In 1943, at the age of 25, the poet/mechanic Ernest Lalor Malley was born. His unusual conception and birth brought forth one of the greatest literary hoaxes in recent history.
Conceived by conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart – who were serving in the army – Malley and his verse were intended to expose and humiliate proponents of modernist poetry, chiefly Max Harris.
Poet and editor of the Arts journal Angry Penguins, Harris embraced the writing of the recently deceased Malley, publishing and praising it. Sidney Nolan provided artwork for the magazine cover. To Harris and his colleagues, Malley was the literary discovery of the century.
There was just one problem: neither Ern Malley nor his poems were ‘real’.
The Ern Malley affair was a key chapter in Australian literary history and soon entered the nation’s mythic landscape. Who better to distil this astonishing tale, rich in irony and subterfuge, than the redoubtable Peter Carey?
Despite Carey’s geographical dislocation from his homeland, his writing continues to explore Australian icons and identity with depth and insight.
My Life as a Fake retells the incident through an outsider. The daughter of an expatriate Australian woman and an Englishman, Sarah Wode-Douglass is the editor of The Modern Review. On a whim, she accompanies poet and family friend John Slater (whom she secretly loathes) on a trip to Malaysia.
There she encounters Christopher Chubb – a morose, shambling Australian who is in possession of some particularly fine verse. The poetry is and isn’t his. It is the work of his prank, his creature, Bob McCorkle.
Chubb – an amalgam of McAuley and Stewart – promises to give Wode-Douglass the poetry if she will hear his bizarre story. Ignoring the advice of John Slater, she agrees.
Sarah Wode-Douglass has known Slater all her life. Her opinion of him is connected inextricably with the suicide of her mother, for which she blames him. However she also has fallen prey to a deception.
Carey’s debt to the details of the Malley incident is immense. With a few exceptions, the circumstances surrounding the hoax are barely altered from fact. In Carey’s re-imagining, the affair has far more tragic and dramatic consequences than in reality. Chubb’s literary trick set off a chain of events which led to suicide, abduction and murder. Yet despite the sometimes lurid content, the narrative retains a laconic edge, imbued with sadness and irony.
Carey’s conceit is that Chubb’s creation, the poetic genius McCorkle, takes on flesh and blood and, like Frankenstein’s monster, rampages out of control. While it is an outrageous notion, with roots firmly planted in magical realism, Carey succeeds in making it almost credible.
Carey’s elegant prose and talent for characterisation are a delight. Ironically, it’s the tragic Chubb rather than the spectral McCorkle who leaps off the page.
An absorbing read about the perils of deceptions and the destructiveness of deceit, My Life as a Fake has a problem. As fascinating and gripping as this tale might be, it cannot really compete with the truth.
