The story of Ern Malley, Australia’s most infamous poet.
His poetry was published in the early nineteen forties after Malley’s untimely death, to wide acclaim. But then his publisher, Max Harris, was charged with publishing obscene material, and convicted. The SA police prosecutor objected to words like ‘genitals’ and 'incestuous.'. ‘I think it is immoral to use the word “genitals”,' the prescutor said, 'I think it is unusual for sexual parts to be referred to in poetry.’
The court case was widely covered by the press of the day and helped to make Ern Malley’s works more famous. Since then, Malley’s poetry has been read, studied, discussed and debated vigorously in schools and universities over these past decades.
Ern Malley inspired writers, composers and performers. Sydney Nolan painted the cover of the avant-garde journal Angry Penguins, which first published Malley’s poems. They say that Malley inspired Nolan to produce some of his best art. Archibald Winner Gary Shead painted a series of works with Ern Malley and his poetry the centrepiece.
photo courtesy of http://www.ernmalley.com/ern_malley_latest.html
In 2003, twice Booker Prize-winning author Peter Carey revived the Ern Malley story in a novel under the title My Life as a Fake
Yes, Ern Malley was a fake, born in a hoax perpetrated on the champion of literary modernism of the 1940s, Max Harris. James McAuley and Harold Stewart were poets who abhorred modernist poetry and, stationed in Victoria Barracks with time on their hands, they decided to debunk the whole business of modernist poetry.
‘The perpetrators of this humorless nonsense,’ they wrote later, ‘had managed to pass it off on would-be intellectuals and Bohemians, both here and abroad, as great poetry.’ They concocted some poetry to prove their point.
They said they took the lines from ‘a chance collection of books which happened to be on our desk: the concise Oxford Dictionary, Collected Shakespeare, Dictionary of Quotations, Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary and the American report on the drainage of breeding grounds of mosquitoes.’
They said they ‘opened these books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them into nonsensical sentences ... we deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes ...’
When they'd produced a series of poems this way, they sent a letter to Max Harris from Ern Malley’s fictitious sister Ethel, which said: ‘Dear Sir, when I was going through my brother’s things after his death, I found some poetry he had written ... I am not a literary person myself and I do not feel that I understand what he wrote, but I feel I ought to do something about them.’
Harris published Ern Malley in the 1944 autumn issue of Angry Penguins. The poems were later published in book form under the title of The Darkening Ecliptic. The Sydney Sunday Sun exposed the hoax, and the public loved the story - tall intellectual poppies taken down a notch or two by a couple of diggers. Even The Bulletin lent its support to the two hoaxers, writing: ‘earnest thanks to the diggers who are joint debunkers of Bosh, Blah and Blather’.
Harris was publicly humiliated but came up with a killer response: whether they liked it or not, he said, McAuley and Stewart had written their best poetry ever, in fact their only poetry of real genius. Ern Malley had clearly liberated them.
That is the point of this strange little story: Ern Malley is still being read and interpreted and discussed vigorously. McAuley and Stewart are long forgotten, and their poetry long gone.
It's a speech I gave at Toastmasters tonight.
Kim
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