Ern Malley, a Melbourne garage hand who, like Keats, wrote poems and died at twenty-six, was the invention of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who also created the poet’s dim sister Ethel. She it was who found the poems after her brother’s death and, knowing nothing about poetry, in 1944 sent the grubby, coffee-stained pages to the Adelaide poetry magazine Angry Penguins and asked for an opinion. So began what turned out to be not an ephemeral joke, a short-running tease, but the most famous literary hoax since Swift tormented the astrologer John Partridge.
McAuley and Stewart were poets of roughly the same age as Ern. When the story broke, they claimed to have written the entire œuvre of Malley in one afternoon and evening. It is possible to doubt the absolute truth of this claim, since at least one of the poems was a serious but discarded early effort by McAuley, and there are unconfirmed reports that other material from his old notebook was transferred to Malley. It is likely that Stewart made a similar contribution. Michael Heyward, author of an intelligent, thorough, and only occasionally over-elaborate study,1 knows all this – indeed knows pretty well everything about the case – but still accepts the hoaxers’ claim, and Stewart, the surviving half of Malley, continues to affirm it in his voluntary Japanese exile.
The object of the prank was to discredit Angry Penguins and its editor, Max Harris, an economics student at Adelaide University. Harris was an enterprising, rather hectic literary man with a taste for Rimbaud, Blake, Surrealism and the current English Neo-Apocalyptic school, whose magazine, Poetry London, had covers by Henry Moore. Angry Penguins had covers by Sydney Nolan, later to become the most celebrated of Australian artists, and a lifelong admirer of Ern Malley.
Harris’s response to the poems was immediate; he had no doubt that Australia had found its poet, and that he, given a glorious opportunity to make the fact public, was the right impresario. The poetry was strange but certainly modern. The dead poet had left a powerful ‘Preface and Statement’: ‘These poems are complete in themselves. They have a domestic economy of their own and if they face outwards to the reader that is because they have first faced inwards to themselves. Every poem should be an autarchy … Simplicity in our time is arrived at by an ambages …’ Delighted, Harris fell upon the verses:
There are ribald interventions
Like spurious seals upon
A Chinese landscape-roll
Or tangents to the rainbow.
We have known these declensions,
Have winked when Hyperion
Was transmuted to a troll,
We dubbed it a sideshow.
There were passages in which he could trace the influence of Mallarmé:
The solemn symphony of angels lighting
My steps with music, o constellations!
Palms!
O far shore, target and shield that I now
Desire beyond these terrestrial commitments.
There was the enigmatically Shakespearian ‘Boult to Marina’:
Only a part of me shall triumph in this
(I am not Pericles)
Though I have your silken eyes to kiss,
And maiden-knees
Part of me remains, wench, Boult-upright
The rest of me drops off into the night.
What would you have me do? Go to the wars?…
And carefully placed on the top of the pile was the best poem in the collection.
Nobody had the slightest idea that the act of sending a bundle of fake poems to an obscure poetry editor would excite the wartime press not only of Australia but of the anglophone world at large; and, to give the hoaxers their due, they couldn’t have foreseen that Harris would suffer so much from ridicule, most of it of course totally ignorant, for the hoaxers acquired allies they could not have wanted in the popular press and the poetry-unloving Australian public. Worse still, Harris had to stand trial for publishing obscene poems, not least ‘Boult to Marina’. Heyward gives a good account of the trial, surely one of the most preposterous in the preposterous history of such prosecutions. The evidence of Detective Vogelsang, the principal prosecution witness, was to be discussed with hilarity for years to come. It was he who, among other perceptions, found the word ‘incest’ to be indecent, though he confessed he did not know what it meant. Sniggering in court, no doubt; but the trial was still a cruel ordeal for young Harris. Apparently he narrowly escaped a charge of blasphemy, which would have been even more serious.
Harris did well enough at the trial, and Heyward gives him due credit for his general demeanour throughout the protracted and sometimes rather frightening events of those months. He was an excitable fellow and often tiresomely flamboyant; his novel The Vegetative Eye was a grotesquely affected and truly awful book. It is easy to see why the learned and satirical McAuley, always, in matters related to poetry, censorious and austere, should want to teach Harris a lesson. But it is to his credit that Harris declined to be put down; hoax or not, these were, he maintained, important poems, and if they were produced unintentionally by rival poets, whose beliefs and works he despised as much as they did his, that fact had no bearing on their quality. Or it merely showed that they wrote better when not constrained by their false conscious assumptions. Harris never lost his faith in his first excited valuation of the Ern Malley poems, which was supported by the powerful voice of Herbert Read in England, and by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch in the USA. Of course most people, whether they had read the poems or not, were gleefully sure that Harris had been had. It may be that nowadays fewer readers would feel so confident that he was absurdly wrong.
It so happened that I was in Australia during much of 1945, for no better reason than that the aircraft carrier I served in was dispatched from the Atlantic theatre, which was closing down, to the Pacific, which wasn’t. Henceforth we would be based on Sydney. Almost on arrival, and entirely by accident, I met A. D. Hope, then around thirty-five or -six, with a big underground reputation as a poet, his work mostly erotic but severely traditional in form. At that time his reputation depended more on his performances as a reviewer of exceptional ferocity. But his verses circulated in a pamphlet, printed on brown wrapping paper and shared with two other, less impressive, writers. To a very young man with his own poetic aspirations Hope was a most impressive figure, wild in behaviour but quiet of speech, with that soothing accent Australians develop after a couple of years at Oxford.
Since I occasionally stayed at the Hopes’ place in Manley, near Sydney, I soon came to know James McAuley. He was about ten years junior to Hope and although of strongly independent intellect he tacitly regarded the older man as his mentor. McAuley was at this time, rather reluctantly, in the Army. He had been in New Guinea, but much of his service had been in sedentary jobs, and he had been able to carry on with his poetry and his other comparably severe intellectual occupations. Conversation between the two poets, despite the flow of liquor, was impressively learned and lengthy, with Mrs Hope and me for the most part discreetly silent.
Hope had been a pupil of Christopher Brennan, a dissolute poet of immense and arcane learning and, rather improbably, once a frequenter of Mallarmé’s Tuesday salon: a mardiste, no less. He taught French at Sydney University, and was said to have lectured propped up by two porters. Brennan’s poetry was at that time practically unobtainable, and this was regarded, at any rate by poets, as a national scandal, for he was declared to be the true father of Australian poetry. Much later his collected poetry was published, but it failed to set Sydney Harbour on fire, perhaps because the mood had changed and Australians no longer cared to think of themselves as second-rate Europeans, needing to re-establish in exile the culture they had lost; or perhaps because Brennan’s reputation had owed something to the principle omne ignotum pro magnifico, and faded a little when the work became generally available. Fifty years ago there was no doubt in Hope’s mind, or McAuley’s, as to the identity of their cultural heritage; they took pride in their European learning, and at the same time deplored both the ignorant antics of exhibitionist fellow poets and the philistinism of Australian life generally. Curiously enough, Max Harris and his friends and contributors had some similar aspirations, despite their different methods and attitudes. They latched on to British and European intellectual fashions, but did so in a sophomoric way that disgusted Hope, who wrote a savage review of The Vegetative Eye. He was naturally sympathetic to the Ern Malley ‘jape’, and I have always suspected that he played a bigger part in it than he acknowledged, or than Heyward claims.
I never met Stewart, but recognize the McAuley I knew in the ample biographical account that Heyward provides. He was an intellectual hard man, with a deploring satirist’s face, a brow of contempt: there was in his manner a sort of perpetual reproof, kept ready, as it were, to deal with those manifestations of intellectual softness or vacuity that are always, given the decadent state of our culture, on the point of occurring. He was extremely well read and was also a musician – a good jazz pianist – and for these reasons agreeable company; but he seemed to have a permanently exacerbated sense of being surrounded by fools and ignoramuses. He was later to convert to Roman Catholicism, move rapidly to the right, and edit the CIA-sponsored journal Quadrant.2
He and Stewart already knew each other, but were brought together in the Army by an extraordinary man called Alf Conlon, who ran a sort of autonomous army unit and made it his business to keep talented young men out of danger. It was on an idle afternoon in Conlon’s outfit that Stewart and McAuley compiled the Ern Malley poems. Early accounts claimed that they had thrown in anything to hand, for instance sentences from an official report on the lifestyle of New Guinea mosquitoes. This they had indeed drawn upon; but the implication that all of the Malley poems were made up of such random scraps is false. There are parodies, more or less remote, of Mallarmé, Pound and Eliot – they might even be called, more grandly, ‘allusions’ to those poets – and there are even McAuley parodies of Stewart and vice versa. They may have worked fast, but they were so talented and so habituated to poetry that they failed to produce the total garbage they had intended.
This made the hoax a bit unfair. Harris had his faults, but he wasn’t totally wrong to find merit in Malley. He did go over the top, proclaiming his discovery of a great poet, conducting an earnest correspondence with Ethel about her genius brother, producing a special edition of Angry Penguins, and, later, a slim volume of the collected Ern Malley called The Darkening Ecliptic. He fell, but not so hard that he deserved the fate he got. It was particularly gross that the final revelation of the hoax was made in a supplement of the Sydney Sunday Sun. This was simply throwing him to the philistines, natural enemies of the small artistic community – the ‘wowsers’, as Australians used to call them. They needed no inducement to jeer at poetry and were not up to discriminating between Harris’s take on European modernism and the more researched and temperate lucubrations of Hope and his friends – who, incidentally, cannot have thought they themselves would have fared any better at such hands.
The hoaxers produced effects they had not meant to cause, but they must have known that they had cheated by attributing good poems or lines to Malley. To fool Harris honestly they should have taken care not to include anything of merit, but they may have suspected that they wouldn’t get away with that. The Ern Malley hoax was not quite the knockout it seemed at the time, and there was a degree of arrogance in its perpetrators, and even a certain blindness, for they might have been expected to see that they had worse cultural enemies than the poets they disagreed with. Yet it was good, in the midst of the Pacific war, to find such people – so talented, so serious about poetry, that they could not be anything but savagely derisive of men with pretensions to culture who were in fact – as they believed – its enemies. Of course I was very young, but I was right to be impressed.
When I flew back to England in December 1945 I left behind with my luggage a complete set of Ern Malley documents: the famous issue of Angry Penguins, a copy of The Darkening Ecliptic, reports of the Harris trial at Adelaide, even the scarce and crumbling brown-paper pamphlet of Hope. All were lost with the rest of my gear, so I never wrote, as I’d intended, about the case. Heywood, who wasn’t even born at the time of the hoax, knows a great deal more about it – about the authors and their methods of composition, about Conlon, and about Max Harris and his circle and his backers. He has done a good and even an important job, but all the same I think he misses some things. All will admit that the opening poem ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1945’ is at least not bad and might be thought better than that:
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass upon alien waters.
An editor might reject that poem, the first in the collection, but could not be expected to see it as a hoax, an attempt to show that he or she lacked all discrimination. Heyward is good at spotting sources but occasionally makes the mistake of believing that having done so he has demolished the dependent poem. So an ingenious Audenesque pastiche, ‘Rise from the wrist, o kestrel’, and the Poundian quatrains of ‘Poetry: the loaves and fishes’ are dismissed simply as jokes about rhyming. Oddly enough, some of Hope’s finest poetry, greatly admired by McAuley, is pastiche, for instance the beautiful Venetia Digby verse-letter, modelled on an early-seventeenth-century epode form. McAuley was a cradle classicist, and must have known such things could be done. ‘Boult to Marina’ is also, I think, a real poem; it got Harris into trouble because it was foolishly accused of obscenity, not because he was wrong to like it.
Of course there’s a lot of rubbish in The Darkening Ecliptic, but people would not now attend to it if it had been all such. It has gone into several editions, it has been the subject of lengthy investigations on Australian radio; it appears in anthologies of Australian verse, and it is here reprinted in full by Heyward. It is continually discussed by a new generation of Australian poets.
Meanwhile the fame of Hope, now a very old man,3 seems a little dimmed, McAuley is dead, and Stewart, who good-humouredly but detachedly obliged Heywood with his memories and present views of the affair, has moved into another world. I last saw Alec Hope in 1988; he sat, benign but still sharp in spite of his deafness, in the big A. D. Hope Building at the National University in Canberra. Among other things I asked him what had become of Cordukes. Cordukes was an amiable timber merchant with an interest in poetry. I met him on my first night in Sydney, when he nearly ran me down. He stopped to expostulate and we fell into conversation, as a result of which I got to know his interests and could share the hospitality he extended to poets. I had heard that right after the war he risked his all on a cargo of Russian timber, which the Sydney dockers refused to unload; the ship went home to Russia and Cordukes immediately disappeared from the scene. So I asked my question; Hope, who probably hadn’t heard the name for forty-odd years, softly replied that he had no idea. Yet generous amateurs and benefactors of poetry are not so common that poets should forget them. I, of course, remembered Cordukes because it was he who introduced me to Hope, and so to the hoaxer McAuley.
McAuley I saw on a hectic day in 1967 – another hoax had been exposed: the covert funding by the CIA of certain magazines. We met in the office of Encounter, a journal from the same stable as Quadrant, the one he edited. He was moderately cheerful; twenty-odd years had, it seemed, reduced his abrasiveness, perhaps his poetry also. I don’t think we talked about old Sydney and the hoax – he must have had enough of it by then. He died in 1976, in his late fifties. There is a sense in which young Ern Malley, saved from oblivion by his barely literate and wholly fictitious sister Ethel, with some help from Harris and the hoaxers and even the Sydney Sunday Sun, has unexpectedly stayed young and lively while his betters have declined into old age and the only end of age.