Telling Tales (16 page)

Finally, the two hoaxers were invited to confess in the pages of the national press and they did so in horribly smug terms. They boasted of their creation of ‘nonsensical sentences’ and ‘bad verse . . . utterly devoid of literary merit as poetry’ and privately rejoiced even more heartily in getting one over on Harris, who they had long considered to be a figure deserving of public ridicule.

You might think that at this point the story would go away. And perhaps at another moment in history, or in another country, it might have done. But something about Ern Malley caught the imagination of the Australian reading public, and that had a lot to do with the quality of his verse. Too many people agreed it was too good to forget. Reading it now, when we are so much more inured to the vagaries of the late modernist style – when the last few decades have produced so much work like it – it is easier than ever to see why not everyone thought it was laughable. Look at these pieces of poems, imagining, perhaps, that they are by a poet you like:

From ‘Sybilline’:

It is necessary to understand

That a poet may not exist, that his writings

Are the incomplete circle and straight drop

Of a question mark

From ‘Palinode’:

I snap off your wrist

Like a stalk that entangles

And make my adieu.

Remember, in any event,

I was a haphazard amorist

Caught on the unlikely angles

Of an awkward arrangement. Weren’t you?

From ‘Petit Testament’:

And having despaired of ever

Making my obsessions intelligible

I am content at last to be

The sole clerk of my metamorphoses . . .

Reserving to myself a man’s

Inalienable right to be sad

At his own funeral . . .

I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.

And most famously, from ‘Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495’:

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 black swan of trespass’, the culmination of that first poem seen by Harris, the one about the struggle for true originality, has become one of the most famous lines in the Australian canon. The image of the black swan has long been central to Aboriginal and white cultural histories in the Antipodes and Malley’s poignant use of it as an image of creative anxiety struck a deep chord. It became the title of Humphrey McQueen’s seminal history of modernism in Australia, as well as the name of the numerous plays and even musical compositions which have sprung up around the Malley story.

Of course, there are many lines in the Malley poems which, whether taken in context or out, are plain ridiculous. Just try pretending your favourite poet wrote these beauties:

From ‘Perspective Lovesong’:

Princess, you 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

To the sad autumn of my Valhalla.

From ‘Egyptian Register’:

The long-shanked ibises that on the Nile

Told one hushed peasant of rebirth

Move in a calm immortal frieze

On the mausoleum of my incestuous

And self-fructifying death.

From ‘Documentary Film’:

The young men aspire

Like departing souls from leaking roofs

And fractured imploring windows to

(All must be synchronized, the jagged

Quartz of vision with the asphalt of human speech)

Java:

Whatever you think of the poems (and they really are worth reading), there is no doubt that the extraordinary afterlife of the Malley hoax has taken on an enigmatic momentum of its own. He is nothing short of one of Australia’s favourite cultural figures and, still, one of her most talked-about poets. The highly respected Australian novelist Peter Carey recently produced his novel
My Life as a Fake
out of his fascination with the story and there are endless replayings of the phenomenon on stage, screen and radio.

Equally fascinating is what became of the key players in the saga after the dust had settled. None of the three men was able to resume their life where they left off after the hoax had spiralled so out of control, but for some the shadow of Ern Malley was longer than for others.

McAuley continued to become more and more reactionary, joining his country’s sizeable band of committed right-wingers and founding the anti-Communist publication
Quadrant
which is still flourishing today. He continued to bask in the glow of his grand refutation of left-wing silliness and ultimately became a very conservative professor of English at the University of Tasmania. Privately, however, he would confess to feeling guilty for what he had done, because the effect of the hoax on young Max Harris was seriously deleterious. And as it turned out, Harris himself was to retain little of the free-thinking passion that once riled McAuley so much: later in life the two men would meet and drink the night away together, putting at least some of the Malley era ghosts to rest.

Long before that, however, in the immediate aftermath of the debunking, Harris must have hated McAuley with a passion. Especially when the police barged in to the offices of
Angry Penguins
and charged him with printing obscene material – a very serious blot on the copy-book of a publisher at the start of his professional life. Evidently, a few lines of the Malley poems were considered too risqué for public consumption. However, references in the poems ‘Young Prince of Tyre’ and ‘Documentary Film’ to ‘the woman who scarcely would/Now opens her cunning thighs to reveal the herb/Of content’ or indeed ‘The blood-dripping hirsute maw of night’s other temple’ are surely more selfconsciously chthonic than deliberately pornographic. The obscenity trial that resulted took place in Adelaide and caused predictable outrage: the defendant was spat at in the street and his name was tarnished forever in the small town. It was, to Harris’s mind, just the establishment flexing its muscle again, but mud sticks and he knew it. Soon after, his beloved magazine folded after his investor-cum-business partner John Reed, who was a key member of the bohemian incestuous artistic sect which included the artist Nolan, became incapable of continuing with the venture. And after Harris fathered a child with his childhood sweetheart, Yvonne Hutton, whose family strongly disapproved of this heathen and hairy peddler of left-wing filth, he decided to set up as a bookseller in Adelaide in the hope of garnering enough income and respectability to be considered a worthwhile citizen.

Although his literary ambitions as a poet and editor never survived the Malley debacle, he did succeed in becoming a much-loved figure in his hometown, ending up dealing rare books and cutting a swathe through artistic Adelaide with his trademark hat and cane and endless supply of literary anecdotes. But he would be best known for the ranting opinion pieces he regularly wrote for Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, holding forth on the state of modern society rather than advocating art and free expression as a path to greater understanding as he might have done back in the days of
Angry Penguins
. In fact, by the end of his life in 1995 he had come far closer to the opinions of his former enemy McAuley than anyone who had known the pair in the 1940s could have anticipated.

The oddest coda to the whole affair is what happened to McAuley’s sidekick, Harold Stewart. Stewart, a middle-class boy from Sydney who had never been able to stick at anything, had always had two private obsessions: poetry and the culture of the Far East. He briefly held down a job in a Melbourne bookshop but in the mid-1960s decided to flee Australia and make a new life in Japan, where he could teach English and learn the Japanese language. This he did, going on to publish translations of Japanese poetry, write reams of his own, and ultimately live a reclusive life in Kyoto, never again returning to the land of his birth. If any reporter or acquaintance ever asked him about his role in the Malley hoax, he would reply that his days in Australia were as a dream to him now, and he had nothing meaningful to say about them. His real life, he maintained, began when he arrived in Japan.

If McAuley and Harris continued to bask in the publicity brought to them by the Malley affair for the rest of their lives, and Stewart tried his hardest to forget it, that only leaves Ern to wonder about. No doubt he is laughing away on his imaginary cloud at the trouble and fame his lack of existence brought to so many people who never knew him.

M
OST HOAXES HAVE
an air of sadness about them. Rejection by parents or publishers and a bitterness that overflows into a lack of self-respect are what characterize their perpetrators. All too often their hoaxees end up equally badly hurt, both emotionally and reputationally, and in the case of Australian literary fraudsters in particular we see an anxiety about race and multi-culturalism that leads to some pretty unpalatable sentiments being expressed. The case of Nino Culotta, however, is different. It is blissfully free of such complications.

Yes, his work is ethno-centric in theme, focusing on a new Italian immigrant to Australia; and yes, a few critics have debated whether the author’s attitude is paternalistic if not over-patriotic. But everyone who has read the book agrees that the main feeling you get from reading Nino Culotta’s journal (and learning about the O’Gradys’ unusual life) is pure, unbridled joy. Put simply, the books, and their real-life author, manage to be brilliantly funny while also enunciating some abiding truths about Australian culture. And best of all, no one got hurt.

Nino, we read, is an educated Italian journalist sent over from his homeland to chronicle the ways of the Australian working man. To this end, he arms himself with a phrasebook and a job as a bricklayer’s assistant and sets about immersing himself in the life of a good honest Aussie bloke. The first thing he notices is that the English he has learnt from books in Europe bears little or no resemblance to that spoken in the pubs and building sites in 1960s Sydney. To get along with this ‘mob’ he is going to have to learn to speak, think and, crucially, drink differently. There’ll be none of the working-class wine-quaffing he knew back home in northern Italy, and certainly none of the passionate interpersonal relationships. Nino must become a bloke. And in charting his transformation into this particular species of man he creates one of the funniest and most endearing tributes to a people the English-speaking world has ever known.

They’re a Weird Mob
opens with Nino addressing the reader thus: ‘Who the hell’s Nino Culotta? That’s what you asked yourself when you first picked up this book, wasn’t it? Well I’m Nino Culotta.’ Only it turns out that actually he isn’t:

My father had me baptised Giovanni – John – well Giovannino is like Johnny, and Nino is an easier way of saying it. Or a lazier way, if you like. The Culotta family is not famous for doing anything the hard way. It is not famous for doing anything. Because as far as I know it doesn’t exist. Not in my family anyway. My family name is something quite different, but I can’t use it here.

Was this playing with identity meant as a clue to the fact that the given author of
Weird Mob
was not who he said he was? Certainly, none of the thousands of readers for whom the book became an instant cult hit seemed to suspect anything. But then they barely had time to consider the question before the real author outed himself voluntarily; and nor did they mind particularly when he did, fresh off the plane from Samoa and wearing a grass skirt.

John O’Grady was an eccentric man with an unusual history. Born just before the First World War to Irish immigrant parents, his first few years were spent in the Waverley district of Sydney where his father was the editor of the
New South Wales Agricultural Gazette
. But when an opportunity to run their own farm came up, the O’Gradys moved their household of eight children out to a remote area of Australian New England to bring them up more or less wild. The nearest school was several hours’ walk away, so for the next few years young John and his siblings had little formal education. However when drought decimated the area O’Grady Senior, now in his fifties, upped sticks again and moved the family back to the city, where he retrained as a barrister. Out of this upbringing of changing scenes and revolving identities came not one but two published authors: John’s younger brother Frank grew up to make his living writing historical novels.

Unlike many literary hoaxers, however, John never dreamed of being an author. Instead, he pursued a career as a pharmacist, dabbling in amateur dramatics on the side but largely remaining committed to working across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific to bring better healthcare to remote communities. After enlisting in 1942, he spent nearly a decade with the Army Medical Service.

It was a throwaway remark over the family dinner table that spurred him on to become Nino Culotta. His son (also called John O’Grady) picks up the story in an article in the
Sydney Morning Herald
:

Every Sunday the family would gather at my grandparents’ home at Bronte. One Sunday my Uncle Frank had a new book out and foolishly asked Da what he thought of it. My father used to refer to Frank’s books as ‘library novels’, because they were researched in the library. Da said: ‘Not much, and if I couldn’t write a better book than that I’d give up.’ So Frank bet him $10 that he couldn’t write any sort of book and get it published. He said, ‘I’ll take the bet.’

It seems he was inspired by his recent experience of life on a building site. He had taken leave from work to help a friend build a house (which was no uncommon thing at that time – Sydney in the 1960s was in the grip of an unprecedented housing boom, as upwardly mobile families created their dream homes on relatively cheap plots of land). John had evidently been fascinated by the fact that he, an Aussie born and bred, couldn’t understand a word of what his co-workers on the site were saying; their accents, vocabulary and strange in-jokes all had him stumped. This sparked off in his mind the idea that a genuine new-comer to the country – someone just off the proverbial boat – would have to find novel strategies to fit in with these loud, incomprehensible, beer-swilling but good-natured men or risk total isolation.