Ern Malley, Wendy Cope and the Poetic Muse

I went with my sister to a reading by Wendy Cope. We had to pay the best part of £10 to get in and the large room was so packed we couldn’t claim our seats in the front. That’s how big Wendy Cope is in British poetry. Her Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis has so far sold 185,000 copies! Good on her. The reading proved to be, not as I had thought, the launch of another book of show-stopping poems. Life, Love and the Archers is prose, published and unpublished, and very good it was. Her style is ineffable, her content always interesting. The Archers, by the way is a radio soap about farmers. Larkin listened to it too. It has recently gone off rather and is now a radio Home and Away.

Wendy Cope had occasion to say some things about the definition of poetry, both from the book and in the question-and-answer session afterwards. What she said was wise and considered. Much of it was true. She said you shouldn’t write poetry for money. Chance would be a fine thing. She said that a good poem was always an honest poem, and she quoted Schubert: “I give to the world what I have in my heart and that is the end of it.” I nodded internally and thought, “How true!” But then it came to me that Schubert had to write down the musical notes as well. They were not in his heart, were they? He had had to learn them. And anyway that is not how I write poems and if she and Schubert were right, then my poems must be wrong.

One thing she did not say was that art comes out of unhappiness. Paraphrasing Henry Ford (or almost) she had been unhappy and now she was happy, and happy was better. And it didn’t stop you writing poems. I expect she would agree with her cocoaee, Kingsley Amis, who wrote a long short story about this.

“Dear Illusion” is about the poet Ted Potter, old and famous, who is about to publish what proves to be his last book. In an interview he says that it is only through writing poems that he has been able momentarily to conquer the fear and ennui that rule his life. The poems give him the strength to carry on. But does that mean they are any good, or just a superior sort of occupational therapy? Are his poems, objectively, any good at all? Critics say so, but they are sheep and how do they know? So Potter devises a test. His last book is deliberate rubbish. Potter writes down the first things that come into his head, and the critics all say it is wonderful. Potter has proved to himself that his poems never were any good. So he commits suicide.

I don’t know whether Amis knew about Ern Malley, the fictional Australian poet. I do know that he was very anti-Dylan Thomas, and Dylan Thomas was the poet the two authors of the Malley hoax wanted most to undermine.

Ern Malley was created in 1943 by James McAuley and Harold Stewart while they were in the Army. Their intention was to deceive Max Harris, who edited a modernist magazine called Angry Penguins of which both disapproved. They succeeded utterly. Harris brought out an Ern Malley number with a fine front cover by Sidney Nolan and Ern’s nineteen poems inside. Then they blew the gaffe. Poor Harris and his Penguins never recovered.

I found a short history of this in an entertaining book called Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes by Melissa Katsoulis. I also read Peter Carey’s strange, almost supernatural novel, My Life as a Fake, where Ern’s avatar, as it were, takes up his bed and walks, becomes, like Christ, the word made flesh and walks out of the pages into real life, or at least into another book, and it was from the poem quoted there that I took most of my own Malleyisms.

Melissa Katsoulis has a progressive Penguins perspective which rather vitiates her account. She characterises McAuley (Quadrant’s founding editor) as “a formal poet who loathed bohemians, loved jazz, smoked and drank like a machine, and was obsessed by the sanctity of Christian marriage”. She suggests breezily that his own poetry is not much good. And that Stewart, “a composer of old-fashioned, whimsical verse” is not much good either.

She is wrong. Stewart’s poems are good and McAuley’s better, but in a traditional way that they feared in the 1940s was to be consigned for ever to the scrapheap by the likes of Dylan Thomas. In fact that did not happen. The great poet of the rest of the century was Philip Larkin, and most of the hairy New Apocalypse fellows ruling the roost then are forgotten.

Except for Dylan Thomas. Larkin and his good friend Amis thought he was a fake. There is a strong whiff of fakery about Thomas. But so there is about Blake, who conversed with angels at the bottom of his garden, and Yeats with his gyres and so forth. But it doesn’t matter. The poems are there. They remain.

Robert Graves wrote, “Dylan Thomas was drunk with melody, and what the words were he cared not. He was eloquent, and what cause he was pleading, he cared not. He kept musical control of the reader without troubling about the sense.” Can you really write poetry like that?

Of course you can take the view of Larkin, Amis, McAuley and Stewart that Thomas was a fraud. But why, in that case, does “Fern Hill” reduce me to tears, as Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” did to Larkin, almost causing him to crash when he heard it recited unexpectedly on the car radio. And that is the true test of poetry according to another great poet, A.E. Housman. It didn’t cause him to crash his car (he didn’t have one), but it did stop him shaving because of the way his skin bristled. That would be Latin poetry, Horace probably.

Larkin thought (I paraphrase) that a poem was a little word machine which would bring to you just what the poet felt and thought whenever you recited it. Wendy Cope thought and thinks that poems come directly from the heart and if they don’t they are worthless. That was what Sir Philip Sidney thought. Look into your heart and write. It is, in the end, a very aristocratic view: poetry depends on the quality of your heart. You could be John Clare or Robert Burns, but still you are an aristocrat inside, a superior person. That makes me feel uncomfortable (as it did Yeats) because we are not like that at all.

So what do I think? I think most succinctly that a poem is an arrangement of words, that it is not about what is in your heart, that it doesn’t really matter what is in your heart. A poem is not personal in that way.

Ern Malley’s poems were as bad as McAuley and Stewart could make them. They claimed to have written them over one weekend. They were rubbish, like Ted Potter’s.

And yet there are words, phrases, sentences which have resonance. Why is that? One view is that the unconscious was at work producing images better than any McAuley and Stewart ever produced consciously. Or perhaps, however badly they tried to write they couldn’t help achieving sonorities, as it were, by accident. Accident has its place in poetry. Auden found a fine line, And the ports have names for the sea. Ports was actually a misprint for poets but he let it stand because it was better.

Larkin described his own method more than once. He began writing quite slowly, “leading the reader by the hand”, as he said, and then, somewhere around the middle of the poem he suddenly saw how it must end, something he hadn’t known when he set sail in his poetic boat. Then it was just a matter of filling in.

Where did that ending come from? Sheer genius, said Larkin, winking. It was not sheer genius, it was what we call the Poetic Muse, not inside the poet, but outside.

How did I write my Ern Malley poem? I found some phrases of Ern’s. What do they mean? I don’t know. But I put them down and other phrases came, phrases that might have come from him, if he had existed. Rhyme and metre did the rest, another thing entirely outside the poet.

Let me quote the Japanese professor Nitta Daisaku in How to Write Chinese Poetry (something a lot of Japanese want to do, apparently):

You must never get the idea that you’ll just try expressing your own private thoughts … in Chinese characters. I’ll say it again: all inner demand for self-expression, all things related to … modern poetics, are forbidden.

So who or what exactly is going to write the poem? Why, “the words will, of course … Listen to what they have to say.”

Or to put it another way:

I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance. 

And who said that? It was Dylan Thomas.