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Journal of Australian Studies
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‘Fuck all editors’: The Ern Malley affair and Gwen
Harwood's bulletin scandal
Cassandra Atherton
a
a
Tutors in the English Department , University of Melbourne
Published online: 18 May 2009.
To cite this article: Cassandra Atherton (2002) ‘Fuck all editors’: The Ern Malley affair and Gwen Harwood's bulletin scandal,
Journal of Australian Studies, 26:72, 149-157, DOI: 10.1080/14443050209387747
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443050209387747
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Framing Stories and Poetry
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'Fuck All Editors': The Ern Malley Affair
and Gwen Harwood's Bulletin Scandal
Cassandra Atherton
Until the 1990s and Helen Demidenko, there have been only been two Australian
literary hoaxes. The first was the Ern Malley Hoax; the second Gwen Harwood's
Bulletin scandal. James McAuley and Harold Stewart were the two poets behind
the creation of the 'great aussie battler' Ern Malley and Gwen Harwood was the
quaintly titled 'lady poet' behind the suave European Walter Lehmann. McAuley,
Stewart and Harwood are important figures in Australian literature, not just for
their individual contributions to Australian poetry but for their construction of
enduring literary figures. Ern Malley and Walter Lehmann were believed by many
to have made a mockery of editors willing to publish their work, but the hoaxes
reveal more than the Australian public's delight in the humiliation of editors Max
Harris and the Bulletin's Donald Home. Despite the fact that Harwood and
Lehmann's poems were no longer welcome at the Bulletin, she managed to
perpetrate a further hoax (although less dramatic), where poems under other
pseudonyms were published unknowingly by Home.1
The creation of Em Malley and Walter Lehmann illustrates John Rowan's
theory of subpersonalities, where pseudonyms can be read as the manifestation of
a sub-self. If a subpersonality is defined as 'a semi-permanent and semiautonomous
region of the personality capable of acting as a person',2
then Em
Malley and Walter Lehmann betray the subconscious desires of their creators. In
the Malley poems we can see 'a young man who believes in his vocation as a poet,
recoiling from a broken love affair',3
as well as the nightmares and self-doubt of
McAuley. Those who have read Cassandra Pybus' The Devil and James McAuley.
will recognise his subconscious desires in this subpersonality. This is a particularly
interesting theory when it is applied to someone like Henri Beyle, Stendal, Henri
Brulard or Mr Crocodile, or any of the one hundred and seventy one pseudonyms
or aliases he adopted.4
Similarly, McAuley has been described by Harwood as
'four or five men rolled into one',5
and by Home as 'a multi-faceted presentation
of himself as a series of performances'.6
The creation of Em Malley, his sister Ethel, and Em's poetical oeuvre is an
entertaining account. They were all created 'one Saturday afternoon'7
in 1943 in
Melbourne by two young Sydney poets: James McAuley and Harold Stewart.
Their dossier on Em Malley is impressive. Em had two very important things
going for him: he was working class and he was dead. In a letter to Max Harris,
co-editor of the Angry Penguins, Em's sister wrote that:
Ernest Lalor Malley was born in England at Liverpool on March 14, 1918. Our
father died as a result of war wounds in 1920, and the family came out to Australia,
where mother had relations ... He did not do well at school... Mother died August
1933 and Ern left school.8
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Jumping the Queue
Ern had been a car mechanic in Palmer's Garage on Tavemere's Hill and then,
after moving to Melbourne at seventeen, he worked for National Mutual selling
insurance policies. Ern died of Graves' disease at twenty-four years of age,
conveniently leaving a manuscript for his sister to find. Em was the perfect
creation of both a national hero and a modernist hero, because his poetry was
devoid of tired Australian clichés and exhibited a sophisticated knowledge of the
international surrealist movement.
McAuley and Stewart wrote sixteen poems as Malley which they entitled 'The
Darkening Ecliptic' The manuscript was then sent to the avant garde magazine
Angry Penguins with a covering letter from Ethel Malley on behalf of her
deceased brother:
Dear Sir,
When I was going through my brother's things after his death, I found some
poetry he had written ... I am not a literary person myself and I do not feel that I
understand what he wrote, but I feel I ought to do something about them. He was
very ill in the months before his death last July and it may have affected his
outlook.9
John Reed, Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan and Max Harris co-edited Angry
Penguins, and after reading the manuscript they decided to publish 'The
Darkening Ecliptic' in the Autumn edition of their magazine. Harris critiqued the
poems in this same edition, touting the poems as 'the work of a poet of great
power'.10
The hoax was exposed by the Sunday Sun on 25 June 1944 with the publication
of a statement by McAuley and Stewart confessing to creating the fictional
character Ern Malley and admitting that the poems were created as a 'serious
literary experiment'.11
They confessed to plagiarising from 'a chance collection of
books which happened to be on our desk: the concise Oxford Dictionary,
Collected Shakespeare, Dictionary of Quotations, Rip/nan's Rhyming Dictionary
and the first three lines of the poem 'culture as exhibit' were lifted, from a
quotation, straight from the American report on the drainage of breeding grounds
of mosquitoes'.12
Harris was to be humiliated even further. On 5 September, the South Australian
police took action against the content of some of the Ern Malley poems and other
writing published in Angry Penguins. Detective Vogelsang, acting for the South
Australian police, objected to seven examples of indecency in the Ern Malley
oeuvre. The poem 'Egyptian Register' was prosecuted because it contained the
word 'genitals' and he stated that 'I think it is immoral to use the word "genitals"
... I think it is unusual for sexual parts to be referred to in poetry'.13
Furthermore
he objected to the word 'incestuous' because, as he stated, 'I don't know what that
means but I think there is a suggestion of indecency about it'. The line: 'shall rest
snug and know what he means' in the poem 'Boult to Marina' was considered
indecent because of the suggestion of the narrator's intentions. Vogelsang stated
that: 'It offends my decency to suggest that a character means he wants sexual
intercourse'.14
Even more ludicrous was his objection to 'Night Piece' as
Vogelsang believed that the indecency 'lay in the fact that the events took place in
a park at night'15
and anything done in the park at night was to be considered
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Cassandra Atherton
indecent. The result was that Harris was found guilty of publishing indecent
material and fined five pounds.
In contrast, the public was delighted by the hoax. To the average Australian,
modernist poetry was incomprehensible and McAuley and Stewart had targeted
this audience by publishing their confession in a tabloid. The Bulletin, to be
hoaxed twenty years later by Harwood, lent their support to the McAuley/Stewart
cause at the time, publishing the comment: 'earnest thanks to the diggers who are
joint debunkers of Bosh, Blah and Blather'.16
They did not show the same spirit,
however, when the tables were turned and the joke was on them.
The Ern Malley poems have been subject to many different interpretations in
the last fifty-seven years, while Harwood's sonnets are only just beginning to be
recognised for their striking images. Opinion has shifted from the prominent belief
in the 1940s that the Ern Malley poems were 'nonsense' and that Harris was
indeed 'insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination'.17
At the
time of the hoax, Sir Herbert Read wired Harris from England. His cable read, 'I
too would have been deceived by Ern Malley but hoaxers hoisted by their own
petard as touched off unconscious sources or inspiration work too sophisticated
but has elements of genuine poetry'.18
Read believed that McAuley and Stewart
had ironically 'hoaxed' themselves as the poetry showed 'effective use of vivid
metaphor, a subtle sense of rhythmic variation ... even a metaphysical unity which
cannot be the result of unintelligent deception', a concept that the poets had not
believed possible.19
There are some very striking and memorable images in many of the Ern Malley
poems. 'Durer Innsbruck, 1495' opens with the narrator reminiscing:
I had often cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters - 20
This imaging on the back of the eyelids like a reversed reflection is beautifully
crafted. So, too is the much debated last line, 'I am still/The black swan of trespass
on alien waters'. These lines in the first poem of 'The Darkening Ecliptic' hint at
the deceptive nature of the hoax.
In 'Sonnets for the Novachord', the rhyme scheme is monotonous, 'Hawk at
the wraith/ Of remembered emotions/ Vindicate our high notions/ Of a new and
pitiless faith'. However, the three line stanza: 'If this be the norm/ Of our serious
frolic/ There's no remorse' clearly defines the situation and cleverly suggests that
choices should be made confidently. In 'Sweet William' the surreal is layered with
sexuality when the narrator states, 'And I must go with stone feet/ Down the
staircase of flesh/ To where in a shuddering embrace/ My toppling opposites
commit/ The obscene, the unforgivable rape'.
Finally, 'Perspective Lovesong' locates itself in Melbourne, giving a refreshing
cultural illustration of existence with a clever play on words:
Princess, you have lived in Princess St.,
Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun
With the left hand. You thought
That paying the price would give you admission
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Jumping the Queue
To the sad autumn of my Valhalla.
But, I, too, invented faithfulness.
Despite McAuley and Stewart's belief that the poems were all 'absurd', the
process they used to create poetry was a radical idea in 1943, although it was
overlooked at the time. Using existing sources of writing to create something new
was an incredibly avant-garde exercise that simultaneously exposed the authors'
preoccupations. The choice of words and creation of images and rhyme schemes
revealed a sexualised stream of consciousness. Some of the images are not very
different from images McAuley used in his later poetry. With its surreal imagery
McAuley's 'Gnostic Prelude' could well be a poem by Malley, just as the Malley
poem 'Durer: Innsbruck 1945' was based on a poem by McAuley.
Harwood created the character Walter Lehmann in 1960 and wrote fourteen
poems as this subpersonality. Only two of the poems in the Walter Lehmann
oeuvre were written as a hoax. As McAuley and Stewart did with Malley,
Harwood gave Lehmann a personal history which made him more than a
pseudonym. He was an 'apple orchardist in the Huon Valley in Tasmania, and
husband and father'.21
In 1961, Harwood achieved notoriety when she made
headlines in Hobart: 'Tas Housewife in Hoax of the Year'. Harwood was miffed
by the 'Tas Housewife' section of the headline, claiming that once again that she
was not taken seriously as a poet because she was a woman. This was precipitated
by two sonnets that Harwood had sent into the Bulletin. Read acrostically, the
sonnets read 'So Long Bulletin' and 'Fuck All Editors'. Harwood believed that the
sonnets were 'poetical rubbish and [would] show up the incompetence of anyone
who publishe[d] them'.22
The poems were therefore written as a literary test.23
They were first sent to Meanjin and rejected by the editor Clem Christesen. When
this failed she sent the acrostic to Home at the Bulletin. Home failed the test and
decided to publish both sonnets. In a letter to her friend Alison Hoddinot,
Harwood concluded, 'I forebore to say that those who couldn't tell poetry from a
bunyip's arse might well be laughed at'.24
There are three possible reasons for Harwood concocting this hoax. Firstly, she
outlines in her interview with Candida Baker:
It was just a natural piece of mischief. I was talking to Hal Porter one day, and I
said to him that a lot of people wouldn't know a poem if it hit them. I bet him that
I could drop a sonnet into the Bulletinwith a foul acrostic in it, and they would
publish it.2
'
The second reason is much more practical as Harwood believed that 'lady poets',
as she called them, did not receive the same acceptance as males. She supported
this statement by publishing under at least three male pseudonyms — Walter
Lehmann, Francis Geyer and Timothy Kline — and claimed that she received far
more invitations and favourable letters to her male pseudonyms than she ever did
herself.
The third reason is much more calculated. Harwood had become disenchanted
with her poetry being published in the Bulletin alongside poetry she considered of
'marked inferior quality'26
and her cunning hoax would both give her extensive
publicity and prove her point. It was not only considered a scandal because of the
expletive but, to Harwood's dismay, because it was attributed to a housewife. A
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Cassandra Atherton
staff correspondent responding to the hoax in a subsequent edition of the Bulletin
condescending that Harwood had 'apparently imagined that the acrostic would
remain her private secret forever. Such are the fantasies of lady poets'.27
In her
defence, Harwood continued to argue that it was the typesetter who first noticed it
and that she had no intention of exposing the 'foul acrostic'.28
However, there is
evidence to suggest that it was the staff and students at Melbourne University who
first detected the scam, prompted by Vincent Buckley, who in turn had been tipped
off by Harwood.29
Harwood's sonnets 'Eloisa to Abelard' and 'Abelard to Eloisa' typify the
ferocity of emotion inherent in the poetry written under the pseudonym Walter
Lehmann. Much more has been written on the acrostic embedded in these sonnets
than on the artistic merits of the sonnets themselves. It was popular to believe, in
line with Harwood's judgement, that the poems were indeed 'poetical rubbish'.
Harwood's view of these poems is much more scathing than contemporary
analyses of their merits. Trigg and Hoddinott emphasise the positive use of meter
and imagery in the sonnets. Hoddinott states that the sonnets are 'poems of
musical mellifluousness, full of words poetically evocative of loss and despair',
but then concludes that they are 'almost completely devoid of overall sense'.30
Trigg is more favourable in her analysis and argues that the poems 'fulfil [the]
technical requirements of a sonnet, and include ... a small handful of powerful
images, even if they do rather tumble over one another'.31
If the sonnets are
deemed to be well crafted pieces, then the impact of Harwood's irreverence is
diminished. The publication of these two sonnets in the Bulletin has been read,
Trigg argues, as 'an example of the anti-establishment resistance'.32
Home could
not detect a hoax or indeed a bad poem when he came across one. The two sonnets
have some literary merit and, if Harwood had not prompted Vin Buckley to read
and publicly identify the acrostic, they may well have stood as two mediocre
poems written by a passionate male poet.
The characters Eloisa and Abelard are an interesting choice. Known for their
passionate correspondence and taboo relationship, they are a conscious choice for
Harwood and specifically for the subpersonality Walter Lehmann. In the first
sonnet, 'Eloisa to Abelard', which spells acrostically 'So lOng bULLetIN',
Harwood explores the themes of exile and spiritual struggle, especially when
tempted by desire. In a dramatic monologue, Eloisa expresses her torturous
feelings of loss to Abelard. Though some of the lines are a little stilted, the line
'You/ shall find/ loss, absence, nothing' clearly captures the double void Eloisa
feels at being separated from her beloved and her remorse at the betrayal of her
religion. Similarly, the richness of images in the second stanza conveys the
sharpness of loss.The words 'My wound/ is you' speaks of an intense and physical
pain and suffering at the heart of their separation, just as a wound by its very
nature separates tissue. The mention of a 'wound' also overlays the imagery with
the pain of abandoning her religious beliefs to lust. The final line of the last stanza
is also a powerful indictment of physical and spiritual love: 'No heart escapes the
torment of its choice'.33
Abelard replies to Eloisa in the second sonnet that acrostically spells 'Fuck AIL
eDiToRs'. As the male, Abelard is stereotypically characterised as stronger than
Eloise and less blinded by romantic love. His dramatic monologue privileges his
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Jumping the Queue
demand that she should revoke him. The commands to 'Stare the sun up ... think
yourself blind' and 'stop your ears' are devastating in their harshness and for the
suffering and pain Harwood is able to evoke in Abelard's words. Harwood incites
Abelard to sacrifice his own feelings for Eloisa's soul to 'Recall no ghost of
love'.34
Characters in Harwood's poems like Abelard and Eloisa or Krote and Professor
Eisenbart are not subpersonalities. Subpersonalities express a facet of the core
self, while characters help subpersonalities explore their preoccupations. Just as
the woman in the park, in the most famous sonnet of Walter Lehmann, is a
character that may be used to express many of Harwood's feelings, so too Abelard
and Eloisa provide a way for Harwood to reveal a deep sense of loss. The sonnets
should be read as an expression of undying love for a lover out of one's reach.
Perhaps the unrequited love experienced by a young Harwood may well have been
the basis for the manifestation of the subpersonality Walter Lehmann. Her psyche,
helping her to overcome these disappointments, placed these emotions within the
Walter Lehmann subpersonality. By using the subpersonality of Walter Lehmann
to write these sonnets, the passion and intensity of the emotion cannot be misread
as a parody. The part of Harwood that is Walter Lehmann does not joke; perhaps
that is why the hoax is synonymous with the unveiling of the Lehmann
pseudonym.
Harwood's hoaxes and pseudonyms were more than just a way to expose the
prejudices of editors. Though she claimed that she employed a variety of
pseudonyms (Theophilus Panbury, Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, Miriam
Stone, Tim Kline, W W Hargendoor) to ensure that as many of her poems as
possible gained publication, her pseudonyms were much more than publicity
ploys: they revealed her as a complex psychological being who consciously
employed subpersonalities to explore a range of feelings she felt were not
acceptable for her own public persona. Harwood's ability to create an array of
pseudonyms reveals a psychological awareness. Both Vincent O'Sullivan and
Gregory Kratzmann have referred to Harwood's inner complexity, describing her
as a poet and friend with a 'complex and enigmatic mind'.35
This kind of
complexity is not an unusual trait in writers.
It is Harwood's conviction that in interviews, 'the person to whom you are now
talking is not the same as the one who writes poems ... the person writing is not
the person speaking':36
'invisible glass' lies between her 'two selves'.37
Harwood
continually analysed the division she saw not only in the public and private
spheres of her life but the division she saw in herself: 'I thought how inwardly
fierce I'd always been, but how calm and untroubled my exterior had been'.38
This
split in identity supports the assertion by James Vargiu, Director of the
Psychosynthesis Institute, that 'we express different aspects of ourselves at
different times':39
Many writers have pointed out that in our personality there exist a multiplicity of
personages — of subpersonalities — each one attempting to fulfil its own aims,
sometimes co-operating but more often isolated or in a state of conflict.40
It seems remarkable that despite the interviewers' and critics' emphases on
Harwood's divided self, a psychosocial, or what I will term a psychomutative or
psychovocal, reading has never been attempted. Both Hoddinott and Trigg flag the
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Cassandra Atherton
issue of multiple selves in their expositions, but neither attempt to read her poetry
in the light of her pseudonyms.
The theory of subpersonalities is appropriate for application to literature. First
conceived by humanistic therapists John Rowan and Mick Cooper, the 'notion of
competing subpersonalities also favours a more distributed sense of self'.41
We
can be many things at one time, just as we may feel many emotions at one time.
When used as a tool for the study of literature, this theory allows the critic to 'gain
access to individuals in the creative acts of understanding themselves, projecting
their aspirations and desperations, and relating to the significant individuals in
their lives'.42
The nature of subpersonalities is best expressed by social researcher
Thomas R Whitaker, who captures the complexities inherent in the use of
subpersonalities. Two opposing yet connected processes define the way in which
subpersonalities are controlled and in turn exercise control. Whitaker describes a
'multi-dimensional ... internal community of subpersonalities ... a somewhat
disorderly congeries of partly subliminal and rather malleable entities who voice
their feelings and knowledge when accessed or provoked by our present
situation'.43
This is not to suggest that there is not a core self that governs these subselves.
Though a personality is composed of a series of subpersonalities, there is an
overriding personality that is often referred to in the first person; the T that is
most often present in non-threatening situations. In an interview with Beston,
Harwood argues that 'I feel that I have sometimes been handicapped by being the
poet-housewife figure; you know how she can make a nice apricot sponge and
write poetry too. There is a savage, nasty part lurking somewhere down there, and
yet this is part of the kind mother too.'44
This revelation adds credence to the
theory that a very divided self manifests itself in subpersonalities. Studying
Harwood's poetry by creating dossiers on each of her pseudonyms facilitates a
process of analysis where her poetry is read as a product of this subpersonality,
and therefore provides a new insight into the psychological underpinnings of her
poetry.
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