The Ern Malley Affair

The most famous Australian poet, leaving aside the Banjos and Lawson, is Ern Malley, but Ern Malley never existed. This is the kind of thing that could only happen in Australia: everywhere has its literary hoaxes, but usually the hoax isn't better than the 'real' work of the hoaxers or the real work of the hoaxed.

Heyward does a great job telling the story, though the legal wranglings at the end of the book (takeaway: forties Australia was a horrible time and place) are much less fun than the development of the hoax and his description of the personalities involved. Cliche alert: it reads like a thriller. Or so I imagine, since I haven't read a thriller for some time. Anyway, I couldn't put it down.

The book lacks one thing: a real show more engagement with the intellectual and artistic problems a successful hoax creates. The editor who accepted the Malley poems argued that the hoaxers, freed from the constraints under which they usually wrote, wrote better than they could have done otherwise: in other words, standard mid-century surrealist/psychoanalytic nonsense. Heyward suggests that the strange quality of the Malley poems is caused by the fact that there was no single Malley; that there are so many different Malleys, in other words, standard late-century postmodern nonsense.

I think the real issue we have to face is: what sort of a literary movement would *not* be subject to hoaxes like this? The neo-classicists were fooled by 'Ossian,' the Romantics fooled by almost everything, and so on. There was never a literature that could not be parodied with great success. But modernism was and is more easily open to it, simply because there are no 'rules' for success in modernist art. This is a problem we're still dealing with. Some people try to impose rigid rules (James Wood), some people revel thoughtlessly in their absence, and the best authors, I suspect, are the ones who can really work through the incredibly strange situation of a high art form that lacks established criteria. I certainly haven't done so. show less

What could I give this book but a perfect score for the hoax poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart pulled off. A hoax in one hand and in the other the greatest modernist expression Australia has ever produced. Does that make this dada-ist poetry? The story is one of those stranger than fiction fish out of water tales that happen once in a lifetime or perhaps in this case once in all of recorded human history.

That being said, I don't know if Michael Heyward nailed all of the important factors about the story. I honestly would've liked to have seen both Ern Malley authors' other poetry and see for myself what exactly a joke is supposed to look like. After all, I'm sure Tennyson joking would look just like Ezra Pound. It's also show more interesting that this is a trick nobody wants to admit is a trick just as Finnegans Wake is the real deal nobody wants to admit is the real deal. Also, the lives of McAuley and Stewart seem awful anemic in lieu of a rather anti-climatic case against Max Harris for obscenity. I wish it had talked more about the demise of the Angry Penguins itself as I heard it did run into issues outside the case that ultimately ended it over any ramifications thereof. show less