.

Who was Ern Malley? There was a time in June 1944 when half of Australia forgot about the war and wanted nothing more than the answer to that question. His story began late in 1943 when a 22-year-old poet and editor by the name of Max Harris sat down to open his mail. Harris was an avant-gardist, a left-wing Jew, an antipodean enfant terrible. His magazine, Angry Penguins, was the plushest thing around -- at least in Australia. It paraded new painters, published poets ranging from Dylan Thomas to Kenneth Rexroth, and gave its young editor, who was beguiled by surrealism, anarchism, and Freud, a platform from which to launch his brilliant career. Harris felt he was on the verge of ``big things.'' He had published two books of poetry and a stream-of-consciousness novel, The Vegetative Eye. Literary glory lay before him.

So he thought. But in the middle of 1943 two young men, both poets who thought Harris had it all wrong, found themselves working together at the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. James McAuley and Harold Stewart were only a year or two older than Harris, but they disagreed vehemently with his romantic surrealism. McAuley was fascinated by modernism, but had decided it was a mistake. Eliot and Pound had walked into a cul-de-sac. Nothing could be worse, McAuley thought, than a literary climate committed to endless experiment. Stewart had never been much interested in any art but the traditional kind. What stirred his imagination was Eastern philosophy and religion, which was of course medieval in its whole outlook. Their wartime jobs gave them time to think, time to write.

One day near the end of October 1943, sifting through his mail, Harris discovered a letter from a woman named Ethel Malley. She enclosed some poetry she said she had found among the personal effects of her poor late brother Ern, an itinerant motor mechanic and watch repairer who had died in total obscurity at the age of 25. Ethel did not claim to understand this work, but felt it best to forward it to someone who might. This was the moment at which Harris's life irrevocably changed. Here's what he read when he opened Ethel's letter.

DURER: INNSBRUCK, 1495

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,

Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colourful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters --

Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.

Now I find that once more I have shrunk

To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream.

I have 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.

Later Harris was to learn this poem was a ``come-on'' -- it was to whet his appetite for the main course he was to swallow at a gulp. Harris came on. He grew besotted with Ern Malley, who turned out to be a loopy, uneven writer, but with undeniable energy and elusive intelligence. Harris eagerly corresponded with the nonplussed Ethel, who in turn regaled him with a pitifully compelling account of Ern's brief, blighted, not quite futile life.

In June 1944 the great moment arrived. Harris published the collected works (16 poems) of Ern Malley in a triumphant special issue of Angry Penguins. The artist Sidney Nolan produced a painting for the cover, the first of many about Ern Malley. To say that Harris staked his critical reputation on Malley is an understatement. He believed he had found the great lost poet of Australian literature. Had Ern Malley really existed Harris's response would have been excessive; but in the circumstances, it was disastrous.

The savage, brilliant truth was exposed after a week or so of frantic public speculation. With the help of some hilarious detective work -- Harris hired a private eye to stake out Ethel Malley's address -- McAuley and Stewart were identified as the culprits. The pair explained themselves in a devastating article that ran in the popular press. They had, they said, concocted the poems in the space of a single afternoon as a spoof on modernism, and especially the Angry Penguins brand of portentous free association. This was a crippling attack because it came from an unexpected quarter: not from the hidebound philistine society Harris had grown up in but from two of his contemporaries.

For a week or so the hoax was an international media sensation, attracting the attention of, among others, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the London Spectator. Harris was skewered, but the Angry Penguins -- supported by Herbert Read, who sent an encouraging cable -- staunchly defended the worth of Malley's verse. (And even though Harris in later years talked about the ``excesses, absurdities, and intolerable posturings'' of the Angry Penguins, he was never to recant on Malley.) Perhaps the greatest indignity Harris suffered in the whole affair came in September 1944, when he was successfully prosecuted in a fatuous Adelaide trial for publishing indecent material, namely the Ern Malley poems, and fined e5.