Telling Tales (15 page)

Heidemann, who continued to protest his innocence of the deception, was put on trial alongside Kujau in the summer of 1984, charged with stealing more than a million marks from his employer, much of which was never able to be traced or repaid. He was convicted of embezzlement and given a custodial sentence. Kujau served a prison sentence of just over three years for his part in the hoax, and on his release set himself up in a gallery selling ‘honest fakes’ – his copies of art works by famous painters like Van Gogh and Miro (and indeed Adolf Hitler), signed both with his own signature and that of the original artist. He also became a regular on the television chat-show circuit, demonstrating his clever signature-forging skills live on air and becoming, with his bald head, round physique and broad grin, something of a viewers’ favourite. When he died in 2000, he left such a famous legacy that his canny great-niece, Petra Kujau, was herself convicted of selling fake versions of his fake paintings.

The years after the Hitler hoax have been less kind to Gerd Heidemann, however. After serving his prison sentence he found himself ostracized by a media unwilling to help him resurrect his career. Now in his mid-seventies, living in a small apartment in Hamburg and crippled with debt, he blames his former brilliance as a journalist for the attitude his old colleagues now take to him: ‘I was the big scapegoat for them. They all ganged up on me. There was a lot of envy and schadenfreude involved . . . At last star reporter Heidemann had made a mistake,’ he told the newspaper
Bild
in 2008.

In 2003 a twist in the tale was revealed, and old interests in the case were revivified. After Stasi files about him were released it was widely reported that Heidemann had been working as an East German spy from the mid-1950s until the late 1980s. Although the files described him as an agent whose only interest was in earning as much money as possible, they gave ammunition to the conspiracy theorists who claimed the entire hoax was a money-spinning exercise by East German officials. The reasoning behind this theory was that silly little Kujau himself could not have produced all the material so must have been helped by a larger organization. Heidemann has denied these claims, and continues to profess his innocence as a mere pawn in Kujau’s grand deception. But there is no denying that the huge scandal of 1983 was caused, at least in part, by his uncontrollable greed: for money, for fame and for professional success. Otherwise he – and his colleagues on the magazine – would surely have looked more closely into the provenance of the manuscripts that seemed too good to be true.

W
HAT IS IT
about Australia? A country whose ratio of literary hoaxes to genuine literary successes is so high must surely be guarding a fascinating cultural secret. Or is the Antipodean profusion of writerly tricks merely the result of a publishing scene desperate for a short-cut to established literary identity? It is telling that every single one of Australia’s hoaxes involves race. Nino Culotta’s books are about Italian immigrants; Norma Khouri writes about Islamic honour killings; Marlo Morgan and Wanda Koolmatrie both ape Aboriginals (albeit from diametrically opposing viewpoints); the unsavoury Helen Demidenko was inspired by the openly white supremacist context of her upbringing to write a fake memoir in support of Nazi soldiers. And even the most famous of them all, the Ern Malley poems, were created by a pair of young Anglo-Saxon fogies who wanted to poke fun at a trendy Jewish poetaster and his modernist crowd.

S
PRING
1943
FOUND
James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two rather traditional Australian poets, doing war work in the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne. The kind of verse they created when not on army duty was the romantic, neo-classical lyricism you might associate with the Englishman Rupert Brooke. Across town, however, their nemesis was at work: twenty-four-year-old Max Harris was busying himself being the
enfant terrible
of radical new literature and had just moved from Adelaide (itself the
enfant terrible
of Australia’s cultural landscape at the time), having published reams of experimental poetry and an epic prose-poem called
The Vegetative Eye
. He was now fronting an avant-garde poetry and painting movement called the Angry Penguins (a quote from one of his own works) and edited a cutting-edge literary magazine of the same name. He did not yet know McAuley and Stewart, but the three young men were about to come together over a literary sensation that would not only alter their lives for ever, but redefine the course of Australian letters in surprising ways.

McAuley was a formal poet who loathed bohemians, loved jazz, smoked and drank like a machine and was obsessed with the sanctity of Christian marriage. A complex, not very gentle soul. Stewart was a middle-class drop-out with a passion for Buddhism, and himself a composer of old-fashioned, whimsical verse. The two friends were united in their hatred of the long-haired, anarchistic (and, in Harris’s case at least, Jewish) young thinkers who were being feted as the next big things in contemporary letters. They agreed that while some early modernist poetry had been quite beautiful – both adored Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, for example – the current vogue for ‘pretentious nonsense’ based on the free association of ideas and an unstructured syntax was abominable to anyone with an ounce of real literary sensibility. They felt that the anti-establishment approach to poetry espoused by the likes of Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs and the new Australian experimentalist poet Kenneth Rexroth, who
Angry Penguins
promoted as the future of verse, all represented a pathetic diversion from the real, robust magic that poetry could do. So, with a glint in their eyes but a seriousness of intent at heart, they decided to teach Harris and his ‘Angry Pungwungs’, as they called them, a lesson.

Holed up in their quarters on the army base, over a number of weeks (probably not, as they initially boasted, in the space of a single afternoon) they composed a string of surrealist, stream-of-consciousness poems by an imaginary car mechanic from the backstreets of Sydney called Ern. They jotted down any funny-sounding nonsense that came into their heads, supplemented by a few words and phrases chosen at random from the dictionary and complete works of Shakespeare they happened to have on the desk in front of them. The only rules, they would later recall, were that no poem should have a single theme; there should be no distinct poetic technique (but rather a deliberate mish-mash of rhythms, rhyme and scansion); and that the general tone of the things ought to reflect the rambling sensuousness of Dylan Thomas – the poet for whom they reserved their deepest disdain.

They called the collection
The Darkling Eliptic
and composed a preface in which the author, Ern Malley, set forth his statement of intent as a writer, which was ‘to discover the hidden fealty of certain arrangements of sound in a line and certain concatenations of the analytic emotions’ and to produce work ‘free of unfulfilled intentions. Every note and revision has been destroyed. There is no biographical data.’

McAuley and Stewart knew that to submit the poems alone might not be enough to prove that Harris and his ilk were undiscerning poetasters. The realized that a concocted back-story for Ern which made him as obscure and raw a figure as possible would give him instant cachet amongst the left-leaning readers and editors of
Angry Penguins
, so set about creating the other character in the Malley hoax, Ern’s sister Ethel. Ethel, they decided, had found the poems among her deceased brother’s meagre possessions in his bedsit in South Melbourne, where he had moved from his native Sydney to seek work. Not being poetically minded herself, she had decided to send them off to the most talked-about literary magazine of the day for a ‘professional’ opinion before consigning them to the bin. In her letter to Harris she would outline the short, sad life of her brother, a barely-educated car mechanic who had tried to make a life for himself in Melbourne but had returned to his hometown sick with the thyroid disorder to which he finally succumbed in July 1943, aged just twenty-five. None of the family knew he had been writing poetry, and no one knew much about his doings in Melbourne in the years before he died.

When a sample poem and a covering letter arrived on the desk of Max Harris one morning, he had no reason to think it was anything special. Hurrying to get together the next issue of his magazine, as well as working on his own writing, he probably assumed it was the hopeful submission of yet another fired-up student radical, long on ambition but short on talent. But then he started reading
Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495
, and he could not take his eyes off the page. He reread it. He was transfixed. He felt that he was in the presence of a tremendous and revolutionary talent, and he wanted more. So he wrote immediately to Miss Malley begging for the other fifteen compositions she said she had in her possession, and poem by poem Malley’s oeuvre unfurled its strange leaves, revealing to a stunned Harris something he had been looking for his whole life: the true new voice of modern Australia.

The next instalment of poems came accompanied by another letter from Ethel which gave a potted history of her late brother’s life that Ernest Lalor Malley was born in England in 1918; emigrated to Australia as a child; was educated at Petersham public school and the Summer Hill Intermediate High, where he failed to achieve academic success; and left school shortly after his mother’s death in 1933.

After showing the work and Ethel’s letter to his peers, including his co-editor and investor John Reed, it was agreed that a whole issue of
Angry Penguins
should be devoted to this extraordinary discovery, and to mark the occasion a painting for the cover was commissioned from one of the hippest painters of the day, the Melbourne artist Sidney Nolan. In an introductory article, Harris wrote that in Malley he had found ‘a poet of tremendous power, working through a disciplined and restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human experience. A poet, moreover, with cool, strong, sinuous feeling for language.’

Due to the war, getting anything printed (especially something not exactly crucial to the national effort) took much longer than usual, so it was not until June 1945 that the special Autumn 1944 edition came out. The firebrand young editor would have been taking a risk staking his name on the tiny oeuvre of a dead, unheard-of motor mechanic even if the author had turned out to be a real person. But when, within days of publication, readers, writers and critics began to cast aspersions on the veracity of Malley’s work, he must have felt the first stirrings of the humiliation and regret that he would go to great pains to deny for the rest of his life.

Almost immediately, literary Australia smelled a rat. And, desperate for some diverting story to relieve them of the steady diet of depressing war news, the mainstream press picked up the scent of this unfolding literary drama as well. Either, ran the stories in publications from the
New York Times
to the
Spectator
, Australia’s greatest poet had indeed been discovered in a mess of papers at a humble house in Sydney or the coolest cat on the literary scene had been royally duped and the whole modernist project looked as if it might fall in shame-faced ruins around him. Either way, it was a great story. In fact, the very first person to tell the press about the hoax was probably a friend of the hoaxers themselves: although they had agreed to keep their prank a secret for the time being, hoping to spectacularly ‘slay’ (as McAuley put it) Harris by revealing his gullibility themselves, McAuley couldn’t help but boast of what they had done to a young woman of his acquaintance, Tess van Sommers. Tess was an aspiring journalist, and had just made contact with the editors of the
Sunday Sun
newspaper in Sydney hoping for work. No doubt she saw the Malley scoop as a way to impress her would-be employers, and she went to them with the story the very week that the autumn
Angry Penguins
came out.

At the same time, a group of academics in Adelaide was beginning to smell a rat as well. Harris had shown the Malley poems to one of his teachers from university, Brian Elliot. Elliot had always been supportive of his highly motivated former student, and thought the poems were indeed impressive. But he confessed that he thought they were the parodic work of Harris himself; there was just something that didn’t ring true about them. Panicked by this and the rumblings from the Sydney journalists, Harris went so far as to pay for a private detective to stake out the address in the Sydney district of Croydon from which Ethel Malley’s letters had come. The address was in fact Stewart’s own, and when the gumshoe knocked on the door he was told, quite truthfully, by the woman who answered it that the only person attached to that household who might know anything about a poet was currently indisposed in hospital. (Harold Stewart was indeed in the infirmary, having minor surgery on an abscess.)