Word: ern
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Fakery is unbecoming to an artist. Indeed, counterfeiting another's creativity is anathema to any honest painter or writer. With his previous novel, Peter Carey took that idea and gave it a macabre twist. In My Life as a Fake, he reimagined Australia's infamous Ern Malley affair - the 1944 literary hoax played by antimodernists Harold Stewart and James McAuley, who posed as a dead working-class poetic "genius" - by bringing a fabricated identity to life to haunt its creator. The novel's sprawling narrative was as gin-soaked and overripe as its Kuala Lumpur setting, but Carey's theme...
...Gang, which won the Booker Prize three years ago, the cunning Australian built a palace of fiction from the "true story" of a legend, the Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly. For My Life as a Fake (Knopf; 266 pages), his point of departure is an even more intricate falsehood, the Ern Malley affair...
...Dylan Thomas. But even after the prank was exposed, the poems outfoxed the pranksters. In-tended as satire of 20th century verse, they were taken up by readers as exemplary modernist beauties. Today you can find them in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, duly credited to Ern Malley, who everyone now knows was imaginary...
...conservative, antimodernist poets invented a literary working-class hero?a garage mechanic who composed surrealist verse, which his creators stitched together from snippets of Shakespeare, a dictionary and a U.S. Army report on mosquito control. They submitted the works of "Ern Malley" to Angry Penguins, a respected literary journal in Adelaide, intending to ridicule the unclothed emperor of modern poetry. Their joke had a bitter, unintended result, however, when the magazine's editor was tried on obscenity charges...
...transports a now lone hoaxer, Christopher Chubb, to Kuala Lumpur. The book's narrator (and Chubb's hoaxee) is Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a highbrow literary review based in London. When Chubb shows her a single page of verse written by Bob McCorkle (the novel's Ern Malley), Wode-Douglass becomes obsessed with publishing work bearing his name. The mainspring of Carey's story is a fascinating statement by Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins, years after the original hoax was exposed: "I still believe in Ern Malley." In Carey's rendering, Bob McCorkle, the fictitious poet...