Adelaide poet and critic Max Harris turns Ern Malley modernist hoax in 1940s into a global literary cult sensation

The young Adelaide poet and critic Max Harris in 1943 and the autumn 1944 edition of his modernist art and literary journal Angry Penguins, devoted to the poetry of the fictitious Ern Malley.
Image by Albert Tucker, courtesy National Library of Australia and Barbara Tucker

Max Harris, the 22-year-old Adelaide avant-garde poet and critic, was targeted in 1943 by what has been called the greatest literary hoax of the 20th Century.

At 18, Harris had started and edited Angry Penguins, a journal for the modernist art and literary movement centred on the farm north of Melbourne developed by Heide and John Reed (patron and also an editor of the magazine).

Resentful of Harris’s precocious and well-funded success, and lamenting “the loss of meaning and craftsmanship” in poetry, Sydney conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart decided to ridicule the modernist poetry they despised by creating 16 poems of what they thought were bad verse and phrases grabbed from dictionaries, Shakespeare and quotations and random documents such as an American report on mosquito breeding grounds.

They created the fictitious Ern Malley as the poet, who had died, and had his fictitious sister Ethel send a letter with some of Malley’s poems to Max Harris.

Immediately impressed, Harris wrote to Reed about them being “among the most outstanding poems I have ever come across”. Adelaide University language and literature professor J.I.M Stewart didn’t share Harris’s enthusiasm, calling the poems “highly derivative” and “rather incomprehensible”. But other members of the Heide Circle backed Harris’s rapture and the autumn 1944 edition of Angry Penguins was devoted to Ern Malley and his work.

Among reactions, Adelaide University’s student newspaper ridiculed the Malley poems and suggested Harris had written them as a hoax. Harris as hoaxed rather than hoaxer was raised in the Adelaide press and confirmed by the Sydney Sun. McAuley and Stewart revealed their role in exposing a literary fashion that “rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination”.

But, although the affair humiliated Harris temporarily and set back Australian modernist poetry, the Ern Malley poems, since the 1970s, were celebrated as successful surrealist poetry, praised by poets and critics such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes, who said “the energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value.”

Malley inspired works by Australian writer Peter Carey and painter Sidney Nolan, who linked the mythical poet to his first Ned Kelly series. Harris maintained “the myth is sometimes greater than its creator” and Malley became better known and more widely read than McAuley or Stewart. At least 20 publications of Malley’s collected Darkening Ecliptic poetry reappeared in London, Paris, Lyons, Kyoto, New York and Los Angeles.

The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1992) editors included all Malley’s poems.