Books: Angry Penguins

Australians were chuckling last week over a literary hoax as fantastic as a duckbilled platypus. Editor Max Harris, of Adelaide’s long-haired little review, Angry Penguins, had introduced the work of a new poet named Ern Malley with a 30-page rhapsody explaining, with deadly and Dadaistic earnestness, why Malley was “one of the two giants of contemporary Australian poetry.”

Then Australian Army Lieut. James MacAuley (who fought in New Guinea) and Corporal Harold Stewart revealed that they were “Ern Malley.” Forced to kill an afternoon’s leave, they created Poet Malley by leafing through The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and other inspirational works, and lifting whatever hit their fancy. Samples of Malley masterpieces:

There have been interpolations, false syndromes

Like a rivet through the hand

Such deliberate suppressions of crisis as

Footscray.*

There is a moment when the pelvis Explodes like a grenade . . .

I have split the infinitive,

Beyond is anything.

Hoaxers MacAuley and Stewart confessed that they culled the first three lines of Culture as Exhibit from a U.S. report on mosquito breeding grounds:

Swamps, marshes, barrowpits and other

Areas of stagnant water serve

As breeding grounds.

But Lieut. MacAuley and Corporal Stewart were out to kill more than an afternoon. As Ern Malley they wrote: “For some years we have observed with distaste the gradual decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry. Harris and other Angry Penguins writers represent the Australian outcrop of a literary fashion prominent in England and America, a distinctive feature of which seemed to us to render its devotees insensible of its absurdity. . . .”

Buzzed Surrealist Editor Harris: “If fifty million monkeys with fifty million typewriters tapped for fifty million years, one of them would produce a Shakespeare sonnet. I hope MacAuley and Stewart have not produced such a phenomenon. It is not their claims of exposure but time [that] tells the story. Time will explain that a myth is sometimes greater than its creators.”

* Footscray: A Melbourne suburb whose malodorous tanneries are the subject of odorous jokes.