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

Michael Heyward

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.

After the fuss died down the hoaxers and their victim got on with their lives, or tried to. Harris ultimately became a prominent bookseller who kept up his interest in editing and publishing. For more than a quarter of a century he wrote a populist column for Rupert Murdoch's Australian. Harris died this year in Adelaide. He never lost his love of the hoax, though it marked him deeply, and became a kind of scarlet letter for him which he wore with a mixture of pride and affection. I well remember him as I saw him in 1988 at the launch of a new edition of the Ern Malley poems. As an actor recited the lines, Harris, plump and elegant, rocked back and forth on his silver cane, smiling to himself and mouthing the words: ``Here the Tree weeps gum tears/Which are also real: I tell you/These things are real.''

He and McAuley eventually got to know each other well. There was a famous occasion in Sydney in 1962 when the pair met for the first time, almost two decades after the hoax, and talked their way through the night with the assistance of a large volume of whisky. In 1976, just a few months before his premature death from cancer, McAuley expressed regret at what the hoax had done to Harris: ``I think Max naturally took a certain amount of hurt from it and I have never been in retrospect comfortable about that.'' By then McAuley was at the end of an extraordinary career as a poet, colonial administrator, hymn-writer, and educationalist. He was fascinated by politics all his life, and contemplated running for office. He had converted to Catholicism in the Fifties; his outlook, after an obligatory dabbling with the Left in the Thirties, became intensely conservative. He was a staunch defender of traditional literary values, and a fierce Cold Warrior.

Meantime his co-conspirator, Harold Stewart, had decamped in the mid Sixties to Kyoto, where at the age of 78 he still leads the life of a scholar-poet, immersed in Buddhism. I spent a week or so with Stewart in Kyoto, and he was bemused by my fascination with what he now regards as the literary trivia of his former incarnation in Australia.

Ern Malley is still with us, and likely to be so for a while yet. Why does he persist? What is it about the hoax that makes it more than a ruthlessly charming provincial anecdote?

Ern Malley beguiles us mostly because of his poetry. His work is in the end quite unlike the kind of romantic gush, debased Dylan Thomas, that it was written to parody. There's a sort of electric anarchic intelligence in Ern, a self-lacerating shrewdness and love of chaos that puts me in mind of the Marx Brothers. Ern reserves ``a man's inalienable right to be sad/At his own funeral,'' he imagines himself as a dromedary between oases, and he

endearingly reflects that ``a poet may not exist, that his writings/Are the incomplete circle and straight drop/Of a question mark.'' Ern Malley is a bit like one of those minor figures in Shakespeare who get only a handful of lines but glow in the mind forever.

Few writers have been so well and so badly regarded. Since 1944 Malley's work has been ignored, reviled, and lavishly praised. Sidney Nolan recorded Orson Welles reading some lines, but the tape has yet to surface. The poems have been set to jazz. Then, just after my book about the hoax was published in America, a man named William Hampton wrote to me with the news that in 1947 he and some friends at the University of Michigan had made a 14-minute expressionist movie about Ern Malley, using surplus Army film stock.

And now, in the March 1995 issue of Quadrant, Professor David Lewis of Princeton University has asked some intriguing questions about the source of Malley's name. Lewis refers to an obscure Austrian philosopher who early in this century expounded a theory of nonexistent objects. The philosopher's name? Ernst Mally. Could this be mere coincidence? Ern Malley is after all an aleatory poet to whom hardly anything ever happened by chance. I decided to call Harold Stewart: was this another of his and Jim McAuley's jokes, to name their poet after the most obscure philosopher in the world, a man who tried to explain what happens when we think about things that don't exist? Harold was blunt. ``I can tell you with absolute certainty that I have never heard of Ernst Mally until this instant,'' he told me.

The history of the Ern Malley hoax is a puzzling, contradictory one, the sum not just of what happened fifty years ago but of the wide range of reactions to it. That's why the hoax is alive, and why David Lewis's intriguing suggestion is now part of the story. I need hardly add that in the process Ern Malley has achieved something Ernst Mally would certainly never have predicted for himself: he has made the philosopher famous in Australia. At a point in our conversation, Harold chuckled. ``You know,'' he said, ``perhaps neither McAuley nor I ever existed except in the imagination of Ern Malley.''

COPYRIGHT 1995 National Review, Inc.
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