| Before the fictional poet Ern Malley came one Mort Brandish. Larry Schwartz reports on an earlier literary hoax. HUNG-OVER when he opened the daily paper one morning in the early ’40s, painter and art critic Adrian Lawlor immediately recognised the name in an obituary notice proclaiming: “I was a poet. I was young. Lawlor, who died in 1969, would tell his writer friend Alister Kershaw he was so startled that in his befuddled state he was “momentarily persuaded that there really had been a poet called Mort Brandish”. Now in his early 70s, Alister Kershaw has been based in France for many years and lives in a small village in the Sancerre region of the Loire Valley. The Melbourne-born writer was in on the secret that “Brandish” was a fictional poet created by Lawlor. Kershaw’s account of the little known hoax, perpetrated just a few years before the Ern Malley controversy, is featured in a new book compiled by Sydney publisher Tom Thompson. Thompson, who recently left Angus & Robertson, has revived this “first joke on Australian arts and letters” by publishing all five of “Brandish’s complete poems”. One of these was originally featured in the November 1941 issue of the Melbourne avant-garde magazine, `Comment’. Lawlor also penned a biographical note that appeared in the literary publication. To be included in the new book, it did not indicate when or how Brandish supposedly died. It claimed he was born on the island of Skye in the Hebrides in 1909, educated in Switzerland and travelled extensively before settling in Australia in 1938. Brandish is described as “a man of troubled eyes”, “a shunner of coteries”. Shy, fierce, reclusive. The fictional biographical note indicated that Brandish favored `Comment’ as “a fitting plot of beechen green for my tender saplings”. It speculated that it might publish more of his work. “Meanwhile, his few bereft friends must continue to repeat as in a trance the dolorous epicedium: Mort Brandish is dead. Kershaw is said to have influenced the Malley hoaxers, Stewart and McAuley with his notorious satire on poets and poetic values, `The Denunciad’, part of which appeared in the `Angry Penguins’ literary journal in September 1943. He has written a lengthy piece on “the fictitious Mort Brandish” for the new book, noting that none of 50 or so `Comment’ readers responded to the hoax. If Brandish did not enjoy the same celebrity as his successor, Ern Malley, this was never the intention. Unlike the latter’s “begetters”, he writes, Lawlor had “not the least desire to prove a point”. “Mort was a private whimsey, designed to amuse just two people _ Adrian himself and me … His identity _ or non-identity _ was only known to us. He remembers receiving a letter from Lawlor in 1940 or 1941 with a poem ostensibly by Brandish and not particularly good. “However tepid my feelings about Mort Brandish’s work may have been, I thought the name itself was wonderfully improbable, a real trouvaille. Thereafter, Mort became an intimate (although always far above us) and we spoke of him constantly. Kershaw writes that he and Lawlor would quote Brandish’s “pungent observations on life and art” and argue as to who held Mort in the highest esteem. They would reminisce about their various meetings with him. “IN a sort of spontaneous collaboration, we built a home for him _ a ramshackle hutch over a garage in Fitzroy. There he would sit, a sullen hermit, dressed in khaki shorts and a cricket blazer, I remember, drinking Ouzo and unaccountably reading nothing but the novels of Edgar Wallace. “I almost had Adrian in tears one evening in his studio when I gave him the details of Mort’s death. `Ah Adrian, you can’t imagine his stoicism and how, at the same time, his love of life persisted to the end’. “`He was sitting in that rickety armchair of his _ you see it? _ and he took a swig of Ouzo and asked me to move the chair so that he could see that old wattle tree for the last time. He looked in silence for a while and then he whispered, Wattle, wattle, what’ll I do?’ `Don’t,’ Adrian said, wiping his eyes, `it’s too heart-rending. I can never forgive myself for not having been there at the end’. After the obituary notice, Lawlor painted a portrait of Mort (“a churlish looking fellow,” Kershaw writes, “with hair en bosse and a piratical beard”). It went missing in a stolen car after Lawlor sent it to Kershaw in France. While at Angus & Robertson as publisher of Australian literature, Tom Thompson co-ordinated a recently published collection of the Malley poems with essays including an introduction by Albert Tucker. The book was taken to task by Harold Stewart who told `The Sunday Age’ that he and McAuley’s widow held copyright and had not given permission for publication of the poems published in `Angry Penguins’ and sent by the hoax poet Malley’s fictional sister, Ethel, except for a new biography by Michael Heyward. Thompson, who has corresponded with Stewart in recent years, has a copy of a letter McAuley sent Stewart on 18 August, 1960. “I rather think that Ethel Malley made a present of all rights to the editors, and don’t feel like precipitating a complicated legal contest by now claiming rights which we never asserted in our own persons,” McAuley wrote. A $15 limited edition of the `Brandish’ collected poems, signed by “the author”, featuring Kershaw’s account and Lawlor’s biographical note, will be available in October from Angrier Penguin Press (PO Box 157, Kings Cross, New South Wales, 2011). THE SUNDAY AGE, 08-Aug-1993 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 