Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“THE ERN MALLEY AFFAIR” by Michael Heyward (first published 1993)
I feel a little nervous writing about the “Ern Malley affair”. It blew up 80 years ago in 1943-44. Michael Heyward’s book The Ern Malley Affair – which I regard as definitive - was first published 50 years later, in 1993. And here I am 30 years on, in 2023, raking over an 80-year-old controversy which has probably been discussed and quarrelled over more times than any other literary event in Australian history. Surely regular readers of this blog will be literate enough to already know about it? Surely there is nothing further to be said about it? But, as a regular reader and reviewer of poetry, I do have a personal stake in raising the matter yet again.
To summarise the affair as chronicled by Michael Heyward in his scrupulously researched and detailed book: In 1943, 22-year-old Max Harris was one of the editors of an avant-garde Australian literary magazine called Angry Penguins. Like most niche literary publications, it was funded by wealthy patrons, John and Sunday Reed (who lived in a menage a trois with the artist Sidney Nolan). Max Harris, product of a posh private school, was regarded as – and regarded himself as – an enfant terrible. Rebelling against traditional and conservative poetry, Australia’s “bush ballad” tradition etc., Harris championed modernism, surrealism and the “New Apocalypse” style, which he saw as an advanced form of surrealism. The politics of Angry Penguins were very left wing, but anti-Marxist. Harris’s outlook was essentially anarchist.
One day, Harris received a fascinating letter. A working-class woman, Ethel Malley, wrote that her brother Ern Malley (Ernest Lalor Malley), who had spent his life in proletarian toil, had recently died. Going through his things, she had been surprised to find a collection of poetry Ern had written. Ethel did not know he wrote poetry and did not know much about poetry. She was not sure if they were of any merit; so she was sending them to Angry Penguins for assessment.
Max Harris was both astounded and overjoyed. The poems – a sequence called “The Darkening Ecliptic” – were clearly a work of poetic genius. They displayed all Harris’s aesthetic – they were modernist, in places surreal, apocalyptic in their moments of despair or self-analysis, erudite in some of their literary allusions, and clearly an antidote to the conservatism that still dominated much of the Australian literary scene. And, perhaps also stoking Harris’s enthusiasm, they were the work of a working-class man, not a bourgeois mandarin. Harris excitedly shared the poems with his circle. John and Sunday Reed and Sidney Nolan were as excited by the poems as Harris was. Most of Harris’s circle were impressed, though one friend, the visiting English literary critic J. I. M. Stewart, was a little more sceptical. Even so, in 1944 Harris published the poems in a special edition of Angry Penguins, lauding the late Ern Malley as a great Australian poet. Extra copies were printed to be sent to the UK and USA – Harris really believed that American and British critics would also applaud and acknowledge a great Australian modernist poet. Some readers were enthused.
And then the bottom fell out.
Harris hadn’t taken the care to check out the address from which Ethel Malley had written. He hired a private detective to confirm the address… and found that no such person as Ethel Malley lived anywhere near the given address. Doubts began as readers of Angry Penguins took in “The Darkening Ecliptic”. It was suspected that the poems had been written under a pseudonym by other established Australian avant garde poets rather than by the elusive and unknown Ern Malley. Various names were mooted and for a while it was even suggested that Max Harris had himself written the poems. Finally the truth came out. There was no such person as Ern Malley. The poems had been written as a literary hoax by two young men – just a few years older than Max Harris – James McAuley and Harold Stewart both of whom, like Harris, had been through university and had once embraced rebellion and the avant garde before they got sick of them. (By the way, among other things, McAuley was an accomplished jazz pianist.) To put it simply, they knew modernism from the inside, now rejected it, and were perfectly capable of creating a mocking pastiche of modernist - and surrealist - poetry.
Lieutenant McAuley and Corporal Stewart were both in the army at the time [the Second World War was in progress, remember?] and stationed at the same base. One afternoon, they thought it would be a lark to write nonsense that might be accepted as a serious literary work by the type of people who edited Angry Penguins. While throwing in some credible-sounding lines (McAuley later called it “seeding” the work), McAuley and Stewart spent an afternoon scribbling down, at random, canonical quotations, shavings from Shakespeare, recherche words from the Oxford dictionary and basically meaningless statements, sometimes covered in moods of fashionable young-man angst. They arranged things so that the poems would become sillier and sillier as the sequence progressed. They also threw in clues that Ern Malley did not really exist, which their readers should have picked up if they had only been more alert. McAuley and Stewart wrote the poems together, tossing idiotic or pretentious phrases at each other and throwing them in the mix. Ethel Malley’s covering letter, however, was mainly the work of Stewart, who carefully and skilfully made her voice that of a working-class woman with little formal education. Some have speculated that it was this letter which led Harris to think he was reading something authentic.
McAuley and Stewart said they achieved their task in one hurried afternoon. Some people have questioned this, given the length of “The Darkening Ecliptic” (it runs to twenty packed pages as presented at the back of Michael Heyward’s book). But the two poets stood by their story. Once revealed, McAuley and Stewart wrote a public statement saying that the works were a “serious literary experiment” and that they were seeking to find out if devotees of modernism could “tell the real product [poetry] from consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense”. They ended their [long and detailed] statement saying that the works of “Ern Malley” were “utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry”. In their own terms they had effectively landed a big custard pie in the face of every pretentious modernist poet.
One thing greatly annoyed them. They let a few friends in on their hoax, and one of them (a journalist) made it publicly known who had really written “Ern Malley”. For the hoaxers, this revelation came too early. McAuley and Stewart were hoping that the Ern Malley poems would reach, and be endorsed by, the British art-and-literary critic Herbert Read, who was then regarded as England’s high priest of both surrealism and modernism. If they could fool Herbert Read, they would have (as they saw it) discredited the centre of modernism. Alas, Herbert Read did not see the poems until the hoax had been revealed. However, he wrote a sympathetic letter to Max Harris saying that, had he not known how the poems were really devised, he too might have been taken in by them.
Now that is the central account of the Ern Malley hoax – but it is the aftermath and later interpretations that are really the interesting part of the story. The year after the Ern Malley poems appeared in print, Max Harris had to face an action brought by the police for publishing obscenity in the Ern Malley poems. Harris was put in the awkward position of having to defend, in court, as justifiable literary tropes what their authors had called “utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry”. McAuley and Stewart did not face trial as they had not published the Ern Malley poems – and they didn’t claim copyright for them either.
Max Harris was convicted and fined five pounds [not exactly a severe penalty]. As Michael Heyward says, McAuley and Stewart were “embarrassed and appalled by the actions of the police… the conviction was widely condemned by writers, artists and civil libertarians, including some who thought poorly of Harris and Angry Penguins”. Reading Heyward’s account of the trial (Chapter 9), it is quite clear that the police witness was trying desperately to find smut where there was none. Indeed, he comes across as an incompetent Mr. Plod. Heyward notes that the whole trial was played out in prim, puritanical Adelaide, and Harris might have been treated more leniently if he had published in more open-minded Sydney or Melbourne.
In the long run, the whole affair destroyed what had seemed to be Harris’s promising literary career. For some years he held out as a modernist and wrote a couple of collections of verse; but by the mid-1950s he had given up not only modernism but poetry and the high literary scene altogether. He became a columnist for the Murdoch press, now producing the type of slick, populist commentary that he had once despised. He even took part in staged performances with actors playing Ethel and Ern Malley, as if the whole affair had actually been jolly good fun. He had become the cultural philistine he used to condemn. Indeed some Australians see the Ern Malley affair as having kicked off a new phase in Australian philistinism. It was now easier for hostile critics and columnists and ordinary blokes to condemn arty types as charlatans – I mean, didn’t the Ern Malley affair prove that these cultural snobs would swallow any old rubbish?
But this was only one reaction. The other was the strategy used by some to defend “The Darkening Ecliptic” as genuine and meaningful poetry. Being very fair and balanced in his assessment, Michael Heyward gives the details of both sides of the case. In Chapter 5, Heyward analyses “The Darkening Ecliptic” thoroughly, as if it were a serious composition, but he makes us aware of all the tricks McAuley and Stewart used to trap their victim and notes how often they dropped hints that they were creating a non-existent poet. He also notes that there was a certain degree of cruelty in the hoaxers’ approach. The “seeding” of coherent lines meant that some parts were genuine poetry in McAuley’s and Stewart’s terms. Indeed the opening poem used lines that McAuley had written in earnest in an unpublished poem some years previously; and there were lines (such as the sequence’s most quoted lines “I am still / the black swan of trespass on alien waters”) that had a certain resonance. In Chapter 9 Heyward also takes eight pages suggesting that in some ways the hoax backfired as the Ern Malley poems really could be read as a coherent sequence, forming a kind of narrative.
This leads to what has become the standard defence of Ern Malley. Almost as soon as the hoax was revealed, Max Harris’s patron and fellow editor John Reed devised their riposte. It was “that McAuley and Stewart, released from inhibition by their extraordinary method of composition, wrote much better than they knew” (Chapter 7, p.190). In one form or another, this has been the standard (and dare I say rather face-saving) way that “The Darkening Ecliptic” has been championed ever since. McAuley and Stewart, liberated from the conservative constraints of pre-modernist verse, had unconsciously created great poems. Buoyed by this defence, some Australian poets, artists and readers embraced the Ern Malley poems, which were reprinted a number of times. Sidney Nolan defiantly painted a series of Ern Malley images. In fact “Ern Malley” has been elevated into a sort of Australian literary folk hero, with its true authors being ignored, and a number of fictionalised novels have recounted his exploits. Over the years, the original Angry Penguins defence has morphed into theories about the “intentional fallacy” (what the writer intends to convey isn’t the same as what the writer actually produces). And, even more contentious, the “death of the author” theory (the actual writer is only one small part of a text’s entity – how the text is received and interpreted by readers is a more dominant part of creativity)… so therefore, to hell with what McAuley and Stewart had to say about their own work.
BUT, even-handed as ever, Michael Heyward (Chapter 10, p.291) defuses this defence thus: “The Angry Penguins theory – that the hoaxers, liberated from inhibitions operating in their ‘serious’ poetry, were in touch with previously untapped sources of creativity in the unconscious – has appealed to many but does not account for the nature of the verse. Ern Malley is hardly a good test of the irrational unconscious in action since much of the time he makes conscious and rational reference to his own status as a surrealist hoax… the fact that the poems ‘didn’t make sense’ was evidence that the hoaxers ‘knew what they were about’. Ern Malley can’t really prove anything about free association as a viable ‘method’ for writing poetry, since his dream-like visions are hardly ‘free’ of the satire that interrupts them.” Heyward goes on to say that there is some merit in the Ern Malley poems, underestimated by “his” detractors but overvalued by “his” supporters.
At this point I have to make it clear that I do not for one moment think McAuley’s and Stewart’s calculated jest “proved” the unworthiness of all modernist writing. Of course not. Ern Malley did not cancel The Wasteland, Ezra Pound’s Cantos or (sorry folks) the most joyful and witty of modernists Marianne Moore. Modernism was an important literary movement - a broad church with many canonical writers therein. But McAuley and Stewart did effectively flush out pretentious people who claimed to see more merit and meaning than there really was to see. This was the real legacy of Ern Malley. And, as a side note, Michael Heyward says that even before the Ern Malley hoax appeared, enthusiasm for both surrealism and modernism was already waning in Australian literary circles.
Having said that, I also note the very defensive and patronising way that McAuley and Stewart are often depicted by people still smarting at the hoax. I pluck off my shelf the Australian academic Lyn McCredden’s monograph on James McAuley (in the Oxford Australian Writers series, published 1992) which is generally a positive account of the poet’s work. But she still can’t refrain, in her introduction, from calling the hoax the “notorious Ern Malley” hoax. Why “notorious”? Off another shelf I dig a frivolous book called Museum of Hoaxes by Alex Boese (published in 2002) – a light anthology of stories about hoaxes, con-men and tricksters. When he gets to his one page on Ern Malley, Alex Boese says it was “the cynical creation of two Australian poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley”. Why “cynical”? Then there is C. K. Stead’s article (originally a review of Michael Heyward’s book in London Magazine in 1995, and reprinted in his collection Book Self in 2008). It is called “The Hoaxers Hoaxed” and it leans to the tired theory that McAuley and Stewart wrote better than they consciously knew. What’s patronising here is the refusal to accept that McAuley and Stewart wrote their hoax in full awareness of what they were doing, alert to the style they were pastiche-ing, and knowing full-well what sort of response they would incite. As they had truthfully asserted, their hoax was “consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense”. They were not hoaxed.
It also has to be noted that much of the later animus against Stewart and (particularly) McAuley had nothing to do with the Ern Malley affair itself. Both men broke away from modernism and the avant garde. Both men saw a world that was decaying and lacking firm and understandable moral direction. Both men, leaving their wilder student days behind them, put their faith in religion, but in very different ways. Harold Stewart became a devout Buddhist and, some years after the war, relocated to Japan where he found peace and wrote many haiku and meditative poetry of Buddhist inspiration. James McAuley had been a rabble-rousing left-winger when he was a student and an enemy of religion. But a few years later he converted to Catholicism (an unforgivable crime in the eyes of some literary pundits) and adopted very conservative attitudes. In the Cold War, McAuley promoted the DLP (Democratic Labour Party), the very Catholic-dominated party that broke away from the Australian Labour Party which it saw as being manipulated by Communist unionists, and in effect prevented the Labour Party from taking office for a number of decades. McAuley also helped found the conservative literary journal Quadrant, continued writing poetry in the neo-classical style, and, as an academic, advised his students not to waste their time reading modernist poems. (Regrettably I cannot locate the exact comment, but I recall hearing Clive James saying wittily “James McAuley didn’t have to tell students not to read T.S.Eliot. Most students would find ways of not reading Eliot on their own.”)
And after all this explanation, I now have to refer to the statement in my opening paragraph. Why do I “have a personal stake” in raising the Ern Malley case again?
I am not so arrogant as to assume that I am the great expert in New Zealand poetry. There are others more capable than I in assessing New Zealand poetry. But, as a reviewer of poetry on a number of platforms, I am confident that I read, assess and think hard about more New Zealand poetry than even the majority of poetry-readers do. I revel in the amount of very good poetry is now being written. But quite often I come across poetry that is stubbornly opaque, obscure in its meaning, lacking clarity and in some cases apparently written for a small in-group. In fact, after reading and re-reading such texts, I have come to the conclusion that they have no real meaning at all. This emphatically does not mean that I am opposed to modern styles, or that I am pining for poems to be written in iambic pentameters, rhyming couplets and so forth. Often attempts to revive earlier forms of poetry result in sheer doggerel. I am also aware that (as has always been the case) there is much challenging poetry that requires great concentration of the reader, but that is meaningful. I am not suggesting that all poetry should be clear and simple as a nursery rhyme (which, by the way, is a very skilled poetic form). But when I come across wilfully opaque poems, I think of Ern Malley and how easily the gullible, moved by what is currently fashionable, can mistake nonsense for profundity.