Ern Malley
| Ernest Lalor Malley | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Ernest Lalor Malley 14 March 1918 Liverpool, England |
| Died | 23 July 1943 (aged 25) Sydney, Australia |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Poetry |
| Notable work | The Darkening Ecliptic |
Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most famous literary hoax. He and his entire body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax Max Harris and his modernist magazine Angry Penguins, which Harris co-edited with John Reed of Heide, Melbourne. Imitating the modernist poetry they despised, the hoaxers deliberately created what they thought was bad verse and submitted sixteen poems to Angry Penguins under the guise of Ethel, Ern Malley's surviving sister. Harris and other members of the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to Malley. The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a cause célèbre and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content. Angry Penguins folded in 1946.
In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right, lauded by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes. The poems of Ern Malley are now more widely read than those of his creators, and the affair has inspired works by major Australian writers and artists, such as Peter Carey and Sidney Nolan. American poet and anthologist David Lehman called Ern Malley "the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century".
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