My Life as a Fake

In the September 29 issue of the Weekly Standard , Sam Munson reviews Peter Carey’s novel, My Life As a Fake , a fictionalized account of a famous Australian literary hoax. As Munson summarizes the (true) story:

Over a single wet weekend on an army base (or so at least the legend of their hoax has it), [Harold] Stewart and [James] McAuley composed reams of mock surrealist poetry. They invented a properly tragic biography of oppression and early death for the ostensible poet, whom they named “Ern Malley,” and then — in the most brilliant part of the hoax — they came up with the idea of Ern’s sister, a stodgy, philistine Australian housewife who had found the poetry in her late brother’s effects and couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Posing as the sister, Steward and McAuley entered into correspondence with Max Harris, editor of the intensely fashionable surrealist quarterly Angry Penguins — and Harris fell for the gag like a stone, publishing the whole corpus of the great unknown Australian poet. The truth quickly came out, and Harris was disgraced: a laughingstock among the literati and without highbrow defenders when he was prosecuted under indecency statutes for some other material he’d published. Surely the most unbelievable part of this story is that there was a literary journal with the name Angry Penguins .