BOOKS: Beyond a joke
IN 1944, the avant-garde Australian poetry magazine Angry Penguins enthusiastically published the work of a hitherto unknown poet called Ern Malley. Ern had died of Graves’ disease, aged just 25, and the verses had been submitted by the poet’s sister, Ethel. She had not even known that her brother, a motor mechanic and insurance peddler, wrote poetry.
Shortly after The Darkening Ecliptic, Malley’s cycle of 17 ultra- modernist poems, had appeared in print, two traditionalist poets then revealed that they had invented Malley and fabricated his verses from various absurd sources. The lines were arrant nonsense, and The Darkening Ecliptic was a hoax to expose the fraudulence of modernist criticism and poetry. Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, was humiliated; in a bizarre twist, he was then prosecuted for obscene innuendo in the poems of Ern Malley he had printed.
Hoaxes are like time bombs: having been been passed as safe by experts, they then blow up in their faces. Ern Malley, for example, could not possibly have died from Graves’ disease, as thyrotoxicosis is not fatal and, although few poetry editors could know this, the punning allusion to Robert Graves might have rung a note of alarm.
Once a hoax is revealed, though, the whole object of study is radically altered and it seems impossible that anyone - let alone an expert - could miss all those giveaway clues. The intention is to undermine an entire field and show that it is hokum; in Malley’s case, modernist poetry. Other recent examples include Alan Sokal’s attempts to debunk critical theory by getting a pseudoscientific article into print, and William Boyd’s disquisition on the invented 20th-century American artist Nat Tate.
The hoaxers claim to be making a legitimate challenge on grounds of accuracy or aesthetics, but it can backfire. Some intellectual renegades have been approvingly citing Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”. Max Harris, Ern Malley’s publisher, continued to believe in him: “For me, Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time.”
Indeed, Harris thought that the collaboration was the best work that the hoaxers McAuley and Stewart had managed, far better than their traditionalist verse. It has certainly been reprinted more often.
Peter Carey’s intricately-labyrinthine novel, My Life as a Fake, is deeply indebted to the Malley affair. Although the collaborators McAuley and Stewart are replaced by the single and singular figure of Christopher Chubb and Max Harris by David Weiss (while Ern Malley has become “Bob McCorkle”), other names, dialogue, and lines of poetry are lifted straight from the case. The account is written in the person of Sarah Wode-Douglass, known as “Micks”, fortysomething editor of The Modern Review. Following a chance encounter with Chubb in Kuala Lumpur, Micks begins to piece together the forgotten McCorkle case after a quarter-century.
The writing is precise and beautifully intense, blending impressions of Malaysia with the ebb and flow of Micks’s mental state, recalled, sometimes mistily, after many years - and perhaps unreliable. She is obsessive and anxious, listening to contradictory accounts of the McCorkle affair in alternating waves of amazement, confusion, irritation and bewilderment. It is difficult to see anything clearly; some stories she hears must be at best delusional, at worst simply mad. But they make compelling reading and, as they take shape, begin to outline something far more eerie than a literary prank.
Chubb claims that he cooked up the McCorkle business for his love of “truth and beauty”, because “There had been a complete decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry.” He believes that literature was being eroded by Weiss’s fashionable support of the pretentious poets in his trendy magazine, Personae: these frauds were the real fakes.
So, pretending to be Beatrice, supposedly the late Bob McCorkle’s sister, Chubb tells how he engaged in a correspondence with Weiss and sent him the spurious poems. Weiss was bowled over and printed the lot. Then things got out of hand. McCorkle took on a life of his own and Chubb became a victim of his own creation: “I imagined someone and he came into being.” The imagined poet was made flesh, and pursued his creator with an uncanny vengeance.
This unnerving tale is told to Micks in a series of interrupted monologues, spoken in a lilting patois. Micks’s spiralling account of Chubb’s story reads as a sort of neo-Gothic novel of stories-within- stories, with entanglements among the riddles of the past, doubling and mirroring, a fascination with books and manuscripts, and mysterious deaths. There are allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Borges, but the Gothic element is underplayed, subordinated to the luscious floral imagery that blossoms throughout the book to leave a heady, almost dream-like memory.
In creating an author as well as the work, literary forgers trespass on sacred ground and may disturb strange demons. But they can also pose fundamental questions about literary - and human - values. Carey gives profound attention to the mysteries of authenticity and poetry, especially on how fabricated fakes may become supernatural and inspirational. This is how he scintillatingly rewrites the Malley affair.
For Harris, the Angry Penguins project sought “a mythic sense of a geographical and cultural identity” for Australia. It was a bold attempt to rethink Australian art and literature, and reforge national culture - until it was torpedoed by Ern Malley. My Life as a Fake accommodates this fall within its own myth of creation, as part of its own composition. This is ultimately a novel about Australian cultural identity, but one which mythologises and embraces the fear of being fake, rather than shying from it. In a beautifully-crafted piece of storytelling, Peter Carey has produced an immensely powerful work that will resonate for generations.
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