1944

SYDNEY. — If the Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, wrote the so-called poems of "Ern Malley" as a hoax, then they succeeded in hoaxing themselves as well as the publishers, said Harry Roskolenko, United States poet and Army officer.
     Mr. Roskolenko chose two of the "Ern Malley" poems for inclusion in the Australian edition of the American magazine "Voices," to be published in about a month's time.
     His observations followed discussion resulting from publication in the Adelaide journal "Angry Penguins" of "The Poems of Ern Malley," and the claim by McAuley and Stewart that they had deliberately concocted them as an experiment to debunk "a pretentious kind of modern verse writing."

"FIVE EXCELLENT"

     Mr. Roskolenko said:— "Max Harris, co-editor of "Angry Penguins," sent me proofs of 16 verses purporting to be the work of Ern Malley, of whom I had never heard. I decided that five of them for excellent poems and that two of the five were really very good.
     "I selected these two for inclusion in the Australian edition of 'Voices.'"
     He added that 11 of the "poems" obviously had been written "with the tongue in the cheek."
     Stewart and McAuley might have embarked on a hoaxing expedition, but they nevertheless should feel proud to have written the five he had selected — even if the merit was subconscious.
     "Frankly, I did not understand some of the words in the 11 poems I rejected," he said. "I could tell a dictionary had been used, and was of opinion that some had been selected from a scientific dictionary."

SYDNEY, Sun: The mythical poet "Ern Malley"—the name under which two former students of Sydney University have perpetrated Australia's greatest literary hoax—has been awarded the degree of "Doctor of Science in Oxometry" by the Sydney University Oxometrical Society.
    Copies of the degree have been given to the two hoaxers—Lieut James McAuley and Cpl Harold Stewart. They wrote the "Poems of Era Malley," which were published in the Adelaide literary magazine Angry Penguins, and hailed by the magazine's editor, Max Harris, as the work of a "giant of contemporary Australian poetry."
     The word "oxometry" is not to be found in any dictionary, but is defined by Mr R. N. Bracewell, president of the society, as "very pretentious talk." The emblem of the society is a bull.
    Mr Bracewell said McAuley and Stewart had shown a commendable impartial attitude in conducting an investigation into the oxogenic structure of some contemporary poetry.
     Lieut McAuley is a frequent contributor of lyric poetry to Australian literary journals, and Cpl Stewart, who is a patient in a military hospital near Sydney, is also a capable poet. In a signed statement they declare that, observing with distaste the gradual decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry, they decided to carry out a serious literary experiment to ascertain whether those who praised so lavishly the "humourless nonsense" of some contemporary poetry could tell the real product from "consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense."

LIFE'S WORK IN AN AFTERNOON

     The statement says that with the aid of a collection of books that happened to be on their desk the two writers produced the whole of "Ern Malley's tragic life work" in one afternoon. Opening books at random, they chose a word or phrase haphazardly, and wove them into nonsensical sentences. They then wrote "a pretentious and meaningless preface."
     According to the statement, the first three lines of one "poem" were taken from an American report on the drainage of breeding-grounds of mosquitoes.
     Here is an extract from the "poems":

SYBILLINE

The rabbit's foot I carried in my left pocket
Has worn a haemmorhage in the lining.
The bunch of keys I carry with it
Jingles like fate in my omophagic ear.
And when I stepped clear of the solid basalt
The introverted obelisk of night,
I seized upon this Traumdeutung as a sword
To hew a passage to my love.

Inventing a fictitious sister for "Ern Malley," McAuley and Stewart sent the "poems" to Angry Penguins, saying that they had been found after the tragic death ofErn, who was represented to have been a garage mechanic and insurance salesman. The "commemoration of the Australian poet Ern Malley" occupies 30 pages of the autumn issue of Angry Penguins, now on sale in Melbourne 5/ a copy. Co-editors of the magazine are John Reed, of Melbourne, and Max Harris, of Adelaide.
Harry Roskolenko, an American poet, who is in Australia with the US Army, selected two of the "Ern Malley" poems for inclusion in the Australian poetry number of the American magazine Voices. When theMalley hoax was revealed Roskolenko claimed that the hoaxers had hoaxed themselves by writing poems of which they could feel proud, but so far neither McAuley nor Stewart has appeared anxious to claim serious recognition for their ''masterpieces of nonsense."

In view of publicity given at the week-end to the poems of "Ern Malley," Messrs Max Harris, John Reed, Sunday Reed, and Sidney Nolan, editors and proprietors of the literary journal Angry Penguins, yesterday offered the following further editorial comment :
"When we first learned that the Ern Malley poems were claimed to be a hoax we immediately made a public statement to the effect that the writer of these poems was a fine poet and that they had been accepted on their intrinsic merit without questioning their source. We now wish to correct this statement, or rather the first part of it. Knowing who wrote the poems we are unable to reaffirm our claim that relative to the creative literature of our time the authors are fine poets. From what we know of the work of James McAuley and Harold Stewart we cannot place them in this category. We accordingly amend our first statement and now affirm that Ern Malley was a fine poet.
"As to the authors' statement, it appears at least questionable whether in some respects they have not deceived themselves, but, however this may be, it is apparent that the spirit that motivated them was essentially a destructive one and as such was likely to be injurious to the whole trend of modern poetry. That the 'hoax' will have an entirely

The two cheerful and healthy- minded young graduates of the Sydney University who perpetrated the much-discussed "Ern Malley" hoax, and who thus blew to smithereens the irritating pretensions and incomprehensible philosophy of a school of so-called "modern poetry," are deserving, perhaps, of some higher distinction than the bogus doctorate conferred upon them by "the Sydney University Oxometrical Society." But the authors of the "Ern Malley" documents, who labored so hard to make his pretended "poems" the most arrant gibberish, and whose highest expectations must have been exceeded when a laboriously bad skit on bad verse was hailed as the work of "a giant of contemporary Australian poetry," will not wear the trappings, if any, of "doctors of oxometry," with an ill grace. The one thing that remains to be thought of, is the invention of a fitting academic award for the poetasters and other literary quidnuncs who took the fictitious "Ern Malley" to their bosoms, swearing that he was a genius after their own hearts, and implying, in the usual way, that all who ventured to pronounce him childish and incomprehensible, would but betray their own pathetic lack of aesthetic taste and spiritual perception. A wooden spoon, or a leather medal, might conceivably meet the case.

He is a brave man who will divorce a poet from his dream or a new poet from his nightmare. At least two men in Sydney are brave; but— well, let that pass.
     Recent happenings call for a defence of new poetry. In the first place, what a wonderful let-out it is. To those of us who can't write the orthodox stuff for nuts it is surely a heaven-sent gift. We have no need to feel frustrated any more. Instead, we sneer at Milton, who can't sneer back; poke polysyllabic fun at Bob Browning, and find in Rupert Brooke merely an Edwardian prettiness.
     We forsake that crowd utterly, and enter a camp where we are allowed to make our own rules. We become at once the Rafferties of rhythmical expression. We are able to interpret and record the subcutaneous sublimations of the unconscious, and all that sort of thing. We analyse each other's effusions, and discover in them meanings the writer hadn't thought of. And so, to parody Clive, that writer becomes astonished at his own immoderation. It is all so very thrilling.
    Take this little effort, which we proudly present as being nearly as good as Ern Malley at his best:

Sockeyed, the bughousiness of bats, Shimmers transcontinentally anew.
Come on,
Scarlet and sable Essendon. . .

In those lines, believe it or not, are concealed, if not a message to main kind, at least a homily to the Australian electors. They express (a) Dr Evatt's views on the referendum, (b) the UAP Opposition thereto, and (c) information as to the right time for planting raspberries.
You don't believe us? Well, all we can say is that you are not only an outmoded Victorian, but an ante-antediluvian. You are Freudless, re-Joyceless, and hopeless. There is, alas! nothing that can be done about you. Not only have you failed to march with the times, which is, after all a Conservative journal, but you are quite incapable of becoming angry with the Penguins. No anger, no art, you know.