There can be no better day
than today – April Fools day – to present another Homohoax, one of the many
hoaxes, pranks, fakes, imposters, conspiracy theories and confidence tricks perpetrated
by or upon the lgbt community.
One of my favourite
all-time April Fool jokes was the one the BBC pulled off in 2008. They made a
short film promoting a non-existent documentary about flying penguins migrating
from Antarctica to Australia. With this in mind I thought I’d write about a
hoax involving both penguins and Australia.
The homohoax is known as
the Ern Malley Hoax, and was carried out in Australia in 1944 by James McAuley
(1917-1976) and Harold Stewart (1916-1995), the latter being regarded today, on
the internet at least, as Australia’s first gay poet, although he was not out
publicly in his lifetime
Let’s begin with the
penguins.
There was an art movement
in Australia in the 1940s called Angry Penguins, which took its name from the title
a journal edited by a modernist surrealist poet called Max Harris (1921-1995). The
name “Angry Penguins” came from a line in one of his poems, "as drunks,
the angry penguins of the night". Other modernist poets and artists allied
themselves to the movement and they became known collectively as the Angry
Penguins.
The Angry Penguins were
anything but conservative and traditional. Harold Stewart and James McAuley,
however, were definitely conservative, and they hated modernism.
Harold Stewart was born
and raised in Sydney, Australia. His father was a health inspector with a keen
interest in Asia, an interest that he would pass on to his son. Harold showed
early promise as a poet when he was a teenager at school. James McAuley was at
the same school, and both received the school’s poetry prize, McAuley in1933
and Stewart in 1935
In school Stewart also
became aware of his homosexuality, though the prevailing social conventions at
the time were very homophobic and he remained in the closet for the rest of his
life. It was only revealed in public in 1996, the year after he died. Stewart's
school poetry had homoerotic subject matters, which subsequently helped to earn
his the title of Australis’ first gay poet. Most of his friends were probably
unaware of his sexuality.
After leaving school
Stewart studied teaching at Sydney University but found it quite dull, and he
abandoned his studies to become a poet. He spent hours in the public library,
reading and copying poems, searching for his own poetic identity. He also met
with friends around Sydney to recite and discuss their poems with each other.
During World War II,
Stewart and McAuley worked in Army Intelligence (in the Directorate of Research
and Civil Affairs) in Melbourne. In 1943, while in the army barracks, in just
one day, they created the Ern Malley Hoax, a fictitious poet and entire body of
work. The poems were deliberately written to be bad, exaggerating the modernist
symbolism to the point of ridicule. They actually just wrote down the first
thing that came into their heads, whether it made sense or not. They also had a
pile of reference books, dictionaries and phrase books from which they lifted
words and phrases at random. At the end of the day Stewart and McAulay had
written 17 poems and a complete fake biography of Ern Malley.
So, what did Stewart and
McAuley come up with for their biography of Ern Malley?
Ernest “Ern” Lalor Malley
was born in England on 14th March 1918. His father died when Ern was 2, and his
mother migrated to Sydney, Australia, with her two children Ern and Ethel. At
the age of 17 Ern moved to Melbourne and had several jobs. In the early 1940s
he was diagnosed with Graves' disease. Although not necessarily fatal, this is
a serious autoimmune disease that particularly affects the thyroid gland which
enlarges and produces hormones causing skin, heart, and muscle problems and, in
the most well-known effect, the bulging of eyes. Malley refused treatment and
he returned to Sydney to live with his sister in March 1943. He died a few
months later on 23 July.
After Ern’s death, Ethel
found some poems he had written. She wrote to Max Harris and asked for his
opinion of them. Ethel was, of course, actually Stewart and McAuley. Harris was
excited. He showed them to his Angry Penguin friends, and they fell for the
hoax hook, line and sinker, just as Stewart and McAulay had hoped. They all
agreed that Malley was a genius. Harris decided to rush out a special edition
of the “Angry Penguins” journal and commissioned noted Australian artist Sidney
Nolan to paint the cover illustration based on one of Malley's poems.
While the modernist poets
praised Malley and his poems, the University of Adelaide’s student newspaper
ridiculed the poems, suggesting that Harris had written them as a hoax. Then
the Adelaide Daily Mail expressed the same opinion. The next week the “Sunday
Sun” ran a front page story correctly alleging that the Malley poems had been
written by McAuley and Stewart.
Then things turned
serious. The police impounded the special “Angry Penguins” issue and prosecuted
Harris for publishing obscene material. Several distinguished expert witnesses
were called to defend Harris, but he was found guilty. His fine by today’s
standard was pretty light - £5.
Understandably, the whole
Malley hoax effected the course of the modernist and surrealist movement in
Australia. Support of the Australian modernist and surrealist movement took a
blow, and the “Angry Penguins” journal lost readership and soon went out of business.
However, Max Harris later took advantage of the affair, and in the mid-1950s he
published another literary magazine called “Ern Malley's Journal”. He was
always adamant that Malley’s poems, even though he knew they were fake, still
had merit and he republished them in 1961. He wrote, "Sometimes the myth
is greater than its creators." His opinion was influential. Even today,
over 70 years later, the Malley poems are regarded as legitimate surrealist
poems. They have inspired many other poems and artists. In fact, the artist
Sidney Nolan said the Malley poems inspired him to create his “Ned Kelly”
series of paintings.
In 1974 there was an
exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s art called "Ern Malley and Paradise Garden"
at the Art Gallery of South Australia's Adelaide Festival Exhibitions. More
recently an exhibition called "Ern Malley: The Hoax and Beyond" was
mounted at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2009. The “Washington Post” has
gone so far as to call the Ern Malley Hoax as the greatest literary hoax in the
20th century (I would challenge this – the Hitler Diaries had a more global
effect).
After the hoax, Stewart
worked in a Melbourne bookshop and collected many Eastern books, as his late
father’s interest in Asia began to become a bigger part his own life. He began
to study and pursue Japanese Buddhism and haiku poetry.
He first visited Japan in
1961. He was almost ordained as a Jōdo Shinshū priest in 1963 but changed his
mind at the last minute. From 1966 Stewart became a permanent resident in
Japan, becoming an expert on the history, culture and art of Kyoto. He wrote a
series of poems with prose commentaries on Kyoto’s history in 1981. Earlier, in
the 1960s, he published two translations of haiku poetry which proved popular.
Harold Stewart died in
Kyoto on 7th August 1995 after a short illness. His body was cremated and his
ashes scattered in the Higashiyama mountains.
One of the ironic twists
is that the Ern Malley poems have become the most well-known poems by Harold
Stewart, more so than the poems he wrote under his own name. I wonder if that
qualifies as a hoax that backfired.
