By James Aitchison

In 1944, Australian surrealist poet and publisher Max Harris opened a packet of poems on his desk in Adelaide.  The poems had been submitted for publication in Harris’s avant-garde arts journal Angry Penguins.  Harris, in his own words, read them with “a sense of mounting excitement”.  

The poems were accompanied by a letter from the poet’s sister.  Ethel explained that her brother Ernest Lalor Malley died the year before aged 25.  He worked as a motor mechanic, then an insurance salesman, and died of Graves’ disease, an autoimmune ailment of the thyroid.  She had found the unpublished poems among his belongings and she hoped that Max Harris might examine them.

The collection of 16 poems, none longer than a page, formed a collection titled The Darkening Ecliptic.  Harris and his literary circle decided they had discovered “an unknown modernist poet of great importance”.  He rushed out a special edition of Angry Penguins with a specially commissioned cover painted by Sidney Nolan.

The first poem in the sequence, Durer: Innsbruck, 1945, begins:

“I had often coiled in the slumbrous 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 — “

The poem concludes:

“I am still the black swan of trespass in alien waters.”

Harris believed Ern Malley’s poetry was in the same class as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.  If only Harris had picked up a clue from that last line …  

….

Ern Malley was indeed a “black swan trespassing”.  In truth, Ern Malley did not exist.  His poems were written in a single afternoon by two conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart.  They set out to hoax Harris and the modernist poetry movement they despised.  They fabricated Ern Malley’s backstory and the letter from his “sister”.  

No sooner was Malley hailed as a genius than the prank was exposed in the press.  However, a shocked and humiliated Max Harris still maintained his belief in the poetry’s quality.  Even when the South Australian police charged him with publishing obscene material, he paid the five-pound fine with equanimity.

But the Ern Malley affair was more than a blip on the poetic radar of Australia.  To this day the Malley poems are celebrated around the world, and many have argued that the hoax backfired on the hoaxers …

…..

When McAuley and Stewart described their writing process, it had echoes of dadaism and absurdism. They wrote down the first thing that came into their heads, lifting words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a volume of 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 into nonsenical sentences.  We deliberately wrote bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from Ripman’s Rhyming Dictionary.”

They proudly asserted, “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 Malley poems were designed as a test to see whether Harris had “sufficient discrimination” to reject them.  The fact that he found them worthy of publication was supposed to prove their point.  

At the time, the legendary Australian Bulletin magazine agreed.  “The editors of Angry Penguins … made complete fools of themselves when confronted by a piece of deliberately-confected bunkum.”

But as Max Harris later wrote, “Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators.”  

The great Australian critic Robert Hughes argued: “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 … 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.”

In 1988, the famous American poet John Ashbery recalled how he discovered the original edition of The Darkening Ecliptic.  “I always had a taste for sort of wild experimental poetry — of which there wasn’t very much in English in America at the time — and this poet suited me very well.”  When Ashbery invited his students to identify the fraudulent poems of Malley vis-a-vis the work of the respected poet Geoffrey Hill, “they got it right about fifty per cent of the time.”

And in The Washington Post, David Lehman argued, “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.”

…….

Ern Malley’s poems offered such titles as Sonnets for the Novachord, Night-piece (Alternate Version), Baroque Exterior and Egyptian Register.  Even the preface, written by McAuley and Stewart, states that “there are no scoriae or unfulfilled intentions … the poems face outwards to the reader that is because they have first faced inward to themselves … The writing was done over five years.  Certain changes of mental allegiance and superficial method took place …”

Though they were intended as a hoax, the Malley poems became celebrated as examples of surrealist poetry in their own right.  Here are some random lines:    

“Rise from the wrist, o kestrel
Mind, to a clear expanse.
Perform your high dance
On the clouds of ancestral
duty.”

                      “Rightly contempt
Rewards the cloud-foot unwary
Who falls to the prairie.”

“Poetry: the loaves and fishes
Or no less miracle;
For in this deft pentacle
We imprison our wishes.”

“A splash — the silver nymph
Was a foam flake in the night.”
“Princess, you lived in Princess St.,
Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun
With the left hand.  You thought
That paying the price would give you admission
To the sad autumn of my Valhalla.”

“I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget …”

The Darkening Ecliptic has been published in full or in part at least 20 times in Australia, London, Paris, Lyons, Kyoto, New York and Los Angeles.

….

Max Harris had the last laugh.  At the time on his death in 1995, he was a member of the Order of Australia, an alumni award-holder of the University of Adelaide, and was later inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame.  He had pioneered a television programme discussing literature and the arts, and wrote for The Australian newspaper.  As the newspaper’s owner Rupert Murdoch wrote in 1973:

“Every society needs a Max, to identify its successes as well as its failures, its forlorn hopoes and lost causes.  And also to shake it out of its smugness and hypocrisy, to act as a catalyst and an irritant.”