Ern Malley hoax

[2][3][4] Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax the Angry Penguins, a modernist art and literary movement centred around a journal of the same name, co-edited by poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed, of Heide, Melbourne.

Imitating the modernist poetry they despised, the hoaxers deliberately created what they thought was bad verse and mailed sixteen poems to Harris under the guise of Ethel, Ern Malley's surviving sister.

Harris and other members of the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to Malley, hailing him as a genius.

The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a cause célèbre and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content.

Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes.

The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators, and the affair has inspired works by major Australian writers and artists, such as Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan.

[5] McAuley and Stewart decided to perpetrate a hoax on Harris and Angry Penguins by submitting nonsensical poetry to the magazine under the guise of a fictional poet.

The entire body of work attributed to Malley - 17 poems, none longer than a page and intended to be read in sequence under the title The Darkening Ecliptic - was written in a single afternoon.

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.

He showed them to his circle of literary friends, who agreed that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great importance had been discovered in suburban Australia.

An article appeared in the University of Adelaide student newspaper, On Dit, ridiculing the Malley poems and suggesting that Harris had written them himself in some elaborate hoax.

The next week, the Sydney Sunday Sun, which had been conducting some investigative reporting, ran a front-page story alleging that the Ern Malley poems had in fact been written by McAuley and Stewart.

[2] After the hoax was revealed, McAuley and Stewart wrote: Mr. Max Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America.

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.

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.

"[16] In a 1975 interview with Earle Hackett, Sidney Nolan credited Ern Malley with inspiring him to paint his first Ned Kelly series (1946–47), saying "It made me take the risk of putting against the Australian bush an utterly strange object.

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.

The American poet John Ashbery said of Ern Malley, in a 1988 interview in the magazine Jacket: I think it was the first summer I was at Harvard as a student, and I discovered a wonderful bookstore there where I could get modern poetry – which I'd never been able to lay my hands on very much until then – and they had the original edition of The Darkening Ecliptic with the Sidney Nolan cover.

[21][9][22][23] In The Washington Post, David Lehman wrote, The Ern Malley affair was the century's greatest literary hoax not because it completely hookwinked [sic] Harris and not because it triggered off a story so rich in ironies and reversals.

It was the greatest hoax because the creation of Ern Malley escaped the control of his creators and enjoyed an autonomous existence beyond, and at odds with, the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart.

In 1977 in Overland, Barbara Ker Wilson wrote a short story "Black Swan of Trespass", in which she has Davydd Davis, whom she presents as an antipodean Dylan Thomas, writing the poems.

[26] Two more recent fictions invent a "real" Ern: "Strangers in the House of the Mind" which appears in Martin Edmond's 2007 collection Waimarino County & Other Excursions,[27] and David Malley's Beyond is Anything.

In 2005, The Black Swan of Trespass, a surrealist play about the real life of a fictional Ern Malley by Lally Katz and Chris Kohn, premiered at the Melbourne Malthouse Theatre.

In the early years of the 21st century, the artist Garry Shead produced a series of well-received paintings based on the Ern Malley hoax.