Article Ern Malley
Summary: Two Australian poets deliberately wrote nonsense verse, and fooled an editor into believing it was the work of a brilliant young writer.
Max Harris was a glamorous young Australian poet who was making a reputation for himself as something of a rebel as editor of Angry Penguins, a cutting-edge literary magazine. Harris wanted to shake up the artistic community by exposing it to new ideas and new writers, and in 1944 he thought he had found a writer worth taking under his wing. That writer’s name was Ern Malley.
Harris never actually met Malley. Instead, he had received some of Malley’s poems in the mail from a woman claiming to be Malley’s sister. Ern himself had, it seemed, died of Graves’ disease and his sister said that she had found the poems while going through his possessions after his death.
The poems were strange, dark, brooding, and almost incomprehensible. They contained lines such as “I am still the black swan of trespass on alien waters.”
The 1944 cover of Angry Penguins devoted to the work of Ern Malley Harris loved them, and he arranged for a special edition of Angry Penguins to be devoted to Malley’s work. There was just one problem. Ern Malley didn’t exist. He was the cynical creation of two Australian poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who were hostile to modernist poetry and wanted to see if they could get the literary world to accept “deliberately concocted nonsense.” They had written the poems in one day by randomly picking out nonsequential lines from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Harris’s reputation and ego took a blow on account of the Ern Malley hoax. But Stewart and McAuley didn’t come out of the hoax as heroes either. Many readers insisted that they enjoyed Malley’s poems (they do make for an interesting read) and argued that the two poets had unintentionally produced better work than they were capable of when trying to be serious.
Some Poems by Ern Malley
| Durer: 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 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. |
| Night Piece |
| The swung torch scatters seeds
In the umbelliferous dark And a frog makes guttural comment On the naked and trespassing Nymph of the lake. The symbols were evident, Though on park-gates The iron birds looked disapproval With rusty invidious beaks. Among the water-lilies A splash—white foam in the dark! And you lay sobbing then Upon my trembling intuitive arm. |