Ern Malley

Ern Malley (1918 - 23 July 1943) is the best-known name in the history of modern Australian poetry. He was born (according to his sister, the only source for his early life) Ernest Lalor Malley in Britain in 1918 and migrated to Australia as a child with his parents and sister, Ethel. Both parents died during the 1920s, and Malley lived alone in Sydney while working as an insurance salesman. His other life, as a poet, became known only after his premature death at the age of 25, when Ethel found a pile of unpublished poems among his belongings.

The Darkening Ecliptic

Ethel Malley knew nothing about poetry, but a friend suggested that she send the poems to Max Harris, a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic in Adelaide, who in 1940 had started a modernist magazine called Angry Penguins. She sent them, along with a letter asking Harris's opinion on her late brother's poems. There were 17 of them, none longer than a page, intended to be read in sequence under the title The Darkening Ecliptic. This was the complete Malley oeuvre, but it was destined to cause a revolution in Australian cultural life.

The first poem in the sequence was called Durer: Innsbruck, 1495:

I had often [it ran], ''cowled in the slumbrous 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 had 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.

Harris read the poems with, as he later recalled, a mounting sense of excitement. Ern Malley, he thought, was a poet in the same class as Auden or Dylan Thomas. He showed them around his circle of literary friends, who agreed with him that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great importance had been discovered in suburban Australia. He decided to rush out a special edition of Angry Penguins, and commissioned a painting by Sidney Nolan, based on the poems, for the cover.

The "Autumn 1944" edition of Angry Penguins appeared in June (it ran late due to wartime printing delays). Harris eargerly promoted it around the small world of Australian writers and critics. The reaction was not what he had hoped for, or expected. An article appeared in the Adelaide University student newspaper riduculing the Malley poems, and suggesting that Harris had written them himself in some elaborate hoax. Others began to ask, who was this Ern Malley? Why had no-one ever heard of him?

The Hoaxers and the Hoaxed

On 17 June the Adelaide Daily Mail raised the possibility that Harris was the hoaxed rather than the hoaxer. Alarmed, Harris hired a private detective to establish whether Ern and Ethel Malley existed or had ever done so. But by now the national press was on trail. The next week the Sydney Sunday Sun, which had been doing some investigative reporting, ran a front-page story, alleging that the Ern Malley poems had in fact been written by two other young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart.

McAuley and Stewart were both at this time in the Army, but before the war they had been part of Sydney's bohemian arts world. McAuley had acted and sung in left-wing revues at Sydney University. They were, however, artistic conservatives, who hated modernist art and poetry and lamented, as they said, "the loss of meaning and craftsmanship" in poetry. They particularly despised the smart circle around Angry Penguins. They also had a high opinion of their own poetic abilities, and were jealous of Harris's precocious success, success which they had not yet attained.

"Mr Max Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America," they wrote. "The distinctive feature of the fashion, it seemed to us, was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination.

"Our feeling was that by processes of critical self-delusion and mutual admiration, the perpetrators of this humourless nonsense had managed to pass it off on would be intellectuals and Bohemians, both here and abroad, as great poetry.

"However," [they went on] "it was possible that we had simply failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions. The only way of settling the matter was by way of experiment. It was, after all, fair enough. If Mr Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject the poems, then the tables would have been turned."

McAuley and Stewart, it turned out, had invented Ern and Ethel Malley out of thin air. They had written the whole of The Darkening Ecliptic in an afternoon, writing down the first thing that came into their heads, lifting words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare and a Dictionary of Quotations.

"We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary."

The triumph of the Philistines

To the philistine Australia of 1943, this was the best joke for years, and the Ern Malley hoax was on the front pages of the newspapers for weeks. Harris was most satisfactorily humiliated, and Angry Penguins soon went the way of most avant garde poetry magazines.

Most people, even most educated people with an interest in the arts, were thoroughly persuaded of the validity of McAuley and Stewart's "experiment." They had deliberately written bad poetry, and passed it off under a plausible alias to the country's most prominent publisher of modernist poetry, and he had been completely taken in. He could not tell "real" poetry from fake, good from bad.

The Ern Malley hoax had long-lasting repercussions. To quote the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, "More important than the hoax itself was the effect it had on the development of Australian poetry. The vigorous and legitimate movement for modernism in Australian writing, espoused by many writers and critics in addition to the members of the Angry Penguins group, received a severe setback, and the conservative element was undoubtedly strengthened."

Controversy over Ern Malley continued for more than twenty years. It spread beyond Australia when it was learned that the British literary critic Herbert Read had been taken in by the hoax. Modernist novelists like Patrick White and abstract painters found themselves tarred with the Ern Malley brush. Since both literary conservatives like McAuley and Stewart and the left-wing nationalist school around Vance and Nettie Palmer disliked modernism with equal venom, though for different reasons, Ern Malley cast a long shadow over Australian cultural life.

The Last Laugh

But cultural history is full of ironies. Today both the Catholic traditionalism of McAuley and the left-wing nationalism of the Palmers are pretty much dead. McAuley died in 1976, and lip service is paid to his reputation as a "great poet," mainly by the political conservatives around Quadrant, the cultural magazine he founded on behalf of the Australian Associaition for Cultural Freedom, a group which was later revealed to have been funded by the CIA. But not many people read his poetry. Harold Stewart settled permanently in Japan in 1965 and faded from public attention.

Max Harris, however, dined out on the Ern Malley hoax for the rest of his long and colourful life. Once he got over his humiliation, he made the best of his notoriety. From 1951 to 1955 he published another literary magazine, which he cheekily called Ern Malley's Journal. In 1961, as a gesture of defiance, he republished the Ern Malley poems, maintaining that whatever McAuley and Stewart had intended to do, they had in fact written some memorable poems. He went to become a successful bookseller and newspaper columnist. He died in 1995, as did Stewart.

Ern Malley himself, the poet that never was, has had the last laugh. His poems are regularly republished and widely quoted - far more so than anything McAuley or Stewart wrote under their own names. When the Australian historian Humphrey McQueen called his history of modernism in Australia The Black Swan of Trespass, the allusion was immediately recognised. Australia is now quite proud of Ern Malley, a genuine literary celebrity in a country that has not produced many such.

At a more serious level, some literary critics take the view that McAuley and Stewart outsmarted themselves in their concoction of the Ern Malley poems. "Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators," Max Harris wrote. Harris of course had a vested interest in Malley, but others have agreed with him. Robert Hughes wrote:

"The basic case made by Ern's defenders was that his creation proved the validity of surrealist procedures: that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody; and though this can't be argued on behalf of all the poems, some of which are partly or wholly gibberish, it contains a ponderable truth... The energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value, and that is why he continues to haunt our culture."

Ern Malley was by no means the last notorious hoax perpetrated in Australia's literary community, the most recent probably being Helen Demidenko.

Further reading