The most extraordinary literary hoax - and what it means for literature teachers

 What does a poem mean? The extraordinary Ern Malley hoax

T.S. Eliot, surely one of the giants of English poetry and a founding father of the modernist language for it, was once asked what he meant with the line (in his Ash-Wednesday (1930)): ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’.

Eliot’s answer? ‘I mean’, he replied, ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’.

Conclusion? Don’t ask the author what they meant.
Other conclusion? The meaning you’re looking for is not for me to tell you about, it’s up to you to determine. Whether it’s the same as mine or someone else’s is immaterial: you are reading the text, make of it what you want!

Those two conclusions are still baffling for some people, and when they are not, they remain difficult to internalize; witness how many times we speak in terms of ‘The author means that…’, or ‘The author suggests that’. Witness how many times we talk of a book ‘being about this or that’, about ‘the book’s main idea’. And that difficulty presents us with a problem when bringing fiction into the class: learners expect the teachers to know ‘what the author meant’, and they expect to be told: ‘The book is about this, and means that’.
And the teachers find it difficult to give free reign to learners’ interpretations, thereby limiting what can be thought about to the ‘meaning’ they have pre-identified.

And really, the problem is in that simple question: Does a poem actually ‘mean’ something? And who knows what that is – if it really does? Who is qualified to say so? And even more importantly: who is qualified to determine that meaning?

Enters Ern Malley and his poems: Australia, 1943 – at that time rather behind Europe and America in terms of cultural development, certainly in literature and poetry. Max Harris, the 22-year-old editor of the poetry magazine Angry Penguins, one day receives a few sheets of paper scrawled over with eighteen poems and an accompanying letter from Ether Malley, sister to the part-time car mechanics Ern (short of Ernest), who she says has just died aged twenty-five. Were those poems any good, she asked? She herself wasn’t a reader and couldn’t judge, so she was turning to Harris for advice, giving him free reign to decide whether to publish them if he thought they deserved it.

Harris was floored: this was Modernist poetry as it then didn’t exist in Australia, inspired by Eliot, by Pound, by Stein perhaps – a style already left a bit behind in Europe but which still hadn’t been seen in Sydney or Melbourne. And he thought the poems were not only very good, but of the utmost quality: they needed to be offered to the public immediately – Ern Malley was a genius in the making.

The problem was that it was all a hoax: two part-time poets (McAuley and Stewart) had written the lot in an afternoon (they claimed), using the Complete Shakespeare, a dictionary of synonyms and various governmental reports on different subjects. Their goal was to deceive Harris, the editor, and thereby prove that Modernist poetry was just nonsense: that ‘it didn’t mean anything’. And not just modernist but imagist (Pound), vorticist (Lewis), Dadaist and Symbolist, too. All of it had lost sight of Meaning: a poem, according to them, had to mean something, it couldn’t just be about images and symbols and words and their music.

The other problem then became that a lot of ‘specialists’ loved those poems too, and were equally fooled by them: poets, writers, teachers, University professors of literature – great numbers read the Ern Malley poems and thought them important, meaningful, and of the highest poetic quality (in fact, they have been reprinted more than five times since).

When the hoax was revealed, Harris was reviled, mocked, turned into a laughingstock: Ah, look, those literature people, they can’t even tell good from bad, real from invented! They can’t even recognize literature from tosh – how can they lecture us on what is poetry?! There are echoes of such other hoaxes here of course, most notably perhaps Ossian’s celebrated 18^th century poems which faked an ancient Celtic text and fooled everyone for decades. So far, so old school.

But our story doesn’t end here, because Harris was then sued for Obscenity and Immorality by the Australian state, which alleged that the Ern Malley poems Harris had published contained obscene and immoral passages – censorship was still in full flow in Australia then, and hundreds of books were banned. What happened then was exemplary of our problem of meaning: the prosecution couldn’t point at more than a few words in the poems that referred directly to a body part, especially a female one: they were no swear-words, no obscene words, no vulgarity, so it all hinged on interpretation. Interpretation (what was the meaning ‘behind’ the words on the page?) and authorial intent: what did the author mean or intend to say? This last was of course baffling since Ern Malley had never existed, so by definition he couldn’t have meant anything. It was doubly baffling as the real authors, McAuley and Stewart, had written those poems with the explicit intention of not meaning anything: they had striven to write gibberish and to make no sense.

So this was the situation: we had two real authors denying meaning – in fact, insisting they had purposely avoided themes and ‘continuity of ideas’; a prosecution which attributed intentions to a non-existing author; poems that were written as a hoax to show nonsense, and readers who did find meaning and sense in them. Who was right? Can anybody be right?

Max Harris, the editor, when put in the dock to answer those charges of indecency, stuck to his guns: he still believed the Malley poems were good and meaningful: he could interpret them in fact, something he did in court. And he still thought lines like these not only good but poetic:

‘Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other
 Areas of stagnant water serve
 As breeding-grounds’.

The fact that those lines came from the beginning of a report on environmental conditions in an Australian region, written as a description of those conditions and without any intention of being poetic, was no deterrent for Harris and others: the poetry is in the line, not in the origins of the line nor in the authorial intent (or even existence) behind the lines. As Harris said to the prosecutor in this extraordinary exchange:

     Prosecutor: Don’t you believe that Ern Malley’s poems were never intended to be serious work at all?Harris: I have no opinion on their intentions. I only worry about their content as poems
Pros.: And you say that it doesn’t matter if the significance is accidental or otherwise?
Harris: I don’t know if the significance is accidental. I am concerned with the significance.

Harris and others suggested that the two writers of the hoax had, much like many decadent and dadaist poets would claim, ‘been poetic without consciously wanting to’: their inner (poetic) being had spoken through them, as it were, without them being aware of it. A Freudian interpretation would have supported that view, and anything from Écriture automatique to Le Cadavre Exquis had indeed claimed that as method.

For most people though, the real question was: do those poems mean what the prosecution says they mean (obscenity, immorality, references to sex) or what Harris says they mean (depth of meaning, symbolism and strong images, poetic qualities)? Which translates as: do poems have a meaning, or do they have possible meanings? Harris and some of his colleagues said during the trial that reading this type of poetry required a trained mind; asked whether he thought that ‘the ordinary person would have an idea of what Hamlet was about?’, Harris replied;

‘He would have a general outline in his mind, the ordinary reader, of the emotional tension of the play and a rough outline from stage directions and the context in which it takes place – although he may have no idea what is biting Hamlet’.

Harris makes a distinction between understanding the story, its setting and context, and understanding the meaning of it – something all of us teachers know well, as we routinely see learners read superficially, reading for the plot only.

Ultimately, this is a hoax that exposes two things literary theory has long argued (New Criticism, Roland Barthes, Genette):

             1. Barthes’ 1967 ‘The author is dead’ idea is a thing: authors may have no idea what they’re doing, they may want one thing and you get another, they may not even exist – the point is that they are most definitely not able to determine whichever meaning we find. Their intentions, if they had any, do not matter to us: the only thing that matters is the text.

              2. This habit of expecting a text to ‘mean’ something is detrimental to our freedom as reader. As the Malley affair shows, there is a perception that specialists are more able to determine ‘what is meant in a text’. That may be true, although I rather think it comes from reading a lot in many directions, but the problem is that we’ve come to think of their meaning as the only meaning. Yet the hoax makes that clear: nobody knows for sure. When faced with a text you know nothing about, determining its literary value becomes problematic, as this other hoax (submitting Jane Austen manuscripts) made clear (https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jul/19/books.booksnews). Classics are classics also because they come to occupy a place in culture and history. As Umberto Eco wrote, ‘A masterpiece is not a masterpiece until it is well known and has absorbed all the interpretations to which it has given rise, which in turn make it what it is’: all the interpretations mind you.

So as ever it’s good to think back to what Margaret Atwood once said in an interview:

'I don’t think poetry expresses emotion. It evokes emotion from the reader, and that’s a very different thing. As someone once said: ‘If you want to express emotions, scream’. If you want to evoke emotion it’s more complicated. Listening to someone scream doesn’t necessarily make you want to scream'. 

The Ern Malley affair is an exemplary case of putting literature on the spot and say: ‘Prove you’re logical and consistent’ as if it were Mathematics or engineering. It isn’t: it’s free from constraints, and it belongs to each and every person who reads the text. Alberto Manguel called reading ‘a creative act’, writing: ‘Something revealing about the creative nature of the act of reading lies in the fact that one reader can despair and another can laugh at exactly the same page’.

Let’s keep that in mind!

• All the information concerning the case is from Michael Heyward (1994). The Ern Malley affair. London: Faber.
• Margaret Atwood. Conversations (1990)
• Alberto Manguel: A history of reading (2014)
• U. Eco & J-C. Carrière: This is not the end of the book (2012)