The importance of being Ern - Ern Malley, Australian hoax poet

National Review, April 17, 1995 by Michael Heyward

Few writers have been so well and so badly regarded. Since 1944 Malley's work has been ignored, reviled, and lavishly praised. Sidney Nolan recorded Orson Welles reading some lines, but the tape has yet to surface. The poems have been set to jazz. Then, just after my book about the hoax was published in America, a man named William Hampton wrote to me with the news that in 1947 he and some friends at the University of Michigan had made a 14-minute expressionist movie about Ern Malley, using surplus Army film stock.

And now, in the March 1995 issue of Quadrant, Professor David Lewis of Princeton University has asked some intriguing questions about the source of Malley's name. Lewis refers to an obscure Austrian philosopher who early in this century expounded a theory of nonexistent objects. The philosopher's name? Ernst Mally. Could this be mere coincidence? Ern Malley is after all an aleatory poet to whom hardly anything ever happened by chance. I decided to call Harold Stewart: was this another of his and Jim McAuley's jokes, to name their poet after the most obscure philosopher in the world, a man who tried to explain what happens when we think about things that don't exist? Harold was blunt. ``I can tell you with absolute certainty that I have never heard of Ernst Mally until this instant,'' he told me.

The history of the Ern Malley hoax is a puzzling, contradictory one, the sum not just of what happened fifty years ago but of the wide range of reactions to it. That's why the hoax is alive, and why David Lewis's intriguing suggestion is now part of the story. I need hardly add that in the process Ern Malley has achieved something Ernst Mally would certainly never have predicted for himself: he has made the philosopher famous in Australia. At a point in our conversation, Harold chuckled. ``You know,'' he said, ``perhaps neither McAuley nor I ever existed except in the imagination of Ern Malley.''