Harris, Max (1921-1995), an Australian poet, editor, and social commentator, helped encourage the Modernist movement in the arts and in Australian literature in particular. During World War II (1939-1945), he found himself involved in a literary hoax called the “Ern Malley” affair.
Maxwell Henley Harris was born on April 13, 1921, in Adelaide and educated at Adelaide University, where he studied commerce. He completed his first book of poetry, The Gift of Blood, in 1940. That same year, he founded the literary and artistic journal Angry Penguins to provide an outlet for the work of a group of revolutionary Modernist intellectuals calling themselves the Angry Penguins. The group’s aim was to revitalize Australian literature through the introduction of modern international influences, notably Surrealism, in which imagery is inspired by dreams and unconscious thought processes. See Surrealism. The group included the painters Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and Albert Tucker. Harris also cofounded with John Reed the experimental publishing company Reed and Harris.
In 1944, as the editor of Angry Penguins, Harris published a series of poems that were supposedly written by a self-taught poet called Ern Malley, who had recently died. Someone claiming to be Malley’s sister sent the poems to Harris. In fact, however, two anti-Modernist poets named James McAuley and Harold Stewart had constructed the poems to expose Harris as a literary charlatan who could not tell good poetry from bad. The poems contained obscene material. Harris was prosecuted and fined for publishing them. Angry Penguins closed in 1945.
The “Ern Malley” poems caused a scandal when the fraud became known. Some experts believed that the affair set the cause of Modernist poetry in Australia back about 30 years. Others believed the whole episode gave an impetus to creativity in Australian literature and the arts. Harris himself saw a haunting quality in the poems and created Ern Malley’s Journal (1951-1955). He also added to and published Ern Malley’s Poems (1961) and, with Joanna Murray-Smith, The Complete Poems of Ern Malley (1988).
After World War II (1939-1945), Harris remained a force in Australian literature both as a poet and an editor. He worked on several literary ventures. He helped set up the Mary Martin chain of bookshops. He also cofounded the journals Australian Letters, which he coedited from 1957 to 1968, and Australian Book Review, on which he worked from 1961 to 1974. He wrote several books and was a controversial essayist. He was also a broadcaster, social observer, and arts critic. Harris died on Jan. 13, 1995.
