Ern Malley

Ern Malley , a fictional poet, was the central figure in the best known forgery of Australian literature and became one of the most recognizable names in the history of national poetry .

The history

The biography devised by its inventors James McAuley and Harold Stewart states that Ernest Lalor Malley was born in Great Britain in 1918 and immigrated to Australia as a child with his parents and sister Ethel . Both parents died during the 1920s and Malley lived alone in Sydney , where he worked as an insurance salesman . His life as a poet was not known until after his untimely death, at the age of 25, when Ethel found a pile of unpublished poems in his possession.

Ethel knew nothing about poetry, but a friend suggested that she send the poems to Max Harris , a 22-year-old avant-garde poet and literary critic in Adelaide . In 1940 he founded the modernist magazine Angry Penguins . Ethel sent the package with a letter asking Harris's opinion on her late brother's poetry. Seventeen of them, none longer than a page, should be read in a row under the title The Darkening Ecliptic . That was Malley's complete oeuvre, but it was supposed to start a revolution in Australian cultural life.

The first poem in the sequence was called Durer : Innsbruck , 1495 (painting):

Albrecht Dürer
view of Innsbruck
Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

I had often, cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,

Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colorful spiers

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters -

Not knowing then that Durer 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.

Harris later said he had read the poems with growing enthusiasm. He thought Ern Malley was a poet in the class of WH Auden or Dylan Thomas . He showed the works to his literary friends, who shared his assessment that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great importance had been discovered in suburban Australia. He decided to publish a special edition of Angry Penguins and commissioned a drawing by Sidney Nolan based on the poems for the cover .

The "Autumn 1944" edition appeared in June due to delays in printing due to the war . Harris promoted it in the small world of Australian writers and critics. The response was not as hoped or expected; an article in the University of Adelaide's student newspaper parodied Malley's poems, claiming that Harris wrote them himself in an extensive forgery. Others began to wonder who this Ern Malley was and why no one had heard from him before.

The counterfeiters and the deceived

On June 17, the Adelaide Daily Mail speculated that Harris was more of the deceived than the forger. Alarmed by the news, Harris hired a private detective to find out if Ern and Ethel Malley ever existed. The following week, the Sunday Sun in Sydney presented the results of their investigative journalism , claiming that the Ern Malley poems were in fact written by two other young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart.

McAuley and Stewart, it turned out, invented Ern and Ethel Malley out of nowhere. They had written the whole of The Darkening Ecliptic in one afternoon, jotting down what came to mind and weaving in words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary , the Collected Shakespeare, and a Dictionary of Quotations .

“We opened any book and randomly picked out a word or phrase. We made lists from them and combined them into nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and misinterpreted. We deliberately produced bad style and picked weird rhymes from a Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary . "

("We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary . ")

McAuley and Stewart were both serving in the army at the time, but before the war they were part of the bohemian art world in Sydney. McAuley has appeared as an actor and singer in left wing revues at the University of Sydney . However, they were artistic conservatives who hated modernist art and poetry and deplored the "loss of meaning and craft" in poetry. Above all, they despised the small circle around Angry Penguins . They had a high opinion of their own poetic abilities and envied Harris for his early success, which was still denied them.

"Mr Max Harris and other Angry Penguins authors represent the Australian offshoot of a literary fashion that has become famous in England and the United States ," they wrote after the forgery was discovered. “The defining characteristic of this fashion, we believe, is that it has rendered its followers impervious to absurdity and incapable of proper judgment. We feel that the representatives of this humorless nonsense have managed to convey it to alleged intellectuals and bohemian artists as great poetry through processes of critical self-deception and mutual admiration . However, it was possible that we just couldn't get into the inner substance of these productions. The question could only be clarified through an experiment. It was fair enough, after all. If Mr. Harris showed sufficient judgment to reject the poems, the tables would be turned. "

("Mr Max Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America. The distinctive feature of the fashion, it seemed to us, was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination. 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 . However, it was possible that we had simply failed to penetrate to the inward substance of these productions. The only way of settling the matter was by way of experiment. It was, after all, fair enough. If Mr Harris proved to have sufficient discrimination to reject the poems, then the tables would have been turned. ")

Reactions

For 1943 Australia, this was the best fun in years and the Ern Malley forgery ruled the front pages of newspapers for weeks. Harris was happily humiliated, and Angry Penguins soon overtook the fate of most avant-garde poetry magazines.

Most people, even highly educated people with an artistic interest, were clearly convinced of the validity of McAuley's and Stewart's “experiment”. They had purposely written bad poetry and conveyed it under a credible pseudonym to Australia's most prominent modernist poet editor and completely embroiled him in the matter. He could not distinguish “real” poetry from falsification, good from bad.

The Ern Malley forgery had long-term aftereffects. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature notes:

“More important than the forgery itself was the effect it had on the development of Australian poetry. The vigorous and legitimate modernism movement in Australian literature, supported by many authors and critics along with members of the Angry Penguins group, has suffered a severe setback and the conservative element has undoubtedly been strengthened. "

("More important than the hoax itself was the effect it had on the development of Australian 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. ")

The Ern Malley controversy lasted for more than twenty years. It went beyond Australia when it became known that the British literary critic Herbert Read had fallen for the forgery. Modernist novelists like Patrick White and abstract painters were of the same kind. With literary conservatives like McAuley and Stewart and the left-wing nationalist school around Vance and Nettie Palmer alike, albeit for different reasons, loathing modernism, Ern Malley cast a long shadow over Australian cultural life.

Historical perspective

Today both the Catholic traditionalism of McAuley and the leftist nationalism of the Palmer are dead. McAuley died in 1976 and paid lip service to him as a "great poet". These statements came mainly from the political conservatives around the culture magazine Quadrant , which he founded on behalf of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom , a group that - as it later turned out - was funded by the CIA . But few people read his poetry. Harold Stewart moved to Japan in 1965 and disappeared from public interest.

Max Harris, however, made the most of the Ern Malley forgery and his bad reputation for the rest of his long and colorful life after overcoming his humiliation. From 1951 to 1955 he published another literary magazine which he called Ern Malley's Journal . In 1961, as a gesture of defiance, he published the Ern Malley poems again, as McAuley and Stewart would eventually have written remarkable poems regardless of their actual intention. Harris became a successful bookseller and newspaper columnist . He died like Stewart in 1995.

Ern Malley himself became a celebrated figure. His poems are regularly republished and often quoted, more than anything McAuley or Stewart wrote under their own names. When Australian historian Humphrey McQueen called his story of Australian modernism The Black Swan of Trespass , the allusion was instantly recognized.

On a more serious level, some literary critics argue that McAuley and Stewart tricked themselves into inventing the Ern Malley poems. "Sometimes the myth bigger than its creators," Max Harris ( "Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators.") Wrote. Harris, of course, had a personal interest in Malley, but others have agreed. Robert Hughes wrote:

“The central argument of Ern's defenders was that his creation proved the validity of surrealist processes: that McAuley and Stewart, by dropping protection and opening to free association and chance, reached inspiration through the back door of parody; and while this cannot be said for all poems, some of which are partially or completely gibberish, there is a grain of truth in the statement ... The energy of invention that led McAuley and Stewart to create Ern Malley produced an icon of literary quality Value and therefore it continues to haunt our culture. "

(“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. ")

Ern Malley was by no means the last notorious forgery to appear in Australia's literary community; the youngest are likely Helen Demidenko and - still under investigation - Norma Khouri .

literature

• Martin Doll: Counterfeit and fake. On the discourse-critical dimension of deception . Kadmos Kulturverlag, Berlin 2012, pp. 199–246. ISBN 978-3865991409
• Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair , University of Queensland Press, 1993

Web links

• Ern Malley official website (English)