Happy Birthday Ern Malley! [With an introduction by Thomas Moody taken from David Lehman]

Ern_MalleyYesterday marked the 105th birthday of Ern Malley, who remains one of Australia’s most internationally renowned poets and our greatest ever literary hoax. After I disclosed that I am an Australian in our first ever email exchange, David immediately wanted to know where I stood on the whole Malley affair. While the hoax overall has legions of fans, many people feel that the poems themselves cannot possibly possess any quality due to the nature of their genesis. In his review of The Complete Poems of Ern Malley published in Jacket in 2002, David offers a comprehensive introduction to Ern’s formative years and a lucid and insightful commentary on his poetry, arguing that Ern’s oeuvre has merit beyond the hoax, no matter the dubious motivations behind the poems’ creation. You can read David’s review here. Happy birthday Ern!

The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax by David Lehman

“THE greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.

In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.

Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry.”

 

Cover

 

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age

I find myself to be a dromedary

That has run short of water between

One oasis and the next mirage

And having despaired of ever

Making my obsessions intelligible

I am content at last to be

The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.

Begin here:



In the year 1943

I resigned to the living all collateral images

Reserving to myself a man’s

Inalienable right to be sad

At his own funeral.

(Here the peacock blinks the eyes

of his multipennate tail.)

In the same year

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 sins that flow between the hands and feet

(Here the Tree weeps gum tears

Which are also real: I tell you

These things are real)

So I forced a parting

Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.



Where I have lived

The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach

Inhabits the crack and the careful spider

Spins his aphorisms in the comer.

I have heard them shout in the streets

The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich

And in the magazines I have read

The Popular Front-to-Back.

But where I have lived

Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray

Guernica is the ticking of the clock

The nightmare has become real, not as belief

But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.



It is something to be at last speaking

Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate

Only to No-Man’s-Land.

Set this down too:

I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,

Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,

Stumbled often, stammered,

But in time the fading voice grows wise

And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence

Traces the inevitable graph

And in conclusion:

There is a moment when the pelvis

Explodes like a grenade. I

Who have lived in the shadow that each act

Casts on the next act now emerge

As loyal as the thistle that in session

Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.

I have split the infinitive. Beyond is anything.

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Author: Thomas Moody