Ernest Lalor Malley

Christine Wertheim has an interesting article about the Australian counterfeit poet Ernest Lalor Malley in the new issue of Cabinet.

Malley was invented as a hoax modernist by a couple of guys who had ambivalent to hostile feelings about modernism. One of them, James McAuley, had originally been quite enamored of Joyce and modernism, but grown sick of it, and he wanted to set up Modernism and Max Harris, the 18-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a modernist journal (it sounds fake though, doesn't it). Harris loved the fake poems when he received them, and the fake poet achieved instant recognition as a great avant-gardist.

The lame response (usually be reactionary types) is that this shows that the modern poet is fake. Something akin to saying "my kid could do that" about Klee or Picasso. But Wertheim makes a more interesting argument: that writing modern "experimental" poetry in some sense to write as a counterfeit. Their hoaxers have thus really written as modern writers; poetry as a critique etc. Wertheim makes a few more specific claims, but I think this is the essence of her argument.

She also depicts the importance of America in this saga, as Koch and Ashbery liked the Malley writings and published various pieces in the US.

The story reminds me of "Den Hemliga Gloden" (The Secret Glow, or The Secret Embers) by Ake Erikson, published in Helsinki in 1925. Erikson was a traditional poet writing under a pseudonym and the book was a hoax. As with Malley, it was supposed to prove the ridiculousness of the modernists. Like Malley it gained a great reception. Major modernists gave it rave review etc.

The interesting thing about that book is (as with Malley's) that it *was* good. Very Mayakovsky influenced. Caricature-ish. Also interestingly, Erikson later admitted that he had had a lot of fun writing the poems; he had in the end come to appreciate modern poetry on some level through counterfeiting it.