Ern Malley

Ern Malley is Australia's favourite literary hoax.

Ern and his work were concocted in 1941 to expose the supposed hollowness of modernist art and writing, and expunge the annoyance that Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, had made of himself, brilliant stirrer, talented poet, communist, sympathizer, literary agitator that he was.

In the early 1940s Adelaide was small – usually described as a big country town – isolated, homphobic, xenophobic, femophobic; it persists as one of the whitest of Australian cities, and modernist art ignored by Robert Hughes / of uncertain investment value, is still ignored by the art market there.

And so James McAuley and Harold Stewart – McAuley a poet in the Australian Army, hanging around in barracks, waiting to be deployed, and his friend and co-conspirator, Stewart, hatched Ern Malley. Malley, young and dead, had been a mechanic. His sister, Ethel, discovered the poems afterwards, in a shed.

Ethel (McAuley and Stewart) submitted Ern's poems to Angry Penguins. Harris accepted them and raved, the hoax was revealed, and Harris, as an individual writer, was destroyed.

(Australia's always been a place of very odd social deaths. There appear to be no rules whatsoever, as MsWord would say of Australian English, until you do something unforeseen.)

Reading the Malley poems now shows them to be almost Edwardian in spots. I like this one for its completely straight-faced silliness:

Dürer: 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 Dürer 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.

Despite his ignoble, destructive, derrière-garde career, Ern's estate still grows.

Here are two hitherto unknown, signed poems, from a box of commercial property daily journals donated to the National Library of Australia. They were apparently pawned for underpants when Ern was an apprentice.

Late Rome

The sun that glitters on mechanical metal
shall not enter this shadeous vault
where the eagle proclaims the imperium. Nettle
will enter, moth, caterpillar; undoing, unwinding, fault.

But in the waste between the day and the dawning
the eagle will also be absent.
There is no Coliseum but morning.

Dualities

But do not think I am all histories
pussyfooting with tom-toms. Through spectral dance
I know the unravelling of future strings and mysteries
Fibonacci and irrational. So glance
at me, my only love. Let us leave the merely national
and outsource to the spitting stars all metempsychoses and avatars,
the mess of the confessional.

1) The complete context, including speculation as to the personal motives that might have driven the hoax, and paintings by the artists Angry Penguins reproduced, can be seen here.
2) Ern's complete corpus can be viewed here.