1944

Ways of the World

By Philo
The Daily News (Perth, WA)
Date: July 8, 1944
Page Number: 15

Ern Malley Hoax part 3

LITERARY circles in the Eastern States are hugging themselves with delight (can a circle hug?) and the ultra-"moderns" are probably pale with anger as a result of the outstanding hoax of recent years.
     An Adelaide magazine "Angry Penguins," which devotes itself largely to the unintelligible, received and published some poems allegedly written by one "Ern Malley" of Sydney, which editor Max Harris hailed as the work of a "giant of contemporary Australian poetry."
     Alas and alack — for Mr Harris — Ern Malley was the joint pen-name of two young writers who decided to test the swallowing capacity of the Angry Penguins of the Holy City by concocting nonsense verse under the cloak of serious literary intent.
     That capacity is indicated by the appearance of the 1944 Autumn number of "Angry Penguins" "to commemorate the Australian poet Ern Malley."
     Thirty-three pages are devoted by the Enraged Birds to the Malley poems which were sent by an alleged sister with a brief sketch of the life and death of her poet brother. He had died of Grave's Disease at the age of 25 without having published anything, or having let anyone into the secret of his poetic gift. Sixteen poems in manuscript were found with "Preface and Statement" in two handwritten pages. That was the story accompanying the poems.

The preface and statement are treated exhaustively by editor Max Harris in his introduction to the poems. "Malley" writes: "These poems are complete in themselves. They have a domestic economy of their own and if they face outwards to the reader that is because they first faced inwards to themselves. Every poem should be an autarchy."
Editor Harris comments reverently: "To this statement I can add little or nothing. It is a beautiful and succinct expression of my own feelings fco a poem."

So much for the story behind the hoax, which will make the Angry Penguin angrier still. Now for some quotations from the poems.
One is entitled "Sweet William." I don't know why.

I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your albion:
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscence. the unforgivable rape.
One moment of daylight let me have
Like a white arm thrust
Out of the dark and self-denying wave
And in the one moment I
Shall irremediably attest
How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding)
My white swan of quietness lies
Sanctified on my black swan's breast

Here is one verse of another poem (no full stops) entitled "Sybilline."

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

Perhaps some explanation of the Angry Penguins being so easily and completely trapped may be supplied by quoting from one of editor Max Harris's own efforts, called "Biography."

I am deciphered by the black waters
union, and terrorist surge avid in my fields,
sun my god, the purpose love,
and the strong swing of hawks my blazing shield.
here I was an age unfolding
like the rose my veneer panels to the rafters.
and the natural birds blinked,
and at my birth the yellow waters followed after.
I lay, like tyranny in my own corn,
waiting nightfall as the mice
to play the moribund penny of desire
at the sneering globule of the moon,
this eye, the black eternal waters, the wild incestuous caverns, my kiss
lay trembling before this neutral agency.

After all, the verse of the nonexistent Ern Malley is plain Tennysonian' stuff compared with the outpourings of Mr Harris.

MODERNISM ! What absurdities are committed in its name, and how many foolish people of small attainments seize on this vehicle to carry them to their goal of notoriety.
     They are all of a piece, these free versifiers and prose writers (Finnegan's Wake), surrealists in the pictorial art field and a few composers of "music" for the piano.
     With nothing of any value to say in verse, paint or music and no real technical ability they apply themselves to the grotesque and affect to scorn the work of masters of their arts.
     This does not matter very much. To the discerning these exhibits in the world's freak show afford a little mild amusement, but they have their adherents who because a production appears obviously meaningless believe that there must be some meaning hidden from all but the elect minority.
     So we have hideous daubs in paint with titles unrelated to any thing sane in life; masses of words with eccentric punctuation, or none at all, and no meaning except toinhabitants of Bedlam (and they can't explain). I shall finish by quoting Mr Harris again in his "Elegaic for Ern Malley":

"The heaving waters turn black and blind, as if they had embraced the sun, or seen the perfect disaster regimented across the bedroom mirror. There are no birds. Remotely the wheat, with its shorn fingers like a mechanic at tea looks awkward. The lamprey eel-like pseudo-fish .... fistula on top of the head, slithers insidiously in the oily scales of the lake bed. She is near, bearing death like a toothpick between her smile. Now !"

Oh ! Mr Harris.

Editors' Invitation To Hoaxers

Army News (Darwin, NT)
Date: July 11, 1944
Page Number: 2

MELBOURNE, Monday.
     Co-editors of the periodical Angry Penguins, victim of the now world famous literary hoax by two Sydney soldier-poets, today invited the hoaxers to submit six of their own published poems for publication alongside six of "Ern Malley" poems they concocted.
     "We are confident," they said, "that 'Ern Malley' will stand up to the test."
     Most readers however, continue to regard the hoax as one of the most successful ever perpetrated.
     "Most people think Reed and Harris haven't a leg to stand on —their obscure false posing has been blown skyhigh, and they refuse to admit it," said one soldier on leave in Melbourne.

Monkey Business

The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.)
Date: July 15, 1944
Page Number: 11

However unorthodox these new poets may be in their alleged verse they are not very original in their public statements. When the Ern Malley hoax was made public Max Harris, heroically embarking on the argument that Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart were not good poets, but that their creation, Ern Malley, was a great one, made a statement. "If 50 million monkeys," he said without acknowledgment, "with 50 million typewriters tapped for that number of years, one of them would produce a Shakespeare sonnet."
     Now, if you turn to page 14 of "The Mysterious Universe" (Pelican series), by Sir James Jeans, you will
find this:
     "It was, I think, Huxley who said that six monkeys, set to strum unintelligently on typewriters for millions of millions of years, would be bound in time to write all the books in the British Museum. If we examined the last page which a particular monkey had typed and found that it had chanced, in its blind strumming, to type a Shakespeare sonnet, we should rightly regard the occurrence as a remarkable accident, but if we looked through all the millions of pages the monkeys had turned off in untold millions of years we might be sure of finding a Shakespeare sonnet somewhere amongst them, the product of the blind play of chance."
     We echo Sheridan when we say that both Max Harris and—was it Huxley? —hit upon the same thought by the blind play of chance, but that Huxley said it first.

Monkey Business

The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.)
Date: July 15, 1944
Page Number: 11

"Angry Penguins" Autumn Number. —Reed and Harris, Adelaide;
"Meanjin Papers," Autumn.—Meanjin Press, Brisbane.

     An enlarged number of "Angry Penguins" commemorates "the Australian Poet, Ern Malley," who according to the literary editor, Max Harris, is one of the two giants of Australian contemporary poetry"—the other giant being the late Donald Bevis Kerr. Malley himself is said to have died last, year at, the age of 25. His works, hitherto unknown, amounting to sixteen poems, with the general title of "The Darkening Ecliptic," are here printed, and Mr. Harris supplies not only a memoir but also an "elegiac" and an appreciation.
    We now know that Malley never existed. But yet it was necessary to invent him. Poets who can seriously emit such lines as "the long golden dirndl swept with the rhythms of sin about the purple sex of the penultimate mountain range" deserve parody, and, by means of their stuffed man. Ern Malley, two of our more independent younger writers have guyed them —Harris himself, from whose "elegiac" the above is taken, Harris's school, the surrealists, the apocalyptics, and the looser modernists generally. "Malley's" verses are so good in their kinds, however, that anyone sympathetically disposed might well be taken in by them. All the same, whole poems, with phrases and turns in others, really could not be taken seriously.
     While Mr. Harris is fast in this trap, he is being laughed to death by A. D. Hope in "Meanjin Papers." Recently he published a "novel," called "The Vegetative Eye," suggested by Blake. This work, too, shows his weaknesses, and Mr. Hope cleverly pierces them. At the same time, a little more might, perhaps have been conceded to Blake, if not to Harris. Mr. Hope appears to regard them as equally unimportant, and thus, in his view, unimportance built on unimportance is hardly worth examination. Anyone to whom Blake's vision has a meaning will perhaps find some significance in Mr. Harris's.
     A good proportion of the space in both periodicals is given to visiting poets. "Meanjin" also offers hospitality to poets overseas, "Angry Penguins" and "Meanjin" are, however, clearly distinguished from each other by the predominance of art criticism and discussion in the former, of social and literary disquisition in the latter.
    The "Angry Penguins" cover is a composite illustration of lines from "Ern Malley's" verse, while "Meanjin" has now sacrificed its black footprints for a couple of frivolous-looking beings playing a sort of hopscotch—a genuine aboriginal design.

-R.G.H.

Topsy-Turveydom's Tongue
The Charms of Doubletalk

By W.G.M.
The West Australian (Perth, WA)
Date: July 22, 1944
Page Number: 2

Graves' disease is an autoimmune disease. It most commonly affects the thyroid, frequently causing it to enlarge to twice its size or more (goiter), become overactive, with related hyperthyroid symptoms such as increased heartbeat, muscle weakness, disturbed sleep, and irritability. It can also affect the eyes, causing bulging eyes (exophthalmos). It affects other systems of the body, including the skin, heart, circulation and nervous system.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism.

In art, Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.

Finnegans Wake is a work of literature by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language.

The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which many critics believe attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Owing to the work's expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.

The Bethlem Royal Hospital is a hospital for the treatment of mental illness located in London, United Kingdom and part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Although no longer based at its original location, it is recognised as Europe's first and oldest institution to specialise in mental illnesses. It has been known by various names including St Mary Bethlehem, Bethlem Hospital, Bethlehem Hospital and Bedlam.

The word bedlam, meaning uproar and confusion, is derived from the hospital's prior name. Although currently a modern psychiatric facility, historically it became representative of the worst excesses of asylums in the era of lunacy reform.

Originating from the Rede Lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge in November 1930, this book is based upon the conviction that the teachings and findings of astronomy and physical science are destined to produce an immense change on our outlook on the universe as a whole, and on views about the significance of human life. The author contends that the questions at issue are ultimately one for philosophical discussion, but that before philosophers can speak, science should present ascertained facts and provisional hypotheses. The book is therefore written with these thoughts in mind while broadly presenting the fundamental physical ideas and findings relevant for a wider philosophical inquiry.

Meanjin is an Australian literary journal. The name - pronounced Mee-AN-jin - is derived from an Aboriginal word for the land where the city Brisbane is located.

In A Vision of the Last Judgement Blake wrote:

Error is Created Truth is Eternal Error or Creation will be Burned Up & then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.

Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE
(21 July 1907 –13 July 2000)
was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.