Surrealism Down Under

Over a single wet weekend on an army base (or so at least the legend of their hoax has it), Stewart and 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, Stewart 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.

The Ern Malley affair is one of the best stories of modern literary times, which makes it difficult to understand why Peter Carey feels he has to fictionalize it. “My Life as a Fake” begins with a literary cocktail party, in the course of which the decrepit and lecherous John Slater, an untalented but highly successful poet, convinces the narrator, Sarah Wode-Douglass, to accompany him on a trip to Malaysia. In Kuala Lumpur, Sarah happens across an elderly and forgotten Australian poet named Christopher Chubb–forgotten, that is, except for the cruel prank he played on David Weiss, the young Jewish editor of a fashionable literary magazine.

Chubb had created a fictitious poet named Bob McCorkle, a bicycle mechanic with a tremendous knowledge of Greek and Latin, and submitted a series of spurious poems to Weiss, resulting in Weiss’s public disgrace and eventual suicide. Sarah learns all this from Slater. When Chubb presents Sarah (herself an editor) with part of a manuscript written, he claims, by McCorkle, she naturally becomes furiously angry. The poetry, however, is good enough to overcome her anger and disbelief, and she listens as Chubb unfolds a fantastic story: McCorkle is, in fact, real, having assumed a corporeal form upon his creation by Chubb. Not content with mere incarnation, McCorkle devoted himself to single-handedly revenging himself upon Chubb, committing a murder for which Chubb was blamed, and kidnapping his only child.

Sarah is skeptical, but as Chubb continues his tale, the evidence seems to indicate that he is telling the truth. And as Chubb tells his story, Sarah also discovers that Slater, whom she blamed for her mother’s suicide, is in fact guiltless–her father’s closeted homosexuality was the real cause. This, understandably, provokes a crisis in Sarah.

BUT JUST AS THE NOVEL seems to be taking a turn from the fantastic towards the introspective, Chubb convinces Sarah to accompany him on an expedition to the interior. McCorkle has died, but he left a manuscript of supreme poetic power, kept under insanely jealous watch by McCorkle’s native wife and Chubb’s stolen child. Sarah gets hold of the book but returns it in what is either a moment of weakness or of empathy. She discovers that Chubb has been murdered, returns to London to marshal her resources, and begins a frantic quest to find the manuscript. She fails, suffers a breakdown, and, as the novel ends, is busy spending the rest of her life wondering what “really” happened.

Carey has always had a fast, smooth prose, and with the Ern Malley hoax, he has a readily adaptable story to work with. But “My Life As a Fake” fails in the clumsiness of Carey’s execution. Sarah Wode-Douglass possesses all of the attributes that a caricatured upper-class Brit should possess: an archaic, vaguely effete name, a minor aristocrat for a father, closeted homosexuality, and a position in the literary world. But, perhaps as a result, she never emerges as more than a stock figure–which makes very unfortunate Carey’s decision to let her narrate half the book. Slater and Chubb are more fully realized: Slater as a cut-rate Rupert Brooke, and Chubb as an oddball. But Chubb, when he comes in for his turn as narrator, turns out to have a voice indistinguishable from Sarah’s and just as free of any sense of character.

Then there are the baroque excesses and cheesy special effects Carey permits himself to bring his novel to a close. Compounding these is the hackneyed “twist” ending–the sought-after manuscript has been under their noses the whole time–as well as Sarah’s ridiculously out-of-character decision to return the book to McCorkle’s wife and child, the senseless killing off of Chubb, and the extremely perfunctory way in which the book ends. It’s as though a small, queer sketch of a novel has escaped the author’s control completely. Is this some deep reflection of the story of Chubb and McCorkle, or just authorial failure? The latter, I’m afraid.

“My Life As a Fake” embodies much of what is wrong with contemporary fiction. It reduces the offbeat, the surreal, and the gothic to the mundane, the narrow, and the trivial. “My Life As a Fake” is trite, closed, and pointless. The Ern Malley story has tremendous documentary and psychological interest. But this isn’t the way to tell it.

Sam Munson is a researcher for Kudlow and Company, LLC.