pseud james mcauley (3 Ergebnisse)

Introd. Max Harris (illustrator). Octavo, wraps, pp 56. Near-fine condition. The famous hoax poems, reprinted for the Adelaide Festival, with an introduction by Max Harris (the founder of 'Angry Penguins' where the poems were first published). Also includes an appendix discussing the subsequent trial for indecency.

Small quarto, with frontispiece in black and white after a painting by Sidney Nolan, and facsimile of a handwritten letter by 'Ethel Malley'; pp. 45. Cardboard wrappers, white lettering to upper. Bookseller's small label on inside front wrapper; signature of Guy Springthorpe, dated 1944, on half-title and his two-stanza poem, entitled 'Bird-Line (lines on first reading the Darkening Ecliptic)' on blank at rear, in pencil written over in ink; wrappers agreeably mellowed an even tone, front and back; a very nice copy. Soldiers McAuley and Stewart contrived 'meaningless' poems and passed them off as the work of the late 'Ern Malley': their aim was to send up the supposedly arbitrary nature of modernist poetry. The victims of the hoax, publishers of the 'Angry Penguins' literary journal, printed the poems (together with the letter they received from Malley's 'sister' and the statement the hoaxers had concocted as a kind of literary manifesto) as this book, 'The darkening ecliptic', after the prank had been revealed. One of the publishers, Max Harris, was made to defend the poems in court against charges of obscenity and forced to explain them line-by-line; he was fined five pounds for his trouble. Guy Springthorpe (1897-1984), was a noted psychiatrist and the son of the eminent physician, John William Springthorpe. We will advise postage costs and delivery times, which will vary from those quoted by Abe.

First book edition, first printing, of the poems that constituted one of the great literary hoaxes of the century. This copy in particularly nice condition. The collection of poems first appeared in a special commemorative Autumn 1944 number (actually June) of Angry Penguins, Australia's leading modernist literary magazine, who had had the poems submitted to their offices with a cover letter by an Ethel Malley, claiming to have found them in the effects of her recently deceased brother, Ern Malley. Angry Penguins took the bait beautifully, and published the poems with a portentous introduction by editor Maxwell Henry Hastings, opening: "Ern Malley prepared for his death quietly confident that he was a great poet, and that he would be known as such." In fact, there were neither an Ethel nor any Ern, but two poets, James McAuley (1917-76) and Harold Stewart (1916-95), who wished to pull the leg of a literary establishment they saw as pretentious and misled. The hoax was quickly exposed in the Sydney Sunday Sun, and this scarce first book issue of The Darkening Ecliptic was issued shortly after by Reed & Harris, adding a facsimile of Ethel Malley's letter, and issuing a new publisher's statement which included McAuley & Stewart's tart confession of themselves as the authors and their justification of the fraud: "What we wished to find out was can those who write and those who so lavishly praise this kind of writing, tell the real product from consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense." In this McAuley & Stewart's hoax appeared to have been an unqualified success, and by 1946 Angry Penguins had folded, utterly discredited. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature observes that "the vigorous and legitimate movement for modernism in Australian writing. received a severe setback, and the conservative element was undoubtedly strengthened." The longer term effect of the Darkening Ecliptic, however, was subtler. In time poets such as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Robert Hughes began to celebrate the poems as a successful example of surrealist poetry. Hughes claimed that Malley's "creation proved the validity of surrealist procedures: that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody". Malley's poems are still today far more widely read than those of his creators. Moreover, much genuine art and poetry was generated in response, knowing or otherwise, to Malley's potent gibberish, in particular artist Sidney Nolan's iconic Ned Kelly series (1946-7). Nolan later claimed that the Darkening Ecliptic "made me take the risk of putting against the Australian bush an utterly strange object". Both the book edition and the original Angry Penguins issue of the Darkening Ecliptic, though well represented institutionally, are very scarce in the trade. Small square octavo. Frontispiece reproducing in black and white Sidney Nolan's painting, facsimile of Ethel Malley's letter. Original wrappers, title in white to front wrapper. Wrappers sunned to spine and around edges, but a smart copy, sound, clean and in excellent condition.