The Ern Malley Affair

The Ern Malley affair is still something of an embarrassment to literate Australians. Ern Malley was the creation of two poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who wanted to show up what they regarded as the insufferable pretensions of an Australian literary magazine called Angry Penguins. They concocted the fictitious Ern, gave him an irresistibly romantic biography, wrote a dozen supposedly awful poems under his name, and sent off the result. To their glee, the editor Max Harris swallowed the bait and published a special issue in Ern's memory. Then the facts came out, and avant-gardists all over Australia were made to look stupid.That would be it, except for the bewildering irony that the Ern Malley poems aren't nearly as bad and incoherent as their authors suggested. Well, not all the time. (Heyward helpfully reprints them as an appendix so you can judge for yourself.) They oscillate in the strangest way between genius and gibberish; I have one highly-educated Aussie friend who thinks that they're the most genuinely avant-garde poetry Australia has ever produced, and Heyward is inclined to agree. The Angry Penguin crowd claimed as much, saying that the authors had surpassed themselves in their attempt to turn off conscious control over their own work. They certainly contain some haunting, extraordinary lines ("I am still / The black swan of trespass on alien waters", "I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.") The fact that these lines were never meant seriously by their authors raises important questions about the usefulness of discussing intention in matters of literary criticism. Heyward's story is lucidly and wittily told. There are no clear-cut villains and heroes. Max Harris comes across as appealingly open-minded and imaginative, as well as gullible. The hoaxers weren't cynical hacks but talented and serious poets in their own right. Amongst those taken in by Ern was Australia's greatest modern painter, Sidney Nolan, who (perhaps rightly) said that it didn't matter whether the poems were "authentic" or not, so long as they worked on some level. A remarkable book, not only in its picture of mid-century Australian cultural history but also in the tricky questions it asks about sense vs. nonsense in art and the motives behind cultural battles.

A brilliantly researched and wittily written chronicle of a great literary hoax. In the nineteen forties Australia's avant-garde arts magazine ANGRY PENGUINS received a package of poems from a woman calling herself Ethel Malley, purportedly the work of her recently deceased brother Ern. The magazine's editor was so overwhelmed with the poems that he published the entire oeuvre in a special edition of the magazine. Then word began to get about that neither Ethel nor Ern Malley actually existed, and that the poems were a hoax. The hunt for the culprits was on. The is a great read: a literary detective story, an intriguing picture of the cultural landscape of postwar Australia, and a book which confronts the reader with crucial questions about the elusive nature of aesthetic judgement.