Gather around, because if you haven’t heard the story of the Australian Modernist art group The Angry Penguins and how they were brought down by a hoaGather around, because if you haven’t heard the story of the Australian Modernist art group The Angry Penguins and how they were brought down by a hoax from rival poets, then do I have a story for you! One of my favorite art stories in fact. The Angry Penguins were a group of avant-garde writers and painters that originated in Adelaide when poet Max Harris started the Angry Penguins literary journal in 1940 at the age of 18. The journal was controversial and in 1944 it all came crashing down when the 4th edition of the journal published 17 poems purported to be written by a recently deceased Australian poet named Ern Malley.
[image]
The Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins. #111 of 1000
Who was Ern Malley really and how did his 17 poems cause such a stir? To understand that a little backstory on the movement is helpful. The Angry Penguins were a contentious group amidst the 1940 Australian arts scene, particularly for their mission to invigorate the Australian art scene they claimed to be stagnated with their own vigorous and revolutionary modernism and inspiration drawn from French surrealists. Adelaide University, where Max Harris attended (if you choose to picture him as Max Fisher from Rushmore for dramatic effect, by all means do so, because that’s my mental image) was a hotbed of young, ambitious artists and under the patronage of poet C.R. Jury, Max formed the Penguins along with Geoffrey Dutton, Donald Kerr and Paul Pfeiffer. And to great effect as the group became recognized as a modernist arts movement.
They caught the attention of John and Sunday Reed, a married couple involved in publishing and funding contemporary arts, who asked to collaborate with Max. They restored a 15-acre estate in Melbourne known as the Heide, which became the home base for the Penguins to work and publish (the location is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art). The group expanded, including artists such as Sidney Nolan (who’s expressionist art was inspired by his time in the military), Joy Hester (the only woman in the Penguins, with haunting portraits inspired by German Expressionism), and her husband, Albert Tucker (who’s time spent painting war wounds for the plastic surgery unit while a patient in Heidelberg Military Hospital during the war would influence his violent artwork). After Joy and Albert divorced, the Reed’s would adopt their son, Sweeney.
[image]
Sidney Nolan
Not everyone loved the Penguins, and they had a rival publication, the Jindyworobaks—a nationalist and anti-modernist arts group with mostly white members who sought to promote Australian bush ballads and indigenous culture through their works. Their mission statement was to 'free Australian art from whatever alien influences trammel it,' so naturally the two groups feuded, and quite publicly so. The Angry Penguins were also a frequent target of criticism from the Communist Party, and a 1944 article in The Communist Review openly celebrated their demise and wrote that ‘the new “Angry Penguins” have proved that it has nothing to offer to Australian art, and that its effect will be to destroy, not raise Australian standards.’ Among other criticisms were that the Penguins were educated elites with no attention to the working class. The Penguins publishing writers such as Dylan Thomas, Gabriel García Márquez, or James Dickey also caused uproar amongst traditional Australian writers.
Finally, Ern Malley. In 1944, Max received a 17 page manuscript, said to be the entire body of work of Ern Malley. The manuscript and subsequent correspondence was thought to be from Malley’s sister, grieved her brother had died at the age of 25 from Grave’s Disease and had discovered he had been a poet without ever telling anyone. Harris was overjoyed with the poetry, excited to have discovered a rare specimen of authentic Australian poety and created a commemorative issue in Malley’s honor. The issue included the entire manuscript as well as a 5 page introduction/analysis and two poems written in memorial to Ern Malley, all penned by Max Harris (as well as a full issue of other poems and writings, including six of Max's poems, a lengthy section of American poetry, and new-at-the-time translation of Rainer Maria Rilke). Harris piles on accolades, claiming Malley ‘transcends Angry Penguin writers and contemporary English writers…his sane personal verse is the embodiment in our time.’ To read Max earnestly write that Ern Malley ‘is one of the most outstanding poets that we have produced’ will surely cause you to cringe on his behalf knowing what came next.
Because the catch is Ern Malley never lived. Poet and critic A.D. Hope was so opposed to Max and the modernists he conscripted two anti-modernist poets currently serving in the army, Harold Stewart and James McAuley to ‘get Maxy.’ In one day, they compiled these 17 poems as a joke in their barracks, taking phrases from a dictionary and an essay on mosquito breeding to paste together random sentences in a surrealist fashion believing it would demonstrate their belief that this style of art had no inherent value. They mailed them under the guise of a bereaved sister and the rest is history. Max hired a private detective who uncovered the truth but it was too late. Even his own alma mater’s student newspaper accused Max of writing the poems himself in order to pretend he found a great poet. The Sydney Sunday paper had a front-page story about the hoax and even the Catholic church for some reason thought they should make a statement criticizing at the time 22 year old Max.
His public reputation already in tatters, Max Harris was delivered another blow after Australian police found issue with some of Ern Malley’s lines of verse and charged Max with printing obscenity. He was found guilty and fined in exchange for not serving 6 weeks in jail. But that was the end of Angry Penguins as a publication and the group fractured. English writer C.P. Snow would later remark that the Penguins 'was probably the last flowering of a 'national' modernism that a completely internationalised world of the arts was likely to see.' Max would continue to publish his own work (including the Ern Malley Journal, to show he took everything in stride as well as becoming a well-regarded publisher and critic), own and operate the Mary Martin bookshop, push for the canonization of Mary MacKillip (the first Australian nun to be recognized by the church, for which he was gifted a holy relic for his support) and much later he was awarded the title of Father of Modernism in the Australian Arts by the Alumni Association of Adelaide University. Honestly, Max Harris seems like a chill dude and was simply enthusiastic about trying something different.
'I still believe in Ern Malley.' -Max Harris
Through all this, Max Harris never wavered on his conviction that the poems, hoax or not, had literary value, saying ‘the myth is sometimes greater than its creator.’ In decades to come he would be affirmed by poets such as John Ashbery and Robert Hughes who would also claim the poetry, fraud or not, had accidentally stumbled upon real value, with Hughes adding ‘The energy of invention that McAuley and Stewart brought to their concoction of Ern Malley created an icon of literary value, and that is why he continues to haunt our culture.’ The Ern Malley poetry has been reprinted the world over and the story is certainly an entertaining, albeit tragic, one. As ‘Malley’ writes, ‘I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.’ Ern Malley is still a legend, probably more so than his creators. McCauley would form a staunch anti-communist magazine and teach literature in Tasmania, while Stewart would move to Japan and become a Buddhist (in case this story didn't already sound like something from Roberto Bolaño).
'I had read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still the black swan of trespass on alien waters.'
The poems are worth checking out. Particularly if you enjoy surrealism or experimental work. At times you can feel they are taunting Max, at times they are actually quite lovely. At times ‘the pelvis / Explodes like a grenade’ and you think, yep, the police didn’t like that. For further reading, The Ern Malley Affair by Michael Heyward is some good fun with many more details....more
s.penkevich
>
Books:
angry_penguins
(1)
Loading...
