“Ern Malley” is the name James McAuley and Harold Stewart gave to a poet who did not exist. They concocted a hoax, or as it came to be a known, a “literary experiment”, where they sent a package of poems to Max Harris, the editor of a small literary magazine called Angry Penguins.
Harris received the poems with a letter from Ethel Malley. She said that her brother, a motor mechanic, had recently died and she had discovered the poems in his room. She asked Harris for his opinion on the poems as she was not in a position to know whether they were good or not. Harris thought highly of the poems, and wrote to Ethel Malley for more information. Ethel wrote that Ern was 25 when he died (the same age as Keats), a victim of Grave’s disease which Ern had elected not to treat.
Harris thought he had found the dead poet genius that Australian poetry needed. He considered Malley’s poems to be extremely good modernist poetry, and arranged for some of it to be published in America. He also devoted the entire August 1944 edition of Angry Penguins to Malley’s poetry.
The poetry caused a sensation, but some people had already begun to smell a rat. Some suspected that Harris had written the poems himself, and Harris began to try and find out more about Malley, sending a private investigator to the address given by Ethel Malley. The hoax was not uncovered by Harris, however, but by a journalist. In transpired that two Sydney poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, had written the poems in an effort to prove that not only was modernist poetry nonsense, but those who championed it were incapable of making literary judgment. They considered Harris to be so caught up in the avant garde of modernism/surrealism that he had lost all critical discrimination. They had hoped that Harris would reject the poems and prove them wrong. Luckily he didn’t, because the hoax/literary experiment has opened up a fascinating debate. What they did prove was the power of literary fashion – they showed how literary reputation depends on what is said about what by whom. For example, Malley’s reputation was built by Harris and then destroyed by McAuley and Stewart.
While the “literary experiment” has given cause for debate, at the time it had a more destructive effect in that it set back the cause for modernism and artistic development in Australia. It fed the common sentiment that the avant garde was to be regarded with suspicion. This was not helped by Harris being arrested on grounds of obscenity and fined for publishing the Malley poems.
Today the poetry of “Ern Malley” is considered to be both a fine example of modernist poetry, as well as being a parody. Some critics take the position that McAuley and Stewart put more into the poetry than they knew. McAuley and Stewart’s assertion that the poetry is incoherent and lacks meaning and structure is contested. The words of Max Harris after the news of the hoax broke proved to be almost prophetic: “Sometimes the myth is greater than its creators”.