BOOKS

Supplying a needed poet

James Buchan

THE ERN MALLEY AFFAIR by Michael Heyward Faber, f15.99, pp. 284 Literary hoaxes succeed because people want them to. Eighteenth-century Europe felt the terrible lack of an Ossian; the Hitler Diaries fed a hungry nostalgia in England and Germany of the 1980s for the condi- tions of 40 years earlier.

Em Malley, it appears, was created and believed in because Australia in the 1940s desperately needed its Keats. Actually, any writer would have done, just so long as he or she was Australian and could show a way out of the country's provincial insecuri- ty and cultural isolation.

Robert Hughes, in his introduction to this book, says the Ern Malley poems were the literary hoax of the century and Michael Heyward certainly writes as if they were, in a long and sometimes solemn essay; but it is a good story and a strange one, with its remote intellectual setting and hot provincial passions. The Ern Malley poems were, it seems, the last wave of metropolitan modernism which broke, 30 years after Prufrock, on the shores of far- thest Adelaide; and with a force that shocked the country and left the lives of some of the participants curiously mangled.

The story opens in the spring of 1943 when Max Harris, a brilliant student at Adelaide university and the outrageously self-assured editor of the literary review Angry Penguins, received a letter from a certain Ethel Malley. The letter, a master- piece of genteel Melbourne English, accompanied a set of poems that Ethel said she'd found after her brother Em's recent and untimely death:

I am not a literary person myself and I do not feel I understand what he wrote, but I feel that I ought to do something about them. Ern kept himself very much to himself.

The first poem Harris read went under the title 'Duren Innsbruck, 1495' and is short enough to quote in full:

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.

None of the other poems was as coher- ent; and all were, as the resident British expert on literature in Adelaide, J. I. M.

Stewart, told Harris, 'derivative': but they were what Harris wanted to read amid the stale Victoriana of current Australian verse or the phoney aboriginalese of the Jindy- worobak School of nature poets:

Wombalunga curses, waitjurk though we cannot break the ban, and follow tchidna any further after one-time karaman

But it was the last line of 'Duren Inns- bruck 1495' that seems to have clinched it for Harris. As an Australian poet, he felt his Australianness isolating him from the main stream of European and American ideas at a time of crisis: he, too, was that black swan on alien waters.

Harris later wrote:

As I imagined him Erne Malley had some- thing of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke's anguished soli- tude; something of Wilfred Owen's angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne . . . I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection against the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.

The doomed poet made as deep an impression on Harris' partner, the Melbourne lawyer John Reed, his wife Sunday, and the painter Sidney Nolan: Nolan's portrait of Em Malley, as

reproduced on the jacket of Heyward's book, is sensational. Nolan also provided the cover for the special issue of Angry Penguins that appeared in June 1944 'to commemorate the Australian Poet Ern Malley' and published 16 of his poems.

The hoax was soon rumbled. A lecturer at Adelaide university at once suggested that Harris had written the poems himself. In panic, Harris set a private detective to trace Ethel Malley. Murray Sayle, the editor of the Sydney university newspaper, linked her Melbourne address with the poet Harold Stewart. The Sunday Sun, a tabloid, announced that it had cracked the hoax but was scooped, on 24 June, 1944, by the Daily Telegraph.

Em Malley was invented by two Sydney poets, Harold Stewart and James McAuley, to make fun of Harris, who seemed to them bumptious, and of the provincial pre- tensions of Adelaide and Melbourne. They seem to have been both fascinated and dis- gusted by the rhetorical modernism of Eliot, Pound and Dylan Thomas and the theorising of Herbert Read. McAuley had been a leftist but recanted in a delightful ballade in the style of Villon:

Comrades, we argued, fought and swore: We might as well have stuck to beer. The Japanese are in Johore — Where are the phrases of yesteryear?

All the poems, 424 lines of them, were composed in a single Saturday afternoon and evening at the Victoria Barracks on St Kilda Road in Melbourne which was the headquarters of the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs — an enigmatic, Waughian outfit where McAuley and Stewart found employment of a sort. One of the directorate's less insubstantial tasks was 'advice to Adjutant-General on neces- sity of establishing entomological services' in New Guinea: a US report on malaria provided the opening lines for Em Malley's poem 'Culture as Exhibit':

Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other Areas of stagnant water serve As breeding-grounds ...

in the manner of some of Henry Reed's soldier poems.

The Penguins' defence was robust. Encouraged by a telegram from Herbert Read in London (HOAXER HOISTED BY OWN PETARD HAS TOUCHED OFF UNCONSCIOUS SOURCES INSPIRATION), John Reed argued that the hoax had some- how broken through McAuley's and Stew- art's repressions and inhibitions and let in the creative stream of the age. Certainly,

though many of the poems are puerile, imi- tative or nonsense, some (such at my favourite, `Boult to Marina') convey the authentic thrill of poetry.

Unfortunately, as often happens, a coterie game was overrun by philistines. Harris was prosecuted for publishing 'inde- cent advertisements' in the Em Malley poems, found guilty on 20 October, 1944, fined f5 and awarded costs. Angry Penguins limped on for a couple of issues (which could not be sold in South Australia) and then folded.

The affair seems to have left a surprising volume of wreckage. Neither Harris, cer- tainly, nor McAuley and Stewart, probably, fulfilled their promise as poets. Harris sim- ply stopped writing verse and ended up a Murdoch columnist. McAuley retreated into a severe and conservative Catholicism. Stewart lives in Kyoto. Nolan deserted from the army — surely the only knight of the realm ever to do so in wartime! — and the Reed circle disintegrated. Australia never got its Keats or rather it did, in the form of an enigmatic text that would glad- den Derrida and his followers and as a symptom of the bankruptcy of an entire poetic tradition, in Adelaide, at the ends of the earth.